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The Human Bot
instynctive
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,885 Arc User
I've been giving game stuff a lot of thought lately, specifically the bot issues.
As far as I know, bots are simple programs that are capable of performing repetitive tasks over and over again. While running the Harper Boward dailies for the third time yesterday, I realized that is the core of this game: repetitive tasks.
I do the same exact thing every day. Log on, invoke/profession, gather daily VIP rewards, buy a Celestial coffer if I have enough coins.. rinse and repeat that times 8 characters. Once I hit the 45-minute invoke, I'll start taking quests.. run a dungeon or two, bang out SH dailies (I save them up over the course of a week and do them all in one sitting), grind for whatever campaign currency is needed most to upgrade the SH. Etc.
When I'm in the campaign areas, I do the dailies in the exact same order every time... I have a "system" that minimizes the time required to get everything done. I ignore the Fairy HAMSTER Trails (to steal a phrase), and roads and paths and jump off cliffs and run through forests for the shortest distance between tasks. I can run all the lairs with my eyes close (not literally, of course, but that's something most people can likely relate to).
Sadly, the most recent injection of creativity has been the Salvatore quests.. even taking my time and exploring, I was finished with those in an hour. And while I'm honestly not a huge Salvatore fan, I was expecting... more. However, I think they were a step in the right direction. Making the new skirmishes "replayable" is a step in the right direction as well, although after going through them 4 or 5 times, they are really no longer "replayable". At least they aren't to me.
A quick tangent, that is related: while going through boxes of stuff that I've collected over the years, I came across an old paperback "choose your own adventure" book. I smiled as I brought it out of the box, flipping through the pages and reminiscing at the drawings inside it. It then hit me: I must have read that book 20 times, and it was different every single time. Sure, the plot lines were simplistic and whatnot, but that book kept me busy for a week, instead of maybe a couple hours that it would normally take to read a book with that many pages.
"Choose your own adventure".
The NPCs in the SH are only too happy to point out that we're "adventurers". Hell, the Master of Coins has even invented "adventurey" words. But ever since "endgame", I feel less and less like an "adventurer" and more like a Human Bot. Endless repetitive tasks, being performed every minute that I'm in-game.
Every quest that is given to us is linear. "Go here, do this. Go here, do this. Go here, do this. Congrats, you won, here's your piece of green gear and potato." Even the Foundry Editor is limited to linear quests (yes, one can make "side quests" and other work-arounds, but if you have to use 4 or 5 copies of the same NPC, that starts getting tedious to keep track of). And every single quest is (and has been throughout the game) nothing more than being someone's errandboy.
I've said it before.. Cryptic is sitting on a game that could truly raise the bar on MMOs. Shatter the expectations and status quo. Bring the feeling of tabletop AD&D into the game with the creativity and expansiveness of unlimited adventure, exploration and riches. More "chosoe your own adventure" and less grind. But how?
As far as I know, bots are simple programs that are capable of performing repetitive tasks over and over again. While running the Harper Boward dailies for the third time yesterday, I realized that is the core of this game: repetitive tasks.
I do the same exact thing every day. Log on, invoke/profession, gather daily VIP rewards, buy a Celestial coffer if I have enough coins.. rinse and repeat that times 8 characters. Once I hit the 45-minute invoke, I'll start taking quests.. run a dungeon or two, bang out SH dailies (I save them up over the course of a week and do them all in one sitting), grind for whatever campaign currency is needed most to upgrade the SH. Etc.
When I'm in the campaign areas, I do the dailies in the exact same order every time... I have a "system" that minimizes the time required to get everything done. I ignore the Fairy HAMSTER Trails (to steal a phrase), and roads and paths and jump off cliffs and run through forests for the shortest distance between tasks. I can run all the lairs with my eyes close (not literally, of course, but that's something most people can likely relate to).
