Another Doozy from Cryptic - This could be the best yet.

JudgeUK

This from Cryptic
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"Keys are currently acquired by purchasing them from the Zen Market, completing certain campaign tasks, or obtaining them from certain non-player characters. Each key can be used to open and claim the rewards from one chest.

In the Sea of Moving Ice update releasing on the live server on November 8th, there will be a change happening to how these keys work.

There is currently a bug on the live server whereby a player may view the rewards without using a key. This bug has been fixed. When this fix gets to the live server, opening a chest will consume the key, give the player the rewards, and display those rewards to the player. To ensure that keys are not accidentally used, the user interface in game will alert you to which key would be consumed and ask for confirmation before continuing.

Since this bug has been live for a long time and we believe that some players may have come to rely on this bug, we are providing advance notice of the change."
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The full post and eruption is here:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1223956/dungeon-key-changes/p1

Apparently the long standing feature of being able to see what's in chests before accepting or declining, (and this feature even has it's own pop up window to allow this decision), is not an intended feature at all.

It is in fact a bug!  - A bug that has been in the game for years.  Operating sneakily in broad daylight, yet under Cryptic's radar - apparently.

So players who have obtained keys will now have to open these chests 'blind' as it where, trusting to the Cryptic God of rng to receive an item that is not only useful for their class, but also not something they already have.

This is awesome in it's sheer ridiculousness. A long standing, scripted feature, was actually a bug the whole time.

Yeah.........

Right.........

Scot

MMOs are now more interested in adopting the worst business practice they can find for the most profit than anything else they could do to actually improve their game.

If you are going to adopt business practices from casinos to create a generation of gambling gamers you are not going to be bothered about a lie or two.

immodium

I wish I heard the word doozy more often in the UK.

Wizardry

Well i believe 100% that it was not intended,however it proves how dumb they are and lack of care to watch their own game.
I assume this goes unnoticed because of the many hands feeding off the same game.WOTC i have seen this business operation many years in the past as a bunch of bumbling idiots,PW well they are usually on top of cash shop use Cryptic likely never knows of the business side,especially the CS part and Hasbro they are simply the giant that spends too much money and time on lawyers in court to know wtf is going on.

I do have one query however,this would mean that NOBODY from Cryptic plays their own game and uses the keys after all these years and that is nearly impossible to believe.However a simple employee might not actually understand that the look see was not intended but i would think the word of mouth would have filtered through.

None the less,this sort of practice of using VERY low % gambling is imo lame and shotty standards for games to be using.Even in the actual governed by law gambling casinos,you KNOW what your reward will be,you KNOW the odds and you have the ability to play the ODDS/probabilities,where as with these chests it is simply an already set/determined % of quality that will never change.

odds/probabilities....By this i mean,you can stand there and watch and follow the cards/numbers and put the odds in your favor.You cannot do this with these boxes other than say you win big,then your likely chance of not winning big for the next several tries is very high but then what,never play again?

bartoni33

Wizardry said:

Well i believe 100% that it was not intended,however it proves how dumb they are and lack of care to watch their own game.
I assume this goes unnoticed because of the many hands feeding off the same game.WOTC i have seen this business operation many years in the past as a bunch of bumbling idiots,PW well they are usually on top of cash shop use Cryptic likely never knows of the business side,especially the CS part and Hasbro they are simply the giant that spends too much money and time on lawyers in court to know wtf is going on.

I do have one query however,this would mean that NOBODY from Cryptic plays their own game and uses the keys after all these years and that is nearly impossible to believe.However a simple employee might not actually understand that the look see was not intended but i would think the word of mouth would have filtered through.

None the less,this sort of practice of using VERY low % gambling is imo lame and shotty standards for games to be using.Even in the actual governed by law gambling casinos,you KNOW what your reward will be,you KNOW the odds and you have the ability to play the ODDS/probabilities,where as with these chests it is simply an already set/determined % of quality that will never change.

odds/probabilities....By this i mean,you can stand there and watch and follow the cards/numbers and put the odds in your favor.You cannot do this with these boxes other than say you win big,then your likely chance of not winning big for the next several tries is very high but then what,never play again?

So you're the one guy that fell for it?

OFC it's not a bug. Shit like this is why I quit playing Arc games years ago.

EDIT: I do agree 100% with your last 2 paragraphs though. I wish I could "LOL" one half of a post and "Agree" the other half!

tawess

I always thought it was a weird choice to let us preview that... But i really did like it. 

It does fly in the face of "loot box" logic ad i have no problem acepting as a "bug" or unintended feature. 

