New World's Winter Convergence Festival is back for the season, bringing holiday cheer to Aeternum with brightly decorated settlements, holiday quests, a world boss, and unique rewards for the duration. Accompanying the event is an update for New World that overhauls the crafting tiers to be much more accessible, introduces a new mutated expedition, and makes various changes to improve server balance and faction play.

Developer' debut MMORPG has been online for over a year now, and despite some growing pains during its early days, has come a long way thanks to continued work from its developers. New World's many updates in the past year have revamped mechanics, added new weapons, and reworked the entire starting experience, along with tons of changes to progression and crafting to make the process much smoother. Compared to the game at release, the grind has been substantially reduced and gameplay is more fluid and interesting thanks to many small improvements that have added up.

This update sees the return of New World's Winter Convergence Festival from last year, which brings snowfall, northern lights, festive decorations, and seasonal activities to Aeternum. The Winter Wanderer can be visited in Everfall, Monarch's Bluffs, Weaver's Fen, Brightwood, and the new Brimstone Sands for some holiday quests. Winter Tokens can be earned which reward limited-time goodies like emotes, housing items, and festive skins, while presents can be collected under various Trees of Light that can be found in settlements. The new Winter Warrior world boss is also waiting to be challenged, yielding special rewards and giving players a chance to try out the new 20-person party system.

Game developer are making two major changes to improve the Trade Skill leveling experience:
The Forge, Outfitting Station, Workshop, and Arcane Repository now offer Azoth discounts for relevant recipes:
*Tier 3 = 20% discount.

*Tier 4 = 30% discount.

*Tier 5 = 45% discount.

Certain recipes are now no longer gated behind tiers:
1) Crafting Stations
*Most procedural weapon and armor recipes.

*Arcane Repository - Stat potions (Health, Mana, Regeneration, and Focus) and elemental recipes.

*Kitchen - Health and mana foods

2) Refining Stations
*Tier 3 unlocks - Recipe level is less than or equal to 100 and not legendary.

*Tier 4 unlocks - Recipe level is 150 and not legendary.

*Tier 5 unlocks - Recipe level is 200 or legendary at any recipe level.
Stonecutting - All gemcutting is no longer gated, but gem fusions remain gated behind relevant tiers

As promised during the recent New World roadmap reveal, a new mutated expedition has been added that is a mashup between Starstone Barrows and Amrine. Endgame players will be able to revisit the Amrine Expedition with new challenges and paths to take. Additionally, crafting tiers have been reworked so that many recipes are no longer gated behind tiers and can be crafted at any tier station. Stat potions, health and mana food, and procedural gear are no longer gated, while named gear and more specialized items still require higher-tier stations.

Developer is also cracking down on various server balance issues, particularly "shell companies" which are large companies that form smaller companies to game the territory control system. With limits to War participation, War Roster restrictions, along with company and server transfer cooldowns, these measures should hopefully mitigate some of the issues that have cropped up even on New World's fresh start servers.

They will implement the following changes to make shell Companies less effective at owning multiple territories:

Daily War Limit
*Players will have a limit of 1 defensive War and 1 attacking War per world (resets daily at 5AM server time). These limits will apply to both even if you have two different characters in the same world.

War Roster Restrictions
1) Participating Companies will have a limited number of Mercenaries they can recruit.
*Attacking Companies: Up to 25 mercenaries.

*Defending Companies: Up to 10 mercenaries.

*The remaining slots are reserved for their Company members.

2) Company Switching Cooldowns
*When leaving a Company, players will start a 72 hour cooldown on fighting in a defensive War and earning Influence for any Company toward War declaration eligibility. The cooldown begins once a player leaves. Any Influence earned will still count towards the player’s Faction.

3) Server Transfer Cooldowns
*We have increased the cooldown on all server transfers from 3 to 30 days.

New World, surprise-hit MMORPG, recently celebrated its first anniversary, and the team revealed a bunch of diverse player statistics that have built up over the past year, one of them being that the game has been played for a whopping 569.1 million hours total. The announcement was done via their official Twitter account, where an attached infograph showed off a lot of specific player stats like total number of NPC enemies killed (17.3 billion), total number of trees chopped down (6.3 billion), total number of minutes streamed on Twitch (12.4 billion), and more.

New World is a third-person action game strongly centered around player interaction. Unlike other MMOs, the game's economy is completely player-run, dependent on trading and material availability. Similarly, terrain can dynamically change hands, as settlements can be fought over and contested by other players.

Though the game suffered a rough critical reception at launch, it did command the attention of the MMO community for a good while. It had a healthy player base in terms of size and was undoubtedly a commercial success. To this day, New World's current player count on Steam sits at nearly 50,000 (as of 2:00 p.m. EST) with a monthly average of over 25,000. New World was first venture into gaming in a first-party capacity, being developed by a subsidiary team known as Orange County.

When it comes to a game like New World, IT has stated that it's a priority to work to have a more balanced system. Previously, they unveiled a series of tiers and varied taxes that would depend on the assessment of how valuable owning that territory was. The new system now has four tiers, with zones like Everfall, Brimstone, and Windward at the top. These are the highest value and will have higher rates.

Things step down into three more tiers, each with progressively lower rates. The intent here is to not have the top tiers just run away with all of the value and attention. The other side of this is the desire to make other territory also worth exploring and owning. Instead of fighting over just the most desirable places, things should hopefully start spreading out. Additionally, they've tied income to territory level, so if you level up and take care of what you claim and own, it will bring in more income for you.

One of the features the New World team has been talking about for months, and is finally set to make a reality soon, are Leaderboards. These will also tie into the territory changes, especially through the monthly and quarterly War boards, which will also show some stats on territory held.

So what else is coming? Social Feature Lead Dan Henuber names timing windows and faction control points as two things to look out for. Timing windows have to do with territories might be actively influential, creating density for PvP with naming hotspots and where the action is. And you can defend or even win influence there. The other option, faction control points, is something they're looking to improve, again to create density, but to tempt fights for the potential of greater rewards for both defense and attackers. In fact, they mention shoring up defense as a big appeal of some of these changes.

For more, watch the full episode above, and head to New World for more.