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Foundry Sunset Feedback

thevampinatorthevampinator Member Posts: 307 Arc User
edited March 2019 in General Discussion (PC)
I use it for making roleplay maps for my characters or I have. I don't want those to be destoryed think of the thousands of hours players have put into it to make their quests. There is no excuse to ruin all that hard work please keep it!
I was really looking forward to all the changes and the possibility of the roleplay community recovering. Please don't kill the foundry off!
Leave it so players can build social houses. At least. Social maps and other things!
Post edited by kreatyve on
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Comments

  • cilginordekcilginordek Member Posts: 459 Arc User
    All the good memories in the foundry, and all that could have been. All of it will be gone.
    Part of the games soul is going away with the Foundry. All in the name of more streamlined mechanics.
    I hope the overhaul will work great for the game and provide a lot of fun for all players, but Neverwinter will never be the same again.
  • luks707luks707 Member Posts: 230 Arc User
    The foundry was one of the unique features of this game. Sadly after it was abused it was sidelined. But that does not mean that it cannot be a core component of keeping this game interesting.
    The solution would have been simple: introduce a random foundry q. In it you would only be in tested non buggy qualifiying foundries and you would get rewards perhaps somewhere between levelling and intermediate dungeons. Every week new content! Other than the initial work needed to update the foundry this should be a feature that keeps people coming back. No developer team can create that much and frankly a great variety of content is what gaming should be about, not constantly doing the same things over. Think of how little content was created for the last mod? Is that what you really want? I know a lot of people that have turned their back out of sheer boredom. With the quality testing and foundry support this would never have happened. And no matter how much you shake up the new mod, you are robbing yourself of the solution to the games core problem.
    PLEASE RECONSIDER!
  • luks707luks707 Member Posts: 230 Arc User
    I should add - up to now I have found what I have seen of Mod16 generally encouraging. But this is a huge step in the wrong direction!
  • taalar#3515 taalar Member Posts: 15 Arc User
    I am trying to hold onto some friends who are roleplayers and spenders. Can you substitute something or find someone who can keep it going? I don't think you realize what this could do to the community.
  • sandukutupusandukutupu Member Posts: 2,285 Arc User
    I don't know if they listen to us any more. I know this is a huge mistake and there will be fallout. But nothing lasts forever, including game companies.
    wb-cenders.gif
  • drartwhodentdrartwhodent Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 300 Arc User
    Will the current Foundry quests continue to be available after it 'closes'?
    It would be a shame if certain classics like Bill's Tavern and Tired of Being the Hero were no longer around for new players to be able to enjoy.
    DON'T
    PANIC!
  • shanefrazier93shanefrazier93 Member Posts: 28 Arc User
    Please, please, PLEASE do not remove the Foundry!
  • shanefrazier93shanefrazier93 Member Posts: 28 Arc User
    Not another cent given to this company unless they reconsider. Cancelling VIP.
  • mithrosnomoremithrosnomore Member Posts: 693 Arc User
    luks707 said:


    The solution would have been simple: introduce a random foundry q. In it you would only be in tested non buggy qualifiying foundries and you would get rewards perhaps somewhere between levelling and intermediate dungeons. Every week new content!

    So how much time are the devs supposed to spend testing foundry missions to make sure that they are not buggy and that otherwise pass muster to be placed into the "foundry queue"?

    Never mind the time needed to add the missions themselves after they have been tested.

    And how can you promise new content every week when you are dependent upon players providing that content (and that content has to be tested and accepted by the devs)?

    It is possible that the foundry removal is an issue with WotC. I won't pretend to have inside info, but maybe the brand holder was concerned about the content that could appear in player-created missions and the damage that they think that it could do to their brand.

    Maybe it is just as they said in the article, but maybe not.
  • langollerlangoller Member Posts: 14 Arc User
    keep the foundary dam it, it is what even keeps me and others around or else i'd never tolerated all the issues and yes, I make founderies and it inspires people when you can't bother to make or update new hubs!
  • langollerlangoller Member Posts: 14 Arc User
    Might I mention some of those works could be used as inspiration for content, you say you don't have enough people to think of new maps or classes? look around in the forums and foundery. We have over 20 proposed classes and hundreds of maps that could be looked at and removing them is a horrible decision you will regret in the long run.
  • mattachinemattachine Member Posts: 189 Arc User

    Not another cent given to this company unless they reconsider. Cancelling VIP.

    I wish I could cancel my VIP and get my money back fo the over 500 days left of VIP that I have.
  • luks707luks707 Member Posts: 230 Arc User

    luks707 said:


    The solution would have been simple: introduce a random foundry q. In it you would only be in tested non buggy qualifiying foundries and you would get rewards perhaps somewhere between levelling and intermediate dungeons. Every week new content!

