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Put into perspective the changes to Leadership on Gateway

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  • theycallmetomutheycallmetomu Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,861 Arc User
    I have difficulty believing they're covering their operating expenses at this point.

    I wouldn't be surprised if they ultimately just ended up shutting it down entirely. But, well, they've got Underdark on the way (who cares about Strongholds amirite?) so I guess they must still be thinking things are salvageable.
  • khimera906khimera906 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 898 Arc User
    macjae wrote: »
    Yep, all mistakes. But that doesn't mean they should double down. It means they should apologize for their foolishness.

    Most people don't have the time to run 50 characters. if you're going to give advantages for having 50 characters, then the people who don't have 50 characters are effectively at a disadvantage. The solution is to not give people advantages for having 50 characters.

    The trick is figuring out how to do so in a way that doesn't severely HAMSTER those who have 50 characters off.

    They originally *had* a model that didn't really disadvantage players of single characters much. One contributing reason to why Leadership got so popular was that they've systematically eliminated the legitimate avenues that people could use to gain a reasonable amount of wealth by just playing the game on a single character.

    - Running dungeons to get gear that could get sold on the AH for AD? Nope, loot now consists of BoP/BotA items/seals.
    - Doing weeklies for additional AD? Gone.
    - Using dragon hoard enchantments to get RP? Nah. (Obviously people botted this too, but as usual the response was to harm the larger number of legitimate players that were around with the "fix".)

    Meanwhile, they've increased the AD sinks required to get to BiS status.
    - Selling Cubes of Augmentation for artifact gear. Bazaar only, AD gets removed from economy.
    - Requiring tons of Greater Marks of Potency to upgrade. Primarily from Bazaar, AD gets removed from economy.

    Without sufficient people generating fresh AD via Leadership, the increased AD sinks with module 6 would mean the economy would start deflating quickly, because people would be spending more AD than there was being generated in order to upgrade their characters. So those leadership armies actually serve a purpose that's useful to all players; increasing the AD in circulation keeps prices up, which gives access to more AD for meeting the static AD sink costs for all players (as long as they occasionally sell stuff on the AH or trade stuff).

    Reducing the amount of AD in circulation by slowing down the AD printing presses will hurt all players trying to scale those pay walls, even if they don't have dozens of characters. Players will feel that squeeze and maybe feel like they need to pay a bit more. Or quit, which is just as well -- free players being wealthy in-game probably isn't ideal for the company.

    The simple way to fix it all would be to increase access to key types of loot:
    - High-end dungeons could get a chance of dropping GMOPs and maybe a tiny chance of a coalescent ward.
    - Dungeon chests could reward RP (sapphire/black opal at minimum)
    - GMOPs and RP stones could be purchasable with glory.
    - They could even add bags of refined AD as special rewards in some cases, allowing people to go beyond the 24k daily limit if they just play a single character, balancing the AD generation capabilities better against leadership armies.

    Balanced correctly, that would help player advancement sufficiently to be satisfactory through normal play.

    I'm with you. I don't PvP, but I believe that everyone should have equal chances at everything - AD, RP, xp, refining stones - all should be obtainable at a reasonable rate both in PvP and PVE. I'm with you... till that "balanced correctly" part. It's not that I don't agree, but could you give me an example of something that's balanced correctly in this game.
    I believe that Cryptic will try their best to fix and balance most of these problems we have, however I don't think they quite get it, and they're to stubborn to listen.
    I hate dancing with Lady Luck. She always steps on my toes.
  • poppakrodahpoppakrodah Member Posts: 40 Arc User
    After doing it for a week, logging in to do the leadership isn't as bad as I thought it would be. With some ui improvements, it could be made better; but I found an annoyance I hadn't even considered when it was announced.

    I pvp a lot and pvp queues are sometimes 30 minutes. I used to use that time to run leadership tasks on my other characters, now it is just dead time. Whatever solution you come up with, I hope it will allow us to run leadership on multiple characters with one character logged in. As it is now, I have to choose between playing and doing my leadership tasks, and I shouldn't have to make that choice.

    Hoping you'll give us an update on this soon.

    thanks Strum!

