We’d like to thank you all for taking the time to give us your feedback on the recent suspension of Leadership on Gateway. We know that this has been a big change to the Astral Diamond economy and it’s going to take a significant effort on our part to make sure the market stabilizes in a positive way. We know that some of you are concerned about the threat of botting moving into the game. As part of this task, we’ve dug in and examined the current data. After analyzing said data, and studying any economy changes, we can report that we have not seen any significant increase in the botting of Leadership in-game.
We also understand your concerns regarding the cost of goods versus the amount of Astral Diamonds coming into the economy. In the short term, we are keeping an eye on the supply of Astral Diamonds to make sure it performs as expected. We will also be running multiple “2x AD” events to make sure adventurers are able to get the Astral Diamonds they need. In the long term, we are re-examining the various non-profession methods of earning Astral Diamonds. It’s important to us that playing the game rewards AD sufficiently.
Again, thank you for your feedback on the change, and your commitment to Neverwinter.
- The Neverwinter Team
I have a hard time accepting this explanation, it seems to either neglect important details or directly mislead.
If 'in-game' botting hasn't noticeably increased, the implication is that they have a way to detect such activity. If they have a detection method, shouldn't they be warn or shut down those accounts, rather than shut down entire game components for everyone?
I receive as much farmer spam as before, which means they must still be able to acquire AD to sell, which, when combined with the previous statement, implies that the AD sellers have always botted in-game (possibly in conjunction with the gateway), and that the only ones truly affected in any realistic way are legitimate players. Is there really so much desperation as to shut this down for the player base and do absolutely nothing to the ones who are generating hundreds of millions of AD to sellfor cash?
Why be so harsh to the entire user population for random players who MAY be botting AD on the gateway while completely turning a blind eye to what appears to have always been an in-game problem? Can Cryptic even claim with a straight face that it would not have said the exact same thing EVERYTIME a change like this has been made, regardless of its actual impact? The gateway isn't exactly difficult to use, you can get through 9 slots per character in about 30 seconds if you are quick about it. You most certainly don't need to bot it to max out daily AD on every character.
Cryptic should really just fess up and admit that this is not about bots at all. if they feel rewards should be adjusted, I think that's fair, but this entire thing has been a complete farce.
"We know that some of you are concerned about the threat of botting moving into the game. As part of this task, we’ve dug in and examined the current data. After analyzing said data, and studying any economy changes, we can report that we have not seen any significant increase in the botting of Leadership in-game."
An admission Cryptic is able to detect leadership botting ingame, but is not willing to do anything about it (otherwise it would go down as Cryptic auto-banned the botters).
And that's the funniest thing around
"Hey guys we know you're out there but since you're not the reason of the lag, please go on have fun!"
I personally don't care. At least I can get my cheap r4's and 5's. If Cryptic can't handle the situation that it's well...whatever. The thing that it's hurting me is that I can't use the gateway to do my profs having a desk job.
Nancy - Dragonborn, SM Guardian Fighter A proud member of "mythical horde of DPS GFs"
1). Is SW more dps or tank based? 2). Yes. I am panzer! 3). Get ACT if you want to celebrate your epeen. 4). Horniness will not stand between me and what I believe - "MM"
I think what has probably been reduced isn't botting as in those people who sell AD to players, and more scripting, as in private players who use Greasemonkey etc to manage their accounts.
I think you are right on this. I don't think they are fighting the commercialized bots. Those bot companies are living well and kicking.
They are stopping casual bots which are run by players who do not have the resource (yet) to make an in-game bot.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
The line can get a bit fuzzy over what is classed as botting. I have two accounts and I have the username and password for each assigned to hotkeys. So I click on the loader then just hit a couple of hotkeys and then ENTER to login. Does that count as automation or botting?
Next step: I imagine it would not take much to get one hotkey to do all of that.
Next step: Once in game I always check profs first, so I could tag that "n" press onto the hotkey. Am I suddenly teetering on the edge of botting or does there have to be some sort of "intelligence" in the hotkey script to count as botting? Or does it only count as botting if I sell the AD/gold/RP/whatever to other players?
Of course, if the loader would take name and password as command-line options I would not be using hotkeys at all and would just have two different shortcuts for the accounts.
But getting back on topic, I think it is hard for us players to spot a leadership bot in game as it's not going to be doing anything obvious. It is very, very easy for us to spot the bleedin' obvious farming bots in various places and those have been reported over and over yet still remain. I find that puzzling.
Bound AD to account and activate gateway leadership again. No more spammers selling AD and rest of us can enjoy game once again.
0
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
Well, if AD was bound to account, then the AH would be completely non-functional.
