There is. It's called buying Zen and purchasing Astral Diamonds and buying things on the Auction House.
There is a reason why they don't want a FLOOD of item drops. Too many hit the AH, the prices get driven down. Fewer ADs needed. Fewer ADs needed, less need for Zen.
It's ALL about Zen sales. Why? Because that is this game's ONLY revenue stream.
Also, if one could fast-grind XP then it won't be long until you hit max level... And unless Cryptic is really doing something different with NW than they have with CO and STO before it, once you get to endgame, you will be inundated with repetitive HAMSTER with it taking months for new stuff to come out, and when it does it will just be more of the same.
So in a way, the foundry nerf probably did you a favor, if you look at it from a certain point of view...
I mean really. Once you hit max level and get max gear, what's left in terms of progression. Nothing you can play in the game will give you anything you need. So even the core game would be as poinless as some of you guys feel the Foundry has been made...
Perhaps you are misunderstanding what I was saying. I am talking about GOLD not AD or Zen. Someone earlier in the thread mentioned it was becoming "difficult to "grind gold" in the game. As of now gold doesn't really buy any decent gear or anything AD/zen related. I was talking more about the items you can buy with gold.
I don't give a crud about the AH and refuse to use or buy zen to buy AD for simple quest related items like hp pots, injury kits etc. I use AD/zen to buy bank space, bags, mounts and things of that nature.
As for gear I will not buy it from the AH I will earn it in game by doing quest etc like I have always done. I will not encourage the the greedy peeps that roll need on items not for the class they are currently playing on.
As for endgame welp like I have been saying we need some real raids, this 5 man delve stuff wont keep people for a long time before they get bored but then maybe that is what they want.
fargardMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 20Arc User
edited May 2013
Let loot as it is now, give back old XP.
Result: Economy stays alive, and people can level alts in foundry if they like. After you leveled your first character you may not want to go through the story again, so monotonous "kill 20 Ogres" foundry quests were nice. So, you nerfed loot: Fine. But bring XP up again please.
Let loot as it is now, give back old XP.
Result: Economy stays alive, and people can level alts in foundry if they like. After you leveled your first character you may not want to go through the story again, so monotonous "kill 20 Ogres" foundry quests were nice. So, you nerfed loot: Fine. But bring XP up again please.
Really was not about the economy. The economy is based more around Zen and AD then gold and dropped loot.
What the problem is, you can churn out 50 of these 5 minute hack job grinding quests, where as the better quests takes upwards of 50-100 hours to put out. What happens is you get nothing short of SPAM in the Foundry listing. Just like your spam folder in your email, players not wanting to grind have to search through 50 or more spam emails (that seem to pop up every day in foundry listing) to find those few quality quests that people ACTUALLY WORKED HARD TO MAKE.
And to people calling me selfish. YOUR **** RIGHT I AM SELFISH. I WANT ONE FRICKING GAME out of all the millions of MMO's out to be different, and I am selfish? No, YOUR all selfish for wanting every MMO you waltz into to play exactly like the one you just left and to hell with the players who want something different. That is all I am getting from everyone wanting the option to grind in NWO, knowing full well it will ruin the Foundry for what it is capable of doing.
I have been during the Alpha tests, and I have yet to max a character out. I have a level 25, that is it. I plan on staying around for a while, and it is because of the Foundry. Everyone wanting to just grind to max level have no intention of staying for the long run. They will treat it like every other MMO. They max out a few characters (in NWO case it took a week to get 3-4 lvl 60's), play the end-game, realize the devs are not putting out new content fast enough for them and jump ship.
That content your looking for the devs to release all the time. THAT is the Foundry...oh wait, you did not mean content, you just meant more levels to grind through...sorry.
Would like to point out not all of us DnP PnP fans are utter self obsessed {BEEP}holes some of us are actually nice . Honest :<
They same way I wont tar all power levelers with the same brush dont tar us with the same one you use on a certain muppet :I
Though I prefare story missions sometimes a well made purely action mission text or no text can be most fun
I see no one has responded to the part in red, probably because it makes sense and that is a forum no no. The flame war about this is getting ridiculous. People just want different types of content, but it seems like forcing things into a box is what the loud minority want. I was excited about making Foundry quests, but when I learned about some of the limitations and now the xp and loot nerfs, what about companion xp, that's really horrible at 60, 60+ mobs in dungeons don't throw out enough xp to make their xp bar jump much.
I wish the yellow part was more the norm, letting people play the way they want instead of trying to force the community to adhere to a single play style.
I don't care too much about farm grinding mobs, but I don't really care if people want to blast their way to 60, it doesn't affect me at all. The net resulting injury to my character = 0, to my story = 0. I don't know what's unbalancing about grinding up to 60, I couldn't care less, and I know a decent number of people who feel the same way.
