Fighting the bots eh?

canmann

2000+ Ghost Story instances.... yup fight them bots.....

Leadership change fixed them right up

oliboyph

LOL

googlymoogly22

Yea, leadership was never the problem to begin with; it was in-game botters farming enchants, potions, etc etc. The real reason behind this was to make you spend cash on zen. What's funny is that all they've done is further encourage botting, encourage buying AD via 3rd party websites, and make individuals leave their game; an intelligent bunch we have running this game.

regenerde

Yeah, and they advertise in Neverdeath Graveyard too now... looks like the botters are really afraid of getting their accounts banned, right?

wentris

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

tripsofthrymr

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

A key difference being, many legitimate players built up Leadership fully following the rules of the game. Now, those players that invested in that part of the game had that investment yanked away.

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

psyb3rtr011

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

So, instead of removing the AD from Leadership, limit the number of characters per Account that can do crafting. One per class is a good number to start with for instance...

tripsofthrymr said:

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

A key difference being, many legitimate players built up Leadership fully following the rules of the game. Now, those players that invested in that part of the game had that investment yanked away.

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Especially those of us who have spent months upgrading our Leaders to Hero's, Adventurers and Man-At-Arms with real money and Mountains of AD... As of a week ago:

Man-at-Arms were over 30K each
Adventurers were over 150K each
Hero's were 800K each

Currently my 8 characters have something like 19 Hero's, 20 Adventurers and 18 Man-At-Arms.... Or over 19 Million AD, and two years time, all but wasted.

tripsofthrymr

canmann said:

2000+ Ghost Story instances.... yup fight them bots.....

Leadership change fixed them right up

You mean these guys?

urabask

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

IKR leadership getting nerfed is making it so much easier for everyone to buy GMoPs.

mynaam

Neverwinter feels like a ghost town after the nerf. I have not seen Wod with more than 5 instances. IWD is empty the only instances still with people is those with lower levels. Heres hoping they don't leave too

obsiddia

Yeah I gave up reporting them when they swarmed the Arcane Reservoir.
The constant chatter of their clerics going in and out was maddening.

Luckily that was fixed... in that the graveyard was easier.

How bout you can't keep going in and out of a mission's gate????

regenerde

Botters will allways find a way...

demonmonger

Bots are obvious and everywhere.... yet astral diamonds get nerfed.
Why not just have the CM go around and bot test people + ban

wentris

tripsofthrymr said:

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

A key difference being, many legitimate players built up Leadership fully following the rules of the game. Now, those players that invested in that part of the game had that investment yanked away.

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Yeah, but... leadership in state it was just had to go. I thought it were indeed some bots generating a lot of AD through it, but no - right now even when Im talking in game with my friends it turns out almost everybody had leadership alts/armies and the large overflow of AD could be caused by users as much as bots. There is still the tasks which gives you unbound reso stones - it gives less income, but you arent left with nothing. I understand the pain of regular users, who built armies just because the inflation caused other in-game wealth sources almost worthless and there was no other way to progress, but seemingly leadership caused a lot of this trouble and it was a loop - more AD in economy -> need even more AD (leadership alts) to progress -> more AD in market. However look at it from perspective of people that didnt do leadership - prices of many items almost halved, zen is easily accessible and its price went down drastically (WAY more than after gateway block). Yes, items I farm and sell become cheaper as well, but without the AD overflow they are worth relatively more than before.

Another important point - look from devs point of view. They wanted ZEN:AD ratio to be at most 1:500. Now look at Zen cost in $. Now see how much AD leadership army could get weekly. Convert it to Zen and then $s. You see the problem? Im not sure but I think leadership alt could give you 20k AD/day, or something like that, right? 10 alts gave you 1.4kk AD weekly. Thats 2800 zen. 30 alts - 8400 zen. 50 - 14000 zen and so on. I havent seen this argument brought up too often in discussion (if ever) but from Devs point of view this was one of most important (if not the most important) reason they had to kill it - as it killed their income. You could literally get ad/zen worth hundreds of $s weekly

kemi1984

wentris said:

tripsofthrymr said:

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

A key difference being, many legitimate players built up Leadership fully following the rules of the game. Now, those players that invested in that part of the game had that investment yanked away.

