Cryptic drove itself into a Catch-22 like a drunk driver with three friends constantly screaming at him to pull over while he angrily slurs that he is perfectly sober.
Right now, either they implement these changes and ruin the game forever, prompting players to leave, or...go back on their plans and cancel the whole deal, which still doesn't prove anything except that it takes a huge chunk of the player base pushing tons of feedback and saying basically what they've been telling the devs all along to provide any change. And even after that, they will just go a roundabout way about that and nerf some other aspect of game progression to goad the few that still find it worth it to spend money on the game to spend more on items that become more and more necessary to become a competitive player.
Just imagine all the botters with thousands of accounts being able to make 100k instead of just 48k AD per day. Unless they start fighting botters with real GMs, any change will only help the botters and hurt the normal players.
Incorrect, they could limit it to T2 dungeons, the majority of botters are farming RP; easy money.
And what about new players? Or what about players, that are not ready for T2 dungeons? How will they make enough AD?
Do you get them T2 ready and then run with them through those dungeons every day?
Just imagine all the botters with thousands of accounts being able to make 100k instead of just 48k AD per day. Unless they start fighting botters with real GMs, any change will only help the botters and hurt the normal players.
Incorrect, they could limit it to T2 dungeons, the majority of botters are farming RP; easy money.
And what about new players? Or what about players, that are not ready for T2 dungeons? How will they make enough AD?
Do you get them T2 ready and then run with them through those dungeons every day?
That's the main problem...Content is so little and the difficulty curve so steep that some players (say, those that didn't spec well enough to be desirable in a pug group and thus have to spend even more diamonds to respec or restart the character from scratch) find themself in a vicious cycle: They cannot acquire the equipment they need because the only way to acquire it (Bind, bind, bind) is to run the same content they are too weak to go through. So their only choice is to either get a 3k+ to run them through over and over until they can afford to crawl out of the "second-rate player" group, spend a ton of money to get the ball rolling, or quit the game.
Short Answer - I hate spending 2+ hours day farming leadership instead of playing PvP, dungeons, et al. I ALSO hate not being able to get all the needed items, in a reasonable amount of time, for "fun" gameplay.
Removing AD from leadership doesn't really solve either of these problems.
1) I will still need to farm RP items in leadership, but now without the benefit of making AD.
2) And now, I will not be able to make enough AD to support my multiple chars as my ONLY source of large stable income will be gone. As it is, I have 17 chars supporting just 1 main char and after playing 2 years (since beta), my 1 main char still isn't maxed out.
Yes, when Lord Neverember's daily AD quests were available, my single char could max out it's 24k rough AD limit through dailies alone, but that option has been removed.
Yes, it's great that you're focusing our gameplay efforts back on gaming (vs farming).
But, you gave me the ability to open 50 char slots. And I have created 1 char of each playable class which is currently 8. But, this game is NOT designed for me to have 8 equal characters (equal in gear, enchants, etc) in a reasonable amount of time without purchasing ZEN with real money.
I get that you are a business and that you need to make money to support this game and to grow it.
But, shouldn't your job be to entertain us sufficiently so that we would WANT to spend money on well appreciated entertainment? As opposed to making things obvious, repetitive and boring?
1) It's obvious you want us to BUY zen.
2) The only way in the future to "make" AD is to play the same 3 things every day (dungeons, skirmishes, PvP). PvP has only 2 maps since Beta. All 3 things are group only activities. All 3 things are subject to the "quality" of the players involved. A very large number of these matches/quests end in failure do to the PUG makeup (lack of experience, knowledge, gameship, etc.) The only thing that was different and soloable was the Foundry quests, but you haven't improved that experience at all.
3) All failures only result in lost time and no reward for time spent. Sitting at campfire in PVP is boring. Watching players leave a map or match is aggravating at first and boring by third straight match or map.
My humble suggestion and opinion is that instead of focusing on "fixing" the money issue first, you should focus on making this game more fun again...first.
I am for fixing leadership and the economy, but not as the first order of business.
