I feel this game has deteriorated severely over time.

klangeddin

For those who care to look through my post history (if such a thing is possible), you can see that I've never been a one-sided contrarian or full-time critic and that I actually applauded Cryptic in certain occasions where they had the guts to take some impopular decisions for the good of the health of the game (like the removal of AD from leadership), sadly, however, I feel that over the course of time, the bad decisions have outweighted the good ones and for me, Neverwinter has gotten to a state where it is no longer an enjoyable game.

You may wonder why I'm still playing it if I don't enjoy it, but the fact is that I don't play it anymore. I logged in yesterday to check if my guildies were still on (one was) and I was willing to give this game another shot, but as soon as I started "getting into it" (read below, I mean after I finished dealing with all the inventory and UI management...), I just couldn't muster the will to play and I logged off soon after. Mind you, this happened after a break of a few months as well, so it cannot be pointed just to a burnout.
Neverwinter is seriously no longer an attractive option for me, when I know it used to be a great one in the (now distant) past.

I started playing Neverwinter at release, back in 2013, and seeing the evolution of this game, I can confidently say that Mod 4 has been the top so far, since then, Neverwinter never reached those heights again for me.
Since this isn't just a personal experience thread, but also a feedback one, I will point out to what have become the two major KILLERS of my gaming experience in Neverwinter.

1 - RESOURCE MANAGAMENT IS A NIGHTMARE
With the management of inventory, profession, refinement, invokes, the amount of time it takes to start playing the actual game is staggering. When I logged back yesterday it took me a full 10 minutes to take care of all the clicking on icons, refinement, inventory and so on. That is simply unacceptable. When I log on, I want to start playing, immediately, and not be put in a pseudo-queue where I need (let's not kid ourselves, I could ignore it all, but if you pile it up together, that's a lot of resources) to micromanage all those UI windows. As if it took any skill or procured any enjoyment to click a bunch of buttons in different windows.
Obviously it just doesn't stop there, because you don't do it only once at login. You're repeatedly forced by the game to engage in this micromanagement with more invocation, more inventory management (because it gets always full as you kill enemies), more profession management (as the tasks can get completed while you play) and let's not forget the ultimate nightmare of it all, refinement, which probably takes you more time than killing monsters itself.
In fact, this is so much that at some point Neverwinter stops looking like a MMORPG and starts looking like one of those flash click games. While some may enjoy them, this is not what I signed for here. And certainly Neverwinter was never advertised as such.

2 - AN OBSESSIVE FOCUS ON DAILY QUESTS
Let's get this out of the way. Repeatable menial tasks are not fun, they are not engaging, they are only time consuming. Daily quests are possibly the worst representation of menial repeatable tasks ever implement in MMOs and Neverwinter has gotten to gravitate around it in nearly every aspect of character's progression. From guild boons (this would deserve a topic on its own, but I feel like mod 7 was really the beginning of the end for me), to campaigns, to AD generation, everything goes through daily quests. It didn't use to be like this and there was a time (up to mod 4 I'd say), where after you had dealt with the few dailies you had to (there were only 4 campaigns back then) you could enjoy yourself in whatever you prefered, be it either Dungeon runs or PvP. Now it seems that if you combine 1 with 2, there's no more time for that. Not for someone who doesn't consider Neverwinter like a full-time job.

There are also so many other things that should be mentioned that gradually seemed to exclude me from the game as time passed, as the introduction guild pvp marks (I pretty much stopped doing PvP after they were introduced, I went from a 50% win rate to a 5% win rate in a single patch.) to the progressive irrelevance of the Foundry, that used to be an important component of Neverwinter at release, but I prefered to stick to the big ones.
For what is worth, this is my last feedback on Neverwinter until sweeping general changes that drastically change the game's focus arrive and adress those two major issues I explained above. Looking at past history, though, I can't say I'm too confident about it, so the likelyhood that this is my final feedback on Neverwinter is very high.

demonmonger

I feel your pain... I have all the top bags you can buy, and they are all full. Max bank space all full. When I run a dungeon I have to throw away something to pull items out of overflow bag. I can't open heroic rewards because my bag space is full... I have over 200 unclaimed heroics.
My professions bags are also filled. I have to throw away a few craters each time something else needs to be created by new content.

