Patch Notes: NW.45.20150618a.6

strumslinger · July 2015

Please head here for the patch notes for our maintenance tomorrow 7/23 at 7am PDT:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/neverwinter/news/detail/9469863

knight5878 · July 2015

I strongly Disagree with the leadership profession being removed from the gateway. It is bad enough that you have to grind massively to get it to level 25 and can only slot 3 of the same task at a time. Not everyone can sit at their home computer 24 hours a day to slot professions. I usually assign profession task in the morning from my I phone before I go to work and I re-slot professions during my lunch break. That is not botting. I believe if you have grinder to the top level of a profession you should not be penalized for taking advantage of the rewards from the profession. I think Cryptic really needs to start paying attention to the recommendations when it comes to the weekly patches rather than crippling the game further. There are several class balancing recommendations out there along with patch changes already made that have in some cases cripple certain classes in the game. These are the kinds of things cryptic needs to work patches for not adding more and more restrictions to things that don't need changed.

thefabricant · July 2015

Excellent on the gateway fix, now all that remains are the rp bots, although I imagine those will be much harder to kill off.

balthezar2 · July 2015

I am definitely with knight5878 on this. If you do this to gateway then it will definitely hurt the working people more than the bots, not everyone can be in the game when the task is complete, so gateway was a great way to get as much done as possible, with the added time to all the main tasks. Now you want to keep us from doing more than 1 task a day? Is this to stop the bots, or lower our AD production? Why not just do away with leadership altogether? Amounts to almost the same thing for a lot of hard working people.

truckula · July 2015

I have to say the leadership nuke really hurts me. I play most of the day on gateway, primarily building leadership. This will severely hamper my efforts. The transfer button will be nice.

Frankly, I do not see why you dont go after the hosting sites of the spam bots. Selling copyrighted material. Either, talk to the hosting sites, or to the browser producers to block them.
Further any account that lists an ad for AD, should be banned.
Also ban by IP. (Yes, I know they use IP hiders, but its a step you can take.)
Finally we all see the ads in zone, you know what they handing out, find the accounts making those kind of trades and ban them. You can also look for accounts buying junk for massive AD and ban them, especially accounts that have no activity other than professions or buying some piece of junk for a million AD.

All this requires a lot of work, but arent the real players worth it? Instead of doing yet something else to hurt the players? First the C.Ward, then keys now this? How will you hurt the real players next since this step will not stop the sellers?

j0shi82 · July 2015

Heroic Encounter rewards will not change if the reward cannot be accepted for some reason.

Is this also true for other rewards?

rifter1969 · July 2015

Really???? Taking Leadership away from gateway???
Sigh... I mean what else are you going to do to hurt the regular players?

Like truckukla said, I use the gateway while I'm at work.. and this was nice. I really hope there is some kind of compromise coming up.

It would be nice if you guy would address the tremendous XP needed to level up from 61 - 70 and also.. refining stones... why in god's name are there three types of each? Bound to Account, to Character and unbounded, please unify them under one roof.

ayroux · July 2015

I agree with both sides of this discussion TBH.

Leadership botting has become a BIG issue in this game. I am fortunate enough to have a job where I sit on the computer each day. I have about 20 character I run leadership on and do the LONG tasks so I dont have to manage it much.

Doing this will KILL my current AD production and because I work all day, that is how I am able to keep up.

Andy, I am really disappointed in this. If you want toreduce the leadership botting then REMOVE the "per character" limit and make a "per account" limit on how much you can refine each day.

Logging in is going to be impossible for the working person. This game IS by definition catered towards a more casual player base, its NOT a hardcore player base that plays. So the casual player wont be in game all day long to do this, the gateway WAS the way to do this.

Dont get me wrong I am 100% behind you on nerfing leadership farming. Honestly its too much. There are people that do make WAY too much doing this, but its also the ONLY way to farm AD in this game right now for a casual player. You have completely killed all other forms of making money. Also leadership doesnt do ANYTHING but make AD... So besides this, whats the point of doing it?

Think about this. ALL this is going to do is make me, each time I want to play, Ill log on and spend 30-45 minutes just doing professions. Not even PLAYING the game! Whats going to happen to my desire to play?

