Explain how bandwidth affects the Foundry

torontodave

Sorry @terramak I'm going above your head. ;D

@asterdahl and @dextructoid and @badbotlimit should be reading this thread. =D

0/100 Foundry Mote weapons.

Artifacts that only drop in Featured Foundries

Daily Foundry Keys that enable a real reward.

+1000 RP for 'submitting' a review. To the player and author. You can only submit 1 review per foundry, only get 1 reward per.

+ this whole HAMSTER thread.

ambisinisterr

mrgiggles651 said:

ambisinisterr said:

Bottom line is that Foundry Content does not contibute to progressions so from a player standpoint it is a waste of time.

Exactly the point, the NWO playerbase views progression as more important than story. You don't have to play for progression, nothing forces the playerbase to do so. You can contentedly play nothing but foundry and not care about being iLVL whatever.

There isn't a game in the world in which players don't care about progression. There are games in which the story is the progression, most often single player games, but don't mistake that for people not caring about the progression.

All but the most die-hard story players care about progression. There are people who don't care one bit about anything but progression but these people tend to be abnormal as those who don't care at all about progression. Most people would welcome a break from grinding the same content over and over again, some more often than others, if there was any semblance of progression tied into it. It is only when something is a complete waste of time, such as Foundry content, that the average person will not do something at least once in a while.

I really don't see why people try to argue the playerbase are mindless grindheads when simply asking people their feelings more often than not tells a completely different story. People do what the game rewards them to do. If the game doesn't reward Foundry content then they will not play it. Exhibit A: The Skinner Box.

And in all seriousness I have never heard somebody say they would not want to progress for doing what they enjoy. Progress less for sure but never to not progress at all. The only time I ever hear such statements are from people who are on the opposite side of the coin and do not like playing the content they are discussing.

Every game has under and over rewarding content. However the only content that people will never play is content which doesn't reward them for the time. And story's are NOT rewards in a game which does not progress through stories.

reiwulf

I partially agree ambi, it's true that everyone cares about character progression in MMOs, but there are also different types of players, some care more about stories, other care more about being BiS, other care more about PvP, etc... there are many different archetypes of players and reasons why they enjoy those things.
It's not a mystery that many story/lore/roleplay oriented players have either left or don't participate much in those activities, it's just a matter of visiting the rp channel and see the little activity there is compared to before. Also like I said, there's almost no people sharing stories about their characters, doing art of their characters, and outside the mask I've hardly ever seen much rp at all, even inside rp guilds there isn't much of it.

if they want the foundry to be played by more people putting some kind og reward would greatly help. many ideas have been given that are not exploiative.

On the other hand, if they want to leave the foundry purely for "fun for those interested in a story" then they could add much more stuff to it to actualy make it more imersive. keep it updated with assets, allow boss fights, allow cinematics, even simple ones, would greatly help it.

Now if they don't want to add either of those, then it's just lazy. why have one of the supposedly structural pillars of a game completely abandoned? it may not bring direct money, but it does bring indirect money. ALL of the money I've spent on this game has been done because it has a foundry, because if it didn't I wouldn't even have played it in the first place. so they have to consider that too.

Like many have said, really small changes to it can drastically improve it.

eldarth

reiwulf wrote: »

Now if they don't want to add either of those, then it's just lazy. why have one of the supposedly structural pillars of a game completely abandoned? it may not bring direct money, but it does bring indirect money. ALL of the money I've spent on this game has been done because it has a foundry, because if it didn't I wouldn't even have played it in the first place. so they have to consider that too.

THAT is the problem. They are apparently soooo poor at understanding marketing that all they can see is direct Zen sales. I'm sure the development questions are always "Will it generate Zen sales?" They simply have zero understanding of a loss-leader strategy It's taken them three years to add try-before-buy equipment visualization. Hopefully that will spur enough RP/costume zen sales that they can see how it increases sales but the RP community may be so diluted and abandoned at this point it might just be a tiny blip.​​

ambisinisterr

I don't think you said anything I didn't or wouldn't say myself reiwulf. I simply absolutely do not believe in saying that "all" the players who like stories left or that those who remain 'don't like stories.'