Sadly, the most recent injection of creativity has been the Salvatore quests.. even taking my time and exploring, I was finished with those in an hour. And while I'm honestly not a huge Salvatore fan, I was expecting... more. However, I think they were a step in the right direction. Making the new skirmishes "replayable" is a step in the right direction as well, although after going through them 4 or 5 times, they are really no longer "replayable". At least they aren't to me.
A quick tangent, that is related: while going through boxes of stuff that I've collected over the years, I came across an old paperback "choose your own adventure" book. I smiled as I brought it out of the box, flipping through the pages and reminiscing at the drawings inside it. It then hit me: I must have read that book 20 times, and it was different every single time. Sure, the plot lines were simplistic and whatnot, but that book kept me busy for a week, instead of maybe a couple hours that it would normally take to read a book with that many pages.
"Choose your own adventure".
The NPCs in the SH are only too happy to point out that we're "adventurers". Hell, the Master of Coins has even invented "adventurey" words. But ever since "endgame", I feel less and less like an "adventurer" and more like a Human Bot. Endless repetitive tasks, being performed every minute that I'm in-game.
Every quest that is given to us is linear. "Go here, do this. Go here, do this. Go here, do this. Congrats, you won, here's your piece of green gear and potato." Even the Foundry Editor is limited to linear quests (yes, one can make "side quests" and other work-arounds, but if you have to use 4 or 5 copies of the same NPC, that starts getting tedious to keep track of). And every single quest is (and has been throughout the game) nothing more than being someone's errandboy.
I've said it before.. Cryptic is sitting on a game that could truly raise the bar on MMOs. Shatter the expectations and status quo. Bring the feeling of tabletop AD&D into the game with the creativity and expansiveness of unlimited adventure, exploration and riches. More "chosoe your own adventure" and less grind. But how?
- Randomized dungeon layouts. I'm not just talking the queued dungeons, but also the lairs. If Diablo could do it, there is absolutely no reason a game as powerful as this can't do it.
- Randomized mob placement. It doesn't matter where I am... I know exactly what's around the corner. So the Cult of the Black Onyx Dragon Cult Horde are all like "surprise!" and I'm all like "you're dead already". I find myself fondly recalling the old days when there was a lot of careful approaches to intersections and "what's behind this door?". These days, The Human Bot is in control.. same thing, same powers, same attack sequence.
- I like the Hammerstone Queen thing. "Hey look at this curiosity! Oh cool, it's sending me somewhere different! Cool!" Sadly, even that has become a task for The Human Bot. Run in, kill everything in the last chamber, run out. And while it's not a "choose your own adventure" thing, it's somewhat of a step in the right direction.
- The problem with Hammerstone is that it's just one thing. Find the thing, run in, kill everything, run out. That's a "side quest". But to utilize it as an example of "choose your own adventure":
- Run in, kill everything and.. oops, hey.. what's this? A drop that is randomized, that's having me go somewhere (I know I've already complained about this in the past, but bear with me)... maybe it's a "oh, secret entrance behind the forge that leads to a thing that randomly goes to this spot or that spot or..". Perhaps nothing drops (which would be rare). Perhaps the Queen drops a purse of sorts that has something in it, and that something needs to be returned to the rightful owner in Caer-Konig, which unlocks a different quest that does whatever and whatever.
Yes, I'm being vague on purpose. But I think most should understand where I'm going with this.
- The problem with Hammerstone is that it's just one thing. Find the thing, run in, kill everything, run out. That's a "side quest". But to utilize it as an example of "choose your own adventure":
- Give options during quests. "Here's the objective. Do you want to go to Place A or Place B? At Place A do you want to do this or this? At place B do you want to do this or go to Place C or do this?" Two becomes four, becomes sixteen, becomes thirty-two. Then, as the objective comes closer, start whittling down the options: thirty-two becomes sixteen, becomes four, becomes two. While yes, there will still be repeats, it won't be nearly as many... and a player could run that quest dozens of times, or perhaps hundreds of times, before getting an exact repeat.