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  • translucentwolftranslucentwolf Member Posts: 116 Arc User
    Pretty happy with leadership being removed from the gateway. Keep up the good work NW dev team.
  • theycallmetomutheycallmetomu Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,861 Arc User
    C'mon, read the mood a little why don'tcha!
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  • tcarncetcarnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 976 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    1 thing is sure. if they nerf leadership somehow and it will be a big nerf, it would be wise to make the changes clearly public about a few months before they happen so people who do level alts by hand especialy on 1 account won't get hurt that much.
    archeage is the best example how not to run a game.
    change after change in normal things making what you worked superhard for suddenly worth nothing.
    which is handled better overall in neverwinter and make it a nicer game to play.

    ofcourse it brings the real bots in an even better position who just made account after account without spending anything and don't get affected by such a nerf.
    Post edited by tcarnce on
  • dfncedfnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 509 Arc User
    2. Botters can level leadership toons faster, again because they avoid the dead-time between the smaller time tasks (2-8 hours). Removing the gateway leadership tasks now makes this MUCH harder on me. I can only do a few tasks a day, so my 'dead-time' will increase drastically. However, a botter who figures how to run some program to log into the game and 'bot', will continue to level up toons fast, and my last 4 toons that I purchased during your last xp event, will take 5-6 months to get to max level now. SO basically, this change INCREASES the distance between myself and the botters, putting me even more behind.
    6 months took me at average to level up to 25 with gateway (leadership as third profession, twice a day). Now it can be easily an year if you can afford only one login per day with game client.
    EX-DL-BtS / ITF-KC-KB / BF-HD-IBS / FtF-IT-ST-Dis / CA-GW-PG
    "When no appropriate rule applies, make one up."
    — (The unwritten rule)


  • generaldiomedesgeneraldiomedes Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 207 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    This will put a slight dent in the AD supply as botting the desktop client simply isn't as easy for a lot of people. The gateway scripts were so easy literally anyone could do it, and desktop bots kind of cross a line into hacker territory that some people people aren't comfortable with. Professional bots I'm sure will figure it out soon enough.

    Unfortunately, it will also affect those people who did leadership on the way to work, and that's actually pretty tragic. I feel sorry for those folks.

    I am curious as to why Cryptic allows 50 characters per account ..
  • dfncedfnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 509 Arc User
    ok call me ignorant but what the hell is botting anyway?
    Lazy brother of farming, son of grind and powercreep // sarcasm
    romotheone wrote: »
    warpet wrote: »
    u need to block using leadership for first 5 mins when log in game to prevent future boting on live server (5 mins per log in would stoped boters or slow them down )

    This would be terrible... this is just another way to annoy the hell out of players who would only login to set their professions. It actually does nothing for a bot.
    Game could require to complete daily mission - dungeon, skirmish appropriate to your level to unlock leadership tasks on this character on today. You would surprise how that would pretty much reduced leadership use to 3-6 characters.
    EX-DL-BtS / ITF-KC-KB / BF-HD-IBS / FtF-IT-ST-Dis / CA-GW-PG
    "When no appropriate rule applies, make one up."
    — (The unwritten rule)


  • suicidalgodotsuicidalgodot Member Posts: 2,465 Arc User
    dfnce wrote: »
    ok call me ignorant but what the hell is botting anyway?
    Lazy brother of farming, son of grind and powercreep // sarcasm
    romotheone wrote: »
    warpet wrote: »
    u need to block using leadership for first 5 mins when log in game to prevent future boting on live server (5 mins per log in would stoped boters or slow them down )

    This would be terrible... this is just another way to annoy the hell out of players who would only login to set their professions. It actually does nothing for a bot.
    Game could require to complete daily mission - dungeon, skirmish appropriate to your level to unlock leadership tasks on this character on today. You would surprise how that would pretty much reduced leadership use to 3-6 characters.

    ...and that'd be for the people without a life.

    Those with a life would either play at a level three notches below, pay, or go away...

    ...and even WITH LShip, about 50% have chosen option three since Mod 6 launch. Doh.
  • sm0ld3rsm0ld3r Member Posts: 236 Arc User
    xsayajinx1 wrote: »
    sm0ld3r wrote: »
    xsayajinx1 wrote: »
    ihaveahies wrote: »
    I am pretty sure that if toon slots were intended just for AD farming, there would not be a toon linked to them. They are meant for creating characters and Playing in-game content. Leadership farms are why we are in this mess.

    No, no it is not. I'm fairly sure caturday and the MONTHS of resonator AD had a little more to do with it. But you still get people who blame it on keys so... The economy was pretty stable before those 2 instances.

    Tons of 50+ character slot accounts botting Leadership has the exactly same effect like resonator exploit back in the days.
    Leadership is actually also part of the problem we're facing since some time. Not to say so has 2 reasons.