You are wrong about backlog, backlog was always gone in every 2x RP weekend due to the GMOP cost.
If you think the price in AH will be drop, means you havn't learn from last gateway change, they said exactly same reason and hope the price will drop later.
Its just purely naive. Give an example, the cost to make a must-have perfect weapon enchantment is 32 shard, 15 Coalescent Wards, 656640 RP and 10GMOPs Lets say you want to use your Tarm Bar to get free CWards only, and you are lucky enough to gain CWard from every pray bag you open. From current lockbox drop its 2-3 per one. 2-3 months to get 1, plus you gain 1 CWard per week. you need 4 months to get 15 of them ONLY with 100% drop rate. Do you really believe they will lower the GMOP cost with VIP package now? VIP level 11 25% reduce. So 75000 each. That is 750000AD Not to mention 656640 RP farming. Good luck if you are new player. From current rewarding system you probably need more than half a year to get all of them.
Guess ppl will happy to spend 100k AD like now on your pants with 3 dungeons farming plus FULL-OF-BOTTERS-PVP reward everyday. LOL
Yes, you can have no sympathy. But when sheety hit your play style, dont cry in the forum
Oh please! Even if you're right about the backlog being gone because of the refinement weekend, it's still great news for people who have never bought Zen before. Is that also why the per-AD price of Zen is also being driven down? We will see if this continues after the weekend is over and the patch is implemented. Either way, this is good news for players who aren't rich!
They've definitely made headway with the botters though. No more ridiculous stacks of enchants, resonance stones and nonsense. I do miss those as it made refining actually somewhat affordable, even for me without a nifty leadership army to supply me endless AD. Of course, I gave up any hopes of ever getting even a perfect enchantment long ago. It's simply not possible if you play the game straight up and don't spend money and everyone knows that. That doesn't justify abuse of a profession to enrich yourself without even playing for the goods. I've stated since my first post that refinement costs need to be dealt with, but that's no excuse for allowing people to continue to generate craploads of AD that they shove into the economy and destroy the value of AD.
New players will finally be able to earn AD from doing the stuff that they're normally doing playing the game: running dungeons, PvP, skirmishes, AH, and professions. You know, the stuff that is actually supposed to generate AD? I certainly do hope that pants become more affordable. Everyone needs pants. I will be happy to provide them.
Hmmm, looks like dragon egg prices are dropping. I'm gonna need to go get some more because I must continue crafting many, many pairs of pants.
Imagine for a minute that you're thrown into a basement.
Imagine you're given fishsticks to eat. You taste them, they're good, you eat them. Then you're given steak. You taste it, you don't like it, and you leave it. Then you're given mash. You taste it, you don't really care about the taste, but you eat it anyway because you're hungry.
Now, imagine that there was plenty of food all around you, but suddenly you heard someone say "All of this food is fake and won't give you any nutrition, except the three you've already seen. You can eat all you want, but only the fish, steak and mash will let you live.
Then the door closes and makes it clear that you aren't getting out of it. You desperately try to enjoy all kinds of food, but you can't because you know that eventually if you want to survive you'll have to eat the same three every day, for the rest of your life. Eventually since you don't want to keep eating fishsticks and mash you force yourself to eat the steak, even though it tastes horrible to you.
Does that sound familiar? Doesn't that sound like "You will keep playing the shallow puddle of content we say you should play over and over again or you get no character progression?"
The difference is, this door is open. So what are you waiting for, follow the example of many others in this topic and leave these fishsticks to rot.
Geebus. 28 pages of almost unanimous negative feedback. I can't even keep up. I lost track back on page 24. I mean, the game economy was based around this 'feature.' 1,000,000 to upgrade a pet. (F'en seriously?!) 100,000 for a single GMoP and you need 5 (half mil). I knew SH would be too costly so I don't care about that. (waste of all that pretty content)
Leadership AD is as old as the game itself. And in-game prices reflect this...
