Oho guys, I think you forgot to say that all earned AD will be added to each character? Because I have three for example and I can't spend so much time to get rewards by new way for every.
Replace leadership task rough AD with consumable items (scrolls, wands, tomes, whatever flavor) that grant bonus AD when a skirmish, dungeon, pvp match, or foundry is run and completed. For example,
A consumable leadership item that gives a chance to find some rough AD as loot from a skirmish/dungeon add. A consumable leadership item that gives a chance to find some rough AD as loot from pvp player kill.
Real players will get these rewards by doing leadership AND playing the game content. Real players also then retain more of their enormous investments in leadership instead of it unfairly stolen away. Bots won't have an easy time to script a complete a skirmish or dungeon run, including selective loot pickup. Bots won't kill real players in pvp (well... some pugs might can be killed by bots lol)
Leadership generates items that supplement AD rewards for activities that are very difficult to bot.
I'm seeing a trend in most of the comments. Almost everyone appeared to be using the professions to earn AD to get refining stones for their equipment. so why not have the professions just give people what they were using the AD to buy. and make it account bound.
Yes, this is a great idea. Let the chest rewards give a small change of GMOPs/Wards. Also, give the invoking reward chests a small chance of a GMOP.
Yes, I would really love if they remove AD and replace it with coals and gmop's even if they are account bound. That would keep me as a casual player, I wouldn't even care if the leadership quest was a week long
I'm completely against this choice of devs. This choice will take the game only to close in few months becasuse the 80% of players will choose another game: there're so many free MMO now. This is just my opinion.
Just to ask, when this last great idea will be probably apply to the game?
Sorry I dont have yet see an answer about the "when" this nice new rule will be applied. Today? Tomorrow? In a week? In a month? Next season? Christmas?
First, no one here but the company knows if the player base is growing or shrinking, so without hard numbers everyone can stop pretending they know what these and recent changes have done.
WRONG. Really, really wrong. Steam alone can show you the decline of the player population. ~~~~~~
Second, they are trying to fix a problem, plain and simple. Would you prefer they do it the other way and let bots run rampant? Would that solve anything? .
They already let bots run rampant. As for leadership bots, there is no such thing. If you say otherwise, I dare you to link the Websters dictionary definition of a of botter then prove to me that someone can "bot" a profession that takes months to level up and 12-16 hours to complete -x3 per character at the most- Fix a problem? They are just creating more problems. If they wanted to fix problems they would start with in game bugs, they would have a dev monitor PE chat for at least 5 hours a day, they would include 3rd party protection that deminishes the amount of botting that can be done, they would ban players that are verbally abusive to others in game. There is a very long list of what they could do to make this game a better one, and punishing players isn't on it. ~~~~~~~
What good is 3k AD from a dungeon chest when the key costs 5k? Will we get a free epic key? Doubt it... If grinding AD with only 1 char is viable now, will the daily refinement limit be remove? Doubt it... The daily AD refinement limit needs a hard reevaluation!
I keep hearing bots killed the economy, but things like GMOPs are commodity-based from the wondrous bazaar. How did they destroy something with a set-standard price by Cryptic?! Commodity prices are too high, and auxiliary AD sources are being completely wiped out. How many times has this, or a similar course of action been tried and failed? These changes *hurt* real, legit players. I'm really starting to believe the cake is a lie.
I kept feeling these very harsh decisions are not very well thought out, in respect to user impact and enjoyment management. Most of us had to make some AD alts just to get by: I'm no where near hardcore. I got mostly rank 7s. Difficulty skyrocketed and refinement and gear requirements skyrocketed. Nothing to do with bots here.
Some very shady politics; concept-framing, staw-manning bots as pretext to take away things they now want you to pay for. We're going to take this away to combat bots. Opps, didn't work, we'll take that away-repeat-repeat. Didn't work. Don't get me started on the dragon horde nerfs. What did we get? Coupons to the item shop.
A few things need to remain free to call it "Free to Play", ya know. I'm a VIP member, before I get called out as a free-loader. This game's post-mod 5 trajectory just continues to disappoint me. Vanilla forums doesn't come with a big enough sad face to convey the feeling I got right now.
