Here's to hoping that they do something sensible and replace the AD taken from leadership to BoA material used to make GMoPs and the like. Well.. it is nice to dream after all....
hmm .. now if they added BOA GMoPs for leadership boxes ... that would actually not be so bad
I could get behind this. The problem is that they don't seem to have that, or anything, planned. They're simply using the old "we're going to monitor/look into this" etc. while just straight up removing the AD from the jobs and otherwise leaving them the same. This is known as going off "half cocked without a plan" and is generally speaking, a really bad idea. Especially when you already have a less than trustworthy reputation with your players and the last time you used those phrases, the promised changes came months after the issue became apparent.
All of this has the main effect of further making achieving "end-game" status even harder, both for players who were getting there and new players who see their options to progress get slimmer and slimmer.
This is not moving the goal posts...They have nowhere to move them, so they resort to kicking the ball all the way back to your side of the court, covering the ground in caltrops and glass shards, replace the ball with a live puffer fish and force you to get the ball back to destination by crawling on your belly and pushing it with your tongue.
The Lord Scott giveth and he taketh away couldn't help that.
Seriously though, what about those of us that primarily solo play? Leadership was my only viable source of ad income cause I just like to romp the end zones at my pleasure and run repeatables and solo dungeons...
The Lord Scott giveth and he taketh away couldn't help that.
Seriously though, what about those of us that primarily solo play? Leadership was my only viable source of ad income cause I just like to romp the end zones at my pleasure and run repeatables and solo dungeons...
The moment that Mod 7 hit, you should have realized that it was a gigantic "you're no longer our market, we don't care what line we used to sucker you in" to anyone who was solo minded. The best you can hope for is what happened to me and my friends. Finding a nice, casual friendly guild of like-minded individuals more interested in helping each other than in having the latest and shiniest of digital blings. That's about a best case scenario these days.
In my many years of playing this and other MMOs the 'adjust many things' line typically works like this.
Step 1) Company uses hammer in place of scalpel and over shoot the intended by 50%. Step 2) Player base screams bloody murder that the world as we know it is ending. Step 3) Roughly 20% of player base swears off game in short-term. Step 4) Company evaluates impact to game and reduces severity from 150% overshoot back to 115% overshoot. Step 5) Company declares adjustment a success. Fan-bois rejoice. Step 6) Player base grumbles and keeps on playing not wanting to throw away 'investment' into game. Step 7) Company notices unintended consequences resulting from adjustments to original problem. Step 8) See Step 1.
Tru fax... In this game there appears to be a very large gap between people that play the game and people that "fix" it. It is obvious that those who are doing the fixing do not play it at all. They look at the "legitimate" ways to make AD and just cant figure out why we arent doing them all. Could it be that the Foundry is a mess of boring, no reward drivel and probably mostly used by bots to level up privately? Could it be that once you have run a dungeon 500 times to get some stupid tokens for gear, doing it over and over for just basic AD is less than emotionally satisfying? Copy that for skirmishes? Actual gameplay is getting painfully repetitive and frankly I (and a lot of other people) are tired of it. Ive played since launch. I ran epic dungeons to get my PVE set complete and doing them again to gain assets that I used to be able to get with just a small amount of effort, saving my free time to do things I wanted to do, seems... more like a job than an enjoyable free time activity. I want to stay competitive but if I cant do that in the time I have allotted to play games, I guess Ill quit too. It made this game attractive, fun to play. Botting should not be my problem. I shouldnt have to pay for their illicit activities. NW seems to think I should. Do your job and quit driving this once enjoyable game past the point where my time investment holds me to it.
But look, there are XB boosters in the shop now... May be we will get lucky, and find some AD boosters there too after the next patch?
It's called VIP.
VIP has some XP bonus in there too. So why not sell AD booster through the ZEN store too? In the end, this change is all about making more money through selling ZEN, and that's it.
Well this just about does it for me. I guess I would call this the nerf that broke the back of it Time to find another game. Oh and cryptic feel free to look up my account and see how much I spend a month. That is revenue you have lost.
Each day that goes by without them telling us a reasonable way to progress our characters is another day where more people are getting angrier and many are leaving. I really hope they have the rest of their plan ready and inform us soon. Or they're the only ones that will finally lose.
Each day that goes by without them telling us a reasonable way to progress our characters is another day where more people are getting angrier and many are leaving. I really hope they have the rest of their plan ready and inform us soon. Or they're the only ones that will finally lose.
Let's see...
- Announced with little warning, certainly not enough for players to convince them to make any sort of change. - No plan to compensate solo players for the staggering loss of AD income that this will cause them. - A return to the philosophy of "grind the same monotonous task ad infinitum" that flew so well with the 192 EE quest progression.
This reeks of a management-initiated dictat, driven by data from the bean-counters.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
...Leadership, while no longer a major source of AD, is still a good source for XP, Gold, and loot items. All of these things are valuable to regular players, but less so to botters...
Scott Shicoff Lead Designer
I've been playing this game since Beta and this change shows you are completely clueless: professions are largely a waste of people's time and effort aside from the very few crafting tasks necessary to get the armor enhancements and upgrading the high-end gear, or crafting elements necessary to do so (like unified elements). One of the only good things about the leadership profession WAS that it produced AD (and since mod 6, the refining stones). No real player gives a flying rat's HAMSTER about the low-grade worthless items, the XP, or the gold that professions give. Gold is largely a throw away item in the game, except to buy potions and injury kits. XP...once you're at max level and waiting millions of XP points between rewards, that XP is also largely a throw away item because your major source of XP is playing content, not professions.
