putzboy78Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,950Arc User
In the beginning there were F2P dungeon farm groups. They farmed dungeons for epic loot to sell on the AH. People who wanted to get geared quickly bought that loot. Giving both F2P players (who had time for many many dungeon runs to earn AD) and P2W players an avenue to progress. P2W progressed faster allowing F2P to be fodder for them in pvp; however, F2Ps always had a since that they were close to being on the same level.
Mod 5 came along and made epic gear worthless
Mod 6 made all epic gear BOP
Taking away these avenues of income, and leaving leadership and rhix quests as the keys to legit AD generation in game.
Another way to generate wealth was farming events. Since no new events (and more specifically cool loot) have been added recently. Many people already have the event items and the events are botted therefore the value in farming events has strongly decreased).
However, Since mod 2 there have been massive AD sinks added to the game. Specifically the new refinement system (and its associated marks) and artifacts. Later with artifact equipment changing every 3-4 months (cubes of augmentation that have 0 value when you use artifact gear as refinement).
The lack of income from questing plus the constant need for RP took a method that was used by a few and made it wide spread. That was the leadership profession which also created a bypass for the daily RAD refinement limit.
The use of leadership to make AD is unique because it requires players with a long term strategy in the game (transient players that enjoy playing multiple games do not typically find interest in this because the results are not immediate). It also has to be less effort than playing the game or be more enjoyable than playing the game because you cannot run an in-game bot on your account while playing the game.
So while there are people who feel like the leadership junkies are ruining the game, these aren't the people killing you in pvp (i will concede that it was possible when leadership was on gateway).
Leadership is not the problem, and AD from leadership is not the problem. Some people really enjoy crafting, let them enjoy it. They shouldn't have to run dungeons, skirmishes, and pvp to enjoy the game. Just as some people only play the AH, its like the stock market to them. There is nothing wrong with it.
This change to leadership doesn't fix the bots, the AD that wrecked the ZAX was made from an exploit that is resolved.
Instead of pointing your angst on people who use leadership, ask yourselves some questions?
1) How did 100s of millions of AD appear out of thin air and cryptic did not have any protection or alert mechanism in place to stop it before it got out of hand? AD only has so many points of origination and all are restrained by the daily refinement threshold, there should have been tracked calculations that says this is how much AD has been generated in the game, the number in game exceed what was generated... emergency maintenance required. BTW that exploit was because of a coding error made by cryptic.
2) Everyone knows where bots can be found in the game. One website even posts a weekly report on how much and what they sold on the AH (here's a hint, the top 63 sellers in the game sold a billion AD of botted items last week). Why is cryptic doing nothing to resolve this issue?
Cryptic is not concerned about stopping botting. They are concerned about getting your money out of your pocket. This change only works to make the game harder for players to progress without making significant RL contributions to do it.
The poll clearly shows people are not ready for this change yet and it could be a very bad decision. I actually suggested replacing ADs with RP items in leadership way back ago (maybe one and a half years ago). But things have changed so much. This idea behind this change seems reasonable. But (a big but) in the current AD generating system, you could not simply delete ADs in leadership without adapting the whole AD generating system gradually. Sadly I am almost sure this will be a very bad decision like many decisions I have saw which seems kind of right but will fail completely.
Even if we are looking at the worst case scenario, this is almost 20k AD in 2 hours. Most likely you'll be doing this in under 90 minutes. And the best days will take less than 1 hour. Now add Invocation on top of it and you're getting very close to 24k. The remaining small part can be done with a salvage, a rare leadership task (they're still there) or additional runs in dungeons, skirmishes or pvp if you feel like it. But if the time invested is too much, those missing 1k-2k will not make or break anything.
If you do not like to be forced into this kind of content, then the complaint is legitimate, but saying that reaching 24k RAD will take 20 to 22 hours is false and it's nowhere close to that.
The most stupid thing about this is that I can just go to WoD and do a dragon run and probably get ~3 lesser resonance stones, 2 minor resonance stones and 15 dragon hoard coffers. And I can just dump all of that on the AH for ~20k. And a dragon run takes ~10 minutes
Personally, I am glad for these changes. I was a slave to the leadership army and I am actually relieved that I don't have to do it anymore.
That said, I think that they REALLY need to look at the prices of AD sinks and lower them significantly, however, I don't anticipate that happening very soon. They probably want to try and soak up some of the excess AD floating around, which... I guess is logical.
But I spent five million AD just in GMOPs yesterday, for ONE toon, and he's not even BIS yet. And I have the 25% discount from VIP. That's ridiculous.
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juleadreamMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 372Arc User
Killing AD from Leadership before having a COMPLETE plan in place to ensure that all players, whether PvP, PvE, solo, or group focused, can earn enough AD reliably in place and ready to go is much like trying to replace the transmission in a car but only having half the needed parts available. It won't work. Before removing AD from leadership, Cryptic NEEDS to address all methods of generating AD for all different playstyles, as well as addressing the now even more over-the-top pricing structure in game as well as the insane costs of upgrading the stronghold. Once everything is in place and set to go, only then should AD be taken from leadership. The idea isn't bad in and of itself, but it has to be done in the proper sequence to ensure a smooth transition from one paradigm to the next.
Its a good idea and overdue. Bots take advantage of it, people abuse it by creating multiple accounts for multiple toons and mine AD through it instead of playing the game and working for it.