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Yeah, but... leadership in state it was just had to go. I thought it were indeed some bots generating a lot of AD through it, but no - right now even when Im talking in game with my friends it turns out almost everybody had leadership alts/armies and the large overflow of AD could be caused by users as much as bots. There is still the tasks which gives you unbound reso stones - it gives less income, but you arent left with nothing. I understand the pain of regular users, who built armies just because the inflation caused other in-game wealth sources almost worthless and there was no other way to progress, but seemingly leadership caused a lot of this trouble and it was a loop - more AD in economy -> need even more AD (leadership alts) to progress -> more AD in market. However look at it from perspective of people that didnt do leadership - prices of many items almost halved, zen is easily accessible and its price went down drastically (WAY more than after gateway block). Yes, items I farm and sell become cheaper as well, but without the AD overflow they are worth relatively more than before.

Another important point - look from devs point of view. They wanted ZEN:AD ratio to be at most 1:500. Now look at Zen cost in $. Now see how much AD leadership army could get weekly. Convert it to Zen and then $s. You see the problem? Im not sure but I think leadership alt could give you 20k AD/day, or something like that, right? 10 alts gave you 1.4kk AD weekly. Thats 2800 zen. 30 alts - 8400 zen. 50 - 14000 zen and so on. I havent seen this argument brought up too often in discussion (if ever) but from Devs point of view this was one of most important (if not the most important) reason they had to kill it - as it killed their income. You could literally get ad/zen worth hundreds of $s weekly

And the dev's need to realize that most of us do understand LS had to go. But at the same time they HAVE to give us a way to earn those diamonds somehow. Throwing those marginal incomes from running dungeons is an insult (I got 140 RAD from Traven in ECC yesterday, all the joy!".
And please don;t forget about solo folks, that only want to run campaign tasks. They have to get their stuff from somewhere. And even if they can buy the gear from the campaign vendor - they need AD's to get their enchants etc.

We all know that shitloads of LS alts could generate shitloads of AD's, thats not a secret and known thing since day 1.
Give us, folks that spend months leveling the proof to get bound/unbound (maybe a 50-50 ratio) RP stones. That way LS won't be useless and help the beginners to earn AD from playing solo content and dungeons/skirms/pvp.

But no, wait...let's just implement HAMSTER and "look into the data". I tell you, I will never stop quoting these stupid words, ever.

psyb3rtr011

wentris said:

tripsofthrymr said:

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

A key difference being, many legitimate players built up Leadership fully following the rules of the game. Now, those players that invested in that part of the game had that investment yanked away.

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Yeah, but... leadership in state it was just had to go. I thought it were indeed some bots generating a lot of AD through it, but no - right now even when Im talking in game with my friends it turns out almost everybody had leadership alts/armies and the large overflow of AD could be caused by users as much as bots. There is still the tasks which gives you unbound reso stones - it gives less income, but you arent left with nothing. I understand the pain of regular users, who built armies just because the inflation caused other in-game wealth sources almost worthless and there was no other way to progress, but seemingly leadership caused a lot of this trouble and it was a loop - more AD in economy -> need even more AD (leadership alts) to progress -> more AD in market. However look at it from perspective of people that didnt do leadership - prices of many items almost halved, zen is easily accessible and its price went down drastically (WAY more than after gateway block). Yes, items I farm and sell become cheaper as well, but without the AD overflow they are worth relatively more than before.

