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Neverwinter - the latest population reducing eruption
JudgeUK
Member RarePosts: 1,700
in Neverwinter
In yet another epic example of player support, Cryptic have announced a change to the Leadership profession.
For those not familiar with the game, Leadership tends to be the main profession as it gives Astral Diamonds (the in-game currency). As is the norm with these things, the rewards increase as the higher the Leadership rank.
You can have more than one character, and all these can level the Leadership profession - so players where doing this for the AD returns - and have been since day one.
But not anymore.
Cryptic have announced a removal of the AD return from the Leadership profession - which has not gone down at all well with the player base (that is about as mildly as I put it).
A more accurate description would be a sh*tstorm of epic proporttions.
Here we go:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1203585/astral-diamond-changes
32 pages at the time of writing - and rising.
A while back the terminally awful module 6 lowered the player population. It will be a question - not if this change has the same effect - but if in fact it will surpass even Mod 6's disastrous effect on player numbers.
For those not familiar with the game, Leadership tends to be the main profession as it gives Astral Diamonds (the in-game currency). As is the norm with these things, the rewards increase as the higher the Leadership rank.
You can have more than one character, and all these can level the Leadership profession - so players where doing this for the AD returns - and have been since day one.
But not anymore.
Cryptic have announced a removal of the AD return from the Leadership profession - which has not gone down at all well with the player base (that is about as mildly as I put it).
A more accurate description would be a sh*tstorm of epic proporttions.
Here we go:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1203585/astral-diamond-changes
32 pages at the time of writing - and rising.
A while back the terminally awful module 6 lowered the player population. It will be a question - not if this change has the same effect - but if in fact it will surpass even Mod 6's disastrous effect on player numbers.
Comments
However... it's been this way for years now, and everyone's adapted to it. Even the little guys like me (just 5 toons at 20 leadership with 9 slots unlocked each) are now invested in the system. So, this is going to hurt.
Still, in the long run it's good for the game. Unlike Mod 6, which was definitely bad or even terminally awful as you say.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
But on the up side i guess... In 6-8 months the economy MIGHT have become more stable... It will be entierly controlled by bots.... but at least it will be stable.
At this point i have a grand total of THREE dungeons to run.... It is going to be a fucking joy doing this. And about the same amount of skirm´s... PvP i have not touched since IWD due to it being completley gear dependent and that in turn equaled spending millions if not billions of AD....
But i guess it at least take the need to log in to collect/setup Leadership out of it.
This have been a good conversation
Yes content has been removed with long standing dungeons disappearing from the game.
I have played this game since launch, with the only purchase being a mount in a sale. So I do have fairly long standing experience of the game developers.
I see things have changed recently in the game development and support, and not for the good. This noticeably come across in the latest modules and the communication from the company.
To me, it now feels like an under-staffed development team really struggling with the game.
At present I do not see how they can turn the ongoing population decline around without significant backroom changes. However, this would likely require significant investment in bringing experienced mmo developers onboard. Something I just cannot see happening with this company at present.
I can only see an ongoing decline with Neverwinter.
I'm not really affected by it since Neverwinter is only in my 2nd-level games (and from those I currently play CO
Only two minor groups won't be affected by these changes, the very casuals like me, who just play once in a while, leveling a new class or playing some Foundry; and the second one of course the bots. Everyone else (the actual, active players) will be shafted by it. Leadership, right from the start was about AD, that was the main reason to raise it. Switching it off, pretty odd solution, which by the way won't "solve" anything, just like every the other "fixes" all the way back until Caturday...
"We saw that bots made huge amounts of AD, we had a fix, which indeed sucked for you, but it's good for the game. Oh wait, bots are still making huge amounts of AD, you know what, we kill Leadership off entirely. All those AD they stockpiled will still be there, your time and resources raising Leadership is down the drain, you will have a tough time from now on, but hey, at least bot will generate a bit less in the future! Yay, we rock, eat this, bots"
(just a hint, maybe ban those accounts, sweeping it weekly? I dunno, it used to work in plenty of games...)
* more info, screenshots and videos here
I logged back in last night because frankly my XBO is only being used as a TV center. It was free. I'd give it a try. I was intrigued that the PC issues weren't over on the XBO.
But quickly I discovered some of the things that changed. Some of them don't affect me right now but I'm starting to wonder "why bother" when it really does.
For example,
Right now, with the cap, you can only get 24K AD per day.
In order to gear up your guys, you're looking approximately 31M AD.