I have never used leadership for AD gain, my leadership skill on all my characters is under level 5. There are other ways to make AD if people are willing to do more than just login, press a few profession buttons, rinse and repeat and then log off. Gateway was even worse. You dont even have to bother logging into the game, just go via gateway avaialble through any web accessing device...
Now people actually have to play the game to earn AD.
I'm sorry for those who invested a lot of time and money into leadership, but for the overall economy and good of the game, I think this is a truly positive move.
News flash for you, botters will be the only ones, that are going to profit from this change, since they can and will farm any content 24/7 to generate the same or even more AD after this change.
Please explain how this is good for the economy or the game itself.
emany people keep saying bots can run full dungeons and beat their bosses, but I haven't seen it yet. only in ghost stories where they don't finish the quest, so they don't really beat the boss. is this really a thing?
emany people keep saying bots can run full dungeons and beat their bosses, but I haven't seen it yet. only in ghost stories where they don't finish the quest, so they don't really beat the boss. is this really a thing?
They wont have to. Why bother making a complex script when its so much easier to just queue up and hope to get carried while following a random attentive player? Sure some will get kicked, most probably. But in the numbers game of botting, even a small success rate can be multiplied to a profitable level if you do it enough times over a long enough period.
You are looking at it the wrong way. If the bots could actually beat the boss and be somewhat useful, there would be less complaints. But they wont, they will be an obstruction, an anchor, an annoyance. A thing that will only serve to complicate, delay, and annoy legit players trying to do the few things they have been reduced to doing so they can still advance.
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putzboy78Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,950Arc User
Its a good idea and overdue. Bots take advantage of it, people abuse it by creating multiple accounts for multiple toons and mine AD through it instead of playing the game and working for it.
I have never used leadership for AD gain, my leadership skill on all my characters is under level 5. There are other ways to make AD if people are willing to do more than just login, press a few profession buttons, rinse and repeat and then log off. Gateway was even worse. You dont even have to bother logging into the game, just go via gateway avaialble through any web accessing device...
Now people actually have to play the game to earn AD.
I'm sorry for those who invested a lot of time and money into leadership, but for the overall economy and good of the game, I think this is a truly positive move.
Why do people say "people actually have to play the game to earn AD". For many people the SCA is the game, the AH is the game, crafting is the game, foundry is the game. One of the beauties about this game is that it had so many ways you can play. It was alt friendly so you could experience every class/role, you could pve, you could pvp, you could use foundry to tell a story, so many things.
And now it seems everyone wants the only way to play the game be their way. Why would you want to force people who don't want to PVP to PVP, who don't like PVE to PVE, etc. I say let people play their way and if its not your way it doesn't hurt you. You will never see them anyhow
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klangeddinMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 882Arc User
Even if we are looking at the worst case scenario, this is almost 20k AD in 2 hours. Most likely you'll be doing this in under 90 minutes. And the best days will take less than 1 hour. Now add Invocation on top of it and you're getting very close to 24k. The remaining small part can be done with a salvage, a rare leadership task (they're still there) or additional runs in dungeons, skirmishes or pvp if you feel like it. But if the time invested is too much, those missing 1k-2k will not make or break anything.
If you do not like to be forced into this kind of content, then the complaint is legitimate, but saying that reaching 24k RAD will take 20 to 22 hours is false and it's nowhere close to that.
The most stupid thing about this is that I can just go to WoD and do a dragon run and probably get ~3 lesser resonance stones, 2 minor resonance stones and 15 dragon hoard coffers. And I can just dump all of that on the AH for ~20k. And a dragon run takes ~10 minutes
Rough AD and AD made from AH may not be a big difference to you, but in the grand scheme of things, they are truly different beasts. Rough AD is new fresh AD that is printed into the economy, increasing the total stock of AD present and reduces its value because of inflation. AD made from AH is a transaction from a player to another, with posting fees and cuts that actually take AD out of the economy, deflating.
These changes about leadership are all about the value of AD, we have been having gigantic backlogs for too long, now this announcement is made and the backlog is nearly gone. Once this goes live, we'll finally see the ZAX under 500 and return closer to release levels.
emany people keep saying bots can run full dungeons and beat their bosses, but I haven't seen it yet. only in ghost stories where they don't finish the quest, so they don't really beat the boss. is this really a thing?
They wont have to. Why bother making a complex script when its so much easier to just queue up and hope to get carried while following a random attentive player? Sure some will get kicked, most probably. But in the numbers game of botting, even a small success rate can be multiplied to a profitable level if you do it enough times over a long enough period.
You are looking at it the wrong way. If the bots could actually beat the boss and be somewhat useful, there would be less complaints. But they wont, they will be an obstruction, an anchor, an annoyance. A thing that will only serve to complicate, delay, and annoy legit players trying to do the few things they have been reduced to doing so they can still advance.
how can you be carried? if a bot is not fighting and doesn't reply he'll get kicked as simple as that. unless you had bad luck enough to be in a party with more bots of course.
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lairdbansheeMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14Arc User
The most stupid thing about this is that I can just go to WoD and do a dragon run and probably get ~3 lesser resonance stones, 2 minor resonance stones and 15 dragon hoard coffers. And I can just dump all of that on the AH for ~20k. And a dragon run takes ~10 minutes
That's great, except that, unless you have BiS everything, you'll be wondering, even just for a little bit, "Hmm, shouldn't I apply this stuff to make my gear better?" Doesn't MY stuff deserve this more? For me, I always choose, "Yes... yes it does." Otherwise I'd be using the proceeds to... buy things that do the same damned thing.