As for those people going on about story...To be honest, I and almost all of my guildies so far, skipped almost all of the story in this game. I let the NPC's talk, but I turned them down, some of my guild mates just turned them off. I just wanted to run some dungeons with my friends who started playing a few days earlier than me, and that has been echoed by others outside my guild. As a PnP Rp'er with years of RP under my belt, I don't understand this attitude of boxing people into playing one way.
I DM'd and GM'd and ST'd and all the other types of Mastering for hundreds of episodes in multiple PnP games and for multiple groups of different friends. One thing I can say from that experience is that no two people enjoy a game the same way. Some want more story, some less, some just want shiny **** to put on their character, some want a title, some just want you to narrate what their character did as bad-*** and let them put points in their stats. It takes all kinds.
Some games I care about the story, and I found some of the Foundry quests to be cool, some were wordy, but neat. I tipped them and starred them appropriately for their efforts, but sometimes blowing stuff up can be fun too. If I can gain 9000 xp in 10 minutes with the main story arc, I think that sort of xp should be in the Foundry also, and right now it's not.
Voice of reason.. wish there was a crowd with a voice as lovely as yours
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baburmisMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
The Foundry was designed with the intention of supporting supporting various play styles but that can only go so far. It is not a cheat button to get massive amount of experience or drops in a short amount of time.
If you want to make a dungeon such as Cryptic Dungeons and get good rewards for the time the first thing you will have to do is trying to slow down the zerging in whichever way possible. The amount of time it takes to complete content plays a major role in whether the content deserves a quality reward or not.
Rushing through Foundry content as fast as possible is what kills the reward drops from the content.
but... arent cryptic made dungeons basically just a bunch of farm mobs thrown together? Theres really no tactics involved, and they already give much better loot than foundry missions (pre patch, foundry chest rewards are a joke now).
Only reason it takes long to complete some of said dongeons is because theres literally thousands of mobs and adds, but basically they are no better than ogre (ones that can fight back, mind you) farm maps, imo.
If you could spawn a 4m hp ogre, and make him spawn 300 adds per 60 seconds, you could as well make a 'cryptic-quality' foundry dungeon bosses :=)
They put a combat xp limit on foundry content, but they have no problems with you killing 500 mobs in 5 mins in open, or killing over 9.000 adds per boss.
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kamaliiciousMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 0Arc User
I encourage you to read my post on the previous page, where I pointed out how by your own logic, letting people grind will actually give you the game you want: a game full only of people who care about story because the grinders will leave.
I encourage you to read my post on the previous page, where I pointed out how by your own logic, letting people grind will actually give you the game you want: a game full only of people who care about story because the grinders will leave.
To be replaced with new ones?
But in any case it's a battle of attrition then, who is going to leave first? The great authors and players wanting something different but are fed up with a Foundry that is rampant with nothing but grind quests?
or the grinders fed up with "no content" because they have chewed through it in a week and did everything at max level...on several characters.
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lanessar13Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 8Arc User
Ok so I did a foundry tonight, Crypts of Carnage (NW-DQQDOB9CO) had never played it before, took about 20 min. I got about 15 xp bubbles, 4 green items, 3 enchantments, 7 white items, 3 ident scrolls and 4 potions. Seems fine to me.
That's not fine. And I'm going to call BS on the "bubbles". Why? Because I tested that same quest last night.
I ran 2 hours of foundry content last night and earned a total of 3,924 XP, both combat-medium (heavier toward the end).
Running three standard quests in 45 minutes garnered me 7,947 on a same level character, for lower level quests (-4 to my level).
This is at level 15-ish.
I have thread where I am running up an alt on Foundry quests only. A character on Foundry only content will take literally twice the amount of time.
Unacceptable.
Additionally, item drops are literally 4x in standard content. Two blues, 23 greens, 14 scrolls, 32 potions in official content.
Foundry? 5 greens, 23 whites (including every foundry chest award) and 8 potions, 5 scrolls.
Devs have stated they want to give the same rewards for Foundry as standard content - it can't be otherwise, or you lose people doing Foundry content. They need to examine this or they have severely violated thier mission statement.
That's not fine. And I'm going to call BS on the "bubbles". Why? Because I tested that same quest last night.
I played this as well and can confirm your finding. The exp is very poor in the foundry and if left unchanged it will be nothing more than a distraction like in STO.
It IS being fixed. Today! Does nobody around here actually read patch notes?
The reason you guys are seeing different amounts of xp earned on the same quest is because you're doing the quest at different speeds. The fastest gets the least XP, and vice-versa. Today's patch will adjust this.