It's madness...

lirithiel

For me, two changes that have affected my enjoyment (or lack thereof) the most are the latest two invoking changes. Now, I don't have an issue with them removing AD from invoking at all, but rather the fact that a 4-hour cycle is bloody ridiculous (whose brilliant idea was that anyway and is that person still with the company?) and that by the time you built up your bonus AD for the day you are done with running the dungeons and skirmishes for the day. Terrible design decisions. The previous invoking system was far better and less time-consuming (I cannot be arsed about the invoking bags we receive because it just takes up more inventory space and they still don't stack - I mean SERIOUSLY???).

ajlir

lirithiel said:

For me, two changes that have affected my enjoyment (or lack thereof) the most are the latest two invoking changes. Now, I don't have an issue with them removing AD from invoking at all, but rather the fact that a 4-hour cycle is bloody ridiculous (whose brilliant idea was that anyway and is that person still with the company?) and that by the time you built up your bonus AD for the day you are done with running the dungeons and skirmishes for the day. Terrible design decisions. The previous invoking system was far better and less time-consuming (I cannot be arsed about the invoking bags we receive because it just takes up more inventory space and they still don't stack - I mean SERIOUSLY???).

Well, it helps for the next day of dungeons and skirmishes

kreatyve

My greatest concern right now is the fact that they took away every single way to earn AD solo. Now you are forced to do group content if you want to make any AD at all in the game. I realize that it's an MMO, but I don't always want to do group content.

qexotic

magenubbie said:

lirithiel said:

For me, two changes that have affected my enjoyment (or lack thereof) the most are the latest two invoking changes. Now, I don't have an issue with them removing AD from invoking at all, but rather the fact that a 4-hour cycle is bloody ridiculous (whose brilliant idea was that anyway and is that person still with the company?) and that by the time you built up your bonus AD for the day you are done with running the dungeons and skirmishes for the day. Terrible design decisions. The previous invoking system was far better and less time-consuming (I cannot be arsed about the invoking bags we receive because it just takes up more inventory space and they still don't stack - I mean SERIOUSLY???).

I could live with the 4h cycle if everything actually worked that way. But my DHEs run out after an hour. WF lasts 45 min if that long and often appears on an account-wide cooldown instead of a character based one. QM enchantments don't go over an hour's worth of online time either, regardless of combat it feels. Fey blessings last quite a while, but drop at a horrible rate. There's no balance between things. Not to mention I can't find anything in the game to keep me occupied for 4 hours per character every day.

The invoke changes I can live with. After a few days of full invoking you can do dungeons whenever you want due to the heavily diminishing rewards. We're getting more VIP keys every day than is efficient to use.

Solo AD making isn't that bad, although I agree there's room for improvement. Not counting the invoking bonuses and salvage, you make roughly 1/6 of your weekly AD doing solo content. (22.5k AD solo vs 56k from dungeons and 56k from skirmishes). I would prefer a 33/33/33 split, but considering how easy the solo content is, I can also understand the rewards being as low as they are. Adding a weekly Cult Prison or Alchemist for 6-7k would be nice though. So would the return of the Foundry.

My personal gripe is two-fold.
First, the lack of content. Seriously. I can do the same SH HEs only so many times before I can do them blindfolded. Same goes for the old campaigns, again for the SH only. They aren't particularly challenging or fun after 3 years. It's killing time, nothing more. Then there's the rest of the dailies that don't give you any progression at all, apart from, again, the SH. Apart from that, the end-game has 6 dungeons (of which people only play 3: etos, LoL and perhaps CN) 6 skirmishes (again, of which people only play 2-3: KR, SoT and TotDG) and 2 raids (and nobody likes the Tiamat grind). Sure FBI is entertaining, but not worth the effort even if you have enough people to do it with, which most of us don't because of the horrible campaign design. I'm getting bored as a hamster. I never thought that possible in a DnD game.

