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Currency, Game Dynamics and Character Traits
finality999
Member Posts: 18 Arc User
Hello Everyone,
I would like to let the designers and the software development teams know about several issues I have seen in game so far. I would also appreciate comments or perspectives on similar issues from the players to help level the playing field in the game and fix issues that have consistently popped up for them as well.
First, for hardware, I am using an MSI GS66 Stealth gaming laptop I bought new in February 2021. It has the Intel Core-i7 10870H @ 2.2GHz, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB Crucial 3800 Mb/s NVMe SSD, and an extra 500 GB Crucial 3800 Mb/s NVMe storage SSD as well as the Nvidia RTX3080 graphics module with a 300 Hz, 1080x 1920 screen. I am running Windows 10 Pro. I have a fiber optic DSL connection with my local internet provider and play through a wired ethernet connection. For accessories, I use the Razer Tartarus Pro and the Razer Naga Trinity, wired, with the 7 button side plate.
I have been playing an arcanist wizard build since I began playing Neverwinter this May 2021. I found that once I pressed and held down the mouse button assigned to fire off my 'ray of frost,' that it would errantly 'beam' away at a 90 degree or more angle while in combat every now and then, which almost consistently happened to me when firing at enemies that were mounted, like the Narzugon horse riders in Avernus. Whenever I dropped that enemy down enough for them to split for separate rider and mount targets, without killing the rider/mount target outright, then my ray of frost fired off the screen to the right most of the time at nothing. When I enter combat against any single foe or group of enemies, I hold down the mouse button for my 'ray of frost' and tap another side buttons assigned to the disintegrate or the arcane torrent spells on my Naga Trinity. I have all of the attack, belt, artifact and healing potion keys assigned to my mouse to keep one hand easily capable of activating any power as needed. I use the Tartarus on my left hand to use for movement, inventory, maps, quest requirements as needed. These devices have been removed and a normal mouse and the keyboard were used to try and see if the ray of frost firing error still happened and it did, so I am going to assume the issue is in the game's targeting code. I read in past forums that this particular issue for wizard characters was present in 2018, this is a long time for a consistent targeting/attacking animation to still be present in a regularly updated and patched game. While playing in the latest event, the Siege of Neverwinter, this happens quite often to my wizard when I am involved in the Catapult event, the ray of frost fires off the screen at nothing I even targeted?.... Please look into fixing this issue, thank you.
This game has perhaps the most diverse number of currencies I have ever come across and this only amplifies the problems in acquiring gear or goods for levelling, outfitting, upgrading characters. I understand that astral diamonds were added after the initial gold/silver/copper system was attacked by third party online 'black market' opportunists who sold gold to players. Such people prey upon unsuspecting players in almost every MMO platform as they seek to make a real world profit at the expense of others. These people either farmed items by employing players to do so, or they hacked players accounts, stole everything and sold it via a chain of player to player. I have seen such activity in the past on another popular MMO I still play today, but with astral diamonds introduced, this made a difference in how the auction houses worked and limited and crushed the issue of farming gold and selling in the real world. You also have oodles of campaign currencies that are only usable in the areas they were earned in. The genie token seems to have been placeholder solution to supplement 3 popular currencies, but there are still umpteen others that sit in a player's currency tab that will likely never get used.
I say that there is a real issue from my point of view on too many currencies because you can buy for example, a mark of potency, whatever rank, from the wonderous bazaar for AD (minus any VIP discounts), or for trade bars from the trade bar merchant, or from tokens earned from various vendors who offer them as rewards for completing questlines or heroic events/dungeons in various campaigns. Too many ways, and the worst is from certain players who farm short supply/high demand items 'that are not able to be put in the auction house,' like the hunt lures from Avernus for example, and they in-turn put these marks they traded for into the auction house to earn AD profits for their characters.
I have had feedback from customer support that this type of behavior is a known problem, but it still persists. I offered a solution on re-coding how the elite Avernus targets could be phased to be targeted only by those player's characters who spawned them but that never panned out. Now with the 'unbind' token, here is a solution, make the hunt lures, every single one, all account bound. Then make the unbinding cost ridiculous, like 200 tokens so this stops the illicit farming and grants players who want to earn the lure to get to the next step not have to compete with another player who is only out to make a profit for themselves.
