New World’s First Winter Event Now Live On PTS, Upcoming Watermark Revamp Causes Uproar

The holiday season is about to converge in New World as Amazon Game Studios gears up for Aeternum’s first-ever holiday event called the Winter Convergence Festival. The event is now live on the test server for those who want to get a head start on the game’s winter festivities.

The Winter Convergence Festival will feature Northern Lights displays and a whole lot of snow. Players will also be able to complete repeatable quests to earn event currency that can be exchanged for seasonal rewards. The winter update will also introduce four new uniquely-themed winter villages, Yeti-infested ice caves, new side quests, the new Aptitude tradeskill, and PvP balance tweaks.

Amazon has also revealed plans to revamp the game’s High Water Mark system starting with renaming it to Expertise. Expertise will function the same way as HWM and will determine the highest possible gear score of item drops for each of a player’s equipment slots.

A succeeding update in January, however, will also downscale gear score down to the player’s Expertise level. Having 520 War Hammer Expertise and equipping a 550 Gear Score War Hammer, for example, will scale the hammer’s effective gear score down to 520.

“While we understand to some players this may result in a temporary reduction in power, we believe in the long run this will result in more rewarding progression loop that can’t be bypassed by buying gear off the trading post,” said Amazon.

Obviously, players aren’t happy with the planned changes, especially since taking on endgame content alone on underpopulated servers is hard enough as it is even without gear downscaling.

“I purposely chose to spend all my time gathering and crafting instead of running watermark runs and now I suddenly have to start basically fresh?” wrote one Reddit user.

“I have never played a game where the devs have actively made the game worse with time to this degree, it's like self-sabotage at this point,” posted another.

Meanwhile, Amazon has addressed the issue of rampant botting by bringing the mighty banhammer down on over 7,000 accounts.

“We’re aware of player reports about increased bot activity in New World. Bots pose a persistent challenge for MMOs, and our team has deployed dedicated resources and tooling to identify and combat them,” the studio told MassivelyOP. “We are committed to continuous improvement in our fight against bots, and yesterday alone, we banned over 7,700 accounts for using bots. Our goal is to ensure New World is fun and fair for all players.”