I suppose you could switch things around though: AD for AD vendor items (and zen exchange) only, while GOLD is used in the AH.
But, that would just wreck the AH economy even more. Because what's more farmable than AD? Gold. It's just that as is, no one bothers because gold is mostly useless.
You can't bind AD to account. You wouldn't be able to spend it.
You *could* remove all inter-account trading and item transfers (AH, Guild Bank, Mail), but that would lose an important part of an MMO.
As long as there is a means to transfer anything between accounts then there is a means for gold sellers to profit.
0
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
AD serves three purposes as is.
1.) AH
2.) Fixed price items such as the Wondrous Bazaar
3.) AD <-> Zen exchange
The issue is, in part, balancing these multiple purposes against one another. If you removed the ability to use AD for the purposes of the AH, you could instead use it for Wondrous Bazaar only (zen exchange is a bit more tricky of a matter). As I alluded to, you'd need to give players some mechanism to access the AH.
The main issue is, if AD wasn't tradable between characters at all, it'd be comparatively easy to price items. Items on the Bazaar would simply be "Oh, this is X days worth of AD for a Yth level character." you could literally just pick arbitrary values. But since AD is used on the AH, and since you can use leadership armies and the like, you can't do that.
But the real issue with the "let's make AD BoP" is how using an alternate currency for the AH would change the AH. See, right now AD supply is noCharacters based. If you changed to a gold model, for instance, it would be playtime based. It's already pretty level based, so I'm not sure where the issue there would be. As I said though, AH funds would be infinitely more farmable. On the other hand, plenty of MMOs have that as an issue, so the real question is, is that really any worse than the current situation?
But, it's not seriously being floated as an idea by anyone in power, so it's largely irrelevant.
0
plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,421Arc User
The line can get a bit fuzzy over what is classed as botting. I have two accounts and I have the username and password for each assigned to hotkeys. So I click on the loader then just hit a couple of hotkeys and then ENTER to login. Does that count as automation or botting?
Next step: I imagine it would not take much to get one hotkey to do all of that.
Next step: Once in game I always check profs first, so I could tag that "n" press onto the hotkey. Am I suddenly teetering on the edge of botting or does there have to be some sort of "intelligence" in the hotkey script to count as botting? Or does it only count as botting if I sell the AD/gold/RP/whatever to other players?
Of course, if the loader would take name and password as command-line options I would not be using hotkeys at all and would just have two different shortcuts for the accounts.
But getting back on topic, I think it is hard for us players to spot a leadership bot in game as it's not going to be doing anything obvious. It is very, very easy for us to spot the bleedin' obvious farming bots in various places and those have been reported over and over yet still remain. I find that puzzling.
I don't think what you do is considered to be botting. Botting is like running an program and it does: login, do things, logout, wait for certain time, login, do things, logout, wait for certain time, ...... This can run 24x7 without human interaction. It may even do the task after reboot (e.g. after power failure)
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
Many of the bots that you see in zones endlessly picking up the same things from the same places and logging in/out in exactly the same place could so easily be detected and banned. And they've clearly been around for ages as they're mostly level 50+ in level 1 type gear.
Best way ever to earn AD and get RP was icewind zerg before the nerf, I think they need to take it back to what it was, I know they felt people were spending too much time there, but it was no secret to those doing it that it wouldn't last long you could sense the hammer was about drop on it right from the beginning, that's why we stayed there every minute we could. If we knew it was going to stick around the way it was at the start you would have seen a more casual approach to it from the players. Please bring it back.
Never happen. As you state yourself, it was a farm, and only a farm. Farms are not what MMOs want you to do.
Don't worry guys "they're looking into it" just like with the dragon hoard enchants
whatever
or like they did with the account wide companions promo
0
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
edited August 2015
I think my position is, bottom line, if you want to be "competitive" with other players, you basically have to be willing to do what they do.
And frankly, I don't want to be expected to run 20+ toons. So in my mind, making having 20+ toons an optimal strategy is a problem in and of itself. Reducing the ability of people to manage 20+ toons is therefore beneficial for me.
The problem is that, well, this doesn't seem to have reflected itself in the AH. You should expect prices to go down, but everything is going up (due to unrelated changes, namely in removing an exploit that made getting Dragon Eggs easier).
I guess my point is, it's not a bad idea to move the focus away from "well just run 20 toons with leadership" but it's pretty obvious that that alone is insufficient.
I mean, unless they're going to lower the Wondrous Bazaar price on items by a factor of 10. 10,000 AD Greater Mark of Potency! WOOOOOO!
