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Neverwinter Open Letter
pettypenguin
Member Posts: 4 Arc User
I recently submitted a ticket to support about extremely low drop rates for my account. They said they couldn't help but appreciated my feedback. I got the automated email asking me to take a survey about my experience with the support team. I started typing, and it turned into an open letter. I updated my ticket with the letter, and the support member told me how much they appreciated my feedback and how sorry they are that I am disappointed with some of the in-game features (you know, like lag). They encouraged me to post my letter to the feedback thread and linked it (which led me here). My letter is as follows:
After playing Neverwinter on the xbox one every day for 5 months, I have developed strong feelings and thoughts on a few things. I was going to write this into the survey that I started filling out, but I knew it wouldn’t fit.
1. I don't think that Perfect World and its representatives care about the community of Neverwinter; it is obvious that they do not care about me. Here are the reasons that I think this:
-Perfect World rushed the “key and loot table change” to be implemented on xbox in mod 10.5. This was sprung on the community. The key change (where chests always consume keys) looked to me and the community as a money grab. You want us to use our keys so that we have to buy legendary dragon keys. Doing this will cause players to run out of AD, and they will be forced to spend real money to restock their funds. At first, the change seemed welcome. During almost every dungeon, someone would get something worthwhile out of the chest(s). +5 rings began dropping more. People were happy. After a week or two, the drop rate for everything obviously went down. As stated in my ticket, I had not pulled anything worthwhile out of a chest in weeks. Additionally, almost everything was account-bound (and also useless). As people run out of their keys, they cannot buy more, because opening dungeon chests is not profitable for most people. This will lead people like me to quitting the game. Along these lines, pc players were able to peek in MSVA/SVA chests and only take the chest if they got a superior mark or legendary ring that they wanted. Xbox One players had to take every chest every time. It drained me of all of my AD, and since everything in there is account-bound (except Valhalla set, which had no AD value after the first few days), it was only a money-pit. Then, it is announced that superior marks will have a 3x chance of being dropped in mod 11. That’s great!...for the few people who want to wait a few months and haven’t already spent all of their AD just getting the marks to upgrade the weapons. For players like me, we are now out of AD and have no way to make it back. Our choices are the following: spend money to get more keys to run content, or quit. I will choose to quit.
-The servers have been getting progressively worse for everyone; dungeons and skirmishes are completely unplayable most of the time (etos, shores, kessell’s, FBI, elol). Before 10.5 was introduced, FBI was mainly the only dungeon that lagged so much that it was unplayable. Now, most dungeons are unplayable due to the lag.
2. I think that this company, like any company that develops "free to play" games, has one goal: squeeze money out of the small community. As you all know, you gain most of your money from a small number of people, all of whom are addicted to the game. While this will be profitable, it will give you a bad reputation—especially among the community from which you are squeezing.
3. No one believes that every account has the same drop rate for rare items. If you conducted a survey and asked the members of each guild or alliance to list the 3 luckiest people in their guild/alliance, I’m sure that the same 3 names would come up frequently. Most people think that the more money you spend on the game, the better your chances are of getting desirable drops. As you can imagine, this notion makes people angry. Sure, you can argue that the people who spend more money on the game are opening more lockboxes, and when they pull a legendary pack, people have confirmation bias. That argument doesn’t matter, because Perfect World is not transparent; the Neverwinter community has very little trust in you all.
4. Perhaps Perfect World is trying to kill of Neverwinter so that they can focus on newer projects. If that’s the case, it makes sense why the community of Neverwinter is appearing to be abandoned and untended. You can let the game die out while letting the already small community continuously sink money into the game (as they hope that things will improve). Whether or not this is true, it’s what the community thinks is happening. A popular explanation for why the servers are so laggy is that some of the Neverwinter servers are now being used for the newer Perfect World projects/games.
5. I wish that more care was given to Neverwinter, because it has potential to be a long-lasting, fun game. Making an effort to show the community that their feedback is seen, understood, and taken into account would go a long way to improving the morale of the community. I don’t know if that matters to you all, but if I were the head of a company, it would matter to me.
After playing Neverwinter on the xbox one every day for 5 months, I have developed strong feelings and thoughts on a few things. I was going to write this into the survey that I started filling out, but I knew it wouldn’t fit.
