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For the game's executive producer:
gregj7
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 4 Arc User
Devs: The number 1 new feature/bug fix should be the ability for parties to replace players that leave. As far as I'm concerned, nothing else needs to be done until this is working smoothly.
There is no endgame content on demand except dungeons. But about 80% of the time I run a DD dungeon in a pug on my level 60, someone leaves. Also, replaced players shouldn't have to spend 5+ minutes to walk to the endboss fight. (That's how long it can take in 1+ dungeons right now that have no intermediate respawn points.) I also need to see how many people are in the queue. I've spent hours in queues only to realize there were probably never even 5 total people in the queue for that particular dungeon. There are serious problems with some players' attitude (the kind that violates the ToS), which should be directly addressed, but even if they weren't, being able to replace a player mid-run usually can be used to make 4 people happy.
After that is fixed, then a priority should be retaining my progress in a foundry quest (I am soloing) when a group is found for me via a queue. At level 60 when I am waiting for a queue to pop, what else am I supposed to be doing?
You can radically reduce the gold spammer problem. It will cost you time and money, sorry. Please do it anyway. During "peak" spamming minutes, I see ~10 consecutive spammed msgs more than once/min, each group by a different account. There is nothing the non-gold-buying players can do about it. It has become offensive to some people in a way that it wasn't a month ago.
How do you decide what to work on? Some of the priority bugs to be fixed are the ones most recently introduced in a patch. When I saw the bug where I am told I am about to delete an email with items, I thought, ugh, don't they hold their programmers accountable for writing working code? Does the programmer even test their code? Many bugs that exist demonstrate that they have not. Just making sure a feature works with the most common usage is not testing. I said to myself, well, at least they will fix it next patch because it will only take 10 minutes of right person's time. That was a long time ago. Don't think I have anything negative to say about the programmers. All the problems in the game can be rightly traced to the chief executive. Half the reason I quit my previous MMO was because of their bug non-fixing policy.
Other priority bugs are the ones that users visually see. There are many, many that have been there from before open beta.
Feel free to stop reading now. The rest of this post is long. It is about fleshing out the wanting-to-burst-out-of-its-shell user-created quests.
A huge opportunity that I would like to see you jump on is to take advantage of the dungeon masters out there who love to express their creativity by creating quests. To be honest, you have not made much effort to support their creativity beyond the most basic things, and now it seems that everything you do is motivated by making money.
If you so willed, DM-made quests could drastically reduce the amount of time/money you need to spend creating content. I'm confident that you don't want to pay royalties for use of such work, even if it is as good as, or better than, the content you create. However, it takes years to get a game to have fully fleshed-out content. Right now there is no endgame-on-demand content at all, and a bare minimum of content up to that point. I can't skip a zone's quests (I skipped Icespire Peak and did the next zone [The Chasm] fine, but had to go back to Icespire Peak to make a few levels to do the zone after The Chasm, because I didn't want to PvP/do foundry quests/craft for 3 levels.) Even games that open with a "full" set of endgame content don't have enough and they have to keep creating more.
Perhaps you can think of other ways other than royalties to reward creators of professional-grade quests. Royalties is by far the best method. I'm sorry it would create so many messes because almost everyone is needy for recognition or money. However it also solves other problems, like what to do when there are multiple authors involved in the creation of a quest. (In the interim, it might be a good idea to allocate each player "class B" astral diamonds each month that can only be used to reward quest creators--perhaps an amount based on the amount of foundry quest playing they've been doing.)
You will never, ever be able to identify the best user-created quests without reviewing them yourself. There are some available now, I'm sure. I have accidentally stumbled onto one or two professional-grade ones so far. They have the same rating as many of the quests that are in the to-be-reviewed list. You can charge a nominal fee (real money) for your time to review them. It would keep your workload down. You can, of course, use player ratings to decide which ones to review and make final refinement suggestions for.
What is desperately needed, even if you don't invest heavily in integrating the best user-created quests with the mainstream game, is to rework how to find quests we want to play and how they are rated. The hash tags are a nice try, but won't work because it is too subjective right now. (Perhaps provide hard requirements that must be met to use each hashtags and then let players evaluate how well they apply.) Right now I type 3 random characters in the foundry search box to see a list of quests I haven't seen before. (I'm glad there are so many.) I've searched for dungeon crawls and got a list of quests that weren't dungeon crawls.
