Ok, as promised, some more details. Skip to the next post if you just want to see the changes, but people have been asking about the math, so here we go! This is all about the three small-guild economic buildings (Recruiter, Assayer, Gemcutter). We're not changing the other ones because we feel they are well within reach for medium and large size guilds, and they are possible (although admittedly a stretch) for smaller guilds, which is where we wanted them.
Here's the basic math approach, with some comments about what went wrong and how we're adjusting. Big picture I think most of the costs were not that far off, with the exception of Labor and Gems (more on that below), once you look at the whole picture and once you dramatically increase the size of the coffers (which we're doing). But lowering the Labor/Gem costs a lot and increasing the coffer size a lot absolutely needed doing, so thanks everyone for the feedback!
Our original design goals for the temporary structures were to let people empty their coffers of things they had too much of, and get some of the things they needed (above all Influence). Our data showed that guilds had: Excess: Food, Stone, Metal, Wood, AD, Labor Not Enough: Influence, Gems, Tyranny, Shards of Conquest These changes focused on getting rid of F/S/M/W and Labor, and letting people get more Influence and Gems. (Tyranny shards aren't in terrible shape, so we're willing to let them go for a bit, but Shards of Conquest are obviously a real problem, and we aren't doing enough for those yet, so they remain on our "problem" list.) Note that Gold (the Assayer) was mainly put in for flavor -- people mostly aren't having trouble with Gold -- so we understand it may not be the most desirable building (although we still want to get its math on the same playing field with the others; see below).
To keep things from getting too wordy, let’s stick with Stone, say. But what’s below applies to Stone, Food, Metal, and Wood. Everything below is about the “economic” temporary structures (Recruiter, Assayer, Gemcutter), not the more advanced structures. * You earn 240 Stone/hour with a level 1 Quarry, and there are 7*24 = 168 hours in a week, so that’s just over 40,000 Stone/week. (Note Quarry capacity is 8 hours’ worth of Stone, so it’s reasonable to think you can actually get most of that 40,000 -- you shouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to tend.) * Especially at lower guild levels, the costs you pay are much smaller than the amount you can earn. So many guilds fill up quickly on Stone. * The idea of the temp structures was to use this excess Stone at around the rate you were earning it, which led to a baseline cost of 40,000. ** We don’t want it to be always correct to choose to build a temp structure. So if sometimes you are short of stone, you might want to wait. Maybe there’s some permanent building you want to build instead. ** However, if you ever get stuck, and you take a week off to earn Stone, you’ll have enough for a temp structure. ** This means every week, you should be able to advance in one way or another. (In other words, we do not want it never correct to choose to build a temp structure either!) ** In practice, it should be possible to do better with some good planning, because the Stone earn rates are so much higher than the Stone costs for everything other than the temp structures. (Also, upgrading Quarries and building Masonry Guilds might become more relevant.) * However, at the lower guild levels, the amount your coffer can hold is *much* smaller than the earn rate. ** You can see how out of proportion things are if you note that at Rank 1, you earn 240 Stone/hour, and at rank 10, it’s 600 Stone/hour. The respective coffer capacities, though, are 8,500 and 273,000. So you can store 35 hours’ worth of Stone at Rank 1, and 455 hours at Rank 10, which is a bit extreme. ** Another way to say this is that coffer capacities and (pre-existing) costs for Stone are far below the earn rates. In theory, we could fix this by raising the costs or lowering the earn rates. (Ouch.) Instead, our approach is to leave those numbers as-is, but increase the coffer capacities. That means the right Stone costs for the temporary structures will look very high compared to the Stone costs on existing buildings. However, they are not that high compared to the earn rates. Which means it will be fine once the coffers can hold the larger amounts.
What about the amount the buildings produce? Well, our basic rule of thumb was "about 10 players playing for a week (not every day, but most days)". Assuming 4 days a week, let's count that as 40 player days. We have some guidelines (all the SH costs are built off of these) for each currency. In particular, we're assuming (per player): Labor: 275/day Gold: 2.5/day Gems: 560/day Influence: 400/day
So, for example, the Recruiter gives ~16,000 Influence total (40 * 400). Thus in a 10 player guild, they'll earn Influence twice as fast in a week when they build the Recruiter.
The one thing I haven't talked about yet are the Labor and Gem costs. There we were just looking at the buildings the wrong way: rather than looking at the player earn (as above), which makes those costs maybe look semi-reasonable, we should have been looking at them as conversion buildings. The Assayer, for example, let you trade 40,000 Labor and 80,000 Gems for 100 Gold. But Labor and Gems aren't like Wood/Stone/Food/Metal (where you have an excess). You have to earn those, and player-by-player too. And the conversion rate in player weeks was almost 8:1, which is pretty harsh for a conversion. We re-tuned it to be more like 2:1 (taking a hint from Settlers of Catan).
Whew, pretty long. I'll put the exact changes into the next post.
Exact Changes: * Coffer Capacities increased for Food/Metal/Stone/Wood. Increased from 8,500 (usually; varies by resource) to 30,000 at Guild Rank 1, from 11,000 to 40,000 at ranks 2 and 3, and from 20,000 to 50,000 at ranks 4 and 5. Ranks 6+ left unchanged. * Max capacities for Assayer, Gemcutter, and Recruiter tuned to allow the building to be untended for 8 hours without losses (this is how the Mine, Quarry, etc. work). * Assayer costs reduced from 60,000 to 47,000 Stone, from 60,000 to 46,000 Metal, from 40,000 to 9,000 Labor, and from 80,000 to 21,000 Gems. * Gemcutter costs reduced from 60,000 to 40,000 Wood, from 60,000 to 34,000 Stone, from 40,000 to 31,000 Metal, and from 40,000 to 23,000 Labor. * Recruiter costs reduced from 40,000 to 32,000 Wood, from 36,000 to 24,000 Stone, from 42,000 to 38,000 Food, from 42,000 to 27,000 Metal, and from 20,000 to 12,000 Labor.
