Hmmm and what exactly will be left there ? The mails ? It's nice that you only care for the SCA, I don't care for the SCA at all, so lets remove that and keep all the rest.
Yeah I don't think she's being too reasonable there. Strange comment. Botting-wise it would even make more sense to remove the SCA and continue ZAX/AH as read-only than the other way round.
I think overall the gateway might need to make the shift away from gameplay related content to information based content. Meaning you can search the Auction House, but not bid or post. You can look up the ZAX and not trade. Write and read mail, but not claim items(which is already the case). Look up the inventory but not buy, sell and open anything.
Based on that you could even start extending it with more guild and alliance functions.
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
The challenging part of this discussion is talking about how deep down the rabbit hole you can go with the Gateway.
Due to the nature of the system, and the data being passed back and forth, it goes a lot deeper than just simply automating professions, like automating leadership for RP. But I'll stop there.
Ultimately, the Gateway was an amazing tool for both the legitimate player and those who like to exploit everything they can. And unfortunately because of the opportunities afforded those exploiters to act in ways which can have extremely detrimental effects on players who don't, the Gateway itself has probably been the foundation for more headaches than your average player even recognizes.
I think the best we can hope for is that they port the SCA over to be a standalone client, or at the very least, incorporated as something fun you can play in game as you take breaks.
But personally, I'm not super-optimistic about how this is going to turn out for people who are fans of the Gateway, for one reason or another.
I can't access the gateway site anymore, just a white screen. Hope it's not on my end, but that they're finally fixing it...
It's standard at maintenance, probably the web server that usually shows the "under maintenance" is also down, so you get only empty page because of some front-end or caching. Anyway, it's always empty page during actual server maintenance.
After just getting back, it is my understanding that Gateway was brought down due to extreme botting activity. There was no set date on when it would be back and we still don't have a set date. We're currently in discussions to see what can be done before bringing it back.
While not aimed specifically at you strum, you get to share in this as being the face of your company and because you are really bloody slow at responding to issues like this.
Seriously? you guys just figured out that gateway has bots on it? And so your best method of solving that is to take gateway down, and you don't even think it is worth informing the bloody players? WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING THROUGH YOUR HEAD RIGHT NOW?!!
You have like 5 different places you can make announcements, official forums for god's sake. blog posts, why can't you just make a bloody blog post and own up to what you are doing. Telling us a week after the fact that "oh yeah, that isn't a mistake or an accident, that is down on purpose" is really just icing on the cake.
Panderus recently said that RP from leadership had not had as significant impact on the game economy as had been anticipated... meaning you guys planned around the bots and didn't see them as a problem, except now you do suddenly. Anyways, all you have done is screw over the genuine player base who used gateway for professions because it is 2-3 times as fast to do professions on gateway in a totally legitimate manner rather than slogging through professions in game. The gateway botters will just move in game for their botting exactly like they did after you disabled leadership from gateway last time.
Seriously, get your HAMSTER straight Cryptic
Guild - The Imaginary Friends We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
The challenging part of this discussion is talking about how deep down the rabbit hole you can go with the Gateway.
Due to the nature of the system, and the data being passed back and forth, it goes a lot deeper than just simply automating professions, like automating leadership for RP. But I'll stop there.
Ultimately, the Gateway was an amazing tool for both the legitimate player and those who like to exploit everything they can. And unfortunately because of the opportunities afforded those exploiters to act in ways which can have extremely detrimental effects on players who don't, the Gateway itself has probably been the foundation for more headaches than your average player even recognizes.
I think the best we can hope for is that they port the SCA over to be a standalone client, or at the very least, incorporated as something fun you can play in game as you take breaks.
But personally, I'm not super-optimistic about how this is going to turn out for people who are fans of the Gateway, for one reason or another.
And you could not have communicated this a week ago?
Well. I am losing more and more interest in this game. Not only does Cryptic seem unable to solve technical issues, they can't even properly communicate with their playerbase. And there are paying customers among said player base, even if this is a free to play game. Those are the people that help you pay your bills. You should treat them with more respect.
I can't access the gateway site anymore, just a white screen. Hope it's not on my end, but that they're finally fixing it...
It's standard at maintenance, probably the web server that usually shows the "under maintenance" is also down, so you get only empty page because of some front-end or caching. Anyway, it's always empty page during actual server maintenance.