Now read the patch notes!
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lanessar13Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 8Arc User
It IS being fixed. Today! Does nobody around here actually read patch notes?
The reason you guys are seeing different amounts of xp earned on the same quest is because you're doing the quest at different speeds. The fastest gets the least XP, and vice-versa. Today's patch will adjust this.
Now read the patch notes!
Hi Tilt, I did read the patch notes.
The quests I played last night shouldn't have been anywhere near the cap. They were combat-medium. I did read the patch notes, and post-tweak will test this again. What you state was not the behavior as of last night (in actual practice as opposed to theory).
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kamaliiciousMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 0Arc User
But in any case it's a battle of attrition then, who is going to leave first? The great authors and players wanting something different but are fed up with a Foundry that is rampant with nothing but grind quests?
or the grinders fed up with "no content" because they have chewed through it in a week and did everything at max level...on several characters.
Conclusion: If you want to make story content, play a game where the players value the content you want to make.
i literally just posted this exact statement in the ideas section it makes me not want to do foundry's anymore i agree something needed to be done but this wasnt it
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sw33tch33ksMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 7Arc User
That's not fine. And I'm going to call BS on the "bubbles". Why? Because I tested that same quest last night.
I ran 2 hours of foundry content last night and earned a total of 3,924 XP, both combat-medium (heavier toward the end).
Running three standard quests in 45 minutes garnered me 7,947 on a same level character, for lower level quests (-4 to my level).
This is at level 15-ish.
I have thread where I am running up an alt on Foundry quests only. A character on Foundry only content will take literally twice the amount of time.
Unacceptable.
Additionally, item drops are literally 4x in standard content. Two blues, 23 greens, 14 scrolls, 32 potions in official content.
Foundry? 5 greens, 23 whites (including every foundry chest award) and 8 potions, 5 scrolls.
Devs have stated they want to give the same rewards for Foundry as standard content - it can't be otherwise, or you lose people doing Foundry content. They need to examine this or they have severely violated thier mission statement.
Well, I don't know what to tell you. I was simply conveying my experience and item gain during that mission. Perhaps there's more to the XP algorithm that is unknown. There's no need to say that I'm lying about it. I leveled and had 10 bubbles(half a bar) when I left that foundry quest.
My foundry quest still will get you about a level a go, and still drops green items pretty frequent. dont know what people are talking about this nerf. Maybe try something other then easy encounters??
sigh.... I cannot believe people are being so silly about the ex/item nerf. I for one play foundry quests for the awesome stories, and I know many others do as well. I for one wish there were a way to turn off xp gain all together. I want to experience the Neverwinter Online main game content at the right level.
If people do not play your quest due to not being able to grind xp or items then they were not really interested in your quest. YOu might just have to try to cater more toward people who care for story over xp grind
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spiderbrigadeMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 14Arc User
edited May 2013
The problem is there are just so many variables that could potentially affect the XP you get. I have to assume that everyone is accurately reporting their results because really, why wouldn't they?
So for instance, this morning I quickly tried out A Visit From the Underdark and went from roughly level 19.6 to 20.3. Most of the XP came from the completion, and item drops were noticeably lower than official content but not horrible especially as I used up 0 resources.
Now, this might be an unusual case for a lot of reasons. Does the XP and difficulty scale weirdly so a L60 doing the same map would spend more resources and get less XP? Do I suck at the game and most people would do it a lot faster, thereby getting less XP? Would a similar map just with slightly different encounter types earn drastically less or more XP?
All I can say is that in my personal experience so far (and yes I'm new) running Foundries is not a waste of time - it's possible the official quests are "more efficient" but my metric is if I sit down and play for an hour or two I want to see some progress, and so far for me the Foundry quests accomplish that.
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kamaliiciousMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 0Arc User
Well, I don't know what to tell you. I was simply conveying my experience and item gain during that mission. Perhaps there's more to the XP algorithm that is unknown. There's no need to say that I'm lying about it. I leveled and had 10 bubbles(half a bar) when I left that foundry quest.
You're correct, I'm a little touchy on this, since people are tossing anecdotal evidence around when I'm actually listing the numbers of XP gain on doing that quest and several others, as well as what level character, with an item count (not "I got some potions").
I didn't go through all 33 pages of this, so I may be restating the same HAMSTER, so I apologize. My two cents on this issue is a double edged sword. On one hand I know people like to use the Foundry to tell a good story, and I've played a few myself that I really had fun with, and more power to the people who really get into it and make it work. The flip side of course is that people will "abuse" the system and make a map with 50 Ogres on it to kill and get gold/loot/exp fast and easy. The way I see it is that the nerf was a bit overkill. They could leave the gold the same as it doesn't matter, you don't buy anything worth a dime with the gold. The drop rate could have been cut back, but most people, from hardcore grinders to those just wanting to level fast, were only really concerned with things like potions, portable shrines and identification scrolls. The actual gear is only useful for a few levels up until 60 anyway, so it's not much of any use outside of just selling to the vendors anyway.