Amounts produced remain the same (24,192 Gems, 101 Gold, 16,800 Influence respectively, over the full week).
These changes have a good chance of launching with the module. (If they don't make it, they should come in shortly thereafter.)
For reference: Cost of each Temp. Structure (As of 20th Apr)
If i Recall right @ Farm level 3(pre warehose) you can only hold 2216 Food making the influence(the one small guilds need the most) completely impossible... might be wrong here though
Why not have a scaled pricing of temporary buildings? The higher the stronghold the more expensive the buildings. The masterworks buildings I understand the high price since this will make AD to the guilds high enough to use them. As things stand now i can not see a small guild building more than 2 temp structures.... if the prices are more afordable. Most of these temp structures are useless.
We(small guilds) get gold by selling items like the dragon hoard coffers to vendor for gold. So gold is not a problem at small guild level. Neither is gems as we run our professions 3/9 slots making them. as for surplace equipement we get that from Qautermaster Enchantment. Sadly only usefull temp building for small guilds will be the influence and that will be to expensive to build.
I am starting to believe this mod will hurt small guilds.
There are more than BIS players in this game RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ???? FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
I think what people are struggling with is a certain over-complication of a rather simple problem: Guilds have too much of A, and need more of B. Wouldn't it have been much easier and straightforward to just allow direct trading, even through a temporary structure? You have posted a full page of math, I fear some players might have trouble getting through the logic and understanding the true gain vs. farming directly.
Furthermore you've now limited trading to specific resources that your data pool indicated. But that probably doesn't apply to all guilds equally and is not a very robust setup for the future. If the economy changes, for whatever reason, guilds could start struggling with other coffers, and then the whole system doesn't work any longer.
I personally would have liked something where you can put in X and get out Y, of course with some sort of trading cost (time, currency) involved to make it less efficient than getting the resource directly. This not only would have made it easier for guilds to understand the benefit, but also would be the vastly more flexible system now and in the future.
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
Exact Changes: * Coffer Capacities increased for Food/Metal/Stone/Wood. Increased from 8,500 (usually; varies by resource) to 30,000 at Guild Rank 1, from 11,000 to 40,000 at ranks 2 and 3, and from 20,000 to 50,000 at ranks 4 and 5. Ranks 6+ left unchanged. * Max capacities for Assayer, Gemcutter, and Recruiter tuned to allow the building to be untended for 8 hours without losses (this is how the Mine, Quarry, etc. work). * Assayer costs reduced from 60,000 to 47,000 Stone, from 60,000 to 46,000 Metal, from 40,000 to 9,000 Labor, and from 80,000 to 21,000 Gems. * Gemcutter costs reduced from 60,000 to 40,000 Wood, from 60,000 to 34,000 Stone, from 40,000 to 31,000 Metal, and from 40,000 to 23,000 Labor. * Recruiter costs reduced from 40,000 to 32,000 Wood, from 36,000 to 24,000 Stone, from 42,000 to 38,000 Food, from 42,000 to 27,000 Metal, and from 20,000 to 12,000 Labor.
Amounts produced remain the same (24,192 Gems, 101 Gold, 16,800 Influence respectively, over the full week).
These changes have a good chance of launching with the module. (If they don't make it, they should come in shortly thereafter.)
OK, this is a big improvement. Not perfect, but a lot better. The Gemcutter now seems feasible. I'm not convinced the reduction in the Gem cost of the Assayer are sufficient. What I am wondering - let's say I have 21.000 worth of Gems in tradable form (enchants or purple vouchers), and offered them in /trade for Gold - how much gold would people be willing to pay?
Recruiter is also semi-feasible, at least for mid-level, medium-sized guilds.
I don't make the decisions on what my guild (GH18) builds, but my current recommendation is that we build the Gemcutter and spread the profession structures throughout the alliance, so we always have all 5 structures available somewhere.
As for the Mysterious Merchant - it is not cost-effective for us to build it. There are 4 items it may sell that I am personally interested in, and if some wealthy GH 20 guild build it, I will be happy to pay a reasonable fee (say, one SMOP?) for temporary access to the vendor.
Hoping for improvements...
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
But that probably doesn't apply to all guilds equally and is not a very robust setup for the future. If the economy changes, for whatever reason, guilds could start struggling with other coffers, and then the whole system doesn't work any longer.
It's a reasonable system insofar as the intent of the SH system goes, that you do have to engage with structures and plan how to allocate resources, and can't just buy your way around absolutely everything (though you can admittedly buy your way around a lot). The main flaw you point out is that it can't help with potential future scarcities as it stands. While this is true, they could create more possible structures to choose from if need be. It would just take more time in the development cycle to get them implemented than being able to trade anything for anything else right off.
OK, this is a big improvement. Not perfect, but a lot better. The Gemcutter now seems feasible. I'm not convinced the reduction in the Gem cost of the Assayer are sufficient. What I am wondering - let's say I have 21.000 worth of Gems in tradable form (enchants or purple vouchers), and offered them in /trade for Gold - how much gold would people be willing to pay?
I think the key is that you're not *really* expected to want to build an Assayer. Not unlike the Alchemy tasks to produce crates of gold, it's there for flavour more than anything. Guilds mostly aren't struggling with gold. /shrug
I'd kind of missed that the gold cost of the Mysterious Merchant was reduced to 400, which seems reasonably sustainable without continuous use of the Assayer. It was 2000 in a previous build and that was very costly but sustainable with the cost and output of the Assayer in that particular iteration. I'm fine with them having dropped that particular dependency.