Another important point - look from devs point of view. They wanted ZEN:AD ratio to be at most 1:500. Now look at Zen cost in $. Now see how much AD leadership army could get weekly. Convert it to Zen and then $s. You see the problem? Im not sure but I think leadership alt could give you 20k AD/day, or something like that, right? 10 alts gave you 1.4kk AD weekly. Thats 2800 zen. 30 alts - 8400 zen. 50 - 14000 zen and so on. I havent seen this argument brought up too often in discussion (if ever) but from Devs point of view this was one of most important (if not the most important) reason they had to kill it - as it killed their income. You could literally get ad/zen worth hundreds of $s weekly

So, instead of finding a way to reduce the influence of the Leadership Armies, and still provide people a means to get some AD without having to spend hours a day waiting in queues for skirmishes, running through dungeons that more often fail than succeed, compete in PvP despite it being broken and many just not even interested in it, and doing a few Foundries every day, while also doing the Invocations and dailies for Stronghold.... All in a hour or two a day... They get rid of it altogether.

Riiiiiight!

They could have easily just limited the number of Characters per Account that can Craft. One per Class is a good start......

Problem solved.....

faredawg1

Its not the removal of AD from leadership tha's gunna kill it. Its the removal of the daily AD quests and the bonus AD hours. Sure the people who were using the leadership thing will be hurt more, but it is kinda of an exploit, assuming they somehow were pooling all that daily AD onto 1 character. I mean exploit as in not being used as intended. But the truth is, more people WERE NOT using Leadership that way then were. But the removal of the daily AD quests and the AD bonus hours are truely the death of the 24K a day refine. The method in place now only allows a player to farm 7200 from dungeons, 7200 from skirmishes and 4800 from PVP matches, and that only adds up to 19,200, well below the 24K a day. Even if you add in the 3K or so from the praying, your still below that 24K a day. But thats not the worst part. They say you can farm that much from Dungeons, skirmishes and PVP matches, but they arent laying out the math. The first 2 runs of each give u a bonus of 2000 AD which seems cool. BUT, after the bonus AD is yours, you drop down to about 200 AD per run, and THEN it diminishes from there all the way down to 50 a run. But for the sake of easy math, lets say it didnt diminish. Let's say it gave 200 AD for every run after the 2K from the first bonus runs (it doesnt though, it diminishes down to as low as 50 per run). If I'm remembering right, you get 2K ish for the first 2 runs of each. So lets say thats 4500 after the first 2 Dungeon or Skirmish runs. Whats that leave to reach the max? 3300 to max in each? Divide 3300 by 200. It's 16.5 runs. Then add in the 2 runs where you got bonus AD, that makes 18.5 and then lets round up just to be nice to the Devs math. Thats 19 runs of a dungeon, in 1 day, to Max out at 7,200 AD. Then you get to do it again for Skirmishes, 19 more runs to get another 7,200 AD for a total of 14,400 AD. AFTER 38 frigin runs!!!! IF each run took only 10 mins, thats 380 mins!! 6.33 HOURS to make 14,400 AD!! Almost 10K SHORT of the daily 24K refine limit. And remember, YOU DON'T GET 200 ADD for each run after the initial 2 bonus runs. It starts there and diminishes down to 50. So that will probably take it up to, I don't know, 50-60 runs to max out just for the dungeons, and another 50-60 runs to max out in Skirmishes. All that for 14,400 AD. But before, your would get the AD from the daily quest, and if you were smart, you'd do them during the bonus hours, and get extra AD for each run. So you could max out after 1 hour of Skirmishes during it's bonus hour, and 1 dungeon run during its bonus hour, or at least come close adding in the praying AD. You may need to take the PVP Victory quest and win 1 match to get all the way there. But what was that? 3-4 hours MAX?? You would still have time to do campaigns or farming AND do it again on another toon, assuming your not a casual player. That's all gone now. Now, if you can somhow earn 19K a day, you will have had to play ALL DAY doing only Dungeons, Skirmishes and PVP matches.....and you STILL wont reach your max refine of 24K a day. Thats gunna be the real big deal IMHO. Im sure most of you have a surplus of rough AD's in your bag right now, so u may not notice this for a few days/weeks. But once that runs out, and your only refining what you made yesterday, its gunna start to hurt, like wher eis the Preperation H kinda hurt. So all the people who are leaving because of all the time and money they sank into Leadership profession, you wont be the only ones leaving. It may take a few weeks, but once this sets in, and assuming the Devs dont make some major changes to this total screw up, when people can't reach their refine limit each day but still need reagents to upgrade, or AD's for campaign tasks, or even to be able to buy ID scrolls for the gear they get as drops and they can't anymore, MANY more people will finally see the colossal disaster this decision has caused to NWO. I hope all of you are happy with your current state of gear, because most of you will not be upgrading any further anytime soon.

