GAMING
PUBLISHED 10 HOURS AGO
THE GAMER.COM
Sometimes you've just got to take matters into your own hands.
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Gambling is rife. House taxes are break-your-back expensive. A recent gold exploitation glitch has injected thousands of gold into the economy, and that's without even mentioning the fishing bots. You pay taxes in New World - which is more than Bezos does. You’ll work five days a week to pay them, then get taxed on crafting and trading, too. All that gold is given to one company (or sometimes, just one player) on the server. Everything costs money, and yet you hardly make any. Welcome to Amazon’s capitalist hellhole.
What did we really expect? New World is a game about colonizing an island and destroying the inhabitants, after all. It’s also developed by Amazon Game Studios, a subsidiary of one the largest companies in the world, headed up by cowboy-hat-wearing space-jockey Jeff Bezos. Surprising absolutely no one, the economy in the game is awful and ripe for exploitation. Cheers, Jeff.
Take this as an example. The leader of one of the largest companies on my server, no names here, sucked up the one hundred thousand gold in their company treasury and booked it to another server. All that money, all those hundreds of hours played by their underlings to stock the company’s coffers, vanished in a moment. People were pissed off. It all felt a bit too ‘real life’ - some caviar-sniffing folk making off with all their hard-earned gold. Cheers, Jeff.
Beyond the exploits, deflation is hitting New World’s economy hard. The prices of materials drop by up to 50 percent with each week that passes. It’s now pretty much impossible to make money from the auction house. You need to pay taxes on your homes and you need to repair your armour when it breaks. Even the cheapest house is around 500 gold a week and armour costs only increase the higher your level. How is anyone meant to pay for anything? Cheers, Jeff.
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I wasn’t going to take this, not from a tax-dodger like Jeff. In an attempt to bring economic balance to our server, I teamed up with my company mates to do something about the awful economy. We’d heard stories from other servers about gambling rings, fight clubs, and a glitch that let you set up camps in the middle of town. But all of these didn’t really seem like what we wanted to achieve. We hold Windsward. We make a ton of gold. What can we do with it to make our server a better place?
So began the long process of wealth distribution. It started with handing out potions to the low-level players we saw wandering around Windsward. We produce hundreds of mana potions and health potions anyway, so why not share them? When we started getting thanks we were like “Hey, this feels pretty neat”, so we started giving out rawhide, wood, and other materials to players we saw at the workstations.
We also began funneling resources to the most hardcore crafter in our company. This guy is at level 200 in furnishing and cooking, which means he can pump out some of the best items in the game. Bring him the resources and he’ll make it for you. I make the potions, my pal crafts armor, and everything is divided up without a penny spent. We love collaborating, sharing, and providing gear for new faction members.
We run a lottery in Windsward two or three times a week. Lotteries aren’t socialist, in fact, they’re pretty much the opposite, but ours are a little different: all of our earnings go right back into the community. You always walk out with a prize, even if it's just a couple of hundred rawhide. It’s a one gold entry fee and you might win a tier 5 bag. We get maybe 50 entrants from all three factions, so we’re hardly making anything, and the odds of winning something expensive are pretty good.
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We’re not in it for profits though, just the experience is fulfilling enough. It brings the server together. You can stop for a minute and hang out in a busy square before heading out into the wild to spend the next few hours killing monsters and cutting down trees. This emergent experience is what MMOs are all about.
Our positive energy has spread around the server. Other players in our faction have started to share resources. We hardly use the auction house anymore. Regular DMs appear from newer players asking if we can craft their weapons and tools if they bring us the resources. Sure, why not?
New World is a game, and we like making it better for people. You don’t need a Prime subscription, and you definitely don’t need to give all your gold to a company leader who might disappear overnight. We’re not grinding to buy a superyacht, Jeff. We’re grinding so the other people on our server can chill out and play the game without the virtual tax man (dressed in an Amazon uniform) knocking down their door. Now we’ve just got to see about actually paying those housing taxes...
THE GAMER.COM
Sometimes you've just got to take matters into your own hands.