Tyranny shards aren't in terrible shape, so we're willing to let them go for a bit, but Shards of Conquest are obviously a real problem, and we aren't doing enough for those yet, so they remain on our "problem" list.)
Comment in another thread prompted me to come back to this.
Tyranny donations are a problem for me personally because of not being done with those boons, so the vast majority of the currency that I earn gets converted into Dragon Empire Treasures for eventual hoard donation (waiting on 2x event). But I also typically don't have enough time to run a great many ToD-related quests in a week. Running Tiamat makes me miserable for a variety of reasons. I *really* hate it. I might be able to suck it up now that we can form alliance groups to run it any time, and if you scheduled another 2xTyranny event, which hasn't been on the calendar since the time they decided to do ALL of them at once, plus the Simril extension ran into it. Siege of Neverwinter helps, which I see is returning. Simril fishing might have helped more if I'd been able to plan around it, but since that addition was a big surprise, I wasn't prepared to take advantage of it.
Conqueror shards were always going to be a problem, and the dev team was told (and not subtly) it was going to be a problem before Strongholds launched and chose to disregard that feedback. The only reason PvE guilds care about Conq shards is the Barracks. The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options. While Strongholds was promoted as not involving any mandatory PvP, the objectively best universal boon building came with a non-negotiable PvP price tag, but nothing to make PvP any more pleasant or welcoming *or winnable* to the average player. The main reason my guild's coffer has enough shards in it to build a Barracks and take it up a few levels is because one of our allies bought literally hundreds of shard packs for another project (filling their Heroic shards quickly, I'm guessing) and was willing to donate out everything they didn't need for themselves. Which is awesome for us, but not normal.
One small thing that would help with shard acquisition (by trading Seal of Triumph) would be if Black Ice Domination was made to count for a daily victory again. This validity was dropped when the daily PvP victory was converted from a quest to automated gain. WAI or oversight, it was a QoL reduction. BID counts for your SH PvP win, but not the general one.
Tyranny shards aren't in terrible shape, so we're willing to let them go for a bit, but Shards of Conquest are obviously a real problem, and we aren't doing enough for those yet, so they remain on our "problem" list.)
One small thing that would help with shard acquisition (by trading Seal of Triumph) would be if Black Ice Domination was made to count for a daily victory again. This validity was dropped when the daily PvP victory was converted from a quest to automated gain. WAI or oversight, it was a QoL reduction. BID counts for your SH PvP win, but not the general one.
Last I checked, BID still counts as a win for the Conqueror shards quest.
EDIT - Ah, but I see you mean Seals of Triumph. Yes, that would be nice.
I am on Xbox, Gh15 with 130-150 players in roster. We are always short and waiting on gems and influence for the next structure and we are typically full on the production plot resources a few days after upgrades even with a level 7 warehouse. So in general this looks appealing to me, although we might not qualify as a 'smaller' guild.
I don't think we could have more than two or three structures going at a time, but I think that would be OK.
As far as the Assayer structure, I don't think 80K (I see they changed that cost - might be worth it now - still math stuff to be done) worth of gems is worth the 100 gold, I think I could sell the gems to a vendor for more than that, but math stuff that I am not able to perform right now as I don't have the game in front of me, plus we always need gems, so no on that one. Take out the Gems cost and maybe we would be interested in this structure.
I think the rest of it looks decent and I am looking forward to trying it out in June, or July or whenever console gets this.
Post edited by sundance777 on
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
What about the amount the buildings produce? Well, our basic rule of thumb was "about 10 players playing for a week (not every day, but most days)". Assuming 4 days a week, let's count that as 40 player days. We have some guidelines (all the SH costs are built off of these) for each currency. In particular, we're assuming (per player): Labor: 275/day Gold: 2.5/day Gems: 560/day Influence: 400/day
These assumptions are interesting. The gems one is... well, that is 112 rank 4s, or 56 rank 5s. Unless all your members are crafting gem crates, it's actually not a very realistic number. For console players, apparently the most cost-effective way to fill your gems coffer is to make a rank 12 runestone to donate. I've not tried to work this out for PC. The duration of stronghold profession tasks is a bit problematic. There is a lot of downtime when slots are idle with the way they're set up, if the player isn't constantly available to cycle them.
It's also kind of assuming that you run Corvee Labor around the clock and maybe get a little leeway with it on days when you have a quest with a voucher available. I guess the number is more likely keyed around sacrificing the drops from profession packs... this hinges on lockboxes reliably containing a profession pack. I think you want to be careful with that.
I'd have to do some figuring on the sustainability of gold. It's probably around right assuming vendoring of identified random equipment drops.
The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options.
Just to clarify -- while I agree everyone (PvE or PvP) will want a Barracks, it shouldn't block guild progression, right? In other words, if Conqueror's Shards are a problem, your Barracks will lag behind, but you can still progress your guild by leveling other structures?
Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options.
Just to clarify -- while I agree everyone (PvE or PvP) will want a Barracks, it shouldn't block guild progression, right? In other words, if Conqueror's Shards are a problem, your Barracks will lag behind, but you can still progress your guild by leveling other structures?
Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
The problem is that virtually no one in a PvE guild wants to play PvP. Stronghold progression is already gated behind a metric ton of apathy inducing grind, the very least you could do is not force us to play a game mode that we have no interest in participating in.
Which is why an open trading system for resources would have made so much more sense. Let players trade shards 2:1. Who cares?
