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.
Methinks it's probably not the devs to blame here... ...this reeks of management.
I could imagine ways how this is handled in a non-damaging way for players - and I can also foresee that none of those will be implemented straght away... :^/
It's a really painful step, and will almost certainly melt away the ZAX backlog due to rreduced AD influx. And thereby hurt the ZEN sales, because probably a lot less people will buy stuff with ZEN when they only get like 200AD for the ZEN.
And when that dip then hits the monthly company account balance chart, some solution will be found, probably.
I hope you will rethink this. I'm not going to quit the game over it, but I will lose several of the people I play with. They are family men and they use the gateway to generate ad when they can't play.
This won't stop those who are selling AD, they will just bot in game instead of out of game.
The reason AD sellers exist is you artificially capped the value of zen at 500 ad. This may change it, but you're taking a huge chance on losing a large % of your playerbase.
The funny part will be tomorrow when all those people who don't look at patch notes try to do leadership online like they've been doing for years and can't. The forums will explode.
Unbelievable. This game is already so hard as it is. It seems so odd to me that the only way to really get some great AD is to get more characters on your account and use Leadership to farm AD. This is the way the game was set up, to be able to do this exact thing. So smart players used AD to make Zen to buy more character slots. Some used real money to do so. So now you are changing the rules in a major way, punishing those players that were doing the smart thing. Using the Gateway saves so much time. Now players with multiple characters will be forced to log in on every character up to 6 times a day to level up leadership. Almost all players have no time to do all that. I really enjoy playing Neverwinter, but Mod 6 and now these changes to the Gateway really have me discouraged. It seems Cryptic just wants players just to quit and find another game more fun.
Don't take gateway leadership away from the legit working-class players.
Use the captchas.
Botters are gonna bot. Ingame like they've been doing forever. Botters will script an in-game work around and legit people will find another game to play.
I really enjoyed crafting in the gateway, this is a heavy hit to my interest for this game.
I think this is the last straw for me. I'm too busy to log into the game everytime a task is done.
This decision was too heavy-handed and not well thought out, seems to be the norm now.
Andy - if I was in your position, the comments in this thread would be triggering me to go straight to management/developers and pulling this weeks patch. This has not been thought through at all, and is going to hurt the general player base (whilst the botters are going to adapt).
There have been some great suggestions and options presented in the comments above - if the team are serious about taking on board feedback from your players, you need to be looking at this. Not tomorrow, not for next weeks patch, not at the next Friday afternoon drinks - you need to be looking at it now.
Here's to hoping that this is revisited before patch time *keeping my fingers crossed*
Andy - if I was in your position, the comments in this thread would be triggering me to go straight to management/developers and pulling this weeks patch. This has not been thought through at all, and is going to hurt the general player base (whilst the botters are going to adapt).
I was once in Andy's shoes at one of my jobs, i went straight to the big boss, with a small trick of course. If i was Andy i would go with the screenshots from our comments straight to Wizards and ask their opinion, would they really like this game swept away by hoards of bad and childish decisions.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
I can't really do nothing but laugh. You guys at Cryptic are closer to the point of no return then you have ever been in terms of loss of players trust, patience and support. And then you do this? I don't do leadership, but i don't really need to to leave a comment on this bold decision you have decided to make. If it was me, I wouldn't be so stupid as to do what you're doing tomorrow without having a dev explain the plans for the future of the game. You guys are exceptional at raising tons of questions that deserves answering and yet giving none. Just unbelievable and highly unprofessional.
Disabling leadership is obviously not anti-bot measure. It is anti-player measure same as DH nerf. Bots can easy do leadership from in-game - just first one to program new bot and all boters will use it (same way as bots farm enchantments)
With all latest changes, It is obvious cryptic is trying to force pay-to win, mostly because of crappy/unplayable/boring end-game content. This is reason to prolong leveling from 60 to 70 (there is no much post lvl 70 content, so why not force players to play 60-70 content for 30 instead of 3 days).
I guess next patch will change refinement success chance (unsles it is already changed in code but not in tooltips)
0
instynctiveMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,885Arc User
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.