I believe that all people, with a select few exceptions, would play Foundry content at least once in a while if it was rewarded even if it was just because they wanted a change of pace.

You can use PvP as an example of this. Zeb is one of those diehard people who won't PvP under any circumstances however many of our mutual friends have PvP'ed from time to time even if they went into the match knowing they would lose just because it was something different to do that did reward them either with AD from a daily or Xp or a myriad of other things. It's not their favorite activity but they'll do it once in a while.

And I suspect all but a few people in this thread can agree upon that. Again with all seriousness the only time I ever hear people say "fun is a reward" is when those people don't like the content and don't want to be tempted to play it. It's akin to those people who we see now and then in here who say they'll never play UGC because all UGC sucks while ignoring the evidence mods and other UGC has had on other games longevity and perception. One blatant example besides the standards was the Desert Combat mod for Battlefront 1944 which was so successful EA bought the rights to it.

But yes...indirect money is likely a huge factor...
There's no way to track revenue from the Foundry really so on paper the bean counters probably look at it and say why would they waste any money on it. It shows NO profit.
Couple that with the junk rewards creating no player interest which in turn creates no author interest and it looks like the worst feature in the game to somebody who only reads numbers on papers...



Just to make this even clearer than I hope it already is: this is purely my own opinion based on my own experience with corporate companies and nothing to do with any information based on my moderator status. For all I know my assumptions could be wrong and a game producer could be the ones making these decisions to not properly work on the Foundry...
But I would like to believe anybody who actually works on games would know better and instead blame somebody who is just there to balance check books.

instynctive

If I could get the same amount of campaign currencies in a foundry as I do in a 30-40 minute grind in the campaign areas...

I'd play nothing BUT Foundries because I'm so sick and tired of the campaign areas. I even dread going into my beloved IWD. *sadface*

valcontar73

What I don't understand is why you ban some people for a "farm quest" but at the same time, you allow the existence of "Fast Review Quests" that are clearly exploitative content.

reiwulf

maybe because farm quests are used to get items at a rate that we shouldn't get, and quick review quests only make it so people get quicker achievements that don't really make the game unbalanced. (just a guess though)

strumslinger

Great discussion here. I love the Foundry myself, hence why I'm trying to incorporate it more into community events in M9. I know that doesn't mean much, since it doesn't affect any bugs, content or progression, but hey, if a contest or event leads more people into the Foundry, that's a good thing in my book.

The teleporter issue is the one that is the biggest on our radar.

instynctive

strumslinger said:

Great discussion here. I love the Foundry myself, hence why I'm trying to incorporate it more into community events in M9. I know that doesn't mean much, since it doesn't affect any bugs, content or progression, but hey, if a contest or event leads more people into the Foundry, that's a good thing in my book.

The teleporter issue is the one that is the biggest on our radar.

Thanks for popping in on this, @strumslinger.

I think the other major issue is the bug that's splitting up parties when they change maps...

torontodave

Now if only we could get 5 people from this thread who DIDNT create a drowned shore entry to volunteer as judges.

That'd be super. ;D

reiwulf

I would, if I wasn't so frustrated with NW and the foundry...
besides I would be an awful judge, just gimme a cool map and you have me XD

iandarksword

I've kinda "helped" a couple of entrants, so in the spirit of fairness, I shouldn't be judging to avoid any bias. At this point though, I say split the AD prize amongst all the Drowned Shore entrants, let's move on and see what @StrumSlinger has in mind for M9. That's just my thoughts, not an endorsement of what to do.

ambisinisterr

magenubbie said:

I don't think that either is strictly within the rules and both should be removed, but that's not up to us.

They are in the EULA's.
It doesn't say 'No farm Quests' but it does say not to use the UGC to circumvent the intended rate of progression within the game or something of that nature. Logically speaking if they wrote "no farm quests" then technically they just said quests containing a farm setting would be against the rules so they have to use the aforementioned terminology.

