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Endgame discouraging to new players
vashh19877
Member Posts: 15 Arc User
point one is elemental evil, i have read alot about it including Devs stating the that xp grind is not that bad for an mmo. the main problem is there is not nearly enough content to justify a grind like that. when your game plan to keep players busy is have them do the same thing over and over again, without enough content to actually lvl you all the way up to 70. (i was lvl 67 when i completed spinward rise with 27% extra xp slotted) i just feel the whole expansion should be reworked, after doing it once i have no interest in rolling another character, sure there are plenty of classes i would like to play but i dont want to do that again, it was not fun or rewarding in anyway.
the second huge problem is when you hit 70, you can grind campaigns for boons but that's just about it, how does a new character go about gearing for what every player wants to do? the group content of course. my lvl 70 character happens to be a GWF. our tab ability gets filled by taking small amounts of damage, in exchange our dps output is increased for a small amount of time. problem number one is everything is a one shot death. redesign the gwf tab ability or take away the artificial difficulty of cheap one hit death moves almost every mob in the endgame content spams.
the second problem is the recommended/required gearscore for t1 dungeons is just wrong, there is no group content that invites new players into the endgame at all. most people look for 2.5k+ gearscores to do this content. if you try to queue for this content with a "low" gearscore you will be kicked from the party. highest lvl gear you can get without doing these dungeons is ilvl120 (campaign currencys +AD) "overpriced/slightly better than random blues) and ilvl122 (black ice gear)
so how do you actually increase your gearscore by a meaningful amount without having access to dungeon gear? well you delve into the very expensive very low chance of success art of refining your enchantments. prepare to do everything you can to make AD to afford this (but not too much! your capped at a max of 24k a day unless you actually find something worthwhile that you dont need) past rank 7 your looking at a 20% or less chance of success and around 100K+ in materials you still lose when you fail.
i have talked to a few people trying to get into the game and they all feel the same way, just simply overwhelmed by whats expected of us just to play the game.... in all honesty i have played korean grinders that were not nearly a daunting as the task this game throws at new players. i honestly cant see how this game could survive very long with the brick wall that blocks new players from fully enjoying the game. but i do certainly see how this game only has one server. with this system new players certainly could not be replacing the older players who leave the game, its something the devs should probably be worried about.
the second huge problem is when you hit 70, you can grind campaigns for boons but that's just about it, how does a new character go about gearing for what every player wants to do? the group content of course. my lvl 70 character happens to be a GWF. our tab ability gets filled by taking small amounts of damage, in exchange our dps output is increased for a small amount of time. problem number one is everything is a one shot death. redesign the gwf tab ability or take away the artificial difficulty of cheap one hit death moves almost every mob in the endgame content spams.
the second problem is the recommended/required gearscore for t1 dungeons is just wrong, there is no group content that invites new players into the endgame at all. most people look for 2.5k+ gearscores to do this content. if you try to queue for this content with a "low" gearscore you will be kicked from the party. highest lvl gear you can get without doing these dungeons is ilvl120 (campaign currencys +AD) "overpriced/slightly better than random blues) and ilvl122 (black ice gear)
so how do you actually increase your gearscore by a meaningful amount without having access to dungeon gear? well you delve into the very expensive very low chance of success art of refining your enchantments. prepare to do everything you can to make AD to afford this (but not too much! your capped at a max of 24k a day unless you actually find something worthwhile that you dont need) past rank 7 your looking at a 20% or less chance of success and around 100K+ in materials you still lose when you fail.
i have talked to a few people trying to get into the game and they all feel the same way, just simply overwhelmed by whats expected of us just to play the game.... in all honesty i have played korean grinders that were not nearly a daunting as the task this game throws at new players. i honestly cant see how this game could survive very long with the brick wall that blocks new players from fully enjoying the game. but i do certainly see how this game only has one server. with this system new players certainly could not be replacing the older players who leave the game, its something the devs should probably be worried about.
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It took me 6 months to finish Sharandar, Dread Ring and IWD campaign.. got to 14K (gs) by that time did dungeons.. went to WOD did dragon runs which i enjoyed alot, and improved gear doing Tiamat.