If nothing has changed ingame, why is it's suddenly harder for the server to keep up the connection while just logging from one character to another?
I'm getting much more "Server not responding", disconnects and sometimes even a sudden crash of the game now.
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
0
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
An excellent question. But, if it weren't for the gateway change, would you automatically assume that server problems are due to an increased number of botters?
I mean, it's entirely possible that it's because of an increased number of people who "botted" (eg used things like Greasemonkey) and are now logging in directly to manage their multi-toon accounts.
No need for bots for the server load to increase.
Of course, it's not a good thing either way-as I've pointed out before, the goal isn't to get people to log in, it's to get people to log-in to play the game. So getting lots of people to log in when they previously weren't isn't really a victory.
Well, if AD was bound to account, then the AH would be completely non-functional.
I suppose you could switch things around though: AD for AD vendor items (and zen exchange) only, while GOLD is used in the AH.
But, that would just wreck the AH economy even more. Because what's more farmable than AD? Gold. It's just that as is, no one bothers because gold is mostly useless.
I wouldn't shutdown AH. Ah must work as it is meant to be, just direct AD transfer from player to player. There must be some limitations made to player to player transfer prices, like u can't sell 50% or more cheaper than AH to another players directly. But there must be exception to that rule, like when you have been in same guild more than week you are free to transfer without any limitations.
Bot's can transfer stuff between them no harm done. What i meant for that 50% rule is spammers can sell AD to players by buying stuff from players. Player gives spammer 10$ and spammer can buy some low value stuff from player with 1 mil AD.
But if we have some limitations of equipment value and no direct AD transfer you couldn't transfer AD from spammer to player.
Well, they could give us a chat filter, that we could then update with keywords on our own, and that would then simply reroute the message in question into another chat channel/chat window.
As mentioned before, that would at least force the goldsellers to work on their message every time. And would at least give us a working "weapon" against the spam...
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
0
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
I do admit I really don't understand the Dragon Hoard nerf. The stuff is BtA to begin with, so it's hard to argue that it's an anti-botting measure or something. Just let people run around and get stones by playing the game, isn't that the goal?
Though I do think it probably makes sense to restrict drops to level appropriate enemies. I remember a while back when it seemed best off to be attacking creatures in Helms Hold because they clumped together in large groups, but drops didn't seem to be level dependent.
There has been alot of decisions lately that seem less like stability/scalability/enhancement concerns and more sales-focused.
Features here today are gone tomorrow.
Dragon horde nerf. Did RP reqs go down? No, up.
Leadership nerf. Did AD reqs go down? No, up.
Stat/gear nerfs. Did difficulty go down? No, up.
Who wants entertainment where the things you like are taken away on a regular basis? It's like the mods/expansions are bad sequels of the original movie everybody loved.
Do I want to spend $ when there is a mod around that corner that might nerf my enchantments, change the effectiveness of my stats, ruin my class features and skills, nullify my artifacts usage,etc.. The drastic survivability changes in the game, it's almost like the entire game was twisted (again) to invent a reason to have a paladin class, while scourge warlock's effectiveness tanks one mod later.
It's the 'we need to destroy the village to save the village' mentality. Can't it even be considered that the drastic game decisions/directions have eaten into revenue like botting has. Botters can be flexible and adapt, legit players have to follow the rules of the cow path and eat every anti-botting measure as a lost-feature. This game is hemorrhaging FUN. It's a game, fun is life.
Game-morale is pretty low. Pulling a popular feature like this was pretty gutsy.
This is the best anti bot measure EVER! Chase off all the legit players and then the bots have no one to sell to.
Seriously though, this has been a huge problem for a very long time. The reality is there is nothing worth any value for people to spend their time to farm to earn cash. For the last nearly 20 years farming has always been a big part in MMOs, for some reason this game just doesn't embrace that model.
which strikes me... now that the end-game content like WOD, IWD was dangerous enough and one could die easily when not paying attention, why not put in AD rewards on some of the existing quest as well? Of course the quest HAVE to be effort based instead of leech-able based.
Surely the bots will be having hard time getting them, no? As pro as bot can be, they still can't beat the actual person playing it when in combat especially those that cannot be tanked, no?
And now we have the big picture:
The VIP program, THAT'S why they pulled leadership from gateway. Note the rewards to VIP table? The program is ACCOUNT wide, those peeps that have alt armies are rewarded. Note the +% discounts from bazaar? GMoPs will be 25% cheaper.
And for those suggesting or asking for it, whats to be the new model for AD?..read closely bonus %AD from invokes and quests and hourly events....so since they don't CURRENTLY give AD for quests other than foundry and hourly, if you read between the lines they must plan to add AD generating quest rewards.