You can get AD from Rhix for doing daily PvP stuff. "L" -> "Earn Epic Rewards" -> "Daily PvP Matches".
Granted it's only 4k per day, but.. it's better than a kick to the head.
Well, I am almost at a loss for words on this gateway leadership move.
Personally I have 14 characters, 7 of which I have played and got all the boons on, the others I made in a vain attempt to earn enough AD to allow the playing ones to progress. None of my characters are BIS by any means and I am in game each day for a long time.
I actually play content as I do love this game, and whilst playing I take a few minutes at a camp fire to go into the gateway and do my professions on the other characters.
There is almost no way at all to make AD now, so many routes have been nerfed or changed.
Quoting Andy on his News post - "We are going to re-examine the non-profession methods of getting Astral Diamonds, and make sure they are rewarding sufficiently. "
My comment to that is - PLEASE, PLEASE re-examine other methods of getting AD BEFORE you change the gateway. You seriously need to have someone that has a big picture outlook on this game and considers the wider impact of anti-botting measures on the normal players. Don't drop a huge change like this without having already considered, and put in place, a balancing alternative.
Strongholds will die at birth as people realise that the enormous amounts of AD needed are impossible to obtain.
yours sincerely,
a truly disappointed player
0
myles08807Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 409Arc User
Raging impotently against this draconian measure is about as useful and likely to result in change as, say, arguing on the Internet...and I've actually WON an argument thereon, so I'm pretty sure I've used up my allotment for this lifetime.
Not going to quit. Not going to threaten, or beg, or plead. Going to accept that drastic anti-botting measures are required and take my lumps with the rest of my brothers and sisters who bravely send their Heroes and Adventurers and Men-at-arms out into the wild to destroy enemy camps and protect diamond shipments. I have heard of (and reported in every instance) Gateway exploits and I have never once experimented with 'em...I've been good but I know damned well that others have not.
I came to this game as a true neophyte, never having played an MMO and never having owned a console newer than the Nintendo 64 (my wife is an Ocarina of Time fanatic). I chose to pursue Leadership as a profession with my first toon, a DC back in the day when DCs were bloody impossible to level, purely for role-playing purposes. I had no idea how lucrative it could be.
Will that change? Yeah, a little. Without the midday check-in, I won't be able to update my shorter-time tasks to keep up the flow. I'll reassign my Heroes to longer-term tasks to keep the time budget on a twice-daily schedule and thus my lower-level tasks will fall to Adventurers, taking a bit longer but still fitting into the new time frame.
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.
You can get AD from Rhix for doing daily PvP stuff. "L" -> "Earn Epic Rewards" -> "Daily PvP Matches".
Granted it's only 4k per day, but.. it's better than a kick to the head.
LOL, sometimes those once-sided pvp matches are a kick to the head.
All those issues "I quit because .. can’t @work" can easily be resolved by just redesigning all of leadership tasks to 16h. No need to login from @work, and it shouldn’t be in first place.
The gateway should be removed all together. Full fledged browsers are and always will be just insecure.
It is even a security problem to login into the forums with ingame account password. It should be a separate forum account not accessable by hacking the forum accounts server, those security desasters reportedly already happend a few times.
Most counter measures against secondary game market suggested will not help.
Captchas? Will be done manually, and then the scripts run.
Caps on daily/max AD per char? Have more chars.
Caps on daily/max AD per account? Have more accounts.
You will never get rid of botters or the Black Market that has arisen around Neverwinter through prohibition.
Making it more difficult for normal players to earn AD and RP only increases the demand forcing loyal players into
the hands of Black Marketeers.
If you Increase the amount AD and RP we can earn through quest rewards, campaigns,salvaging and selling tiered BOE items, you will reward people for actually playing content.
In short hit Botters where it hurts the most, their pockets.
So then i presume you are gonna unbind every item that drops from chest or anywhere? Or if not i have only one thing to say: Please STOP!!! Maybe you can fix SW? Or can you come with a note at least, on if or when you have any plans for SW? The best SW's in the game already quit or made new chars!
1° Reduce Drasticaly the Refine Drops.
2° Make EVERYTHING bound so players cant sell anything on market to produce AD.
3° Create new BiS Refinable Equips Every mod to players expend ad in things that gonna be useless.