Oh okey, thanks for the info. Then I will get back to waiting and some more waiting
I could see the entire experience of the gateway becoming read-only. Don't remove it - there would be *some* value to seeing how much time is left on running professions and there is value in seeing the market costs even if you can't post or otherwise interact with the AH otherwise. I don't care a whit for SCA either. It's a neat little game, but it takes way too long and is pretty monotonous to run the only dungeon that's actually worth anything, so it's loss wouldn't bother me a bit. I use the gateway to collect professions, without it, I'd return to my (more or less) once-a-day method whereas with the gateway, I can hop on whenever I have time to reset them (boring meetings, before bed, car-rider line waiting to pick my kids up, kitchen waiting for something to finish cooking... I've found it's greatly increased the output of my Leadership toons. But I won't cry if that's discontinued. The only feature that I consider pretty important for my personal use-case is the ZAX - when I consolidate AD, I like having the client and gateway open at the same time on different monitors. I put the toon that's getting the AD up in the client, and then use the gateway to switch around making the buy orders, then cancel and collect within the game client. Makes the whole process much more efficient. I also use the mail client in the gateway frequently since you can copy and paste from the mails but you can't do that easily in the game client without extra clicks.
Nevertheless, if they removed SCA (since making it read only would render it entirely pointless) and made the whole experience otherwise read-only... I'd be sad to see cheaters ruin another important part of the game, but I wouldn't really be too upset at the end of the day. I'm less concerned at the loss of the Gateway than I am at the terrible way Cryptic operates as a business. The management there is terrible and should all lose their jobs over how poorly they handle pretty much everything. They are not a customer-centric business, they don't care -- forget what they've said in the past or how many.. er.. few.. times they've "listened" and implemented features we've asked for -- they DON'T CARE what their customers actually think and they clearly don't spend nearly as much time "analyzing" data as they seem to imply they do.
This is simply one more example in a long line of examples of how to treat your customers like garbage. I've already doing my part and refusing to provide financial support to this company in the form of buying Zen. I strongly urge everyone to do the same. Don't reward their bad behavior. Don't quit the game, just.... emphasize the "FREE" part of Free to Play in your game play habits. They clearly don't pay attention to our voices and care nothing for whether how they're perceived by their own customers - so maybe they'll pay attention our wallets once they're closed? It's the only actual voice we have that they may pay attention to. Giving Cryptic your money is letting them know you approve of their mismanagement, that you approve of their lack of communication, and you approve of them dismantling the game piece by piece without really any plan to improve it. So... if you don't approve of those things - don't tell them you do by paying them to keep doing things the way they have been.
Bots - the excuse for another nerf. Well play and well plan, Cryptic. The AD invocation nerf was not told. The Gateway shutdown was not told. We more or less can say goodbye to Gateway now. It was planned all along.
This is not accurate- this was on preview and people paying attention knew about it in advance. Whether they made a post about it or not, it was not a surprise, it was being discussed on the forums.
I'm personally hoping they can remodel the gateway- if they have to remove zax or auctions or whatnot due to botting, fine, just get us back our SCA and our ability to Q leadership through a browser so I don't have to fiddle with unreliable remote desktopping in to do it - I can live without the rest of it. Just do it fast, please! Like a bandaid already.
Selfish Opinion: Make the Gateway Zen Exchange and the Gateway Auction House read-only. Lock Gateway Professions for characters that haven't completed Blacklake District, Tower District & Spellplague.
Blacklake I run for bag, tower until I've sorted the 40 shards and then till level 23 so I can jump to NWG.
For some reason I just don't like Spellplague and haven't done it apart from my first ever character, add to that I'm now running Azure 7s on most toons as soon as I can slot them, along with a habit of idling anything I'm not currently playing with occasional rounds of invokes and AD runs when I need something like a main slot arti off the AH and most of my toons are level 40+ without having done much past whacking Karzov for a bag.
So how about no?
Level 10 and say completing Blacklake fair enough or as someone said ONE character that's got decent progression, but as it is I've got toons ranging from a fair chunk of the Campaign log claimed to a level 56 OP that I'm gonna head back to soon that due to a couple of 2 x XP events and guild dailies still needs to get his Sybella and NWG bags and even more embarrassingly still has "Nest Egg"in his quest log along with "Trouble at the Towers"... he's been idle for weeks now, why should I have been banned from levelling his profs via in-game queuing/Gateway queuing just because I decided to gear a main and off-main and also level some throwaway toons for Sigils to make him better and smoother to gear as I level him ( I plan to make him my second Main ).
