As the New World player count continues to rise post-Twitch campaign and fresh start servers, it turns out Amazon Games has also decided to increase the MMORPG‘s taxation rates. Just as death and taxes are inevitable, so is player backlash – and there’s a lot of it.
As part of the current New World PTR update, trading post taxes will be doubling, soaring from 2.5% to 5%. As explained by Amazon, this is an attempt to restore “healthy balance” to the game’s economy, as there have been “significant increases in coin generation from economy updates in the July and October updates.”
While Lost Sack of Coins is also being hit with a pretty hefty nerf, it’s the taxes that have riled players – I mean, who can blame them, taxes suck. “Spoiler alert: They’re doubling trade tax,” reads one forum thread. “Guess they think too much coin is around and the solution is to double the 2.5% trading post tax to 5%?”
This revelation hasn’t exactly gone down well with players, many of whom have noted that the taxes from trading go to the territory’s respective owner, so the wealth gap will simply continue to grow. Sounds like real life, right?
“Tax the rich, reduce the percentage of gold that goes to territory owners instead,” comments one, while another replies “I thought trading taxes went to the territory owners. How would that remove gold from the economy?” This is echoed by another player. “How about they fix the territory upgrade system that’s causing the problem?” they ask.
A final tongue-in-cheek response reads “‘let’s fix the economy by making the rich richer.’ Truly an American solution to an American problem.”
All jokes aside, Amazon’s approach to reworking the economy doesn’t quite make sense here – after all, the wealth gap already exists, decreasing the flow of cash isn’t going to change something that’s already there. Instead, I would agree that some serious changes need to be made to the territory owner system to better distribute gold. Wow, how political of me.
If you’re diving back into the mysterious world of Aeternum and are looking to climb to the top of the economic ladder, it’s worth starting from scratch on one of the New World fresh start worlds. If you’d rather just join the dominant faction instead, we’ve got a list of the New World factions right here for you.