I am not sure what you mean by Fast Review Quests but if the quest only exists in order to get credit for giving or receiving reviews then that would be something we could forward on to be reviewed. If you are referring to the myriad of junky 15 minute quests well there's no rules on quest quality as long as the content is there and does not do something blatantly wrong such as ask people to wait 15 minutes before completing the quest.


And yes, contests would be nice both on the author side and on the player side.
There's probably a lot of little things we (community managers and mods) could do to promote both new and existing foundry content without developer support if we put our heads to it. It's something that really has not occurred to me since the change in PWE's community team so I suspect we can get the ball rolling a bit better ourselves with the support of Andy and Alex than we could have in the past.

Not a replacement for proper rewards without contests or events but it is better than nothing.

reiwulf

definitely better than nothing.
and yeah, fast review quests are basically "interact with x asset in protector's enclave" and you're done. they're quests that take literally 5 secs to complete and are used just to get fast foundry achievements. (both as a player and author). there are tons of these and it's not hard to find them.

ambisinisterr

If you send lists to Andy or to any moderator we can forward them for review.

They're sort of like bots though, they tend to get made faster than resources can be assigned to remove them. I know people always try to scream blasphemy at such statements but a coalition of trusted individuals to rate and report foundry quests would be really helpful to expedite the trash out of the system and improve the way quests are organised and promoted.

I actually just got an e-mail from Pandora about their "trained musicologists" going through all content adding a network of suggestions based on the number of thumbs up you give content based on the tags their "trained musicologists" apply to content. We can't get anything like that I'm sure but simply having a group of people who go out of their way report bad content and help break up the noise of the content would be a boon regardless of the cries of abuse that always seem to come up by the tin foil crowd.

strumslinger

iandarksword said:

I've kinda "helped" a couple of entrants, so in the spirit of fairness, I shouldn't be judging to avoid any bias. At this point though, I say split the AD prize amongst all the Drowned Shore entrants, let's move on and see what @StrumSlinger has in mind for M9. That's just my thoughts, not an endorsement of what to do.

Which quests are they? I can feature all five entrants one by one.

beckylunatic

ambisinisterr said:

I am not sure what you mean by Fast Review Quests but if the quest only exists in order to get credit for giving or receiving reviews then that would be something we could forward on to be reviewed.

That's exactly it. They are always titled something like "Fast Community Review [number]", because they are uploaded in series for multiple achievements.

bitt3rnightmar3

ambisinisterr wrote: »

If you send lists to Andy or to any moderator we can forward them for review.

They're sort of like bots though, they tend to get made faster than resources can be assigned to remove them. I know people always try to scream blasphemy at such statements but a coalition of trusted individuals to rate and report foundry quests would be really helpful to expedite the trash out of the system and improve the way quests are organised and promoted.

I actually just got an e-mail from Pandora about their "trained musicologists" going through all content adding a network of suggestions based on the number of thumbs up you give content based on the tags their "trained musicologists" apply to content. We can't get anything like that I'm sure but simply having a group of people who go out of their way report bad content and help break up the noise of the content would be a boon regardless of the cries of abuse that always seem to come up by the tin foil crowd.

If there were such a group I'd be happy to go through foundries and do that at least one or two days a week.​​

instynctive

ambisinisterr said:

but a coalition of trusted individuals to rate and report foundry quests would be really helpful to expedite the trash out of the system and improve the way quests are organised and promoted.

I've volunteered several times for something like this.. I'll sign NDAs, waivers, subject myself to a proctological exam if need be...

Just want to help.

beckylunatic

magenubbie said:

And people don't report them because 1, they are being (ab)used as h3ll and , 2: you have to do them first.

