Foundry Temporarily Off

iandarksword

What is frustrating is that the Foundry on STO gets much quicker response time when issues arise. I know this because our author group on Facebook contains both Neverwinter and STO authors. Yes, the STO editor is simpler than ours, but from my understanding, this is in the same building. They've even received asset updates from time to time. We've been dealing with the equivalent of a word processing editor for nearly 3 months now, and so many ideas have come and gone. (Not to mention curious new authors and players.)

elvalianon

I am no dev but is it that hard to just bring back the catalog? I am hugely disappointed in this neglect, as usual. Nothing new here.

sandukutupu

@mimicking#6533 isn't this your baby? Some authors have made some rather simple suggestions... beyond getting it up and running.

1. Many of us would like some kind of reward returned to the Foundry. Not necessarily AD but it could be anything of value or importance to finishing the goal. My thought is putting blue or purple refinements in the chest.
2. Others have said, they would like to see the 2x XP Foundry hour back on regular.
3. Xanros Dirgel told me the way to repair the AD drops in the Foundry is have the mobs drop the AD (just two or three randomly) so they have to kill something to get AD to prevent cheats.
4. Another author says he is a database admin for a company, he would like to be able to log into the Foundry offline and says he knows it can be done. Apparently the files are saved on our HD and then uploaded when we save. There is little or no point to being online while editing a Foundry. This would cure a world of woes with downtime.

We don't work for Cryptic, we don't get a paycheck, and never asked for anything more than the tools need to assist you.

Thank you for your attention.

vandignesca

sandukutupu said:

2. Others have said, they would like to see the 2x XP Foundry hour back on regular.

I am a purely PvE player, and I am one of those players who is VEHEMENTLY opposed to them returning any kind of "adventure hour" that grants rewards or free keys etc. I fully support their current direction of allowing us to play what content we want, when we want. In fact, I believe, especially in the case of the Foundry, that an adventure hour would hurt it more than anything. The foundry would take A LOT of work to become fully integrated into the game, so, assuming it comes back up sometime in the near future, short of a complete overhall, it will remain a niche playstyle as many folks will choose to pursue campaign/dungeon goals with their time over player content that gives no or limited (even if ad rewards came back) reward.

If an adventure hour were implemented, it would FORCE the player to choose between Cryptic's content and the player-created content for the best use of their time. If a guildie was starting up a dungeon run at the same time, or if they didn't want to run something then and just do dailies, they would end up getting burnout from compelled quest runs, or more likely, in my opinion, they would ignore it all-together. As a foundry author and player, the last thing I want is a return to this antagonistic relationship of it being player content versus Cryptic's, which a foundry hour would only reinforce. If the Foundry is too much work to integrate and become part of the game, then I at least prefer it remain in a more neutral position instead of a position destined to set it up for failure. So, I say please devs, whatever you do, please do not go back to adventure hours for dungeons or the foundry especially.

Unknown

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iandarksword

I am currently, (as of 8:33 CST 2/2/17) able to open the editor and load my quests. Custom creatures are available to place on the existing map(s) however there are still no available assets, maps, costumes, item icons, etc. (No change essentially from the past few months.) It took a while for the editor to load, briefly did the Windows 10 "not responding" but it did not crash the game client or my computer. Not sure what caused the crash for @radix4257, but mine loaded properly.

It did, however, crash the game client when I attempted to send a tell to another player while still in the editor. The following login recommended a force verify.

iandarksword

Well, the Auction House is down now. At least we're not alone...

nameexpired

True, but the AH was brought up immediately. It's an AD sink.
Foundry is just something players like.

elvalianon

Will the foundry catalog come back with the new module? I hope it does.

And maybe these should be removed....

hustin1

I keep thinking of the scene from Apollo 13:

"Houston, uh... we sure could use the re-entry procedure up here. When can we expect that?"

