A token companion is hardly worth the 800k AD or so I just spent on buying purple companions for my two characters without any kind of warning less than a week before they took the gateway down so I could spend more time playing SCA.... You know what guys, I quit.
IPs of tor exit nodes are published. There are proxy/tor/vpn rbl dns servers that are freely open for anyone to use to reverse dns an ip and see if it's a known proxy. They dont even need to maintain anything.
0
banzaikittenMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 220Arc User
ugh, what is next to close ? the game it self, bcouse no option can befound for the spammers/goldsellers.
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
gateway was closed because of botting, money was never an issue for gateway. it was about how long it would take for doing the process of making gateway less bottable, yes resources would be put into it and money is a resource, but money was not the reason gateway was closed.
They proved before they can disable certain aspects, and it isn't like would have to build anything. Just get in the code, turn off the AH, Zax, Professions and bam, useful tool.
Useful? What's left?
Looking at inventory on alts or reading mail? I hardly call that a "must have" feature worthy of continued support, or even the effort to dig into the code and make it work, as well as ensuring that these features are indeed "off" and inaccessible to botters and exploiters.
It's a waste of time.
As much as I'll miss the gateway for QoL reasons @ironzerg79 is right, you wouldn't hire a Lighting Designer to fit a kitchen light or an engineer to teach your kid how to build LEGO. Even with my rusty circa 2000 HTML knowledge I know it's not as simple as "turn it off", hell the Broken/Glitched Tutorial workaround showed that, you'd need resources and Dev Time to build even a Read Only version... something they seem loath to provide.
They proved before they can disable certain aspects, and it isn't like would have to build anything. Just get in the code, turn off the AH, Zax, Professions and bam, useful tool.
Useful? What's left?
Looking at inventory on alts or reading mail? I hardly call that a "must have" feature worthy of continued support, or even the effort to dig into the code and make it work, as well as ensuring that these features are indeed "off" and inaccessible to botters and exploiters.
It's a waste of time.
Agreed with oldbaldyone. There are many of us that still want to use those "worthy" aspects for you, Iron. And please, "continued support"? Leave it as is, the base of all GW is done, dunno it will take 1 month to add a few new items to collection page, if not, leave it AS IS, and turn off professions and AH, and don't say it's more difficult that do this all from the ground. Don't need to update it EVERY DAY, do it once a month or even two. We don't ask them to create NEW thing, just to leave AS IS old ones. They say it was greatly affect live shard. C'mon, what live shard they play on? Haven't seen any imporvement since GW is down. Disabling prof and AH will free quite good amount of traffic. Even maybe put it all on lower spec servers. It will be a bit slower but I think we wouldn't mind. Thousands of users happy.
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
gateway was closed because of botting, money was never an issue for gateway. it was about how long it would take for doing the process of making gateway less bottable, yes resources would be put into it and money is a resource, but money was not the reason gateway was closed.
How many people do you know actually buying rp from the zen store ??? With the gateway going down and people manually crafting the market will take a hit after the surplus has dried out so yes it was a pretty calculated move on their part . And when hasn't it been about money with this game lol ....
IPs of tor exit nodes are published. There are proxy/tor/vpn rbl dns servers that are freely open for anyone to use to reverse dns an ip and see if it's a known proxy. They dont even need to maintain anything.
As far as i know (i don't tryed "TOR" or its network yet up to that extend) The thing is that a "TOR" user can change the IP he or she gest when enters into the TOR Network so, a bit hard to do so.
(tl;dr: tor is easy to block. botting is largely easy to detect and stop. arc made cryptic stop caring.)
TOR relies on bouncing a route between peers in the network, then uses an exit node with a known publicly facing IP address. Anyone can set up or take down their own exit node at any time, but it's ip address is soon discovered by bots people run to find new ones (http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/). The IP is then added to the database of known nodes. There aren't many exit nodes. Today there are 926 exit nodes, each with their own IP address. That's a very manageable.
If you want to blacklist proxies, public vpns, and tor you don't need to think about the database though. All you have to do is do a reverse dns check on one of the many rbl/dnsbl DNS servers when someone connects and see if it's on the blacklist. There are people who volunteer their time to maintain these databases free of charge. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_blacklists). This is actually very easy to implement and is the first step in stopping people from using borrowed IP addresses on the net.