Even if you buy the blood rubies, they're RP contribution is a drop in the bucket to upgrading gear with requirements so high now. I know because I've bought them. If RP reqs go up, but the RP contribution is the same at the same price, you're devaluing your own offering. It went from 50 or 100 bucks to catch up with the pack in mod 4 to hundreds, if not thousands. It's staggering. There are only so many Moby Dicks in the MMO Ocean.
If the in-game prices remain the same and almost everyone's primary source of AD is gone, everyone is gonna get a pay-wall smack in the face end-game. You need to lube changes this massive. The sloppy leadership changes everyone saw on preview was erm... yeah. Will LS AD removal cause deflation? The last two attempts failed. You're using a production sales environment like a test lab, and paying customers as lab rats. Not to mention the burn of buying things like character slots and having them become obsolete. I bought some recently and never came close to getting the return value.
And think of all the extra work for the devs (I want to buy these guys lunch). Now you add re-evaluation to commodity and baseline metrics of the economy to the list. Because fixed-price items can't stay with an AD inflow depletion. You'll have to make this P1 because new players will get sticker-shock and the final nail in the coffin will be placed. And you should take a look at PE zone chat. It's past vulgar now. No new players are gonna stick around for press this bad.
I know you're in a bad spot. I'm IT too. But a pill this big needed some massaging . Not a sorry, last two anti-bot measures failed, we're gonna sock you with another one because we can't clean up our own backyard of scripted parasites-Here is a coupon. I don't blame dev. Sales should been like, hey, can we think about this for a minute?
"No more ridiculous stacks of enchants, resonance stones and nonsense."
What AH are you looking at? There are 99 stacks of all sorts posted by the 10s and 20s by the same characters... The only thing right now is that since it's 2x RP, those stacks are being bought out. They're not going anywhere - that's why this change won't effect botters. They will STILL be botting, leadership was simply a side income for them.
Again - this change wasn't about botting - it was about making legit players buy ZEN since in no logical way could it possible have anything to do with bots. That botting thing is a smokescreen to justify reducing the AD supply in an effort to force us to buy Zen, simple as that. If they had data about bots that can differentiate bots from legit activity, they would just ban the bots. But they DON'T HAVE THAT KIND OF DATA! If they did, it means they're ignoring the bots and just penalizing us instead. I don't think that's the case. At best, they're basing this off of woefully flawed data. Either way - it's about reducing the AD supply, not about stopping bot - since, of course, this won't stop even a single bot.
Another thing I'd like to point out to people is that Cryptic has the time and people to produce the coding to make the AD changes, but not the people to stabalize the servers or fix all the bugs that still need fixing.
Spot on!
If we ask about 3 year old bugs, lag, reworked dungeons, PVP balance, proper matchmaking, fixing of queue, etc. answer is always, no time to do that, cause we got push from Wizards to release more content (or better said erase exsisting content). So they point with finger, but if it comes to do HAMSTER like this, suddenly they got time, they got the necessary man power.
That's why i newer crowd fund any game anymore, anywhere, all lie into the customers face and then make a 180 degree turnaraound.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,406Arc User
New players will finally be able to earn AD from doing the stuff that they're normally doing playing the game: running dungeons, PvP, skirmishes, AH, and professions. You know, the stuff that is actually supposed to generate AD? I certainly do hope that pants become more affordable. Everyone needs pants. I will be happy to provide them.
AH and profession (after leadership is nerfed) do not generate AD. You can take AD from another player by selling stuff through AH but these 2 things do not generate AD. AD store is the AD sink to take AD out of the game. Dungeon, PVP, Skirmishes, salvage, etc are those which will generate AD.
*** 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. ***
Might as well make it a sub game at this point... kill off f2p altogether. Might HAMSTER off less people.