The problem with your "cure" is not everyone 1) plays the way you do and 2) can actually face Spellplague.
There needs to be some form of change yes, but not something as arbritary as that.
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zebularMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 15,270Community Moderator
I agree with this, except take it one step further - remove professions, Zen Exchange, and the AH from the Gateway completely. I think they would still have issues with people botting SCA though, and that's one thing I don't want to lose, so make the rewards from SCA BtA.
Hmmm and what exactly will be left there ? The mails ? It's nice that you only care for the SCA, I don't care for the SCA at all, so lets remove that and keep all the rest.
I also only care for SCA in what the Gateway offers, and I am sure just like there are many who like it for other reasons like you, there are many who like it just for SCA like myself. So, instead of being spiteful about it, let's do be rational. There's no rational reason to take down just SCA and leave the rest just like there's no rational reason to take down everything except for SCA.
I do think it would be far better to put in botting deterrents, like what they did with the PS4 which are similar to what @two30 suggests:
Selfish Opinion: Make the Gateway Zen Exchange and the Gateway Auction House read-only. Lock Gateway Professions for characters that haven't completed Blacklake District, Tower District & Spellplague.
I never did like that the Auction House and Zen Exchange could be used fully outside the game. In my opinion, if one is going to meddle in the economy of the game, one should be logged into and playing the game itself, not micromanaging it from a browser.
Never-the-less, if the Gateway were to be brought down permanently, I'd not be bothered. There's no Gateway for the XBOX and I am enjoying Neverwinter just fine there without and I haven't even logged into the Gateway for my PC characters in almost two months now. I guess I just like actually logging into the game I am wanting to play, not some glimpse of it through a browser.
In my opinion, loosing the gateway's AH and ZAX access could only be a boon to the stabilization of the game's economy, as much of what exploiters do and bots do to ruin such would be greatly impaired or removed outright were they not be able to use their fiendish ways on the Gateway.
I am betting it won't be long till people botting start running scripts in game rather than on the gateway. I am also betting that it will be much worse for the servers but hey, you never know.
It's already happening, haven't you noticed the increase in lag / rubber-banding? Since the gateway went down, the game turned into a lagfest, sometimes it's barely playable, while before i had pretty much 0 lag. The boters won't just sit and wait till the gateway is back, they'll just switch to an in-game profession bot. Disabling the gateway permanently or removing the leadership from the gateway once again will do nothing to combat boters running RMT businesses, it'll just annoy real players, just like most of the anti-botting measures implemented so far.
Dear lord, *that* is what is causing my game to suddenly be quite unplayable? Yesterday at about 5:15pm CST suddently everything lagged all to heck.... If that's what is doing it, make it stop.
So he basically just said professions on the gateway are no longer going to be a thing. You literally just killed your game... They kept the lack of any economy afloat and you guys officially just ruined the rest of the game haha.
Ugh... To sit here after enjoying every single mod until 6-7 ish, you guys finally ruined what was my favorite game. From strongholds, to boons, to endless dailies, to zero sellable equipment, zero dungeons of worth, keys for F'n everything, insignias, endlesssssss mounts/companions and then nerfing them after people buy them, and the mother of all annoyances (aside from your complete disregard for QOL or giving even a little bit of a sh** about your players with communication) REFINEMENT.... Whoever thought of that... Well I hope they are in a better place.
Good luck at your next jobs if you guys don't revert the gateway back. Especially if you don't do SCA. Adios, strum is the only one that should be hired back although you can all the Cryptic'itis is slowly bringing him down. Kreatyv is growing on me finally after all my warnings. So I'll wish you good luck also
And you could not have communicated this a week ago?
Zerg is speculating exactly as much as the rest of us. He (and Kreatyve, etc.) learn about things when staff deign to tell them, and were as in the dark as anyone else over the weekend.
I am betting it won't be long till people botting start running scripts in game rather than on the gateway. I am also betting that it will be much worse for the servers but hey, you never know.