The experience though, should have been left alone. If somebody wants to farm and power level, it does not effect anybody else but them. But lets say you're not using those maps because you're hardcore. There's also those casual people who have friends that play and power level or run dungeons or just in general have more time to play and thus, some fall behind. Right now I'm 15 levels above one of my friends who was the same level as me 3 days ago, because I have more time to grind out the levels. Before, he could go solo some foundry quests and catch up to me pretty quickly in the short time he could play, but now that would only work if I didn't log in for two days, which sucks. I looked at these exp foundry maps as the equivalent of World of Warcraft's heirloom gear, just a way to power level your toon (or multiple alts) to max level as fast as you can so you didn't have to quest as much or grind dungeons as much.
And did that somehow hurt anybody else who didn't have heirloom gear? No, not really, it just sped up the process. For this, people will always want a way to power level as fast as they can and if they don't have to leave town to do it, then that's how they'll do it. But taking it away so dramatically isn't going to solve anything other than upsetting the player base that enjoyed it and being a free to play game that relies on people sticking around to buy things in the store, you don't want less people in game doing what they enjoy. In fact, in some ways it's to their advantage to allow people to power level since that will force those players to buy more character slots if they want to play alts, and as more races and classes come out, that will happen even more. But this won't happen if everybody clamps down, makes a main character and has no willpower to want to make an alt and run all the same content again, and again. It's one of the major complaints going on right now with World of Warcraft and why they've lost about 1.5 million subscribers in a very short time with the latest few patches.
If people cry loud enough, they may put the experience back into the foundry, but just looking around these forums leads me to believe that once they've made a decision, they stick with it until the game dies and they just make a new game and repeat the same mistakes. We'll see how it goes, but I wouldn't mind seeing this game do well for a while, it's better than I thought it'd be and the foundry stuff was a lot of fun for all types of players, and now it's become something barely worth doing except if you're really into D&D and just like a decent story here and there. That's just how I see it.
I am fine with the XP nerf. That needed to happen. The drop rate nerf went too far. Please fix it so that I can at least get something worthwhile from running a 50+ minute mission. Having 4 green items and a single ID scroll drop is pretty unacceptable.
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spiderbrigadeMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 14Arc User
Yes. Difficulty for the same encounter ramps up significantly as you get to high levels.
That's useful info, thanks!
To me that would suggest that the item-drop nerf is actually much more important than the XP nerf at high levels. Presumably harder=takes longer, so hitting the XP caps would be less likely. But, since you need to be able to recoup costs for resources and time, losing out on items would be more painful the higher level you are.
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kamaliiciousMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 0Arc User
To me that would suggest that the item-drop nerf is actually much more important than the XP nerf at high levels. Presumably harder=takes longer, so hitting the XP caps would be less likely. But, since you need to be able to recoup costs for resources and time, losing out on items would be more painful the higher level you are.
Well, at level cap the xp nerf has no effect, you're at cap so no content gives xp anyway. However, cap level characters wind up needing to use potions etc much more often than lower levels. I don't think my character used any potions at all until level 25 or so, now I'm at a point (upper 30's) where I use them regularly.
The loot nerf has made it such that higher level characters use more potions, and the gold required to buy them, than they are getting from the missions. As a result high level characters playing Foundry will actually weaken the character by draining their gold. High level character thus will actively avoid Foundry content.
My main has reached high 30's by playing only official content except for the featured Foundry missions. So I've played 5-6 Foundry missions with that character. I started a new character just for Foundry content, but am level 2 (woohoo!) and no Foundry content until I reach Neverwinter.
The difference is that Cryptic balanced that content to an appropriate level and hand selected rewards that were appropriate for a balanced dungeon.
No. Many posters on the forums are claiming 40-60 hours to get to max level. That's balanced? And wait a minute. So Cryptic hand picked all the drops in the Cloak Tower dungeon? The developers deliberately placed drops to be useful for only trickster rogues in that dungeon? Because in ten runs now, that's what I've seen drop. The only things my GF can use are the belts and amulets. Every other piece of loot worth anything has been for TR's. How is THAT balanced?
They can't do that for every foundry mission. The task they have is to automate a system which tries to place an appropriate reward for the effort it takes to complete dungeons.