Then you're just increasing the heroic shard grind which is already bad enough. They just need to give us another way to earn conqueror's shards. Give us a queue instance to play a dom match against bots or something. It just needs to be something that isn't forcing us to jump through hoops like BiD.
The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options.
Just to clarify -- while I agree everyone (PvE or PvP) will want a Barracks, it shouldn't block guild progression, right? In other words, if Conqueror's Shards are a problem, your Barracks will lag behind, but you can still progress your guild by leveling other structures?
Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
For any small (under 20) or even most medium sized guilds (50-75 people) the buildings like the mason's guild that add increased stone/wood/food/metal production are a complete waste. Those guilds do not progress fast enough that food etc are a barrier to continuing. the only guilds that do find themselves gated are the large guilds who can add all the other resources fast enough and then find themselves farming dragons with bells to get vouchers for food and stone.
Resources for medium and smaller guilds are incredibly precious and we plan these things out pretty much all the way to GH lv 20 so that we don't screw up along the way and so that we can take advantage of things like SH sales where we might get desperate enough to end the grind for conq or heroic shards that we will drop some zen/ad on the power packs.
So, saying that guild progression is not blocked is true... but why would we want to level a building that is a complete waste? My guild would much rather build a pvp boon building because it is a boon building and pvp might eventually get fixed, but that takes even more conq shards, and glory as well which we can't even buy.
My guild solved the lack of conq shards for the barracks by copious use of the wallet buying power packs (thanks to everyone who pitched in!) and then we solved the deficit in heroic shards we found ourselves in by doing the same thing again and trading our now extra conq shards for heroic shards to our allied guilds (who are all awesome).
Anyways. that all sucked and cost a HAMSTER load of AD. now we are closing in on GH lv 19 thanks to a great deal of AD and stupid amounts of grinding and even more AD to stop the horrible grinding and we still need one more building before we can start building GH 20.... and our choices are a pvp boon building (conq shards AND glory? lol) a second warehouse (at double the heroic shard cost of any other buildings? lol) or a resource boosting building like the mason's guild (useless much as soon as we hit GH 20? lol). So we are building a second warehouse because at least that gives us some extra space to hoard stuff once we hit GH 20 and we can't buy the glory for a pvp boon building even if we wanted to.
All decisions are bad ones in this situation. the buildings are not balanced enough in their costs for shards and some things like conq shards can't be obtained unless you spend a lot of AD.
So yeah, most of the player base feels like their progression is blocked if they can't level their barracks because the cost to level up an extra building is just too high. and yes, my guild needs that extra building now, but at GH lv 10 we couldn't afford to waste the time or the resources on it
Guild - The Imaginary Friends We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
Which is why an open trading system for resources would have made so much more sense. Let players trade shards 2:1. Who cares?
Then you're just increasing the heroic shard grind which is already bad enough. They just need to give us another way to earn conqueror's shards. Give us a queue instance to play a dom match against bots or something. It just needs to be something that isn't forcing us to jump through hoops like BiD.
Ooh a 5 man 'defend the base' skirmish against a horde of npc's that awards Conqueror Shards - love that idea. My guild would definitely run that.
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
That's not really the issue. What I see as the main problem is the following:
This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. It is not fun to be forced to do things you hate.
To me, PvP has no place in a D&D-based game, and it irritates me immensely to be almost forced to participate in it. This is not the same as the endless grind, which I do not particularly enjoy either - but at least it makes some (slight) thematic sense, and I see that as a necessary evil.
I do want the Power boon - in fact, that is the Offensive boon I currently have selected. I try to contribute my share towards it - I occasionally do the Maze engine campaign task that can reward you with Conqueror's shards, but my view is basically that this is a design flaw. There are many PvE-only guilds, and forcing them to do PvP just for this is simply, well...wrong.
The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options.
Just to clarify -- while I agree everyone (PvE or PvP) will want a Barracks, it shouldn't block guild progression, right? In other words, if Conqueror's Shards are a problem, your Barracks will lag behind, but you can still progress your guild by leveling other structures?
Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
Er @rgutscheradev, the only real reason to progress any stronghold structure is gain access to boons. Everything else is just background clutter, for want of a better term. The only boon that is useful to all classes is Power and that can only be obtained by building and progressing a Barracks. To do that, people have to play PvP which is very much a minority aspect of NW. As @adinosii stated:
This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. It is not fun to be forced to do things you hate.
Making the only universally useful and desired SH boon only available through PvP is destroying the fun in this game for a lot of players. It really is high time this situation was addressed and changed.
The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options.
Just to clarify -- while I agree everyone (PvE or PvP) will want a Barracks, it shouldn't block guild progression, right? In other words, if Conqueror's Shards are a problem, your Barracks will lag behind, but you can still progress your guild by leveling other structures?
Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
Er, the only real reason to progress any stronghold structure is gain access to boons. Everything else is just background clutter, for want of a better term. The only boon that is useful to all classes is Power and that can only be obtained by building and progressing a Barracks. To do that, people have to play PvP which is very much a minority aspect of NW. As @adinosii stated:
This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. It is not fun to be forced to do things you hate.
Making the only universally useful and desired SH boon only available through PvP is destroying the fun in this game for a lot of players. It really is high time this situation was addressed and changed.
I wrote a big long post above as to why the barracks was actually a block to guild progression but you put it a lot simpler just by stating the obvious that the entire reason we have a Stronghold is for the boons. As long as the barracks is gated behind conq shards that is a barrier to completion
Guild - The Imaginary Friends We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
Although to answer the original question, it is incredibly painful to put resources into a structure that doesn't particularly benefit you, all the more if resources are slow to accumulate. I've built an Animal Pen I did not strictly have to, and upgraded it once, both prior to there being alliances. I believe both were in reaction to running low on bag space for stacks of shards or hitting currency caps, so I couldn't store resources on my characters anymore and had to clear the coffer a bit. It was a long time ago.