The next thing would be to log all gateway activities in a sql database. Then you'd write a small script that found the highest usage per IP. If an IP address is polling the AH or whatever is causing degradation at regular intervals over a long period of time, you ban the IP. If enough IP's are banned within a subnet, you flag it and manually review it to ban the whole subnet. If a botter is renting access to (or has created their own) malware driven botnet to use IP addresses, you will eventually filter those and be able to automatically contribute new abuse IP's to existing blacklists, contributing back to the abuse prevention communities.
Once an IP is banned you leave it up to the user to put in a support ticket for manual review. Many botters know this is a futile attempt to get their IP unbanned and won't even try at that point, rather they would focus on trying to buy another IP somewhere. Paying for a new IP every day or two cuts into profit margins significantly and takes more of a time investment, discouraging botting.
This is what should have been done from day 1. It takes about a day to write the scripts and set up the database. Maybe another day to watch it and debug it, with boundary tweaks over the course of a week or so.
The whole "We dont want to spend the manpower to do it." is a cop out.
The truth is, historically, when Neverwinter transferred management from Cryptic to Arc, the development on the gateway stopped completely, and left it in eternal "beta limbo". Noone did any development on it from that point forward. There are many bugs in the gateway and a couple of significant exploits that I reported and never were corrected (and I never publicly released). The exploits were never abused to the point that an emergency response was required, which is the only time they seem to patch leaking holes (remember Caturday?). I can only imagine, but it seems that Arc didn't want to spend the money on paying skilled HTML5/SQL coders to work on it, the gateway/neverwinter api wasn't fully developed or documented and the person who was in the middle of development left the company or was reassigned, or everyone involved just stopped caring and focused on raking in the money.
I'm sure Arc paid someone a significant amount of money to gain control of Neverwinter and the focus went from developing and innovating an amazing product to recouping those costs.
I should know by now that when games change hands, I should just bail out and go find something else to play. Viacom screwed me with neopets. Zynga screwed me with omgpop. And now Arc with neverwinter.
0
ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
I'm sure Arc paid someone a significant amount of money to gain control of Neverwinter and the focus went from developing and innovating an amazing product to recouping those costs.
I should know by now that when games change hands, I should just bail out and go find something else to play. Viacom screwed me with neopets. Zynga screwed me with omgpop. And now Arc with neverwinter.
Hrmm...just to clarifying some things.
Cryptic is the company that developed and continues to work on Neverwinter. When we're talking about "the devs", this is Cryptic 100% of the way. PWE (see below) doesn't work on any development.
Perfect World Entertainment or PWE is the publisher for Neverwinter.
Arc isn't a company, but PWE's platform that connects together all their games into a single place, much like Steam.
Ancillary to this relationship is Wizards of the Coast or WotC, who own the D&D trademark. Cryptic has been collaborating with WotC to build stories and content that ties back into Neverwinter current D&D themes from other products (See Storm King's Thunder, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, or Princess of the Apocalypse).
No one's been sold to anyone since Neverwinter launched. Arc was introduced by PWE a couple years into the launch of Neverwinter, but it has nothing to actually do with Neverwinter, other than including it as one of the games tied to the platform, since it houses all of PWE's properties.
I'm sure Arc paid someone a significant amount of money to gain control of Neverwinter and the focus went from developing and innovating an amazing product to recouping those costs.
I should know by now that when games change hands, I should just bail out and go find something else to play. Viacom screwed me with neopets. Zynga screwed me with omgpop. And now Arc with neverwinter.
Hrmm...just to clarifying some things.
Cryptic is the company that developed and continues to work on Neverwinter. When we're talking about "the devs", this is Cryptic 100% of the way. PWE (see below) doesn't work on any development.
Perfect World Entertainment or PWE is the publisher for Neverwinter.
Arc isn't a company, but PWE's platform that connects together all their games into a single place, much like Steam.
Ancillary to this relationship is Wizards of the Coast or WotC, who own the D&D trademark. Cryptic has been collaborating with WotC to build stories and content that ties back into Neverwinter current D&D themes from other products (See Storm King's Thunder, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, or Princess of the Apocalypse).
No one's been sold to anyone since Neverwinter launched. Arc was introduced by PWE a couple years into the launch of Neverwinter, but it has nothing to actually do with Neverwinter, other than including it as one of the games tied to the platform, since it houses all of PWE's properties.
