"Party Recommended" means "Party Required"?

samaka

My partner and I just started playing Neverwinter right as the 2x XP event kicked off. We so enjoyed our first 24 hours that we even both bought enough Zen to cover a month of VIP... yay, lockbox keys!

However, one thing we seem to be confused by is trying to have just the two of us enter a 3-person dungeon. All the stuff I can find online states that we should be able to enter a dungeon with less than 3 (or 5) players by going to the door in-world... except that seems to have changed. We created a mule account and were able to queue up with the mule account, however, unless we also choose to level characters on separate accounts that is only going to work for the lower level dungeons... never mind having to level 3 mules for the 5-person dungeons!

We are enjoying the game, however, we are a bit sad to find out that we will be forced to group. My partner is disabled and we often go through dungeons slowly, or need to take random breaks for medical reasons... is there some workaround to duo'ing a dungeon or are we just stuck? The two dungeons we've done so far (Cloak Tower and Cragmire Crypts) have been quite fun and we have had no issues duo'ing the content.

Why was this mechanic changed? Might I also suggest changing the wording on quests that say a party is recommended to a party is required? There is a difference!

greywynd

Make understanding friends that are willing to help and accommodate the necessary delays.

wildfirede

The developer was asked many times to make the option available again(due to your reasons or for players that want to have the challenge to solo content) but saddly without success... at the moment i am thinking their servers can't handle too many instances and hence force players to 3/5 man.

On a sidenote - yes a understanding guild would be the best solution as i am sure you are not alone in the need to make real live breaks.

samaka

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Right now our main characters are level 50, our two alts on the same account are in the 30's, and our two mule characters (created and levelled to 15 so we could create our own guild) are around level 20. We are enjoying the game, it is very beautiful, sort of a cross between DDO and WoW, though so far I would not say it has been challenging.

The guild system in this game is obviously designed for multiple characters, so we probably won't get much use out of a guild of just two players. We will check into the guild recruitment forum and see who we can find!

Oh, another thing that is disappointing is the fact the Foundry is down. When we started playing we thought the Foundry was simply unavailable as we had not yet hit 15. When we did hit 15 and the game told us the Foundry was now available we were very excited, as this feature was a significant factor in choosing to come play Neverwinter. After visiting the forums and discovering the Foundry has been down for two months already with no apparent sign of when it will be back... well the disappointment there was palpable!

samaka

magenubbie said:

samaka#2511 said:

The guild system in this game is obviously designed for multiple characters, so we probably won't get much use out of a guild of just two players. We will check into the guild recruitment forum and see who we can find!

Oh yes you will have a use for it! Cheap storage space from the guild bank! Trust me. Keep at least one of your alts in there and transfer/take any excess stuff from the guild bank to your account shared bank and visa versa. Even purchasing the 2nd tab on the guild bank is a lot cheaper than bags or bank expansions for 2 characters. And with 4 free bags now, you'll be good on personal "traveling" storage for the moment.

Yes, that is the one main reason we got the guild, just didn't anticipate that it would cost 150k AD to buy the first tab. I think across all our characters we might have 100k so far. Then again, we've only been playing a week'ish so far.

4 free bags? I know we got one from the Blacklake District and another from the Neverdeath Graveyard. One of our sets of characters each got an extra bag from the First Time Buyers Pack... what others are we missing?

samaka#2511 said:

Oh, another thing that is disappointing is the fact the Foundry is down. When we started playing we thought the Foundry was simply unavailable as we had not yet hit 15. When we did hit 15 and the game told us the Foundry was now available we were very excited, as this feature was a significant factor in choosing to come play Neverwinter. After visiting the forums and discovering the Foundry has been down for two months already with no apparent sign of when it will be back... well the disappointment there was palpable!

Don't we know it. Well they said it wouldn't be touched this year because they have too much work managing the rest of the game and future expansions. But we never expected it to shut down, no. For now, we were prepared to make due with the bugs. Both Foundry authors and players are not amused by this. But it is what it is. Getting angry won't solve anything either.

Does not being touched this year also mean being offline for the remainder of the year? We were both really excited to try out the Foundry and eager to see what it can do. We have ideas for quests, but with no access to the editor we really have no idea what is possible and what is not.

We have been playing MMO's for years, all the way back to Asheron's Call... we don't really get angry, usually just disappointed with the decisions that are made. Par for the course with MMO's it seems.

Thanks again for your information, it really is appreciated!

sockmunkey

Not being touched, and being off-line are two separate issues, more or less.

Each time they publish a major game update, it messes up the foundry. All existing foundry missions in the catalogue get disconnected from the server. And then one by one each one has to be republished. This is a task that can normally take weeks. But with each new expansion, it takes longer and longer. The last time, it kept getting stuck and needed some less then gentle nudging from the dev team.

The real issue, is they arn't slowing down new updates to deal with the foundry. So, what we get is a system that is slowly trying to republish all the content, then bam! New update, and it has to start over again.

Thats pretty much what happened this time. The catalogue finally had about 300+ quests and was publishing slowly. Then alliances launched and we are back to nothing.

samaka

magenubbie said:

samaka#2511 said:

what others are we missing?

The big starters bag, the 2 you mentioned from Blacklake and Neverdeath and one from the " Benign Order of the Third Eye" mini campaign. Talk to Knox with any lvl10+ character and you'll get it. While you're at it, start the Tryanny of dragons campaign as well if you haven't already. Knox will guide you.

I was confused what the Benign Order was, then I remembered the new UI they added and found it pretty quickly... thanks for that tip, now at least our characters won't be clamoring for space quite so much.

We also both took the artifact that lets you summon a vendor every 2 minutes on each of our characters... that has been an amazing artifact for inventory management!