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gankdalf
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 930 Arc User
Discuss the abstinence of AD in NW.
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ Gankdalf The Icehole █ ▇ ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁
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It will be more convincing if you stand in front of a pit in eCC.
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!
Since the last few patches and Module 7 you have a good chance to generate wealth in the game. The VIP-Membership as example is pretty cheap. 1 Month cost you only 500.000 AD while you can earn 720.000 AD per Month freely. VIP at Rank 1 provides you with 1 Lockbox key and other nice stuff like an additional epic chest key.
Okay RNG at lockboxes is not for everyone a nice thing but it basically gives you 1-2 blue wards per month (Tarmalune Tradebars).
Then the VIP Program made a lot of Items Cheaper also the Coupons of the Invoke System mades a lot of Items cheaper. As example: Legendary Bags
Such 36 Slot bag costs 1.600 Zen which is 800.000 AD and you can buy it for 650.000 - 700.000 AD in the Auctionhouse. A lot of Profession Stuff is also getting cheaper. Enchantments are getting cheaper while in an update a few weeks ago got buffed a little.
If you need something you can farm it. If you need Resonance Stones gather one or two groups of guild mates and farm medium and epic encounters in your stronghold. They drop grey to purple resonance stones and can be done in 1-5 minutes per encounter.
If you need other refining points you can buy them cheap in the auction house (1 Stack Rank 4 enchantments cost between 1.500 to 2.000 AD which means on matching Enchantments and Artifacts you get over 26.000 RP and on not matching Items 13.000 RP that means you spend around 0,07 - 0,15 AD per RP. That is pretty cheap. If you would spend your whole 24.000 AD only on RP you would get 160,000 - 350,000 RP per day. Or play the game. The daily quests of sharandar provides you with 22,500 RP for enchantments per day (ounbound!). The daily quests of the dread ring gives you refining stones for Artifacts.
You need a second, third and fourth artifact? Play another class up to level 60. This is pretty fast and i am sure some players will help you to get through the dungeon to obtain and unlock the class artifact. So you can unlock two class artifacts for free. This means you only need a fourth artifact. Buy the raven skull for a bit of glory (i would recommend Gauntlegrym PvP because you can trade the seals for more glory) and get it. You need better matching artifacts? There are plenty of cheap artifacts in the auction house for 200.000 - 400.000 AD or simply earn them by playing the game. Valindras Artifact, Black Ice Betrayer and Horn of Lostmauth can drop as loot. Or play the PvP Campaign to unlock one of the three PvP Artifacts that you can also use in PvE.
The only thing that you force to get more ADs in the game are expensive exclusive mounts like the flail snail, the upgrade costs of companions and the costs of Greater Mark Of Potency (but if you have a VIP-Membership there is a good chance to get some in a month).
You simply can farm stuff out of the game. Lostmauth Horn as example. It is part of the best Set. I run on a daily basis around at least 5 times elol since the last 3-4 weeks and the horn dropped three times. And i am not the only "lucky one" every person in my group that runs elol in the same frequent way got the horn at least once.
This mean you doesn't even need to buy it from the auction house you can simply play the game and earn it.
It is not hard to earn Stuff in Neverwinter. You simply play the game, success will come automatically. If you want it early then pay. The game is free2play. You can earn a lot of stuff by simply playing it but it will take some time and this is the core of every MMORPG.
I'm being honest and even if I enjoyed playing the game as much as I did a year ago I wouldn't get the same quantity of AD
After more than a year (might be one and a half now) of playing the most I could get from leadership is a mere reward of 4-5000 raw AD coming from my main toon: I have a handful toons but I just reached lvl 20 on my main, and the other character which I have progressed more has 19... I'm not a bot and I'm not interested in doing the work of one, pressing repetitively the same buttons with the same pattern for 20 toons (which I don't have) or so.
No dungeon is feasible: No AD coming from salvaged items since I can't get new epic items; not even a single drop each day, while I could get like 4-5 drops a day with previous mods.
Pvp is a pain: it always has kinda been, but at least I could stack Rhix and Protector's missions and get a nice amount of raw AD
Same goes for the foundry, and the skirmishes, which I was always keen on skipping, because they were kinda repetitive and/or dull
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!
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ Gankdalf The Icehole █ ▇ ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁
The "competitive" way of getting astral diamonds will be the way that provides the most astral diamonds. I mean, ignoring items with fixed costs (Wondrous Bazaar items, zen shop items while the AD cap exists on the exchange, etc), prices of items on the auction house are based on availability and the amount of AD people are willing to spend (eg supply and demand). The fact that people have AD because of leadership armies means that people are willing to spend AD to match that leadership army level of income.
tl;dr version: the existence of leadership armies makes it so that you need to have one to play the game. Now, I will also say that it's possible that fixed price items (eg Greater Marks of Power etc) are also too expensive, but that's an entirely separate issue. The real issue is, why exactly did Cryptic come up with a gameplay design that encourages players to create alts not to play them, but just to benefit from the fact that they exist?
