Why the greater challenges are the worst experiences

noqualification

Tiamat, PvP and the new Demogorgon are currently the most challenging contents in the game; experienced players gather together to overcome extincting obstacles and play the best strategies in the game and, when the team is successful, all have a sense of accomplishment since they know they were a part of that victory.

So how come this are the worst human interaction experiences that players have in the game? From players being abusive on chat, abandoning the team in the middle of the fight or simply trolling everyone else... What's wrong here?

Does Neverwinter managed to gather the cream of cruel and/or opportunistic MMO players? Well, I don't think this is the root of the problem.

All the above contents have one thing in common: they're structured in a way that if one person (let alone more) makes a mistake, the whole team pays the price. To aggravate this situation, these are extreme challenges that demand lots of trials before someone learn how to do a good job in there and, again, during these trial runs the experienced players pay the cost of others' inexperience.

Now sum to this the fact that players invest on average 20 to 40 minutes of their time in one match and that minimum requirements to get in are majorly underestimated; and you will get to obvious conclusion that the structures of these contents provide a HUGE incentive for players to get irritated (which in turn drives abusive behavior) when things go wrong.

At the end, the experiences are bad for both "vets" and "noob" players, one group gets immensely frustrated and promotes abusive behavior while the others usually react in ways that only escalates the situations. The reflex of these badly engineered structures is therefore observed in how much hate there is in this forums and in the general bad climate inside the game.

The good news is: Devs have access to simple measures that can solve this problem. In some cases they have actually implemented such measures, although not at the extension required to fix the issue.

An easy way to start solving this is just creating more Tiers in each of these contents queues, for instance, PvP queue tier that goes from 1.5K to 2K, then from 2K to 2.5K and so on... This way players would always go against groups in their same Tier (a 3K toon wouldn't be able to play agains a 2K and vice-versa). Creating more than one Tier for Tiamat and Demorgon is, by now, simply making official what Players had already done with the 3K, 4K zerg channels. Tiamat really should have an "epic version" of 3K+ minimum item level.

For the PvE content, Tiamat and Demogorgon could also have a tutorial (much like the Siege tutorial) to avoid clueless people going in.

Well, in all fairness, in Demogorgon you Devs almost got it right with the normal and epic versions, the problem is that a minimum requirement of 2.5K item level is too low so there are a bunch of people that go into the epic version without ever have played the normal one. Also, instructions given during cut-scenes aren't very effective since players are already inside and they will have to learn on the go.

My point is, much of the bad mojo of Neverwinter is just a result of the bad structure pushing players to blow off steam on the others and Devs could improve this just by being more thorough in the information and classification of players.

I hope this helps to improve something.

Cheers!

Unknown

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noqualification

magenubbie said:

Cryptic should simply lay down the law and have reports mean something so I can get these shafts banned for grieving. Like every other self-respecting MMO would.

Well, then you are in luck, they already do this. And doesn't work! People keep being abusive and players keep leaving the game.
Yes, you can think about this problem as the "mask of anonymity" giving people an excuse to behave badly, or that these are just some bad apples... And you would be right in some cases.

What I'm discussing here though is about the structure of such challenges giving incentives for "good people" to be mean. Human beings are pattern searching organisms, when something goes wrong our first instinct is to look for something or someone to blame. My point is that when, for instance, 1 mistake by 1 individual can render useless 30 minutes of other 9 people's lives, then it's pretty easy for even the "Dalai Lama of players" to get angry, blame someone and blow off some steam.

And when people don't have enough information, they are prone to make many mistakes. I'm not defending that there's a right way to play these challenges, I'm defending that there's a way to avoid people going into these challenges without a clue of what to do or without power to do anything (e.g.: being a 2K player against a 4K team on PvP).

Yes, the structure can be upgraded to minimize this kind of behavior with simple measures, it's simply smart for a company to want to create the best environment for their customers. You can always improve the game and your "people suck" mantra is not a valid justification for not trying.

Cheers!

oldbaldyone

PVP is always going to get the ego trippers, because it pits people versus people, and that will never end well.

Solution for Demo and Tiamat: Allow people to queue has a 10/25 man group. If this was allowed, people wouldn't be FORCED to PUG (something most people try and avoid for this very reason). However, being forced to PUG makes for an easy way to make the content appear more challenging without having to put any work into it, so it won't happen.

Remember when Tiamat released, the "reviewed" the ability to queue as a team, and found that it was not an option they wished to pursue. Its a common game mechanic in practically every game (wow had 40 man raids in what, 2005?), but they chose not to use it. Wonder why.