No matter how many mobs are in the dungeon, if you complete the dungeon within 15 minutes it couldn't have been very hard and therefore you are rewarded with 15 minutes worth of reward. Sadly that might not be much.
I'm sorry, but again, no. Cryptic content is being literally burned through right now. Even as I'm typing these words out. I've done Cryptic's "Cloak Tower" in less than half an hour already, when the flavor text says it takes 45 minutes. And there's no lessening of loot going on there. There's very much good loot coming out of fast runs, and now that people are getting the hang of running the game's dungeons, they'll only get faster. I wouldn't be surprised if there's soon broadcasts for speed runs.
The Foundry is not a story only tool but it's not designed to throw a bunch of mobs down to farm. You can do that if you wish but Then you should not expect a very high quality reward.
The Foundry was designed with the intention of supporting supporting various play styles but that can only go so far. It is not a cheat button to get massive amount of experience or drops in a short amount of time.
And yet, plenty of the content I'm running through is exactly that. A bunch of mobs thrown down to farm that give good enough loot during the leveling process. And the mobs in each area are level locked. A level 40 can go back to say...oh....the tower district and mobs won't magically level to 40 to provide a challenge, but they'll still drop THEIR LEVEL OF LOOT, whereas the Foundry SHOULD be dropping loot to the level of the character or party running the arc/mission. Except...not. There's now some magical "xp gained per hour/minute" formula that has to be adhered to in Foundry content, but not regular game content. DOUBLE STANDARD.
If you want to make a dungeon such as Cryptic Dungeons and get good rewards for the time the first thing you will have to do is trying to slow down the zerging in whichever way possible. The amount of time it takes to complete content plays a major role in whether the content deserves a quality reward or not.
Rushing through Foundry content as fast as possible is what kills the reward drops from the content.
Except in CRYPTIC DESIGNED CONTENT you don't have to slow down. You can zerg your heart out and still get decent loot drops. Again I ask, as civilly as possible.....why is the Foundry being treated differently? Just because some "literary geniuses" got bent out of shape that farms are more popular than their stories?
I really do get that exploits are bad. I'm against breaking the risk-vs-reward ratio myself....but to hold a double standard by limiting xp gain per time period in Foundry content and not developer content is indeed just that. And it's wrong. No debating about it. Hypocrisy on the highest order.
All in all ambi, you're a good person, and we see eye to eye on a lot of things. But in this, I have to stand opposite you and say...don't believe every word you're being told by Cryptic. Or do, but just don't expect us to believe every word they tell you to say.
Occam's Razor makes the cutting clean.
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited May 2013
I'm not told that by Cryptic. Players can't abuse the game and the system.
You can power level...by zerging content.
You can't create content to mimic a button that makes your character level 60 with minimal to no effort.
That's not balanced. Games have to be balanced.
I know some people want that button...
But it will never and should never exist. If you thought the Foundry was that button you are sadly mistaken.
Cryptic will do everything they can to give the best rewards possible for content but not at the expense of game balance.
Players will never have the same power and authority Cryptic has because it would break the game.
Make the dungeons take 45 minutes and you will see better drops. Time is they key.
The changes are to limit the players trying to get to do 45 minutes of balanced mob kills in 5 minutes by dropping mobs on top of each other.
baburmisMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited May 2013
No idea why are so many people dissatisfied with latest foundry changes?
I personally quite like it as it is now, because getting a white item thats not even your class item, for a 2hrs foundry mission reward chest is just great.
In fact i believe they should add grey gear, which would be weaker than whites, and replace all other foundry drops with greys.
I really think they got the balance right atm.
- doing 15 mins quest instance = blue item chest reward, treasure chests, materials and items dropping left and right. And no exp penalty, even if you kill 2.000.000 mobs in 15 mins.
- doing 2hrs long foundry mission = whites, lots of whites. no treasure chests. no materials. 1-2 id scrolls, 1 green if you are lucky. And of course, icing on the cake - white item thats not your class specific as final chest rewards. Ah and theres exp penalty too. Because fighting masses of mobs is bad, and its against cryptic idea of how dungeons/missions should be made. Right.
honestly, i believe devs are just trolling us :P
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baburmisMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Cryptic will do everything they can to give the best rewards possible for content but not at the expense of game balance.
But... what balance are you talking about? :P There is no balance. You can powerlevel zerging through cryptic made quests. You can powerlevel via pvp too. You can even use leadership and lots of diamonds/$ to powerlevel even faster.
But when it comes to foundry, you shall not be able to powerlevel. Because cryptic doesnt like powerleveling, eh?