Agree mate, but then again it should have at least some unique PVE content, not just recycled rubbish, that even i can program in a few days time.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
dungen 6k 10 min skirm 6k 30 min pvp 8k 1 hour total 20,000 astral diamonds in 1 hour 40 min
new system you earn dungen 6k for 20 min skirmish 3k for 20 min pvp 4k for 30 min total 13000 for 50 min
with bonus new sytem dungen 6k 20 min 7200 bonus at minimum 1.6 hours total of 13200 skirmish 3k 20 min bonus of 7200 at minimum 2.4 hours total of 10200 pvp 4k for 30 min bouns of 4800 for another 4 hours minimum total 8800 total 32200 for 8 hours "
in those 8 hours, i can play 6 alts and currently farm 120k vs the futur 32.2k so we are talking about 400% nerf.
its fun how when talking about dragon hoard nerf 1 hour and half/2 hours is the "commonly expected game session" and when talking about AD generation magically common expected playtime becomes 8 hours.
Doesn't matter if it makes sense to us. When was the last time anything made logic sense in this game in regards to changes being made? Oh, I remember... Module 3...
New players will finally be able to earn AD from doing the stuff that they're normally doing playing the game: running dungeons, PvP, skirmishes, AH, and professions. You know, the stuff that is actually supposed to generate AD? I certainly do hope that pants become more affordable. Everyone needs pants. I will be happy to provide them.
AH and profession (after leadership is nerfed) do not generate AD. You can take AD from another player by selling stuff through AH but these 2 things do not generate AD. AD store is the AD sink to take AD out of the game. Dungeon, PVP, Skirmishes, salvage, etc are those which will generate AD.
You are not making a distinction between generating AD for the economy vs. for the player. Of course if AD is moved from one source to another, it's not being created out of thin air, LIKE LEADERSHIP DOES. As the developers explained, AD is a time reward currency. You get rewarded for spending your time playing their game. Taking 20 minutes a day to set of an army of leadership "characters" that do nothing but professions is not playing the game. The point is that folks will now be rewarded for doing the stuff they already do and make better AD at it. The only people this hurts are the people abusing the system.
What AH are you looking at? There are 99 stacks of all sorts posted by the 10s and 20s by the same characters... The only thing right now is that since it's 2x RP, those stacks are being bought out.
I don't buy it. I took a break 8 months ago and at that time, it was a simple thing to find x99 stacks of resonance stones on the AH anytime I wanted, pages and pages of them. I know because I bought some because that was the only way to rank up artifact equipment. I come back, get all new artifact equipment, and those stacks are gone. We'll see if they come back but I haven't seen them since I returned. There are some now for rank 4 enchantments and below, but only a few (and yes, they come from the same bot characters). As I wrote, I was glad for it because it was the only thing keeping refinement costs sane. Yes, now it is better because there are more sources of refinement, but it's not good enough. However, it's pretty obvious that the bot sources of refinement are drying up compared to what it was before. The gamerunners obviously realize this as this is the second RPX2 weekend there has been since I've been back.
The gravy train is coming to an end and the spoiled babies who could just sit back and watch the AD roll in need to cinch up their diapers and put on the big boy pants. Gotta work for your HAMSTER soon, just like in the real world. The game has problems and leadership AD was a big one. Seeing it go can't come too soon.
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rickcase276Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,404Arc User
Lots of resonance stones are not going to come back, as the only source of non-bound ones now are the dragon runs in WoD. All that you get from leadership are either character or account bound.
The "rewards" no where near compensate for what you are taking away. You designed the whole economy around leadership armies. Rank 7+ and Legendary items are insanely expensive. AND they are required to do dungeons and pvp. Hell even the lvl 70+ campaigns.
At the very least you could replace all the AD in leadership with more RP bags of comparable value. It only took people 9 months of full time ranking to get to rank 25, surely that effort shouldn't be meaningless now.
And why is everything still bind on pickup? Salvage rates are awful. Why have raw AD cap anymore? How will anyone gear an ALT?
Hope the xbox crowd is pulling in dough because you are chasing away the PC players again... like 5 months in a row.
Had cryptic not made this change, I would have been pulling 170k/day, gotten max VIP eventually and never paid a dime of real money. Very true.
It's worth stating that you actually ARE spending real money in a sense. Every Zen you gather from AD to purchase the VIP has been paid for by someone out there, so you are generating revenue for Cryptic/PWE any time you use the exchange.