You might say "Well, I'l ljust buy some Zen and sell it for AD's" Well yesterday, it sold for 500 AD for 1 Zen, which broke down to bascially $20 USD for 1 million AD. Today, right now, that is down to 430 AD for 1 Zen. And thats the first day. How low will it drop tomorrow? Next week? Next month?? I don't know the number, but I do know it will just get lower and lower. So if you have ever bought Zen before and sold it for AD's, be prepared for your Real Life dollars to not go anywhere near as far as they did for you yesterday. Then you might say "well, the prices will drop because of this" And I THINK you'd be right. But after how long? And IF you are right, and after that long of this disgracful change in the most important resource in the game, how many players will still be around to see it?

I'm telling you, Leadership is THE LEAST of our AD problems.

Oh yeah, and we are still being server attacked. Can't get on right now.

tripsofthrymr

wentris said:

Yeah, but... leadership in state it was just had to go. I thought it were indeed some bots generating a lot of AD through it, but no - right now even when Im talking in game with my friends it turns out almost everybody had leadership alts/armies and the large overflow of AD could be caused by users as much as bots.

AD should never have been in leadership. However, it was. People invested real money and real time because of that.

There were many good suggestions for modifying leadership to still make it rewarding for a normal player, while making it less so for bot armies and unusable by bots. AD has been in the game for 2 years. It would not have killed things to spend 4 weeks implementing some of these suggestions first, rather than just removing the AD.

Additionally, zero thought was put into modifying leadership. There is a 4 hour task with virtually the same rewards as a 24 hour task, except the 4 hour task awards more XP. There is no plan to compensate players, who played fairly, for the character slots and assets they purchased if they no longer find leadership rewarding (it takes LOT of time to run those characters!)

Simply yanking all of that investment away without any thought for the players involved is disheartening. Many players will quit (continuing a trend you can see in the Steam data). You will have a very well functioning economy with very few players.

Cryptic always makes drastic changes to the game. A series of well-considered, well communicated, slow changes to stabilize things would have been much better received. And the lie claiming this is a "bot issue"? Nobody believes that. Don't lie to your customers.

wentris

kemi1984 said:

wentris said:

tripsofthrymr said:

wentris said:

I dont know how about you but I was way more affected by uncontrollable AD generation, rather than potions, profession materials, even enchantments - not saying GS bots are good, but they have less impact on overall game, than leadership armies.

A key difference being, many legitimate players built up Leadership fully following the rules of the game. Now, those players that invested in that part of the game had that investment yanked away.

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Yeah, but... leadership in state it was just had to go. I thought it were indeed some bots generating a lot of AD through it, but no - right now even when Im talking in game with my friends it turns out almost everybody had leadership alts/armies and the large overflow of AD could be caused by users as much as bots. There is still the tasks which gives you unbound reso stones - it gives less income, but you arent left with nothing. I understand the pain of regular users, who built armies just because the inflation caused other in-game wealth sources almost worthless and there was no other way to progress, but seemingly leadership caused a lot of this trouble and it was a loop - more AD in economy -> need even more AD (leadership alts) to progress -> more AD in market. However look at it from perspective of people that didnt do leadership - prices of many items almost halved, zen is easily accessible and its price went down drastically (WAY more than after gateway block). Yes, items I farm and sell become cheaper as well, but without the AD overflow they are worth relatively more than before.