Foundry quest ratings can't be simple stars, they need to be a selection from phrases like "Can't tell the difference from a professionally built quest," "Excellent with a few exceptions," etc. Each major area of the quest needs to be rated separately. e.g., perhaps: design of the dungeon, aesthetics of the quest, design of the story, quality of the dialog, etc. Probably one of the most valuable things to do is to identify people who are capable of telling when a quest has reached professional quality (to reduce your workload; perhaps call them "editors" and show their ratings separate from the ones from the masses!), and give them some greater capabilities to influence quest design before it is published and/or submitted to you for review. At the most basic level you need web pages to discuss what makes a good quest.
Players won't be able to make quests that are much different than the rest until they have more flexibility in the foundry. With this goes additional work to make it easier for the author to know how to do what he has in mind with the editor. Amazing things can already be done, but people shouldn't have to go to a YouTube tutorial--it should be made clear by the editor. You don't even have good tooltips! Shameful. In fact, some screen objects don't have tooltips at all. It seems you never asked 1 of the foundry devs to spend a week writing them. Even a full set of short and terribly written tooltips that explain capabilities and limitations of the features would have saved authors thousands of hours already. I frequently see foundry quests where the author must have (or said they) spent more than a hundred hours to create it. Not only is it because it is so hard to learn how to accomplish a task, but also because the editor is so cumbersome. The author has to remember everything about his quest, because the editor doesn't help him much. e.g., I should be able to create something that is needed without losing my place in what I was doing that required it. Players shouldn't have to hack things together that are commonly used. e.g., timers, modifying multiple objects all at once. Placing an object in 3D mode should have a snap-to-other-objects option. Fix the bugs already there, of course. They prevent some things from being done for not only the author but everyone who plays their quest.
If you become serious about encouraging great user-created content, you need to implement a way for authors to make components of their quests available for use by other authors. Some people would love to create elaborate mansions or mountainscapes, but don't care about storylines or encounters. Also, authors need to be able to import textures so everything in the game doesn't look the same. Yeah, you would have to review every important texture for abuse. It would be worth it. You can make a process where other authors or players verify it is safe before the public can see it, anyway. You might not even have to approve it yourself if you did a full-blown job implementing the process of identifying different kinds of author-editors posited above.
Less important, but needed, are custom sounds, in spite of the horrific voice acting the players would have to endure. A minority wouldn't be horrific and could have thundercrashes at the right points in the dialog.
Thanks for all your hard work. I wouldn't complain if I didn't care.
There is no endgame content on demand except dungeons. But about 80% of the time I run a DD dungeon in a pug on my level 60, someone leaves. Also, replaced players shouldn't have to spend 5+ minutes to walk to the endboss fight. (That's how long it can take in 1+ dungeons right now that have no intermediate respawn points.) I also need to see how many people are in the queue. I've spent hours in queues only to realize there were probably never even 5 total people in the queue for that particular dungeon. There are serious problems with some players' attitude (the kind that violates the ToS), which should be directly addressed, but even if they weren't, being able to replace a player mid-run usually can be used to make 4 people happy.
After that is fixed, then a priority should be retaining my progress in a foundry quest (I am soloing) when a group is found for me via a queue. At level 60 when I am waiting for a queue to pop, what else am I supposed to be doing?
You can radically reduce the gold spammer problem. It will cost you time and money, sorry. Please do it anyway. During "peak" spamming minutes, I see ~10 consecutive spammed msgs more than once/min, each group by a different account. There is nothing the non-gold-buying players can do about it. It has become offensive to some people in a way that it wasn't a month ago.
How do you decide what to work on? Some of the priority bugs to be fixed are the ones most recently introduced in a patch. When I saw the bug where I am told I am about to delete an email with items, I thought, ugh, don't they hold their programmers accountable for writing working code? Does the programmer even test their code? Many bugs that exist demonstrate that they have not. Just making sure a feature works with the most common usage is not testing. I said to myself, well, at least they will fix it next patch because it will only take 10 minutes of right person's time. That was a long time ago. Don't think I have anything negative to say about the programmers. All the problems in the game can be rightly traced to the chief executive. Half the reason I quit my previous MMO was because of their bug non-fixing policy.
Other priority bugs are the ones that users visually see. There are many, many that have been there from before open beta.
Feel free to stop reading now. The rest of this post is long. It is about fleshing out the wanting-to-burst-out-of-its-shell user-created quests.
A huge opportunity that I would like to see you jump on is to take advantage of the dungeon masters out there who love to express their creativity by creating quests. To be honest, you have not made much effort to support their creativity beyond the most basic things, and now it seems that everything you do is motivated by making money.