This idiotic change will not only kill normal players' ability to accrue enough AD to continue advancing their characters, but will do NOTHING to stop the botters, who I am convinced that you do NOT seriously want to do anything about--as the gold spammers have been present since Beta and have only gotten worse over time.
This change will likely result in me giving up playing--and as I've pumped quite a bit of REAL money into the game because I'm largely a solo player, that's frustrating.
Dungeons/skirmishes/pvp...what about rewarding for playing the damned content and quests that you keep churning out? How about fixing the damned celestial coin reward boxes? I've noticed that they are not giving Coalescent Wards anywhere approaching the frequency they should be, given that I haven't had one in a box in months. How about bringing back the dungeons you took offline with mod 5?
This weekend was 2xrefinement, and I finally got my first artifact to max rank...and I would not have been able to do that without getting AD from leadership--you guys want to take the AD away from us, then you need to slash prices for everything across the board, but especially on refinement items.
/rant
I couldn't agree more. You covered my frustrations well and my end result will be the same.
2 question! First; what can i do with the 3 keys i get with vip???? run a dungeon to get useless piece of equipment??? realy? Second: will those changes make zen far more cheap?? I mean, who wants zen if we need 100k ad for just one GMOP, so our money won't worth much, it like you want us to put money on trash?
Ok, i would like to give my last drops of my 2 cents to this pretty useless, one sided conversation again, cause as it seems we are left alone to vent some steam, but nobody cares to answer.
I work for a company, that is a sub to two major mega companies, 1st is Mercedes Benz and 2nd is Bosch. My job includes all kinds of activities, but my main focus is international relations and sells. My work time is divided between two countries, one lies in Mid-Eastern EU (Hungary), the other in western EU (Germany), so i may say i know people pretty well from more cultures.
Dear Cryptic, get my advise, stop this stubborn, we go against the tide mentality or you won't have a future soon, not with this game, but as a company entirely. No matter, how small this market segment is, sooner or later your constant negative behavior towards your clients will make your position on the market unbearable.
I love this game, i love DnD, so every drop of advise i tried to give you via CS or Mods over the last 3 years was all in love for the product, which now wants us, customers out of the house. If this is not intentional, then you have to wake up and ASAP, cause you are alienating your last drop of remaining player base.
I try to show you through one of my work examples, what you guys currently do. Ok, what if i sold you a Benz from Stuttgart and one night after, let's say 3 years, i would send a technician to your garage and let him dismantle the 4 wheels and take the axles and the motor with it. Would you like to drive that car? Could you drive it at all? No, of course not. Would you rage if something like this would happen to your beloved car? Sure you would, naturally.
Now imagine us, we BOUGHT many assets of the game with RL cash and now you are taking it over the course of two Modules these by many players BOUGHT assets away.
Leadership is an essential part of the game! When all of us joined this game and spent our money, we did it in a good will of knowing, aha, the game has this and this, ok i like it, i would like to support it, so we opened our wallets and supported you. Now you want to take our investment away 3 years after payment/launch. Sure i am not alone, but this is so ridiculous, i can't hardly find any appropriate words.
Not a single bit of a serious and decent company does such things. We know corporate history and most of those, who practice unethical methods are doomed over a time. Sure not every part of the world is same, some countries and cultures allow more space to maneuver, some less. I can only speak now as a European, we here aren't so forgiving.
Sure i don't know, if you want to stay long term in the market or just be a one day wonder, it is not for me to decide, but this move doesn't grant you a good PR for the future at all.
As i mentioned many of us have their RL money invested. I mentioned our company makes business in most parts of the world, let me tell you dear Cryptic, most part of this world is utterly poor. You should call yourself lucky you could sell a huge name in many poor countries too and you get payments from people, who earn only a few hundred EU/Dollars a month and still they support you. Well this is the case for most part of Eastern EU, where i live. Do you really want to throw all this trust away? What do you think, how many of the possibly tortured customers would pay for your next game? Sure far less, if you pull this off. Yet again i can only speak on my behalf, but most of the EU population will make a huge turn if you kill this game for many years to come. I don't know, if an IT company can only live on a small market nowadays, but i have my doubts.
I know for CEOs ego is a huge factor, sometimes even bigger, than common sense, but please, this time let your suits swallow the bitter pill and take this back from Test Sever and never again come up with such nonsense.
Thank you, may common sense guide you and not momentarily greed. You know, what the biggest triumph for a good manager is? I will answer it, the TRUST of his customers, cause they will return. I personally would instantly show the door to any of my employees, who would gamble with our customers trust, cause TRUST is the foundation for a long and successful business and it is very hard to earn, please dear Cryptic don't throw it away!
P.S: I keep a Stella Artois behind me in a little show case and every time i need to make a decision i turn around and take look at the label: 1366. Many of us can learn from them, how to make business, that lasts and makes both the producer and the customer a happy chappy!
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
Ok, i would like to give my last drops of my 2 cents to this pretty useless, one sided conversation again, cause as it seems we are left alone to vent some steam, but nobody cares to answer.
I work for a company, that is a sub to two major mega companies, 1st is Mercedes Benz and 2nd is Bosch. My job includes all kinds of activities, but my main focus is international relations and sells. My work time is divided between two countries, one lies in Mid-Eastern EU (Hungary), the other in western EU (Germany), so i may say i know people pretty well from more cultures.
Dear Cryptic, get my advise, stop this stubborn, we go against the tide mentality or you won't have a future soon, not with this game, but as a company entirely. No matter, how small this market segment is, sooner or later your constant negative behavior towards your clients will make your position on the market unbearable.
I love this game, i love DnD, so every drop of advise i tried to give you via CS or Mods over the last 3 years was all in love for the product, which now wants us, customers out of the house. If this is not intentional, then you have to wake up and ASAP, cause you are alienating your last drop of remaining player base.