If this stays in effect, you will see a MAJOR drop in players. I guarantee it.

Nothing about the economic model is fair except if players are smart, invest in leadership they can make enough of an allowance to make slow progressions.

If your gonna do this then you ALSO need to do the following:
1) RP require for gear - CUT IN HALF (or MORE!)
2) ALL Drops from dungeons are now BOE - able to be sold on the AH.
3) Daily quests offer more AD
4) Profession ITEMs (like rings) need to be able to be SOLD for profit on the AH.
5) RP for enchants - CUT DOWN. remove the "double" requirement on 1-10 meaning all you would need is the RP+GMOPs+Wards to make a better version - just like 11-12 did.
6) Swap ALL leadership tasks that make AD to a 24 hour task that gives you 2-3x the amount of Raw AD. So a player only has to log in once or twice per day to "Reset" his tasks.

NOW you would have a much more fair economic model. All this did was screw over all the casual players who use gateway as a way to do this outside of the game. You want players to PLAY the game when they log in, not feel like its their job to run all their professions.

ayroux · July 2015

Ill add this because this really frustrates me. The players that DO bot this type of thing, will find a new way to do it - probably in game. So the "bots" will still run, maybe they might be easier to catch but all this is going to do is hurt the average player base and hurt population.

THIS solution may have just been a massive nail in the coffin, I hope I am wrong and I am not personally leaving over this but I forsee MANY players leaving because there is no way to sustain or farm for AD in this game now.....

chiennedeluxe · July 2015

I play neverwinter for PVP. I hate PVE. Removing Leadership from gateway will hurt too much my caracter progression since its my only source of AD income. So if that happen I gonna have to quit the Neverwinter cause I am not rich enough to pay many thousands of dollars to keep my toon competitive. This game is already one of the most if not the most expensive game there is.

j0shi82 · July 2015

ayroux wrote: »

Ill add this because this really frustrates me. The players that DO bot this type of thing, will find a new way to do it - probably in game. So the "bots" will still run, maybe they might be easier to catch but all this is going to do is hurt the average player base and hurt population.

THIS solution may have just been a massive nail in the coffin, I hope I am wrong and I am not personally leaving over this but I forsee MANY players leaving because there is no way to sustain or farm for AD in this game now.....

They don't need to bot ingame. Now that Unified Elements will get more valuable again, Alchemy will replace Leadership.

montaire · July 2015

This change is really going to hit me. I do leadership tasks on my phone as a way to try and shore up my meager AD income. Please reconsider.

razlorus · July 2015

That leadership change is going to hurt more legit players than it will bots players like me don't have the time to constantly log onto the game and do their professions for all their characters I use the gateway to setup my leadership tasks before bed and when I get up in the morning this honestly seems like a horrible change that is just going to punish legit players while the botters just do what they always do and find a work around.

valcontar73 · July 2015

And again, not a single word for foundry!! Yay!!

alleykate · July 2015

What, I cannot believe you are doing this to leadership, I work and travel too so the gateway leadership is the only option to get some AD to spend it on refining (I long for the day to have enough AD to increase the speed on 80% mounts for my characters or get my companions to purple...not going to happen now).

It is not enough that you have reduced in-game earning of AD and making us buy dungeon keys to do a second dungeon, that you took away Neverember rewards that were AD, and now you do this....I have been playing for almost 2 years..and it has taken me 2 years to get my characters reasonable level (not BIS), how are new players going to do this...you are almost directing them to illegal websites. I beg...DON'T DO THIS PLEASE.....

kominatcha · July 2015

This only punishes the players and not the actual professional botting companies that spam throughout the entire game. It's been obvious that in game botting has been ignored. Everything that has happened since Tyranny Of Dragons has slowly taken away any chance of players in game to grind and still be competitive and turned this into almost entirely pay to win. This has destroyed the hopes of a beta player that this game actually cared about its player base. At least now I won't have any obligation to continue playing and will feel better for finding a game that actually listens to the players. Since I am pretty sure this post will not affect the outcome, I hope it deters future potential players unless they are willing to pay literally thousands of dollars to stay competitive.