#2 is really problematic. I know that reporting foundries without finishing them was disabled because of other abuses of the mechanic, but I really wish it were possible to flag an entire series or just an author without having to add to their play count. I don't know if it falls under behavior reporting though customer service, but I don't mind being held accountable for reporting a foundry author as abusive, because I wouldn't do it without just cause.

rezuron

Hey, if there already is something like "Only 15 min+ quests are rewarded Daily", then why there are achievements for doing any Foundry? I really don't see the point. It's obvious that quest with average time under 15 minuts is not an andventure. It's grind/fast review/ exp farm/test. Ok, people can get exp anywhere, but hey, grinding achievements? It's just

if(Foundry.averagetime>(15*60)){
player.achievement(FoundryReview)++;
}

And we don't have fast review Foundrys. There is no problem. From now on review achievements are only for those, who really play Foundrys. It's 20 minutes of work to add this. (Because you have to find right place)

mrgiggles651

torontodave said:

Now if only we could get 5 people from this thread who DIDNT create a drowned shore entry to volunteer as judges.

That'd be super. ;D

I'm specifically not judging in the interest of impartiality because I provided the prize.

mrgiggles651

strumslinger said:

iandarksword said:

I've kinda "helped" a couple of entrants, so in the spirit of fairness, I shouldn't be judging to avoid any bias. At this point though, I say split the AD prize amongst all the Drowned Shore entrants, let's move on and see what @StrumSlinger has in mind for M9. That's just my thoughts, not an endorsement of what to do.

Which quests are they? I can feature all five entrants one by one.

Sorry to poke you, but the Drowned Shore community contest was kind of forum stickied at one point :-)

valcontar73

strumslinger said:

iandarksword said:

I've kinda "helped" a couple of entrants, so in the spirit of fairness, I shouldn't be judging to avoid any bias. At this point though, I say split the AD prize amongst all the Drowned Shore entrants, let's move on and see what @StrumSlinger has in mind for M9. That's just my thoughts, not an endorsement of what to do.

Which quests are they? I can feature all five entrants one by one.

At the moment there are 3 only:

@Eldarth
NW-DH4XKQXPU - Sage Ramiel Goes to War #DS# (I'm not sure if this one is finished, you need to ask Eldarth.)

@Torontodave
NW-DCDINRW8U - Tidal Redux - (#DS#)

@Zachariah92
NW-DRTBVIVMU - Drowned Shore: Disembark #DS#

But we had a lot of issues to finish them, with the foundry down for a lot of time, the sound crash to desktop bug (that is now fixed) and not to mention the teleporter bug.

I don't know if there still some more authors to want to participate on the contest to get at least 5 entries.

Anyway the contest is in standby at the moment to my knowledge. I'm guessing we could fix a final date after the teleporter bug is fixed.

instynctive

valcontar73 said:

I don't know if there still some more authors to want to participate on the contest to get at least 5 entries.

I would love to, but ... at the moment, it's really difficult for me to build foundries with all the HAMSTER that's going on with them.. and now wiith that idiot ramping up his DDoS thing again...

*sadface*

mrgiggles651

ambisinisterr said:

I really don't see why people try to argue the playerbase are mindless grindheads

I'm not saying it to insult the playerbase, though you seem intent on twisting it that way. I happen to play the game too you know (where do you think I got the AD for the foundry contests?), even run Demonic HE's in Icewind Dale with Strum and his (poorly optimized ) paladin.

The playerbase are lootheads. That's not insulting them. Diablo 3 sold 30 million copies of gear progression via grind to run the same content again (via difficulty levels and newgame+).

Player A likes loot progression over story. Player B likes story over loot progression. Those are descriptive statements of market segments, they are not insulting in any way other than you seem to feel bad about it. Neverwinter Online's playerbase is made up of Player A. There's nothing wrong with that. The foundry authors want player B, but B is just not here in enough numbers. It's purely a matter of knowing what your market is.

reiwulf

I don't want to generalize all of NW's playerbase, but like I said before I think most players in here do not really care much for stories or lore, and tend to care more about rewards and item levels; specially comparing them to other MMO's playerbases.
It's never too late to try to encourage those who do care about stories and lore to give it a try if some things change, but if the main game keeps on rewarding just mindless grind, then that's the playerbase it'll keep on having.