4° Turn Artifact Drop Rate From Dungeons and HEs Realy Low.
5° Remove Leadership From the Gateway to destroy their way of lvling it up without log on the game.
Its just me that noticed this game have been goin in an extremly pay to win path?
I hope the NW Team go back with that last decision or probably we gonna see TONS of playeable bots on PE and TONS of honestly players quiting.
0
bigredbrentMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 155Arc User
honestly if they have "other plans" how about waiting till you have those "other plans" ready and implementing them instead of just going all hatchet on it, considering how long leadership has been "botted" or "exploited" or whatever on the gateway, this seems like.. it is a little late and extreme????
I urge you to reconsider this change. You need help in coming up with a solution to the problem, LAY OUT THE PROBLEM AS YOU SEE IT AND ASK THE COMMUNITY FOR SUGGESTIONS. Contrary to what zone chat makes it appear, there are some very smart folks who play the game and would love to see it stay around. Don't keep shafting the folks who like your game...ultimately, you guys are the ones who end up suffering.
You will never get rid of botters or the Black Market that has arisen around Neverwinter through prohibition.
Making it more difficult for normal players to earn AD and RP only increases the demand forcing loyal players into
the hands of Black Marketeers.
There is so much truth to this statement it deserves being quoted until it finally sinks in.
This is going to be a gold sellers dream come true, when players have no other viable way to get AD other than paying a fortune for ZEN, or buying it for a fraction of the cost from a gold seller.
They nerfed Leadership to the dirt compared to what it was. They do everything they can so that legit players can not have AD unless they buy Zen and turn it into AD or turn unlegit and buy it from a gaming site. With the cost of some of the most simplest items being in the millions of AD and the facts that in order to get millions of AD you would have to spend hundreds of dollars in Zen it is just no feasible to buy Zen and turn it into AD it is cheaper to buy it. It is like they want to force people to buy unlegit Zen.
SOME of this can not be blamed on Devs. They high cost of items are the result of players knowing that people with unlegit Zen or people with thousands of dollars will pay it. However instead of doing things like removing Leadership from gateway they can work on a permanent Fix to fix the economy. Namely capping prices in the AH.
I know a lot of people are against it but this is also how people trade unlegit Zen in the AH as well. If you cap people will still sell and people will buy more stuff and Zen would be worth buying as your AD will go farther. Huge cashers would benefit as well. Sellers will benefit as they might not get as much as they use to off of an item they will sell more items. As most people are not going to horde there AD they will spend it on more items.
Well this is just my two cents. As I believe the solution of a MP cap like in a lot of other games and has worked very well could work very well here as well. You do not see people crying on Runescape because of a MP cap and there has been one there for almost forever. 5 percent up or down either way of the average price is RS cap. So if a lot of people start selling at the lower end the market price adjusts to a new norm like it could here. Yet there can also be hard caps. Like 1 million for a R10 Chant *for instance* So you could use both a hard cap and a soft cap. Think about it 110.00 USD on some enchants... Is that REALLY realistic? Or just plane stupid and broken when most those enchants are being sold by AD farmers.
You will never get rid of botters or the Black Market that has arisen around Neverwinter through prohibition.
Making it more difficult for normal players to earn AD and RP only increases the demand forcing loyal players into
the hands of Black Marketeers.
I have to agree with ravenbrand here. Getting AD in this game is hard , and newer players are not gonna wanna spend a lifetime of getting AD and will look for an easier way.
I have the same reasons for "DON'T DO THIS CRYPTIC" as mostly everyone in this discussion. I urge you cryptic, please reconsider for the reasons many of us legit, loyal, committed players have put forth.
I will miss leadership going away from the gateway, hopefully it shall return. In the mean time, I will play as I always have!
So, has anyone tried playing NWN on a Win10 tablet? They be out soon, and its the same OS as a PC now. I don't care if the graphics are not good, just want renew my tasks
Captchas? Will be done manually, and then the scripts run.
Yeah, no, this is nonsense.
At the point where you have to manually input 50 captchas to service your 50 accounts, you are no better off than doing things by hand.
Which is why captchas are used all over the internet for such services.