- Hell.. things don't even need to be whittled down.. just keep branching the quests out.. 32 choices become 64, become 128. Quest parts could even be flagged on accounts so that they are unable to be done again (until they've all been done). That would make Neverwinter a completely different game for everyone.
Further in this vein of thought, if, for whatever reason, non-linear quests are impossible, simply have the NPC or the drop (like the Hammerstone Queen example) choose a random path for the character to follow. The game randomly chooses Place A or Place B, and at Place A it chooses this or this... At place B do it chooses this or go to Place C or do this. There. Linear quest that's masked as non-linear. And have the same results: complete replayability. - "Endgame" drops and gear and stuff. How many people miss the old quests in which bosses would drop something cool? A new sword. Better armor. Endgame would need to be handled slightly differently... why not drop RAD? RP items? Why is it that after killing Lostmauth, my character can't shove his pockets full of Lostmauth's treasure? Or, at the very least, find something cool, hidden in the piles of gold? MAKE ME LOOK FOR IT (but please give me a ramp or something so I don't have to wade through molten gold, kthx)!
The "endgame" drops should go to further bolster our characters, even if it's a little bit at a time. Major Armor Reinforcement Kits. The occasional Rank 12 enchantment. A 4-pack of dyes. A companion (killed the bad guy and his dog is grateful and follows you home sort of thing). Vouchers that we can feed our Mimic in the SH... the higher level GH, the bigger the vouchers we find.
If the devs don't want this stuff to be freely available for the Bot Bots to harvest and sell, make it BtA. Simple. Or better yet: BtG (Bind to Guild). Allow us to freely share things between our own characters and/or Guildmates. - FIX THE DAMN FOUNDRY. Seriously. Cryptic is sitting on an infinite amount of potential for an infinite amount to content, which won't cost them a DIME. Yes, I know "95% of the foundries are HAMSTER, and I don't want to waste my time for HAMSTER drops in a HAMSTER foundry and HAMSTER HAMSTER HAMSTER".
Honestly... if Foundry Authors didn't have to spend so much time trying to come up with creative work-arounds and dealing with the constant state of bugginess and compounded issues that the Foundry experiences because it hasn't been touched in 6 or 7 mods... then maybe there would be more/better content. I'm not the best DM in the world, but I do have some good ideas from time to time, and translating those ideas into the severely limiting Foundry Editor doesn't always work out.
However... if I (and others like me) had the Devs' tools to create quests, that would be a massive game-changer. I've invited Cryptic, a number of times, to share those tools and I would write content for them that would last a long time. Still haven't gotten access to it. In the meanwhile, the very least they could do is give us the ability to place actual Bosses, not just stuff disguised as bosses. The drops should be more conducive to character advancement, especially "endgame" characters (RAD and RP and cool things like that). The final chest should NOT just be a Level 38 piece of green gear. That's bullpuckey, and the very reason why people don't bother to run Foundries.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
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I know that I'm gonna get flamed pretty hard for this post, and I can already hear all the nay-sayers, so unless you have something *constructive* to add to this, please just keep it to yourself. This isn't my first visit to the forum, so I already know what certain people are going to say. And unless the comments are constructive, I'm reporting posts on this, because, honestly, I've put a lot of time and thought into these things..
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Most people I know who are playing pallies is for the overpowered nature of that class. While the OPness of the OP is great, I'm making it a point to play my pally in true LG nature, and upholding to the letter of pally law (by way of 2nd Ed). He literally has nothing but the armor on his back.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
On the other hand you still do have to look to see if lostmauth dropped something because they leave a whole giant ****ing dragon on top the peridot he always drops.
(*I think there is a neat story at the core of Strongholds, but I get access to new chapters of it slower than Kentaro Miura publishes Berserk, so it's kind of hard to tell.)
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
i agree in every point! very nice post!
most ppl i know think the exact same things about this game as u do.
this needs to be addressed since a very long time.
Most ppl i know are bored of WORKING this game. game should be fun and not boring "human botting" (like that it matches 100%) !
i only just log in for my vip key and run something with my giuld IF they are online once a week or so.