pantherwitch4982 · July 2015

The way this is going to work out is that regular players (you know, people with an outside game life) won't be able to stand up to the gold sellers. The gold sellers will just buy more computers, make more accounts, and keep people running the game constantly for them. The "regular joes" will maybe get on once a day (or less, depending on how stable the servers are at the time... oh, did I mention that was a huge issue that should have been addressed FIRST?) Yeah, good luck keeping a player base. I know darn well that PWE/Cryptic won't lower the prices on C wards, or anything else in the zen store. Oh, and let's not forget that Zen itself can be horribly expensive for some people who don't have a lot to put into a game.

twoheadedpuig · July 2015

Better get your application out to Blizzard before the guy in the cubicle next to you wakes up. Should leave out the part where you worked for Cryptic, maybe say you were in prison all this time...

martianmnhunter · July 2015

How does this affect or stop botters? all they have to do is rewrite their scripts to be ingame and leave the client open, they already do it with praying.

RIP NW community.

ayroux · July 2015

Again all the need to really do to address leadership botting is put a PER ACCOUNT max rather than a per character max of AD to refine.

Something in the range of 250-500k (50 characters @ 24k a day = 1.2M).

So this REALLY only huts the "botting players" because most casual players (I know I dont) dont earn over a few hundred K from leadership....

The only NEXT step would be to try and find a way to target players with multiple accounts who can get around this although it does take a CONSIDERABLE investment to get 50 characters going on an account....

But putting a per account cap allows a player to refine more than 24k on ONE character but not more than a max of w.e the account max is. So it overall brings down the "higher" players and doesnt affect the casual gamer who does this.

THAT is the first attack against botting. Not removing it entirely.

razlorus · July 2015

ayroux wrote: »

Again all the need to really do to address leadership botting is put a PER ACCOUNT max rather than a per character max of AD to refine.

Something in the range of 250-500k (50 characters @ 24k a day = 1.2M).

So this REALLY only huts the "botting players" because most casual players (I know I dont) dont earn over a few hundred K from leadership....

The only NEXT step would be to try and find a way to target players with multiple accounts who can get around this although it does take a CONSIDERABLE investment to get 50 characters going on an account....

But putting a per account cap allows a player to refine more than 24k on ONE character but not more than a max of w.e the account max is. So it overall brings down the "higher" players and doesnt affect the casual gamer who does this.

THAT is the first attack against botting. Not removing it entirely.

I don't even make the 24k a day from leadership because I use it to get my refining items together so this seems like a much more reasonable change imo than the one Cryptic are implementing honestly I know very few legit players with more than 3 characters due to the fact this game has become so expensive to sustain due to the ridiculous amount of refining items needed for 4 artifacts and 4 pieces of artifact equipment as well as a full set of enchants 250k account wide cap seems more than fair as for legit players it would be an effective buff while non-legit it could be a massive nerf though I personally think 250k is still a little high I would say at most 200k either way it is a much better alternative to what Cryptic plan to implement which just punishes legit players.

araraguy · July 2015

In all honesty it seems like the development team prefers short term band-aids to actual fixes, bots have always been a plague but the team here seem to believe that harming their own customers instead of fixing the root is acceptable which is disgusting.

Yet they seem to love to promote and stream out new content and want these same customers to lap it up like mindless zombies. Please stop with this horrid method of "development" and address your own issues before you take it out on your customers.

I really wish to play this game more but with the ever slippery slope that is mod 6 it seems like more holes are made rather than filled, listen to your customers or better yet play your own game a little and try to gain some perspective before making rash and woeful decisions.

icenamn · July 2015

Just wondering why they do this? Is it to combat the AD sellers because if so why not raise the Zen vs AD ratio to 1000 instead of 500 so you can get more AD for your expensive Zen?

Because the AD sellers are just gonna do it in game instead or hire someone to do it for 3 bucks an hour.

All they really do here is to <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> up leadership for all the dudes who have like 10 chars and do it from their phone or tablet from work once or twise a day. The major bots will not be affected by this thats one thing thats for sure.

denvald · July 2015

Now the legit players cannot do their leadership at work or on the go which was the whole point of gateway before.

I cannot do my leadership while waiting for pvp queues to pop either, because that requires me to log my character one at a time.

