New World - June Alpha Release Notes

With New World's closed beta scheduled for July, the MMO's developers still intend to release a couple of balance and polish-focused alpha updates in June. The first of those is already here, offering over 1,000 bug fixes along with various other improvements.

Here's an excerpt from the patch notes:

Greetings, Adventurers!

Today's Alpha release is focused on polishing up the gameplay experience and systems, including a heaping pile of bug fixes that span across all aspects of the game—all in preparation for Closed Beta in July and our August 31 launch.

GENERAL
  • Fixed 1,209 bugs.
  • Increased Company member limit from 50 to 100.
  • Updated new player quests related to choosing a faction and gathering and refining for the Constable.
  • Added a new series of lore notes in each starting zone with additional revelations about that zone’s Constable.
PROGRESSION UPDATES

In May we rebalanced progression and leveling to introduce a number of new ways for players to advance, such as earning tradeskill levels or territory standing levels and discovering points of interest (POIs) or lore pages. That rebalance resulted in players leveling faster than the content, so we’ve made a few changes to XP gain and leveling.
  • Increased the amount XP from discovering lore pages. We love this new activity and how it rewards exploration, and want to ensure it’s more impactful on progression. Base XP has been increased from 25 to 40, and XP is increased by 10 (up from 5) for every 10 notes discovered.
  • Doubled the XP awarded for discovering POIs. Like lore note discovery, this is a great new source of XP, and we want to pump up the amount it contributes.
  • Increased XP required to level by 40% for all levels after 7.
    • Players in the Alpha are leveling faster than we expected, faster than the content, and as a result, they're missing some cool quests and POIs. The goal of this change is to better align progression with the content in the game.
  • Reduced the XP gained from Corrupted Breaches by 10-20% based on level of the breach. We also decreased the breach spawn speed from 15 minutes to 30 minutes for minor breaches, and from 30 minutes to 60 minutes for major breaches. We love Corrupted Breaches and how they bring players together, but want the feeling to be more about cleansing the area of corruption and then waiting for it to rebuild, not be a constant grind.
  • Reduced the XP from faction missions to compensate for the change in mission structure. In this update we’ve changed faction missions back to the single mission structure. Since they are considerably faster now, we’ve adjusted the rewards accordingly.
  • Reduced the XP from PvP missions by about 20%. The proximity of the mission locations and speed at which players could complete missions led to a quicker rate of XP gain than intended.
  • Arenas will now require one party member to have a Tuning Orb for entry.
    • Increased the rewards for completing an Arena.
    • Like Expedition Orbs, Tuning Orbs will be given during an initial quest and can then be crafted from materials found around Aeternum.
  • Added the crafting missions we removed from faction missions to town projects. Thematically, this felt like a better place for this type of activity.
    • Along with the move to town projects, cooking and armor and armament crafting missions have been overhauled and changed to be more accessible:
      • Requirements here have been made easier for cooking missions, with a maximum of 4 ingredients for any mission and less of each ingredient type.
      • Tuned armor and armament missions to require less of each material.
      • Rather than requiring materials from tier 2 to tier 5, these missions now require materials from tier 1 to tier 4.
  • Raised the cap on the number of active buy and sell contracts to 100 per character.
  • We re-ordered and tuned the list of territory standing bonuses offered at each level:
    • The new order has bonuses more relevant to the early game rolling at the earlier territory standing levels, such as town storage, territory standing bonuses, and XP bonuses.
    • Generally (but not always), standing bonuses should offer a choice between similar things. For instance, one set of bonuses will pick between taxes and fees, while the other set will pick between advancement bonuses such as territory standing bonuses or faction token bonuses.
    • Increased the amount of furnishing points granted by the furnishing standing bonus from 1 to 5.
      • This required a reduction to the overall number of times this bonus is offered. We wanted to stay close to our previous hard cap at max standing, but we also wanted to grant more than 1 point at a time.