Another important point - look from devs point of view. They wanted ZEN:AD ratio to be at most 1:500. Now look at Zen cost in $. Now see how much AD leadership army could get weekly. Convert it to Zen and then $s. You see the problem? Im not sure but I think leadership alt could give you 20k AD/day, or something like that, right? 10 alts gave you 1.4kk AD weekly. Thats 2800 zen. 30 alts - 8400 zen. 50 - 14000 zen and so on. I havent seen this argument brought up too often in discussion (if ever) but from Devs point of view this was one of most important (if not the most important) reason they had to kill it - as it killed their income. You could literally get ad/zen worth hundreds of $s weekly

And the dev's need to realize that most of us do understand LS had to go. But at the same time they HAVE to give us a way to earn those diamonds somehow. Throwing those marginal incomes from running dungeons is an insult (I got 140 RAD from Traven in ECC yesterday, all the joy!".
And please don;t forget about solo folks, that only want to run campaign tasks. They have to get their stuff from somewhere. And even if they can buy the gear from the campaign vendor - they need AD's to get their enchants etc.

We all know that shitloads of LS alts could generate shitloads of AD's, thats not a secret and known thing since day 1.
Give us, folks that spend months leveling the proof to get bound/unbound (maybe a 50-50 ratio) RP stones. That way LS won't be useless and help the beginners to earn AD from playing solo content and dungeons/skirms/pvp.

But no, wait...let's just implement HAMSTER and "look into the data". I tell you, I will never stop quoting these stupid words, ever.

I agree. Many AD sinks were introduced to fight the inflation caused by growing armies (on side note: this was another problem - leadership armies were growing through modules). They arent needed anymore, however there is still a lot of AD in market which has to go before sinks go. The question now is - how much of it has to go for economy to be balanced? There are many variables in that equation that probably nobody can even roughly estimate that, not even talking about exact values - including the devs. I think - I hope - they have to wait as well to see the outcome before doing anything - how players will adapt (without the doomsaying that everybody will leave, as it obviously is not true, despite players declarations made in anger).

regenerde

Well, the main problem right now is, the botters are growing in numbers, while normal players are leaving.

walk2k

here's what I don't get.

I was looking at this (banned) web site yesterday, they scan the AH and build a big list of the top botters.
There are single accounts there with over 500,000 items listed in the AH! (all stacks of 99 rank 4 and rank 5 enchants)!!

IF they can build a list like this, WHY can't PW? Just scan the AH, look who is botting and BAN THEM!!

silverkelt

Wonderful, but even as a legit player, I will admit, the only way to really progress in game was due to the bots supplying our RP..

now if you could remove the need for RP.. great, even better. Ban them all.

You cant have one without the other. They literally CUSTOM made this game for the bots, offering only grind fest after grind fest. Instead of truly fixing the issue (make fun DDS you can do with your guildies and more balance matches in pvp) the game was much better in mod 1 and 2, then it was ever now with about 80% less grind involved.

ITS not mistake that dread ring is always everyone's favorite by a majority in every poll.. it takes so much less time to do it and its a fun little 5 min trip a day.

Compare that to mod 4s ridiculous 2 hour grinds on dragons to proceed daily. mod 4 and 6 is always on everyone's hate list.. as either too broken or too grindy.

fogtripper

tripsofthrymr said:

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Counterpoint: those without leadership armies were faced with artificially inflated prices due to said armies. So yeah, they are upset with the leadership armies and what they did to the economy.

urabask

fogtripper said:

tripsofthrymr said:

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Counterpoint: those without leadership armies were faced with artificially inflated prices due to said armies. So yeah, they are upset with the leadership armies and what they did to the economy.