1. I don't think that Perfect World and its representatives care about the community of Neverwinter; it is obvious that they do not care about me. Here are the reasons that I think this:
-Perfect World rushed the “key and loot table change” to be implemented on xbox in mod 10.5. This was sprung on the community. The key change (where chests always consume keys) looked to me and the community as a money grab. You want us to use our keys so that we have to buy legendary dragon keys. Doing this will cause players to run out of AD, and they will be forced to spend real money to restock their funds. At first, the change seemed welcome. During almost every dungeon, someone would get something worthwhile out of the chest(s). +5 rings began dropping more. People were happy. After a week or two, the drop rate for everything obviously went down. As stated in my ticket, I had not pulled anything worthwhile out of a chest in weeks. Additionally, almost everything was account-bound (and also useless). As people run out of their keys, they cannot buy more, because opening dungeon chests is not profitable for most people. This will lead people like me to quitting the game. Along these lines, pc players were able to peek in MSVA/SVA chests and only take the chest if they got a superior mark or legendary ring that they wanted. Xbox One players had to take every chest every time. It drained me of all of my AD, and since everything in there is account-bound (except Valhalla set, which had no AD value after the first few days), it was only a money-pit. Then, it is announced that superior marks will have a 3x chance of being dropped in mod 11. That’s great!...for the few people who want to wait a few months and haven’t already spent all of their AD just getting the marks to upgrade the weapons. For players like me, we are now out of AD and have no way to make it back. Our choices are the following: spend money to get more keys to run content, or quit. I will choose to quit.
-The servers have been getting progressively worse for everyone; dungeons and skirmishes are completely unplayable most of the time (etos, shores, kessell’s, FBI, elol). Before 10.5 was introduced, FBI was mainly the only dungeon that lagged so much that it was unplayable. Now, most dungeons are unplayable due to the lag.
2. I think that this company, like any company that develops "free to play" games, has one goal: squeeze money out of the small community. As you all know, you gain most of your money from a small number of people, all of whom are addicted to the game. While this will be profitable, it will give you a bad reputation—especially among the community from which you are squeezing.
3. No one believes that every account has the same drop rate for rare items. If you conducted a survey and asked the members of each guild or alliance to list the 3 luckiest people in their guild/alliance, I’m sure that the same 3 names would come up frequently. Most people think that the more money you spend on the game, the better your chances are of getting desirable drops. As you can imagine, this notion makes people angry. Sure, you can argue that the people who spend more money on the game are opening more lockboxes, and when they pull a legendary pack, people have confirmation bias. That argument doesn’t matter, because Perfect World is not transparent; the Neverwinter community has very little trust in you all.
4. Perhaps Perfect World is trying to kill of Neverwinter so that they can focus on newer projects. If that’s the case, it makes sense why the community of Neverwinter is appearing to be abandoned and untended. You can let the game die out while letting the already small community continuously sink money into the game (as they hope that things will improve). Whether or not this is true, it’s what the community thinks is happening. A popular explanation for why the servers are so laggy is that some of the Neverwinter servers are now being used for the newer Perfect World projects/games.
5. I wish that more care was given to Neverwinter, because it has potential to be a long-lasting, fun game. Making an effort to show the community that their feedback is seen, understood, and taken into account would go a long way to improving the morale of the community. I don’t know if that matters to you all, but if I were the head of a company, it would matter to me.
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Comments
@mimicking#6533 @asterdahl @ontheriver @dreadnaught#5263 @ctatumdev#6113
I would second the feelings about the drop rates and the RNG favoring players or shifting from player to player. In my opinion, and with some mild research done on my part about modern computerized RNG engines, leads me to believe that either it is just plain old luck, or there is something in the game that feeds into your luck such as characteristics of your toons or some other supposedly unique value(s). Using static values as inputs to an RNG engine, would not create a very high quality RNG experience and the former, just plain old luck, is much more likely.
I have in the past had what some call very good luck, but I am currently on a low luck streak, this is just opinion, I am not measuring it as I really have no good way to do so. It is just how I feel about it right now. As far as lockboxes go, I think we as humans just don't understand the odds. Think of it this way, it's a scratch ticket and the legendary pack is the grand prize, you certainly would not expect the top prize just because you scratched a couple hundred tickets would you? People have made video of opening hundreds and hundreds of lock boxes, see if you can find one and it might shed some light on what results you can expect. Myself I have had two legendary packs in about 3500 lockboxes...which is probably on the high side of luck.
I am completely fine with RNG being used in the game, I mean, it is a game that originated from a game with dice. However, I think there are a few spots where RNG could be tuned, or modified if not removed. I am currently thinking about the Relic weapons. I have about 15-20 hours of RNG effort (fishing, treasure hunting, heroics) into gathering the materials to just restore my weapons (never mind refining them) and because of what I feel is low luck, I have only about half of the materials to do one of the two weapons. This is depressing to me, I have other things to do in game besides farm for this with low results....I get it, it should not be easy but at this pace Mod 13 will be out before I get this done.