Player's characters seem to have extreme limitations placed on them even at maximum level. This may be a tactic that forces players to cooperate with one another to form teams to achieve goals, but there comes a time that most players do not want to go backwards to help another player just because that one individual wants a piece of gear for transmog purposes only. It is not worth their time to help that individual. Thus the point of this part of my revelation: why are dungeons/raids scaled to make the content harder when these dungeons/raids are from past modules or from the vanilla Neverwinter? A good example here is anyone who is an AD&D Forgotten Realms player/dungeon master, should know that Elminster is about a 41st level or more, mage. Put aside he held 40% of Mystra's greater god powers for a long time, and think on this, if he went into the Underdark, to rescue Drizzt from matron Banrae or to put Halaster in his place in Undermountain, he is not going to leave his spell books behind, or his magic rings, cloak, staff, etcetera, he is going to be completely geared to wipe out his foes and not even break a sweat. So why are the game designers tying our hands behind our backs and taking away our hard earned items so to speak by making older dungeon/raid content harder when we go it alone? I do not want to do Temple of the Spider Queen (Epic level) with a group, at item level 54k or so I should be able to one-shot all the trash and only spend maybe 20 seconds actually killing the 3 bosses. That dungeon should be done in less than 2 minutes by a single max level, high iLv character, where most of my time is spent walking from place to place. But no, that is not what happens, the trash and bosses are boosted up to an item level equal to and greater than my own and if I try that dungeon solo, which I have, I take about an hour to clear it all, die several time in trying and wonder what happened? It is old content, created when the game held a maximum character level of 80, that dungeon was for level 55 toons, so that being said, at level 20 now the maximum, it would be 13.75, so why is it still so difficult? Please fix this, it is only right and makes sense.
I read in my reviews of Neverwinter Online, that there are perhaps 10 million active account worldwide. That is a fair number of players who enjoy the AD&D world, many congratz and thanks to all of you who support this game, I am and have been involved in the AD&D universe since 1982. Having read several hundred dedicated AD&D novels, including playing the initial forerunners for the PC: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Pools of Radiance computer games, Cryptic has done a fabulous job on graphics, and very reasonable content as extracted from the AD&D world. I get it there are tons of currencies in our own world from all of the countries we have on our planet, but please make things simpler or provide a currency exchange to trade older unused currencies in game. It seems that Astral Diamonds are the top contender for usable currency in game, but even though a limit was put in place on how astral diamonds could be converted from rough to usable, 100k a day, you still have players asking for 10's of millions for items they auction. Really, like who actually has 100 million AD sitting in their shared bank vault to spend like that? Why not do what most of the countries in the real world do, have government regulated/monitored lotteries. In Neverwinter, create one that for say 100 astral diamonds per ticket, a player could buy for their account a lottery ticket, the 'lottery system' tracks what is put into it and once a week or twice, a draw is held and in the mail, lo and behold, some lucky player received a notice to go visit Lord Neverwinter in the Protector's Enclave to receive a 10,000,000 astral diamond lottery payout and get a picture by Elminster with the court royality and they are on the wall for a few days until the next winner! Woohoo! Whatever, this is in sync with the extremely low chance that is offered when any player tries to open an enchanted lockbox to try and get the top item, but that being said, the odds should be better at winning astral diamonds because it is one event at a time that millions will try to get, the program assigns a ticket with a random hidden number (one player or more can get the same random hidden number), well, one or more wins the jackpot, more fun, and you should limit how many tickets can be bought this way so that filthy rich AD hoarder players don't go and buy 1,000,000 tickets because they can. The rub here also works in our favor, as if there is no winner(s) for that draw, the jackpot only builds for the next one and that jackpot is even bigger. There may be some ethical concerns about gambling like this, but realistically, the players who buy Zen with real world cash, then use it to buy enchanted keys (like me, ahem, ahem...) have already taken a gamble on trying to get a nice item/jackpot/virtual prize, which I will say usually disappoints most of the time.
At the end of the day, these are just my opinions on all of the things I have seen in game, seen in the comments in the zone/trade chat and the issues I personally have experienced in playing Neverwinter for the last 177 days, but I hope that things will get fixed and the game-play will get better over the next 177 days, regardless though, this is the best AD&D themed game I have ever played, keep up the good work and keep on blasting dragons to smithereens!!!