    1. You either have tons of AD slaves yourself
    2. Or you are stupid or lying because of point 1.

    It's not even remotely close to the resonator bug. Even an army of 1000 leadership toons can't generate the same AD that one player was able to do in a couple of hours. Not to mention, you needed months to get those leadership toons up to a proper level. AD Resonator was doable by pretty much anyone. Zax was backlogged to over 14M at one point.....

    As has been pointed out, the bots doing leadership are now doing it ingame. The only ones hurt are the players that needed to set up their leadership while at work or on the train or otherwise away from their PC.

    Be prepared for the population to drop to the point that the only thing seen in zone or lfg chat is bot advertisements.

    Again: Leadership has the exactly same effect like resonator exploit. You create ADs (too many ADs) out of nowhere! I didn't say leadership is worse than previous exploits, it's just affecting our economy in the same way. How many and how long it takes doesn't matter in this case.

    P.S 1000 bots would be nice! What we have now, is in reality way way way more!

    Again, you are totally wrong. You can't compare every method of getting AD to the resonator bug. The resonator bug allowed limitless AD for any 1 character. Leadership is gated at 24K per day per character and required a big investment in time to get there. Likewise, are you going to compare running lostmouth or other dungeons where you can salvage items to the resonator bug? Perhaps what you are trying to say is you don't think there should be ANY way to get AD in game, that it should be a $ transaction only?
  • tcarncetcarnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 976 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    sm0ld3r wrote: »

    Again, you are totally wrong. You can't compare every method of getting AD to the resonator bug. The resonator bug allowed limitless AD for any 1 character. Leadership is gated at 24K per day per character and required a big investment in time to get there. Likewise, are you going to compare running lostmouth or other dungeons where you can salvage items to the resonator bug? Perhaps what you are trying to say is you don't think there should be ANY way to get AD in game, that it should be a $ transaction only?
    nicely said ;p
    personly i wasn't going to take the effort of talking to such comments :dizzy:
    timewaste if they don't look at the whole picture and need everything explained.

  • dfncedfnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 509 Arc User
    skitzopyro wrote: »
    I still fail to see the difference in a gateway bot vs a player with max leadership. If you only have to cycle one time per day and make the same AD as someone botting, where is the difference?
    Difference isn't big. Let's compare:

    MANUAL LEADERSHIP (MOD6) - 1 day per slot performance (worst case, no rare task) - 12,000 AD

    12,300k=2000*3+1600*3+500*3

    Battle Elemental Cultists, 2000 AD
    Destroy Enemy Camp, 1600 AD
    Escort a Wizard's Seneschal, 500 AD

    BOT LEADERSHIP - 24h performance (worst case, no rare tasks) - 18,000 AD

    Based on performance numbers http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Leadership

    18k =(100*3+83.3*3+66.7*3)*24

    Battle Elemental Cultists, 83.3 AD/h
    Destroy Enemy Camp, 100 AD/h
    Fight Off Spellplagued, 66.7 AD/h

    MANUAL LEADERSHIP (MOD5) - 2 day per slot performance (worst case, no rare task) - 14,400 AD

    14,400k=2*(1600*3+400*3+400*3)

    Destroy Enemy Camp, 1600 AD
    Fight Off Spellplagued, 400 AD
    Battle Undead, 400 AD

    It was decided that "Destroy Enemy Camp" task which could be run twice a day with blue asset in MOD5 is too good, so PWE developers made it harder to use and added extended grind to new cap. But bright side of it, provided you had N number of alts in MOD5 you should use x1.5 or x2 alts in MOD6. You need to setup tasks only once per a day and archive same or even better results in AD/RP gain. No gateway required. Invocation happen to give good bonus discount vouchers.

    To make situation fair for players and make bots less effective:

    1. Disable gateway completely for managing profession tasks.
    2. Make longevity of all tasks measured in days - 1/2/5. Remove 4h, 8h, 12h times since they asking for being used by bots.
    3. Make XP leadership leveling like Black Ice one, with reputation gained with doing campaign or daily missions.
    4. Enabling any of AD/RP leadership tasks should be done by playing prerequisite mission (PvE/PvP) which grant necessary component for these tasks.
    EX-DL-BtS / ITF-KC-KB / BF-HD-IBS / FtF-IT-ST-Dis / CA-GW-PG
    "When no appropriate rule applies, make one up."
    — (The unwritten rule)


  • tcarncetcarnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 976 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    dfnce wrote: »
    .
    *cough contradicting post*
    saying limit tasks to a day or longer, while saying people will double their alts or accounts.

