Why are tasks designed for griefing

randyr59

Whats the deal with daily tasks that are purposely designed to make it simple for people to steal the goal from other players. Ones like the freeing the dwarfs in Dwarven valley where one player attacks the group of trolls and while they are killing them someone else can go free the dwarves and the player doing the work doesnt get credit. Or the gathering supplies in Cold Run where only one person can loot the items as someone else is killing the giants.
There are many tasks that let everyone interact with the objective once, or that reward all in the area with an update so why are some tasks made so poorly. It is almost like the devs want players to get mad at each other and frustrated with playing.

beckylunatic

Sticky thread in this very forum to try to bring these issues to light:

http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1223762/pc-ps4-xbox-feedback-stealable-or-griefable-quest-objectives

silence1x

Been that way since Mod 3 came out. Sometimes they fix them (Caravan Survivors), sometimes they don't.

dupeks

to answer OP's question: why? carelessness and a disconnect between the development team and the game testers (if there in fact are any).

All we can do is submit bugs and call attention to these issues as we notice them. Bear in mind that this F2P game has a historical trend of not investing much development in correcting these kinds of issues, and when they do it often comes with unexpected (and undesired) side-consequences.

Part of that Neverwinter charm I suppose.

kreatyve

dupeks said:

to answer OP's question: why? carelessness and a disconnect between the development team and the game testers (if there in fact are any).

All we can do is submit bugs and call attention to these issues as we notice them. Bear in mind that this F2P game has a historical trend of not investing much development in correcting these kinds of issues, and when they do it often comes with unexpected (and undesired) side-consequences.

Part of that Neverwinter charm I suppose.

I'd say it's more "lack of foresight" in how a less scrupulous player would approach certain quests. I'm starting to think that Cryptic should hire some trolls to work in QA and try to break stuff by any means necessary before stuff gets launched.

beckylunatic

Good game testing always involves trying to find ways to break the quest rather than just confirming that it functions when the player does everything perfectly. This is incredibly time-consuming, and the fact that preview testing takes away from live gaming time with no compensation means that I don't volunteer for a lot of it. I used to test a lot of Baldur's Gate modding through dialogue exploration, which I could do while I played by saving obsessively (lots of points to recover if I broke my game). There were very few BG modders who thoroughly checked their negative outcomes, and their initial test teams usually only ran a "good" playthrough as well because that was all they were interested in seeing, so all kinds of bugs would turn up when I chose an option that would make their NPC mad at me, etc.

In NW, this manifests as all kinds of What-Ifs that don't manifest until some hapless sucker in the live game has irretrievably bugged themself by doing something in the wrong order or abandoning a mission that has no provision for being given again or discarding an item they thought they could reclaim.

NW's testing also doesn't seem to take into account very well how quests feel a lot of the time. Setting a quest macguffin to a 25% drop rate seems like you should be able to get enough macguffins soon, but it means the items you need won't drop 75% of the time, which means that if you hit that fail over and over again, it basically feels like "never". And something like the boot in "Fetch Quest" is funny ONCE, not as an outcome that happens frequently on a quest that is finicky and frustrating at the very best of times. That they reused the boot for Lonelywood fishing is incredibly tone-deaf.

NW design also tends to repeat bugs. Patch notes indicated that they finally nailed the root cause of dragon stun bugs, but this happened repeatedly in the past, every time they added or changed control powers, because of neglecting to except dragons. They've repeatedly forgotten to disable new healing consumables in PvP. New proc-on-deflect effects always throw you into combat, even though they fixed it with Fey Thistle.

Anyway, to the original topic, I'm not sure that it always has to do with scruples, as NW is inconsistent between objectives being shared or not, so at times it's just not being aware that you're ninja-ing. Sometimes it's because people don't care, but often they don't even know.

dupeks

kreatyve said:

I'd say it's more "lack of foresight" in how a less scrupulous player would approach certain quests. I'm starting to think that Cryptic should hire some trolls to work in QA and try to break stuff by any means necessary before stuff gets launched.

I would add "lack of hindsight" to this as well, since they've previously patched numerous quests for this exact reason. And then they continue to include new quests with these exact design flaws. If you lack foresight and you lack hindsight, I'm going to make the stretch to careless (or something even less polite).

MK did mention something about dungeon design templates, so perhaps they are taking a hard look at their design methodology. If so, it hasn't taken hold yet based on the most recent 2 updates which are filled with _infuriating_ quests.

All we can really do is continue to provide this feedback in a polite and articulate manner. Perhaps someone will listen one day.

beckylunatic said:

Good game testing always involves trying to find ways to break the quest rather than just confirming that it functions when the player does everything perfectly.

**SNIP**

Anyway, to the original topic, I'm not sure that it always has to do with scruples, as NW is inconsistent between objectives being shared or not, so at times it's just not being aware that you're ninja-ing. Sometimes it's because people don't care, but often they don't even know.

Completely agree with you on testing. QA is borderline useless unless it's testing around common edge cases. But If we take a look at how quickly bugs get fixed when they are reported on the preview forums you start to really scratch your head. I personally think it's a capacity issue (not enough experienced devs/testers) but perhaps it's grossly mismanaged resources.

With regards to folks not knowing... you are also right. In my experience about 1/3 don't know, but 2/3 do and don't care. When I politely mention in /say that they are stealing objectives from a support DC struggling to solo they tell me to eat a HAMSTER just to confirm they know what they are doing.

mamalion1234

Why for this quest poeple do not invite each other instead trying to steal?

armadeonx

Usually because they are only running the quest for a couple of mins and it's faster to ninja...

dupeks

I wanted to mention that someone sent me a mail yesterday apologizing for stealing a mission objective (after I had pointed that out) and saying that they didn't know it was steal-able.

Made me very happy, restored some faith in humanity. Sometimes politely pointing things out in /say works out

linaduin

It's very common behaviour in Sharandar and WoD too. One of the most fun things in the game (especially considering the fun factor of recent content) is trailing someone who just ninja-ed you and ninja-ing them back. Wot larx!

l0th4ri0

linaduin said:

One of the most fun things in the game (especially considering the fun factor of recent content) is trailing someone who just ninja-ed you and ninja-ing them back. Wot larx!

I personally LOVE LOVE doing this. Most of the time I'm hoping that somebody ninjas me so i can show them what being a victim of rudeness feels like afterwards.

But I've also had people apologize for stealing because they didn't know it was possible. I would say a great number of ninjas are not on purpose... people i think just assume that the game somehow prevents this stuff, and if it is possible to take something it must be okay, because why would the game make it easy for someone to be a jerk? IOW, they simply assume that the game design is a little bit more thoughtful than it actually is.

But yeah I've seen some a-holes too. Those guys get griefed right back, believe it.

demonmonger

No one can ninja me! I'm permastealth permaninja you!