I am on board with this change completely. With my limited game time, the only way I have been able to afford anything is by having a "Leadership Army" and that turned into a catch-22. All my available time each day was spent working Leadership. With these changes, I will be able to stop my "leadership army" and instead spend that 30-90 minutes actually playing the game AND earning AD.
I feel the pros definitely out-weight the cons and while yes there will be upset folks that can no longer rake in near endless AD (like me), what this does is turn the game economy back on track to what it should be. I feel too that these changes will allow far more people will be able to enjoy the game than those upset. Especially new and returning players. This sounds great to me. Looking forward to actually being able to play the game and not work it.
I would love to see how can you make 24kAD in 30 minutes of playing the game. Now that we have Strongholds quests to run each day, farm old areas for donation resources in order to upgrade buildings in Strongholds - when shall we find time to run this X amount of dungeons, pvp, skirmishes per day to max out the allowed AD income?
For a casual player - the daily quests rewarding some extra amount of AD were perfect. Maybe you only want to do one dungeon run?
As with removing AD from Leadership - I only have one main toon that was bringing in some extra AD for me. Now i don't think that extra 15k AD per day doing this somehow ruins the economy. As some of other players have mentioned, if you need around 3mil AD to buy a R12 enchant, how long will i have to do my Leadership tasks to save for one of these enchants??
The saddest thing I really think is that this is all being done with the intent of fighting botters. All these problems are caused by botters. We wouldn't be here if they had taken proper steps to combat botting from the beginning - bot detection code, etc. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and all.
Myself i don see where it is a big deal i make more astral seals in a day than i can refine and the new way looks like ill make more . Myself im going to Wait and see before i cry over spilled milk >also they mentioned people not doing foundry only time i had issues with game will not mentiion what but it was after doing foundry quest that computer sent warning about .
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mamalion1234Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,415Arc User
Your botter whom logs in with multiple accounts will adjust their code to speed run content with single characters per account because it makes no sense for a botter to pay for character slots.
Or they can just get 3 characters from separate accounts and bot skirmishs and dungeons. They wouldn't even have to talk to Rhix now! Just enter private instance, rinse and repeat.
Increased server load and instability issues for legitimate players ensues ...
i remember a post in another thread: bots cant do dungeons are not so smart. What happened now?
Ok, so let me see if I understand this correctly. The VIP time I paid for to get the AD bonus is gone. The AD I spent to improve the amount of AD I could generate from leadership is gone. The built in AD sinks for everything are still the same. The gear prices to run the events to get the AD are still the same. So how exactly does this benefit us the casual players again? Also what will we be getting as compensation for losing out on what we paid for.
I am not seeing how this benefits US the player. I am only seeing that I spent money for something that has now been revoked and that the things I need to progress in the game will require a casual player such as myself to now pay even more to be able to participate in it.
So you killed leadership on the gateway and my dream of making enough AD to upgrade my beautiful rank 2 mounts, but I still dream. Now you announce the removal of AD making and forcing people like me to do pvp just to get AD. I spend a lot of time on this game but pvp is my nightmare. Where does my AD go..into refining..still dreaming of upgrading my rank 2 horse.
I am an active member of my guild and actively donate my hard earned AD into the guild too, we are a small guild. Please tell me how long it will take to repeat the skirmishes and dungeons (since I wont be doing pvp), after spending what little I have on refining, to donate to that very hungry mimic...he wants only want 46 million AD just to rank up the guild hall completely (and this does not include other guild structures).
So here are my broken dreams: I cant rank up all my enchantments to rank 9 because of refining cost. I can't rank up my rank 2 mount..costs too much AD. I can't afford to rank up my artifacts on my characters I play with ( 6 main ones because I love their uniquess of ablities). I cant afford to upgrade my companions. I can't afford to donate to the hungry coffer so our guild will probably never be finished. I am a level 7 VIP and I do play a couple of hours a day but I am not looking forward to a dungeon/skirmish grind daily to meet my character/ guild needs.
