Well -- we had much this same argument from one other player, but he never was able to particularly suggest anything to help his enjoyment of it (or did not care to). If you have suggestions, we're certainly open to them.
Here's the situation as I see it:
Old Situation
1. All players get a copy of every ingredient as soon as anyone picks it up, anywhere in the world.
a. This has the advantage of being really good for when someone is offline but still wants to pop by every so often.
b. Also great when you're joining a server blind.
c. Downside of being really unclear, and in fact even leading a few reviewers and players to think that "ninja loot stealing" was possible.
d. Also has the massive downside of encouraging players to journey separately from one another but on the same server, since if two players are separate they gain 2x the resources they would when together.
2. The multiplier of enemy health was 1x the number of players who had been in the chunk.
a. Advantage of being numerically balanced.
b. Disadvantage of players almost unanimously perceiving it as unbalanced when it is not.
Encouraged behaviors:
A. Logging onto random servers and adventuring around a bit, mostly without anyone, but with being on the same server.
B. Serial-play games where one player plays for a while, then another player plays some, then maybe both play some, etc.
Discouraged behaviors:
C. A group of friends actually journeying together and having fun in the same areas with one another. Which was kind of the original point in the first place.
New Situation
1. Any time there's a resource dropped, all the players on the screen have the opportunity to pick it up. Or all players in a mission get the reward, as the case may be.
a. The advantage is that it neither penalizes nor rewards playing separately or together. If you play with other people, you get the same rewards as them. If you play apart, you get the rewards you get.
b. The disadvantage is that for a player who drops in and out while others are playing consistently, that player will fall behind.
c. On the plus side, as spellgems are physical object now, other players are now easily able to give that player a spellgem if they wish, whereas before they could not do so.
2. Additionally, any player joining a server completely fresh gets both catch-up enchants AND spellgems of an appropriate level.
a. This has the advantage of not making a new player on a strange server be beholden to the kindness of strangers.
b. This has the disadvantage of not helping people who hop in and out of servers.
3. Finally, the multiplier when players are together has been made sub-linear, so that if there are players playing together in one chunk it is demonstrably better than being apart even to casual math/logic.
a. This has the disadvantage of being technically less balanced, but not by too much.
b. However, it has the massive advantage of seeming more balanced to the many people who thought the other system was unbalanced.
Conclusion
In my view, the new system offers vastly more flexibility except in one case: the case where one player only plays some of the time while the majority of players play the whole time through. I'm not yet sure what to do about that case, and nobody affected by that case has yet put forth any comments or arguments one way or the other about it. If people have suggestions, we'd love to hear them, but this simply isn't how we play the game and so we're not likely to think of a solution to it.
In general, the premise of this game isn't lots of strangers running around completely unaware of one another in a world. If it were, we wouldn't have or need all the anti-griefing controls. And all the business with citybuilding and guardian power scrolls and so forth wouldn't really fly in that sort of environment, because it would be far too easy for someone to grief unless they were locked out of it completely. Which they certainly can be, if that sort of "strangers running around completely unaware of one another in a world" gameplay mode is attractive to someone.
But more often than not, the people we've heard from have been those playing with friends or family. The new system lets them split off when they want to intentionally diverge themselves (let me get this fire spell while you get that earth spell, then we'll meet up), while at the same time encouraging them to actively stay together and overcome challenges... cooperatively.
Next Steps If You Disagree
Please don't get mad; I'm really not interested in an impassioned argument about this, and there's no need for it. If you have a "use case" that I'm not familiar with or are overlooking, please explain to me what it is. If you have ideas to how the new system could be tweaked to better serve your use case, or server options or similar that might better serve that use case, then by all means please tell us about it. We'll listen, discuss, and see what we can do. And by "see what we can do" I don't mean "brush you off indefinitely because we actually don't care."
We do care, but we can't design something effectively that we don't actually play. And that's what it boils down to: from almost every angle I can think of, the new system is demonstrably better. And yet you and one other player so far have come forward saying that it's making your play experience worse, but without specifics enough for it to be actionable yet. To me that says that, despite it being AVWW in both cases, we're really playing different games. And before we can do anything about fixing yours, we need to understand what it even is.
I hope that makes sense and/or helps!