Unknown

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noqualification

magenubbie said:

Then the law isn't strict enough.

Well, obviously, punishment is not the most profitable way to get more customers or to keep the ones you have, thus it's not in Cryptic best interest to go for a policy like "if you don't enjoy it, go to WoW". I'm trying to be constructive here, changing the structure is not a punishment per se and, as long as the measure sounds fair, most players will agree with it. Doing an interactive video tutorial (like the Siege one) for Tiamat and Demogorgon is not a big deal and would only help the game.

magenubbie said:

The game needs to guide players properly and restrict things like the WoD map to people who have actually an idea of what they are doing. WoD shouldn't even be available to people who haven't done Sharandar, DR and at least 2 boons in IWD. Without that experience, you get exactly what you get now: AFK players in tiamat. They don't go AFK because they don't want to do the content. They go AFK because they feel themselves useless but believe they need the rewards. The same goes for Underdark. Get 4 ToD boons before even be allowed in it.

I agree, minimum requirements for some areas should be higher and/or more creative than "minimum level/item level", like for instance what you suggest "X boons in Icewind and completing DR".

magenubbie said:

With all that, and regardless of who's to blame, there's simply no excuse for people to behave like a manure ventilation shaft. Ignorance is not a crime until it becomes deliberate. And with the above, you can hardly blame people for trying the -to them- most exciting part of the content.

To be clear: I'm not excusing that behavior nor blaming the new players for trying. Again, I want to stress that my point is about incentives, which are given by the current structure and insufficient information. These incentives provide a fertile ground for this kind of behavior to flourish.

Cheers!

Unknown

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wylonus

devs werent looking at big picture, they think it would work and cool, they seem hadnt count on having some folks went "afk", or suddenly dropped out. some would get "nerd-rage" or become twisted to grief others.
they have failed with Tiamat temple for months since mod 6.

Mod 6 is the bane of players, it became no longer fun game, it became most disgusted and unplayable for alts. it use to able at 60 levels when these mobs are standard types until they upped to 70 level cap and we begin to see "Elite heroic" 73 level mobs and survivablity went down so fast and players losing the stocks of kits and potions started to get vanished in hours/days after mod 6 went live.
devs had these 100% completely wrong all the way, there shouldnt be any, "ANY" elite 73 level mobs on overlands, they should be limited to epic dungeons, the reason why they pull all the other dungeons, it made it so hard to earn the boons we need to handle the elite mobs later. they wont fix it and they said it is not priority and we had waiting for months, suffering too long.
players can be patience for so long and some dont tolerate these devs that not doing on timeframe, they dont care if players quitting in droves. if they decide to fix ASAP, players will come and some returning once they find game more fun and enterianing, and may forgive and giving 2nd chance to reopen wallets, right now many get tight, and we just lost 1 member from dev team very recently.
i know it is sad to run with barebone team and thier time and resource are limited. it not thier fault or our faults, we get many unexpected problems, or bugs often not reported in testing server, and assumed some players were counting on exploits after the patch released before too late as soon many other players discovered or devs werent listening and went ahead to get the game slowly being destroyed.
they get together fast before to the point of no return.

when they announcing mod 8 and/or mod 9, they were expecting cheers from players, but many players are now expecting another let-downs and false hopes. many players had assumed Mod 7 the underdark would be massive new "explorable" areas and new dungeons never seen before, and all we saw a reskinned and recycled fight zones.

kemi1984

On the topic of knowing what to do and learning on the fly in Demogorgon.

I would say that the cutscene before the fight even begins is more than enough to know what should be done.

If someone does not understand that one should aim for the yellow portal and not for the black one (NPC is saying exactly that) than we do have a problem. and for Gods sake...that's not the game issue...

silverkelt

I have been playing mmos for longer then some of you have been alive.

Community is community is community.

It policies itself. You find it , you thrive for it, you figure it out.

This isnt a game company issue, never was and shouldnt be.

You do what is best for that community, you do what is best for your group and for your role. This is what always has been done. You find those people, you stick together and work at it.

This game general population is NO worse then any other Ive ever experienced, other then maybe language barriers.. other games did maybe a better job at having it a bit more segregated, so confusion wouldn't spread quite so much.

But frankly, you dont need to speak the same langague to even do edemo.. because it tells you what to do and you can figure it out.. no need to have anything else.

Join a guild, find legit, there are plenty of non gen pop channels out there.

The game should always rewards those who work together.. always.