I think many forget this when they talk about 'free players.'
rickcase276Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,404Arc User
edited September 2015
The ones I get from the tasks in leadership are all account bound, or at least they say they are for me. Character bound ones come from the invoking things.
As the developers explained, AD is a time reward currency. You get rewarded for spending your time playing their game. Taking 20 minutes a day to set of an army of leadership "characters" that do nothing but professions is not playing the game. The point is that folks will now be rewarded for doing the stuff they already do and make better AD at it. The only people this hurts are the people abusing the system.
Really now? See, thanks to Cryptic, my guild and most of my friends on my friend's list are gone. (For Store High In Transit and Giggles, I logged in today. With a friend's list of over 200, *ONE* person was playing. One. That wasn't even a guildie.) I don't Skirmish, or PvP or run Dungeons anymore, 'cos I won't PUG anymore. They put me off on that YEARS ago, when they let people exploit the HAMSTER out of it and it took them YEARS to fix glaring problems, like kicking, design explots, etc. I do my God-Awful Daily Grinds for *ALL* 8 of my toons.
So where's my "time reward currency?" I have a family, I've spent the equivalent of a 3 year subscription on WoW in the past 2+ years, but I don't get to play 8 hours a day, every day, so where's my reward? What you're telling me is that even though I've been here since closed beta, even though I supported the game, by purchasing Zen, even though I still play when I can, I don't deserve to make in-game currency, to play the game the way *I* want to, which is *NOT* what Cryptic wants.
Your logic, just like Cryptic's, is flawed.
* * *
So, Cryptic, how about those account login numbers. I counted the number of PE instances and the number of accounts. It was lower than 5k. You telling me the other 995,000 other accounts are off in Strongholds?
Scott, do us all a favor and THINK, before you speak. Trust me, it works.
plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,406Arc User
Dungeon, Skirmish, PVP requires commitment to play for (say) half an hour continuously. Not everyone can do that. Daily quests, you solo and can choose the time to stop or pause. You can do 1/3 of the quest and come back later. You cannot do that for Dungeon, skirmish or PVP. I can see a lot of people will have problem to earn AD through the "proposed" ways although I am not one of them.
*** 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. ***
I agree that solo play is easier to comit to, however if you can't even play for 30 mins in a row maybe this isn't the right game for you. (or anyone in that situation)
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darkstarcrashMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,382Arc User
I think taking AD out of Leadership will in the long run be a good thing for the economy, but it is a huge mistake to make that change without giving good alternatives to getting AD in the same patch for all styles of game play.
And "run dungeons/skirmishes/pvp matches for AD" is not sufficient.
My gameplay is prioritized as follows:
1) Run the Builder's and Ranger's SH dailies for influence, heroic shards and adventurer's shards on multiple alts.
2) Run the campaign zone that is the Master of Coin daily or the one that we need currency from for the next building (right now, that means IWD. Yuck) on multiple alts.
3) Run the other campaign zones on my OP who needs boons from every campaign.
4) Run single nToS during DD for 6900 AD (VIP) -- and more importantly, 4 pieces of blue gear to feed the SH coffer -- on ~5 alts
5) Run epic dungeons for fun, seals, salvageable gear and dungeoneer's shards
Note that I will not make any AD until #4 on my priority list.
Campaign zone and other solo quests have to give AD, not just group play.
You don't buy there's stacks NOW? Again, what AH are you looking at? A simple search of "Rank 5" turned this up - second page (first page had some too, but only a few toward the bottom, second page was easier to display:
You don't buy there's stacks NOW? Again, what AH are you looking at? A simple search of "Rank 5" turned this up - second page (first page had some too, but only a few toward the bottom, second page was easier to display:
Well, I'll probably sell off part of my hoarded R5s tonight or tomorrow. And it'll look somewhat similar - I've hoarded since the last 2xRP WE. Also bought a bunch of cheap - low figure - stacks after the 2x Ench/RS WE. Nothing botted. So what?