So then i presume you are gonna unbind every item that drops from chest or anywhere? Or if not i have only one thing to say: Please STOP!!! Maybe you can fix SW? Or can you come with a note at least, on if or when you have any plans for SW? The best SW's in the game already quit or made new chars!
That'd require certain people to care about more than eating all of an increasingly small cake.
why am I not surprised. I would curse you all to hell but what's the point. no ad to make in game anymore, no rewards or loot for trading,no doable dungeons, everything is bound or broken.. the story is known to all who play this.
it's like I'm playing single player game that only wants more money.
why don't you just make it p2p and get it over with?
we can't have the game installed and access it on every computer!!
I quit this then after 2 years. really nothing worth doing here anymore. yea good riddance to you too
well it has happened at last the game will become like wow they destroyed the economy so this is it the game will go down hill and be closed down this is not dandd any more cryptic finally showed there true colors were they want money only and don't care about the old players and new players that hav ebeen here from the beginning and I have not seen no dev speak up for us and listen to our opinions that is why I play star trek on line more than neverwitner and soon I will be on eleder scroll online at least there they did not destroy the economy the found out the hard way pay to play does not work soi give this game another 6 months and there will be less people here maybe the devs should have an automatic number system in game to show how many people have left the game or playing the game for pc and that will show what the in game people have been talking about
Well seeing how you've taken away the working person's ability to make a little AD from the gateway I think it's time I say goodbye to neverwinter. It's a sad thing but I keep seeing you guys making this game worse and worse and I'm quite tired of it. Many posts here have warned of a possible mass exodus. I believe they are correct and I'm joining it. Too bad to, this is really the only game of this type i ever liked playing.
0
kwsapphireMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 671Arc User
Disabling Leadership from the Gateway makes the gateway utterly useless. It was already *very* painful from a mobile device. Just last night I was considering creating a comparison video, showing how it takes 2-4 times longer to do profession maintenance on my characters via the Gateway over in-game.
1. Attempt to log in to Gateway
2. Re-verify my computer if my cookie has expired, even if I just logged in yesterday
3. Oh, and can't verify my account on my phone, because swapping to my mail app kicks me out of the Gateway. So I have to use at least two devices to verify if mobile.
4. Wait for character select screen to appear, which can take a minute or more
5. Swap to professions screen and wait for it to load, which can also take a minute
6. Click "claim reward" button and wait for reward to pop, which can take upwards of 5 seconds each
7. Repeat step 6 for all profession slots
8. Start new tasks for each slot, which can also take 5 seconds or more
9. Hit most of the buttons more than once, because even though the button lights up in acknowledgement that you tapped it, it's not going anywhere. Also, lots of vertical scrolling, lots of hitting "next page" and waiting for it to load.
10. Swap characters, repeat steps 5-9.
It's such a painful process that it takes far less time to do this in-game, even if I have to boot my computer up and patch the game first. The Gateway has always been slow and painful. And now it's useless to boot.
I guess I can remove that bookmark from all my devices. >:\
Comments
Methinks it's probably not the devs to blame here... ...this reeks of management.
I could imagine ways how this is handled in a non-damaging way for players - and I can also foresee that none of those will be implemented straght away... :^/
It's a really painful step, and will almost certainly melt away the ZAX backlog due to rreduced AD influx. And thereby hurt the ZEN sales, because probably a lot less people will buy stuff with ZEN when they only get like 200AD for the ZEN.
And when that dip then hits the monthly company account balance chart, some solution will be found, probably.
This won't stop those who are selling AD, they will just bot in game instead of out of game.
The reason AD sellers exist is you artificially capped the value of zen at 500 ad. This may change it, but you're taking a huge chance on losing a large % of your playerbase.
The funny part will be tomorrow when all those people who don't look at patch notes try to do leadership online like they've been doing for years and can't. The forums will explode.
Use the captchas.
Botters are gonna bot. Ingame like they've been doing forever. Botters will script an in-game work around and legit people will find another game to play.
I really enjoyed crafting in the gateway, this is a heavy hit to my interest for this game.
I think this is the last straw for me. I'm too busy to log into the game everytime a task is done.
