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Lockbox Opening Syndrome (LOS)
imivo
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 1,682 Bounty Hunter
Those are way too fun to be good for my budget. 
I settled for opening ONE every time I level up, provided I have one. This keeps the addiction in check! Hopefully by 60 I will have the mount, or I will have to think of a different plan. 
You guys good at resisting, or did you just give in and bought a ton of keys?
I settled for opening ONE every time I level up, provided I have one. This keeps the addiction in check! Hopefully by 60 I will have the mount, or I will have to think of a different plan. You guys good at resisting, or did you just give in and bought a ton of keys?
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60 Drow Trickster Rogue
11 Elf Control Wizard
Server: Beholder
Guild: Praetor Lupus
Guild Website: http://www.PraetorLupus.com
Hero of the North & Guardian of Neverwinter Founder.
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Besides the ten bars, mine have had idols that could be traded in for 40,000 AD each, purple runestones, a blue necklace, a coffer with green and blue runestones.
And if you get lucky you could even turn a profit.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
probably spending money on zen to purchase keys.
Its possible to convert AD to zen, which may be likely as well but a single key will cost you around 5k AD currently
Yeah, a key costs 125 zen, which can easily be 50,000-62,500 astral diamonds depending on the exchange rate.
The major problem with this the inflated amount of astral diamonds on the market right now, making them worth very little compared to zen. That combined with the apparently high drop rate of these boxes.
On the surface it makes it look very unrealistic for a free to play participant to be able to open these boxes with out paying money. If you are a think inside the box jobber, you're saying to yourself, "I have to do 5 dozen dailies, and spend 3 days refining rough diamonds, and then sell them on the zen market just to open one of these boxes.
What people don't realize is that the easiest way to make astral diamonds is from other players. Find something other players want to buy, and sell that on the auction house.
It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to find things that players are willing to pay AD for.
The simplest thing that I'm going to spoon feed to anyone who would read this, is farm for some rank 4+ runes. You can spend a few hours dedicated to farming trash mobs in pirate's skyhold, icespire peak, the chasm, or even some level 48+ dungeons, and I guarentee you end up with at least 3 or 4 level 4 runes.
Fun fact, (in BW4) it cost something like 32,000 astral diamonds to pull a level 4 enchant out of a blue quality piece of lvl 47+ gear. SO, if you sell your runes for 20K each on the AH, a market saavy person will see the value in this, and before you know it, you have enough AD for some keys.
My only issue is Mounts and pets aren't account wide, and my main will be the Ranger class when it is released...so even if I got a Nightmare wouldn't do me much good because I plan to use the player I'm leveling now mostly for crafting.
I think you can unbind the Nightmare and then mail it to another character. I saw chatter in the zone channel about there being a Nightmare in Dragon's AH for 2M. I didn't check, though that is how it works with the Zen-only mounts, too.
The more people farm, the more AD prices will get pushed down since there is a hard cap on how many enter the economy. You won't be able to make more than the daily max unless you are either a really smart farmer or spend more time farming than the average person who farms. That could easily mean 3, 4, maybe more hours per day. And the number of people looking to spend AD but not sell anything for AD will likely be very low.
I predict that only the best farmers at the very top and people who have spent significant money on Zen will have any ability to make even a moderate amount of AD. Remember that AD earnings can always be viewed as "how many players worth of AD did I get today?" and for every players worth you earn, that is one less player's worth available.
There is a lot of stuff that eats up AD regularly (unbinding items, taking runes out of sockets, etc.), not to mention items like the cat for nearly a million.
With the HoN mount you just go to the vendor across from Sgt Knox and you can get a new one for each new character. I like the ability to pay to unbind, don't like that it cost an arm and a leg in AD
I just think that extra AD is going to be a luxury that only a thin slice of players at the top are able to get.
It wouldn't seem so bad to me if it was the keys that drop, and the boxes were on the cash shop. Do they do it like GW2 at least, where every few levels you get a level up package and you get a key or two in it for the lock boxes?
Things like character slots cost a lot more in GW2 ($10 for 1), if that's what you are talking about.
Also, don't be surprised if they change the drop rate in the boxes the day after open beta launch, after everyone has seen the spam from people opening and winning, without telling anyone of course. There is absolutely no transparency in the process, they can change them whenever they want without saying a word.
I can only see things like this getting worse when people get to endgame and there is something in a lockbox you might need to gear up to actually progress through high end content. I hope they set the cash shop requirement (for realistic progress in endgame) at a reasonable level, though judging from other PW games, I am a bit worried.
Okay, I always have to take issue with people playing the "gambling" card like this. By loose definition, the entire game is "gambling." In theory, you could play the game for a month and never get a drop, other than the ones that are hard-coded, such as specific equipment programmed to drop for specific encounters. No copper, no equipment, no nothing. Yes, it's highly unlikely, but any game that involved a random number generator to determine anything is "gambling."
To be blunt, you'd have to be stupid addicted to gambling to spend any significant amount of money on these keys. And yes, I realize that there are people out there who are stupid addicted to gambling. But this isn't exactly a casino here, and there are several HUGE differences between the type of "gambling" in this game and the type of gambling that goes on in Las Vegas:
1) There is a stopping point in this game. Assuming that you're some sort of OCD collector that's also stupid addicted to gambling, at some point without spending too terribly much cash, you will have all of the items available, and there's no reason to continue pulling that lever and spending money. In Las Vegas, no matter how much money you lay down on the tables, there's always more to be won, leading to a situation where you'll never win.
2) The amount of money we're talking about here is paltry compared to what goes on in casinos. Short anecdote: Once I was playing blackjack in a casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. I like to do so for fun, and I usually limit myself to $100 or so, which typically lasts for a few hours at the $5 tables. (But you get free drinks and entertainment, so...) Anyway, this guy comes in and sits next to me and gets $1,000 worth of chips. He had a pretty bad run of luck, and in less than five minutes, he was out. He pulls out a wad of cash and gets another $1,000 in chips. His bad luck streak continued, and in another five minutes, he was out again. At that point, he got up and left. Now, I don't know anything about that guy. He could be a multibillionaire, and $2,000 to him is chump change.
Still, I couldn't help but think that if I lost $2,000 gambling in around 10 minutes, I'd need smelling salts and oxygen to help me recover. At any rate, my point is that no one is going to be losing $2,000 in 10 minutes by playing Neverwinter. This is penny ante HAMSTER compared to what most people consider real gambling, low-level enough that reasonable people simply consider it paying for entertainment.
3) RMT aside, you can't "cash out" and take your winnings and use them elsewhere. If you go to Vegas, the appeal of winning isn't so that you can stay in the casino and play more. The appeal is that if you strike it big, you can afford a new car or a house, something that has nothing to do with the casino. In Neverwinter, if you "strike it big," whatever that means, you can't even use the Zen in another Perfect World game. All it's good for is, well, playing more Neverwinter.
...Now, that having been said, if you don't like the concept of lockboxes, fair enough. Personally, I get tired of the "So-en-so acquired an Infernal Nightmare mount" messages that keep popping up on my screen. It negatively affects my gameplay experience, and I couldn't care less who got what. It's dumb, and they really need to stop it.
But please don't compare it to "gambling," as you're only making yourself look subject to hyperbole, and it seriously diminishes and desensitized people to folks who really do have stupid gambling addiction, people who lose hundreds, thousands, or even more.
However I hope they DO take some ideas from their shop options, because it would greatly reduce the lockbox chain that people hate.