Gambling is rife. House taxes are break-your-back expensive. A recent gold exploitation glitch has injected thousands of gold into the economy, and that's without even mentioning the fishing bots. You pay taxes in New World - which is more than Bezos does. You’ll work five days a week to pay them, then get taxed on crafting and trading, too. All that gold is given to one company (or sometimes, just one player) on the server. Everything costs money, and yet you hardly make any. Welcome to Amazon’s capitalist hellhole.
What did we really expect? New World is a game about colonizing an island and destroying the inhabitants, after all. It’s also developed by Amazon Game Studios, a subsidiary of one the largest companies in the world, headed up by cowboy-hat-wearing space-jockey Jeff Bezos. Surprising absolutely no one, the economy in the game is awful and ripe for exploitation. Cheers, Jeff.
Take this as an example. The leader of one of the largest companies on my server, no names here, sucked up the one hundred thousand gold in their company treasury and booked it to another server. All that money, all those hundreds of hours played by their underlings to stock the company’s coffers, vanished in a moment. People were pissed off. It all felt a bit too ‘real life’ - some caviar-sniffing folk making off with all their hard-earned gold. Cheers, Jeff.
Beyond the exploits, deflation is hitting New World’s economy hard. The prices of materials drop by up to 50 percent with each week that passes. It’s now pretty much impossible to make money from the auction house. You need to pay taxes on your homes and you need to repair your armour when it breaks. Even the cheapest house is around 500 gold a week and armour costs only increase the higher your level. How is anyone meant to pay for anything? Cheers, Jeff.
I wasn’t going to take this, not from a tax-dodger like Jeff. In an attempt to bring economic balance to our server, I teamed up with my company mates to do something about the awful economy. We’d heard stories from other servers about gambling rings, fight clubs, and a glitch that let you set up camps in the middle of town. But all of these didn’t really seem like what we wanted to achieve. We hold Windsward. We make a ton of gold. What can we do with it to make our server a better place?
So began the long process of wealth distribution. It started with handing out potions to the low-level players we saw wandering around Windsward. We produce hundreds of mana potions and health potions anyway, so why not share them? When we started getting thanks we were like “Hey, this feels pretty neat”, so we started giving out rawhide, wood, and other materials to players we saw at the workstations.
We also began funneling resources to the most hardcore crafter in our company. This guy is at level 200 in furnishing and cooking, which means he can pump out some of the best items in the game. Bring him the resources and he’ll make it for you. I make the potions, my pal crafts armor, and everything is divided up without a penny spent. We love collaborating, sharing, and providing gear for new faction members.
We run a lottery in Windsward two or three times a week. Lotteries aren’t socialist, in fact, they’re pretty much the opposite, but ours are a little different: all of our earnings go right back into the community. You always walk out with a prize, even if it's just a couple of hundred rawhide. It’s a one gold entry fee and you might win a tier 5 bag. We get maybe 50 entrants from all three factions, so we’re hardly making anything, and the odds of winning something expensive are pretty good.
We’re not in it for profits though, just the experience is fulfilling enough. It brings the server together. You can stop for a minute and hang out in a busy square before heading out into the wild to spend the next few hours killing monsters and cutting down trees. This emergent experience is what MMOs are all about.
Our positive energy has spread around the server. Other players in our faction have started to share resources. We hardly use the auction house anymore. Regular DMs appear from newer players asking if we can craft their weapons and tools if they bring us the resources. Sure, why not?
New World is a game, and we like making it better for people. You don’t need a Prime subscription, and you definitely don’t need to give all your gold to a company leader who might disappear overnight. We’re not grinding to buy a superyacht, Jeff. We’re grinding so the other people on our server can chill out and play the game without the virtual tax man (dressed in an Amazon uniform) knocking down their door. Now we’ve just got to see about actually paying those housing taxes...
About The Author
Harry Alston is a writer based in the UK. He was once number one in the world on Call of Duty: Black Ops and now spends his days chasing that past glory.
Harry Alston is a writer based in the UK. He was once number one in the world on Call of Duty: Black Ops and now spends his days chasing that past glory.
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