Feedback about the Driftwood Tavern Stream (04/07/19)

oremonger

If you have not seen the stream you may want to go check it out before it is removed. I don't know why VODs do not stay up longer on this channel. Julia did say an edited version will be uploaded to Youtube.

@mimicking#6533 @nitocris83

On the positive, Julia did STEP UP. Big KUDOS for taking this stream seriously.

The stream was 100% more professional, and they were well organized.

They had a dedicated person handling questions so more of them got answered. (Maybe not the answers people wanted to hear but answered.)

They did not "dodge" questions even though they still did not get the point of some of them and pushed others down the road to a future stream.


We as a community should redouble our efforts to provide feedback in the format they requested by using font colors and being as descriptive as possible. We should not leave a doubt about what we are talking about so that there is no confusion when they try to address the issues we post about.


Link to the stream


I'm not going to be negative. They did close the discussion thread though after 9 pages of responses.

I feel that Mr. Foss is still a little out of touch. I can see that he is passionate about the game, but he is also trying to push things that the majority of the player base just have no interest in.

For example: If you base changes around PVP in a mostly PVE game you are always going to fail.

I have always said they need to make PVP and PVE two seperate things. You want to PVP change to your PVP loadout with your PVP based skills, caps, balancing and gear. You want to do PVE change to your PVE loadout and so on.

There is no need to balance one playstyle with the other or to even have them resemble each other in any way. Sadly that is not his vision, and because he "Loves" PVP the PVE community will always suffer for balance issues in a part of the game they never play. PVP already even has its own instances. Use those instances to balance classes for PVP when they are entered don't involve PVE in the equation at all.


Thursday will tell us all we need to know. He said they fixed it. He said that scaling is here to stay but that now it has been fixed. If this is true then we will see a majority of the scaling issues disappear on Thursday. He also said that more updates will be in next Thursdays update. I am looking forward to the patch notes.


Speaking of patch notes, please be more descriptive when discussing changes that have been made and bugs that have been fixed. Maybe even give credit to those who brought attention to the bugs? (that might be too much)

I am happy to hear that Julia is taking content creators more seriously as community manager and has taken responsibility for making things work in that area. We will see what she is able to do in the next few weeks.

My attitude toward Julia has changed a bit after seeing todays stream, I now feel that she does get it and that she is stepping up her game. I really hope they allow her to spend more time with her community manager hat on. This community requires a full time community manager. I hope at some point they realize just what a difference it could make.

All of this gives me hope, but like I said this Thursday and next Thursday are the test.

vorphied

I don't religiously watch the streams, but there definitely is a contrast in Julia's favor between this stream and some older content. Her comments indicated understanding of player concerns and a willingness to engage, if in a somewhat more structured and measured way than some players would prefer.

I feel that Thomas is in a difficult position as Lead Designer when he speaks to the player base because we are all reading volumes into his most incidental comments. Looking back on past content updates, I don't see much evidence that he's been letting his personal interest in viable PvP negatively impact the PvE experience (or even that he's directed the team to do much of anything with PvP at all). I wouldn't take his statements about wanting to develop and improve PvP at face value or as indication of the team's underlying reason for making major changes. I think it's pretty obvious that a system overhaul was necessary, PvP or no.

While there was a bit of a disconnect with certain questions and the ensuing attempts to answer, I get the feeling based on how he describes his experience as a NW player that his is more of the "everyman" and new player perspective; meaning that, if things generally function and are mostly playable, they are probably okay. I'm not entirely sure that he relates as much to players who are engaged with the numbers aspect of the game and are, for example, bothered when scaling drops them below statistical caps they worked to meet.

All in all I was pleasantly surprised with the level of engagement and am optimistic based on what we see starting on Thursday. I'm actually quite happy with a lot of things in Undermountain, and it's unfortunate that some major difficulties and controversies are overshadowing some of the hard, quality work that has been done.

aandrethegiant

Ok I just watched the stream. I made several suggestions to Julia privately and they covered each item. I'm happy to see that they struck an apologetic tone. I recommended Mr Foss to take ownership and admit he and his team blew it with communication piece with the preview testers. They really did come through on this in my personal opinion. Period.