PART of the VAST frustration with strongholds, is the forced recycling of content, that many of HAVE no desire to do 1 million times.
IVE SAID this dozens of times.
DITCH current system, normalize ALL items to base values (donation of 50,100,500) on vouchers. Green chance 100% of the time, blue 25% , epic at 5%, this way there is no complaints as people just blowing through stuff. Cap general vouchers daily to 10 per character total. So you basically could earn 500 a day donation for doing ten things.. (quests, dungeons, skirm, pvp.. doesnt MATTER YOU CHOOSE!)
MAKE only one voucher.. that drops NO matter what you are doing (solo, group, whatever) at RANDOM rewards in anything you do.
This would make everyone happy.
Dont want to pvp? dont, get your general voucher you can donate TO any category you want.
This also fixes when you your guild is bottle-necked , you can direct your guildies to donate all of your general voucher to salvage for the week.
This would so vastly CHANGE the entire experience of strongholds, for the better. x 1000. The basic problem is they are tying EVERYTHING into massive time gating.. because they think we all play 80 hours a week or something. Thats simply not the case
I have no idea why they think we want to go back to dread ring just to run quests.. Ive been there now 7 times with alts.. thats enough for me..
Same with the rest of these old zones.
This is being done totally wrong and many other game devs would shake their head at this recycled garbage the way the are doing it.
This should've been REALLY thought of originally and not the terrible implementation that happened. But that is one of our biggest gripes with the company, not that EVERYthing they do is that bad.. its just the implementation of said idea , can be horrendous at times. (I.e. leadership removal, leaving us hanging for a month.. for NO good reason, while another batch of people quit the game.. for NO good reason)
NORMALIZE donation levels... CREATE 1 general voucher. Do what I said above, and people will again be much happier with your game.
I want to comment on the random levels like Diablo which would TOTALLY rock my socks...
Two benefits for Cryptic and us gamers. 1) You destroy botting as they can't plan for random and 2) We get different dungeons that are not the same every time making it more fun.
You get this a little bit in eLOL. Sometimes a different door opens and you have a different gauntlet to deal with.... at least that's a start in the right direction... and I hope they do more of that going forward.
Good Post OP!
Anyone that generalizes MMORPGs (hate that so many leave THOSE (important) last three letters out) as anything other than another subgenre of ARPG should seriously go back and re-evaluate what makes an ARPG. Neverwinter qualifies, as does WoW, SWTOR, Champions, etc. The only difference is that Neverwinter and the other mentioned games are "Massively Multiplayer" and "Online-only", but they still can be called ARPGs. *steps off his soapbox, kicks it over and hops his furry five-tailed butt into it, vanishing from the area*
There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to merge many of the *RPG styles into this game. There's a great basic foundation, and the best graphics and gameplay controls I've found to date in a game. Now let's take this turkey and stuff it full of good stuff. As somone had noted above (they edited their post), even if dungeons couldn't be randomized "on the fly", no reason they couldn't be randomized and compiled, then loaded. That would take what? An extra second of load time? I'm down with that.
Yup. Mine too.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
THESE things would go along way in making the game alot more feasible without people resorting to botting or/or afk jerks.
There are so many things they need to revamp.. but the problem is they DONT do any of them.. they just ADD something else instead.
OTHER games do both.. add content, revamp old stuff at least once a year.
If it takes a complete overhaul to really bring this game to life and make it pop, then fine.. overhaul it and release "Neverwinter 2: Y'all Wanted an MMOARPG". Charge me $50 for it. Let it start with our Level 70s. Introduce a finely-tuned gaming machine and Foundry editor. Incorporate all these idea to help prevent botting and AFKers and mind-numbingly repetitive gameplay.
Want to send us back to Dread Ring? Cool! Look how much it's changed! Valindra is LONG GONE but wow, these Demons sure are tearing the place up.. No more Jawbone.. no more Death Forge... it's laying in ruin, which has opened up a passage to what's *beneath*.. a dungeon? A boring cellar that happens to have a portal to the 49th level of the Abyss? Oh jeez.. Planescape. Yeah. That would have to be sandboxed though.
