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[Editorial] Neverwinter: On the Duplication Debacle
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Last weekend was a rough one for Neverwinter developers and players alike as it was revealed that an exploit had essentially trashed the game's economy. In a new editorial, we take a look at the debacle and what it means for players. Read on and then leave your thoughts in the comments.
It was nice of Cryptic to laugh at themselves and provide the equivalent of a virtual T-Shirt that says, “I survived Caturday and all I got was this stupid shirt.” All sarcasm aside this mea culpa is a nice little freebie especially for the players that were not affected by the 7 hour rollback. For the people that were impacted by the 7 hour rollback it does not go far enough. Cryptic must answer individuals’ claims about lost merchandise during this 7 hour period.
Read more of Rob Lashley's Neverwinter: On the Duplication Debacle.
Comments
Excellent Article and I agree 100%.
Unfortunately, the game is even worse than the issues you list.
For example, when you work hard to get to level 60 with enough glory to buy a set of full PvP armor, you will soon learn that the most important slot on the armor, i.e. the purple "armor enhancement slot" will cost you a TON to utilize. Not only do the 4 "enhancements" (not enchantments) have a 1% success rate to fuse into a purple, but the cost of a purple is hundreds of thousands of AD. And so is the cost to fuse it.
This game game was NOT designed to make money from the use of AD and Zen...NO...the game was designed first and formost to SUCK you DRY.
I am done with it, and by the way...PvP is horrid...despite being very good at PvP in this game, most matches have so many AFKrs, that there is hardly ever a balanced match.
Sometimes an entire team is AFK at the spawn site with hot keys automatically set to make them jump and not be disconected.
Hand on heart the AH being down had zero impact on me, reason is I have yet to use it even at lvl 37, thats not to say it didn't impact others, but I do not thrive on the use of an AH, my focus is gameplay.
The 7hr Rollback though did affect me, but not to such a degree that I was going to throw all my toys out of the pram and start screaming at PWE, I shrugged, thought to myself I'd love to see some real action taken against the offenders and then continued on with my game.
You are right that their "rollback" is the politically correct way to say "wipe" or "reset". A lot of people lost a lot of legitimately obtained items and currency. They spent real world time on their characters only for Cryptic to say, "Your time was stolen by some dbag over here. We like you so much we will have to effectively make that time disappear as if you had never lived it because of a group of people. Have a good day". That displeased me to no end and I find myself playing less Neverwinter because of it.
Before the rollback, I had enough Astral Diamonds to buy a character respec. Now, I have to spend another 7-8 hours of dungeon delves to get items at the end of the runs to make those AD back. So, in essence, I lost the 7 hours of work they wiped plus whatever time it takes me to get those AD back. As you can see, the time they actually will take away from me is more than what they rolled back. To me, nothing is more important than time because it is one of the few things you can never, ever, get back.
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
Could not agree more. They have to fix the pay-to-win aspect or this game will be a ghost town in the near future.
One problem with the "hide behind beta" remarks, is that Cryptic has never done that! People keep saying this, but they have responded to server outage etc with a ferocity that matches if not exceeds any non beta title.
They may have said a couple times. This is why we have an open beta period to find these issues etc. But they have never said "Oh calm down its just beta." As far as customer service goes, they treat it as a launch product 100%. So stop claiming they are making excuses when they really are not.
Come on Grak you know better! =P
Spent a ton of money on this game thought it would be good to play but when you have 2 of 5 classes worthless at end game your game is just broke. Plus, it is a huge money sink if you want to have anything good in the game or you just play 24/7 but not even I can do that and I could given my condition.
I gave up until they fix the classes!
Isn't the answer to stop supporting studios that blatantly scam their customers with such an unfair payment model/cash shop?
But you already gave them a ton of money, so they'll see it as a success. If they can trick even 1/10th of their players to do what you did they will turn a profit. They don't even need to "launch" the game they should just go about making the next F2P cash grab. Oh and they don't have to pay for you to be using server space anymore so its win-win
The future of MMO's right here (as it has been lauded on this site).
http://xivpads.com/?1595680
http://guildwork.com/users/murugan
While the exploit isn't as bad as D3's Exploit and handling. D3 AH for US is completely destroyed. Prices have doubled on low end items and have gone up to even more ridiculous levels for the high end gear it is a big problem. On there, a vast majority of things are on RMAH now after the dupe has ruined gold... which sadly is benefiting blizzard and makes me feel the reason they did no roll back was because of the money it was making...
More could of been done though the economy isn't completely in shambles... granted thats looking at the 'good' side of things. Still, I feel it was done primarily to fix damages while trying to keep as much of their profits as possible. Its easy to see they are really trying to gouge at the consumer's wallet, which is a shame since its a fun game. Flawed as it might be, it can be fun. They could of handled this exploit far better.
Well, all we can do is refuse to pay for the game, still play it if you like it to show the game is good and voice out why people aren't paying and what needs to be done to make the game a better place. Hopefully someone will sense will realize they have a Gem and make it better rather then cash in on it.
Well I also gave the game a lot of money in the first 2 weeks, however I do feel like I got my monies worth for that time. I would have also continued to give the game money but I am now not going to for various reasons that I'm not going to go into here.
Yes PWE/CRYPTIC will have gained a lot of money in the first 3-4 weeks of this game going into open beta, by players like me, but I can tell you this. Give it another 3-4 weeks and they will see how their income is actually decreasing from the players in the game along with player numbers. When that happens perhaps they will start to really address the many issues the game currently has. Until they do, players like me won't be giving them any more money.
Good article. I'm enjoying my time in NW and will not fall for the zen gambling cash grab that seems to be their revenue strategy.
I'll play the parts of the game that I can enjoy without shelling out an unreasonable amount of money and leave it at that. The game IS fun. I just refuse to buy "chance" items in any game.
Sadly, I don't expect much from Cryptic. True I played their games, but mostly as a complete freeloader, as they don't have any lasting appeal nor any decent value whatsoever.
Champions was the first one and already was paramount of the company idea of what games and MMO should be. It was so much different from the City Of Heroes they abandoned that it showed enough of what the company was all about.
Lowering your expectation, Neverwinter is a nice romp. Sadly a game that don't compels you to shell out money for it. Sadly, as the Foundry idea is a nice one...
”If Cryptic did wipe the servers they would have to refund every Zen that anyone has spent on the game. To do anything else would be criminal. Not literally but you get the idea."
IMO, If so, then yes literally, they have taken money but not provided the product (As far as I know, there are laws that cover this)!
I don't play it much, so was not affected by it yet, but most likely will be, if the economy does not correct its self!
Everything is too expensive. 6$ for a respec? No thank you.
Everything cost a ton of AD and crafting doesn't seem to be worth it.