Also: True botters would probably use one-time chars for that purpose... ...spreading the risk, huh?
Comments
Right now, either they implement these changes and ruin the game forever, prompting players to leave, or...go back on their plans and cancel the whole deal, which still doesn't prove anything except that it takes a huge chunk of the player base pushing tons of feedback and saying basically what they've been telling the devs all along to provide any change. And even after that, they will just go a roundabout way about that and nerf some other aspect of game progression to goad the few that still find it worth it to spend money on the game to spend more on items that become more and more necessary to become a competitive player.
Or what about players, that are not ready for T2 dungeons?
How will they make enough AD?
Do you get them T2 ready and then run with them through those dungeons every day?
That's the main problem...Content is so little and the difficulty curve so steep that some players (say, those that didn't spec well enough to be desirable in a pug group and thus have to spend even more diamonds to respec or restart the character from scratch) find themself in a vicious cycle: They cannot acquire the equipment they need because the only way to acquire it (Bind, bind, bind) is to run the same content they are too weak to go through. So their only choice is to either get a 3k+ to run them through over and over until they can afford to crawl out of the "second-rate player" group, spend a ton of money to get the ball rolling, or quit the game.
Removing AD from leadership doesn't really solve either of these problems.
1) I will still need to farm RP items in leadership, but now without the benefit of making AD.
2) And now, I will not be able to make enough AD to support my multiple chars as my ONLY source of large stable income will be gone. As it is, I have 17 chars supporting just 1 main char and after playing 2 years (since beta), my 1 main char still isn't maxed out.
Yes, when Lord Neverember's daily AD quests were available, my single char could max out it's 24k rough AD limit through dailies alone, but that option has been removed.
Yes, it's great that you're focusing our gameplay efforts back on gaming (vs farming).
But, you gave me the ability to open 50 char slots. And I have created 1 char of each playable class which is currently 8. But, this game is NOT designed for me to have 8 equal characters (equal in gear, enchants, etc) in a reasonable amount of time without purchasing ZEN with real money.
I get that you are a business and that you need to make money to support this game and to grow it.
But, shouldn't your job be to entertain us sufficiently so that we would WANT to spend money on well appreciated entertainment? As opposed to making things obvious, repetitive and boring?
1) It's obvious you want us to BUY zen.
2) The only way in the future to "make" AD is to play the same 3 things every day (dungeons, skirmishes, PvP). PvP has only 2 maps since Beta. All 3 things are group only activities. All 3 things are subject to the "quality" of the players involved. A very large number of these matches/quests end in failure do to the PUG makeup (lack of experience, knowledge, gameship, etc.) The only thing that was different and soloable was the Foundry quests, but you haven't improved that experience at all.
3) All failures only result in lost time and no reward for time spent. Sitting at campfire in PVP is boring. Watching players leave a map or match is aggravating at first and boring by third straight match or map.
My humble suggestion and opinion is that instead of focusing on "fixing" the money issue first, you should focus on making this game more fun again...first.
I am for fixing leadership and the economy, but not as the first order of business.
They've definitely made headway with the botters though. No more ridiculous stacks of enchants, resonance stones and nonsense. I do miss those as it made refining actually somewhat affordable, even for me without a nifty leadership army to supply me endless AD. Of course, I gave up any hopes of ever getting even a perfect enchantment long ago. It's simply not possible if you play the game straight up and don't spend money and everyone knows that. That doesn't justify abuse of a profession to enrich yourself without even playing for the goods. I've stated since my first post that refinement costs need to be dealt with, but that's no excuse for allowing people to continue to generate craploads of AD that they shove into the economy and destroy the value of AD.
New players will finally be able to earn AD from doing the stuff that they're normally doing playing the game: running dungeons, PvP, skirmishes, AH, and professions. You know, the stuff that is actually supposed to generate AD? I certainly do hope that pants become more affordable. Everyone needs pants. I will be happy to provide them.
Hmmm, looks like dragon egg prices are dropping. I'm gonna need to go get some more because I must continue crafting many, many pairs of pants.