@nitocris83 , uh...we sure could use a working Foundry editor out here. When can we expect that?

nitocris83

The Cryptic plague hit our team hard this year but I'm still trying to locate some concrete responses on the Foundry with the people left in the office.

beckylunatic

nitocris83 said:

The Cryptic plague hit our team hard this year but I'm still trying to locate some concrete responses on the Foundry with the people left in the office.

Before people start freaking out that this means everyone got laid off or changed jobs, I am pretty sure that Julia means a ton of people are out sick.

vandignesca said:

sandukutupu said:

2. Others have said, they would like to see the 2x XP Foundry hour back on regular.

I am a purely PvE player, and I am one of those players who is VEHEMENTLY opposed to them returning any kind of "adventure hour" that grants rewards or free keys etc.
.... As a foundry author and player, the last thing I want is a return to this antagonistic relationship of it being player content versus Cryptic's, which a foundry hour would only reinforce. If the Foundry is too much work to integrate and become part of the game, then I at least prefer it remain in a more neutral position instead of a position destined to set it up for failure. So, I say please devs, whatever you do, please do not go back to adventure hours for dungeons or the foundry especially.

Bonus Foundry rewards were a bit of a mixed bag because it was just bonus experience granted for Foundry content run during that hour, and missing that isn't the end of the world. On the other hand, for players trying to squeeze every possible advantage from the game, it was a huge contributing factor to running Bill's Tavern (etc.) 4x in an hour to get your AD. It was also one factor deterring players from playing long missions because if it happened to take more than an hour to finish a quest, you missed the bonus entirely. So I fall on the side where returning a timed Foundry event is a bad idea.

Afaik, Foundry quests even have brakes built in now where you stop earning rewards if you gain "too much" experience in too short of a time, though with a level 70 character this might not trigger anymore due to the massive XP gain required to fill the bar. I admittedly haven't messed with testing those parameters in a long time.

That said, Foundry quests do need to be rewarding in some way as the only thing they have going for them right now is novelty, and that's insufficient to overcome the pull of grind.

iandarksword

Granted, many suggestions for rewards and how to improve them have been given, several times over. I'm not sure the hourly event would benefit the current state of things with the Foundry. I do think an Astral Diamonds reward should return in some form. Whether that be the original 4 quests for 4k or some other amount is not up to us as players. What needs to happen is a reward system that benefits from "time earned" and mob difficulty. These alone aren't enough to sway some players from grinding campaigns, and it also doesn't address the issue of "Fast Review" style quests. Keep in mind, we STILL don't have a working editor at present, rewards mean nothing if we can't create quests in which players *could* possibly be rewarded.

beckylunatic

Re-written for @nitocris83 's benefit (I've posted variants of this post multiple times), but I think I've worked out a viable solution for getting some AD rewards back into Foundry without destroying the economy (no more so than bots in lowbie pvp or dungeons coughcough).

Other content that rewards AD has a maximum amount that can be earned per day, paid in large chunks for the first two daily completions and then hitting harsh diminishing returns for subsequent runs. This can work for Foundry quests as well. This would be far better than the old system wherein you had to run 4 Foundries at level 60 in order to fulfill the daily (ain't no-one got time for that). To be honest, 2000AD for each of your first two quests doesn't seem unfair to me. It's something you choose to do instead of a different activity which might pay more or get you a really cool drop, and that's about what you can earn from a skirmish at level 70, which might only take a couple of minutes.

How to decide which Foundry quests qualify for paying out? Well, we already have a "Daily-qualified" system in place, which filters out the "fast review" cheater quests. "Qualifies for Daily" means the quest has been run enough times and has a sufficiently long average completion time that the game can be relatively certain it's not an exploit quest. It's not perfect, but it's not a terrible system either. There's no such thing as a skirmish that can't qualify for daily AD if you can queue for it, even if it takes under 2 minutes to complete. So what kind of double standard are we enforcing here by saying that no Foundry quests *at all* may allow players to earn AD just because sometimes some of them are too fast?