It's already happening, haven't you noticed the increase in lag / rubber-banding? Since the gateway went down, the game turned into a lagfest, sometimes it's barely playable, while before i had pretty much 0 lag. The boters won't just sit and wait till the gateway is back, they'll just switch to an in-game profession bot. Disabling the gateway permanently or removing the leadership from the gateway once again will do nothing to combat boters running RMT businesses, it'll just annoy real players, just like most of the anti-botting measures implemented so far.
Dear lord, *that* is what is causing my game to suddenly be quite unplayable? Yesterday at about 5:15pm CST suddently everything lagged all to heck.... If that's what is doing it, make it stop.
Don't fool yourself - anyone that has a bot that runs in the gameclient is, and has been, using it. There's no "switching" going on. This won't be a huge loss to the professional cheaters, it will just be a lost to those casual cheaters that are willing to mess around with scripts in the browser but not the hardcore risk of a real bot. My suggestion to Cryptic - really - is to implement detection tools to look for the scripts. The existing gateway bots (both the server-side and the browser scripts) all have extremely obvious signatures that wouldn't lend themselves to false positives (I'm more than happy to provide more info on this non-publicly) and the cat and mouse game of defense, provided you implement detection in a solid framework, wouldn't be that awful to maintain.
But... no... as usual, instead of implementing reasonable and extensible solutions that don't hamper the experience of legit customers, Cryptic chose the nuclear option right out of the gate. booooom.
The problem starts somewhere else. I use the gateway because the interface is much better than the game interface. Examples:
Inventory management: If I want to find an item on one of my eight toons I can find it on the gateway within 30 seconds. Using the game client it takes bloody ages to search for an item as I have to boot up each character in a zone. Suggestion: make all inventories and paperdolls accessible from the character that is currently logged in. Won't happen, I know.
AH: the AH on the gateway is faster and has more lines per page than the in game AH client. Usual keyboard navigation methods (cursor etc.) don't work in the game client. Suggestion: improve the GUI to be more responsive and adapt the information it delivers. Make ONE access via the handle to the AH and not one for each character.
ZAX: transfering AD from one character to another one takes 20 seconds on the gateway, 2 minutes in game. Suggestion: Make a shared AD purse so I do not have to misuse the ZAX for AD transfers.
Mail: not possible to copy text from within a mail without the reply workaround. Suggestion: rework the mail window and its functionalities.
Professions: just a real pita to do in game. I don't know where to start suggesting what to do.
So basically Cryptic has made a game that is partially more fun to use/play in the browser than using the actual game itself. On the other hand, if there were no Professions and AH in the browser I might have left the game already in August 2013.
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
The problem with your "cure" is not everyone 1) plays the way you do and 2) can actually face Spellplague.
Pretty sure he means the Plague Tower quest, which concludes around level 20. Locking out professions, etc. until a character is in their 50s is pretty extreme.
Although, just to be mischievous, navigating everything in the Chasm might be a pretty good "prove you're human" qualifier. Though of course, once such things are accurately scripted, bots are better at it than we are....
the gateway is up So if the game suffers of extreme botting during 2rp or 2enchants even, just take it down during those events, allowing us to use it while we work or whatever?
If botting professions is the problem the bandaid is simple, disable leadership again or make the rewards BtA. Sure they can level up enchants and sell them but there is more work involved and wait for it... The game needs to be played to rank and sell enchants!
If there was another exploit that hit then so be it but Strums post clearly says it's to combat botters.
It would not bother me in the least if the rewards were bound. If you want to bind to character, enable queuing to make it better for us(QoL). If it's BtA we'll keep running them and transfer the stuff to the toon we want to use it on.
I feel as though Strum is now the company scape goat. The community doesn't want to blame him and would rather bash management making him the perfect scape goat.
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micky1p00Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,594Arc User
The problem with your "cure" is not everyone 1) plays the way you do and 2) can actually face Spellplague.
Pretty sure he means the Plague Tower quest, which concludes around level 20. Locking out professions, etc. until a character is in their 50s is pretty extreme.
Although, just to be mischievous, navigating everything in the Chasm might be a pretty good "prove you're human" qualifier. Though of course, once such things are accurately scripted, bots are better at it than we are....
Yup, I know he meant Plague Tower... and as said I hated it that much I've never went back since my first toon and prefer if needed to even farm Tower zone and Guild dailies till 23.