Dont you see anything wrong with that picture? :=o
You can't create content to mimic a button that makes your character level 60 with minimal to no effort.
speaking of which, isnt leadership just that... Sure theres effort involved, you must click that finish now thingy qaite a few times. But apparently its ok because you gotta spend $ to do it, so it doesnt fall under normal 'powerleveling' category? )
I personally quite like it as it is now, because getting a white item thats not even your class item, for a 2hrs foundry mission reward chest is just great.
Sarcasm usually works better if it plays with actual facts. . I do plenty of foundry quests on my characters, both combat and story ones, and I am very sure that there are just as many greens, scrolls and potions as before. If there are limitations, they only apply to borderline problematic foundry quests.
Comments
Perhaps you are misunderstanding what I was saying. I am talking about GOLD not AD or Zen. Someone earlier in the thread mentioned it was becoming "difficult to "grind gold" in the game. As of now gold doesn't really buy any decent gear or anything AD/zen related. I was talking more about the items you can buy with gold.
I don't give a crud about the AH and refuse to use or buy zen to buy AD for simple quest related items like hp pots, injury kits etc. I use AD/zen to buy bank space, bags, mounts and things of that nature.
As for gear I will not buy it from the AH I will earn it in game by doing quest etc like I have always done. I will not encourage the the greedy peeps that roll need on items not for the class they are currently playing on.
As for endgame welp like I have been saying we need some real raids, this 5 man delve stuff wont keep people for a long time before they get bored but then maybe that is what they want.
Neverwinter Thieves Guild
Result: Economy stays alive, and people can level alts in foundry if they like. After you leveled your first character you may not want to go through the story again, so monotonous "kill 20 Ogres" foundry quests were nice. So, you nerfed loot: Fine. But bring XP up again please.
Really was not about the economy. The economy is based more around Zen and AD then gold and dropped loot.
What the problem is, you can churn out 50 of these 5 minute hack job grinding quests, where as the better quests takes upwards of 50-100 hours to put out. What happens is you get nothing short of SPAM in the Foundry listing. Just like your spam folder in your email, players not wanting to grind have to search through 50 or more spam emails (that seem to pop up every day in foundry listing) to find those few quality quests that people ACTUALLY WORKED HARD TO MAKE.
And to people calling me selfish. YOUR **** RIGHT I AM SELFISH. I WANT ONE FRICKING GAME out of all the millions of MMO's out to be different, and I am selfish? No, YOUR all selfish for wanting every MMO you waltz into to play exactly like the one you just left and to hell with the players who want something different. That is all I am getting from everyone wanting the option to grind in NWO, knowing full well it will ruin the Foundry for what it is capable of doing.
I have been during the Alpha tests, and I have yet to max a character out. I have a level 25, that is it. I plan on staying around for a while, and it is because of the Foundry. Everyone wanting to just grind to max level have no intention of staying for the long run. They will treat it like every other MMO. They max out a few characters (in NWO case it took a week to get 3-4 lvl 60's), play the end-game, realize the devs are not putting out new content fast enough for them and jump ship.
That content your looking for the devs to release all the time. THAT is the Foundry...oh wait, you did not mean content, you just meant more levels to grind through...sorry.
They same way I wont tar all power levelers with the same brush dont tar us with the same one you use on a certain muppet :I
Though I prefare story missions sometimes a well made purely action mission text or no text can be most fun
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
Voice of reason.. wish there was a crowd with a voice as lovely as yours
but... arent cryptic made dungeons basically just a bunch of farm mobs thrown together? Theres really no tactics involved, and they already give much better loot than foundry missions (pre patch, foundry chest rewards are a joke now).
Only reason it takes long to complete some of said dongeons is because theres literally thousands of mobs and adds, but basically they are no better than ogre (ones that can fight back, mind you) farm maps, imo.
If you could spawn a 4m hp ogre, and make him spawn 300 adds per 60 seconds, you could as well make a 'cryptic-quality' foundry dungeon bosses :=)
They put a combat xp limit on foundry content, but they have no problems with you killing 500 mobs in 5 mins in open, or killing over 9.000 adds per boss.
To be replaced with new ones?
But in any case it's a battle of attrition then, who is going to leave first? The great authors and players wanting something different but are fed up with a Foundry that is rampant with nothing but grind quests?
or the grinders fed up with "no content" because they have chewed through it in a week and did everything at max level...on several characters.
That's not fine. And I'm going to call BS on the "bubbles". Why? Because I tested that same quest last night.
I ran 2 hours of foundry content last night and earned a total of 3,924 XP, both combat-medium (heavier toward the end).
Running three standard quests in 45 minutes garnered me 7,947 on a same level character, for lower level quests (-4 to my level).
This is at level 15-ish.