So since they have driven off/pissed off the whale players that used to pay, they are adding a monthly fee based rewards system to try and drum up some business.
So forget the red herring "bot's did it....", <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> and realize it's actually just another P2P money grab dressed up as a "premium service".
Comments
I have a hard time accepting this explanation, it seems to either neglect important details or directly mislead.
If 'in-game' botting hasn't noticeably increased, the implication is that they have a way to detect such activity. If they have a detection method, shouldn't they be warn or shut down those accounts, rather than shut down entire game components for everyone?
I receive as much farmer spam as before, which means they must still be able to acquire AD to sell, which, when combined with the previous statement, implies that the AD sellers have always botted in-game (possibly in conjunction with the gateway), and that the only ones truly affected in any realistic way are legitimate players. Is there really so much desperation as to shut this down for the player base and do absolutely nothing to the ones who are generating hundreds of millions of AD to sellfor cash?
Why be so harsh to the entire user population for random players who MAY be botting AD on the gateway while completely turning a blind eye to what appears to have always been an in-game problem? Can Cryptic even claim with a straight face that it would not have said the exact same thing EVERYTIME a change like this has been made, regardless of its actual impact? The gateway isn't exactly difficult to use, you can get through 9 slots per character in about 30 seconds if you are quick about it. You most certainly don't need to bot it to max out daily AD on every character.
Cryptic should really just fess up and admit that this is not about bots at all. if they feel rewards should be adjusted, I think that's fair, but this entire thing has been a complete farce.
And that's the funniest thing around
"Hey guys we know you're out there but since you're not the reason of the lag, please go on have fun!"
I personally don't care. At least I can get my cheap r4's and 5's. If Cryptic can't handle the situation that it's well...whatever. The thing that it's hurting me is that I can't use the gateway to do my profs having a desk job.
A proud member of "mythical horde of DPS GFs"
1). Is SW more dps or tank based?
2). Yes. I am panzer!
3). Get ACT if you want to celebrate your epeen.
4). Horniness will not stand between me and what I believe - "MM"
I think you are right on this. I don't think they are fighting the commercialized bots. Those bot companies are living well and kicking.
They are stopping casual bots which are run by players who do not have the resource (yet) to make an in-game bot.
Next step: I imagine it would not take much to get one hotkey to do all of that.
Next step: Once in game I always check profs first, so I could tag that "n" press onto the hotkey. Am I suddenly teetering on the edge of botting or does there have to be some sort of "intelligence" in the hotkey script to count as botting? Or does it only count as botting if I sell the AD/gold/RP/whatever to other players?
Of course, if the loader would take name and password as command-line options I would not be using hotkeys at all and would just have two different shortcuts for the accounts.
But getting back on topic, I think it is hard for us players to spot a leadership bot in game as it's not going to be doing anything obvious. It is very, very easy for us to spot the bleedin' obvious farming bots in various places and those have been reported over and over yet still remain. I find that puzzling.
I suppose you could switch things around though: AD for AD vendor items (and zen exchange) only, while GOLD is used in the AH.
But, that would just wreck the AH economy even more. Because what's more farmable than AD? Gold. It's just that as is, no one bothers because gold is mostly useless.
You *could* remove all inter-account trading and item transfers (AH, Guild Bank, Mail), but that would lose an important part of an MMO.
As long as there is a means to transfer anything between accounts then there is a means for gold sellers to profit.
1.) AH
2.) Fixed price items such as the Wondrous Bazaar
3.) AD <-> Zen exchange
The issue is, in part, balancing these multiple purposes against one another. If you removed the ability to use AD for the purposes of the AH, you could instead use it for Wondrous Bazaar only (zen exchange is a bit more tricky of a matter). As I alluded to, you'd need to give players some mechanism to access the AH.
The main issue is, if AD wasn't tradable between characters at all, it'd be comparatively easy to price items. Items on the Bazaar would simply be "Oh, this is X days worth of AD for a Yth level character." you could literally just pick arbitrary values. But since AD is used on the AH, and since you can use leadership armies and the like, you can't do that.
But the real issue with the "let's make AD BoP" is how using an alternate currency for the AH would change the AH. See, right now AD supply is noCharacters based. If you changed to a gold model, for instance, it would be playtime based. It's already pretty level based, so I'm not sure where the issue there would be. As I said though, AH funds would be infinitely more farmable. On the other hand, plenty of MMOs have that as an issue, so the real question is, is that really any worse than the current situation?
But, it's not seriously being floated as an idea by anyone in power, so it's largely irrelevant.