I try to show you through one of my work examples, what you guys currently do. Ok, what if i sold you a Benz from Stuttgart and one night after, let's say 3 years, i would send a technician to your garage and let him dismantle the 4 wheels and take the axles and the motor with it. Would you like to drive that car? Could you drive it at all? No, of course not. Would you rage if something like this would happen to your beloved car? Sure you would, naturally.
Now imagine us, we BOUGHT many assets of the game with RL cash and now you are taking it over the course of two Modules these by many players BOUGHT assets away.
Leadership is an essential part of the game! When all of us joined this game and spent our money, we did it in a good will of knowing, aha, the game has this and this, ok i like it, i would like to support it, so we opened our wallets and supported you. Now you want to take our investment away 3 years after payment/launch. Sure i am not alone, but this is so ridiculous, i can't hardly find any appropriate words.
Not a single bit of a serious and decent company does such things. We know corporate history and most of those, who practice unethical methods are doomed over a time. Sure not every part of the world is same, some countries and cultures allow more space to maneuver, some less. I can only speak now as a European, we here aren't so forgiving.
Sure i don't know, if you want to stay long term in the market or just be a one day wonder, it is not for me to decide, but this move doesn't grant you a good PR for the future at all.
As i mentioned many of us have their RL money invested. I mentioned our company makes business in most parts of the world, let me tell you dear Cryptic, most part of this world is utterly poor. You should call yourself lucky you could sell a huge name in many poor countries too and you get payments from people, who earn only a few hundred EU/Dollars a month and still they support you. Well this is the case for most part of Eastern EU, where i live. Do you really want to throw all this trust away? What do you think, how many of the possibly tortured customers would pay for your next game? Sure far less, if you pull this off. Yet again i can only speak on my behalf, but most of the EU population will make a huge turn if you kill this game for many years to come. I don't know, if an IT company can only live on a small market nowadays, but i have my doubts.
I know for CEOs ego is a huge factor, sometimes even bigger, than common sense, but please, this time let your suits swallow the bitter pill and take this back from Test Sever and never again come up with such nonsense.
Thank you, may common sense guide you and not momentarily greed. You know, what the biggest triumph for a good manager is? I will answer it, the TRUST of his customers, cause they will return. I personally would instantly show the door to any of my employees, who would gamble with our customers trust, cause TRUST is the foundation for a long and successful business and it is very hard to earn, please dear Cryptic don't throw it away!
P.S: I keep a Stella Artois behind me in a little show case and every time i need to make a decision i turn around and take look at the label: 1366. Many of us can learn from them, how to make business, that lasts and makes both the producer and the customer a happy chappy!
^^ This! This! This!
@goatshark Please read the above quoted passage and if necessary relay it to your superiors. If you want this game, and your present job, to be here this time next year, you're going to need to start focusing on the long term view. This strategy may generate a slight spike in short term sales from a handful of frustrated players, but it will not be worth the cost in damage to the long term viability of the game, the charitably-described-as-shaky trust between the Devs and the players (which is rapidly becoming more aptly described as 'toxic' as evidenced in this very thread by the number of people who believe that the 'botter' excuse is just that, a smokescreen excuse to try and squeeze more cash out of a player base while offering nothing in return) and Cryptic/PWE's own reputation.
Because right now, that's about where you're at.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you want to remove the AD from leadership, you need to have a replacement of equal value waiting in the wings. That is clearly not the case here, and the previous days, weeks, or months between this massive paradigm shift and whatever nebulous 'solution' lies ahead is going to cause you to hemorrhage players, who probably will not return if and when a solution is implemented. I love this game. I love D&D. But you guys don't own a monopoly on the D&D-esque High Fantasy MMO genre, and if you continue to treat your player base like this, without regard for the consequences, they're going to vote with their wallets, leave you, and send this game into a death spiral (assuming it ain't already in one, and this is the result of the Powers-That-Be trying to squeeze enough cash out of a depleted playerbase to pay their bonuses without stopping to consider if the players will just leave, or worse, hang around without spending cash, driving up your costs.)
I'm ashamed to admit I gave these guys money for a few expansion packs and bought 6 months of VIP access. I liked what they did in the past, made a fun game that you don't need to buy stuff to have fun and enjoy it all the way to end game. That is pretty cool, however the last few mods just have been nerf after nerf after nerf. Each time my HR gets better gear my dps goes down by a lot. Not sure if its backwards day or if its just the company is going in the wrong direction... Usually in the normal world, when you get better gear more levels, you do more damage and so on. But now with these changes to leadership (spent my 18+ months leveling up leadership and since I bought 2 packs and a few extra character slots to enjoy the benefits of those packs) I have 15 characters 9 of which have leadership to level 25 now. Its actually a hassle to log in each character to do the daily prayer and collect my leadership booty but its nice since I make a decent amount to cover my time for logging in.
After these changes go live, could I ask for a full refund of all my money I gave you when you sold me a game of fun and now im holding an empty bag of ... (guess the word im thinking of)....
Go bad to mod 3 days, where HR were more fun to play then just to log in and do a daily prayer, I do more dps on my paladin then my fully booned all ranked 4 skill hunter with max gear... my paladin is only level 62 in green gear
Sorry just very disappointed, im sure this post will get deleted again since they don't like hearing how they are hurting us paying customers. I should probably just go buy from a bot since they probably care more for you then this company.
Listen to us real people and do the right thing, keep leadership with AD rewards. Many of us spent hard earned cash for the few things we have and invested in the game.
Once again, you folks totally miss the mark. Where's the AD in doing solo quests if your taking out the additional AD for dungeons and skirmishes.