    So how much time are the devs supposed to spend testing foundry missions to make sure that they are not buggy and that otherwise pass muster to be placed into the "foundry queue"?

    Never mind the time needed to add the missions themselves after they have been tested.

    And how can you promise new content every week when you are dependent upon players providing that content (and that content has to be tested and accepted by the devs)?

    It is possible that the foundry removal is an issue with WotC. I won't pretend to have inside info, but maybe the brand holder was concerned about the content that could appear in player-created missions and the damage that they think that it could do to their brand.

    Maybe it is just as they said in the article, but maybe not.
    I have no current knowledge of Wizards, although I did playtest 4th edition (sorry about that!) so I a bit of an idea. Wizards was a driving force behind the idea of player generated content, and the arguments I am using atm were why the foundry was introduced. Also: WotC is built on player content. DMs in pen and paper have enormous freedom and that is what drives players to engage with their products. But that is speculation.

    The testing for foundry content would be quite simple. You would start witht the content that has positive reviews. Then you would have some trusted beta foundry players to go through them on preview. Then you flag them for the random q. It will take very very little time compared to making something yourself, as you still have all the other stages to worry about then. Plus the driving factor will be novelty for people in q, not campaign progress.
    As to content every week, even if it was to change every two weeks or every month it would still be great. There is an impressive backlog of content already. Admittedly not all is necessarily great for a random q system but you can easily fill a year of random q with versions of what has already been created.

  • klangeddinklangeddin Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 882 Arc User
    edited March 2019
    While the sentiment is understandable, and no one wants to see a feature that they loved so much to be removed, you have to realize that this kind of decision was not lightly taken and there's no chance in hell, they're going to revert it after they made such an announcement. They kept a half dead foundry going on for years before giving up on the idea entirely, they wouldn't make such an announcement if the foundry wasn't gone for good. You're simply going to have to accept it and move on.

    You're not gonna like what I'm gonna say, but I'm actually glad it's gone. It was a hog of resources for the team, and spending so much time/maintenance for a feature that affected... say... 5% of the player base at best (I'm being generous, I suspect it's actually closer to 0,5% nowadays) is just not fair to the vast majority of the player base who was not touching it at all.

    I tried making something with the foundry myself, and I played some missions when the game was released, back in 2013, but it was never meant to be. I shall explain why.
    Let's be frank for a moment now, shall we? Neverwinter's Foundry was pathetic. Yes, pathetic. In the features (you could not even change the skin of weapons or customize the set of powers of enemies, if you gave an enemy the doomlord's power set, it was stuck with sword + shield, and those two attacks, swing and slam on the ground), in its scripting powers, in how it allowed creators to be creative and create decent content, and it was pathetic in the incentives it gave the player base to actually play those missions. In terms of gameplay, the foundry was already gone in mod 1. (as in, there was really no more reason to play it, as a player).
    They didn't even allow a party scaling option, or a party size restriction (like making foundry missions for 5 players or 10 players ONLY).

    I have played games that offered tools that were superior in every way, and some of those games are much older than Neverwiner, in fact, the two Neverwinter Nights games (especially the second one, which has a tremendously powerful editor). More recently, even games like Divinity Original Sin 2 allow a much better experience for user content creation.

    You will say that those games are single players and not mmorpgs, but that's actually kind of the reason why the foundry was such a failure here.
    Single player games can give much more freedom to content creators because they give the creators the opportunity to host those games, to BE the server host (you can understand why this is simply not possible to do here). And, in today's internet, if the game is successful and the content created is very good, they can reach just as many players as a mmorpg can.
  • kreatyvekreatyve Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 10,545 Community Moderator
    They did everything that they could do. And if you think making them take a financial hit to bring it back, that's just going to have the opposite effect. If you really want to try to bring it back, vote with your wallet in the other direction. Give them more money to hire more people to run it. But I don't think that would really help, because I know they did everything that was in their power to keep it going.
    My opinions are my own. I do not work for PWE or Cryptic. - Forum Rules - Protector's Enclave Discord - I play on Xbox
    Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official.
    Any messages written in orange are official moderation messages. Signature images are now fixed!
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  • mattjohnsonvamattjohnsonva Member Posts: 139 Arc User



    You're not gonna like what I'm gonna say, but I'm actually glad it's gone. It was a hog of resources for the team, and spending so much time/maintenance for a feature that affected... say... 5% of the player base at best (I'm being generous, I suspect it's actually closer to 0,5% nowadays) is just not fair to the vast majority of the player base who was not touching it at all..

