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.