A lot of the playerbase don't enjoy dungeons and skirmishes. There are also a lot of @#!$holes in game who are constantly kicking people or dropping teams if they are not "Just so" for dungeons and skirmishes. Once again, these changes hurt the "Have nots"
Do you guys even have a clue about what's going on in your own game? For the most part these changes don't affect me. I have 2+ years in the game and am pretty much decked out.
But if I was a newcomer and saw this, and fully understood it. I'd be on the first train to BDO, or some other non Crypic/PWE ran game.
Finally AD gets removed from Leadership, FINALLY. Really happy about this. Of course more has to be done, Foundry and Heroic Encounters should give AD too, but at least the alt armies can go F emselves now and the playing field is a bit more leveled.
Having been around since Beta, I can say that a very vocal portion of the forum using player base has called for this to be done from the moment Professions went live. I have played Cryptic Games since 2003 and City of Heroes. Quite a few of the most unpopular changes pushed in their games originate from player suggestions.
Remember how at launch we didn't have Marks of anything, just wards? Take 5(?) same ranked enchantments and refine them into 1 enchantment of the next higher rank. Fail on the roll and simply lose 1 of the enchantments you were trying to refine. Then we had huge amounts of AD exploitation and the PLAYERS demanded a fix and suggested AD sinks and removal of AD from Leadership. The Devs changed refinement and added sinks. Players said it wasn't enough and suggested more sinks, which we got, and a removal of AD from Leadership. The Devs changed Professions so that you could only do 3 of the same task rather than remove AD. The players continued to demand more AD sinks and a removal of AD from Leadership. They nerfed Dragon Hoard and Fey Blessing after the PLAYERS suggested it. Well.... the Devs are finally going the next step demanded by the players.
Yeah, then let's just continue on this road... - anything created from professions should be bound to account - any purchase from the auction house should be bound to account - any loot at all should be bound to account - add unbind scrolls to the ZEN shop, 100-1000 ZEN per scroll, depending on the quality of the item to unbind
Before mod 6 i didn't even thought to do leadership, there were a lot of content were i could do needed fo all my goals AD with time to time buying Zen. But now, when almost everything is attached to account, leadership was a good raplacemend, but still not enough. And now they will remove it, and what alternative they will give to us? No more dungeons? No more content? Only gvg wars without any new AD reward? That sounds pretty bad... I realy hope they will fire Scott or other stuff who are making this briliant decisons and hire someone more professinal in these sphere.
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
Our goal: if you play Neverwinter, you earn AD. Before the upcoming changes, this wasn’t reliably the case, sometimes brokenly so. In order to correct this, we’re implementing the following adjustments.
That should have been your goal when you designed crafting 2+ years ago. Now, players have invested hugely based on the system you offered. Taking it away generates further distrust in the game and it's designers. People that do not trust that their investments won't be yanked away from them tend to shy away from further investments.
There have been many viable suggestions for how you can maintain AD in leadership for legitimate players while making it harder / less viable to bot, including
Add a CAPTCHA-like element to professions
Require certain hard-to-bot tasks (similar to the Stronghold tasks) each week to unlock the AD reward for Leadership each week.
Trade seals for keys to unlock AD chests. Seals from higher level zones needed for chests from higher level leadership tasks. Just think! Finally a real use for Seal of the Lion. (NOTE: Make this an "I'm not a bot" level of effort, not a new grind).
Please don't slowly kill the game by continually eroding your player's trust. Give people back the confidence to invest in the game, and they will.
santralafaxMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,896Arc User
Personally, I don't want Cryptic mucking around with the dailies. They cut AD from Leadership, so be it. I'll find my own route to replace that income--I don't need the F'ing up dailies as well.
Each day that goes by without them telling us a reasonable way to progress our characters is another day where more people are getting angrier and many are leaving. I really hope they have the rest of their plan ready and inform us soon. Or they're the only ones that will finally lose.
This in spades!!! Get on here and talk to us like we are adults, and not some toddler adolescents that need to be told the "way of things" (this is the issue I have with the mods on here as well, always talking down to people like we are petulant children) .... You come on here and dump this really crappy announcement on us, and then vanish....
I will say that people need not blame Cryptic as much for this as PWE.... I have played Forsaken World and PWI and Star Trek Online..... PWE are the people that brought you the $1200 enhancement stone in Forsaken World and people bought it, ALOT of people did (I forgot if it was a stone or a pack or what, but it was $1200 cash value if I remember right)
As long as we pay and play this game.... they will keep it up.... Heck, I am just as guilty, I wanted to take advantage of this 2x's weekend I dropped cash again when I said I wouldn't.... and they love every minute of it.... /sigh
They'll need to hang on to a handful of players with bottomless wallets then, as the majority will stop playing the game if they continue in the direction they're currently heading.
maybe not just fire, but Hasbro could revoke liscense contract because it is ruining the reputation. i dont understand these devs and business managers doing more harm than rather fighting the bots since they take big slice of cut from Cryptic, and they are the ones who voliated CoC and EULA, not the players. again, i wonder what the devs are doing, are they driving this game into the MMO Graveyard? so they can get unemployment check? no, i would forbid them, if i am CEO of other game firm, i wouldnt hire them, i would blacklist those. i would hire unemployed programmers from Kingdom of Kaldimar, those work for Studio 38 did very well and almost flawless/bug free game, they all have lost and most are unpaid since Studio 38 went bankrupted.