They maintain they are more than mere Man-at-arms using AD generating factories, they also store stuff, run dungeons and skirmishes, and occaisonally allow me to play a class other than my main. They admit the equipment they have may be poor, the backstories they have to tell, limited, but they exist DAMMIT!
They humbly request an apology for this slight put unto them.
And if you're legitimately playing full time with10 characters, well, those of us without a massive amount of free time just don't have the ability to compete and that's problematic in a different way :P
I'd LOVE to spend more time on them, explore each class at various levels, that was my plan, but I'm struggling to find enough time to play my main and feed the guild mimic let alone invoke and professions on the alts. I didn't intentionally create this situation, it happened around me. I mourn the loss of their reduction to AD factories. They have stories to tell.
"Well, then won't bots just not buy VIP passes?" Well sure. But the bots that do buy VIP passes have a major advantage over those that don't, because the minute another bot undercuts them, BAM! They can repost the item at no cost. Prices of items continue to drop on the AH, every time Cryptic bans an account that's money they get, new bots make new accounts, buy more VIP passes, get banned again, etc.
It's a way to increase the cost of doing business for botters. In practice? I doubt botters are spending a whole lot on VIP passes, because the exchange still only has a 1 week wait time or so.
If you want the best rewards out of the game i would recommend to play all 9 Sharandar Quests (=9 green Thaumaturgy Stones = in 11 Day 1 full Stack = 100-130K AD). Run Dragon Heralds every hour (maybe you can try to access a Zerg Channel, they are pretty effectiv in organzing and killing a lot of Heralds in 10 Minutes and even the channels with lower iLvL are pretty helpfull). From Heralds you get a lot of usefull stuff. As example the Dragon Hoard Chest which can be sold by 30-40K of a stack. You can get grey to purple resonance stones. You get every time a rank 5 enchantment (i have now a couple of stacks farmed myself and stored for the next double RP weekend). And you have the chance of a Belt drop. Most belts are not much worth but you can get a Tiamat or Lostmauth belt which can be sold each for 50-60K AD.
But yes the game need better rewards. I would wish that Bosses would always drop an Aquamarin upwards + additional chance of stuff like the blue and purple armor parts or artifacts.
I dont know how long it takes to detect bots, but my guess would be, that their accounts get banned on a regular basis, so the benefit of VIP 12 wont last long.
I play since beat and I decided, that VIP 12 is a smart investment, so I bought it. Asking for an audit is like claiming, that everyone with a expensive car might be a crimminal and should be investigated.
If you're not, then there's nothing to worry about. Yes yes, I realize how much this sounds like the standard debate about whether there's a constitutional right to privacy and how we're trading privacy for security, and blah blah Benjamin Franklin or Jefferson saying "Trades liberty for security deserves neither" yadda yadda yadda. Cryptic already has rights to pay attention to 100% of AH purchases though, and it's really just a question of where they spend manpower in terms of reviewing which purchases are particuarly fishy. If you have a VIP pass, and you use it to do perfectly normal things (including, BTW, buying GMoPs at -25% cost and selling them at -15% cost), that's fine. It's only when you get to things like somehow having a massive stash of farmable materials that a typical single player would not individually have time to collect being sold on the AH that you'd trigger any red flags.
Here's the simple fact of the matter: as long as it's free for botters to make accounts, they'll make accounts. You can ban them all you want, but they'll just make new accounts from different emails. The only way to permanently deal with a botter problem is if the cost of their doing business is higher than the profit from their doing business. Obviously, you can do this by discouraging players from doing business with them (which would generally entail banning players that purchase their services), but you can also do it by making their activities more expensive.
Because botters are automatic, they're more prone to competitive acts as per a free market. But if a VIP pass makes one botter more competitive than another, the botters that don't get that pass end up being left in the dust; it's an additional hurdle towards effective botting basically.
On the other hand, if we follow that rabbit hole and think bots ARE buying VIP passes, we'd really expect there to be a much much larger zen backlog than currently exists. So, the reason my idea is a bad one has nothing to do with your objections-it's simply a bad one because the hypothesis "botters are buying VIP passes (wouldn't it be funny if they were banned after doing so?)" is almost certainly false.
Also, I mean, how do you think the IRS decides who to audit and who to not? They pick up on suspicious activity. So... yeah, if you normally don't spend a lot of money and BAM a sports car falls out of nowhere, if there's other suspicious activity, the IRS might consider it worthwhile exerting a certain amount of manpower towards detecting foul play. Of course, you do have to consider the question of scale.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
Other ppl buy cheap and sell for higher prices before or on double RP WE, no botting included.
It is not that easy to find botters just by AH activity. You would have to monitor the sales for some days. Even if you do that, you could hit the wrong ppl. While the event was running I bought thousands of tymoras gifts and I sell them now (due to bots selling them while the event was running and less players, without or without much profit). Anyone who buys them could get the impression that I botted, due to the fact, that I sell thousands of them, while in fact I bought them in stacks in hope for a profit at a later date.