With alliances, I can donate out my surplus campaign currencies to help someone else. I've also been able to construct Warehouses so our caps are higher, for the things that fill quickly. The Warehouses are only rank 1, and I hope I haven't crippled us down the road. I try to plan ahead a few levels, but beyond that is a bit beyond me.
And what the heck is up with a Warehouse costing twice as many very-hard-to-farm-in-quantity shards as anything else anyway?
Curse the refusal to do anything about the personal 20-hour cooldown on Heroic shards from HEs and Influence quests from boon structures, while we have your attention.
Although to answer the original question, it is incredibly painful to put resources into a structure that doesn't particularly benefit you, all the more if resources are slow to accumulate. I've built an Animal Pen I did not strictly have to, and upgraded it once, both prior to there being alliances. I believe both were in reaction to running low on bag space for stacks of shards or hitting currency caps, so I couldn't store resources on my characters anymore and had to clear the coffer a bit. It was a long time ago.
With alliances, I can donate out my surplus campaign currencies to help someone else. I've also been able to construct Warehouses so our caps are higher, for the things that fill quickly. The Warehouses are only rank 1, and I hope I haven't crippled us down the road. I try to plan ahead a few levels, but beyond that is a bit beyond me.
And what the heck is up with a Warehouse costing twice as many very-hard-to-farm-in-quantity shards as anything else anyway?
Curse the refusal to do anything about the personal 20-hour cooldown on Heroic shards from HEs and Influence quests from boon structures, while we have your attention.
Had to google sheet all our way to 20 (from about 5) when it appeared that we need for the GH upgrade count a spare structure that we don't actually need, and we can get stuck with no shards. Had a buffer of about 30k conqueror shards , IIRC, before making the barracks, choosing it as the third boon plot and not earlier. So we wont get stuck.
With several variants for the spare building, warehouse, smelters yard.. etc..
Even though we are now a little bit deviating from the plan and I hope it wont bite us in the HAMSTER. The entire system with "must build stuff you don't want" is demoralizing, especially considering the huge costs and time involved. Even if the same total costs was made via streamlined upgrades, the effect on the players would have been better. Ok, it costs X, we grind X to get that rank or boon. Now it's, we need X for the boon, Y for the Yard/warehouse, we have to grind Y, life sucks.
I'm going to put in my $0.02 on this issue: the way I see it, most other mods have been complete-able during that module, or shortly into the next module. Strongholds, especially for small to medium sized guilds, is a multi-year slog. And, this basic point:
The design of the SH grind means that it's an exclusive-OR with most other current-module content.
In my limited in-game time, I can run: River District OR Heroic Shards of Power (severely time-gated, can get 10/day on a character) OR Tyranny of Dragons campaign OR Some other campaign currency
There's pretty much no synergies in that list above -- and that's what our guild needs most right now. The few synergies that exist are welcome: the Builder's Heroic shards quests for Beasts/Drakes/Spiders can overlap with HEs for influence. That's a two-fer, and a good thing. What I'd like to see more of is the AND in the SH grind.
Here's some ways I'd suggest to add the 'and' to the SH grind: - Any campaign currency spent on boons gives out a voucher for equivalent (or higher) amount of campaign currency for the mimic. Right now, I spend on boons OR I contribute. Make it AND. - More ways to get SH vouchers when doing current-campaign work. Quartermaster's Enchantments, for example, help w/ Surplus Equipment needs. But, we're not able to earn HSOPs or ToD currency during that. - Doing SH stuff together (guild/alliance) should provide a bonus (vouchers). For example, if 10/25 out of a Tiamat run are from our guild/alliance, then extra vouchers for the group content run.
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
I am starting to believe this mod will hurt small guilds.
But how do you feel about it after reading the whole thread and not just the first post?
My problem is not just what is posted on the forums but from what i saw on preview. Granted as i am in a small guild i can't get enough guildies to do the new skirmish but i can see serious hard times from those things i can do. There is a few great things about this new mini mod, sadly it is overshadowed by other things that is just aimed at the 1% ers
For 1 thing it is impossible for rank 1 sh to build temp bulding. I am now upgrading to rank 2 and are pretty sure the same goes for r2 I would be surprised if upto rank 4 can build it.
Reason: Max wood rank 1 can have 2.1k Needed wood : 40 K
P.S. Remember small guilds was promised(on twitch) relieve in this mini mod all we will get is reduction of chance to get new players as all will want MW. I am gratefull for the Rank 10 reduction needed for MW.
Post edited by mynaam on
There are more than BIS players in this game RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ???? FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
I am starting to believe this mod will hurt small guilds.
But how do you feel about it after reading the whole thread and not just the first post?
My problem is not just what is posted on the forums but from what i saw on preview. Granted as i am in a small guild i can't get enough guildies to do the new skirmish but i can see serious hard times from those things i can do. There is a few great things about this new mini mod, sadly it is overshadowed by other things that is just aimed at the 1% ers
For 1 thing it is impossible for rank 1 sh to build temp bulding. I am now upgrading to rank 2 and are pretty sure the same goes for r2 I would be surprised if upto rank 4 can build it.
Reason: Max wood rank 1 can have 2.1k Needed wood : 40 K
P.S. Remember small guilds was promised(on twitch) relieve in this mini mod all we will get is reduction of chance to get new players as all will want MW. I am gratefull for the Rank 10 reduction needed for MW.