Let's do the simple math: 34,000,000/24,000 = 1, 416 days. That's right. And that's if you make sure you hit your cap EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Which you won't. That's 3.8 years with current pricing to get what you need.
And for that matter... these changes don't combat botting. In fact, there's quite a few blogs out there including: http://blog.nwo-uncensored.com/weekly-neverwinter-botting-data-16/
These show that botters don't give a rats. They change the method of their botting and still achieve their AD gains. The people who are affected are the SPECIFIC players who are playing by the rules.
Honestly, took the wind out of my sails when I read this.
It was funny because all the people who bought the "early access" packs had their own diamond stacks rendered worthless.
As far as the forums being clogged with 35 pages of screaming, it's not all anti-patch, plus of those 35 most of the manifestos are from players who seem to have the most to lose. Those that agree with the change, have just said so and moved on. Further, we who agree with the change don't have 50 accounts to log in and diatribes.
The system was not designed to be that way, and in order for us normal players to even have a remote chance to keep up, we too would have to make dozens of accounts. The Leadership Army players ruined the economy, they ruined the fun experience, they caused serious server lag, and now they are complaining that they got cheated. No, YOU players cheated US!
So, now they are forced to actually play the game, and you would think the end of the world is coming.
Remember kids, free to play, free to quit, and I say good riddance. Go try and find another game to exploit and ruin for your own selfish reasons.
It's a great game, and it'll get even better. Strongholds is a blast IMO. The only drawbacks right now are 1) dungeons are still being revamped 2) pvp is still owned by whales many which are the AD Army generals 3) the economy will take some working on to get back on track after being flooded by so much AD from these jerks.
Firstly then. Of course not all pplayers have 50 characters. However, the development team did allow players to have this option - for a price of course. So some players took them up on the offer. Players didn't scream at Cryptic for 50 slots, it was the company's decision to make this available to the players base.
But like a lot of players, I have around 7-8 characters. With all these I have maxed out Leadership - because it gives AD. That has been the sole incentive to do this since day one.
The costs in AD, and also to an extent the required game time in progressing a character to end gear prohibit doing this with multiple characters. Consequently players tend to focus on a single character whilst boosting their AD with leadership on others.
Secondly, there is only one way for players to catch up - wallet time. That is the nature of this game (and some would say of the company as a whole).
PvP - as you say, forget it unless you have extensively raided your bank account. One of the worst examples of money over skill.
Dungeons being revamped? Just for how long have these been removed from the game? They disappeared at Mod 6, months ago. Still no sign or even intended dates for their return.
Let's get this straight. They gave the reason for removing leadership as an anti bot measure. This is an utter fallacy.
Bots do not hang around long enough to max out leadership, that takes months. Their accounts are short lived, and repeatedly change.
You can find bots running automated content at lower levels. They are in groups doing this. Not hard to spot.
It is purely a measure aimed at getting players to spend even more in the game, that is it.
Leadership causing lag? Just what? You may as well say it's caused by the sun coming up.
Go into the Well of Dragons area when the dragon heralds appear - then you'll experience lag - the worst of the lot. The lag is caused by the historical poor optimization of the game, ground aoe skills here can just freeze the game.
As for feel free to quit. Well the player numbers show that's exactly what is happening. But is that really the best outcome for this game? Or any game?
Sometimes it is, but only as a lesson to the development team to reverse a direction.
Even then it's a question of whether those players, having moved on to another game, will return.
Sure, mistakes are understandable too, since they were new to this whole f2p (CoH and CO was developed as p2p, STO was in the middle ground, started as p2p but the revamp after the PWE takeover was made in an f2p mindset), Neverwinter was their first straight-to-f2p game, and that showed in some odd decisions, like the AD for AH (was a "great" help for spreading the effects of duping, Caturday rings a bell?), AD for gear, AD in Foundry, etc. The game was built around AD, and they were the ones who put Leadership into the game as a slow-but-steady AD source. They should've think about the possible side-effects...
Anyways, I think this time they really mean it and try to go against bots, shafting the alt-keepers is just the cherry on top. That's why I said it's an odd solution which won't solve anything: Bots will be unaffected by this change too, like they were with the Gateway one.
(Btw, whether keeping a legion of alts is "legal" or "intended" etc. could be a valid and interesting discussion, at an another time, since as I said, I think this change is not target those players.
For the record, personally I believe it's a lame behaviour, but I always mocked no-lifers, even back in the MUD days
Except I wrote that I think it's really against botters, and only as an added benefit it kills off the alt-hoarders. But since we're not inside Cryptic meetings, we can only guessing...