PWE is also the owner of Cryptic Studios, which they acquired from Atari about...5 years ago, give or take. At the time, Neverwinter was still in the very early stages of development.
ROLL TIDE ROLL
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
I wonder who choses the active bonus of companions, 55 movement, yeah so cool
0
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
For all the moaning about the gift companion having a bad bonus... so what?
If it had a great bonus, then it would be giving an unfair advantage to anyone who gets one as opposed to anyone who doesn't.
It was undoubtedly given the worst possible stats intentionally, because the point of it is to be a cute commemoration, not something to actually make you stronger. So they have made it an item that is nearly purely cosmetic.
It's much like the Caturday capes, other than not getting one per character.
For all the moaning about the gift companion having a bad bonus... so what?
If it had a great bonus, then it would be giving an unfair advantage to anyone who gets one as opposed to anyone who doesn't.
It was undoubtedly given the worst possible stats intentionally, because the point of it is to be a cute commemoration, not something to actually make you stronger. So they have made it an item that is nearly purely cosmetic.
It's much like the Caturday capes, other than not getting one per character.
It's a "free" trinket that cost me 800k AD, considering I had just purchased purple companions to play SCA on two characters. Now I have 8 bound level 25 purple companions that I will never use for anything.
If the gateway is really gone forever, I hope they un-nerf the professions and make them profitable enough to play with again. Players became botters partly because profit margins became so slim (due to botters) that working the professions on a single account wasn't worth the time investment. You'd make as much profit spending the time running around blacklake opening skill nodes for bottom level profession assets to sell for pennies. The only way professions were profitable was by botting. So, in essence, trying to fight botting by nerfing, they drove more people to bot and existing botters to expand their footprint. The correct response was to mitigate the problem through IP filtering, not by destroying a game mechanic. I hope that if they take anything from this going forward, it's that addressing the abuse to the system is the solution; breaking the system not.
0
kreatyveMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 10,545Community Moderator
For all the moaning about the gift companion having a bad bonus... so what?
If it had a great bonus, then it would be giving an unfair advantage to anyone who gets one as opposed to anyone who doesn't.
It was undoubtedly given the worst possible stats intentionally, because the point of it is to be a cute commemoration, not something to actually make you stronger. So they have made it an item that is nearly purely cosmetic.
It's much like the Caturday capes, other than not getting one per character.
It's a "free" trinket that cost me 800k AD, considering I had just purchased purple companions to play SCA on two characters. Now I have 8 bound purple companions that I will never use for anything.
If the gateway is really gone forever, I hope they un-nerf the professions and make them profitable enough to play with again. Players became botters partly because profit margins became so slim (do to botters) that working the professions on a single account wasn't worth the time investment. You'd make as much profit spending the time running around blacklake opening skill nodes for bottom level profession assets to sell for pennies. The only way professions were profitable was by botting. So, in essence, trying to fight botting by nerfing, they drove more people to bot. The correct response was to mitigate the problem through IP filtering, not by destroying a game mechanic.
Bah, I upgraded 2 companions to legendary (one with AD) just for SCA. I'm not going to complain about the million AD I lost. Always, always, always assume that things will change with an MMO. Especially when spending a lot. Case in point - the first Angel of Protection that was available in the game sold for over 20 million. Now they are one of the cheapest epic companions.
My opinions are my own. I do not work for PWE or Cryptic. - Forum Rules - Protector's Enclave Discord - I play on Xbox Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official. Any messages written in orange are official moderation messages. Signature images are now fixed!
0
ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
Yeah, I put 4 to Legendary for SCA...but I had fun, earned some good loot, so they probably paid for themselves at some point...maybe. But whatever, it's a game.
"It's a "free" trinket that cost me 800k AD, considering I had just purchased purple companions to play SCA on two characters. Now I have 8 bound level 25 purple companions that I will never use for anything."
This.
I was gearing up companions to play SCA and almost bought zen for that purpose. Now PWE won't see that money and probably never see real world money from me ever again.
I was gearing up companions to play SCA and almost bought zen for that purpose. Now PWE won't see that money and probably never see real world money from me ever again.
Imagine the loss I would have felt if I had dumped $100 into it. Thank god I didn't fall into that hole. It's not as bad as it could be. I could have spent money on the game.
For all the moaning about the gift companion having a bad bonus... so what?
If it had a great bonus, then it would be giving an unfair advantage to anyone who gets one as opposed to anyone who doesn't.