If you check rgutscheradev's comment above, you'll see he's talking about raising the coffer storage at rank 2 to 40k for all 4 'materials'. That means you'll be able to build one of these at GH rank 2.
One interesting point you bring up though is that wood currently has a much lower storage (at GH1) than Stone, Metal & Labor. It could be a typo but neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Coffer lists Wood as 3.3k and the others at 8.5k but they equal out at rank 2.
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Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Here's the basic math approach, with some comments about what went wrong and how we're adjusting. Big picture I think most of the costs were not that far off, with the exception of Labor and Gems (more on that below), once you look at the whole picture and once you dramatically increase the size of the coffers (which we're doing). But lowering the Labor/Gem costs a lot and increasing the coffer size a lot absolutely needed doing, so thanks everyone for the feedback!
Our original design goals for the temporary structures were to let people empty their coffers of things they had too much of, and get some of the things they needed (above all Influence). Our data showed that guilds had:
Excess: Food, Stone, Metal, Wood, AD, Labor
Not Enough: Influence, Gems, Tyranny, Shards of Conquest
These changes focused on getting rid of F/S/M/W and Labor, and letting people get more Influence and Gems. (Tyranny shards aren't in terrible shape, so we're willing to let them go for a bit, but Shards of Conquest are obviously a real problem, and we aren't doing enough for those yet, so they remain on our "problem" list.) Note that Gold (the Assayer) was mainly put in for flavor -- people mostly aren't having trouble with Gold -- so we understand it may not be the most desirable building (although we still want to get its math on the same playing field with the others; see below).
To keep things from getting too wordy, let’s stick with Stone, say. But what’s below applies to Stone, Food, Metal, and Wood. Everything below is about the “economic” temporary structures (Recruiter, Assayer, Gemcutter), not the more advanced structures.
* You earn 240 Stone/hour with a level 1 Quarry, and there are 7*24 = 168 hours in a week, so that’s just over 40,000 Stone/week. (Note Quarry capacity is 8 hours’ worth of Stone, so it’s reasonable to think you can actually get most of that 40,000 -- you shouldn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to tend.)
* Especially at lower guild levels, the costs you pay are much smaller than the amount you can earn. So many guilds fill up quickly on Stone.
* The idea of the temp structures was to use this excess Stone at around the rate you were earning it, which led to a baseline cost of 40,000.
** We don’t want it to be always correct to choose to build a temp structure. So if sometimes you are short of stone, you might want to wait. Maybe there’s some permanent building you want to build instead.
** However, if you ever get stuck, and you take a week off to earn Stone, you’ll have enough for a temp structure.
** This means every week, you should be able to advance in one way or another. (In other words, we do not want it never correct to choose to build a temp structure either!)
** In practice, it should be possible to do better with some good planning, because the Stone earn rates are so much higher than the Stone costs for everything other than the temp structures. (Also, upgrading Quarries and building Masonry Guilds might become more relevant.)
* However, at the lower guild levels, the amount your coffer can hold is *much* smaller than the earn rate.
** You can see how out of proportion things are if you note that at Rank 1, you earn 240 Stone/hour, and at rank 10, it’s 600 Stone/hour. The respective coffer capacities, though, are 8,500 and 273,000. So you can store 35 hours’ worth of Stone at Rank 1, and 455 hours at Rank 10, which is a bit extreme.
** Another way to say this is that coffer capacities and (pre-existing) costs for Stone are far below the earn rates. In theory, we could fix this by raising the costs or lowering the earn rates. (Ouch.) Instead, our approach is to leave those numbers as-is, but increase the coffer capacities. That means the right Stone costs for the temporary structures will look very high compared to the Stone costs on existing buildings. However, they are not that high compared to the earn rates. Which means it will be fine once the coffers can hold the larger amounts.
What about the amount the buildings produce? Well, our basic rule of thumb was "about 10 players playing for a week (not every day, but most days)". Assuming 4 days a week, let's count that as 40 player days. We have some guidelines (all the SH costs are built off of these) for each currency. In particular, we're assuming (per player):
Labor: 275/day
Gold: 2.5/day
Gems: 560/day
Influence: 400/day
So, for example, the Recruiter gives ~16,000 Influence total (40 * 400). Thus in a 10 player guild, they'll earn Influence twice as fast in a week when they build the Recruiter.
The one thing I haven't talked about yet are the Labor and Gem costs. There we were just looking at the buildings the wrong way: rather than looking at the player earn (as above), which makes those costs maybe look semi-reasonable, we should have been looking at them as conversion buildings. The Assayer, for example, let you trade 40,000 Labor and 80,000 Gems for 100 Gold. But Labor and Gems aren't like Wood/Stone/Food/Metal (where you have an excess). You have to earn those, and player-by-player too. And the conversion rate in player weeks was almost 8:1, which is pretty harsh for a conversion. We re-tuned it to be more like 2:1 (taking a hint from Settlers of Catan).
Whew, pretty long. I'll put the exact changes into the next post.
* Coffer Capacities increased for Food/Metal/Stone/Wood. Increased from 8,500 (usually; varies by resource) to 30,000 at Guild Rank 1, from 11,000 to 40,000 at ranks 2 and 3, and from 20,000 to 50,000 at ranks 4 and 5. Ranks 6+ left unchanged.
* Max capacities for Assayer, Gemcutter, and Recruiter tuned to allow the building to be untended for 8 hours without losses (this is how the Mine, Quarry, etc. work).
* Assayer costs reduced from 60,000 to 47,000 Stone, from 60,000 to 46,000 Metal, from 40,000 to 9,000 Labor, and from 80,000 to 21,000 Gems.