With Leadership ADs we never have this decision. Hey, it's ADs! WooHoo! Let's go refine it and buy what we need.
how can you be carried? if a bot is not fighting and doesn't reply he'll get kicked as simple as that. unless you had bad luck enough to be in a party with more bots of course.
Ive been in several groups, mostly during events like CTAs and such, where players would literally do nothing but sit at the camp fire and kick attempts would fail. And if the bot moved, via following, and was able to do basic levels of attacking when in combat. Its lackluster playing would only stand out after a little time in the dungeon. Not that you could kick them out initially anyhow with the changes to the kick system. Even if you could detect a bot with 100% certainty. You would still have to do so at the expense of time.
In some cases, like quick skirmishes for example, some might decide its better to deal with the bot then to suffer any delay.
Bots don't have to succeed to win, its a game of percentages. and even with low odds of success they can still win though shear time and numbers.
The most stupid thing about this is that I can just go to WoD and do a dragon run and probably get ~3 lesser resonance stones, 2 minor resonance stones and 15 dragon hoard coffers. And I can just dump all of that on the AH for ~20k. And a dragon run takes ~10 minutes
That's great, except that, unless you have BiS everything, you'll be wondering, even just for a little bit, "Hmm, shouldn't I apply this stuff to make my gear better?" Doesn't MY stuff deserve this more? For me, I always choose, "Yes... yes it does." Otherwise I'd be using the proceeds to... buy things that do the same damned thing.
With Leadership ADs we never have this decision. Hey, it's ADs! WooHoo! Let's go refine it and buy what we need.
I only started playing again at the end of june so there was pretty much no way to actually get enough RP to get my mainhand to legendary. So it's more efficient to sell RP and upgrade artifacts/enchants/companions.
DH enchants got me enough RP to get just about everything to epic in two months anyways.
maybe if they bring back some more dungeons and perhaps drop some more items we can sell on AH or salvage at a reasonable rate of investment ...i can make AD another way...otherwise this was the only way to make the ad needed to buy GMOPs to upgrade enchants, equipment, runestones, etc ....
All of these people happy with another nerf because everybody has to run dungeons now for AD... What exactly are you getting out of these runs that generates AD? You can't sell anything, daily reward is peanuts, same monsters in the same places doing the same things. ...and now you're going to be forced to do it while your gear progression will mostly stay right where it's at.
I guess if people are new here and struggling, they have no idea of how great this game used to be and haven't had to watch what worked in the past get slowly stripped away module by module. The way the game got into this state isn't the fault of any players, exploiters included. Cryptic took one thing at a time away from the game that provided AD until Leadership was the last man standing. They've successfully boiled us, like frogs. Obsequious forum rats have made their job that much easier, too.
New guy, your 24K refined is going to go straight to boons if you know what's good for your toon. This will go on for months. You will be poor forever. No Lostmauth or Valindra artifact lottery, either. Those things will drop in price so far they'll become worthless compared to the fixed price items you'll need to progress. So smug "play the game now" comments need not apply here.
Cheaper Zen isn't going to help you. Even if you put real money in, it's going to give you multitudes less in return. The ZAX isn't going to help with bottomed out prices because your AD is going to be so hard to get, you'll have to buy GMOPs with it, not bags or pets or anything except maybe wards.
Leadership right now = Free to Play. Taking that away won't do anything positive for the game, but might make those who have been too lazy to rank up Leadership happy that their indolence has finally paid off on something. Bringing experienced players with old investments down to nub levels of income won't level the playing field. Are you guys playing on one toon only? Never tried another class? Think, people. This is bad.
emany people keep saying bots can run full dungeons and beat their bosses, but I haven't seen it yet. only in ghost stories where they don't finish the quest, so they don't really beat the boss. is this really a thing?
They wont have to. Why bother making a complex script when its so much easier to just queue up and hope to get carried while following a random attentive player? Sure some will get kicked, most probably. But in the numbers game of botting, even a small success rate can be multiplied to a profitable level if you do it enough times over a long enough period.
You are looking at it the wrong way. If the bots could actually beat the boss and be somewhat useful, there would be less complaints. But they wont, they will be an obstruction, an anchor, an annoyance. A thing that will only serve to complicate, delay, and annoy legit players trying to do the few things they have been reduced to doing so they can still advance.
how can you be carried? if a bot is not fighting and doesn't reply he'll get kicked as simple as that. unless you had bad luck enough to be in a party with more bots of course.
...but before that bot gets kicked it slows down the party progress, blocks out a legit player, and, hey, guess - considering the playerbase in this game and the trend it'll take when the changes are effected - the chances that the replacement alloted by the big Q System will be a bot, too?
But nothin really happend if they give possibility to buy lvl 60 equipment for 20 silver on woundrous bazar and slavage this for 1000 RAD. Check testing server.