The botters will continue. There will still be a huge gear gap between old and new players, as the old players who have rank 12's will still have them. You have not provided us with any evidence, and as I begged before, don't do this because it will only affect the players that actually play for fun and enjoy the social nature of this game.
I love it. Finally the non-players who had 10 characters all running leadership purely to generate AD will have to actually play the game to earn money. Insane prices on some items will finally fall to where normal players can afford them. Wallet warriors will still be able to spend money and casual players with an hour or so a day to run a dungeon will be able to actually make AD. People will have something to shoot for and gear will become worth something again. They should have made this change long ago, not that the AD mongers will not still find ways to farm endless AD, but at least they can turn off the easiest method that any schlub with too much time on his hands can use to generate AD and inflate the economy. I can't wait to see what effects this has once the whining has diminished.
People have been saying this game has been dying ever since it launched. It's still going and there are plenty of players to sustain it. Zone chat is just as ridiculous as ever.
I'm laughing all the way to the dungeon and I hope folks can take it in good humor. It's not theft; nobody is entitled to make waves of AD for virtually no effort. That's been a problem with this game from the start.
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santralafaxMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,896Arc User
We believe we can make the Astral Diamond economy much more stable and uniform for all players. Want to earn AD? Play Dungeons, Skirmishes, and PvP whenever you have time! Check back soon for more information on future additional AD sources.
Scott Shicoff Lead Designer
Scott, you have proven that "soon" in your book is way different than in mine. Also, a big announcement was made about having eliminated sooo many botters when you took leadership from the gateway. What happened?? Many people predicted the move to in-game botting, did you not think ahead??
This is a very unstable game: Changing core PVP rules without so much as a patch note, removing lvl 60s from Campaign zones with no warning, nerfing Dragon Hoards, adding and then removing RP from IWD, taking leadership off of the gateway (now this!), doubling hit points of all creatures, then taking it back 2 mos. later, etc., etc. I could delve into Mod 6, but Cryptic's ideas for that mod still make me queasy.
The one bright, shining point in this is that you made an announcement. That rarely happens before major changes in this game, and I appreciate it. You did neglect to give dates on when this will happen.
To be completely frank. I have myself to blame. This is what a F2P MMORPG is. Take it or leave it. If any of you have ever played a different one. Ask yourself, sure maybe a little better CS/Balance/Content/Mechanics/Art etc, or maybe a little worse, but their overall system models are based on pretty much the same things.
Gear Treadmills Lockboxes End Game - Group play PVE/PVP
Sometimes small differences (drop mechanics, lvling time, etc) will draw different types of people towards the game. Even, almost, unknowingly; just preferences. Other times, its for very obvious reasons.
Why, I dont like it, but have to say it; take it or leave it. The games are honestly complex and you do have to appreciate the thought, time, and effort that has to be put into it. I don't think bots are programming games completely yet... yet. But to the point, the game is here for our enjoyment; BUT also to provide revenue and then profit for the company. On the surface and easily communicated is bots are damaging the economy, (bugs/exploits); didnt help. But those systems listed above are just inherently intertwined with revenue generation systems (cause ofc they make money, and why RMT farmers target them), because ground up that is how the model works and was built.
Ok, to what is disappointing to me though. But understandingly part of the causes of the actual current issues. Early in this games life cycle, you could truely play F2P w/o a doubt relatively easily. The combination of leadership plus actually how rewarding the gameplay was; veterans remember farming all sorts of things in every aspect of the game PVE/PVP(I farmed blue belts for example, they sold for 100ks, you had to get a decent score though I remember so it was tough for a bot))/Even foundry creators could get cool stuff(exclusive augment stone, thats dope). It was almost the perfect F2P for ALL types of players, f2p, p2w, casuals, hardcore. People made many youtube videos, streamed, it was usually charted on the major MMO sites. But this combined with the major exploits, and bugs, and because of the popularity and accessibility it attracted botters. It's why I say the foresight wasn't there. Or it was there, but just pushed to the side until major changes had to be made. PWE/PW and cryptic is not a new company, you should still be searching/development/enforcing ways to battle bots/RMT Farmers. It is not new to the industry. It's hard to believe, but again understandably lucrative, this isn't treated like something almost like a flesh eating fatal disease to the industry.