As for the money aspect, I get it, companies need to make money and I have given some fairly dedicated monetary support to play a game that I thoroughly enjoy. The issue I have is things are just too expensive from the zen market, when there is a 50% sale, I feel like that should be the normal price of things with coupons to discount it further from time to time.
OP - Sunshine: 16000 IL
Casual Dailies
I agree on all counts.
I've pulled nothing of merit and what I do get is discarded for lack of usefulness and or bound / bad.
[]Full Metal Witch[]
4149 TiL
Guild: (X1) The Legendary Outlaws
"The Best of the Best"
"Nobody does it better"
#TLO BiS
Character: Vendetta
I realised very early on in the game that the company is more into profit than supporting the player community. It's an imbalance in philosophy that actually reduces the amount of income they earn, as players learn that:
a. investment does not equal benefit
b. the company roll out quick fixes to anything that costs them, but ignore (for literally years) issues that cost players
c. every few months the company try something that is obviously designed to make them more profit at players expense
People will spend money if it is worth it and if they feel positive about the game.
The amount of real cash charged for small amounts of zen/products is totally over the top. The cost of a good mount, useful pack, decent amount of storage all cost about the same as buying a brand new game - each, not collectively. When I first started playing and saw they charged $10 for 1k zen and that a mount therefore meant $35 I literally choked at how outrageous it was.
Buying keys with cash is also not worth the expense as each $1.25 that you spend gives you a less that 0.1 chance of a return on your money. As such, someone buying 10 keys for $12.50 still only has a less than 1% chance of getting something good, especially since the introduction of 'packs within packs' multiplying your chance of a loss even further.
So is spending money on the game worth it? Absolutely not.
On the subject of player happiness, I personally have a few criteria for this:
good community
good game-play experience
ability to progress
On point one I'm overall satisfied with how the community is. Guilds/alliances are important and useful, players often go out of their way to help strangers - just as often they'll do the opposite of course but that's people for you. There's an active and vocal forum community with a few resident expert theory crafters. Chat in PE is sometimes amusing and ridiculous etc etc. Sure, things like Paingiver often create a negative/competitive environment and give opportunity for trolls to be even more trollish or elitist but I suspect these things are allowed by Cryptic to push people to spend more on improving.
Game play experience; yes, lag is a constant battle, but pugging, guild/alliance runs for things like Tiamat/SH dragons, edemo etc are fine and mostly work as intended. I generally get a positive experience out of group runs.
The negative is the amount of times we are now expected to run the same things to progress. This has become much worse in mod 10 with acquiring new gear etc being directly linked to running content hundreds of times instead of dozens and links directly to our ability to progress. (note; my personal limit for working on boons & gear in new content is about 4 weeks or 30 hours per character).
Progression is what the game is all about. Most other games you can complete everything and max a character in a couple of months or less. In Neverwinter it takes a lot longer. In most cases players are ok with this as it gives them something to do, something to keep working for, a reason to keep playing.
However, Cryptic have directly linked most of a players ability to progress with their ability to spend. This is the core of the common feeling among players that the game is specifically designed to milk them. You want to rank up your enchantments? You need to buy coal wards - which are (now) only available from the Zen store (I don't count the ones from invokes, as a player with 7 active characters I receive on average about 3 per year).
Improving companions, artifacts, enchantments, stronghold, mounts etc all have an associated financial cost and that cost is high. Yes, if you're one of the clever people who've learned how to play the AH and the Zen Exchange then you can earn quickly, but for every 'winner' using these methods there are a bunch of losers who are being milked by the market flippers.
Where cost is not the primary limiter, it's now excessive grind. By this, I'm specifically referring to the new paradigm introduced in mod 10, the huge grind to not only acquire new armor and weapons, but also the grinding cost of restoring and maintaining them. This is locked behind a very 'player unfriendly' rng wall where something has to be performed multiple times in order to get a fraction of the currency required for restoration & maintenance.
I don't actually believe this is ALL a cynical plot against players. Some of it was obviously introduced for profit but I suspect a lot of it was just plain lack of thorough analysis on the part of the designers & decision makers. This is made worse by the fact they don't actually do a lot of listening / talking with players. Most of their communication is one way and the communication usually starts AFTER they've made the decisions and told some poor employee to 'go sell it to the population'.