The amount of AD earned for Foundry quests should be scaled to character level, as has been done with skirmishes. A low-level character doesn't have the earning capacity of a max-level one. This is fair. Skirmishes also at least claim to adjust their AD rewards based on how long the content takes to complete, which would be nice if it's workable for players who do tackle the hour+ epic missions, and also fair if it decreases rewards for any speed-runnable quest that does slip through the qualification process. Heck, go ahead and slap a hard limit on it so that a quest that took under 10 minutes to complete won't pay at all. Be reasonable; if the quest qualifies for daily rewards but someone manages to complete it in slightly less than average time, don't punish them. It used to be difficult for popular "Daily Foundries" (like the notorious Bill's Tavern) to maintain their daily status, due to the volume of players speedrunning them. The system polices itself, after a fashion.

A daily payout system for Foundry would accomplish several useful things for Neverwinter's dedicated players.

It puts rewards back into a system that players lost interest in due to lack of rewards, creating a vicious cycle where no investment went into Foundry because people didn't play it and people didn't play it because devs were not investing in it so it wasn't worthwhile. But it isn't badly unfair to console players as something they don't have access to, and it would scale easily into a limited catalogue system if it's ever possible to present a "Best Of Foundry" on consoles or anything like that.

It adds a novel activity for players who've maximized their daily AD gain from other sources, if they are so inclined.

It adds an alternative activity for players who like to run group content but would like a change sometimes without giving up material rewards entirely.

It adds a very valuable source of AD income for players who are disinclined towards group content. This isn't an insignificant contingent of Neverwinter players, and they got hit hard by things like removing AD from Leadership and invoking. Gameplay options for making AD from anything but group content are severely lacking, even though you can spend many hours a day playing Neverwinter without partying up for anything. Daily Foundry rewards would give something back aimed at the players who like to log in and noodle around.

Most of all, I don't think anything in my suggested approach requires building an entirely new reward system, but utilizes systems that already exist.

I hope the Foundry editor and catalogue are returned as functional once M11 launches, after the usual outage and republish process. Sigh.

iandarksword

@beckylunatic has some good points. We do need to have some changes to the way quests are organized as well. Yes, there are some great quests at the top of the "Best" tab, but we also need to foster an environment where newer authors and quests can get exposure. @eldarth has also submitted some previous ideas for improving the Foundry, and I would hope (should @mimicking#6533 find time and manpower) that many of these ideas from the community are taken into consideration. Hopefully, after we've got a working editor, @nitocris83 can figure out the Feature system and we can get some sort of schedule back on track. I know I've been asked in-game how to get Featured, and it'd be great to see some newer quests and newer authors receive that opportunity. Until the editor is up, all we can do as a community is wait.

dread4moor

@vandignesca
"So, I say please devs, whatever you do, please do not go back to adventure hours for dungeons or the foundry especially"
I respect your opinion, but I never saw it that way. As a non-author, I really enjoyed foundry hour back circa Mod2-3.
It was a refreshing change from all the PK runs. Yes, some people exploited them. But IMO they were the minority.
Many of us enjoyed the diversity of stories and mini-adventures. It was like taking a fun little coffee break between your job of dungeon runs and dailies.
How about a compromise: One free Foundry chest key per day.
That will make short and longer Foundry adventures equal. Those who want to do them for fun Will do longer foundries. Those who just want loot will do shorter. Strengthen the certification process so no "log-in and win" exploits are possible.
The chest can have a moderate value account bound salvage and a chance at a Genie token (universal campaign currency). Valuable enough to make the foundry worthwhile but impossible to exploit.

vandignesca

@dread4moor
I am definitely not opposed to the Foundry getting some reward system. I just see the specific "adventure hour" reward system as one I really hate, for both official and player content. When I log in, I want to choose what I want to do and be rewarded for it on a general standard, not for playing at a specific time.