Im sure you will tell me it is, and give me proof. If that is so, and it's just incurable, but can only be treated till the eventual death of the host.
But back to the TL DR
To be completely frank. I have myself to blame. This is what a F2P MMORPG is. Take it or leave it. If any of you have ever played a different one. Ask yourself, sure maybe a little better CS/Balance/Content/Mechanics/Art etc, or maybe a little worse, but their overall system models are based on pretty much the same things.''
To end it; I have spent, what I would say, a fair contribution of real washingtons to the revenue. Im not demanding anything. I wouldnt still be here if I didnt think this was a service/product worth playing. But just you really have made MAJOR changes that effect all demographics of the games population for the sake of bots.
What is the true source of this problem. The systems developed to operate and intake revenue for this market of games has been compromised.
Bots can run through dungeons and skirmishes just fine today, and they will do it 24/7 after those changes. Botters will run one character after the other to the daily AD limit, and this won't stop them.
Botters are running in guilds, placing their lowlevel characters in PE for advertisement, while their highlevel characters are probably farming the Stronghold map.
Botters probably also monitor the Auction Hause 24/7 to buy good items cheap and resell them at a higher price again.
Botters are still farming 24/7 in Neverdeath the Ghost Stories, and not a single word about those bot hives.
Q: You want to fight botters? A: Get real GMs into your game.
If you go through with this change, more players will leave, and more players will not even bother to try your game. While botters will allways find a way to keep their AD flowing.
This is just another change, that will hurt regular players more then the botters.
1. botter in pvp match, they will just wait the match finish then get ur AD up to 7200, image 10 v 10 match, how it will rune the pvp ,
2. botter in Skirmishes, they will just bot action and wait till the skirmishes finish then get ur AD up to 7200
Please use ur wisdom to consider every situation !!!!!!!!!
You rather take off the AD from leadership other than blocking the botter use The Arcane Reservoir exploit to farm, which is actually stealing ur money, seriously?
Replace leadership task rough AD with consumable items (scrolls, wands, tomes, whatever flavor) that grant bonus AD when a skirmish, dungeon, pvp match, or foundry is run and completed. For example,
A consumable leadership item that gives a chance to find some rough AD as loot from a skirmish/dungeon add. A consumable leadership item that gives a chance to find some rough AD as loot from pvp player kill.
Real players will get these rewards by doing leadership AND playing the game content. Real players also then retain more of their enormous investments in leadership instead of it unfairly stolen away. Bots won't have an easy time to script a complete a skirmish or dungeon run, including selective loot pickup. Bots won't kill real players in pvp (well... some pugs might can be killed by bots lol)
I challenge you to find a problem with this proposition and identify any reasons it will not work. And do not say "Bots will exploit it" because that won't be a problem. And easy to squash.
I am an active member of my guild and actively donate my hard earned AD into the guild too, we are a small guild. Please tell me how long it will take to repeat the skirmishes and dungeons (since I wont be doing pvp), after spending what little I have on refining, to donate to that very hungry mimic...he wants only want 46 million AD just to rank up the guild hall completely (and this does not include other guild structures).
If you run dungeons and foundries every day until you hit the 7,200 cap for each, earning 14,400 AD a day it will take you about 3,195 days (little over 8 years) to earn 46 million diamonds.
twitch: Lady_Starrlight
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
Okay people you need to calm down. It sounds so much worse than it actually is.
You get less AD. YES. The AD you get will skyrocket in Value. YES. Prices will DROP so that players can afford the items. YES.
A mount wont cost 4m AD in AH because nobody will be able to buy it and then the seller wont get his AD. So he will lower the price far enough so people can afford it. So instead of 4m maybe it will cost 400k. This wont happen over a night, but I think this is the long term goal.
And I think they will adjust all vendor/zen prices after time.
I love when people understand how economies work and understand that currency, like any other object, has a supply and demand value attached to it.
I kept feeling these very harsh decisions are not very well thought out, in respect to user impact and enjoyment management. Most of us had to make some AD alts just to get by: I'm no where near hardcore. I got mostly rank 7s. Difficulty skyrocketed and refinement and gear requirements skyrocketed. Nothing to do with bots here.