It was undoubtedly given the worst possible stats intentionally, because the point of it is to be a cute commemoration, not something to actually make you stronger. So they have made it an item that is nearly purely cosmetic.
It's much like the Caturday capes, other than not getting one per character.
I know, right? The way people are talking, you'd think they expected game-breaking legendary companions for simply gracing the Gateway with their presence. It's meant to be a token.
ROLL TIDE ROLL
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
Really? For all of the time spent leveling and researching companions to play Swordcoast with numerous characters I am rewarded by having a game that I enjoy "closed down" and in return for promoting this as one of the benifits to playing Neverwinter, to friends, I get a "green" pet? I return to my original question: "Really?"
On the plus side, companions should be falling dramatically in price just like professional assets. With the exception of a few BiS companions, there's no use for most of them.
Really? For all of the time spent leveling and researching companions to play Swordcoast with numerous characters I am rewarded by having a game that I enjoy "closed down" and in return for promoting this as one of the benifits to playing Neverwinter, to friends, I get a "green" pet? I return to my original question: "Really?"
Oh, but the best part is that they thanks us for our understanding ... understanding what? That they fail to prevent botting, so they shut down utilities that many players have enjoyed. I for one do not agree with their lame story, nor with the decision to shut down Gateway.
Will there be a new app in store to continue assess the professions while away from consul.
I'm not an official source, but after this announcement, I think we can all agree that the answer to the question of another application allowing people to access their Neverwinter account while away from their computer/console is a clear and resounding "No".
the whole reason bonding pets are better then augmented ones is cause augmented are like normal companions stats wise and all but they don't fight or do anything. i love my bonded pet so i got no were to really complain here. but i can however complain a bit about augments.
i see no need to nerf bonding runestones. instead buff the overall augmentation pets or buff the augment effect.
Silvergriffon's Holistic Suggestion Agency
Augment companions used to be the vastly superior choice, and harder to get than regular companions. Bonding runestones were supposed to make people want to use the combat companions, but they were too good and made Augments greatly inferior. They recently reined in the Bonding stone a little bit, but they are still better than using an Augment companion.
Personally, I think that both should be good choices. Bonding stones are slightly less reliable and bursty, so it is reasonable that they grant more points when they proc. But, right now the gap is too wide. High rank Bonding runestones aren't really all that hard to get and the buff is up pretty much all the time in combat anyway.
I propose two changes.
First, I suggest that Augment companions be given an additional active bonus. Augmentation Affintiy: An active, but not summoned, Augment companion adds 10% of it's stats to the currently summoned companion. This bonus is increased to 100% of stats if the currently summoned companion is also an Augment.
Second, limit the total number of active Augment companions at any one time to two. Atempting to make a third one active will generate an error stating that you may only have two active Augment companions at one time and must make one of your currently active aguments idle before making this one active.
So, under my suggestions, if you have a summoned Augment plus an active Augment you get +100% of stats from each. If you have a summoned combat companion with Bonding runestones and two active Augments then your combat companion would have +20% of the Augment's stats making it more effective and survivable while also increasing the bonus to the character when the Bonding stones proc.
Numbers That Might Be Right (Excluding the companions base stats as this is a small number, probably varies widely, and I am lazy.)
Currently, a combat companion with 3 Rank 12 Bonding Runestones, Loyal Avenger gear with all Rank 12 enchantments gives the character 30,002 stat points when it procs. Currently, an Augment pet with all Rank 12 runestones, Loyal Avenger gear with all Rank 12 enchantments gives the character 11,517 stat points.
With my suggestion, if you have a summoned combat companion equipped as above along with two active Augments equipped as above the character gets 36,569 stat points when the stones proc. With my suggestion, if you have a summoned Augment companion equipped as above along with a second active Augment companion the character gets 23,142 stat points.
The Bonding stones could still deliver many more stat points but the ratio goes down from about 2.6:1 to about 1.6:1. I think that makes it more viable to chose either path.
Plus, from a revenue standpoint players will have two or even three companions that they will need to gear up for each character. Gearing up makes players spend money and/or play more (which ultimately causes somebody to spend money).
I disagree with all of this. Getting 3 rank 12 bonding stones takes massively more amount of time, AD and effort (and pain of burning hundreds of wards) than buying an augment. I see the augment as a first step and the bonding path as the end game. All part of leveling and improving your character. My main has an inactive augment and 3 rank 12 bonding. My alts all have augments. This seems natural to me.