There is absolutely no way of making money in the game trough playing content, no RNGesus did not smile on me I'm not a lucky person. I never got that Eye of lathander, and I never got drops from chests in elol or whatever artifacts from dungeons. I have completed everything in the game, campaigns, 80 tiamats, you name it. For me the only sense of progression was making money, the only thing I had left to do was upgrade my enchants, and upgrade my artifact gear. Which I've done trough leadership via gateway while waiting for pvp Queues on lowbies or my main in the meanwhile.

The irony is it doesnt solve the problem it punishes players, simply put. The botters will simply keep doing it in game, there's a reason stacks of r4 enchants are worth 2k each.

I have nothing more to say, there will be a big wave of player quitting tomorrow if this goes live

denvald · July 2015

I really don't know what to say lol

Especially since this band-aid really isn't even fixing the issue at hand. Botters will stay do it in game lol

End game feels extremely unrewarding, it takes too long to get an overflow reward because of exp changes, theres no money to be made from end game content, there's less dungeons content than before. It's extremely frustrating in many cases because of the high difficulty of the current game and...

I REALLY don't know what to say. Of all my friends I played this game with when I started last game, we were 5, only two of us stayed in mod 6. My only friend who still played with me trough mod 6 quit on the exp changes patch, and I think the one that'll do me trough is the leadership one.

adammreilly · July 2015

I started playing this game a couple of weeks before Elemental Evil was released. In that time, you've killed all the dungeons, while leaving the quest stubs for them. You've nerfed and broken classes and skills. You've applied bandaid thinkign to addressing bot problems, which in the end did more damage to the legit player base then to the botters. You've actually made it easier for botting in some cases.
You've been harping on and on about the coming strongholds, but have done nothing to fix your core problems with existing content.
Now you want to deprive me of doing my professions from my phone during my lunch break? I use gateway as my primary access to professions, even when I'm in the game, and lately I've been getting DCed a lot while doing that.

You (Cryptic) are really making it hard for me to stay motivated in coming back to this game. If not for the guild I've been trying to help rebuild I might have already quit. Strongholds may be the lynch pin in that decision next month.

ucanthandle · July 2015

Nerfing leadership to only be used in game is not that bad of a thing IF, and thats a big IF, they make ways in game to earn AD. Honestly I would like to see leadership give about half the AD it does now. The keep AD flowing in the economy that is accessible to players, allow Dungeons to reward a choice of 10k raw AD per dungeon, or 4k refined AD. This would give incentive to do dungeons. Make this only available to max level chars so bots could not do it. There are 100s of ways to make it where only real players would earn AD. This would not only make the players happy they could advance by playing, but also hurt bots by not making it too hard to bot. Since this would cut down on botting so much, people would actually buy zen to sell for AD. Its a win/win for Cryptic. Honestly have no clue why they refuse to stop bots in an effective manner.

Move AD income to non bottable content is a simple solution. I do not see bots running things like ECC over and over to make AD....

bioshrike · July 2015

How about actually implementing some anti-botting measures, instead of cutting off your nose to spite your face? You added the delay to professions completing in-game, to try and combat botters, and that didn't work out. You want to battle botters? Add in a CAPCHA or some sort of simple math/logic problem to solve, in order to start a session. There are numerous ways you can handle this issue w/o crippling legitimate players' ability to participate in the game when away from home.

mutjinninja · July 2015

When I heard that so many devs had been fired from the old team, I rejoiced. I thought that maybe they had cut the dead weight that was dragging this game down and things were going to improve. The improved communication and consideration of feedback got my hopes up more. However...this is an old dev team decision. I'm sad to see that you guys are still as committed to killing your game as ever. Do you get kicks out of watching that server activity decline as you force a max exodus?

Seriously guys, what are you thinking?? Completely removing leadership from the gateway rather than limiting it or even listening to your player base and their (frankly ingenious at points) ideas is a terrible, terrible decision. As almost every single person above me is saying, this hurts your LEGIT and dedicated players more than anyone.