Bots can run through dungeons and skirmishes just fine today, and they will do it 24/7 after those changes. Botters will run one character after the other to the daily AD limit, and this won't stop them.
Botters are running in guilds, placing their lowlevel characters in PE for advertisement, while their highlevel characters are probably farming the Stronghold map.
Botters probably also monitor the Auction Hause 24/7 to buy good items cheap and resell them at a higher price again.
Botters are still farming 24/7 in Neverdeath the Ghost Stories, and not a single word about those bot hives.
Q: You want to fight botters? A: Get real GMs into your game.
If you go through with this change, more players will leave, and more players will not even bother to try your game. While botters will allways find a way to keep their AD flowing.
The last modules allready cost you many players, but with this change, i'm really curious to see how many players will keep on playing.
+1 and another thing... the ad changes and the biggest part of the suggestions here looks like economical decisions of some latin minister. i dont need say how bad that works here... you guys are programmers, not economists. call some profissional of the area to give suggerstions about that and limit yourselfs to work in your areas.
ps: so a artefact will cost 400k? so cut... to pass a green companion to blue that cost 500k. the fixed prices of some services will be inaccessible. well, waste of time.
I think each character should be able to get enough resources for his own progression in a fair time. Right now that doesnt happen and its the reason why so many people have ls alts. This change can work but only if future changes are made too. Character progression needs to be accesible for those who play in a fair amount of time. I really hope to see some of those changes soon
This seems a lot more like fighting the players using leadership to get ahead than fighting bots. As usual cryptic won't make the changes necessary to make this work so we will be left with high prices for everything and no free AD to get them. Goodbye yellow brick road...
So I read through most of the thread and want to admit that I'll be repeating a number of points already made (hard not to, at this point). I'm one of your more casual players, though I have bought Zen in game a few times. The first time was about 1.5 years ago and it was mostly to get a mount that would be shared for all characters on my account (and a few other things I don't remember). The second time was just last week to become VIP because I'd just returned from being away from the game for almost a year and thought the bonuses would be a nice way to get me back into this game.
I'd always heard about how great leadership farms were for AD but had always been too lazy to set up a "serious" one. Sure, all of my characters on my account (only 4 at the moment, with one slot free) leveled leadership and ran it whenever I was active in the game but that's not even really 100k AD / day for me and I rarely feel like spending the effort to even deal with 4 of them. That should mean this change isn't that harmful for me, right?
Wrong. Unless you make it so that earning AD by actually playing can get me to ~100k / day without needing to run all of that content on all four characters (which would take maybe 2-3 hours per character including queue / grouping times) then I too am losing out on AD per day.
I am actually fully in support of the general idea behind these changes (reward active playing of content rather than managing an army of alts) but I think you need to make a lot of underlying changes alongside these. One of the biggest ones is that playing the actual content of the game (campaigns especially) COSTS AD. There's no way around it. You NEED to be upgrading gear if you want a chance to actually play new content when it comes out (and for those just hitting 70 they need it to experience basically any content).
The fixed-cost AD sinks in game will need to be completely reworked. If this system goes into place without reworking the cost of GMoPs, for example, you're just completely ruining non-rich players' chances of ever getting anything done in game. Having a F2P game take a lot of effort (you said in the original post that AD was meant to be a resource for players with time but not cash - but in the current proposed changes it's a resource for people willing to WAIT, not invest time) is great. Having a F2P game where you need to put in a lot of effort AND wait 4-5 days to upgrade one enchantment one level on one piece of gear is not. It's just discouraging.
If you make these changes, and made in-game AD purchases scale a bit better (not going to through out suggestions, but maybe one or two days' worth of active AD earning on one character = GMoP) then I don't hate the changes - though many still will.
That's all I've got. Your heart seems to be in the right place but if you were going to "fix" leadership it should have been done in 2013. Now you're just filling some players with rage and not offering to fix AD for the rest of us who aren't otherwise all that angry.
Okay people you need to calm down. It sounds so much worse than it actually is.