Miss rolling through Thayans like a weedwhacker through dried grass? Sure! Let's take our party of over-geared, over-powered BiS premades and get wiped out before we even get to the border of Thay. So how do we infiltrate? What is our objective here? Do we find and assassinate the head guy, or simply undermine from the shadows? No one sent us here.. we're doing this on our own... if we fail, no one will know.. if we succeed, who knows what Lord Neverember has in store for us? Riches? Accolades? RP? PRISON TIME?
I think everyone's figured out by now that our Strongholds are inside Lurkwood somewhere... and yes, there is the start of a great potential storyline, but I agree.. that story is coming more slowly than a new Boston album. I spoke before of "random dungeons"... why not put dungeons/lairs "randomly" into the SH map? Why not allow Foundry authors to do the same? I'd sent Andy a long email while testing SHs on preview regarding this, so I know at least one person over there has that thought in the back of their mind somewhere... (I also begged and begged to allow us access to the inside of our stronghold).
And while I may be mistaken (but I don't think I am), SH Siege appears to be an abject failure... the PvP guilds ran it, but I doubt many others have, or will... which is too bad, because it was a great idea. But let's turn it into something positive... release the PvP map for PvE... more places to explore.. more things to do.. in addition to "Hey look, a cave! Let's explore it!" and fewer invisible walls (a solid 1/3 of the map is walled off) and for the love of all that is holy, take away the doors and give us steps up to the battlements of our Keep! (yes, I know TRs and GWFs can get up there).
In short: we are adventurers! We want to go find our fortune and fame and glory and ghastly demise!
Maybe I just need more coffee... or maybe the urethane fumes from my new cabinets are affect my brain. But dammit, I wanna get creative.. I wanna BE creative, and I want to explore creative.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
I'm all with you. Just tend to package it in the one-worder I use when describing the gameplay NW has to offer since Tiamat:
InfiniGrind(TM).
On the plus side for you: You're way more constructive in your criticism - just it'll never even fall upon those deaf ears...
I feel that if enough of the playerbase comes forward with not just issues, but also solutions, all confined within constructive feedback and criticism, that things will fall on ears. We don't need to be screaming at the mods and Andy and the few Devs who do come hang out here... that's a lesson I learned during Andy's first week "in office". I was all riled up abotu something and lit into someone (who more than deserved it, former mod or not) and Andy (politely) smacked me down and gave me a 5-day vacation from the forum. It was at that time that I realized that I had been completely overcome and influenced by the "mob mentality", and that if we, the players, had any chance of effecting any sort of positive change in the game that we'd have to be a whole lot more intelligent about it.
From what I've seen, the current Dev team is doing what they can to improve the game. Okay, so there are some problems and whatever, but if it's true that Cryptic fired 18 Devs right at the launch of Mod 6, the new team has their work cut out for them. I see the positive that they're doing, and some of that seems to be coming from constructive conversation with/from the players.
So perhaps it's time to take back our game. But.. let's be smart about it. Let's be patience with the development. Instead of knee-jerk "THIS SUCKS I QUIT" posts.. we could lose the ALL-CAPS and *explain* why it sucks, or why it's not ideal.. and so forth.
Time will tell.
In the meanwhile.. time to grind more Tyranny. Lola is hungry.
(Yes, our Mimic's name is "Lola". Just go with it.)
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
lol.
Anyways.. the most super negative I was ever at in this game was leadership removal and it had not much to do with leadership removal , but with them taking forever to adjust costing to reasonable standards (and we are not 100% there yet either)
Seeing long time players quit.. and not come back, was really saddening to me. I was frothing every day that people wouldn't just come to their senses and fix it.