> @macjae said: > So my question is this. Was leadership a fun aspect of the game for people? Did people honestly enjoy the "cookie clicker" aspect of leadership? Or was it the results that made people happy? > > > > Obviously the results. Personally, I've always enjoyed the PvP (though they've been making it increasingly dysfunctional with a lack of support and care over recent mods) and found most of the PvE content beyond tedious -- so much so that clicking through Leadership actually annoyed me a lot less. Other people obviously have different preferences. In either case, Leadership was a beneficial arrangement that allowed people to pursue the content they enjoyed and still earn an income. The changes they've presented will essentially force everyone to do the same content grind to earn maximum AD -- forcing people to do things they don't want to do, if that is PvP, dungeons or skirmishes. > > "Cookie clicking" is less un-enjoyable than the only source of AD being grinding through content you don't enjoy. In other words, do you feel the game would be more fun for people if: > > A) Players were essentially required to run 20-30 or more Leadership toons to be able to play the game > > or > > b) Playing the game was more rewarding, and provided a more clear path to advancement > > > > The answer to this is obviously B, but that's just hypothetical -- the history is abundantly clear on this. Once they nerf some economic aspect of the game, they've NEVER done a tweak that really compensated players; at best they've offered the occasional weak band-aid. Because A is the status quo. If the planned leadership changes were reverted, it would essentially require players to continue to play "cookie clicker" for most of their time, in the hopes that what little slivers of time they had not managing a leadership army was more fun. > > > > Which reflects on just how poor much of their current content is. They gutted the game of dungeons, shut down the Foundry, have left PvP with several dysfunctional elements and very poor balance, kept messing with solo content in wild difficult swings, added a stronghold grinding mode which essentially amounts to "play all the old content more," and they've been continually eradicating the actual feeling of being rewarded for doing things -- from dungeons giving nice drops of set items to giving uninteresting bound items and minor RP, PvP giving out less glory (and always being less rewarding than PvE), and now Leadership being gutted. Biased polls aside, that's the real choice we're looking at here. > > > > The reality is that we're not looking at a "choice"; we're looking at what we get. And what the developers give us. Looking at their history, people have been repeating these ideas forever. The actual actions taken by the developers just show that they're not on the same page, probably not even the same planet, as players when it comes to this. > > If they wanted to do this *right*, they would have either: > > 1) gradually reduced Leadership rewards while increasing rewards from other sources, softening the blow. > > 2) introduced a much stronger reward structure while burning down Leadership (and doing an actual retooling of what Leadership *does* while they're at it, not just removing the AD and leaving everything else as-is, a true hack job). > > However, they were apparently satisfied with just doing their hack job on Leadership and leaving it at that, while not *actually* increasing the rewards for playing. If they had *actually* given some increased rewards and *actually* done a proper rework of Leadership, it might not have been such a terrible thing. > > All they are doing, however, is feeding people stick. There is no carrot. This is the essential problem. Make-believing and dreaming about what the reward system *should* be like is fine and all, but it would be better to stick to the reality of what they're actually *doing*. Until they actually come up with an adequate and functional reward system, they should leave the current less-than-ideal (but still better than what we'll have once this rolls out) system in place. They don't need to starve players for a few months while copy-pasting "we're listening"/"we're monitoring the situation" before increasing RAD rewards by 300 per day or something equally "significant". > > The worst part of it all, however, was how blatantly insulting the developers were about it -- pushing the same old bot story when it's more transparent than glass what their real intentions are. > > If they had actually intended to reward playing more, they would have included something along with this Leadership gimping. They included *nothing*.
Lol, you know things are bad when CWs start fighting each other haha
Even if we are looking at the worst case scenario, this is almost 20k AD in 2 hours. Most likely you'll be doing this in under 90 minutes. And the best days will take less than 1 hour. Now add Invocation on top of it and you're getting very close to 24k. The remaining small part can be done with a salvage, a rare leadership task (they're still there) or additional runs in dungeons, skirmishes or pvp if you feel like it. But if the time invested is too much, those missing 1k-2k will not make or break anything.
If you do not like to be forced into this kind of content, then the complaint is legitimate, but saying that reaching 24k RAD will take 20 to 22 hours is false and it's nowhere close to that.
The most stupid thing about this is that I can just go to WoD and do a dragon run and probably get ~3 lesser resonance stones, 2 minor resonance stones and 15 dragon hoard coffers. And I can just dump all of that on the AH for ~20k. And a dragon run takes ~10 minutes
Rough AD and AD made from AH may not be a big difference to you, but in the grand scheme of things, they are truly different beasts. Rough AD is new fresh AD that is printed into the economy, increasing the total stock of AD present and reduces its value because of inflation. AD made from AH is a transaction from a player to another, with posting fees and cuts that actually take AD out of the economy, deflating.
These changes about leadership are all about the value of AD, we have been having gigantic backlogs for too long, now this announcement is made and the backlog is nearly gone. Once this goes live, we'll finally see the ZAX under 500 and return closer to release levels.
What "gigantic" backlogs are you talking about? That ridiculous lowish 5m AD? There were backlogs from more then 21m AD in the past, and no one had a problem with that...
And the 5m AD backlog only took a day of 2x RP to melt away.
Insert more artifact equipment probably coming with Underdark, and a 2x RP event per month, there would be no real backlog anymore.
And btw. why would anyone continue to buy ZEN with real money and then exchange it to AD for a lot less then 500 AD per ZEN? The players might rather start selling something from the ZEN shop for AD again directly, or they start buying from botters, that can provide much more AD for a lot less real money. There're no GMs in game, so there is no fear of risking a bann by buying AD from botters. So instead of fighting botters, the Devs just made it even easier for botters to sell their AD to players.