You get less AD. YES. The AD you get will skyrocket in Value. YES. Prices will DROP so that players can afford the items. YES.
A mount wont cost 4m AD in AH because nobody will be able to buy it and then the seller wont get his AD. So he will lower the price far enough so people can afford it. So instead of 4m maybe it will cost 400k. This wont happen over a night, but I think this is the long term goal.
And I think they will adjust all vendor/zen prices after time.
I love when people understand how economies work and understand that currency, like any other object, has a supply and demand value attached to it.
Can we please get an official word on when this is happening cause I want to be in PE zone chat to siphon all those tears.
Comments
Replace leadership task rough AD with consumable items (scrolls, wands, tomes, whatever flavor) that grant bonus AD when a skirmish, dungeon, pvp match, or foundry is run and completed. For example,
A consumable leadership item that gives a chance to find some rough AD as loot from a skirmish/dungeon add.
A consumable leadership item that gives a chance to find some rough AD as loot from pvp player kill.
Real players will get these rewards by doing leadership AND playing the game content.
Real players also then retain more of their enormous investments in leadership instead of it unfairly stolen away.
Bots won't have an easy time to script a complete a skirmish or dungeon run, including selective loot pickup.
Bots won't kill real players in pvp (well... some pugs might can be killed by bots lol)
Leadership generates items that supplement AD rewards for activities that are very difficult to bot.
Sopi SW Youtube channel pvp brickabrack
Today? Tomorrow? In a week? In a month? Next season? Christmas?
~~~~~~ They already let bots run rampant. As for leadership bots, there is no such thing. If you say otherwise, I dare you to link the Websters dictionary definition of a of botter then prove to me that someone can "bot" a profession that takes months to level up and 12-16 hours to complete -x3 per character at the most-
Fix a problem? They are just creating more problems. If they wanted to fix problems they would start with in game bugs, they would have a dev monitor PE chat for at least 5 hours a day, they would include 3rd party protection that deminishes the amount of botting that can be done, they would ban players that are verbally abusive to others in game. There is a very long list of what they could do to make this game a better one, and punishing players isn't on it.
~~~~~~~ I think he's talking to you, mmy.
If grinding AD with only 1 char is viable now, will the daily refinement limit be remove? Doubt it...
The daily AD refinement limit needs a hard reevaluation!
I keep hearing bots killed the economy, but things like GMOPs are commodity-based from the wondrous bazaar. How did they destroy something with a set-standard price by Cryptic?! Commodity prices are too high, and auxiliary AD sources are being completely wiped out. How many times has this, or a similar course of action been tried and failed? These changes *hurt* real, legit players. I'm really starting to believe the cake is a lie.
I kept feeling these very harsh decisions are not very well thought out, in respect to user impact and enjoyment management. Most of us had to make some AD alts just to get by: I'm no where near hardcore. I got mostly rank 7s.
Difficulty skyrocketed and refinement and gear requirements skyrocketed. Nothing to do with bots here.
Some very shady politics; concept-framing, staw-manning bots as pretext to take away things they now want you to pay for. We're going to take this away to combat bots. Opps, didn't work, we'll take that away-repeat-repeat. Didn't work. Don't get me started on the dragon horde nerfs. What did we get? Coupons to the item shop.
A few things need to remain free to call it "Free to Play", ya know. I'm a VIP member, before I get called out as a free-loader.
This game's post-mod 5 trajectory just continues to disappoint me. Vanilla forums doesn't come with a big enough sad face to convey the feeling I got right now.
Now that we have Strongholds quests to run each day, farm old areas for donation resources in order to upgrade buildings in Strongholds - when shall we find time to run this X amount of dungeons, pvp, skirmishes per day to max out the allowed AD income?
For a casual player - the daily quests rewarding some extra amount of AD were perfect. Maybe you only want to do one dungeon run?
As with removing AD from Leadership - I only have one main toon that was bringing in some extra AD for me. Now i don't think that extra 15k AD per day doing this somehow ruins the economy.
As some of other players have mentioned, if you need around 3mil AD to buy a R12 enchant, how long will i have to do my Leadership tasks to save for one of these enchants??