melinden

If @eldarth feels so inclined, it might not be a bad idea to send the master list of ideas for making Foundry profitable once more. Emails are often those things that get lost when there is a change in an office. It is possible @mimicking#6533 and his team have never seen or heard of them.

simplyshawn

Just hope that the next update does something, I'd really love to try the foundry out.

iandarksword

@Eldarth received a reply, apparently folks are thankful for his input, hopeful that they "might" find time. But the development schedule has already been blocked out for the fiscal year. Let's just say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not certain @Eldarth is going to return to confirm here, but sounds like all game decisions are made early in the year and rarely deviated from. Another player shared a podcast, sheds light into how these decisions compare to other games that have had similar issues, and it sounds far too familiar. I'll share it here as well:
https://gamingstuff.website/2017/02/pixels-dice-3-foundry-floundering/
So good luck folks, hard reality to swallow, but it is what it is.

hustin1

*sigh* For the love of... I wish there was a way we could take some of the workload off the devs, even if it was simply a matter of data manipulation. Some of us code for a living.

iandarksword

@hustin1 I don't think it's entirely a workload issue. I think it's a budget issue that arises much higher than the developers, even though the devs are left to catch the lion's share of the blame that isn't their fault to begin with. If the budget isn't provided to adequately meet the needs of the player base, (look at PvP too) then you see developers prioritizing to accommodate the budget. It begs the question, if now they ignore Foundry, what's the next feature to get cut from "priorities?" You can't cut your way to prosperity.

hustin1

iandarksword said:

@hustin1 I don't think it's entirely a workload issue. I think it's a budget issue that arises much higher than the developers, even though the devs are left to catch the lion's share of the blame that isn't their fault to begin with. If the budget isn't provided to adequately meet the needs of the player base, (look at PvP too) then you see developers prioritizing to accommodate the budget. It begs the question, if now they ignore Foundry, what's the next feature to get cut from "priorities?" You can't cut your way to prosperity.

Oh, believe me, I get it. In the world of government contracts, you're always aware of how many hours are budgeted for this task, for that task, etc. By reducing workload I see it as implicitly freeing up budget. Granted, it's not that simple, especially in the world I inhabit, but it's not as if Neverwinter is a FAR contract

wylonus

i agree with Becky, since that old "hourly" feature were set up to fail and the bonus became invalid.
i dont like hourly program, they should had "special" weekend long event, with cooldown before repeat next goal set.
when someone finish 4 or 6 hours later, then everyone wins regardless if someone else finished all 4 required quests within 2 hours, then have to wait 2-3 hours or if decided by devs on cooldown restrictions to prevent overfarmings. only enough for special weekend shedules.
personally, i just believe that it was managment dept/market team just mishandle and made bad hourly program design was totally all wrong and might be seem heartless toward the game, bad format mean players not happy.

Ctyptic need someone that can do very creatively and to see the minds and hearts of players, and to make sure they are happy all the time, instead currently, many are upset and some are depressed to the point of quitting, and no business really want that to happen and to make money, players must be happy and willing to buy at reasonable prices, and lately, all we see the company is driving into the ground with recent lay-offs and calling the shots for nerfings left and right.

please just finish with class balancing, that takes too long and stop with "backburners issues" excuses, we are fed up, ENOUGH! we dont want "Oh we fix that in 6 months later" and once it pass and there was no signs of progress made. no more fake promises!
reasons? we want to try new classes and we are still waiting since paladins last released, that is more than 1 1/2 years. Do we have to wait for another 3 years?

eldarth

iandarksword said:

@hustin1 I don't think it's entirely a workload issue. I think it's a budget issue that arises much higher than the developers, even though the devs are left to catch the lion's share of the blame that isn't their fault to begin with.

Exactly. It's PWE incompetence at understanding loss-leaders, leveraging free content, and anything other than simple short-term Zen sales.
The suggestions we as a community have presented are definitely solid fixes -- two of the main ones I presented could be produced by a first-year programmer within a week EASILY with days to spare. It would simply involve perhaps (at most) a dozen lines of code/calculation and would solve the majority of foundry exploits as well as fixing rewards.