    Ok two points here, and remember I am only talking about STO's foundry and I have no knowledge of NWN. First, there was no resource hog at all, any assets that were put into the foundry were done by Devs in their own time. The only time Cryptic had to plan resources for it was wehn it inevitably broke after a major update, so by closing the foundry they are not going to suddenly see a large influx of dev resource time, their only advantage is that they won't have to fix it next time it breaks.

    Secondly, the figures for STO are very different. Over one third of all players regularly use the foundry, this equates to almost a million players, and perhaps that's why our forums are on fire and these are not.

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  • ghoulz66ghoulz66 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 3,748 Arc User
    kreatyve said:

    They did everything that they could do. And if you think making them take a financial hit to bring it back, that's just going to have the opposite effect. If you really want to try to bring it back, vote with your wallet in the other direction. Give them more money to hire more people to run it. But I don't think that would really help, because I know they did everything that was in their power to keep it going.

    Kidding me? They put in more effort with mod 15. Mod 16 is just signaling that they're giving up and praying that people are dumb enough to keep throwing away their money over a butchered product that they have no more plans of salvaging. All your money is going towards funding PWE's next cash grabs.
  • klangeddinklangeddin Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 882 Arc User



    You're not gonna like what I'm gonna say, but I'm actually glad it's gone. It was a hog of resources for the team, and spending so much time/maintenance for a feature that affected... say... 5% of the player base at best (I'm being generous, I suspect it's actually closer to 0,5% nowadays) is just not fair to the vast majority of the player base who was not touching it at all..

    Ok two points here, and remember I am only talking about STO's foundry and I have no knowledge of NWN. First, there was no resource hog at all, any assets that were put into the foundry were done by Devs in their own time. The only time Cryptic had to plan resources for it was wehn it inevitably broke after a major update, so by closing the foundry they are not going to suddenly see a large influx of dev resource time, their only advantage is that they won't have to fix it next time it breaks.

    Secondly, the figures for STO are very different. Over one third of all players regularly use the foundry, this equates to almost a million players, and perhaps that's why our forums are on fire and these are not.

    I understand, but perhaps STO's foundry missions were better implemented in the game than Neverwinter's and were a much more important part of the game there than they are here. I don't play STO so I wouldn't know about that.
    My post was not directed at STO's foundry. These are Neverwinter's forum and I'm talking about it from Neverwinter's perspective.

    The resource hog is there, because foundry requires maintenance (featured foundries are not selected automatically, someone from the dev team had to playtest and evaluate them regularly) and dedicated servers to run the missions whenever a player "calls" one (if there are no dedicated server for them, it's even worse, as they would overload the servers used by other players, but I doubt this was the case). Now, that guy (or guys?) from the dev team will either be layed off (more financial resources) or will be moved to do something else (more speed/quality in that aspect of that game). A (very) small portion of the player base will lose from this, but pretty much everyone else only has to gain from it, potentially.
  • warrfb#9532 warrfb Member Posts: 19 Arc User
    > @mattjohnsonva said:
    > Hello NWN fans, Matt from the STO forum here. The backlash from this decision is pretty big over on our forums with over 300 replies to the announcement and 5000+ views so far. I'm not a NWN player so I don't know how deeply this affects players over here but I fear, like in STO it cannot be in a positive way.
    >
    > Sadly there seems to be nothing we can do and from last night's livestream we were told they tried for about a year to work out ways of keeping the foundry running, but in the end it boiled down to resources. In my opinion they have very badly misjudged the community on this one. In their search for the bottom line they failed to realise that those who played the foundry and those who authored the foundry were some of the most supportive players in the game, from a gameplay point of view and more importantly from a financial point of view. I am one of the whales in STO, with 15,000 hours of play time and 9 fleets with over 1000 active players and a spend point of about £1 per hour (yes, don't remind me how much that is), but I have now made the decision to no longer support STO financially.
    >
    > Unless this decision is reversed my wallet is now closed as far as Cryptic is concerned and many if not most of my fleet mates are taking the same course of action. Cryptic are run by bean counters now and if they see their bottom line falling sharply after this announcement they may have no choice but to do something about it.
    >
    > So, if you are a foundry fan in Star Trek Online or Never Winter Nights then I would urge you to continue playing the game, avail yourselves on the free service Cryptic offer, enjoy it as far as you can, but do not support it financially, I truly believe that this is the only language they will understand and thousands of posts here or elsewhere will make little difference.
    >
    > We have told them unequivocally that we are no longer supporting the game financially and this is the reason why, now it's up to them. Fingers crossed.