I am not seeing how this benefits US the player. I am only seeing that I spent money for something that has now been revoked and that the things I need to progress in the game will require a casual player such as myself to now pay even more to be able to participate in it.
I am not a happy camper at all.
I am an active member of my guild and actively donate my hard earned AD into the guild too, we are a small guild. Please tell me how long it will take to repeat the skirmishes and dungeons (since I wont be doing pvp), after spending what little I have on refining, to donate to that very hungry mimic...he wants only want 46 million AD just to rank up the guild hall completely (and this does not include other guild structures).
So here are my broken dreams: I cant rank up all my enchantments to rank 9 because of refining cost. I can't rank up my rank 2 mount..costs too much AD. I can't afford to rank up my artifacts on my characters I play with ( 6 main ones because I love their uniquess of ablities). I cant afford to upgrade my companions. I can't afford to donate to the hungry coffer so our guild will probably never be finished. I am a level 7 VIP and I do play a couple of hours a day but I am not looking forward to a dungeon/skirmish grind daily to meet my character/ guild needs.
The botters will continue. There will still be a huge gear gap between old and new players, as the old players who have rank 12's will still have them. You have not provided us with any evidence, and as I begged before, don't do this because it will only affect the players that actually play for fun and enjoy the social nature of this game.
Part of Team Tredecim of the Cloaks Alliance website
https://cloakalliance.wordpress.com/
People have been saying this game has been dying ever since it launched. It's still going and there are plenty of players to sustain it. Zone chat is just as ridiculous as ever.
I'm laughing all the way to the dungeon and I hope folks can take it in good humor. It's not theft; nobody is entitled to make waves of AD for virtually no effort. That's been a problem with this game from the start.
This is a very unstable game: Changing core PVP rules without so much as a patch note, removing lvl 60s from Campaign zones with no warning, nerfing Dragon Hoards, adding and then removing RP from IWD, taking leadership off of the gateway (now this!), doubling hit points of all creatures, then taking it back 2 mos. later, etc., etc. I could delve into Mod 6, but Cryptic's ideas for that mod still make me queasy.
The one bright, shining point in this is that you made an announcement. That rarely happens before major changes in this game, and I appreciate it. You did neglect to give dates on when this will happen.
Gear Treadmills
Lockboxes
End Game - Group play PVE/PVP
Sometimes small differences (drop mechanics, lvling time, etc) will draw different types of people towards the game. Even, almost, unknowingly; just preferences. Other times, its for very obvious reasons.
Why, I dont like it, but have to say it; take it or leave it. The games are honestly complex and you do have to appreciate the thought, time, and effort that has to be put into it. I don't think bots are programming games completely yet... yet. But to the point, the game is here for our enjoyment; BUT also to provide revenue and then profit for the company. On the surface and easily communicated is bots are damaging the economy, (bugs/exploits); didnt help. But those systems listed above are just inherently intertwined with revenue generation systems (cause ofc they make money, and why RMT farmers target them), because ground up that is how the model works and was built.
Ok, to what is disappointing to me though. But understandingly part of the causes of the actual current issues. Early in this games life cycle, you could truely play F2P w/o a doubt relatively easily. The combination of leadership plus actually how rewarding the gameplay was; veterans remember farming all sorts of things in every aspect of the game PVE/PVP(I farmed blue belts for example, they sold for 100ks, you had to get a decent score though I remember so it was tough for a bot))/Even foundry creators could get cool stuff(exclusive augment stone, thats dope). It was almost the perfect F2P for ALL types of players, f2p, p2w, casuals, hardcore. People made many youtube videos, streamed, it was usually charted on the major MMO sites. But this combined with the major exploits, and bugs, and because of the popularity and accessibility it attracted botters. It's why I say the foresight wasn't there. Or it was there, but just pushed to the side until major changes had to be made. PWE/PW and cryptic is not a new company, you should still be searching/development/enforcing ways to battle bots/RMT Farmers. It is not new to the industry. It's hard to believe, but again understandably lucrative, this isn't treated like something almost like a flesh eating fatal disease to the industry.