I am more curious tho if this is the point in the lifespan of the game that you do a move like this, enraging the vocal minority and pissing off the people who really have nothing better to do than yell loudly. 

bartoni33

tawess said:

I am more curious tho if this is the point in the lifespan of the game that you do a move like this, enraging the vocal minority and pissing off the people who really have nothing better to do than yell loudly. 

I would say the lifespan is near the end if they are doing this. Obvious cash grab. Or at the least changing a core aspect (NOT a bug/unintended feature) of the game to force people to spend money for keys.

As many have said in their forums if they had just been honest and said "we are changing this because cash reasons" instead of "we are fixing a clearly coded mechanic of looting chests that we somehow missed for YEARS and many updates/modulars because it was a bug" it would not look so unseemly.

tawess

no matter what they did... it would be a explosion. In all honesty it is actually smarter to give it some spin, because that is what the people who hold shares expect. 

bartoni33

tawess said:

no matter what they did... it would be a explosion. In all honesty it is actually smarter to give it some spin, because that is what the people who hold shares expect. 

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think the shareholders or at least the suits downtown tasked the Devs to find a way to make more money and this was the quickest, easiest way to do so. 

gervaise1

I also agree that this was - clearly - a "bug". Either bad design and codong or - more likely - whoever coded it linked it to a routine to "deliver" the loot and didn't realise the routine included a "decline" option.

And it does indeed highlight the extent to which some games are on "auto-pilot". 

Kyleran

It actually could be a bug, as it makes no sense at all to RNG code loot boxes without masking the loot from players. Devs may gave coded in a god mode and forgot to remove it.

Besides, we're talking Cryptic here, one of the more inept studios in modern gaming.

As for no one in the studio noticing? Either the testers thought they could see it because of their special permissions, or no one really has tested it in a very long time. (perhaps there are no testers?)

Maybe its like fast food restaurant employees who rarely eat the crap food they serve, no one at Cryptic plays their crap games either.

Iselin

gervaise1 said:

I also agree that this was - clearly - a "bug". Either bad design and codong or - more likely - whoever coded it linked it to a routine to "deliver" the loot and didn't realise the routine included a "decline" option.

And it does indeed highlight the extent to which some games are on "auto-pilot". 

You were so close there with your misspelling of coding as "codong" ... "codung" would have been so much better.

Sovrath

bartoni33 said:

So you're the one guy that fell for it?

nah, I think it's a bug (it doesn't make sense to have a random loot chest that you can preview) and I think Kyleran is correct, there is some sort of "god mode" preview and the devs never turned it off.

Talonsin

Having Cryptic on your resume is like having GOON in your Eve corp history, it means you can not cut the mustard anywhere else.  Many of their top executives have left Cryptic and had to come back when they realized they did not have the skill to work at a real company.  Even Stahl, who did finally land a job at Blizzard a few months ago, left Cryptic after being the Executive Producer of STO and came back in less than a year, having realized he needed more work on his skills. 

Cryptic is more of an indie game studio that is owned by a money hungry Chinese company who care little for the actual players.

parpin

what a garbage lie...they are basically forcing people to spend more money on the game..i played neverwinter for some hours when i saw how big of a cash grab the game is i deleted the game from my pc and i am glad i did. 

Emeraq

So what's the issue? That they are calling it a bug, or that they are making the change?  I stopped playing the game long ago, and don't recall much about this, so I'm curious can you sell the boxes on auction house after seeing what's inside them and not using the key? If so, do you feel it's right to try to sell a bok with "junk" that you viewed determined wasn't good enough for you and therefore passed on?

I think making it the way boxes work in other games is fine as that's the norm, and that folks are just getting up in arms for no reason (other than maybe the wording of bug)

JudgeUK

Emeraq said:

So what's the issue? That they are calling it a bug, or that they are making the change?  I stopped playing the game long ago, and don't recall much about this, so I'm curious can you sell the boxes on auction house after seeing what's inside them and not using the key? If so, do you feel it's right to try to sell a bok with "junk" that you viewed determined wasn't good enough for you and therefore passed on?

I think making it the way boxes work in other games is fine as that's the norm, and that folks are just getting up in arms for no reason (other than maybe the wording of bug)

No, these aren't the standard lockboxes that people trip over in the game. They are the end reward for defeating certain bosses. There's a long list of affected dungeons/raids, a few examples are:

• Malabog’s Castle Key
  
• Valindra’s Tower Key
  
• Kessell’s Retreat Key

For years the mechanic has been:
Defeat end boss - check chest reward (via pop up window) - then either use your key or not depending on content suitability.