I don't think what you do is considered to be botting. Botting is like running an program and it does: login, do things, logout, wait for certain time, login, do things, logout, wait for certain time, ...... This can run 24x7 without human interaction. It may even do the task after reboot (e.g. after power failure)
Never happen. As you state yourself, it was a farm, and only a farm. Farms are not what MMOs want you to do.
or like they did with the account wide companions promo
And frankly, I don't want to be expected to run 20+ toons. So in my mind, making having 20+ toons an optimal strategy is a problem in and of itself. Reducing the ability of people to manage 20+ toons is therefore beneficial for me.
The problem is that, well, this doesn't seem to have reflected itself in the AH. You should expect prices to go down, but everything is going up (due to unrelated changes, namely in removing an exploit that made getting Dragon Eggs easier).
I guess my point is, it's not a bad idea to move the focus away from "well just run 20 toons with leadership" but it's pretty obvious that that alone is insufficient.
I mean, unless they're going to lower the Wondrous Bazaar price on items by a factor of 10. 10,000 AD Greater Mark of Potency! WOOOOOO!
I'm getting much more "Server not responding", disconnects and sometimes even a sudden crash of the game now.
I mean, it's entirely possible that it's because of an increased number of people who "botted" (eg used things like Greasemonkey) and are now logging in directly to manage their multi-toon accounts.
No need for bots for the server load to increase.
Of course, it's not a good thing either way-as I've pointed out before, the goal isn't to get people to log in, it's to get people to log-in to play the game. So getting lots of people to log in when they previously weren't isn't really a victory.
I wouldn't shutdown AH. Ah must work as it is meant to be, just direct AD transfer from player to player. There must be some limitations made to player to player transfer prices, like u can't sell 50% or more cheaper than AH to another players directly. But there must be exception to that rule, like when you have been in same guild more than week you are free to transfer without any limitations.
The idea behind the AH is that it's free trade (with a 10% sale tax).
But if we have some limitations of equipment value and no direct AD transfer you couldn't transfer AD from spammer to player.
As mentioned before, that would at least force the goldsellers to work on their message every time. And would at least give us a working "weapon" against the spam...
Though I do think it probably makes sense to restrict drops to level appropriate enemies. I remember a while back when it seemed best off to be attacking creatures in Helms Hold because they clumped together in large groups, but drops didn't seem to be level dependent.
There has been alot of decisions lately that seem less like stability/scalability/enhancement concerns and more sales-focused.
Features here today are gone tomorrow.
Dragon horde nerf. Did RP reqs go down? No, up.
Leadership nerf. Did AD reqs go down? No, up.
Stat/gear nerfs. Did difficulty go down? No, up.
Who wants entertainment where the things you like are taken away on a regular basis? It's like the mods/expansions are bad sequels of the original movie everybody loved.
Do I want to spend $ when there is a mod around that corner that might nerf my enchantments, change the effectiveness of my stats, ruin my class features and skills, nullify my artifacts usage,etc.. The drastic survivability changes in the game, it's almost like the entire game was twisted (again) to invent a reason to have a paladin class, while scourge warlock's effectiveness tanks one mod later.
It's the 'we need to destroy the village to save the village' mentality. Can't it even be considered that the drastic game decisions/directions have eaten into revenue like botting has. Botters can be flexible and adapt, legit players have to follow the rules of the cow path and eat every anti-botting measure as a lost-feature. This game is hemorrhaging FUN. It's a game, fun is life.
Game-morale is pretty low. Pulling a popular feature like this was pretty gutsy.
EDIT:Typo: every->everybody
Seriously though, this has been a huge problem for a very long time. The reality is there is nothing worth any value for people to spend their time to farm to earn cash. For the last nearly 20 years farming has always been a big part in MMOs, for some reason this game just doesn't embrace that model.
Surely the bots will be having hard time getting them, no? As pro as bot can be, they still can't beat the actual person playing it when in combat especially those that cannot be tanked, no?
The VIP program, THAT'S why they pulled leadership from gateway. Note the rewards to VIP table? The program is ACCOUNT wide, those peeps that have alt armies are rewarded. Note the +% discounts from bazaar? GMoPs will be 25% cheaper.
And for those suggesting or asking for it, whats to be the new model for AD?..read closely bonus %AD from invokes and quests and hourly events....so since they don't CURRENTLY give AD for quests other than foundry and hourly, if you read between the lines they must plan to add AD generating quest rewards.
So since they have driven off/pissed off the whale players that used to pay, they are adding a monthly fee based rewards system to try and drum up some business.
So forget the red herring "bot's did it....", <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> and realize it's actually just another P2P money grab dressed up as a "premium service".