I disagree with all of this. Getting 3 rank 12 bonding stones takes massively more amount of time, AD and effort (and pain of burning hundreds of wards) than buying an augment. I see the augment as a first step and the bonding path as the end game. All part of leveling and improving your character. My main has an inactive augment and 3 rank 12 bonding. My alts all have augments. This seems natural to me.
Bonding Runestones not hard to get? Not sure where you heard that. It is a major investment. I only have mine due to TB wards and companion packs from VIP.
Let me clarify. I meant that they are not harder to get than any other runestone. But, not everyone has VIP to open a lockbox every day, so you are correct that getting ahold of them in the first place can be more costly. I stand corrected on that point. And I do recognize that its a significant investment to rank up any runestone or enchantment.
I also admit that I hadn't really thought of it as bonding runestones being the end game choice over augments either. That's a really good way to look at it. But, I do still think that the margin for how much better bonding is vs. augment is too high.
What about simply increasing the stat point percentage for augments based on their rank? So, the more you invest in ranking them up, the more stat points you get. For example, 100% at green, 105% at blue, 115% at purple, 135% at legendary. Including the +15% for having a legendary companion that would total +150%. That's equal to 3 Rank 9 Greater Bonding runestones on a non-legendary companion. Would something like that help address the concern about comparative investment? It is definitely also a major investment to get a companion to legendary. Epic to legendary alone costs 1 million AD.
My real motivation behind the whole suggestion is that I am strongly in favor of diversity in appearance, builds, and strategies. There are far too many things that push us towards "sameness".
Some of us have character concepts or background stories that make them unlikely to have a companion fighting by their side on a regular basis. And the augments have had just as much work put into their appearance and animations and its a shame that there aren't more of them being shown off.
Let me clarify. I meant that they are not harder to get than any other runestone. But, not everyone has VIP to open a lockbox every day, so you are correct that getting ahold of them in the first place can be more costly. I stand corrected on that point. And I do recognize that its a significant investment to rank up any runestone or enchantment.
It is a lot of harder to get a bonding stone than any other runestone. I have tons of rank 9 for other type of runstones and I did not even need to refine them. (tons means from 20 to 50 unused). They just came as rank 9. I have only 4 rank 9 bonding stone which I needed to refine them one by one to rank 9.
I have VIP since the first day they introduced VIP.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
Comments
the game it self, bcouse no option can befound for the spammers/goldsellers.
VIP status is not proof that your account is operated by a plays-for-entertainment human being.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Where the f alt-friendly character management UI?
Fix the game.
Dead🔪TOR relies on bouncing a route between peers in the network, then uses an exit node with a known publicly facing IP address. Anyone can set up or take down their own exit node at any time, but it's ip address is soon discovered by bots people run to find new ones (http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/). The IP is then added to the database of known nodes. There aren't many exit nodes. Today there are 926 exit nodes, each with their own IP address. That's a very manageable.
If you want to blacklist proxies, public vpns, and tor you don't need to think about the database though. All you have to do is do a reverse dns check on one of the many rbl/dnsbl DNS servers when someone connects and see if it's on the blacklist. There are people who volunteer their time to maintain these databases free of charge. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_blacklists). This is actually very easy to implement and is the first step in stopping people from using borrowed IP addresses on the net.
The next thing would be to log all gateway activities in a sql database. Then you'd write a small script that found the highest usage per IP. If an IP address is polling the AH or whatever is causing degradation at regular intervals over a long period of time, you ban the IP. If enough IP's are banned within a subnet, you flag it and manually review it to ban the whole subnet. If a botter is renting access to (or has created their own) malware driven botnet to use IP addresses, you will eventually filter those and be able to automatically contribute new abuse IP's to existing blacklists, contributing back to the abuse prevention communities.
Once an IP is banned you leave it up to the user to put in a support ticket for manual review. Many botters know this is a futile attempt to get their IP unbanned and won't even try at that point, rather they would focus on trying to buy another IP somewhere. Paying for a new IP every day or two cuts into profit margins significantly and takes more of a time investment, discouraging botting.
This is what should have been done from day 1. It takes about a day to write the scripts and set up the database. Maybe another day to watch it and debug it, with boundary tweaks over the course of a week or so.