But it's not the norm. I'd say that's around 5-8 characters, with one main and alts.
The high AD cost of getting anywhere with a character really promotes the single main focus.
But this is not an anti-bot measure - which they have said it is.
It takes months to get leadership to a high level. Bots simply do not hang around for anywhere near that length of time. They farm lower level content, disappear, to be replaced by others.
This leadership change will not hurt bots - it is aimed purely at the player base.
You could take actually say it is directed at the people who have invested the most time and money into their game - what sort of reward is that lol?
Anyone can pluck numbers out of their imagination.
The only accurate information we have is that a player can have up to 50 character slots. The game company allows this. You could say they encourage it by selling these character slots in their cash shop.
This is not breaking any game rules. It has in fact benefited the company by spending money with them. Their sales mechanism has worked - they have got the sale.
And why would players buy these multiple character slots that Cryptic where selling?
Why?
-There is only one reason
- And Cryptic knew full well what that reason was
- That is why they had this multiple character slot feature in their cash shop
-------->Leadership AD
There are many ftp games out there. Some allow the game to be played, having basically cosmetic items in the store - Rift for example.
Others are at the opposite end of the scale, and Cryptic are well known in this respect.
Bots will continue to make AD from this game unless Cryptic take targeted action against them.
You say that the business is there to make money, to support families. Well, at a fundamental level, that can also be applied to the gold sellers.
By that same thought process, they will also be working to maximize their AD from the game. And this action by Cryptic simply does not stop them.
In fact, it will likely increase their income as this AD revenue source for players disappears. How's that for an outcome?
- Promote increased AD buying, whilst utterly failing to take effective and direct action against the gold sellers, with actions that drive more people away from the game.
Win win......hardly.
How about this? How about the casual player who has quit and moved on, because he can't keep up with the players that have a leadership army? How about his hours and his investment? What are you going to give him from your own pocket?
lol yourself, you're a selfish person, typical of this day with not a worry about how your actions affect others just so long as you "get yours" and screw everyone else on the way, but as soon as anything might inconvenience you a tad bit, you squeal like a stuck pig.
Maybe I have you personally all wrong, and I'm lumping you in with the jackasses who caused this.
"But this is not an anti-bot measure - which they have said it is."
Again, I think this IS an anti-bot measure, the difference is, you are convinced or you have your head in the sand and don't know, or don't want to know that the botters are those with the massive leadership armies, they are NOT the AD sellers you see spamming the channels. They are your guildmates, or anyone (I know, and I created this account so I would not be recognized by my guildmates, because I KNOW they are botting like mad and there are instructions all over the web to do it, and it is encouraged by guildmates because of our stronghold and a need to keep up with the Joneses, it's ridiculous).
This huge bot increase, which maybe you don't realize sprung up bad, I don't think was intended at the guy with one account and 10 characters. It came about after strongholds, when the arms race began. Short sighted yes. Every game, every person, every country, every programmer, every president, every committee, every everybody makes mistakes, but anyone worth their salt works to correct them as fast as they can.
The big time AD sellers you see spamming don't bot, just like WoW or any other game, they just pay someone off on the inside for the transfer of pixels into one account or another or they dupe items of value, we all know that. Should they go after them? You bet, but I think it's harder to track down and prosecute people in communist China than it is to work on those things that you can control. At least that's where I would put my effort.
And, no matter what (I know, never start a sentence with "and"), there will always be a black market. You have to assume that a small percent of the population will buy black market items, but the thing with that is, it is evenly distributed and it is not as widespread as an exploit that everyone knows about and that has come to be accepted by the players. So a few guys become whales, everyone knows who they are, there is probably one in every average sized guild, but we dont' even try to keep up with them. We just say "yeah, that Jake, he buys his gold from the Koreans, what a jackass, he can't cut it" and we move on and tend to just avoid Jake, then Jake goes and finds a new game after "whaling up" and then complaining that everyone on the server sucks at PvP (well after he rubs everyone's face in the fact that he PwNz and they SuXor).
An exploit has to be fixed ASAP. Good luck finding the guy in a coffee shop in Tsing Zhou selling AD over a Tor Guarded network. Usually what companies do, is they make deals with these individuals to throttle the sales, in return they give them something, most think that is how they are selling Founder Packs and Vanguard Packs, etc. Sausage making is not pretty, we know that.