The Good:

1. JULIA! Julia gets it. She is one of US. "We missed the big picture. " She made Mr Foss say: "We blew it". She kept Foss focused and made him answer questions that PW/Cryptic brass NEVER HAS. Highly impressed. The fact she is working much more closely with the Devs is the most positive takeaway I got from the day. And it bodes well for the game long term. I give her an A+.


2. Mr Foss. Mixed bag. HUGE kudos to Foss for being the first member of brass to answer unfiltered raw questions LIVE, since way back at game launch in 2012 when I posed REAL QUESTIONS on my own podcast to the game creators. My questions were hidden and in your face, and they trusted me somehow, but Devs answered just about every question. It was a huge boon to the playbase during launch and I felt some of that magic/un-comfortableness again here for the very first time since game launch.

Mr Foss sat there and was open, and came across as a busy man that wants to hear feedback and follow-through. He admitted he blew it when it came to listening to the community's big picture. He committed to continued work on bug fixing and he was apologetic and thankful to the play testers. THIS WAS NEEDED IN 2012-2013. But if Mr Foss backs it up with continued bug fixing its a huge win for the community and the longevity of Neverwinter and Tyrs Paladium and our alliance.

The bad side: Catering balancing to improve PVP. This was a losing argument for the dev team in Alpha. Playerbase was always majority PvE as is D&D. Globally, MMOs hold a PvP majority base. PW/Cryptic never understood this and balancing the entire game to improve the PvP experience is a risk at this juncture in the 9 year resume span of the Neverwinter devs. The game was never built to do both well. PW/Cryptic has always wanted both to be able to co-exist and be viable. And maybe it should, right? Jury is out on this direction imho.

Near future focus: Continuing to tweak scaling issues, monster power, and character spawning issues. Will hold off on console release to focus on PC fixes and tweaks. Admitted they tackled too many system changes so they want to polish them before going to the console. Really good idea. Shocking to hear. This team feels more on it and inclusive with the playerbase than the Alpha team was. I think this approach is a very good sign for the game, IF they followup. Continuing these streams in exactly this format would do wonders for the community.

A+ to Mr Foss for admitting faults and for his determination to want to get it right. And yes for actually being a player himself.

The Bad: Progression needs work. The age old PvE and PvP balance debate lingers!

Best question/comment asked but not answered: Old dungeons, make them worth running again !

Outlook : Very positive. This format was brilliant. They answers a lot of questions head on. More then they ever had. They dodged character building/progression questions. MOAR of these type of streams will bode extremely well for playerbase morale in the community.

Outlook for our guild Tyrs Paladium and our Neverwinter Fellowship alliance: Long term very good. We can handle the additional challenge because of our willingness and ability to team up! We are built for camaraderie, fun & teamwork from the ground up.

krumple01

From my perspective the stream was really lacking in any enthusiasm or anything to get excited over. It was pure damage control with very little damage control. Yeah I might be sounding harsh here but what were we really suppose to get out of the stream? A promise to do better fixing bugs or connecting with player feed back? Wait this should be standard and never needed to be mentioned. It should be standard practice. Players are your free feed back and if you ignore it, there are two consequences, a bug remains impacting additional players and it makes it seem as if the developers don't really care about bug fixes.

One major thing that stood out was when Thomas talked about the healing companion being lack luster for his Fighter while he was soloing. This proves that NONE of the devs actually play in any meaningful way. They NEVER play the game from the perspective of an average player. They are given Dev Packs that allow them to pull any items from the database that they want. They don't know the grind of some of the campaigns, they don't know how boring it is to repeat the same quest every day for 2 months. They don't know how imbalanced some of the dungeons are because all they did was change the classes and neglected to realize some of the dungeon designs were based off the old system which we can no longer utilize for success. Yet these same mechanics under the new system leave the party at a loss.