Im sure you will tell me it is, and give me proof. If that is so, and it's just incurable, but can only be treated till the eventual death of the host.
But back to the TL DR
To be completely frank. I have myself to blame. This is what a F2P MMORPG is. Take it or leave it. If any of you have ever played a different one. Ask yourself, sure maybe a little better CS/Balance/Content/Mechanics/Art etc, or maybe a little worse, but their overall system models are based on pretty much the same things.''
To end it; I have spent, what I would say, a fair contribution of real washingtons to the revenue. Im not demanding anything. I wouldnt still be here if I didnt think this was a service/product worth playing. But just you really have made MAJOR changes that effect all demographics of the games population for the sake of bots.
What is the true source of this problem. The systems developed to operate and intake revenue for this market of games has been compromised.
Fox Stevenson - Sandblast
Oh Wonder - Without You
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas
Botters will run one character after the other to the daily AD limit, and this won't stop them.
Botters are running in guilds, placing their lowlevel characters in PE for advertisement, while their highlevel characters are probably farming the Stronghold map.
Botters probably also monitor the Auction Hause 24/7 to buy good items cheap and resell them at a higher price again.
Botters are still farming 24/7 in Neverdeath the Ghost Stories, and not a single word about those bot hives.
Q: You want to fight botters?
A: Get real GMs into your game.
If you go through with this change, more players will leave, and more players will not even bother to try your game.
While botters will allways find a way to keep their AD flowing.
This is just another change, that will hurt regular players more then the botters.
1. botter in pvp match, they will just wait the match finish then get ur AD up to 7200, image 10 v 10 match, how it will rune the pvp ,
2. botter in Skirmishes, they will just bot action and wait till the skirmishes finish then get ur AD up to 7200
Please use ur wisdom to consider every situation !!!!!!!!!
You rather take off the AD from leadership other than blocking the botter use The Arcane Reservoir exploit to farm, which is actually stealing ur money, seriously?
And do not say "Bots will exploit it" because that won't be a problem. And easy to squash.
Sopi SW Youtube channel pvp brickabrack
ps: so a artefact will cost 400k? so cut... to pass a green companion to blue that cost 500k. the fixed prices of some services will be inaccessible. well, waste of time.
I really hope to see some of those changes soon
I'd always heard about how great leadership farms were for AD but had always been too lazy to set up a "serious" one. Sure, all of my characters on my account (only 4 at the moment, with one slot free) leveled leadership and ran it whenever I was active in the game but that's not even really 100k AD / day for me and I rarely feel like spending the effort to even deal with 4 of them. That should mean this change isn't that harmful for me, right?
Wrong. Unless you make it so that earning AD by actually playing can get me to ~100k / day without needing to run all of that content on all four characters (which would take maybe 2-3 hours per character including queue / grouping times) then I too am losing out on AD per day.
I am actually fully in support of the general idea behind these changes (reward active playing of content rather than managing an army of alts) but I think you need to make a lot of underlying changes alongside these. One of the biggest ones is that playing the actual content of the game (campaigns especially) COSTS AD. There's no way around it. You NEED to be upgrading gear if you want a chance to actually play new content when it comes out (and for those just hitting 70 they need it to experience basically any content).
The fixed-cost AD sinks in game will need to be completely reworked. If this system goes into place without reworking the cost of GMoPs, for example, you're just completely ruining non-rich players' chances of ever getting anything done in game. Having a F2P game take a lot of effort (you said in the original post that AD was meant to be a resource for players with time but not cash - but in the current proposed changes it's a resource for people willing to WAIT, not invest time) is great. Having a F2P game where you need to put in a lot of effort AND wait 4-5 days to upgrade one enchantment one level on one piece of gear is not. It's just discouraging.
If you make these changes, and made in-game AD purchases scale a bit better (not going to through out suggestions, but maybe one or two days' worth of active AD earning on one character = GMoP) then I don't hate the changes - though many still will.
That's all I've got. Your heart seems to be in the right place but if you were going to "fix" leadership it should have been done in 2013. Now you're just filling some players with rage and not offering to fix AD for the rest of us who aren't otherwise all that angry.