The problem is there are way more folk than me that are now levelling alts and have access to various things from being dragged along for one single HE in guild SH and suddenly BANG we're level 20+ to just knowing the game and either idling after 11 with invokes or keeping our lowbie runs till 2 x XP. Hell, an average set of guild dailies will net me 2 levels a day without stress for not a lot of time expended leaving me more time to spend on Mains of sigil throwaways and even pre SH quests you can just do your 2 dungeon runs for AD and usually get a level or 2 and therefore bypass that whole area if you want before moving to the Graveyard.
It does need a fix, but a thought out one either less hamfisted than effectively blocking out sub 20 or alts... something like as someone suggested tying it into a much more comprehensive unlock on A character per account.
Its fine that everyone disagrees as to what they like and don't like with the gateway. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions.
However giving suggestions on what to kill is pretty horrible.
I dont like xyz!! (or I don't use xyz!!) kill xyz and leave the rest. Pretty hard to be more self serving than this. (IMO really bad coming from mods)
Well xyz is what the bots are doing... Kill it and leave the rest. The bots are doing everything... Only Cryptic know what activity they acted to stop last weekend. They are not likely to tell us. All this does is give them random suggestions on what to do.
Well lets make everything read only. Doing so will kill the functionality of the gateway just as soundly as killing it off.
The fact is killing off the gateway is not a good idea at all. Please do not suggest this or ideas of the same. There is very little difference between this and class forum discussions on "nerf this feat." They are not productive. and, tbh, why give them ideas on what things to do away with. I am sure that even though they are "discussing their options" they already have an idea on what they want to do. Asking to nerf aspects of the gateway will not help the playerbase at all.
The gateway is useful. It is more productive than in game. I do not want to see any of it go away.
For professions, it is quicker than in-game. Also, I have a dual monitor set up, and I use the gateway to update professions even when in the game and on the same toon I am currently using in game. I do it while waiting for a party to form, while in queue, or while chatting with friends. Heck, I can even knock out 2 or 3 profession tasks while waiting for the long (and now very boring) and unskippable cut scene before the final boss in elol.
The AH... The gateway AH seems to give better results. All the times that the AH has been bugged in recent weeks does not seem to be a problem on the gateway. Also, I will use the AH on the gateway to buy things on a different toon then in-game, either because that is the toon that has the AD to afford it, or that is the toon I want to use the item on (and I'm too lazy to want to transfer it to him/her later.)
The ZAX.. Plain and simple, if I need money on my current toon, nothing is easier then going through my toons on the gateway, finding one that has enough money to spare and transferring it. I can usually do this in less time than it takes to swap a single toon.
SCA... Personally I rarely use this. But I don't want to see it go away. People enjoy it... People like the gear it drops too. They can make money and I can get good companion gear affordably.
Character inventory. I missed this a lot during 2x RP last weekend. I tend to grab and enchant or acct-bound MH/OH gear and put it in my shared bank. I then go to every character and take it out of the shared bank, fill it with character bound RP and put it back into the shared bank. Unfortunately If I get called away from the computer or asked to swap toons to join a dungeon run, I sometimes forget to put it back into the bank. There is no easier way to find it then to look at the inventory pages on all my toons through the gateway. I get through 5 toons on the gateway in the time it takes me to swap once. This is also useful for me to find any remaining RP on my toons before the end of 2x RP. It is also easier to right click on sell to vendor to get rid of any junk in my inventory. no need to find a vendor when its is just a click away. Even with VIP I find this easier then summoning and talking to the professions vendor to do the same thing.
The big problem is that is a lot of functionality to lose due to calls of people asking to "nerf the gateway or parts thereof" If it happens these tasks are more of a burden to do in game. I also sure that my list is not complete, other people have different legitimate uses for the gateway.
The other issue is that if these functions are removed, the bots will just go into the game client. Then we can suffer with the additional lag and disconnects... and will not be fun at all.
So please do not call to nerf the gateway... Hopefully a solution can be found to fix the current problem and leave it functional.
Comments
Yeah I don't think she's being too reasonable there. Strange comment. Botting-wise it would even make more sense to remove the SCA and continue ZAX/AH as read-only than the other way round.
I think overall the gateway might need to make the shift away from gameplay related content to information based content. Meaning you can search the Auction House, but not bid or post. You can look up the ZAX and not trade. Write and read mail, but not claim items(which is already the case). Look up the inventory but not buy, sell and open anything.