I have thread where I am running up an alt on Foundry quests only. A character on Foundry only content will take literally twice the amount of time.
Unacceptable.
Additionally, item drops are literally 4x in standard content. Two blues, 23 greens, 14 scrolls, 32 potions in official content.
Foundry? 5 greens, 23 whites (including every foundry chest award) and 8 potions, 5 scrolls.
Devs have stated they want to give the same rewards for Foundry as standard content - it can't be otherwise, or you lose people doing Foundry content. They need to examine this or they have severely violated thier mission statement.
Bad move.
I played this as well and can confirm your finding. The exp is very poor in the foundry and if left unchanged it will be nothing more than a distraction like in STO.
The reason you guys are seeing different amounts of xp earned on the same quest is because you're doing the quest at different speeds. The fastest gets the least XP, and vice-versa. Today's patch will adjust this.
Now read the patch notes!
Hi Tilt, I did read the patch notes.
The quests I played last night shouldn't have been anywhere near the cap. They were combat-medium. I did read the patch notes, and post-tweak will test this again. What you state was not the behavior as of last night (in actual practice as opposed to theory).
Conclusion: If you want to make story content, play a game where the players value the content you want to make.
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?238692-UGC-The-Wizard-of-War-NW-DBLKY7K2S&p=3124672#post3124672
My Flash Games ->
http://www.mind-wars.com
If people do not play your quest due to not being able to grind xp or items then they were not really interested in your quest. YOu might just have to try to cater more toward people who care for story over xp grind
So for instance, this morning I quickly tried out A Visit From the Underdark and went from roughly level 19.6 to 20.3. Most of the XP came from the completion, and item drops were noticeably lower than official content but not horrible especially as I used up 0 resources.
Now, this might be an unusual case for a lot of reasons. Does the XP and difficulty scale weirdly so a L60 doing the same map would spend more resources and get less XP? Do I suck at the game and most people would do it a lot faster, thereby getting less XP? Would a similar map just with slightly different encounter types earn drastically less or more XP?
All I can say is that in my personal experience so far (and yes I'm new) running Foundries is not a waste of time - it's possible the official quests are "more efficient" but my metric is if I sit down and play for an hour or two I want to see some progress, and so far for me the Foundry quests accomplish that.
You're correct, I'm a little touchy on this, since people are tossing anecdotal evidence around when I'm actually listing the numbers of XP gain on doing that quest and several others, as well as what level character, with an item count (not "I got some potions").
The experience though, should have been left alone. If somebody wants to farm and power level, it does not effect anybody else but them. But lets say you're not using those maps because you're hardcore. There's also those casual people who have friends that play and power level or run dungeons or just in general have more time to play and thus, some fall behind. Right now I'm 15 levels above one of my friends who was the same level as me 3 days ago, because I have more time to grind out the levels. Before, he could go solo some foundry quests and catch up to me pretty quickly in the short time he could play, but now that would only work if I didn't log in for two days, which sucks. I looked at these exp foundry maps as the equivalent of World of Warcraft's heirloom gear, just a way to power level your toon (or multiple alts) to max level as fast as you can so you didn't have to quest as much or grind dungeons as much.
And did that somehow hurt anybody else who didn't have heirloom gear? No, not really, it just sped up the process. For this, people will always want a way to power level as fast as they can and if they don't have to leave town to do it, then that's how they'll do it. But taking it away so dramatically isn't going to solve anything other than upsetting the player base that enjoyed it and being a free to play game that relies on people sticking around to buy things in the store, you don't want less people in game doing what they enjoy. In fact, in some ways it's to their advantage to allow people to power level since that will force those players to buy more character slots if they want to play alts, and as more races and classes come out, that will happen even more. But this won't happen if everybody clamps down, makes a main character and has no willpower to want to make an alt and run all the same content again, and again. It's one of the major complaints going on right now with World of Warcraft and why they've lost about 1.5 million subscribers in a very short time with the latest few patches.
If people cry loud enough, they may put the experience back into the foundry, but just looking around these forums leads me to believe that once they've made a decision, they stick with it until the game dies and they just make a new game and repeat the same mistakes. We'll see how it goes, but I wouldn't mind seeing this game do well for a while, it's better than I thought it'd be and the foundry stuff was a lot of fun for all types of players, and now it's become something barely worth doing except if you're really into D&D and just like a decent story here and there. That's just how I see it.
To me that would suggest that the item-drop nerf is actually much more important than the XP nerf at high levels. Presumably harder=takes longer, so hitting the XP caps would be less likely. But, since you need to be able to recoup costs for resources and time, losing out on items would be more painful the higher level you are.