And then you will start seeing some really gigantic backlogs on the ZAX...
I just wish that Cryptic had a true project manager and someone else who is actually good at communication. Because this sucks on both counts - appalling levels of management ability is once again being displayed.
There should be a clear roadmap to huge changes in game i.e. as already mentioned the replacement for Leadership AD generation should already be tested and on the preview server.... not an ad-hock slash/hack job that reeks of hasty implementation.
This change is being implemented badly - anyone seriously can see this.
Frankly, this looks like an attack on solo players who do not dungeon/skirmish/PvP and have leadership maxed. This is every bit as bad a design as the class paragons - where you only have one way to play if you wish to be competive.
This is forcing people into another one way of playing the game - breaking the strengths that Neverwinter used to have.
And now it seems everyone wants the only way to play the game be their way. Why would you want to force people who don't want to PVP to PVP, who don't like PVE to PVE, etc. I say let people play their way and if its not your way it doesn't hurt you. You will never see them anyhow
By your logic, cryptic should never change any existing part the game. Nothing should ever be removed or nerfed because such changes would "force" players to play differently. Bugs and cheats/exploits should never be fixed because that "forces" players to change their playstyle. Bots should be allowed because that's how some people like to "play". Leadership will still work after AD is removed. continue to "play" that if you want.
PvE is this what you do in this game immediately after creating a character. Neverwinter has always been primarily a pve game with optional pvp. People who dislike pve should not play this game, especially strongholds, which is very much focused on pve.
One way to still enjoy is: try out every class up to level 60, or if you like to grind to level 70, and stop there, without ever refining anything at all, and no need for AD along the way.
Had they made playing actually rewarding enough, then maybe it'd be a good decision. Otherwise they've taken out one of the only source of AD people could rely on. Botters will still bot, and with some people earning less, they may benefit from more people buying their AD at possibly higher rates. Leadership was high investment, highish reward. Now it's high investment, barely any reward. How are people expected to pay tens of millions for high end gear at botted rates over 2x rp let alone the prices without any bots...
At best they made chances equal to when neveremeber dailies existed. At worst, with a big chunk of AD generation is removed, a lot of people, especially casuals will be harmed.
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putzboy78Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,950Arc User
a lot of people, especially casuals will be harmed.
Despite being one myself -I have a life outside Neverwinter- I don't consider that a bad thing. There's 1 rule that applies to every game in the world: If you want to progress, you have to play it. We've just been spoiled by a system that can help casuals progress while they aren't playing. A nice consideration, but as soon as people en masse prefer to use leadership armies over playing the game you know you're sitting on a economical timebomb.
Of course it's up to Cryptic to provide us with enough things to do that we enjoy to keep the game working and at the moment I'd say that the game falls short of stuff to do. 6 dungeons and 3 skirmishes isn't enough. People will burn out or get bored.
Its not even that its for casuals. The reality is a person playing 8 hours a day has the potential to earn only slightly more than a person playing two hours a day. That's do to AD flow being controlled by the refinement limit. Thanks to the cost of keys you can only profit from one dungeon a day. Glory is worthless so you only profit from reaching the rhix threshold... you get the point
The counter argument is play your alts and the counter argument to that is gearing and maintain alts cost AD. You don't actually improve your AD per character threshold with playing alts. The game has significant AD sinks, they are so severe that a normal player, on one character cannot keep up with the progression of the game. In the old days you could grind gear, etc and sell it on the AH to people paying RL $ to progress faster in the game. This is how we made AD outside of the daily AD refinement structure. When that was taken away people turned to leadership farms because the investment was far less than equipping/maintaining a playable alt and the return was comparable.
The defenders of this change are either very naive, or are choosing to be willfully ignorant, on how those who sell in game currencies for RL cash can, and do, operate. Bots have been, and will continue to be, able to be scripted to run dungeons even since I started playing MMO's in 2002. Those companies began abusing the VIP system from day 1 of its implementation and their ability to earn millions of AD per week will not be impacted in least bit. Even if the entire server was reset, so that every 'toon was reset to level 1 with no AD, the currency sellers would be back to full force within less than a month. That is just the simple reality with every MMO that I have played.
It also seems that some think their multitude of clicks in combat makes that a more "honorable" way of earning AD than by utilizing a profession. The reality is that there are, and should be, multiple ways to play and enjoy any game. Some people love playing Auction Houses and seeing how much of an economy they can control, others prefer crafting/professions, x percentage prefers to play solo, x percentage prefers to grind dungeons repeatedly with guilds, and etc. All of these are valid play styles and none is better than the other. As individuals we all have different tastes that we may, or may not, share with others.
Having paid my gaming dues by playing 40+ hours per week the first 5 years of playing MMO's, I liked the fact that I could progress nicely in this game with only 5-10 hrs of time investment per week. My 2 toons, out of 12, that have rank 21 leadership took almost 10 months to get there. Don't give me this <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> that the ability to gain large amounts of AD through Leadership is anything that easy for anyone starting this game from scratch. After 10 months of game time I only have a smattering of green Leadership assets and find it very presumptuous to assume that everyone who has leadership factories is cranking out an insane amount of AD for the time they have put into that profession.