    This.
  • warrfb#9532 warrfb Member Posts: 19 Arc User
    edited March 2019
    > @klangeddin said:
    > While the sentiment is understandable, and no one wants to see a feature that they loved so much to be removed, you have to realize that this kind of decision was not lightly taken and there's no chance in hell, they're going to revert it after they made such an announcement. They kept a half dead foundry going on for years before giving up on the idea entirely, they wouldn't make such an announcement if the foundry wasn't gone for good. You're simply going to have to accept it and move on.
    >
    > You're not gonna like what I'm gonna say, but I'm actually glad it's gone. It was a hog of resources for the team, and spending so much time/maintenance for a feature that affected... say... 5% of the player base at best (I'm being generous, I suspect it's actually closer to 0,5% nowadays) is just not fair to the vast majority of the player base who was not touching it at all.
    >
    > I tried making something with the foundry myself, and I played some missions when the game was released, back in 2013, but it was never meant to be. I shall explain why.
    > Let's be frank for a moment now, shall we? Neverwinter's Foundry was pathetic. Yes, pathetic. In the features (you could not even change the skin of weapons or customize the set of powers of enemies, if you gave an enemy the doomlord's power set, it was stuck with sword + shield, and those two attacks, swing and slam on the ground), in its scripting powers, in how it allowed creators to be creative and create decent content, and it was pathetic in the incentives it gave the player base to actually play those missions. In terms of gameplay, the foundry was already gone in mod 1. (as in, there was really no more reason to play it, as a player).
    > They didn't even allow a party scaling option, or a party size restriction (like making foundry missions for 5 players or 10 players ONLY).
    >
    > I have played games that offered tools that were superior in every way, and some of those games are much older than Neverwiner, in fact, the two Neverwinter Nights games (especially the second one, which has a tremendously powerful editor). More recently, even games like Divinity Original Sin 2 allow a much better experience for user content creation.
    >
    > You will say that those games are single players and not mmorpgs, but that's actually kind of the reason why the foundry was such a failure here.
    > Single player games can give much more freedom to content creators because they give the creators the opportunity to host those games, to BE the server host (you can understand why this is simply not possible to do here). And, in today's internet, if the game is successful and the content created is very good, they can reach just as many players as a mmorpg can.



    Nah. Check the top number of players online back when the foundry was a thing, and now.

    A tool like the foundry isnt just about what you can and can not do with the micromanaging of mechanics, its about the story. The NWO foundry will never be like the neverwinter nights toolset, simply because they have to worry about cheating. If pelple didnt care, threads like these would not exist. If the foundry currently affects 5 or 0.5 % of the community, notice that its because the bulk of the foundry players have LEFT after the foundry was first abandoned. - And they took their pve activity AND their wallets with them.

    The foundry could have been a big source of income - Had the team the mind to have invested in it while it was hot. This game sells "character slots" on a regular basis, having players pay for their extra character storage. Well ?? Like any foundry user would know, the Foundry ha budget limits, some visible some not, and they are tight. I would gladly * have paid zen for a foundry budget Author boost, and I would promote it and beetch you until you bought one too. And thats just one idea on the fly - Campaign slot limit, adventure slot limit, and zen-only resources all come to mind.

    What really killed the foundry ? Doesnt take a genius to guess.
  • mithrosnomoremithrosnomore Member Posts: 693 Arc User

    Nah. Check the top number of players online back when the foundry was a thing, and now.

    What sort of reasoning is this? Besides "terrible reasoning", I mean?

    The foundry is a "thing" now.

    There are a great many things in this game that can be listed as reasons, or potential reasons, for why the player base now might be smaller than the player base at some point in the past.

    The foundry is probably quite low on that list.

    I would think that the meta, such as it is, probably accounts for many, many times more players leaving the game or playing less frequently than before than any lack of foundry upkeep.

  • taalar#3515 taalar Member Posts: 15 Arc User
    I will be looking for a new location for my rping group unfortunately.. a waste of money on this one.. One hopes they have an announcement that would save this.
  • wylonuswylonus Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 2,376 Arc User
    let us all petitioning. if we dont have enough sign ups, then it will die. let rocking!
    Please Keep! i started and it not finish.
  • kemnimtarkaskemnimtarkas Member Posts: 838 Arc User

    I will be looking for a new location for my rping group unfortunately.. a waste of money on this one.. One hopes they have an announcement that would save this.

    I think the post was pretty clear.

    Whoever built the software foundations for the Foundry is gone from Cryptic and the company didn't invest in proper knowledge management practices to retain the institutional knowledge needed to maintain it.

    The current crop of devs lack both the necessary prowess/knowledge with the programming behind the Foundry system and time/resources to rebuild said knowledge.

    I'm sure they realize this is going to cost them some hardcore, early adopter customers/gamers/fans.

    But the ugly reality is they have no other options that make business sense.
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