On the subject of chests and keys there are two ways of looking at the drop rate:
a. they increased the drops to make people happy with the key nerf, then reduced it back to 'normal' once the fuss had died down.
b. they took note of the fact AH prices were dropping significantly due to items flooding the market & players were now complaining about profits instead of rewards.
It is a tricky balance to be sure. How do you ensure profit via saleable items without flooding the market? I can't say but they need to go back to the basic point of why people run dungeons - profit and gear.
I suspect Cryptic are currently working on the theory that players will run at a loss for most dungeons and be happy with the occasional good drop and that this drop will make up for the previous losses. They are overlooking the fact that players can sell good items for a high price because other players have enough AD saved up from their own dungeon runs. When the buyers are poor, the sellers won't get a high return. You introduce a negative spiral that has only one outcome.
If players do not profit from their time investment then they have no reason to run dungeons. Running dungeons is the core of the game. It's why players invest in gear. If they are not running dungeons they have no reason to even log in, let alone spend cash.
Xael De Armadeon: DC
Xane De Armadeon: CW
Zen De Armadeon: OP
Zohar De Armadeon: TR
Chrion De Armadeon: SW
Gosti Big Belly: GWF
Barney McRustbucket: GF
Lt. Thackeray: HR
Lucius De Armadeon: BD
Member of Casual Dailies - XBox
The ethos of the game being free to play relies on the cash rich subsidising the fiscal part of the time riches participation, and the time rich supporting the availability of the stuff the cash rich want to buy.
Time rich/cash poor players aren't expected to pay lots of hard currency for zen.
Zen is the method by which the time rich can trade up the goods they earned in game with the cash rich, who haven't the time to invest in sourcing it.
I'd add a category to the reasons people run dungeons, cos there are some of us out here who do actually play for the fun of it. Yeah, I'd love loads of great stuff, but as long as I enjoy the experience, I'm not annoyed if I don't.
I agree that the drop rate seems to have decreased since the changes first saw a bigger spread of stuff.
But I can't see how either the player base or the devs couldn't realise in advance that more of something makes it more available, and that when more people are selling the same thing prices always drop. Unless the sellers form a cooperative monopoly, which is literally impossible when the product is gained randomly. So I'm not sure I buy the people moaning about profits theory. I find it hard to believe a business would be that lacking in simple fiscal method.
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!
Its really over the top. Ill admit i am getting sick of this game lately cause it discourage me but i have 111 days of playtime, i have seen the winter and summer festival pass 2 times already, so i have lots of playtime and still i don't have a maxed character. I only focuss on 2 characters, my third one being a bank, i don't have 10 of them.
The game is definately designed to be pay to win over time to win, but i was ok with that from the get go. My only complain that remain is the coalescent ward price wich is outrageous. I feel the superior mark price is alright at 75K (vip 12) and with a bit of effort and time i manage to keep my VIP almost permanent but i never have AD to put on Zen otherwise to buy those coalescent that are soooo expensive. To be fair they would need to put them back as tradebar stuff or decrease them to 500 zen.
But with all that said, the mod 10.5 stuff is not even hidden under a paywall, its simply hidden under an insane grind, one that even i have no will to do. I think it demotivated me from the get go when i saw the chest glitch 2 times in a row in FBI... the dungeon being already hard to run because lets face it, not much peoples are geared enough to go there and for the ones that are, they often run among themselves. In any case i let that go and when i saw for the weapons what was needed, i was even less motivated...
I hope they learn from the mistakes and make mod 11 content more accessible and fun. What this game need really is a new batch of dungeons that are fun and accessible. Everybody is tired of running elol and kessel. Its one thing to put some end game content,im fine with this, but more tier 1 dungeons to vary and spice things up is definately something they should think about. Or tier 2 in the spider category, short, not too hard, fun overall.
Give people motivation to run stuff and all. And honestly since the drop in price of blue item + no double AD for months.. its even less motivated to run dungeon it seem..
I've also been preaching the gospel of new queue based material for a while.
The problem would be if they open up a new raft of dungeons, and they all require the 3+1+1 DPS/Tank/Heal team build, cos that would leave queues hanging for hours. A finite player base with more options will naturally spread more thinly. More so if they all require a healer and a tank.
How about a DPS only?
Not excluding Tanks and Healers, but something that can be completed by five competent DPS.
For example, a shooting gallery style skirmish for ranged... TBH there are loads of ideas, they'd just need balancing and testing.
I also think, now that Alliances seems to be working well, they could take the next step and implement Factional membership.
Alliances could pledge support for npc Factions, like the Harpers, the Zhentarim, Lords Alliance and so on.