Note to those current dev team, to save your carreer, please listen to most players, but not just to niche "favs" group, everyone is different, some seem cant play the way some used to play before mod 6 and many just had given up and sick of waiting for 4-6 months, and all they did by waiting when they log to do invokings, and you just announced to be taken away and replace with something not favorable to some, it became another "nail" to bury thier hopes of seeing this game be more playable. what you all did was making too many bad calls instead of redoing Sharandar, Dread Ring, and Icewind to reduce difficulties, ignore those fanboys at all cost. why make game too hard? that is the biggest wall that some players cant overcome, some have disabilities.
right now, difficulties still too hard, and still getting one shotted, and it cost me over 50 gold coins and more than 70 health kits wasted last week, and this week i am avoiding dungeons and skirmish and only recover small amount back and still trying hard to recoup the cost i spent on kits. Shame on you!!!
No more nerfings!, No more take aways!!! devs, you still hadnt fix Tiamat and those dang cheating legion devils still oneshotting and way too much blinkings and over-excessive flankings, also sick of "Mirror moves/counter runs" whenever i make surprised or unexpected sudden move, they seem to read my mind in advanced. gosh, i really hate it! so, this mean there is no way to be unpredictable to fool these mobs, it seem they have higher AI base. it is very frustrating, and it is suppose to be a game that meant to be fun to play. so far, it isnt.
I have been playing Neverwinter for way more then a year. It had it upsides and downsides and even when i did not agree with some of the decisions from the developers i still respected them and generally thought they are either thought through or at least reasonable.
The change regarding astral diamonds gain from leadership profession proposed by the Neverwinter developer Team and posted by Goatshark is purely wrong for a number of reasons.
I am gonna try and put the reasons here to make people discuss them, and since i still really like and am passionate about Neverwinter i am gonna try to convice as many players as possible to make Cryptic and perfect world change theirs decision even if i know its futile. I have spent a roughly 2000 Hours playing Neverwinter and explored basically all it has to offer.
Lets start with the fact that to achieve anything in Neverwinter and be considered usefull by other players in parties or guild you need to have gear, and not some easily acquirable dungeon gear, the kind of gear you need to spend Hundreds of millions of Astral Diamonds on.
Even if you buy your zen with your hard earned real life cash those are vast amounts going in dozens of thousands so the only way of getting to the top was either botting which is just wrong, exploiting other players and trade which is even more wrong and finally using Leadership as a steady time taking but rewarding way of getting your desired astral diamonds and ultimately gear in order to beacome a better player and have more fun from playing.
Not only is Goatshark saying he is going to take all the time we invested in learning what needs to be done and then doing it to achieve the goals we set out to but he is also saying he is not going to give anything in return. That kind of solution is going make Hundreds if not Thousands of Players, Including the Ones that have paid a lot to just rage quit the game, and when they are going to do that there's a really slight chance of them going back.
In perspective it does not mean increased incomes from more purchases like cryptic predicts but an economy crysis unheard of in Neverwinter that can potentially make the game just go dead with only hundreds of players; mostly botters and exploiters staying in it and Perfectworld not making any futher profit on that game. I might be exaggerating but the truth is that after reading this post many of my friends told me that they are just going to quit.
I want to Appeal to whatever development team is on the project to rethink what they are planning to do beacose i am sure that its not going to increase the company profits and as a player invested in a game i want the company to make a lot of money so they can keep providing the great content that i appreciate so mutch.
As another valid and important reason not to implement those changes i would like to say that the change is going to punish the players that are playing honestly while the cheaters/botters/exploiters are going to be rewarded for Developers inability to track the data of their own game. It should be relatively simple to see which accounts earn very increased amounts of astral diamonds in small period tables also it should be relatively simple to track where they are sending their ill gotten astral diamonds to so cryptic could just ban those account in order to restore the balance. All that means that the decision delete the option to make astral diamonds from leadership is simply unjust, i think its a very important reason to consider that change again.
So considering all the arguments and more that i was not able to present beacose of the language barrier i still think that economically in both short and the long term this decision is not going to be beneficial for the company or the players.
If all of those reasons are invalid or incomplete then there is one major thing that Developers should do in order to keep the game balanced and reasonable. If your going to take away Astral Diamonds from Leadership then Please be sure to make salvageable items from Dungeons Unbound again. Before the Elemental Evil module that made salvageable items from dungeons bound almost nobody was even trying to get diamonds from leadership, everyone had a fair chance to earn diamonds by normal gameplay , so if you cant allow people to have fun and earn astral diamonds by farming leadership that they have invested and spent so mutch time to level up then at least let them make astral diamonds by farming dungeons and selling their items.
In conclusion of my chaotic post i just wanted to say that If you have not got it already then i implore you, do not implement such a radical change and if you do have to go through with it please be sure to sweeten it up by unbinding epic salvageable items so the astral diamonds market do not die out, and do remember if you stop normal people from making astral diamonds your gonna end up in a situation when they are going to be left with hundreds of thousands of astral diamonds at most while the botters will still be sitting on hundreds of millions and that is not going to lead to anything good and by that i mean the game is going to depopulate rapidly.
Another Huge request from player base would be to make developers perform a referendum among all of the game accounts it should take a week and the question could simply "Do you agree that from now on Leadership profession will not yield and Rough Astral Diamonds?" . I am quite sure that the answer of No would be propobly in around 85-99 %. I do know this is a game owned by a corporation and all of players signed agreements that stated this game does not in anyway belong to them but still in order to make a good game community invoice should be taken under heavy consideration dont you think guys?
Thank you for reading and please do hear me and a vast part of Never winter community, this change is simply "a bridge too far" and might be this games downfall. If by any means i offended or insulted anyone i am deeply sorry i just wanted to save the game i really like from what i think is going to be a catastrophe.
Scott, I work in healthcare so these analogies spring to mind. This is a bad idea, because whilst you are amputating the diseased leg (in this case with a cleaver), you're not stopping the bleeding. You haven't done your preparation by measuring up a prosthetic in advance. The patient won't be able to walk until you do.