I still think their biggest issue is how they implement items, not the actual idea of said items. Leadership removal was ok, if they would've just listened and adjusted costing at the start. There is no way both actions shouldn't have been done together. THE vast majority of players WERE not sitting on millions and millions of AD..
BTW we still have some costing issues, like opening up powers on artifact weapons. Those are ridiculous.. beyond reason, as is transmuting costs.. No costs should be associated with that part of the game at all.. people want to build unique looks and it shouldn't hamper game progression to do so.
When you lose players, its not like the company is gaining anything.. I guess that is what my issue boiled down to the removal and the extreme amount of time it took them to start adjustments.
My biggest issue right now, is how ultra grindy they think we like the game.. its just a tad overboard, and I really want some stuff adjusted correctly.
My biggest issue after all this time, is now the same.. RP is way too demanding, locks out players from playing alts. THEY need a 50% reduction in amount of RP needed from green to epic level, leave epic to legendary as it is now.
This would be a start.
Hell.. even I nearly left. I downloaded all the "f2p" MMOs that I could find, but none of them looked or operated as well as this game. I had guildmembers tell me the only reason they were still in this game was because of the Guild. Hey.. we're a pretty close-knit family, what can I say? We struggled to recruit more people. We struggled to find ways to keep the game fun, with guild events and contests and just general tomfoolery.
The dedication of these people, "my" people (I am responsible for them, as guild leader), kept me going, and made me determined to make the most of the lag and bugs and endless EE grind (I took 6 characters all the way through the original EE, BTW. 6.)..
So then we find ourselves with a new dev team. Remember the blog about "we are aware of some difficulties with Mod 6 and are going to look into it" (paraphrasing)? Tell me they haven't made good on that. Yes, there are still bugs and issues, but in the course of the last almost-year, I have seen so many significant improvements to this game.
Sure, they come slowly. And I think that had they adjusted costing before nerfing leadership, that would have only further empowered the bots and Leadership farms. Had they made the adjustment and the nerf simultaneously, I think that could have introduced some significant problems (bugs, etc.). While the latter would have been ideal, I think the devs needed to wipe clean the AD thing, eliminate some of the farming/bot sources of AD generation in the game, in order to crunch some numbers to see what the average player was really making in AD per week, then adjusting costs accordingly.
There was a blog not too far back, explaining the AD market and what they were finding on PC vs. XBox, and while their numbers seemed a bit suspect to me, the spirit of the blog, from my point of view, was spot on. I am actually making more AD now than ever before... I'm not as trapped by the hourly events schedule, and I'm even working on a system so that I can remember who did what weekly to get AD and when. I find running dungeons now to be a lot more rewarding, even though I don't get many drops these days (Syndryth is a greedy spiderchick), but with the help of Legit and some of my kick-HAMSTER guildies, we've gotten eToS down to like a 10 minute run... with my VIP, that's like 450 AD per minute. To quote Bowen: "That's a nice haul for one day's work!"
RP is a bit on the unrealistic side, I agree. I think the devs might agree with us on that point, and that might be the source of our unexpected 2xRP weekend (and I hope they keep the next one over New Year's as well). I'm sitting at Rank 51 on my big GWF's mainhand, so I've invested about 2.3million RP into it. To get to Rank 60 (just a measly 9 ranks to go!), I'm going to need to double that. 4.6mil RP for another 5 ilvl points and a handful of points to some stats. But I'd like to have that additional enchantment slot! :-) At this point, it's a matter of stubbornness. At nearly 3k ilvl on my GWF, I really am not wanting for bigger/better/whatever, since I don't PvP. I can solo any regular area at this point, to include most 10+ HEs. I still need some help with the Undead Giants and No Sympathy. Lots of help. lol
I've completely digressed.. apologies.
TL;DR -> I agree that there are still a lot of changes that need to be implemented... but I also think that this game has come a VERY long way since Nerf 6. The guild is growing and thriving, we're making AD, and having fun, despite the grind.
But how can we impress upon the devs that the grind needs to stop?