This decision was too heavy-handed and not well thought out, seems to be the norm now.
Andy - if I was in your position, the comments in this thread would be triggering me to go straight to management/developers and pulling this weeks patch. This has not been thought through at all, and is going to hurt the general player base (whilst the botters are going to adapt).
There have been some great suggestions and options presented in the comments above - if the team are serious about taking on board feedback from your players, you need to be looking at this. Not tomorrow, not for next weeks patch, not at the next Friday afternoon drinks - you need to be looking at it now.
Here's to hoping that this is revisited before patch time *keeping my fingers crossed*
I was once in Andy's shoes at one of my jobs, i went straight to the big boss, with a small trick of course. If i was Andy i would go with the screenshots from our comments straight to Wizards and ask their opinion, would they really like this game swept away by hoards of bad and childish decisions.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
With all latest changes, It is obvious cryptic is trying to force pay-to win, mostly because of crappy/unplayable/boring end-game content. This is reason to prolong leveling from 60 to 70 (there is no much post lvl 70 content, so why not force players to play 60-70 content for 30 instead of 3 days).
I guess next patch will change refinement success chance (unsles it is already changed in code but not in tooltips)
You can get AD from Rhix for doing daily PvP stuff. "L" -> "Earn Epic Rewards" -> "Daily PvP Matches".
Granted it's only 4k per day, but.. it's better than a kick to the head.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Personally I have 14 characters, 7 of which I have played and got all the boons on, the others I made in a vain attempt to earn enough AD to allow the playing ones to progress. None of my characters are BIS by any means and I am in game each day for a long time.
I actually play content as I do love this game, and whilst playing I take a few minutes at a camp fire to go into the gateway and do my professions on the other characters.
There is almost no way at all to make AD now, so many routes have been nerfed or changed.
Quoting Andy on his News post - "We are going to re-examine the non-profession methods of getting Astral Diamonds, and make sure they are rewarding sufficiently. "
My comment to that is - PLEASE, PLEASE re-examine other methods of getting AD BEFORE you change the gateway. You seriously need to have someone that has a big picture outlook on this game and considers the wider impact of anti-botting measures on the normal players. Don't drop a huge change like this without having already considered, and put in place, a balancing alternative.
Strongholds will die at birth as people realise that the enormous amounts of AD needed are impossible to obtain.
yours sincerely,
a truly disappointed player
Not going to quit. Not going to threaten, or beg, or plead. Going to accept that drastic anti-botting measures are required and take my lumps with the rest of my brothers and sisters who bravely send their Heroes and Adventurers and Men-at-arms out into the wild to destroy enemy camps and protect diamond shipments. I have heard of (and reported in every instance) Gateway exploits and I have never once experimented with 'em...I've been good but I know damned well that others have not.
I came to this game as a true neophyte, never having played an MMO and never having owned a console newer than the Nintendo 64 (my wife is an Ocarina of Time fanatic). I chose to pursue Leadership as a profession with my first toon, a DC back in the day when DCs were bloody impossible to level, purely for role-playing purposes. I had no idea how lucrative it could be.
Will that change? Yeah, a little. Without the midday check-in, I won't be able to update my shorter-time tasks to keep up the flow. I'll reassign my Heroes to longer-term tasks to keep the time budget on a twice-daily schedule and thus my lower-level tasks will fall to Adventurers, taking a bit longer but still fitting into the new time frame.
I'll probably be more efficient at work, too.
LOL, sometimes those once-sided pvp matches are a kick to the head.
All those issues "I quit because .. can’t @work" can easily be resolved by just redesigning all of leadership tasks to 16h. No need to login from @work, and it shouldn’t be in first place.
The gateway should be removed all together. Full fledged browsers are and always will be just insecure.
It is even a security problem to login into the forums with ingame account password. It should be a separate forum account not accessable by hacking the forum accounts server, those security desasters reportedly already happend a few times.
Most counter measures against secondary game market suggested will not help.
Captchas? Will be done manually, and then the scripts run.
Caps on daily/max AD per char? Have more chars.
Caps on daily/max AD per account? Have more accounts.
Not yet smart enough.