The sad reality is that if the game managers had perma-banned game exploiters along the way, and fixed the bugs, they would have grew a much larger player base...which would have generated more income with more people buying Zen.
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
After 10 months of game time I only have a smattering of green Leadership assets and find it very presumptuous to assume that everyone who has leadership factories is cranking out an insane amount of AD for the time they have put into that profession.
Actually, it is extremely easy. Buy your character slots for 500 Zen (or 250k AD). Or cheaper if you waited for the sales. Buy the T3 white assets so you don't have to waste time making higher tier guys. Last time I added 4 toons to my leadership army, they were 8k each. I did six because that's the easiest number of slots you can unlock. So that's another 48000 AD per toon. So that's an upfront investment of 173k AD.
Now, Assuming you go all in on experience, in order to rush to level 25 Leadership the fastest, I think you're looking at 60 days-ish (checking it twice a day on average) to get to level 25. After that, a level 25 toon can easily generate 12k AD/day if only checked one. Or 84k a week.
So last time I added to my farm it was only 4 more Leadership toons, and that was in December. So I invested about 700k AD into those toons. After 60 days, we're cranking out about 500k AD/week with those new toons. And they've been working for 8.5 months, or 30 weeks. So 34 times 500k is 17 million AD. From an upfront investment of 700k. And that's in about 10 months.
All together, I have 25 leadership toons at level 25. So over 2 million AD/week. Took me about 20 minutes a day to check all those toons. So about 2.5 hours a week...or earning over 800k AD/hr AD.
And you're talking about NOT being able to crank out insane amounts of AD?
I think you're wrong. Very, very wrong.
Which is why, despite losing that income (but gaining my sanity back), I can clearly see how Leadership farms, even run legitimately, are a huge problem for the economy.
Comments
Mod 5 came along and made epic gear worthless
Mod 6 made all epic gear BOP
Taking away these avenues of income, and leaving leadership and rhix quests as the keys to legit AD generation in game.
Another way to generate wealth was farming events. Since no new events (and more specifically cool loot) have been added recently. Many people already have the event items and the events are botted therefore the value in farming events has strongly decreased).
However, Since mod 2 there have been massive AD sinks added to the game. Specifically the new refinement system (and its associated marks) and artifacts. Later with artifact equipment changing every 3-4 months (cubes of augmentation that have 0 value when you use artifact gear as refinement).
The lack of income from questing plus the constant need for RP took a method that was used by a few and made it wide spread. That was the leadership profession which also created a bypass for the daily RAD refinement limit.
The use of leadership to make AD is unique because it requires players with a long term strategy in the game (transient players that enjoy playing multiple games do not typically find interest in this because the results are not immediate). It also has to be less effort than playing the game or be more enjoyable than playing the game because you cannot run an in-game bot on your account while playing the game.
So while there are people who feel like the leadership junkies are ruining the game, these aren't the people killing you in pvp (i will concede that it was possible when leadership was on gateway).
Leadership is not the problem, and AD from leadership is not the problem. Some people really enjoy crafting, let them enjoy it. They shouldn't have to run dungeons, skirmishes, and pvp to enjoy the game. Just as some people only play the AH, its like the stock market to them. There is nothing wrong with it.
This change to leadership doesn't fix the bots, the AD that wrecked the ZAX was made from an exploit that is resolved.
Instead of pointing your angst on people who use leadership, ask yourselves some questions?
1) How did 100s of millions of AD appear out of thin air and cryptic did not have any protection or alert mechanism in place to stop it before it got out of hand? AD only has so many points of origination and all are restrained by the daily refinement threshold, there should have been tracked calculations that says this is how much AD has been generated in the game, the number in game exceed what was generated... emergency maintenance required. BTW that exploit was because of a coding error made by cryptic.
2) Everyone knows where bots can be found in the game. One website even posts a weekly report on how much and what they sold on the AH (here's a hint, the top 63 sellers in the game sold a billion AD of botted items last week). Why is cryptic doing nothing to resolve this issue?
Cryptic is not concerned about stopping botting. They are concerned about getting your money out of your pocket. This change only works to make the game harder for players to progress without making significant RL contributions to do it.
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The most stupid thing about this is that I can just go to WoD and do a dragon run and probably get ~3 lesser resonance stones, 2 minor resonance stones and 15 dragon hoard coffers. And I can just dump all of that on the AH for ~20k. And a dragon run takes ~10 minutes
That said, I think that they REALLY need to look at the prices of AD sinks and lower them significantly, however, I don't anticipate that happening very soon. They probably want to try and soak up some of the excess AD floating around, which... I guess is logical.
But I spent five million AD just in GMOPs yesterday, for ONE toon, and he's not even BIS yet. And I have the 25% discount from VIP. That's ridiculous.
Its a good idea and overdue. Bots take advantage of it, people abuse it by creating multiple accounts for multiple toons and mine AD through it instead of playing the game and working for it.
I have never used leadership for AD gain, my leadership skill on all my characters is under level 5. There are other ways to make AD if people are willing to do more than just login, press a few profession buttons, rinse and repeat and then log off. Gateway was even worse. You dont even have to bother logging into the game, just go via gateway avaialble through any web accessing device...
Now people actually have to play the game to earn AD.
I'm sorry for those who invested a lot of time and money into leadership, but for the overall economy and good of the game, I think this is a truly positive move.