    no solution.
    next

    what a horrible stuf people come up with, with this trying to help.
    make it at least seem that you know what you're talking about.
    this guy above me comes with the solutions which only brings more bots. not less.
    it's already a mess with ingame bots.
    doesn't look pretty at all.

    the endless cycle of foundry bots for example. chars popping in and out of foundry 24h a day hahaha.
    yes lets believe they're people.
    saw one between those other bots trippleboxing foundry too obvious, reported ofcourse.

    i was also the first to spot the armies of rogues in that mountain place.
    impossible by normal sight, but the online list betrayed them.
    whole list was filled with lvl 60 rogues. kind of suspicious in lvl50 area.
    i don't know what they were farming and if it was "fixed"
    but it's a long time ago hehe.

    but what can you do about it. close foundry, close the game is the only solution to stop bots.

    Post edited by tcarnce on
  • plasticbatplasticbat Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 12,456 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    When a lot of people here complaining got disconnected, I was not. Now, I start to get disconnection. Login server is slower than before. Coincidence? Or, more bots are coming to town?
    *** 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. ***
  • vaelynxvaelynx Member Posts: 182 Arc User
    gphxgphx wrote: »
    People have been asking developers to take care of the zone chat spam too.
    If you addressed that the way you've addressed Gateway botters you'd just shut down zone chat.

    Well, Cryptic (or rather PWE) is of the school of design that goes that the best way to remove stains from a carpet is with a sharp knife.

    lirithiel wrote: »
    vyperdrive wrote: »
    Once again, people seem to be blowing this well out of proportion; because the sky is always falling in Neverwinter...

    That's because the sky IS always falling in NW. I asked this question in guild chat today and no-one could answer me: what was the last QoL improvement made by Cryptic in NW? All they seem to do is HAMSTER us over EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
    To prevent an army of alts from botting would be to remove the army. I don't see a reason why there are mechanics in place to allow so many alts. I mean really, I can see having a total of 3 toons for each class as a max since each class has 3 paths, it would make sense to allow everyone to create an alt to play each path of each class.

    Having any more alts than that is the open door to massive botting. Real people don't have time to manage that many toons, especially with all the game mechanic changes in the last couple of months.

    I say limit the amount of alts, limit the amount of accounts that can login from one IP address, hire 3 real people (3-8 hr shifts to cover 24/7) to monitor the zones for possible bots hanging around. Pay them minimum wage and offer a bonus for each bot they discover.... to give them incentive to search and destroy the bots. This would also take care of a lot of in-game bots as well.

    Implement this strategy and I think half or more of the bots problem will be eliminated. All these nerfs to combat the bots hasn't and will not work as long as people can create armies of them. It has only served to make the player base upset and left with the feeling of being ripped off yet again.

    Another simply implemented measure would to be the use of capcha's in the gateway login and again that pop up randomly to get the human factor of control back.

    The amount of time that management consumes to prevent botting will become less which leaves them more time to actually work on the game mechanics, bugs, exploits, NEW content instead of recycled content..... and the list goes on...

    Just my 2 cents worth .....

    0 cents more like.
    Actual botters and goldsellers have multiple accounts, since having to pay for slots would be a cut in their business, plus,would make their activities easier to track.
    Solve the problem of people logging in with 50+ accounts and that'd do soemthing.
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  • myowmyowmyowmyow Member Posts: 1,923 Arc User
    edited July 2015
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    This is not a healthy economy as far as I can tell, not enough AD in the economy.

    This is actually a lot better than it used to be, when there was a 12 million AD backlog. I'll bet there a LOT less active players now, based on those much lower overall volumes.

    Players eventually leave when bugs are left unfixed for months on end and change implemented that anger players . . .
    SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! SEC! (repeat indefinitely)


    myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
    pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
    looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
  • suicidalgodotsuicidalgodot Member Posts: 2,465 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    vaelynx wrote: »
    [...]
    To prevent an army of alts from botting would be to remove the army. I don't see a reason why there are mechanics in place to allow so many alts. I mean really, I can see having a total of 3 toons for each class as a max since each class has 3 paths, it would make sense to allow everyone to create an alt to play each path of each class.

    Having any more alts than that is the open door to massive botting. Real people don't have time to manage that many toons, especially with all the game mechanic changes in the last couple of months.

    I say limit the amount of alts, limit the amount of accounts that can login from one IP address, hire 3 real people (3-8 hr shifts to cover 24/7) to monitor the zones for possible bots hanging around. Pay them minimum wage and offer a bonus for each bot they discover.... to give them incentive to search and destroy the bots. This would also take care of a lot of in-game bots as well.