Finality
I would like to let the designers and the software development teams know about several issues I have seen in game so far. I would also appreciate comments or perspectives on similar issues from the players to help level the playing field in the game and fix issues that have consistently popped up for them as well.
First, for hardware, I am using an MSI GS66 Stealth gaming laptop I bought new in February 2021. It has the Intel Core-i7 10870H @ 2.2GHz, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB Crucial 3800 Mb/s NVMe SSD, and an extra 500 GB Crucial 3800 Mb/s NVMe storage SSD as well as the Nvidia RTX3080 graphics module with a 300 Hz, 1080x 1920 screen. I am running Windows 10 Pro. I have a fiber optic DSL connection with my local internet provider and play through a wired ethernet connection. For accessories, I use the Razer Tartarus Pro and the Razer Naga Trinity, wired, with the 7 button side plate.
I have been playing an arcanist wizard build since I began playing Neverwinter this May 2021. I found that once I pressed and held down the mouse button assigned to fire off my 'ray of frost,' that it would errantly 'beam' away at a 90 degree or more angle while in combat every now and then, which almost consistently happened to me when firing at enemies that were mounted, like the Narzugon horse riders in Avernus. Whenever I dropped that enemy down enough for them to split for separate rider and mount targets, without killing the rider/mount target outright, then my ray of frost fired off the screen to the right most of the time at nothing. When I enter combat against any single foe or group of enemies, I hold down the mouse button for my 'ray of frost' and tap another side buttons assigned to the disintegrate or the arcane torrent spells on my Naga Trinity. I have all of the attack, belt, artifact and healing potion keys assigned to my mouse to keep one hand easily capable of activating any power as needed. I use the Tartarus on my left hand to use for movement, inventory, maps, quest requirements as needed. These devices have been removed and a normal mouse and the keyboard were used to try and see if the ray of frost firing error still happened and it did, so I am going to assume the issue is in the game's targeting code. I read in past forums that this particular issue for wizard characters was present in 2018, this is a long time for a consistent targeting/attacking animation to still be present in a regularly updated and patched game. While playing in the latest event, the Siege of Neverwinter, this happens quite often to my wizard when I am involved in the Catapult event, the ray of frost fires off the screen at nothing I even targeted?.... Please look into fixing this issue, thank you.
This game has perhaps the most diverse number of currencies I have ever come across and this only amplifies the problems in acquiring gear or goods for levelling, outfitting, upgrading characters. I understand that astral diamonds were added after the initial gold/silver/copper system was attacked by third party online 'black market' opportunists who sold gold to players. Such people prey upon unsuspecting players in almost every MMO platform as they seek to make a real world profit at the expense of others. These people either farmed items by employing players to do so, or they hacked players accounts, stole everything and sold it via a chain of player to player. I have seen such activity in the past on another popular MMO I still play today, but with astral diamonds introduced, this made a difference in how the auction houses worked and limited and crushed the issue of farming gold and selling in the real world. You also have oodles of campaign currencies that are only usable in the areas they were earned in. The genie token seems to have been placeholder solution to supplement 3 popular currencies, but there are still umpteen others that sit in a player's currency tab that will likely never get used.
I say that there is a real issue from my point of view on too many currencies because you can buy for example, a mark of potency, whatever rank, from the wonderous bazaar for AD (minus any VIP discounts), or for trade bars from the trade bar merchant, or from tokens earned from various vendors who offer them as rewards for completing questlines or heroic events/dungeons in various campaigns. Too many ways, and the worst is from certain players who farm short supply/high demand items 'that are not able to be put in the auction house,' like the hunt lures from Avernus for example, and they in-turn put these marks they traded for into the auction house to earn AD profits for their characters.
I have had feedback from customer support that this type of behavior is a known problem, but it still persists. I offered a solution on re-coding how the elite Avernus targets could be phased to be targeted only by those player's characters who spawned them but that never panned out. Now with the 'unbind' token, here is a solution, make the hunt lures, every single one, all account bound. Then make the unbinding cost ridiculous, like 200 tokens so this stops the illicit farming and grants players who want to earn the lure to get to the next step not have to compete with another player who is only out to make a profit for themselves.