Imagine you're given fishsticks to eat. You taste them, they're good, you eat them.
Then you're given steak. You taste it, you don't like it, and you leave it.
Then you're given mash. You taste it, you don't really care about the taste, but you eat it anyway because you're hungry.
Now, imagine that there was plenty of food all around you, but suddenly you heard someone say "All of this food is fake and won't give you any nutrition, except the three you've already seen. You can eat all you want, but only the fish, steak and mash will let you live.
Then the door closes and makes it clear that you aren't getting out of it. You desperately try to enjoy all kinds of food, but you can't because you know that eventually if you want to survive you'll have to eat the same three every day, for the rest of your life. Eventually since you don't want to keep eating fishsticks and mash you force yourself to eat the steak, even though it tastes horrible to you.
Does that sound familiar? Doesn't that sound like "You will keep playing the shallow puddle of content we say you should play over and over again or you get no character progression?"
The difference is, this door is open. So what are you waiting for, follow the example of many others in this topic and leave these fishsticks to rot.
I mean, the game economy was based around this 'feature.'
1,000,000 to upgrade a pet. (F'en seriously?!)
100,000 for a single GMoP and you need 5 (half mil).
I knew SH would be too costly so I don't care about that. (waste of all that pretty content)
Leadership AD is as old as the game itself. And in-game prices reflect this...
Even if you buy the blood rubies, they're RP contribution is a drop in the bucket to upgrading gear with requirements so high now. I know because I've bought them. If RP reqs go up, but the RP contribution is the same at the same price, you're devaluing your own offering. It went from 50 or 100 bucks to catch up with the pack in mod 4 to hundreds, if not thousands. It's staggering. There are only so many Moby Dicks in the MMO Ocean.
If the in-game prices remain the same and almost everyone's primary source of AD is gone, everyone is gonna get a pay-wall smack in the face end-game. You need to lube changes this massive. The sloppy leadership changes everyone saw on preview was erm... yeah. Will LS AD removal cause deflation? The last two attempts failed. You're using a production sales environment like a test lab, and paying customers as lab rats. Not to mention the burn of buying things like character slots and having them become obsolete. I bought some recently and never came close to getting the return value.
And think of all the extra work for the devs (I want to buy these guys lunch). Now you add re-evaluation to commodity and baseline metrics of the economy to the list. Because fixed-price items can't stay with an AD inflow depletion. You'll have to make this P1 because new players will get sticker-shock and the final nail in the coffin will be placed. And you should take a look at PE zone chat. It's past vulgar now. No new players are gonna stick around for press this bad.
I know you're in a bad spot. I'm IT too. But a pill this big needed some massaging . Not a sorry, last two anti-bot measures failed, we're gonna sock you with another one because we can't clean up our own backyard of scripted parasites-Here is a coupon. I don't blame dev. Sales should been like, hey, can we think about this for a minute?
What AH are you looking at? There are 99 stacks of all sorts posted by the 10s and 20s by the same characters... The only thing right now is that since it's 2x RP, those stacks are being bought out. They're not going anywhere - that's why this change won't effect botters. They will STILL be botting, leadership was simply a side income for them.
Again - this change wasn't about botting - it was about making legit players buy ZEN since in no logical way could it possible have anything to do with bots. That botting thing is a smokescreen to justify reducing the AD supply in an effort to force us to buy Zen, simple as that. If they had data about bots that can differentiate bots from legit activity, they would just ban the bots. But they DON'T HAVE THAT KIND OF DATA! If they did, it means they're ignoring the bots and just penalizing us instead. I don't think that's the case. At best, they're basing this off of woefully flawed data. Either way - it's about reducing the AD supply, not about stopping bot - since, of course, this won't stop even a single bot.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
If we ask about 3 year old bugs, lag, reworked dungeons, PVP balance, proper matchmaking, fixing of queue, etc. answer is always, no time to do that, cause we got push from Wizards to release more content (or better said erase exsisting content). So they point with finger, but if it comes to do HAMSTER like this, suddenly they got time, they got the necessary man power.
