Eliminating the grind

shadrakt2

The most common complaint I hear from players is that the game is getting more and more grindy with every new mod. And I mean I hear people complain about it every day. I've known a few players that abandoned the game after 2 or 3 years cause they just couldn't stand it anymore. We wanna keep those players. I'm sure there are a million ideas out there to address this, here's just one more.
 
We have to step out of the paradigm of "If you want the new reward, you have to grind the new content". That tends to make old content irrelevant and forgotten, and creates an ever increasing gap between new and veteran players. Why was the old content created, just to be played through once and then abandoned to gather dust?
 
I propose creating a list where each player can set up their own priorities in terms of rewards. Each campaign's currency could be an item, AD could be an item, gold, XP, etc. This is what a priority tree would look like for example:
 
1. ToD campaign currency
2. Stronghold vouchers
3. Refinement stones, marks and wards
3. AD
4. Consumables
5. Enchants and runes
6. Professions resources
7. Companions and companion gear
8. Mounts and insignias
9. Player gear and artifacts
10. Underdark campaign currency
etc.
 
Players could shift every item up or down the list as they see fit. Then they could go out there and play whatever content they desired, and everything would have a chance to drop these rewards in order of likelyhood. I could run around in Blacklake District killing mobs all day long if I liked that, and would slowly see a cult secret or dragon sigil drop here and there. Harder content, such as T2 dungeons or heroic encounters in high-level zones, would have a higher drop rate. Obviously the better rewards, like twisted ichor, companions or artifacts, should have much lower drop rate, and maybe only drop from hard content.
 
If we wanted to tie certain rewards to specific content, we could lock that priority item every night at midnight. Then the players would have to unlock them every day by completing daily quests in the corresponding zone. This is what the list would look like in the morning:
 
[Locked: ToD campaign currency]
[Locked: Stronghold vouchers]
1. Refinement stones, marks and wards
2. AD
3. Consumables
4. Enchants and runes
5. Professions resources
6. Companions and companion gear
7. Mounts and insignias
8. Player gear and artifacts
[Locked: Underdark campaign currency]
 
I'd have to complete a daily quest in WoD or from Harper Boward in PE to include the chance of those items dropping for the rest of the day.
 
Maybe bots would be a problem in this system, but I just wanted to throw this idea out there, as a brainstorming thing. I don't think Cryptic WANTS Neverwinter to be a grind-fest, but I'm not sure if they are very concerned that it is.

mousebreaker85

Unfortunately it's the way neverwinter is set up.
There is always 1 end all be all meta set people are striving for .
Gets boring when every player has to do the exact same thing for the exact same gear.
In WoW and other mmos
There were so many gear sets
You could do raids , heroics, solo instances,rep grinds with 50 different factions ,professions actually had viable gear , arena pvp sets .
Raids of every level 40 man 10 man 20 man 5 man heroics,
You could always do your own thing and progress .
Not everyone had to do the same dailies for the sAme campaign .
There were so many builds that there was no best in slot for every build.
I had a priest hated healing so shadow priest.
Here in neverwinter the content limits you to the flavor of the mod. There is not any other options.
Gets boring ....
A good game to look at was DC universe online.
This was a game with a neverwinter like setup but was always fun as you could change clAsses if you wanted something different and armor sets had different sets for different builds

kalina311

@shadrakt2
-1
The bot and farmers would love your suggestion do content in any area easy for rewards without doing content lol ummmm no