This wasn't solely due to leadership armies. Prices are still going to be inflated beyond what a normal player can earn even when the economy finally settles. Heck this change hits those players harder because before they could at least sell RP to earn their GMoPs.

That was like 2-5 dragons runs a GMoP. Now you're looking at more than twice that. And prices on the AH dropped but not enough to help anyone. An elol set will still set you back 1.2 million, personalized rings/gemmed pants/shirts will still set you back 160k, greater marks still go for 30-50k. Pretty much all the prices still make 24k a day look like pennies. And they won't drop much further.

tripsofthrymr

fogtripper said:

Counterpoint: those without leadership armies were faced with artificially inflated prices due to said armies. So yeah, they are upset with the leadership armies and what they did to the economy.

Sure, the same way that people who surf all day are upset at "that prick driving a Porsche", who happens to work hard to earn it. Some people chose to run content all day, nothing wrong with that. Others chose to spend a lot of time leveling up leadership (2-3 months per toon) instead of running content during that time.

Leadership has been open to everyone, on an equal footing, since the game started. There is nothing fair about removing it's key benefit just because some "have" and some "have not". Same argument as calling people "pay to win" because they actually spend money on the game.

I'm all for a rework (there are lots of good, fair, workable suggestions on the forums), but Cryptic simply took an axe to the whole thing.

fogtripper

urabask said:

fogtripper said:

tripsofthrymr said:

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Counterpoint: those without leadership armies were faced with artificially inflated prices due to said armies. So yeah, they are upset with the leadership armies and what they did to the economy.

This wasn't solely due to leadership armies. Prices are still going to be inflated beyond what a normal player can earn even when the economy finally settles.

Cryptic-set items, probably. Player-set items though? Well it SHOULD become a buyers market. If the former are not lowered over time, Cryptic may as well have tattoo'd "Money Grab" on their foreheads.

urabask

fogtripper said:

urabask said:

fogtripper said:

tripsofthrymr said:

If you had spent months leveling leadership (by hand - not using bots!), you would be upset too.

Counterpoint: those without leadership armies were faced with artificially inflated prices due to said armies. So yeah, they are upset with the leadership armies and what they did to the economy.

This wasn't solely due to leadership armies. Prices are still going to be inflated beyond what a normal player can earn even when the economy finally settles.

Cryptic-set items, probably. Player-set items though? Well it SHOULD become a buyers market. If the former are not lowered over time, Cryptic may as well have tattoo'd "Money Grab" on their foreheads.

There's enough AD floating around that it will never happen.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

sasageru

Everyones focusing on the lack of AD from leadership now. Honestly, I think removing it was a good decision. As already stated, plenty of players were using multiple accounts with multiple characters just for the purpose of farming AD from leaership - thats not playing, thats barely better than botting.

So, change it so that we earn ad from dungeons/skirmishes/pvp - awesome, but the real problem here? They've capped it. You can't earn above a cap (which is in no way generous), so you're still not being rewarded for playing and with the loss of potentialy hundreds of thousdands of AD a day from leadership armies, people are going to be peeved.

If they remove the cap, then probem solved - bots can't take advantage of dungeons or pvp or the lvl 70 skirmishes because it's too easy to get killed without intelligent interaction. And pvp, you don't get rewards if you dont score any points - so again, bots can't really do much with it. So why cap it?

bittynation

As we all should know there are two types of botters. Professionals that want to make $$$ and players that want to make gearing up easier. Leadership was way to prevalent among the players which is where the game makes it's money and if the players already have enough AD why would they need to buy it. There is only a few dozen professional botters, but they have many many accounts running simultaneously, that's how they are able to accumulate the thousands of items they sell everyday. The average player botter would not be able to come anywhere near that, to difficult and time consuming. The devs want to set the bar high enough to make it difficult for a normal player to bot and leadership was way to easy as far as that goes. Life will go on in Neverwinter until players find another easy way to bot/exploit the game and then the bar will be readjusted.