Please consider this british military saying too. The 7 P's. Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Pi$$ Poor Performance.
You don't seem to have planned this right. Sort the other side of the coin, which is player rewards. what you're proposing is just not good enough for the time we will invest. Especially given that you've taken a load of content out (see dungeons). Whats left isn't enough still.
Removing hourly event, might have worked when you had enough players...ill be surprised if it does now. expecting long queue times
Leadership, while no longer a major source of AD, is still a good source for XP, Gold, and loot items. All of these things are valuable to regular players, but less so to botters............
Scott Shicoff Lead Designer
Honest to goodness, have you actually looked at what comes out of those leadership boxes? gold is as another put, pretty much a throw away resource. XP supplementing 0-60 might be ok but beyond that is a drop in the ocean. bear in mind that 0-60 player wont have leadership at a decent level to make that worthwhile, and youve not done enough (if anything to the overload rewards) Loot items from the boxes are frankly worthless. look at the rank of enchants that pop from them and compare to how you've set up refinement.
You'll go ahead with this change, no doubt about that, but think more about how you manage the player's unhappiness please
Comments
This is not moving the goal posts...They have nowhere to move them, so they resort to kicking the ball all the way back to your side of the court, covering the ground in caltrops and glass shards, replace the ball with a live puffer fish and force you to get the ball back to destination by crawling on your belly and pushing it with your tongue.
Seriously though, what about those of us that primarily solo play? Leadership was my only viable source of ad income cause I just like to romp the end zones at my pleasure and run repeatables and solo dungeons...
So why not sell AD booster through the ZEN store too?
In the end, this change is all about making more money through selling ZEN, and that's it.
- Announced with little warning, certainly not enough for players to convince them to make any sort of change.
- No plan to compensate solo players for the staggering loss of AD income that this will cause them.
- A return to the philosophy of "grind the same monotonous task ad infinitum" that flew so well with the 192 EE quest progression.
This reeks of a management-initiated dictat, driven by data from the bean-counters.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
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My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
First; what can i do with the 3 keys i get with vip???? run a dungeon to get useless piece of equipment??? realy?
Second: will those changes make zen far more cheap??
I mean, who wants zen if we need 100k ad for just one GMOP, so our money won't worth much, it like you want us to put money on trash?
I work for a company, that is a sub to two major mega companies, 1st is Mercedes Benz and 2nd is Bosch. My job includes all kinds of activities, but my main focus is international relations and sells. My work time is divided between two countries, one lies in Mid-Eastern EU (Hungary), the other in western EU (Germany), so i may say i know people pretty well from more cultures.
Dear Cryptic, get my advise, stop this stubborn, we go against the tide mentality or you won't have a future soon, not with this game, but as a company entirely. No matter, how small this market segment is, sooner or later your constant negative behavior towards your clients will make your position on the market unbearable.
I love this game, i love DnD, so every drop of advise i tried to give you via CS or Mods over the last 3 years was all in love for the product, which now wants us, customers out of the house. If this is not intentional, then you have to wake up and ASAP, cause you are alienating your last drop of remaining player base.
I try to show you through one of my work examples, what you guys currently do. Ok, what if i sold you a Benz from Stuttgart and one night after, let's say 3 years, i would send a technician to your garage and let him dismantle the 4 wheels and take the axles and the motor with it. Would you like to drive that car? Could you drive it at all? No, of course not. Would you rage if something like this would happen to your beloved car? Sure you would, naturally.
Now imagine us, we BOUGHT many assets of the game with RL cash and now you are taking it over the course of two Modules these by many players BOUGHT assets away.
Leadership is an essential part of the game! When all of us joined this game and spent our money, we did it in a good will of knowing, aha, the game has this and this, ok i like it, i would like to support it, so we opened our wallets and supported you. Now you want to take our investment away 3 years after payment/launch. Sure i am not alone, but this is so ridiculous, i can't hardly find any appropriate words.
Not a single bit of a serious and decent company does such things. We know corporate history and most of those, who practice unethical methods are doomed over a time. Sure not every part of the world is same, some countries and cultures allow more space to maneuver, some less. I can only speak now as a European, we here aren't so forgiving.
Sure i don't know, if you want to stay long term in the market or just be a one day wonder, it is not for me to decide, but this move doesn't grant you a good PR for the future at all.
As i mentioned many of us have their RL money invested. I mentioned our company makes business in most parts of the world, let me tell you dear Cryptic, most part of this world is utterly poor. You should call yourself lucky you could sell a huge name in many poor countries too and you get payments from people, who earn only a few hundred EU/Dollars a month and still they support you. Well this is the case for most part of Eastern EU, where i live. Do you really want to throw all this trust away? What do you think, how many of the possibly tortured customers would pay for your next game? Sure far less, if you pull this off. Yet again i can only speak on my behalf, but most of the EU population will make a huge turn if you kill this game for many years to come. I don't know, if an IT company can only live on a small market nowadays, but i have my doubts.
I know for CEOs ego is a huge factor, sometimes even bigger, than common sense, but please, this time let your suits swallow the bitter pill and take this back from Test Sever and never again come up with such nonsense.
Thank you, may common sense guide you and not momentarily greed. You know, what the biggest triumph for a good manager is? I will answer it, the TRUST of his customers, cause they will return. I personally would instantly show the door to any of my employees, who would gamble with our customers trust, cause TRUST is the foundation for a long and successful business and it is very hard to earn, please dear Cryptic don't throw it away!
P.S: I keep a Stella Artois behind me in a little show case and every time i need to make a decision i turn around and take look at the label: 1366. Many of us can learn from them, how to make business, that lasts and makes both the producer and the customer a happy chappy!