Now you're lucky if you finish 2-4 dragons cuz they are very powerfull, and usually im in a zone with just not enough players.
So then lvl 70 came along, suffered the 60 to 70 which was okay, but will leave my 2 Alts for now couse i can't for the moment find the joy to go through that again.
Now im back to grinding DR and Sharandar again for the artifact stones, sitting on 2300 rating for months now, can't do quests in IWD or WOD cuz im getting my bottom handed to me at allmost every pack.
Point of this little story is, i think there needs to be Epic lvl 70 gear available in DR and Sharandar Item lvl 125-135, to make the jump to Dungeons, and/or do things like Dread Spire, Phantasmal Fortress, Biggrin Tomb, Drake Pens solo again... asking for invite and LFG everytime is not my cup of tea.
The only way you are raising Item level is to max out Artifacts and get as many armor enchant slots as you can and fill them with the highest ranks you can get.
A player in blue alliance armor can have 4k ilvl if they have mythics/rank12 enchants/armor kits. Don't you see a problem here ?
i spent 500k ad on a vorpal enchantment worth 40 gs, at that point i realized it was going to take forever to get anywhere in this game. its just a neverending grind with little to no reward for doing it. i can see all the people who are at best buy buying a new monitor because they lost 300k worth of mats on there last enchantment refinement lol. should have forked up 10 bucks to Cryptic.
its made even worse by if you wanna maximize your ad intake you have to pvp, which is a absolutely horrible experience at 1840 gs and no tenacity.
as for leadership im still turning out footman so i can do the higher ranked nothingness (like serously leadership gives you nothing until rank 25 just another ridiculous timesink )
you can recommend other pointless timesinks all you want, i would rather grind Teras endgame than this, atleast there are dungeons to be done and they need to be completed to progress its still a grind and there is still some chance to upgrading equipment but its much more doable and you dont lose a week or more worth of grinding when it fails. i would go back to rift too, they have more endgame content than you can shake a stick at 26 dungeons, 11 raids, 5 different types of warfronts. they are not that much older than neverwinter either, i just dont understand whats so appealing about the endgame progression the devs have decided to go with and why i can name 5 or more games that have more dungeons that are doable and fair ontop of not having dungeons in the title.
the refining materials are far to expensive for how often it fails, and its not even the community that has set the price on the most common type. Cryptic themselves have set Gmops at 100k or 5 days doing as much as human possible to earn AD. remember salvaging gear or selling equipment is not viable for someone who cannot get a group for endgame content.
this game should be called mega ultra super high risk gambling solo long term slow progression grinder now with almost unobtainable optional group content,
They did it for Tia... why not this?
Urlord
Why aren't you buying preservation wards? They're like 6k AD a piece on the AH. I agree with the general idea though.
Guess what, you NEED all of this <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> to further upgrade your character, and you need A LOT. So many that it's absurdly disgusting considering how much they cost. Like, seriously, BUY zen market prev wards ONLY to have em all fail on an upgrade attempt...?
I have never encountered a game with progression like this....
Level 70 content is ridiculously difficult for low to average geared people, and so it makes grinding to actually improve the gear even longer and less pleasant.
Then there are all the bugs. I've never managed to complete Shores of Tuern because the last boss simply lags so badly everything freezes for everyone. The epic dungeons also have so many bugs it seems most people just use exploits.
I posted on another forum how impressed I was while levelling up. The game up to level 60 is great, there's lots to do, you don't ever run out of AD by playing normally, you can always keep geared up. There's so much content you end up skipping lots as you outlevel it.
But really, the end game is in an absolutely disastrous state. A few months back there was a community letter saying lots of things were being changed to make the experience better, but so far, have there been any at all?
Which, you know, is great. I would have loved an actual single player Neverwinter game. Maybe I could have played it at night. But what would it have been called?
Baldur's Gate
...quite the opposite. Last thing was that 60-70 was made "more rewarding" by stretching it out even more.