For years -  across multiple modules, dungeons and raids.

But apparently this has been a bug the whole time...................

tawess

and the fact that these not only are not really RNG but does not behave like any other loot box in the game does validate that it is in fact.. a bug... Why it has been left in and if it is really worth the PR backlash to fix it... that i worth discussing. 

But my guess is that they feel that "why the heck not.. we have ran our customer base through the grinder about seven times.. if they are still here, this will be but a breeze"

Ofc the order is financial in nature, just in case someone missed that. 

goboygo

Scot said:

MMOs are now more interested in adopting the worst business practice they can find for the most profit than anything else they could do to actually improve their game.

If you are going to adopt business practices from casinos to create a generation of gambling gamers you are not going to be bothered about a lie or two.

Yup.  But wait no one is FORCING you to use the cash shop even if the the ENTIRE games is designed around using it.

Broken logic by people raised on the cash shop ( that use it obviously ).

Tiamat64

If this hypotheticlly is a bug, then the biggest doozy is that it took Cryptic this long to notice it.

Then again, I remember back when I played Ultima Online, bows were two-handed weapons and you needed a hand free in order to drink potions, which limited potions to one-handed weapons.  However, for some reason, you could actually drink potions while you had a bow equipped (but you still couldn't do any other actions that required a hand free, the most obvious being using a shield but I'm pretty sure there were others like maybe lockpicking).

This was in the game for like, two years with various people mentioning it here and there on the closest thing to an official forum (UO didn't have its own forums but the designers frequented certain fansite forums a lot) to the point where people assumed it was a feature after a while.  Then finally someone asked about it to the lead designer (Designer Dragon, same guy who would go on to do Star Wars Galaxies) who had also been UO's lead dev since it's birth (like, two years by now) and his answer was (and I QUOTE), "You can drink potions with a bow!?"

Took them another couple of months to finally patch it out.

.........seriously, that and this random box loot preview stuff is crap the designers of these games should have been able to find out if just SOMEONE in the company actually played the game even casually.  I mean just... do developers really think it's a good idea to just develop the game blind without having a single person actually PLAY the game to see what it's like?  Oo

H0urg1ass

I cannot even remotely believe that this was a bug.  If the game revolves around this model for generating cash, then there's no way that it went unnoticed for years.

What is more likely is that they planned it the way it is now, allowed it run this long and then saw how much money that Blizzard and other companies were making by not revealing the contents first and decided to retcon their decision and claim it was a bug.

If your game is designed around players buying keys to open chests, and that's a part of your revenue stream, then there's no way in frakking hell that the players ability to see the contents goes unnoticed for years.  There's simply no way that a single person on the forums or somewhere else didn't bring this up at some point.  There's always that guy who raises their hand when something's too good to be true and says "Hey Cryptic, is it supposed to work like this?"

Po_gg

I tend to agree @H0urg1ass and see it more as a communication spin. (plus, as much as I like them, this is worthy of an epic facepalm... maybe that's why I play mostly just CO and STO)

And to beat the dead horse a bit more, even if it was a bug (which is not the case imo), it was one of the most f.cked up mechanic in the first place, from the start. Purchase keys if you want to loot in dungeons? Come on... "dungeons are free, you can run them as many times as you want - just give us some money if you want the cool loot at the end"  
It was lame even with the current iteration, where you could check beforehand whether the piece is good for you / an alt, or not. As one of the commenters posted under the announcement, if this change goes through, nobody will run dungeons beyond the one free daily.

Anyways, it was a good laugh, thanks for the update Judge  

JudgeUK

This is one of the quoted dungeons - Malabog's Castle - and how it has been working in regard to chest rewards. At 15.55 in the video the window is there showing the chest content. This has been the norm for many dungeons over years.
It's a pop up window with listed rewards -  including pictures of the things. But now it's a bug......

bartoni33

I wonder...

To those that think think this is an actual bug: What is your opinion on Arc/Cryptic/whoever else is involved in this game? I have a theory.

Joseph_Kerr

It's really a shame they're the ones that get to use the Star Trek and Neverwinter IP's to make mmorpg's of them when all they do is butcher them. I guess it's a common practice in today's world of gaming greed as EA gets to repeatedly butch Star Wars as well.

Arglebargle

There's a reason I don't play any of their games anymore....

Also, had the fun experience of trying to recover an account on Champions Online when some friends of mine wanted to play it:  The  support links on the official site yielded 404 errors, over a period of weeks.   Good going!