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
@goatshark Please read the above quoted passage and if necessary relay it to your superiors. If you want this game, and your present job, to be here this time next year, you're going to need to start focusing on the long term view. This strategy may generate a slight spike in short term sales from a handful of frustrated players, but it will not be worth the cost in damage to the long term viability of the game, the charitably-described-as-shaky trust between the Devs and the players (which is rapidly becoming more aptly described as 'toxic' as evidenced in this very thread by the number of people who believe that the 'botter' excuse is just that, a smokescreen excuse to try and squeeze more cash out of a player base while offering nothing in return) and Cryptic/PWE's own reputation.
Because right now, that's about where you're at.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you want to remove the AD from leadership, you need to have a replacement of equal value waiting in the wings. That is clearly not the case here, and the previous days, weeks, or months between this massive paradigm shift and whatever nebulous 'solution' lies ahead is going to cause you to hemorrhage players, who probably will not return if and when a solution is implemented. I love this game. I love D&D. But you guys don't own a monopoly on the D&D-esque High Fantasy MMO genre, and if you continue to treat your player base like this, without regard for the consequences, they're going to vote with their wallets, leave you, and send this game into a death spiral (assuming it ain't already in one, and this is the result of the Powers-That-Be trying to squeeze enough cash out of a depleted playerbase to pay their bonuses without stopping to consider if the players will just leave, or worse, hang around without spending cash, driving up your costs.)
After these changes go live, could I ask for a full refund of all my money I gave you when you sold me a game of fun and now im holding an empty bag of ... (guess the word im thinking of)....
Go bad to mod 3 days, where HR were more fun to play then just to log in and do a daily prayer, I do more dps on my paladin then my fully booned all ranked 4 skill hunter with max gear... my paladin is only level 62 in green gear
Sorry just very disappointed, im sure this post will get deleted again since they don't like hearing how they are hurting us paying customers. I should probably just go buy from a bot since they probably care more for you then this company.
Listen to us real people and do the right thing, keep leadership with AD rewards. Many of us spent hard earned cash for the few things we have and invested in the game.
A lot of the playerbase don't enjoy dungeons and skirmishes. There are also a lot of @#!$holes in game who are constantly kicking people or dropping teams if they are not "Just so" for dungeons and skirmishes. Once again, these changes hurt the "Have nots"
Do you guys even have a clue about what's going on in your own game? For the most part these changes don't affect me. I have 2+ years in the game and am pretty much decked out.
But if I was a newcomer and saw this, and fully understood it. I'd be on the first train to BDO, or some other non Crypic/PWE ran game.
Remember how at launch we didn't have Marks of anything, just wards? Take 5(?) same ranked enchantments and refine them into 1 enchantment of the next higher rank. Fail on the roll and simply lose 1 of the enchantments you were trying to refine. Then we had huge amounts of AD exploitation and the PLAYERS demanded a fix and suggested AD sinks and removal of AD from Leadership. The Devs changed refinement and added sinks. Players said it wasn't enough and suggested more sinks, which we got, and a removal of AD from Leadership. The Devs changed Professions so that you could only do 3 of the same task rather than remove AD. The players continued to demand more AD sinks and a removal of AD from Leadership. They nerfed Dragon Hoard and Fey Blessing after the PLAYERS suggested it. Well.... the Devs are finally going the next step demanded by the players.
- anything created from professions should be bound to account
- any purchase from the auction house should be bound to account
- any loot at all should be bound to account
- add unbind scrolls to the ZEN shop, 100-1000 ZEN per scroll, depending on the quality of the item to unbind
There have been many viable suggestions for how you can maintain AD in leadership for legitimate players while making it harder / less viable to bot, including
- Add a CAPTCHA-like element to professions
- Require certain hard-to-bot tasks (similar to the Stronghold tasks) each week to unlock the AD reward for Leadership each week.
- Trade seals for keys to unlock AD chests. Seals from higher level zones needed for chests from higher level leadership tasks. Just think! Finally a real use for Seal of the Lion. (NOTE: Make this an "I'm not a bot" level of effort, not a new grind).
Please don't slowly kill the game by continually eroding your player's trust. Give people back the confidence to invest in the game, and they will.Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
i dont understand these devs and business managers doing more harm than rather fighting the bots since they take big slice of cut from Cryptic, and they are the ones who voliated CoC and EULA, not the players.
again, i wonder what the devs are doing, are they driving this game into the MMO Graveyard? so they can get unemployment check? no, i would forbid them, if i am CEO of other game firm, i wouldnt hire them, i would blacklist those.
i would hire unemployed programmers from Kingdom of Kaldimar, those work for Studio 38 did very well and almost flawless/bug free game, they all have lost and most are unpaid since Studio 38 went bankrupted.
Note to those current dev team, to save your carreer, please listen to most players, but not just to niche "favs" group, everyone is different, some seem cant play the way some used to play before mod 6 and many just had given up and sick of waiting for 4-6 months, and all they did by waiting when they log to do invokings, and you just announced to be taken away and replace with something not favorable to some, it became another "nail" to bury thier hopes of seeing this game be more playable.
what you all did was making too many bad calls instead of redoing Sharandar, Dread Ring, and Icewind to reduce difficulties, ignore those fanboys at all cost. why make game too hard? that is the biggest wall that some players cant overcome, some have disabilities.
right now, difficulties still too hard, and still getting one shotted, and it cost me over 50 gold coins and more than 70 health kits wasted last week, and this week i am avoiding dungeons and skirmish and only recover small amount back and still trying hard to recoup the cost i spent on kits. Shame on you!!!