* Gemcutter costs reduced from 60,000 to 40,000 Wood, from 60,000 to 34,000 Stone, from 40,000 to 31,000 Metal, and from 40,000 to 23,000 Labor.
* Recruiter costs reduced from 40,000 to 32,000 Wood, from 36,000 to 24,000 Stone, from 42,000 to 38,000 Food, from 42,000 to 27,000 Metal, and from 20,000 to 12,000 Labor.
Amounts produced remain the same (24,192 Gems, 101 Gold, 16,800 Influence respectively, over the full week).
These changes have a good chance of launching with the module. (If they don't make it, they should come in shortly thereafter.)
Why not have a scaled pricing of temporary buildings? The higher the stronghold the more expensive the buildings. The masterworks buildings I understand the high price since this will make AD to the guilds high enough to use them. As things stand now i can not see a small guild building more than 2 temp structures.... if the prices are more afordable. Most of these temp structures are useless.
We(small guilds) get gold by selling items like the dragon hoard coffers to vendor for gold. So gold is not a problem at small guild level. Neither is gems as we run our professions 3/9 slots making them. as for surplace equipement we get that from Qautermaster Enchantment. Sadly only usefull temp building for small guilds will be the influence and that will be to expensive to build.
I am starting to believe this mod will hurt small guilds.
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
Furthermore you've now limited trading to specific resources that your data pool indicated. But that probably doesn't apply to all guilds equally and is not a very robust setup for the future. If the economy changes, for whatever reason, guilds could start struggling with other coffers, and then the whole system doesn't work any longer.
I personally would have liked something where you can put in X and get out Y, of course with some sort of trading cost (time, currency) involved to make it less efficient than getting the resource directly. This not only would have made it easier for guilds to understand the benefit, but also would be the vastly more flexible system now and in the future.
Recruiter is also semi-feasible, at least for mid-level, medium-sized guilds.
I don't make the decisions on what my guild (GH18) builds, but my current recommendation is that we build the Gemcutter and spread the profession structures throughout the alliance, so we always have all 5 structures available somewhere.
As for the Mysterious Merchant - it is not cost-effective for us to build it. There are 4 items it may sell that I am personally interested in, and if some wealthy GH 20 guild build it, I will be happy to pay a reasonable fee (say, one SMOP?) for temporary access to the vendor.
I'd kind of missed that the gold cost of the Mysterious Merchant was reduced to 400, which seems reasonably sustainable without continuous use of the Assayer. It was 2000 in a previous build and that was very costly but sustainable with the cost and output of the Assayer in that particular iteration. I'm fine with them having dropped that particular dependency.
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Tyranny donations are a problem for me personally because of not being done with those boons, so the vast majority of the currency that I earn gets converted into Dragon Empire Treasures for eventual hoard donation (waiting on 2x event). But I also typically don't have enough time to run a great many ToD-related quests in a week. Running Tiamat makes me miserable for a variety of reasons. I *really* hate it. I might be able to suck it up now that we can form alliance groups to run it any time, and if you scheduled another 2xTyranny event, which hasn't been on the calendar since the time they decided to do ALL of them at once, plus the Simril extension ran into it. Siege of Neverwinter helps, which I see is returning. Simril fishing might have helped more if I'd been able to plan around it, but since that addition was a big surprise, I wasn't prepared to take advantage of it.
Conqueror shards were always going to be a problem, and the dev team was told (and not subtly) it was going to be a problem before Strongholds launched and chose to disregard that feedback. The only reason PvE guilds care about Conq shards is the Barracks. The argument that you can just build something else instead of a Barracks is viewed as a joke, because there are no comparable options. While Strongholds was promoted as not involving any mandatory PvP, the objectively best universal boon building came with a non-negotiable PvP price tag, but nothing to make PvP any more pleasant or welcoming *or winnable* to the average player. The main reason my guild's coffer has enough shards in it to build a Barracks and take it up a few levels is because one of our allies bought literally hundreds of shard packs for another project (filling their Heroic shards quickly, I'm guessing) and was willing to donate out everything they didn't need for themselves. Which is awesome for us, but not normal.
One small thing that would help with shard acquisition (by trading Seal of Triumph) would be if Black Ice Domination was made to count for a daily victory again. This validity was dropped when the daily PvP victory was converted from a quest to automated gain. WAI or oversight, it was a QoL reduction. BID counts for your SH PvP win, but not the general one.
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EDIT - Ah, but I see you mean Seals of Triumph. Yes, that would be nice.
Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
I don't think we could have more than two or three structures going at a time, but I think that would be OK.
As far as the Assayer structure, I don't think 80K (I see they changed that cost - might be worth it now - still math stuff to be done) worth of gems is worth the 100 gold, I think I could sell the gems to a vendor for more than that, but math stuff that I am not able to perform right now as I don't have the game in front of me, plus we always need gems, so no on that one. Take out the Gems cost and maybe we would be interested in this structure.
I think the rest of it looks decent and I am looking forward to trying it out in June, or July or whenever console gets this.
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It's also kind of assuming that you run Corvee Labor around the clock and maybe get a little leeway with it on days when you have a quest with a voucher available. I guess the number is more likely keyed around sacrificing the drops from profession packs... this hinges on lockboxes reliably containing a profession pack. I think you want to be careful with that.
I'd have to do some figuring on the sustainability of gold. It's probably around right assuming vendoring of identified random equipment drops.
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Is it just that it's too painful to put other precious resources into something like a Mason's Guild? Or are guilds getting in a state where they are literally locked out of all guild progress until they progress their Barracks all the way to Guild Level/2?