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Everytime there is an issue, they are forced to limit the functions/freedom of the objects they have implementef and created. They have to cut down the creativity effort they have made to support a wrong design
By doing this everytime for more than 2 years, you come to the place where we are: human bot.
Concerning creativity: they have engaged Salvatore, but at the end it seems to me that it was a marketing operation and nothing else if you look at current status of UD.
Yesterday evening I felt asleep while running the PoM...I'm not joking: doing the same things for 20++ minutes with no brain, it's like watching a boring talk show on tv at the end of a working day. You fall asleep in front of it.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
I'm thinking more and more about this Human Bot thing this morning, as I cycle through my characters, invoking and professioning... same thing. CTRL+I, F12 (keybound to go straight to the character screen), click the next character, CTRL+I, F12, click the next one, ad nauseum.
I take the same professions tasks each time on my characters... half of them are UE/Elemental Aggregate factories and the other half churn out Marks of Gratitude and RP.
After the next round of invokes, I'll actually start doing something in-game, besides tending all my characters and taking care of guild administrative stuff. The "what to do today" involves looking at what's needed most for the coffer, which has been Treasures of Tyranny for the last 3 weeks. (Mine L3, Quarry L3 and GH L7 upgrades back to back to back = 1.44mil Treasures of Tyranny). So it'll be off to Harper Boward (again) and run (most likely) Ebon Downs stuff (again), then WoD (again) times 5 characters.
It had better not be Fetch Quest (again).
We deviated from the usual program last night and took some newer characters through WoD last night. They were absolutely amazed that we are so familiar with that map that we were able to take them straight to all the Vantage Points and the Cult Prison, and whatever the other quest they had was, all while knocking out our own quests, AND finishing 4 Demonic HEs.
"We've been here a couple times before..."
"I guess maybe."
I was sorely disappointed that Underdark was just a series of HEs in campaign areas and a couple of long, OMG boring skirmishes. Yeah.. fought Demo twice, ones regular, one extra crispy. Whatever. It really isn't a very engaging fight. Don't get me wrong, the artwork inside Midol-Derith is gorgeous, but I feel that it was kind of a "cheap" mod.
However, looking forward to the next one! I hope they take into consideration how absolutely sick and tired a lot of us are, regarding the grind, and get super creative... perhaps even take some advice from players, such as points in my OP that many of you have agreed with, as well as points many of you have also brought up.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Just like Sword Coast Legends (a fun game FYI!) does. It allows 1 player to be "The DM" while others go through a quest. Action combat as a Troll, a Giant, or even a Dragon? Hell yeah!
Make it like a PvP Arena even... Yeah I know it's unlikely, as each bad guy would need it's own powers put into Encounrers/AtWills/Dailies, and they coukd/should be fixed (!), but it's a good idea IMO...
Problem is, the foundry is too easily botted.
But I agree with the other points about this being a game designed for bots, the "login reward" alone is designed for bots to hammer the login server. Login 7 times per DAY per CHARACTER? per my 8 characters? .. No one but a bot does that. I'd spend most of my time staring at a loading screen. If it were properly designed, the countdown would only count while logged in (and rewards would be better)
Solution to a botted foundry is a daily key like Sharandar/DR/DailyDungeon .. More keys, Ugh. If only we had a 'key ring' =X
One key per day = 10k of reward from an eligible foundry quest.
NW-DC9R4J5EH - 'The Black Pearl' - Spelljammer! Phlo Riders and Space Orcs
Thanks for all the fish.
I collect professions and invoking rewards, start new profession tasks and then continue playing my main character.
And other real players do the same with even more characters on their accounts...
This is ridiculous.
It's getting harder to find a fun factor within NWN these days.
For me, it's not the eDemo farm thing. That's my goal and it's keeping me right up there for now.
A proud member of "mythical horde of DPS GFs"
1). Is SW more dps or tank based?
2). Yes. I am panzer!
3). Get ACT if you want to celebrate your epeen.
4). Horniness will not stand between me and what I believe - "MM"