Based on that you could even start extending it with more guild and alliance functions.
Due to the nature of the system, and the data being passed back and forth, it goes a lot deeper than just simply automating professions, like automating leadership for RP. But I'll stop there.
Ultimately, the Gateway was an amazing tool for both the legitimate player and those who like to exploit everything they can. And unfortunately because of the opportunities afforded those exploiters to act in ways which can have extremely detrimental effects on players who don't, the Gateway itself has probably been the foundation for more headaches than your average player even recognizes.
I think the best we can hope for is that they port the SCA over to be a standalone client, or at the very least, incorporated as something fun you can play in game as you take breaks.
But personally, I'm not super-optimistic about how this is going to turn out for people who are fans of the Gateway, for one reason or another.
Anyway, it's always empty page during actual server maintenance.
Seriously? you guys just figured out that gateway has bots on it? And so your best method of solving that is to take gateway down, and you don't even think it is worth informing the bloody players? WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING THROUGH YOUR HEAD RIGHT NOW?!!
You have like 5 different places you can make announcements, official forums for god's sake. blog posts, why can't you just make a bloody blog post and own up to what you are doing. Telling us a week after the fact that "oh yeah, that isn't a mistake or an accident, that is down on purpose" is really just icing on the cake.
Panderus recently said that RP from leadership had not had as significant impact on the game economy as had been anticipated... meaning you guys planned around the bots and didn't see them as a problem, except now you do suddenly. Anyways, all you have done is screw over the genuine player base who used gateway for professions because it is 2-3 times as fast to do professions on gateway in a totally legitimate manner rather than slogging through professions in game. The gateway botters will just move in game for their botting exactly like they did after you disabled leadership from gateway last time.
Seriously, get your HAMSTER straight Cryptic
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
Well. I am losing more and more interest in this game. Not only does Cryptic seem unable to solve technical issues, they can't even properly communicate with their playerbase. And there are paying customers among said player base, even if this is a free to play game. Those are the people that help you pay your bills. You should treat them with more respect.
Nevertheless, if they removed SCA (since making it read only would render it entirely pointless) and made the whole experience otherwise read-only... I'd be sad to see cheaters ruin another important part of the game, but I wouldn't really be too upset at the end of the day. I'm less concerned at the loss of the Gateway than I am at the terrible way Cryptic operates as a business. The management there is terrible and should all lose their jobs over how poorly they handle pretty much everything. They are not a customer-centric business, they don't care -- forget what they've said in the past or how many.. er.. few.. times they've "listened" and implemented features we've asked for -- they DON'T CARE what their customers actually think and they clearly don't spend nearly as much time "analyzing" data as they seem to imply they do.
This is simply one more example in a long line of examples of how to treat your customers like garbage. I've already doing my part and refusing to provide financial support to this company in the form of buying Zen. I strongly urge everyone to do the same. Don't reward their bad behavior. Don't quit the game, just.... emphasize the "FREE" part of Free to Play in your game play habits. They clearly don't pay attention to our voices and care nothing for whether how they're perceived by their own customers - so maybe they'll pay attention our wallets once they're closed? It's the only actual voice we have that they may pay attention to. Giving Cryptic your money is letting them know you approve of their mismanagement, that you approve of their lack of communication, and you approve of them dismantling the game piece by piece without really any plan to improve it. So... if you don't approve of those things - don't tell them you do by paying them to keep doing things the way they have been.
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Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
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I'm personally hoping they can remodel the gateway- if they have to remove zax or auctions or whatnot due to botting, fine, just get us back our SCA and our ability to Q leadership through a browser so I don't have to fiddle with unreliable remote desktopping in to do it - I can live without the rest of it. Just do it fast, please! Like a bandaid already.
https://www.theholycrusaders.com/
For some reason I just don't like Spellplague and haven't done it apart from my first ever character, add to that I'm now running Azure 7s on most toons as soon as I can slot them, along with a habit of idling anything I'm not currently playing with occasional rounds of invokes and AD runs when I need something like a main slot arti off the AH and most of my toons are level 40+ without having done much past whacking Karzov for a bag.
So how about no?