Though: Quite some bugs have been fixed. Also some of the more egregious ones.
not to mention as another poster pointed out, the gear is nothing compared to your enchantments when it comes to raw stats and gearscore. so grind out the 67+ Gmops and buy yourself a perfect vorpal lmfao. or get rid some of that AD grind and fork up tons of real cash and make it yourself! you need atleast 12 coal wards or more, i'm not sure it was 2 depressing after just making my lesser and seeing the upgrade cost from that.
hell mabye i will mess around with some lower lvl toons with no intent to lvl past 60.
i just know cryptic needs to do something good for the overall community, the people who are rich are gonna stay rich no matter how many times you nerf ad income. fixing the problem itself will consist of removing the inflation your current system causes all on its own, the people who own the most rediculous items to refine that can be sold practically own the entire market. they set the prices, and they set them high, and its probably because they had to spend real cash to make them. your own system completely destroys the economy, i honestly dont think you have that much of an ad farmer problem, if anything the ad farmers are just your free playerbase trying to make due, sure some of em bot and thats bad, but dont you think its kinda sad that regular people have to play the system or pay to get anywhere once you hit 70?
if they had also upgraded the rewards overall,
if they had also started bug fixing classes, equipment and anything else on a more constant base,
if they had changed the difficulty overall,
if there were no more one-shots anywhere,
... and so on.
There is a feedback thread sitting in the feedback forums, and while there is a lot of player feedback in it... where are the answers from Devs on that feedback?
Stronghold blogs every week, but no time for saying at least something about that thread?
as for me i found something to keep me busy with a business model i can stand for, that's another mistake by me. i should have researched the cashshop and the endgame economy. i dont think im ever going to jump into something blindly again. it may have been free, but it was over 200 hours of my life i could have spent doing something i was not gonna regret in the end.
Thats how I feel now, too. I don't care how good your game is, if I percieve your bussiness model to be unethical, I will look for something else.
The only reason I bother posting, is becasue I really, really hope that they see that their scarcity marketing tactics are disnenfranchising paying customers, and that they look to examples in the industry that have far more ethical bussiness models.
This used to be a really fun game with a postive environment. Its a great franchise. I hope that they recover from this
the sinking is happening, there are tons of ex neverwinter players playing my new little hobbie. world chat was buzzing with comparisons of the two games (mostly informing people saying the game is grindy that they have not seen nothing yet) trading credits for the premium cash is alot more affordable too seeing they are not that pricey to begin with and the price is set by the developer, not purchasers thank god.
the difference from a free player and a payed player is the payed one earns things 50% faster, i can deal with that lol, a good way to reward people for paying without walling off content or progression to casual players.
you well never run into anything at anypoint that screams, want that to work out for ya? pay me. that is refreshing.
I know which "hobby" you're talking about. It definitely needs some tuning, but its got a lot of potential. The setting is novel too
launch time is always gonna have it problems, ive found that the fact everything can be done in a group to be a factor that keeps things pretty fun. ive also found that sticking to one of the beginning classes and having a gameplan for what you want overall is helpful too.
biggest issue i have had so far is virtually nothing is explained to you, they need a tutorial to ease players into the game. it took me some time to catch onto everything.
Actual gear is a red herring - the difference between the blue T1 armor and the black-ice infused T2 armor is not going to make or break you. The difference between purple and mythic artifacts, however, is immense; hundreds and hundreds of stat points. Same with rank 7/8 and rank 11/12 enchants, or rank 7 weapon enchants vs rank 10+ enchants. Massive differences in player power, all totally dependent on refinement.
While you can do perfectly well in all current content with around a 2500 gear score - and that is purple artis/arti equipment and rank 7 enchants, not TOO bad to grind out via normal ingame methods - getting appreciably higher than that requires a massive investiture of resources that is not reasonably obtainable without equally massive amounts of astral diamonds (mainly to buy cheap RP from the friendly bots).
then there is the fact that once you are geared enough to run instances, they are practically not worth running. a geared person could decide that they want to play a different toon and share enchants too. so as soon as enchantment slot hit we got us a 3k+ gearscore lvl 20 (could be later i dont remember.)