No more nerfings!, No more take aways!!!
devs, you still hadnt fix Tiamat and those dang cheating legion devils still oneshotting and way too much blinkings and over-excessive flankings, also sick of "Mirror moves/counter runs" whenever i make surprised or unexpected sudden move, they seem to read my mind in advanced. gosh, i really hate it! so, this mean there is no way to be unpredictable to fool these mobs, it seem they have higher AI base.
it is very frustrating, and it is suppose to be a game that meant to be fun to play. so far, it isnt.
The change regarding astral diamonds gain from leadership profession proposed by the Neverwinter developer Team and posted by Goatshark is purely wrong for a number of reasons.
I am gonna try and put the reasons here to make people discuss them, and since i still really like and am passionate about Neverwinter i am gonna try to convice as many players as possible to make Cryptic and perfect world change theirs decision even if i know its futile.
I have spent a roughly 2000 Hours playing Neverwinter and explored basically all it has to offer.
Lets start with the fact that to achieve anything in Neverwinter and be considered usefull by other players in parties or guild you need to have gear, and not some easily acquirable dungeon gear, the kind of gear you need to spend Hundreds of millions of Astral Diamonds on.
Even if you buy your zen with your hard earned real life cash those are vast amounts going in dozens of thousands so the only way of getting to the top was either botting which is just wrong, exploiting other players and trade which is even more wrong and finally using Leadership as a steady time taking but rewarding way of getting your desired astral diamonds and ultimately gear in order to beacome a better player and have more fun from playing.
Not only is Goatshark saying he is going to take all the time we invested in learning what needs to be done and then doing it to achieve the goals we set out to but he is also saying he is not going to give anything in return.
That kind of solution is going make Hundreds if not Thousands of Players, Including the Ones that have paid a lot to just rage quit the game, and when they are going to do that there's a really slight chance of them going back.
In perspective it does not mean increased incomes from more purchases like cryptic predicts but an economy crysis unheard of in Neverwinter that can potentially make the game just go dead with only hundreds of players; mostly botters and exploiters staying in it and Perfectworld not making any futher profit on that game.
I might be exaggerating but the truth is that after reading this post many of my friends told me that they are just going to quit.
I want to Appeal to whatever development team is on the project to rethink what they are planning to do beacose i am sure that its not going to increase the company profits and as a player invested in a game i want the company to make a lot of money so they can keep providing the great content that i appreciate so mutch.
As another valid and important reason not to implement those changes i would like to say that the change is going to punish the players that are playing honestly while the cheaters/botters/exploiters are going to be rewarded for Developers inability to track the data of their own game.
It should be relatively simple to see which accounts earn very increased amounts of astral diamonds in small period tables also it should be relatively simple to track where they are sending their ill gotten astral diamonds to so cryptic could just ban those account in order to restore the balance.
All that means that the decision delete the option to make astral diamonds from leadership is simply unjust, i think its a very important reason to consider that change again.
So considering all the arguments and more that i was not able to present beacose of the language barrier i still think that economically in both short and the long term this decision is not going to be beneficial for the company or the players.
If all of those reasons are invalid or incomplete then there is one major thing that Developers should do in order to keep the game balanced and reasonable. If your going to take away Astral Diamonds from Leadership then Please be sure to make salvageable items from Dungeons Unbound again. Before the Elemental Evil module that made salvageable items from dungeons bound almost nobody was even trying to get diamonds from leadership, everyone had a fair chance to earn diamonds by normal gameplay , so if you cant allow people to have fun and earn astral diamonds by farming leadership that they have invested and spent so mutch time to level up then at least let them make astral diamonds by farming dungeons and selling their items.
In conclusion of my chaotic post i just wanted to say that If you have not got it already then i implore you, do not implement such a radical change and if you do have to go through with it please be sure to sweeten it up by unbinding epic salvageable items so the astral diamonds market do not die out, and do remember if you stop normal people from making astral diamonds your gonna end up in a situation when they are going to be left with hundreds of thousands of astral diamonds at most while the botters will still be sitting on hundreds of millions and that is not going to lead to anything good and by that i mean the game is going to depopulate rapidly.
Another Huge request from player base would be to make developers perform a referendum among all of the game accounts it should take a week and the question could simply "Do you agree that from now on Leadership profession will not yield and Rough Astral Diamonds?" . I am quite sure that the answer of No would be propobly in around 85-99 %.
I do know this is a game owned by a corporation and all of players signed agreements that stated this game does not in anyway belong to them but still in order to make a good game community invoice should be taken under heavy consideration dont you think guys?
Thank you for reading and please do hear me and a vast part of Never winter community, this change is simply "a bridge too far" and might be this games downfall.
If by any means i offended or insulted anyone i am deeply sorry i just wanted to save the game i really like from what i think is going to be a catastrophe.
panderus
Please consider this british military saying too.
The 7 P's. Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Pi$$ Poor Performance.
You don't seem to have planned this right. Sort the other side of the coin, which is player rewards. what you're proposing is just not good enough for the time we will invest. Especially given that you've taken a load of content out (see dungeons). Whats left isn't enough still.
Removing hourly event, might have worked when you had enough players...ill be surprised if it does now. expecting long queue times Honest to goodness, have you actually looked at what comes out of those leadership boxes?
gold is as another put, pretty much a throw away resource.
XP supplementing 0-60 might be ok but beyond that is a drop in the ocean. bear in mind that 0-60 player wont have leadership at a decent level to make that worthwhile, and youve not done enough (if anything to the overload rewards)
Loot items from the boxes are frankly worthless. look at the rank of enchants that pop from them and compare to how you've set up refinement.
You'll go ahead with this change, no doubt about that, but think more about how you manage the player's unhappiness please