Guilds could then run more guild specific events than just DF, with the Faction offering daily, weekly, or even hourly missions.
How much fun would guilds have running round a different stronghold owned by an enemy. Instead of splitting to fight four dragons, (for example) run an assault with multiple objectives. Four key structures that need destroying, or four important figures who need killing.
Its one thing to keep asking for more stuff, better stuff... meaning items and better stats, but stuff is secondary to having a good time.
If people have a good time they play, even if they aren't always getting good stuff.
But if they aren't getting good stuff and the material they have to play to keep not getting it is dull, even tedious, they won't play for long.
The original premise on which roleplaying games were built was that the players get to tell a story.
No one wants to tell the story of how they spent days digging up pots and fishing.
There also needs to be a wider variety of BiS to stop the vanilla-isation of characters. But that's an entirely different conversation.
The game that never reached its promise to the community, a forfeit of results and embarrassment for all involved. A choice has been made, a cry for support has been denied, our alias have given up on us, they no longer fight beside us, we are on our own. The battle cry has reached as far as it could, adventures fade away in there own glory of support, I guess for each is it's own path of pain. Daily we follow up on events crushed by non-sense, individuals that claim to be truly supportive only follow up on there own glory. Where is the passion for looking out for oneself? There is no honor in that! We push for bigger and better, why can we not simplify something such as this for support from our fellow adventures. What are the true consequence of asking for support? PC and counsel player are suppose to be alias we are all connected, ARC, Cryptic the Neverwinter community, and Perfect World we are all alias. We the powerful force we must join as one..... We need to listen and learn from each other!
Mod 10/10.5 is terrible. The grind for your weapons and the armors is insane. And the constant refueling your armor with voninblod. I've enjoyed the game for the most part but 10/10.5 are killing it for me. I stopped grinding the blod for my cleric because I did it so much on my guardian fighter, I'm burnt out on this gring
I use to spend money on this game and the best thing I've pulled from that was an epic Strider mount. I've opened probably a few hundred boxes. Its a bit disheartening when someones name rolls up on the screen with a legendary mount and then a few seconds later, the same name pops up several more times.
The promises have continuously been broken toward the players based and continuous nerfing of classes have caused player to give up and move to other games. You can see it when trying to get players for guilds the picking continue to be few since many have dropped out of the game. The community is static and dying. Can it be saved?
Escape the Ordinary GH 20
Lord Havok GWF
Lady Icethorn CW
Brother Heals DC
Lord Bubble OP
Sister Tetera GF
I'm one of those weird players who actually play all my characters, and it is a cast iron ballache having certain characters with tonnes of keys, and others struggling.
Because I rotate regularly through my characters, it is often impossible to get a dungeon, especially for my DPS classes. So they gain the Tyranny currencies and the Faerzress and other stuff, and make one of each daily, but the only thing they can realistically do is a Skirmish. Meanwhile my GF and particularly my DC walk into dungeons like a platinum VIP at a nightclub.
Let me be clear. I'm NOT going to be wasting any AD on keys. At all...
If I can't get into a dungeon, stuff it. I'd rather farm for elements than buy keys.
Its bad enough that I've not even had a purple ring in the past three days, but if I'd spent AD on keys...
I don't want to fall out with the game, so I avoid situations likely to annoy me... I'll continue to stockpile keys in the hope that the exciting and challenging changes to the DC will see a huge surge in people opting for that class freeing up queues and making it easier... (I imagine I'll be waiting a LONG time...)
Making keys BtA or faster to make wouldn't massively impact numbers, because you would still need to play the game to farm the resources. Maybe have a BtA variation on the campaign tree, that costs more campaign currency to craft to limit stockpiling? Or make them unstackable, and not live in the useful items tab?
People who run dungeons a lot will still buy keys, but instead of one demonic key per day, they might use two or even three, making the return on five bought keys less painful if they all net poor rewards.
I have a friend that spends a great deal of money on this game. Every time he's had an issue, he gets great support. I've had responses that were dismissive, even to the extent of placing blame on me. He's agreed that the treatment is completely unbalanced and seems to revolve around $ spent in game.
I've asked for nothing unfair, but that they fix something based on deceptive practices. The response is nothing short of 'tough luck'.
As example, purchased retraining 'tokens' that went to one character. Was advised that its not an actual token, no offer to move said token, displays same token that can be earned free in game, says nothing in description that its character bound.
But hey, I guess arc really needed me to spend another $10 because deception intentional our not, is the rule and not the exception.
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