Level 10 and say completing Blacklake fair enough or as someone said ONE character that's got decent progression, but as it is I've got toons ranging from a fair chunk of the Campaign log claimed to a level 56 OP that I'm gonna head back to soon that due to a couple of 2 x XP events and guild dailies still needs to get his Sybella and NWG bags and even more embarrassingly still has "Nest Egg"in his quest log along with "Trouble at the Towers"... he's been idle for weeks now, why should I have been banned from levelling his profs via in-game queuing/Gateway queuing just because I decided to gear a main and off-main and also level some throwaway toons for Sigils to make him better and smoother to gear as I level him ( I plan to make him my second Main ).
The problem with your "cure" is not everyone 1) plays the way you do and 2) can actually face Spellplague.
There needs to be some form of change yes, but not something as arbritary as that.
I do think it would be far better to put in botting deterrents, like what they did with the PS4 which are similar to what @two30 suggests: I never did like that the Auction House and Zen Exchange could be used fully outside the game. In my opinion, if one is going to meddle in the economy of the game, one should be logged into and playing the game itself, not micromanaging it from a browser.
Never-the-less, if the Gateway were to be brought down permanently, I'd not be bothered. There's no Gateway for the XBOX and I am enjoying Neverwinter just fine there without and I haven't even logged into the Gateway for my PC characters in almost two months now. I guess I just like actually logging into the game I am wanting to play, not some glimpse of it through a browser.
In my opinion, loosing the gateway's AH and ZAX access could only be a boon to the stabilization of the game's economy, as much of what exploiters do and bots do to ruin such would be greatly impaired or removed outright were they not be able to use their fiendish ways on the Gateway.
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Ugh... To sit here after enjoying every single mod until 6-7 ish, you guys finally ruined what was my favorite game. From strongholds, to boons, to endless dailies, to zero sellable equipment, zero dungeons of worth, keys for F'n everything, insignias, endlesssssss mounts/companions and then nerfing them after people buy them, and the mother of all annoyances (aside from your complete disregard for QOL or giving even a little bit of a sh** about your players with communication) REFINEMENT.... Whoever thought of that... Well I hope they are in a better place.
Good luck at your next jobs if you guys don't revert the gateway back. Especially if you don't do SCA. Adios, strum is the only one that should be hired back although you can all the Cryptic'itis is slowly bringing him down. Kreatyv is growing on me finally after all my warnings. So I'll wish you good luck also
Signing off once and for all.
Dom
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
But... no... as usual, instead of implementing reasonable and extensible solutions that don't hamper the experience of legit customers, Cryptic chose the nuclear option right out of the gate. booooom.
*slow clap*
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
I use the gateway because the interface is much better than the game interface.
Examples:
- Inventory management: If I want to find an item on one of my eight toons I can find it on the gateway within 30 seconds. Using the game client it takes bloody ages to search for an item as I have to boot up each character in a zone.
- AH: the AH on the gateway is faster and has more lines per page than the in game AH client. Usual keyboard navigation methods (cursor etc.) don't work in the game client. Suggestion: improve the GUI to be more responsive and adapt the information it delivers. Make ONE access via the handle to the AH and not one for each character.
- ZAX: transfering AD from one character to another one takes 20 seconds on the gateway, 2 minutes in game. Suggestion: Make a shared AD purse so I do not have to misuse the ZAX for AD transfers.
- Mail: not possible to copy text from within a mail without the reply workaround. Suggestion: rework the mail window and its functionalities.
- Professions: just a real pita to do in game. I don't know where to start suggesting what to do.
So basically Cryptic has made a game that is partially more fun to use/play in the browser than using the actual game itself.Suggestion: make all inventories and paperdolls accessible from the character that is currently logged in. Won't happen, I know.
On the other hand, if there were no Professions and AH in the browser I might have left the game already in August 2013.
Although, just to be mischievous, navigating everything in the Chasm might be a pretty good "prove you're human" qualifier. Though of course, once such things are accurately scripted, bots are better at it than we are....
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
So if the game suffers of extreme botting during 2rp or 2enchants even, just take it down during those events, allowing us to use it while we work or whatever?
If there was another exploit that hit then so be it but Strums post clearly says it's to combat botters.
It would not bother me in the least if the rewards were bound. If you want to bind to character, enable queuing to make it better for us(QoL). If it's BtA we'll keep running them and transfer the stuff to the toon we want to use it on.