The loot nerf has made it such that higher level characters use more potions, and the gold required to buy them, than they are getting from the missions. As a result high level characters playing Foundry will actually weaken the character by draining their gold. High level character thus will actively avoid Foundry content.
My main has reached high 30's by playing only official content except for the featured Foundry missions. So I've played 5-6 Foundry missions with that character. I started a new character just for Foundry content, but am level 2 (woohoo!) and no Foundry content until I reach Neverwinter.
No. Many posters on the forums are claiming 40-60 hours to get to max level. That's balanced? And wait a minute. So Cryptic hand picked all the drops in the Cloak Tower dungeon? The developers deliberately placed drops to be useful for only trickster rogues in that dungeon? Because in ten runs now, that's what I've seen drop. The only things my GF can use are the belts and amulets. Every other piece of loot worth anything has been for TR's. How is THAT balanced?
I'm sorry, but again, no. Cryptic content is being literally burned through right now. Even as I'm typing these words out. I've done Cryptic's "Cloak Tower" in less than half an hour already, when the flavor text says it takes 45 minutes. And there's no lessening of loot going on there. There's very much good loot coming out of fast runs, and now that people are getting the hang of running the game's dungeons, they'll only get faster. I wouldn't be surprised if there's soon broadcasts for speed runs.
And yet, plenty of the content I'm running through is exactly that. A bunch of mobs thrown down to farm that give good enough loot during the leveling process. And the mobs in each area are level locked. A level 40 can go back to say...oh....the tower district and mobs won't magically level to 40 to provide a challenge, but they'll still drop THEIR LEVEL OF LOOT, whereas the Foundry SHOULD be dropping loot to the level of the character or party running the arc/mission. Except...not. There's now some magical "xp gained per hour/minute" formula that has to be adhered to in Foundry content, but not regular game content. DOUBLE STANDARD.
Except in CRYPTIC DESIGNED CONTENT you don't have to slow down. You can zerg your heart out and still get decent loot drops. Again I ask, as civilly as possible.....why is the Foundry being treated differently? Just because some "literary geniuses" got bent out of shape that farms are more popular than their stories?
I really do get that exploits are bad. I'm against breaking the risk-vs-reward ratio myself....but to hold a double standard by limiting xp gain per time period in Foundry content and not developer content is indeed just that. And it's wrong. No debating about it. Hypocrisy on the highest order.
All in all ambi, you're a good person, and we see eye to eye on a lot of things. But in this, I have to stand opposite you and say...don't believe every word you're being told by Cryptic. Or do, but just don't expect us to believe every word they tell you to say.
Occam's Razor makes the cutting clean.
You can power level...by zerging content.
You can't create content to mimic a button that makes your character level 60 with minimal to no effort.
That's not balanced. Games have to be balanced.
I know some people want that button...
But it will never and should never exist. If you thought the Foundry was that button you are sadly mistaken.
Cryptic will do everything they can to give the best rewards possible for content but not at the expense of game balance.
Players will never have the same power and authority Cryptic has because it would break the game.
Make the dungeons take 45 minutes and you will see better drops. Time is they key.
The changes are to limit the players trying to get to do 45 minutes of balanced mob kills in 5 minutes by dropping mobs on top of each other.
I personally quite like it as it is now, because getting a white item thats not even your class item, for a 2hrs foundry mission reward chest is just great.
In fact i believe they should add grey gear, which would be weaker than whites, and replace all other foundry drops with greys.
I really think they got the balance right atm.
- doing 15 mins quest instance = blue item chest reward, treasure chests, materials and items dropping left and right. And no exp penalty, even if you kill 2.000.000 mobs in 15 mins.
- doing 2hrs long foundry mission = whites, lots of whites. no treasure chests. no materials. 1-2 id scrolls, 1 green if you are lucky. And of course, icing on the cake - white item thats not your class specific as final chest rewards. Ah and theres exp penalty too. Because fighting masses of mobs is bad, and its against cryptic idea of how dungeons/missions should be made. Right.
honestly, i believe devs are just trolling us :P
But... what balance are you talking about? :P There is no balance. You can powerlevel zerging through cryptic made quests. You can powerlevel via pvp too. You can even use leadership and lots of diamonds/$ to powerlevel even faster.
But when it comes to foundry, you shall not be able to powerlevel. Because cryptic doesnt like powerleveling, eh?
Dont you see anything wrong with that picture? :=o
You can't create content to mimic a button that makes your character level 60 with minimal to no effort.
speaking of which, isnt leadership just that... Sure theres effort involved, you must click that finish now thingy qaite a few times. But apparently its ok because you gotta spend $ to do it, so it doesnt fall under normal 'powerleveling' category?
Sarcasm usually works better if it plays with actual facts.