Please explain how this is good for the economy or the game itself.
Let's keep it at least a bit realistic here...
You are looking at it the wrong way. If the bots could actually beat the boss and be somewhat useful, there would be less complaints. But they wont, they will be an obstruction, an anchor, an annoyance. A thing that will only serve to complicate, delay, and annoy legit players trying to do the few things they have been reduced to doing so they can still advance.
And now it seems everyone wants the only way to play the game be their way. Why would you want to force people who don't want to PVP to PVP, who don't like PVE to PVE, etc. I say let people play their way and if its not your way it doesn't hurt you. You will never see them anyhow
Rough AD is new fresh AD that is printed into the economy, increasing the total stock of AD present and reduces its value because of inflation.
AD made from AH is a transaction from a player to another, with posting fees and cuts that actually take AD out of the economy, deflating.
These changes about leadership are all about the value of AD, we have been having gigantic backlogs for too long, now this announcement is made and the backlog is nearly gone.
Once this goes live, we'll finally see the ZAX under 500 and return closer to release levels.
With Leadership ADs we never have this decision. Hey, it's ADs! WooHoo! Let's go refine it and buy what we need.
In some cases, like quick skirmishes for example, some might decide its better to deal with the bot then to suffer any delay.
Bots don't have to succeed to win, its a game of percentages. and even with low odds of success they can still win though shear time and numbers.
DH enchants got me enough RP to get just about everything to epic in two months anyways.
this game is going nowhere faster
I guess if people are new here and struggling, they have no idea of how great this game used to be and haven't had to watch what worked in the past get slowly stripped away module by module. The way the game got into this state isn't the fault of any players, exploiters included. Cryptic took one thing at a time away from the game that provided AD until Leadership was the last man standing. They've successfully boiled us, like frogs. Obsequious forum rats have made their job that much easier, too.
New guy, your 24K refined is going to go straight to boons if you know what's good for your toon. This will go on for months. You will be poor forever. No Lostmauth or Valindra artifact lottery, either. Those things will drop in price so far they'll become worthless compared to the fixed price items you'll need to progress. So smug "play the game now" comments need not apply here.
Cheaper Zen isn't going to help you. Even if you put real money in, it's going to give you multitudes less in return. The ZAX isn't going to help with bottomed out prices because your AD is going to be so hard to get, you'll have to buy GMOPs with it, not bags or pets or anything except maybe wards.
Leadership right now = Free to Play. Taking that away won't do anything positive for the game, but might make those who have been too lazy to rank up Leadership happy that their indolence has finally paid off on something. Bringing experienced players with old investments down to nub levels of income won't level the playing field. Are you guys playing on one toon only? Never tried another class? Think, people. This is bad.
Deathstroke to PUGging, IMHO...
> So my question is this. Was leadership a fun aspect of the game for people? Did people honestly enjoy the "cookie clicker" aspect of leadership? Or was it the results that made people happy?
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> Obviously the results. Personally, I've always enjoyed the PvP (though they've been making it increasingly dysfunctional with a lack of support and care over recent mods) and found most of the PvE content beyond tedious -- so much so that clicking through Leadership actually annoyed me a lot less. Other people obviously have different preferences. In either case, Leadership was a beneficial arrangement that allowed people to pursue the content they enjoyed and still earn an income. The changes they've presented will essentially force everyone to do the same content grind to earn maximum AD -- forcing people to do things they don't want to do, if that is PvP, dungeons or skirmishes.
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> "Cookie clicking" is less un-enjoyable than the only source of AD being grinding through content you don't enjoy. In other words, do you feel the game would be more fun for people if:
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> A) Players were essentially required to run 20-30 or more Leadership toons to be able to play the game
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> or
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> b) Playing the game was more rewarding, and provided a more clear path to advancement
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> The answer to this is obviously B, but that's just hypothetical -- the history is abundantly clear on this. Once they nerf some economic aspect of the game, they've NEVER done a tweak that really compensated players; at best they've offered the occasional weak band-aid. Because A is the status quo. If the planned leadership changes were reverted, it would essentially require players to continue to play "cookie clicker" for most of their time, in the hopes that what little slivers of time they had not managing a leadership army was more fun.
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> Which reflects on just how poor much of their current content is. They gutted the game of dungeons, shut down the Foundry, have left PvP with several dysfunctional elements and very poor balance, kept messing with solo content in wild difficult swings, added a stronghold grinding mode which essentially amounts to "play all the old content more," and they've been continually eradicating the actual feeling of being rewarded for doing things -- from dungeons giving nice drops of set items to giving uninteresting bound items and minor RP, PvP giving out less glory (and always being less rewarding than PvE), and now Leadership being gutted. Biased polls aside, that's the real choice we're looking at here.
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> The reality is that we're not looking at a "choice"; we're looking at what we get. And what the developers give us. Looking at their history, people have been repeating these ideas forever. The actual actions taken by the developers just show that they're not on the same page, probably not even the same planet, as players when it comes to this.
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> If they wanted to do this *right*, they would have either:
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> 1) gradually reduced Leadership rewards while increasing rewards from other sources, softening the blow.
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> 2) introduced a much stronger reward structure while burning down Leadership (and doing an actual retooling of what Leadership *does* while they're at it, not just removing the AD and leaving everything else as-is, a true hack job).