    Implement this strategy and I think half or more of the bots problem will be eliminated. All these nerfs to combat the bots hasn't and will not work as long as people can create armies of them. It has only served to make the player base upset and left with the feeling of being ripped off yet again.

    Another simply implemented measure would to be the use of capcha's in the gateway login and again that pop up randomly to get the human factor of control back.

    The amount of time that management consumes to prevent botting will become less which leaves them more time to actually work on the game mechanics, bugs, exploits, NEW content instead of recycled content..... and the list goes on...

    Just my 2 cents worth .....

    0 cents more like.
    Actual botters and goldsellers have multiple accounts, since having to pay for slots would be a cut in their business, plus,would make their activities easier to track.
    Solve the problem of people logging in with 50+ accounts and that'd do soemthing.

    ...that's BTW probably why the bots are all in the same guild - use of the guild bank to stack all that HAMSTER.

  • plasticbatplasticbat Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 12,456 Arc User
    vaelynx wrote: »
    0 cents more like.
    Actual botters and goldsellers have multiple accounts, since having to pay for slots would be a cut in their business, plus,would make their activities easier to track.
    Solve the problem of people logging in with 50+ accounts and that'd do soemthing.

    +1. bots owners do not want to inject anything to the game. They just want to take things out. bots owners would worry about his account would be taken away any time in the future. Hence, they will keep wealth within the account as minimum or getting rid of valuables for real cash profit ASAP. They don't mind losing the account.
    *** 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. ***
  • tcarncetcarnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 976 Arc User
    edited July 2015

    Solve the problem of people logging in with 50+ accounts and that'd do soemthing.
    but how they have to do that. they can't see how many people live in a house or dorm using one ip.
    and with changing ip's which happens to most of us you might end up on someones ip that reached his account limit and can't create one :D
    i mean if you're a new player and get unlucky.

  • zukn75zukn75 Member Posts: 364 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    Good points Vaelynx and plasticbat, I don't imagine for 1 second any bot account that sells for profit has more than 2 characters on it.... I wonder if gateway could POSSIBLY detect how chars are on the account and disable/enable leadership based on the number, that sounds like a VERY tricky thing to code, and would have made a terrible fuss in the community if that had been made as a first step before then declaring an all out hammerblow.
    Operate with a scalpel not a sledgehammer please devs.
  • dfncedfnce Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 509 Arc User
    tcarnce wrote: »
    dfnce wrote: »
    .
    *cough contradicting post*
    saying limit tasks to a day or longer, while saying people will double their alts or accounts.

    no solution.
    next

    what a horrible stuf people come up with, with this trying to help.
    make it at least seem that you know what you're talking about.

    this guy above me comes with the solutions which only brings more bots. not less.
    Right now you only need 1 min to "play" a char to collect 12k AD. 600k AD on 50 chars in 1h - not bad and fair.

    New player shouldn't spend 1.5-2 years to raise leadership farm to archive anything, he usually plays actively with 1-3 characters. Reward such players accordingly. It is major PWE problem they pretend don't see.

    Leave bots to PWE, but leadership in-game isn't hardest thing to bot at this moment. When you need to do quests to earn prerequisite materials for leadership tasks, how much more bots/accounts help? Bots farming T2 boss in ECC for leadership mats, love to see it.

    EX-DL-BtS / ITF-KC-KB / BF-HD-IBS / FtF-IT-ST-Dis / CA-GW-PG
    "When no appropriate rule applies, make one up."
    — (The unwritten rule)


  • wardell2015wardell2015 Member Posts: 35 Arc User
    edited July 2015
    If someone pays for slots they should get the benefit from them. I highly doubt anybody that bots is going to either use a credit card or a prepaid source to acquire slots. To easy to get banned and or have the company that bots sued because of the personally information used to acquire the Zen.


    Edit: Yes, you can trade AD for Zen to acquire a slot. Cryptic should look at Warframe and consider getting rid of AD for use in the auction; And make AD far less needed in game.


    Sigh, this entire NEED to have any profession to get AD highlights how dead other avenues are for ad generation. It does not help matters that the required AD to get a character moderately geared, not BiS, is almost a black-hole.

    There are issue caused by everything that has a fixed AD rate, such as Greater marks of potency. This is an issue that will guarantee bots in game. Remove the demand to get AD for GMoP and the demand for bot's AD will plument.
    Post edited by wardell2015 on
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