Don't kid yourself, players like me have been complaining to Strum and others that the Leadership armies had to go. It was making MY FRIENDS leave the game, they just couldn't keep up with the Leadership Generals. We want both to go, the Commercial Sellers and the AD Armies (a few characters does not an Army make). Not only that, it was driving my other friends into a tizzy, I dare say some people were going way out to keep up with the other guild that hit rank 5 that week, and then other guilds were doing the same damn thing.
I see your point of view, you invested hours, with only 8 characters you don't sound like an abuser at all. Now see mine, if I have two hours a day to play, I want to go watch netfix then, or play another game maybe, not have my computer dedicated to running script or hogging my bandwidth. How can I even be a valued member of a guild when I only have 5 characters total and the guild has people who are making 2 million AD a week for them (plus their own stash of AD).
I don't need BiS in every slot to PvE. I have rank 8's on my 70's, 2400-2600 gear and I do just fine. I don't PvP because I am not going to fight against a premade 3000k on teamspeak while I'm with my wife in a PuG or maybe with a guildmates some of which may not even all speak the same language. We play for fun. PvP is not fun for us in NW. Not my idea of fun anyways, I'd rather run dragons, SH encounters, IWD HE's or the few Dungs that are left, and my gear does just fine, but then again, this is not my life and that's the point, if I HAVE to make an army to earn AD, then it will become my life. I'm not willing to make that sacrifice and neither should you or anyone else, but to each his own.
There are two sides to every coin. I've heard about 100 sides to this coin, I'm giving you my side.
Notifications of guilds quitting
Guilds being reduced to a couple of people
PE looking like a ghost town
Players who are sticking with it stopping any kind of spend
Bots increase in low level farming areas, Neverdeath Graveyard in particular
Bugged revised Leadership profession - 4 hour quest giving more rewards than 1 day quest.
Bugged dungeons not giving the newly promised AD rewards
Post after post of people leaving the game
Currently at 54 pages with over one thousand six hundred replies.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1203585/astral-diamond-changes/p54
However you look at it - this is a really bad turn for the game.
Alternatives to Leadership AD? That is precisely what the player base was asking Cryptic to consider before just doing this removal.
People have put multiple suggestions forward in that forum thread - there has not been one single response from the development team.
But it is not the players responsibility to produce these alternatives - that is game design, and that is what the development team is for.
As for Melodramatic? Everything I said in my previous post has either been directly witnessed or comes first hand from other guild leaders who I've known for years.
Is there any reason now to have leadership trained? Did this change make leadership worthless?
I'm not sure I will return now. This change seems completely profits driven. The real source of botting has nothing to do with leadership, it's the bots that plague the game inside -- you can see literally hundreds of thousands of things selling on AH rolling up all day every day, amounting to hundreds of millions a week. Nothing's ever been done about it, despite endless reports. However, the leadership stuff is mostly from genuine players who have paid money into the game, bought extra slots, etc. I'd say that Crypic/PWE is assuming that these players will feel there's no other way now than to buy VIP and buy AD via Zen.
hi, i am new to this gamers site.
i have wondering and been searching for other sites about NWO's moderators abuse of power, saying i was creating flamebaits, which i never did, all i just did to offer suggestions and recently i found some of posts i made went missing.
since Mod 6 released, it was horrible, and game got harder and been getting oneshotted even with current item score 2.3k as playing Gaurdian Fighter, and my other alts became useless and still without boons.
it made me angry and felt helpless and afraid of getting ban for no reason. i have no problem with Star Trek Online, it is still decent and some missions can be hard but doable to get it finished.
now i am wondering again, What about Hasbro/WotC doing, do they know what going on with Cryptic? the way i see, it is ruining reputation and abuse of Liscense contract, many of guildmates already left, not just because of ADs get serious cut, seeing big "roadblock" to game progression and amount of frustrations when it should be fun and stress-free game environment.
it seem devs are focus on something that isnt broken or can be fix later when they should focus on playable issue and difficulties that need to tone down, now that forced many to create leadership crew to get much needed currencies to get upgrades and to buy Greater mark refine stones. many players are tired of seeing same status/item score for weeks with no chance of upgrading unless feel forced to open the wallets.
we are backed into the corner.
And NWO's moderators just delete or move to "black hole" section where it wont be ever answered. then why do we need those guys to clean up and do they want us to talk in baby words? best moderator i trusted the most was Zebular and he often gave me advices, and others just claim as flamebaits, and i ask Zeb to check few times but not too much since they are busy.
the new community moderator leader seem to have no clue and seem to make him/her unpopular.
censorship are getting heavy handed just recently, and i have seen other posts made by other players are worst than mine posts and still allowed and very rough words used.