Scaling veteran characters down so they can play with fresh new level 70/80 characters? Really punishing the players who have put time into the game so we can play with characters who aren't ready for the content. They havent learned their roles, don't know the dungeons, and lack understanding of party mechanics.

croixx

I am speaking only from my own perspective as a gamer. Having played many mmos, it just feels like all the changes from mod 16 weren't made to enhance the game but to simplify it to free up resources for other projects. The content added was ok, but its the changes to the core of the game that really threw red flags right off the bat with dodgy answers from the developers.

I'm not a know it all, I make mistakes, and also make poor choices at times like everyone. And of course I don't know for sure what transpired from all their meetings, closed tests etc. However, we know the game was too easy at mod 15 and needed something. I myself never used lifesteal, but did like a lot of recovery on my superbuff DC (cleric now). Endgame content was way too easy. So...….with that said, it become clear to me that they would try to kill many birds with one big stone to address many issues with the game as it stood at mod 15 and issues within Cryptic. Unfortunately for me, the stone took out the gameplay I grew to enjoy. Its a different game now, and I tried to get into the new animations (encounter powers & dailies) on preview. The more I played on preview the more I just kinda got tired of the game. yes, I finished the campain and got some of the endgear, just a very empty and tasteless combat, idk. I can see why they wanted to rework the core of the combat system and make the changes they did, but what they implemented it with just turned me off from the game not because its hard but just lacking synergy. Yeah, the scaling kinda complements the bitter taste of it with more time demanding grind.

Sorry, Im long winded about NW but I do love the game and especially the community here. Great people to game with and hope they implement an idea to put it back on track in the right direction.

krumple01

Yeah many players want to love Neverwinter but they devs are not making it easy. So the complaints come out and many of those complaints are justified but the player gets labeled toxic and ignored.

aandrethegiant

The devs are definitely not making it easy, but they are willing to listen now and address. The dev teams of the real BIG FAIL games never did that. Diablo II, SWG, Those dev teams would not listen at the end. So Neverwinter has a fighting chance.

These devs are printing out these past stream comments and forum comments and bringing them to the attention of the dev team to see how many of the game's problems they can solve.

Holy cow the NW Alpha and Beta teams in 2012 & 2013 would have LOVED to hear that and even more see that executed.

It's a big risk.

PC GAMER: "What ultimately killed Star Wars Galaxies wasn't the servers finally closing due to Sony Online Entertainment's license for Star Wars ending, it was the controversial New Game Enhancements that stripped the game of its unique professions while also simplifying a host of other systems. John Smedley, president of SOE, would later outright apologize for the changes, regretting that the team "didn't listen to the fans when we should have." But it was already too late, players were fleeing the game in droves, and SOE tried fruitlessly for years to scrub the stains from their reputation."

DDO: Turbine did the exact same thing with DDO, but they SUCCEEDED. They needed to streamline the game so they could station themselves to put out content with a smaller staff. Same thing Neverwinter needs to do. Did Turbine listen to the playerbase? Of course not. But the the devs were right. But they COMMUNICATED. Yes of course they lost people. But they also gained new blood and had the budget to add major MODS which went over very well.

But understand... the DDO community has weekly podcasts and the community TALKS to one another. Heck most KNOW each other.

So THAT is my bar, personally speaking. Cryptic will go Turbine/SSGs way, or they will go SOEs way.

I already know which way it's going. They chose communication, thusfar. It was an excellent stream, but begging for followup.

Cryptic must continue to learn from the DDO devs and communicate, like they did in this Stream. But they must set up weekly opportunities to communicate to stand a chance. The forum alone here will not be enough. Reddit will not be enough.

ENGAGEMENT is the only solution, such as from a weekly podcast or interactivity of some sort.. THAT is what SSG got right, and SOE got wrong. One game is alive, and one game, with much more money behind it, is dead.

Cryptic must grow in this sector, for the game to grow.

oremonger

Forget it, I just tried again after the new "patch". Not only did they not fix most of the things they said they did in the stream, they actually broke more things in new and exciting ways! /s For crying out loud! They knew this patch was important! Everytime I turn around they poke me in the damn eye!