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> However, they were apparently satisfied with just doing their hack job on Leadership and leaving it at that, while not *actually* increasing the rewards for playing. If they had *actually* given some increased rewards and *actually* done a proper rework of Leadership, it might not have been such a terrible thing.
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> All they are doing, however, is feeding people stick. There is no carrot. This is the essential problem. Make-believing and dreaming about what the reward system *should* be like is fine and all, but it would be better to stick to the reality of what they're actually *doing*. Until they actually come up with an adequate and functional reward system, they should leave the current less-than-ideal (but still better than what we'll have once this rolls out) system in place. They don't need to starve players for a few months while copy-pasting "we're listening"/"we're monitoring the situation" before increasing RAD rewards by 300 per day or something equally "significant".
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> The worst part of it all, however, was how blatantly insulting the developers were about it -- pushing the same old bot story when it's more transparent than glass what their real intentions are.
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> If they had actually intended to reward playing more, they would have included something along with this Leadership gimping. They included *nothing*.
Lol, you know things are bad when CWs start fighting each other haha
That ridiculous lowish 5m AD?
There were backlogs from more then 21m AD in the past, and no one had a problem with that...
And the 5m AD backlog only took a day of 2x RP to melt away.
Insert more artifact equipment probably coming with Underdark, and a 2x RP event per month, there would be no real backlog anymore.
And btw. why would anyone continue to buy ZEN with real money and then exchange it to AD for a lot less then 500 AD per ZEN?
The players might rather start selling something from the ZEN shop for AD again directly, or they start buying from botters, that can provide much more AD for a lot less real money.
There're no GMs in game, so there is no fear of risking a bann by buying AD from botters.
So instead of fighting botters, the Devs just made it even easier for botters to sell their AD to players.
And then you will start seeing some really gigantic backlogs on the ZAX...
There should be a clear roadmap to huge changes in game i.e. as already mentioned the replacement for Leadership AD generation should already be tested and on the preview server.... not an ad-hock slash/hack job that reeks of hasty implementation.
This change is being implemented badly - anyone seriously can see this.
Frankly, this looks like an attack on solo players who do not dungeon/skirmish/PvP and have leadership maxed. This is every bit as bad a design as the class paragons - where you only have one way to play if you wish to be competive.
This is forcing people into another one way of playing the game - breaking the strengths that Neverwinter used to have.
PvE is this what you do in this game immediately after creating a character. Neverwinter has always been primarily a pve game with optional pvp. People who dislike pve should not play this game, especially strongholds, which is very much focused on pve.
At best they made chances equal to when neveremeber dailies existed. At worst, with a big chunk of AD generation is removed, a lot of people, especially casuals will be harmed.
The counter argument is play your alts and the counter argument to that is gearing and maintain alts cost AD. You don't actually improve your AD per character threshold with playing alts. The game has significant AD sinks, they are so severe that a normal player, on one character cannot keep up with the progression of the game. In the old days you could grind gear, etc and sell it on the AH to people paying RL $ to progress faster in the game. This is how we made AD outside of the daily AD refinement structure. When that was taken away people turned to leadership farms because the investment was far less than equipping/maintaining a playable alt and the return was comparable.
It also seems that some think their multitude of clicks in combat makes that a more "honorable" way of earning AD than by utilizing a profession. The reality is that there are, and should be, multiple ways to play and enjoy any game. Some people love playing Auction Houses and seeing how much of an economy they can control, others prefer crafting/professions, x percentage prefers to play solo, x percentage prefers to grind dungeons repeatedly with guilds, and etc. All of these are valid play styles and none is better than the other. As individuals we all have different tastes that we may, or may not, share with others.
Having paid my gaming dues by playing 40+ hours per week the first 5 years of playing MMO's, I liked the fact that I could progress nicely in this game with only 5-10 hrs of time investment per week. My 2 toons, out of 12, that have rank 21 leadership took almost 10 months to get there. Don't give me this <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> that the ability to gain large amounts of AD through Leadership is anything that easy for anyone starting this game from scratch. After 10 months of game time I only have a smattering of green Leadership assets and find it very presumptuous to assume that everyone who has leadership factories is cranking out an insane amount of AD for the time they have put into that profession.
The sad reality is that if the game managers had perma-banned game exploiters along the way, and fixed the bugs, they would have grew a much larger player base...which would have generated more income with more people buying Zen.
Now, Assuming you go all in on experience, in order to rush to level 25 Leadership the fastest, I think you're looking at 60 days-ish (checking it twice a day on average) to get to level 25. After that, a level 25 toon can easily generate 12k AD/day if only checked one. Or 84k a week.
So last time I added to my farm it was only 4 more Leadership toons, and that was in December. So I invested about 700k AD into those toons. After 60 days, we're cranking out about 500k AD/week with those new toons. And they've been working for 8.5 months, or 30 weeks. So 34 times 500k is 17 million AD. From an upfront investment of 700k. And that's in about 10 months.
All together, I have 25 leadership toons at level 25. So over 2 million AD/week. Took me about 20 minutes a day to check all those toons. So about 2.5 hours a week...or earning over 800k AD/hr AD.
And you're talking about NOT being able to crank out insane amounts of AD?
I think you're wrong. Very, very wrong.
Which is why, despite losing that income (but gaining my sanity back), I can clearly see how Leadership farms, even run legitimately, are a huge problem for the economy.