Player's characters seem to have extreme limitations placed on them even at maximum level. This may be a tactic that forces players to cooperate with one another to form teams to achieve goals, but there comes a time that most players do not want to go backwards to help another player just because that one individual wants a piece of gear for transmog purposes only. It is not worth their time to help that individual. Thus the point of this part of my revelation: why are dungeons/raids scaled to make the content harder when these dungeons/raids are from past modules or from the vanilla Neverwinter? A good example here is anyone who is an AD&D Forgotten Realms player/dungeon master, should know that Elminster is about a 41st level or more, mage. Put aside he held 40% of Mystra's greater god powers for a long time, and think on this, if he went into the Underdark, to rescue Drizzt from matron Banrae or to put Halaster in his place in Undermountain, he is not going to leave his spell books behind, or his magic rings, cloak, staff, etcetera, he is going to be completely geared to wipe out his foes and not even break a sweat. So why are the game designers tying our hands behind our backs and taking away our hard earned items so to speak by making older dungeon/raid content harder when we go it alone? I do not want to do Temple of the Spider Queen (Epic level) with a group, at item level 54k or so I should be able to one-shot all the trash and only spend maybe 20 seconds actually killing the 3 bosses. That dungeon should be done in less than 2 minutes by a single max level, high iLv character, where most of my time is spent walking from place to place. But no, that is not what happens, the trash and bosses are boosted up to an item level equal to and greater than my own and if I try that dungeon solo, which I have, I take about an hour to clear it all, die several time in trying and wonder what happened? It is old content, created when the game held a maximum character level of 80, that dungeon was for level 55 toons, so that being said, at level 20 now the maximum, it would be 13.75, so why is it still so difficult? Please fix this, it is only right and makes sense.
I read in my reviews of Neverwinter Online, that there are perhaps 10 million active account worldwide. That is a fair number of players who enjoy the AD&D world, many congratz and thanks to all of you who support this game, I am and have been involved in the AD&D universe since 1982. Having read several hundred dedicated AD&D novels, including playing the initial forerunners for the PC: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Pools of Radiance computer games, Cryptic has done a fabulous job on graphics, and very reasonable content as extracted from the AD&D world. I get it there are tons of currencies in our own world from all of the countries we have on our planet, but please make things simpler or provide a currency exchange to trade older unused currencies in game. It seems that Astral Diamonds are the top contender for usable currency in game, but even though a limit was put in place on how astral diamonds could be converted from rough to usable, 100k a day, you still have players asking for 10's of millions for items they auction. Really, like who actually has 100 million AD sitting in their shared bank vault to spend like that? Why not do what most of the countries in the real world do, have government regulated/monitored lotteries. In Neverwinter, create one that for say 100 astral diamonds per ticket, a player could buy for their account a lottery ticket, the 'lottery system' tracks what is put into it and once a week or twice, a draw is held and in the mail, lo and behold, some lucky player received a notice to go visit Lord Neverwinter in the Protector's Enclave to receive a 10,000,000 astral diamond lottery payout and get a picture by Elminster with the court royality and they are on the wall for a few days until the next winner! Woohoo! Whatever, this is in sync with the extremely low chance that is offered when any player tries to open an enchanted lockbox to try and get the top item, but that being said, the odds should be better at winning astral diamonds because it is one event at a time that millions will try to get, the program assigns a ticket with a random hidden number (one player or more can get the same random hidden number), well, one or more wins the jackpot, more fun, and you should limit how many tickets can be bought this way so that filthy rich AD hoarder players don't go and buy 1,000,000 tickets because they can. The rub here also works in our favor, as if there is no winner(s) for that draw, the jackpot only builds for the next one and that jackpot is even bigger. There may be some ethical concerns about gambling like this, but realistically, the players who buy Zen with real world cash, then use it to buy enchanted keys (like me, ahem, ahem...) have already taken a gamble on trying to get a nice item/jackpot/virtual prize, which I will say usually disappoints most of the time.
At the end of the day, these are just my opinions on all of the things I have seen in game, seen in the comments in the zone/trade chat and the issues I personally have experienced in playing Neverwinter for the last 177 days, but I hope that things will get fixed and the game-play will get better over the next 177 days, regardless though, this is the best AD&D themed game I have ever played, keep up the good work and keep on blasting dragons to smithereens!!!