Resources for medium and smaller guilds are incredibly precious and we plan these things out pretty much all the way to GH lv 20 so that we don't screw up along the way and so that we can take advantage of things like SH sales where we might get desperate enough to end the grind for conq or heroic shards that we will drop some zen/ad on the power packs.
So, saying that guild progression is not blocked is true... but why would we want to level a building that is a complete waste? My guild would much rather build a pvp boon building because it is a boon building and pvp might eventually get fixed, but that takes even more conq shards, and glory as well which we can't even buy.
My guild solved the lack of conq shards for the barracks by copious use of the wallet buying power packs (thanks to everyone who pitched in!) and then we solved the deficit in heroic shards we found ourselves in by doing the same thing again and trading our now extra conq shards for heroic shards to our allied guilds (who are all awesome).
Anyways. that all sucked and cost a HAMSTER load of AD. now we are closing in on GH lv 19 thanks to a great deal of AD and stupid amounts of grinding and even more AD to stop the horrible grinding and we still need one more building before we can start building GH 20.... and our choices are a pvp boon building (conq shards AND glory? lol) a second warehouse (at double the heroic shard cost of any other buildings? lol) or a resource boosting building like the mason's guild (useless much as soon as we hit GH 20? lol). So we are building a second warehouse because at least that gives us some extra space to hoard stuff once we hit GH 20 and we can't buy the glory for a pvp boon building even if we wanted to.
All decisions are bad ones in this situation. the buildings are not balanced enough in their costs for shards and some things like conq shards can't be obtained unless you spend a lot of AD.
So yeah, most of the player base feels like their progression is blocked if they can't level their barracks because the cost to level up an extra building is just too high. and yes, my guild needs that extra building now, but at GH lv 10 we couldn't afford to waste the time or the resources on it
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
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This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. It is not fun to be forced to do things you hate.
To me, PvP has no place in a D&D-based game, and it irritates me immensely to be almost forced to participate in it. This is not the same as the endless grind, which I do not particularly enjoy either - but at least it makes some (slight) thematic sense, and I see that as a necessary evil.
I do want the Power boon - in fact, that is the Offensive boon I currently have selected. I try to contribute my share towards it - I occasionally do the Maze engine campaign task that can reward you with Conqueror's shards, but my view is basically that this is a design flaw. There are many PvE-only guilds, and forcing them to do PvP just for this is simply, well...wrong.
This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. It is not fun to be forced to do things you hate.
Making the only universally useful and desired SH boon only available through PvP is destroying the fun in this game for a lot of players. It really is high time this situation was addressed and changed.
We are searching for slave labor, will pay with food from our farm!
With alliances, I can donate out my surplus campaign currencies to help someone else. I've also been able to construct Warehouses so our caps are higher, for the things that fill quickly. The Warehouses are only rank 1, and I hope I haven't crippled us down the road. I try to plan ahead a few levels, but beyond that is a bit beyond me.
And what the heck is up with a Warehouse costing twice as many very-hard-to-farm-in-quantity shards as anything else anyway?
Curse the refusal to do anything about the personal 20-hour cooldown on Heroic shards from HEs and Influence quests from boon structures, while we have your attention.
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With several variants for the spare building, warehouse, smelters yard.. etc..
Even though we are now a little bit deviating from the plan and I hope it wont bite us in the HAMSTER. The entire system with "must build stuff you don't want" is demoralizing, especially considering the huge costs and time involved. Even if the same total costs was made via streamlined upgrades, the effect on the players would have been better. Ok, it costs X, we grind X to get that rank or boon. Now it's, we need X for the boon, Y for the Yard/warehouse, we have to grind Y, life sucks.
The design of the SH grind means that it's an exclusive-OR with most other current-module content.
In my limited in-game time, I can run:
River District
OR
Heroic Shards of Power (severely time-gated, can get 10/day on a character)
OR
Tyranny of Dragons campaign
OR
Some other campaign currency
There's pretty much no synergies in that list above -- and that's what our guild needs most right now. The few synergies that exist are welcome: the Builder's Heroic shards quests for Beasts/Drakes/Spiders can overlap with HEs for influence. That's a two-fer, and a good thing. What I'd like to see more of is the AND in the SH grind.
Here's some ways I'd suggest to add the 'and' to the SH grind:
- Any campaign currency spent on boons gives out a voucher for equivalent (or higher) amount of campaign currency for the mimic. Right now, I spend on boons OR I contribute. Make it AND.
- More ways to get SH vouchers when doing current-campaign work. Quartermaster's Enchantments, for example, help w/ Surplus Equipment needs. But, we're not able to earn HSOPs or ToD currency during that.
- Doing SH stuff together (guild/alliance) should provide a bonus (vouchers). For example, if 10/25 out of a Tiamat run are from our guild/alliance, then extra vouchers for the group content run.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
(Ed: The fact that there are enough bots in lowbie PvP to make it sound viable does kind of place it on the spectrum of funny-sad though.)
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For 1 thing it is impossible for rank 1 sh to build temp bulding. I am now upgrading to rank 2 and are pretty sure the same goes for r2 I would be surprised if upto rank 4 can build it.
Reason:
Max wood rank 1 can have 2.1k
Needed wood : 40 K
P.S. Remember small guilds was promised(on twitch) relieve in this mini mod all we will get is reduction of chance to get new players as all will want MW. I am gratefull for the Rank 10 reduction needed for MW.
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
One interesting point you bring up though is that wood currently has a much lower storage (at GH1) than Stone, Metal & Labor. It could be a typo but neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Coffer lists Wood as 3.3k and the others at 8.5k but they equal out at rank 2.
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