New World is finally testing its long-awaited (and long promised) Leaderboards. Yesterday, team held a PTR War with the community. Sort of. It was cut very short by either some incompetent oversight by the team, according to players, or “backend issues”, according to the team. The different takes are sparking some discussion, and a request for clearer answers.
In December’s Winter Convergence update, New World added some new rules to combat “Shell Companies” and to try and make War fairer. These rules meant that an attacking company could have up to 25 mercenaries and defending companies could have up to 10 mercenaries. The rest of the roster had to be Company members only.
When the PTR War began, the rules were still apparently in place. Since the War was started by the New World team, with hundreds of players, none being in Companies involved in the War, there was an automatic player cap of 10 on one side and 25 on the other. Clearly, this was not going to work the way they intended and so everything came to an abrupt end as the devs realized there was an issue. “WELP” exclaimed one.
Speculation happened, many accusing the development team of being careless and forgetting that the limits were in place. The New World team, after cutting the planned PTR test short, had some explanations via official CM posts.
According to CM Aenwyn, they were trying to drop the merc restrictions when the War was pushed too fast. Also in the official response was a pledge to do better, especially after two scrapped PTR tests.
“While a different issue than the last time we hosted a War in PTR, we respect this has now happened twice to players and it’s not a great moment. We’re going to take significant steps to avoid it in the future.”
Some players weren’t having it and continued speculation, and accusing the team of not playing their own game or of being less than competent. On a Reddit post, soome even jokingly suggested that WELP should be a new title. Still, with Leaderboards a priority feature and two scrapped tests and apologies, we should see some more testing relatively soon.