How are we supposed to make AD now hm? The dailies from Rhix? Wow, awesome, a whopping 10k or something per day? I'll be ready to buy that pvorpal in a few years! Perhaps we can salvage loot from our runs! Oh wait, I forgot, the loot salvage return has been nerfed so hard it doesn't even pay for the key to get it.

News flash! No one wants to cart their pc around with them to log into the game every day and spend 15 mins to an hour doing a metagame rather than actually playing. Gateway made this professions grind sooooo much faster, simpler, and convenient. Leadership was the only reason I, personally, even used gateway.

Andy, we don't mean to shoot the messenger, but when you bring us news like this, it's sort of hard not to. This is a horrendous decision and could leave to many deciding this game has become too much for them. Please, for the sake of your game population and the quality of life in game, reverse this decision or take another route. I don't care how many pretty new mods you release, if I can't make AD, I won't be able to progress. Progression is the name of the game in an mmo. Thanks for shooting it in the face

lordwhitetiger · July 2015

Andy, I hope this is MASSIVELY reconsidered. This will cause me to leave Neverwinter as well. I have my alts that do leadership ON THE GATEWAY because I don't feel like logging 22 characters in everyday, several times a day to do my professions. We spoke yesterday about some fixes that NEED to be made to this game and now THIS is just ... wow... this bends over SO MANY players that DO NOT BOT. This SERIOUSLY needs to be reconsidered. Why do I have 22 Characters some people ask? Because I'm on Social Security and I can't AFFORD to buy everything in this game so I use the alts to make me diamonds that I turn into Zen when I NEED Zen or of course, need something off of the auction house.

With the AD nerf that already took place then, the leadership tasks being upped in completion time, then let's seeeeeeee oh yeah the addition of **24 HR** completion tasks for menial diamonds (come on really?!?!)... yeah this is just ridiculous for those of us that can't afford to fork out money for a 'free to play' game that ends up costing us hundreds upon hundreds of dollars to be able to do the content (I'm not even talking about pvp gear/readiness.. omg!)

IN ADDITION TO WHAT WAS SAID ABOVE BY AYNROX(??).......

Let's get real here.

24 hour COMMON TASK = 20,000 AD upon completion
24 hr RARE Task(s) = 50,000 AD upon completion
18 hr tasks = 15,000 AD upon completion
16 hr tasks = 10,000 AD upon completion
12 hr tasks = 8,000 AD upon completion
8-12 hr tasks = 4,000 AD upon completion
<8 hr tasks could remain as is.

This isn't mod 2 anymore. The requirements needed (and greed) for items has just thrown the economy to <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>.
We can't get coalescent wards except by paying for them (trade bars or outright) or HOPING one pops up upon opening an invoke box. So, upgrading our armor/weapon enchantments is just utterly ridiculous.

We can't get keys unless they are purchased now.

Also, what about setting SELL LIMITS (With the above completion changes):
(stackable items would need to be formulated for example let's say I want to sell Lesser Resonance Stones (Green item)
(99 * 10,000 AD / 5) [or something similar]

Orange lock box items - Max Sell Price 8,000,000 AD (I recently saw an orange lock box item listed for 145m)
Purple DROP items [or purple professions lock box items] - Max Sell Price 500,000 AD
Purple lock box items [non-profession] - Max Sell Price 5,000,000 AD
Blue items (lock box or drop) - Max Sell price 100,000 AD
Green items (lock box or drop) - Max Sell Price 10,000 AD

Then you could remove the Binding of items and let the market flow.

Setting a low sell limit for green / blue items would severely disrupt the diamond sellers. It would make people that DO choose to deal with them (yes, it's going to be almost impossible to get rid of them) REALLY THINK HARD... "Do I want to give up a purple lock box item to make this deal and skyrocket my astral diamond stash? Or, should I list it on the auction house and make the diamonds legitimately?"

I have dozens of ideas for the economy and ways to help people be able to stay competitive in this game without draining wallets on a continual basis, but, STILL get the company money (and on a LARGER scale [oh, some of the ideas I have for the Zen Market!!!]).

I've been pretty silent about a LOT of the changes that have happened in this game since I started playing but, it's time that I TRY to make my voice heard now.

The rest of you, if you don't like my thought process, feel free to flame on....

Patch Notes: NW.45.20150618a.6

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