Making it more difficult for normal players to earn AD and RP only increases the demand forcing loyal players into
the hands of Black Marketeers.
If you Increase the amount AD and RP we can earn through quest rewards, campaigns,salvaging and selling tiered BOE items, you will reward people for actually playing content.
In short hit Botters where it hurts the most, their pockets.
2° Make EVERYTHING bound so players cant sell anything on market to produce AD.
3° Create new BiS Refinable Equips Every mod to players expend ad in things that gonna be useless.
4° Turn Artifact Drop Rate From Dungeons and HEs Realy Low.
5° Remove Leadership From the Gateway to destroy their way of lvling it up without log on the game.
Its just me that noticed this game have been goin in an extremly pay to win path?
I hope the NW Team go back with that last decision or probably we gonna see TONS of playeable bots on PE and TONS of honestly players quiting.
Yes please!
There is so much truth to this statement it deserves being quoted until it finally sinks in.
This is going to be a gold sellers dream come true, when players have no other viable way to get AD other than paying a fortune for ZEN, or buying it for a fraction of the cost from a gold seller.
SOME of this can not be blamed on Devs. They high cost of items are the result of players knowing that people with unlegit Zen or people with thousands of dollars will pay it. However instead of doing things like removing Leadership from gateway they can work on a permanent Fix to fix the economy. Namely capping prices in the AH.
I know a lot of people are against it but this is also how people trade unlegit Zen in the AH as well. If you cap people will still sell and people will buy more stuff and Zen would be worth buying as your AD will go farther. Huge cashers would benefit as well. Sellers will benefit as they might not get as much as they use to off of an item they will sell more items. As most people are not going to horde there AD they will spend it on more items.
Well this is just my two cents. As I believe the solution of a MP cap like in a lot of other games and has worked very well could work very well here as well. You do not see people crying on Runescape because of a MP cap and there has been one there for almost forever. 5 percent up or down either way of the average price is RS cap. So if a lot of people start selling at the lower end the market price adjusts to a new norm like it could here. Yet there can also be hard caps. Like 1 million for a R10 Chant *for instance* So you could use both a hard cap and a soft cap. Think about it 110.00 USD on some enchants... Is that REALLY realistic? Or just plane stupid and broken when most those enchants are being sold by AD farmers.
I have to agree with ravenbrand here. Getting AD in this game is hard , and newer players are not gonna wanna spend a lifetime of getting AD and will look for an easier way.
I have the same reasons for "DON'T DO THIS CRYPTIC" as mostly everyone in this discussion. I urge you cryptic, please reconsider for the reasons many of us legit, loyal, committed players have put forth.
"Live long and Prosper" while you can
So, has anyone tried playing NWN on a Win10 tablet? They be out soon, and its the same OS as a PC now. I don't care if the graphics are not good, just want renew my tasks
Yeah, no, this is nonsense.
At the point where you have to manually input 50 captchas to service your 50 accounts, you are no better off than doing things by hand.
Which is why captchas are used all over the internet for such services.
That'd require certain people to care about more than eating all of an increasingly small cake.
aaaaaaand what about minor, timewasting, "first invocation" bug?
No.
1. Attempt to log in to Gateway
2. Re-verify my computer if my cookie has expired, even if I just logged in yesterday
3. Oh, and can't verify my account on my phone, because swapping to my mail app kicks me out of the Gateway. So I have to use at least two devices to verify if mobile.
4. Wait for character select screen to appear, which can take a minute or more
5. Swap to professions screen and wait for it to load, which can also take a minute
6. Click "claim reward" button and wait for reward to pop, which can take upwards of 5 seconds each
7. Repeat step 6 for all profession slots
8. Start new tasks for each slot, which can also take 5 seconds or more
9. Hit most of the buttons more than once, because even though the button lights up in acknowledgement that you tapped it, it's not going anywhere. Also, lots of vertical scrolling, lots of hitting "next page" and waiting for it to load.
10. Swap characters, repeat steps 5-9.
It's such a painful process that it takes far less time to do this in-game, even if I have to boot my computer up and patch the game first. The Gateway has always been slow and painful. And now it's useless to boot.
I guess I can remove that bookmark from all my devices. >:\