Cryptic stated early last year that 2016 was blocked out and wouldn't see any foundry work. Now @mimicking#6533 confirms, and stated that 2017 is now also fully blocked out and won't see any foundry work.

I might check back in 2018 (if NWO is still even alive).

iandarksword

I don't see a positive anywhere here, at least one that benefits the Foundry community, or what's left of it. I guess it's safe to assume "Temporarily Off" actually means: "Indefinitely Disabled?" I'm not trying to be negative, just searching for the truth of the matter here. It's not like the community was asking for an entire module devoted to the Foundry, just some seemingly simple bug fixes and some more assets. We can't even get functionality restored after months of waiting, indefinitely waiting. Is that the intent at this point? To keep us indefinitely waiting?

elvalianon

iandarksword said:

I don't see a positive anywhere here, at least one that benefits the Foundry community, or what's left of it. I guess it's safe to assume "Temporarily Off" actually means: "Indefinitely Disabled?" I'm not trying to be negative, just searching for the truth of the matter here. It's not like the community was asking for an entire module devoted to the Foundry, just some seemingly simple bug fixes and some more assets. We can't even get functionality restored after months of waiting, indefinitely waiting. Is that the intent at this point? To keep us indefinitely waiting?

Exactly my issue. In the long run a module or more love surrounding the foundry would be absolutely great! But that is quite a lot to ask for, the least NW can do is give us a working foundry editor back. I was hoping they would have fixed it with this new module... Not that I expected it really.

simplyshawn

I was really hoping this was gonna be the day

There is undoubtedly more to getting it back up and running than any of us can guess, and I'm sure they've discussed it and decided not to work on it for now for a reason other than "I don't wanna..."

...but I still can't believe it couldn't simply fall under a "bug fixing" budget. That's essentially what's primarily wrong with it right now, with the assets not loading.

iandarksword

It appears to be an edict from above, or a budget-type issue currently. @Eldarth has continued to have a dialog with @mimicking#6533, he's on our side, mentioned he is still playing our quests. He hinted that he continues to advocate for Foundry to get some more attention than it is currently receiving. Whether that means more manpower or more work hours wasn't revealed. It would be great if we could find some way to assist @mimicking#6533 to convince the powers that be, though I'm not certain how. The lack of rewards and editor down time have likely distorted the perception of whether there is continued interest, at least on paper. Aside from our non-stop advocacy here, which at times has fallen quiet, save for the usual suspects, we currently don't have many options at our disposal as a community to show.

hustin1

iandarksword said:

It appears to be an edict from above, or a budget-type issue currently. @Eldarth has continued to have a dialog with @mimicking#6533, he's on our side, mentioned he is still playing our quests. He hinted that he continues to advocate for Foundry to get some more attention than it is currently receiving. Whether that means more manpower or more work hours wasn't revealed. It would be great if we could find some way to assist @mimicking#6533 to convince the powers that be, though I'm not certain how. The lack of rewards and editor down time have likely distorted the perception of whether there is continued interest, at least on paper. Aside from our non-stop advocacy here, which at times has fallen quiet, save for the usual suspects, we currently don't have many options at our disposal as a community to show.

I don't believe he has played mine, or if he has, he hasn't left any feedback

It's hard for us to try to assist if we don't know what the internal issues are. We don't even know how the Foundry is architected, so it's hard to even guess at the issues. Is there a data migration issue? Is there a data preprocessing issue? Or is it just a code issue? Have they reached a point where they have outgrown the Foundry's design? I have no doubt that many of us would like to help (even with an NDA), but we can't even brainstorm if we don't know what the issues are.

As for making the Foundry profitable, here's just one idea straight off the top of my head: reintroduce BiS companion gear (e.g. Loyal), but only in "unrestored" form in certain featured Foundry quests. Then introduce the materials to restore them in the Zen store.

BOOM.