Secondly, the neverending RP grind. And the inventory problem isn't the worst of it. The power creep is. It makes you OP compared to the content and removes all challenge from it. There's absolutely no need to go beyond purple weaponry and artifact (gear). yet if I don't use it eventually I'll run out of bag space. 3 of my roster and some on a 2nd account are confined to storage duty. Not because I don't like playing them, but because it's the only way to have enough affordable storage. I didn't start using 4 mods worth of RP until this mod forced me to do what I dreaded doing for 6 mods: getting orange gear. I needed to bridge a 500IL gap for FBI. While I could fix part of that by upgrading DHE/Fey/QM enchantments, I still had to add enough power increasing R9/10s to make the rest of the game trivial and yet another reason to get bored with the game. There's no fun in 1 shotting an entire mob.

Even the CTAs and other events are getting boring. After 3 years I can honestly say I have everything I want from them. Time for something new I'd say. The game has been standing still for long enough.

I almost feel like I wrote this, especially the two-fold personal gripe. I have 'only' three characters. After two years of playing, two of them now have full sets of Legendary gear and Mithral artifacts, the third is not too far off being the same. I have completed everything except FBI more times than I like to think about and it has all become more than a little dull and tedious. Right now, I'm struggling to work up any enthusiasm for running anything as it all falls under: 'been there, done that...not interested in the t-shirt !' For some strange reason, I still enjoy the DR lairs, especially the Phantasmal Fortress, but that is about it. If it weren't for having the NW RNG Gods smile on me a couple fo weeks ago, I might well have thrown in the towel and left. I hit a Legendary Resurgence Pack It is still sat unopened in my bank vault but it has given me a lifeline to fun over on the Preview Server. For light relief I can now head over there and fly any of my characters around on Tenser Discs and other fun stuff. But there is something seriously wrong when the only way I can enjoy playing a game is to be logged into the Official Beta Version of it >:)

nameexpired

defiantone99 said:

Mod 7 was for whales, 8 and 9 were for new players, now 10 and 10.5 are for the whales. We need content for those of us in the middle.

The problem I see is this:
You get lots of money from whales - cause they are whales
You get lots of money from new players - 'cause they need to outfit and aquire mounts, companions, etc.
I think you do not get lots of money from "the middle". You already have your horses, your companions, your enchantments.
I think "the middle" has already been harvested. Maybe a few crops are still to be still found, but basically "the middle" is a barren land. Hence not in the focus of a money making company.

plasticbat

I don't think 10 and 10.5 are for whales because you need more than money and AD to progress. You need to grind regardless who you are. Having money and AD always has the edge regardless which mod.

darthpotater

You cant buy the gear but you can buy the VB from the ostorian relic pack in the lockboxes. And they are buying this items just look to the AH from time to time

lirithiel

@mimicking#6533 has a lot of work to do if he plans on keeping his job as lead dev. After this fey fiasco, a good place to start would be inventory and the 4,836,924,089,510 different RP items in-game, and scrapping character-bound ones for a start. I will keep re-iterating the point that only quest rewards (and not RP) should be character-bound, for everything else there is mastercard account-bound, if they're worried about bots selling.

silverkelt

I think we all agree a good place to start would be inventory, but I would take a review of mod 10 and 10.5 to figure out a better balance on the grinding level.

I think those two things are key .

I wouldnt wish @mimicking#6533 job on anyone really.

I do feel like alot of the good work they put in after the mod 6 debacle has been undone though, like we are back to that point again, thats how bad the game has gotten.