It's officially two months since New World's release, and while the game's launch day was an immense success, following up with an all-time peak of over 910,000 concurrent players on Steam a few days later, the MMO has been going through a rather rough patch. The honeymoon phase for many players was over a week or two into the game's release, and the first instance of the game-breaking duplication glitch had just been discovered by the community. Amazon was slow in taking action then, and ever since the players' trust in the developer has sunken lower and lower due to many other issues and secret changes that ruined the experience for some.
The aforementioned secret changes were pushed with New World's latest major patch, the Into the Void update from less than two weeks ago, and some of them ended up punishing solo players with content drought and ways to acquire better gear reliably. Another change was made to how the crafting skills in New World work, making it much harder for players to get any skill to 200 due to a drastic increase in the experience required to level up professions. Amazon Game Studios originally intended to make the change but also increase the experience players could gain for each of their crafts in order to balance things around, but this plan went sideways, and now many crafters are stuck.
How New World's Crafting Changed, and How to Change it Back
Gathering skills and crafting skills are intrinsically tied to each other, as players can spend their time gathering resources virtually for free in the world, and then go back to a settlement to refine them and then craft items out of them. However, this process is not completely free, and crafting takes a toll on players' finances when crafting high-level items using expensive materials, meaning that it should be worthwhile to do both in terms of experience and possible economic gains. This is not the case, unfortunately, because of flawed design choices in New World.
After the November update, New World players no longer get a lot of experience points when crafting items, meaning that their trade skills are often much lower in level than those who crafted prior to the update. In fact, the change to experience was not implemented retroactively, in the sense that those who had already gotten to level 200 in their desired crafting skills could and still can benefit from them, whereas everybody else has to spend more time and resources to reach that same goal. To provide an approximate estimate, players who crafted 100 high-level items when sitting at level 150 of the corresponding crafting skill would most likely end at level 190 to 220, whereas now 200 of those same items take someone from 150 to around 170.
This is utterly disproportionate, and it makes it much more expensive and frustrating to level up trade skills when in reality that's pretty much the endgame for solo players at the moment. As such, New World should now revise its crafting system once again, but this time either make retroactive changes or simply make it less frustrating for everyone to level up.
MMOs often tie the lack of extra content to an increased time farming for anything, and the grind can be real in some games. New World is no exception, and players are suffering from some poor decisions that ended up having a much larger impact on the game than anticipated, both in terms of PvE content and crafting - especially considering they can be tied to one another, occasionally. Ultimately, while it was maybe too easy to level up professions in New World prior to the change, what the update did was slow down the game, and that's not always a good thing for MMOs whose player numbers are already dwindling.
New World is available now on PC.