Finality
1
Comments
Now, a low level ToS takes as long as a high level dungeon, except with the added flaw of permitting players who haven't even advanced enough to unlock their paragon path option or all of their powers. Adding the fact that the daily AD reward is so low as to be not worth it, these dungeons are now skipped by most players over 40k (those that can access RQ Trials) which is a shame since they've moved the majority of their dungeon content from the Advanced queue into the low queue.
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
I have had feedback from customer support that this type of behavior is a known problem, but it still persists. I offered a solution on re-coding how the elite Avernus targets could be phased to be targeted only by those player's characters who spawned them but that never panned out. Now with the 'unbind' token, here is a solution, make the hunt lures, every single one, all account bound. Then make the unbinding cost ridiculous, like 200 tokens so this stops the illicit farming and grants players who want to earn the lure to get to the next step not have to compete with another player who is only out to make a profit for themselves."
The hunting system is and was a success (with the exception of the problem that occurred in Barovia)!
About this it is necessary to understand that many players love and spend a lot of time dedicating themselves to the game. They are dedicated to becoming strong in many characters or to keep them at an acceptable level and for that they need resources that have limited gain by the game (refining from RAD to AD) and the best way in the complexity of the game is through of fighter jets. Since I started at Neverwinter there have always been the BIS items and the renegades, newer items like the old Demon Lords set replaced the Lostmouth set and this made everyone quickly forget about content, because the same is currently the case with the new Demogorgon set , he is BIS and everything before him is garbage (save excesses). That's why players play Demo, to profit and improve their characters.
When I was practically a beginner, the hunting system was implemented in Chult, and that changed my game. I was dedicated (I played more than a normal player, which must be the time of the invocations) and won in 1 module a ticket to Vanguarda. If this is removed, how will f2p players evolve? Farming Dungeons that 99% do not drop anything interesting or have loots with very rare chances of dropping something salable even if you are a VIP and have 8 MORE CHANCES than an f2p? If you think that removing a means of an evolve f2p will help the game, you're wrong! f2p buy the items that are not suitable for the vips that no longer interest you. But the system is fair, as they have more time and can devote themselves to selling items that the casual player or VIP or other f2p wants to buy. All of this makes the economy spin gears.
Finally, look at how the gear works perfectly: A novice player wants the best armor, he will buy Zen to exchange this for AD so he can buy MoP which is probably from a VIP that will end up being sold in the AH where it will go for the second time having ad removed from the game and it will end up in the account of a f2p player who will use that AD buying other things like Mounts, Companions or Tokens from these VIP's and once again removing AD from the game. As you are "newbie" maybe you still haven't understood, in NW the new is always BIS, now with the scale some items are usable or remain BIS like Ribcage, but mostly the new is always BIS.
And trading can take several forms.
Bartering items (whatever they are) you have farmed is one of those trading forms and, honestly, one I like because it's "hand to hand" "direct player to player" : you have to make contact with one another, meet and initiate the trade, maybe talk a bit or negociate the deal.
That's very different from the dehumanized auction house, where you probably never read the name of the character you have bought from or sold to.
In other words, from a AD&D table player since 1991 to someone involved in AD&D since 1982, bartering is very much a situation you can roleplay in (even though most of Neverwinter players aren't a lot to be into true roleplaying, sometimes you get one who answers it, lightly or deeply).
Lures (be it the ones from Chult when Soshenstar and Omu were the latest content, or Avernus ones nowdays) are quite the most dynamic part of this bartering economy, and stay there as long as the items you can loot from the hunts are relevant in builds/endgame.
Are some players making profit on that ? Sure.
Is that "illicit" : absolutely not. As long as an item is unbound, and as long as the trade interface between two players exist, then it is licit to barter lure(s) for something else. And even if I personnally never have bought nor sell any lure this way, i wouldn't like it to be prevented.
Is it really a problem that you can't sell lures on AH but can trade them hand to hand ?
In my opinion, no.
Lure farmers provide a sort of "service" for players who can't or don't want to afford the farming time but can afford the price, and it brings a bit of life in the local chan : during mod12-13, Port Nyanzaru really felt like a trading city with all the people shouting their WTT, WTB, WTS lures.
Is the issue about AD sellers vs $$ parallel economy ? I mean, I don't feel like there is much AD sellers left... and they can find other means, in fact there are more efficient ones than lures.
Is the issue about for what they are trading for ? It doesn't matter if they trade for marks of potency, preservation wards, black perls or whatever, as long as trade and AH will operate, there will be something.