The whole "We dont want to spend the manpower to do it." is a cop out.
The truth is, historically, when Neverwinter transferred management from Cryptic to Arc, the development on the gateway stopped completely, and left it in eternal "beta limbo". Noone did any development on it from that point forward. There are many bugs in the gateway and a couple of significant exploits that I reported and never were corrected (and I never publicly released). The exploits were never abused to the point that an emergency response was required, which is the only time they seem to patch leaking holes (remember Caturday?). I can only imagine, but it seems that Arc didn't want to spend the money on paying skilled HTML5/SQL coders to work on it, the gateway/neverwinter api wasn't fully developed or documented and the person who was in the middle of development left the company or was reassigned, or everyone involved just stopped caring and focused on raking in the money.
I'm sure Arc paid someone a significant amount of money to gain control of Neverwinter and the focus went from developing and innovating an amazing product to recouping those costs.
I should know by now that when games change hands, I should just bail out and go find something else to play. Viacom screwed me with neopets. Zynga screwed me with omgpop. And now Arc with neverwinter.
Cryptic is the company that developed and continues to work on Neverwinter. When we're talking about "the devs", this is Cryptic 100% of the way. PWE (see below) doesn't work on any development.
Perfect World Entertainment or PWE is the publisher for Neverwinter.
Arc isn't a company, but PWE's platform that connects together all their games into a single place, much like Steam.
Ancillary to this relationship is Wizards of the Coast or WotC, who own the D&D trademark. Cryptic has been collaborating with WotC to build stories and content that ties back into Neverwinter current D&D themes from other products (See Storm King's Thunder, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, or Princess of the Apocalypse).
No one's been sold to anyone since Neverwinter launched. Arc was introduced by PWE a couple years into the launch of Neverwinter, but it has nothing to actually do with Neverwinter, other than including it as one of the games tied to the platform, since it houses all of PWE's properties.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
If it had a great bonus, then it would be giving an unfair advantage to anyone who gets one as opposed to anyone who doesn't.
It was undoubtedly given the worst possible stats intentionally, because the point of it is to be a cute commemoration, not something to actually make you stronger. So they have made it an item that is nearly purely cosmetic.
It's much like the Caturday capes, other than not getting one per character.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
If the gateway is really gone forever, I hope they un-nerf the professions and make them profitable enough to play with again. Players became botters partly because profit margins became so slim (due to botters) that working the professions on a single account wasn't worth the time investment. You'd make as much profit spending the time running around blacklake opening skill nodes for bottom level profession assets to sell for pennies. The only way professions were profitable was by botting. So, in essence, trying to fight botting by nerfing, they drove more people to bot and existing botters to expand their footprint. The correct response was to mitigate the problem through IP filtering, not by destroying a game mechanic. I hope that if they take anything from this going forward, it's that addressing the abuse to the system is the solution; breaking the system not.
Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official.
Any messages written in orange are official moderation messages. Signature images are now fixed!
"It's a "free" trinket that cost me 800k AD, considering I had just purchased purple companions to play SCA on two characters. Now I have 8 bound level 25 purple companions that I will never use for anything."
This.
I was gearing up companions to play SCA and almost bought zen for that purpose. Now PWE won't see that money and probably never see real world money from me ever again.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
Are you having a Relapse?
I also admit that I hadn't really thought of it as bonding runestones being the end game choice over augments either. That's a really good way to look at it. But, I do still think that the margin for how much better bonding is vs. augment is too high.
What about simply increasing the stat point percentage for augments based on their rank? So, the more you invest in ranking them up, the more stat points you get. For example, 100% at green, 105% at blue, 115% at purple, 135% at legendary. Including the +15% for having a legendary companion that would total +150%. That's equal to 3 Rank 9 Greater Bonding runestones on a non-legendary companion. Would something like that help address the concern about comparative investment? It is definitely also a major investment to get a companion to legendary. Epic to legendary alone costs 1 million AD.
My real motivation behind the whole suggestion is that I am strongly in favor of diversity in appearance, builds, and strategies. There are far too many things that push us towards "sameness".
Some of us have character concepts or background stories that make them unlikely to have a companion fighting by their side on a regular basis. And the augments have had just as much work put into their appearance and animations and its a shame that there aren't more of them being shown off.
Champions Online Advanced Forum Search
I have VIP since the first day they introduced VIP.