That's why i newer crowd fund any game anymore, anywhere, all lie into the customers face and then make a 180 degree turnaraound.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
You can take AD from another player by selling stuff through AH but these 2 things do not generate AD.
AD store is the AD sink to take AD out of the game.
Dungeon, PVP, Skirmishes, salvage, etc are those which will generate AD.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
" currently just with one toon you can earn
dungen 6k 10 min
skirm 6k 30 min
pvp 8k 1 hour
total 20,000 astral diamonds in 1 hour 40 min
new system you earn
dungen 6k for 20 min
skirmish 3k for 20 min
pvp 4k for 30 min
total 13000 for 50 min
with bonus new sytem
dungen 6k 20 min 7200 bonus at minimum 1.6 hours total of 13200
skirmish 3k 20 min bonus of 7200 at minimum 2.4 hours total of 10200
pvp 4k for 30 min bouns of 4800 for another 4 hours minimum total 8800
total 32200 for 8 hours "
in those 8 hours, i can play 6 alts and currently farm 120k vs the futur 32.2k so we are talking about 400% nerf.
its fun how when talking about dragon hoard nerf 1 hour and half/2 hours is the "commonly expected game session" and when talking about AD generation magically common expected playtime becomes 8 hours.
does it make any sense to you?
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
The gravy train is coming to an end and the spoiled babies who could just sit back and watch the AD roll in need to cinch up their diapers and put on the big boy pants. Gotta work for your HAMSTER soon, just like in the real world. The game has problems and leadership AD was a big one. Seeing it go can't come too soon.
At the very least you could replace all the AD in leadership with more RP bags of comparable value. It only took people 9 months of full time ranking to get to rank 25, surely that effort shouldn't be meaningless now.
And why is everything still bind on pickup? Salvage rates are awful. Why have raw AD cap anymore? How will anyone gear an ALT?
Hope the xbox crowd is pulling in dough because you are chasing away the PC players again... like 5 months in a row.
I think many forget this when they talk about 'free players.'
So where's my "time reward currency?" I have a family, I've spent the equivalent of a 3 year subscription on WoW in the past 2+ years, but I don't get to play 8 hours a day, every day, so where's my reward? What you're telling me is that even though I've been here since closed beta, even though I supported the game, by purchasing Zen, even though I still play when I can, I don't deserve to make in-game currency, to play the game the way *I* want to, which is *NOT* what Cryptic wants.
Your logic, just like Cryptic's, is flawed.
* * *
So, Cryptic, how about those account login numbers. I counted the number of PE instances and the number of accounts. It was lower than 5k. You telling me the other 995,000 other accounts are off in Strongholds?
Scott, do us all a favor and THINK, before you speak. Trust me, it works.
And "run dungeons/skirmishes/pvp matches for AD" is not sufficient.
My gameplay is prioritized as follows:
1) Run the Builder's and Ranger's SH dailies for influence, heroic shards and adventurer's shards on multiple alts.
2) Run the campaign zone that is the Master of Coin daily or the one that we need currency from for the next building (right now, that means IWD. Yuck) on multiple alts.
3) Run the other campaign zones on my OP who needs boons from every campaign.
4) Run single nToS during DD for 6900 AD (VIP) -- and more importantly, 4 pieces of blue gear to feed the SH coffer -- on ~5 alts
5) Run epic dungeons for fun, seals, salvageable gear and dungeoneer's shards
Note that I will not make any AD until #4 on my priority list.
Campaign zone and other solo quests have to give AD, not just group play.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
Do the remaining players all boldly go where no man went
beforein the last three months? Or did C shift to reverse gear? Well, I'll probably sell off part of my hoarded R5s tonight or tomorrow. And it'll look somewhat similar - I've hoarded since the last 2xRP WE. Also bought a bunch of cheap - low figure - stacks after the 2x Ench/RS WE. Nothing botted. So what?Also: True botters would probably use one-time chars for that purpose... ...spreading the risk, huh?