I feel as though Strum is now the company scape goat. The community doesn't want to blame him and would rather bash management making him the perfect scape goat.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
It is back up, and working.... O.O
The problem is there are way more folk than me that are now levelling alts and have access to various things from being dragged along for one single HE in guild SH and suddenly BANG we're level 20+ to just knowing the game and either idling after 11 with invokes or keeping our lowbie runs till 2 x XP. Hell, an average set of guild dailies will net me 2 levels a day without stress for not a lot of time expended leaving me more time to spend on Mains of sigil throwaways and even pre SH quests you can just do your 2 dungeon runs for AD and usually get a level or 2 and therefore bypass that whole area if you want before moving to the Graveyard.
It does need a fix, but a thought out one either less hamfisted than effectively blocking out sub 20 or alts... something like as someone suggested tying it into a much more comprehensive unlock on A character per account.
However giving suggestions on what to kill is pretty horrible.
- I dont like xyz!! (or I don't use xyz!!) kill xyz and leave the rest. Pretty hard to be more self serving than this. (IMO really bad coming from mods)
- Well xyz is what the bots are doing... Kill it and leave the rest. The bots are doing everything... Only Cryptic know what activity they acted to stop last weekend. They are not likely to tell us. All this does is give them random suggestions on what to do.
- Well lets make everything read only. Doing so will kill the functionality of the gateway just as soundly as killing it off.
The fact is killing off the gateway is not a good idea at all. Please do not suggest this or ideas of the same. There is very little difference between this and class forum discussions on "nerf this feat." They are not productive. and, tbh, why give them ideas on what things to do away with. I am sure that even though they are "discussing their options" they already have an idea on what they want to do. Asking to nerf aspects of the gateway will not help the playerbase at all.The gateway is useful. It is more productive than in game. I do not want to see any of it go away.
For professions, it is quicker than in-game. Also, I have a dual monitor set up, and I use the gateway to update professions even when in the game and on the same toon I am currently using in game. I do it while waiting for a party to form, while in queue, or while chatting with friends. Heck, I can even knock out 2 or 3 profession tasks while waiting for the long (and now very boring) and unskippable cut scene before the final boss in elol.
The AH... The gateway AH seems to give better results. All the times that the AH has been bugged in recent weeks does not seem to be a problem on the gateway. Also, I will use the AH on the gateway to buy things on a different toon then in-game, either because that is the toon that has the AD to afford it, or that is the toon I want to use the item on (and I'm too lazy to want to transfer it to him/her later.)
The ZAX.. Plain and simple, if I need money on my current toon, nothing is easier then going through my toons on the gateway, finding one that has enough money to spare and transferring it. I can usually do this in less time than it takes to swap a single toon.
SCA... Personally I rarely use this. But I don't want to see it go away. People enjoy it... People like the gear it drops too. They can make money and I can get good companion gear affordably.
Character inventory. I missed this a lot during 2x RP last weekend. I tend to grab and enchant or acct-bound MH/OH gear and put it in my shared bank. I then go to every character and take it out of the shared bank, fill it with character bound RP and put it back into the shared bank. Unfortunately If I get called away from the computer or asked to swap toons to join a dungeon run, I sometimes forget to put it back into the bank. There is no easier way to find it then to look at the inventory pages on all my toons through the gateway. I get through 5 toons on the gateway in the time it takes me to swap once. This is also useful for me to find any remaining RP on my toons before the end of 2x RP. It is also easier to right click on sell to vendor to get rid of any junk in my inventory. no need to find a vendor when its is just a click away. Even with VIP I find this easier then summoning and talking to the professions vendor to do the same thing.
The big problem is that is a lot of functionality to lose due to calls of people asking to "nerf the gateway or parts thereof" If it happens these tasks are more of a burden to do in game. I also sure that my list is not complete, other people have different legitimate uses for the gateway.
The other issue is that if these functions are removed, the bots will just go into the game client. Then we can suffer with the additional lag and disconnects... and will not be fun at all.
So please do not call to nerf the gateway... Hopefully a solution can be found to fix the current problem and leave it functional.
Murphster - SS CW | Jennsen Rahl - MoF CW
Taarna - GWF
Eowyn - Protector OP | Leela - Devoted OP
Mara Jade - TR
Leeloo - Tempt SW | Kahlan Amnell - Fury SW | Galadriel - Damnation SW
Sturm Nightblade - GF