Is the issue about competition on the instances to get the T0 prey ?
Well, then, it's a MMORPG, i mean, communication and banding together with some other players is kind of possible.
Farming lures together is vastly more efficient if you know how to do it (ie : do not group in party but group in queue, clean the foes that trigger the spawn of a T0 prey, use the queue group to make call where a T0 has spawn, wait for each one in the queue to get one hit on the T0 before killing, everyone has then a chance to loot the trophy, which can ends up with 5 players each getting 1 chain on the same one Mane), and you can very much deter/deny leechers from your farming area.
With my guild/ally, we either lock the instance for us [filling one instance with members until noone else but friends, guildies and allymates can pop in], or if we aren't enough, we just have some strategies to deter the bad leechers from staying more than their "checking turn".
As a lone player, you have 5 solutions to get your lures count up :
- barter
- make or get an ad hoc group of players to hunt together with
- be a "good" leecher (tag the prey and wait a bit to see if someone else is coming for it, don't oneshot the prey, and when seeing a group of players already hunting in the area wait for them on every prey [if the group of players is from my guild, you are then tolerated, and are likely to get an invite to the queue group so you can see the spots called by the group and can call the spots for the others, and at the end profit from our collective farming without leeching anymore])
- be a "bad" leecher (don't wait anybody even after seeing others roaming/cleaning the area, oneshot the preys even if someone else is also going for it, kind of "steal" the work of others. If my guild is around hunting, you are very likely to see someone parks his car on your, or get stalked by someone while the "cleaners" stop the spawning process and just camp until you leave)
- work alone, clean the foes yourself to make the corresponding T0 spawn, then find this T0 to kill it hoping nobody has poped in and stolen your prey (which will still happen even without players trading their lures for x MOP).
BtA lures are not a nice idea in my opinion, mostly because I conceptualize hunting as a collective activity : in my guild, we usually farm together and/or mutualise the trophies and lures. If I have 20 chains, and another guildy have 20 forks of the spinagon, then i expect us to be able to provide 20x T1 lures for our guild. If i have 1 T2 trophy, and another guildie has the 2 others, I want us to be able to get a T3 for our guild so the next guildy on the list can have a chance to get his ribcage. Isn't kind of the goal on a MMORPG ? playing together ?
I currently have that amount. I had peaked at 180M AD (though not all in my shared bank as it's limited to 100M there).
But my economic strategy revolves around "never buy anything on the AH (unless it is a BiS account wide thing i'm not able to pull out from lockboxes with my keys before the next new lockbox)", so I don't think i fall in the category of people you seem to think are not existing. Supply and demand. The very basic economic system. Which is kind of tied with capitalism, and end with a certain idea of concentration of wealth, aka, for Neverwinter, hoarding AD like a dragon and playing longterm economic strategies.
Those who are in needs of plenty of things (usually new and/or casual and/or impatient players) buying things to those who don't need much (usually old and/or hardcore and/or patient players). And so the smart and the rich are getting richer.
100k AD is the limit you can make by refining, but it's not the limit you can earn for yourself by "running" some businesses.
The 100kAD/account was implemented at mod14 launch. Before that, it was 36kAD/character, a huge advantage for older players able to pull out an army of alts, and a much greater gap than we have today between old "rich" and new "poor", even though Zax cap was 500:1 (cheaper preservation and coalescent wards) and not as backlogged as nowdays (so a better ability to build your account quickly), the cost in the wonderous bazar for marks was the same as today, your usual 99xblack perls could be over 10k AD on the AH, and best mounts often floating above 30M AD. I don't mind if a lotery comes to life on Neverwinter, though I do think there are really, really, really, really, really (i roll 5 on my D6) enough RNG system in the game already and would ask about the necessity of any other "randomized prize" one...
And anyway : any lottery system in any country is tied to the same rule as a casino : the house has to always win. Which would translate, in Neverwinter, to any amount of AD that would be won by the great lotery winner can never exceed the total amount of AD invested by all the players on lotery tickets (and should probably be only 90%, to keep sinking some AD from the game). Which at the end, won't end any problem you have about the prices on the AH.
Personnally, I would prefer server wide-contests for that (for exemple : best score in the sledge race at the end of the 3weeks of the Winter Fest will get 10M AD, 2nd 5M, 3rd 2M).