If you so willed, DM-made quests could drastically reduce the amount of time/money you need to spend creating content. I'm confident that you don't want to pay royalties for use of such work, even if it is as good as, or better than, the content you create. However, it takes years to get a game to have fully fleshed-out content. Right now there is no endgame-on-demand content at all, and a bare minimum of content up to that point. I can't skip a zone's quests (I skipped Icespire Peak and did the next zone [The Chasm] fine, but had to go back to Icespire Peak to make a few levels to do the zone after The Chasm, because I didn't want to PvP/do foundry quests/craft for 3 levels.) Even games that open with a "full" set of endgame content don't have enough and they have to keep creating more.
Perhaps you can think of other ways other than royalties to reward creators of professional-grade quests. Royalties is by far the best method. I'm sorry it would create so many messes because almost everyone is needy for recognition or money. However it also solves other problems, like what to do when there are multiple authors involved in the creation of a quest. (In the interim, it might be a good idea to allocate each player "class B" astral diamonds each month that can only be used to reward quest creators--perhaps an amount based on the amount of foundry quest playing they've been doing.)
You will never, ever be able to identify the best user-created quests without reviewing them yourself. There are some available now, I'm sure. I have accidentally stumbled onto one or two professional-grade ones so far. They have the same rating as many of the quests that are in the to-be-reviewed list. You can charge a nominal fee (real money) for your time to review them. It would keep your workload down. You can, of course, use player ratings to decide which ones to review and make final refinement suggestions for.
What is desperately needed, even if you don't invest heavily in integrating the best user-created quests with the mainstream game, is to rework how to find quests we want to play and how they are rated. The hash tags are a nice try, but won't work because it is too subjective right now. (Perhaps provide hard requirements that must be met to use each hashtags and then let players evaluate how well they apply.) Right now I type 3 random characters in the foundry search box to see a list of quests I haven't seen before. (I'm glad there are so many.) I've searched for dungeon crawls and got a list of quests that weren't dungeon crawls.
Foundry quest ratings can't be simple stars, they need to be a selection from phrases like "Can't tell the difference from a professionally built quest," "Excellent with a few exceptions," etc. Each major area of the quest needs to be rated separately. e.g., perhaps: design of the dungeon, aesthetics of the quest, design of the story, quality of the dialog, etc. Probably one of the most valuable things to do is to identify people who are capable of telling when a quest has reached professional quality (to reduce your workload; perhaps call them "editors" and show their ratings separate from the ones from the masses!), and give them some greater capabilities to influence quest design before it is published and/or submitted to you for review. At the most basic level you need web pages to discuss what makes a good quest.
Players won't be able to make quests that are much different than the rest until they have more flexibility in the foundry. With this goes additional work to make it easier for the author to know how to do what he has in mind with the editor. Amazing things can already be done, but people shouldn't have to go to a YouTube tutorial--it should be made clear by the editor. You don't even have good tooltips! Shameful. In fact, some screen objects don't have tooltips at all. It seems you never asked 1 of the foundry devs to spend a week writing them. Even a full set of short and terribly written tooltips that explain capabilities and limitations of the features would have saved authors thousands of hours already. I frequently see foundry quests where the author must have (or said they) spent more than a hundred hours to create it. Not only is it because it is so hard to learn how to accomplish a task, but also because the editor is so cumbersome. The author has to remember everything about his quest, because the editor doesn't help him much. e.g., I should be able to create something that is needed without losing my place in what I was doing that required it. Players shouldn't have to hack things together that are commonly used. e.g., timers, modifying multiple objects all at once. Placing an object in 3D mode should have a snap-to-other-objects option. Fix the bugs already there, of course. They prevent some things from being done for not only the author but everyone who plays their quest.
If you become serious about encouraging great user-created content, you need to implement a way for authors to make components of their quests available for use by other authors. Some people would love to create elaborate mansions or mountainscapes, but don't care about storylines or encounters. Also, authors need to be able to import textures so everything in the game doesn't look the same. Yeah, you would have to review every important texture for abuse. It would be worth it. You can make a process where other authors or players verify it is safe before the public can see it, anyway. You might not even have to approve it yourself if you did a full-blown job implementing the process of identifying different kinds of author-editors posited above.
Less important, but needed, are custom sounds, in spite of the horrific voice acting the players would have to endure. A minority wouldn't be horrific and could have thundercrashes at the right points in the dialog.
Thanks for all your hard work. I wouldn't complain if I didn't care.
Post edited by gregj7 on
0
Comments
Theire CS is a joke... Worst in the history of mmo gaming -.-
Lots of good points, but this one would really help Foundry makers.