Maybe if game was good people would give more money for it just saying... This game still have problems from start I remember bigger issues than bots, back than in AH there was a bug that you can sell something for negative price and the buyer also got the price...
My main problem is that this is not the first time that months of playing ends up useless. Something always change in bad ways. I say thats enought for me. There are tons of games deserve more atention of players then this grinding ****.
Theres no any sense of achivement in this game, and I think there never will be.
I say stop playing neverwinter online till you didnt wasted more time in it.
I see a bunch of people speculating on how it will effect the economy etc and they make some bone headed statements, they simply don't understand basic economics.. Maybe the Dev team needs to hire a economist consultant to explain things to them.
If..and I say a big IF, botting AD is the real reason they are taking leadership off the gateway (I actually think it's a red herring myself) then there are actually several ways to combat botters on the gateway (of course that would only drive them in game to do the botting). One real simple method would be the query counter query method, an actaul human would have to type in the 5-12 characters that appears in the small banner pane that a bot can't translate, a human has to interperate what it means to do so. So you log on to gateway account and it shows that little pane with spagetti alpha-numerics and the bot is stopped cold, it can't translate what that means and don;t get in to bot the skills.
Back to the economy: 2 maxims always hold true in market forces.
1. Things are only worth exactly what you can convince someone else to pay for it, period.
They can lock in a vendor GMoPs cost but that only sets the upper edge value, if someone wants to sell it on AH for less, and someone pays that, that was the ACTUAL cost.
2.Value is set by supply vs. demand, ALWAYS.
The actual value of zen is somewhere in excess of 500AD, they have artificially set the cap at 500, thats why zen for AD trade requests sit forever unfilled, those that have Zen to trade actually buy what they want with the Zen and rarely trade for the AD value, if they released the cap then the actual value would float and settle at the real value exchange rate. This would make people fell the AD route was a better value and they would spend real live money to get zen, then buy the REAL value AD, then buy what they wanted, if it was GMoPs etc. they thusly "destroyed" AD and fixed the economy. The other reason botters do it isn't the amount each day they get from the actual leadership skill, it's the RP items, they get far more for those from the AH and get around that other artifical cap..the 24k/day limit. If they lifted the Zen/AD exchange cap this too would pass, they would have to drop their prices as the AD dried up from the real exchange rate. Thus reducing the financial incenetive to bot.
I keep seeing people making the assumption that if they dry up the AD from leadership that somehow things are going to get cheaper, more plentiful etc. This is false logic.
Consider this as an example of their false logic: The baker on the corner Fred calculates what it takes him to produce a loaf of bread, he factors the labor and material costs, the rent and power etc etc. He then tacks a tad more to that figure so his family can eat and his kids get braces etc and that sets his real true cost of a loaf to the public,
Now last week John his 1 loaf a week customer had a good job and was flush with cash and could afford a loaf every week. But this week, his boss cut his pay in half and he had his cash on hand dry up. Does the fact that john has less money in his pocket make the actual cost of a loaf of bread drop? No, it means john can't afford a loaf a week, he either cuts back to a loaf every other week, or cuts corners elsewhere so he can get that loaf.
Drying up AD actually does not make things cheaper, it just makes things go out of those with less moneys reach.
The gateway was intended as a simple fun dice diversion for those that couldn't get to actual game time. The interface was a bit faster and easier for those that wanted to set their profession skills, especially if your skill timer ran out you could use your mobile device and reset them. The "solution" they have enacted isn't going to give actual bots a pause, it will only punish those that are following the rules, as usual jerkwads acting bad make it bad for everyone else.
With this solution they killed 9/10 of any reason I would go to gateway now, I used to go to gateway and set all the skills on my main and alt, then log in game and invoke, then get to the actual game playing, it was far faster to do that and actually dive in the game, now all my game time is spent logging between characters in game, and the botter that has no time constraints at all? He is still botting, just in game now.
u need to block using leadership for first 5 mins when log in game to prevent future boting on live server (5 mins per log in would stoped boters or slow them down )
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romotheoneMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 729Arc User
u need to block using leadership for first 5 mins when log in game to prevent future boting on live server (5 mins per log in would stoped boters or slow them down )
This would be terrible... this is just another way to annoy the hell out of players who would only login to set their professions. It actually does nothing for a bot.
In reality there is no difference between a bot and a player with level 25 leadership. When you reach max level leadership its easy to cap your 24k AD limit on each character because the time for the AD its 24 to 14 hour intervals which means you only need to do them once per day, maybe twice.
Now a player botting at 25 has less to worry about than a player botting before level 20.
A regular player with 30-50 lvl 25 leadership alts can do all of this without botting because they only need to do two logins per day.
So in retrospect the players who have been botting the longest are not affected at all.
Once again this change really only affects the average player trying to scrape by.
u need to block using leadership for first 5 mins when log in game to prevent future boting on live server (5 mins per log in would stoped boters or slow them down )
Do you understand that what bot has and what normal Joe does not have? What bot has is time. It does not care if your delay is 1 hour.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
There are ALOT of great strong points here that I have to totally agree with overall and many much better solutions that should have been addressed in the very beginning..
I am one of the many players who doesnt get very much ingame time overall.. I work hard 6 days a week and use the gateway to try to at least least make some kind of AD when I am not able to play 6 days a week.. I am only able to play in game on saturdays and on a limited internet unfortunately, which I know I'm one of many players who are in the same boat..
Cryptic claims that the botters are destroying the AD market in Neverwinter. I have to agree to this to an extent, But the way you guys are going about this the wrong way.. To put a block on the leadership profession in gateway is not the way to do it.. you guys think that this being the first step to stop them is a honestly a joke..
Here are the problems and current circumstances:
1. All these botters are in game as well.. and willing to place my bet with my char's that each and every one of those accts have at least 10 or more char's running the leadership profession. Which why I understand the gateway block.
2. Many of these botters are more then likely on autokey running around ingame also making tons of AD via skill kits, using enchants to gather RP and other items of value.
3. and I imagine there are many other ways that they are abusing the game.
Place in game GM's..
The many ways of how this would help not only reducing the overwhelming amount of the many problems you guys have with botters and spammers.
Possible solution.:
1. have each of your employees RANDOMLY login into the game and spend maybe 15-20 each day.. Important that each one them has the ability to recognize them and the ability to BAN
2. do NOT set a schedule for the above.. make sure its 100% random logins so that the spammers, autokeyer's, and botters would never know when they can safely come into the game and blow up the LFG, trade, and Zone channels..
3. This would help you guys' gain so much more respect from your customers (us the players) when we see you guys in the channels chatting with us and maybe even helping us with some ingame problems, getting in realtime feedback about the current and upcoming ideas of Neverwinter.
4. Place and background program in game that recognizes these spammers chat text that they post literally every 30 seconds to 1 minute in all the channels constantly. ( I have over 300 ignored @names from this).. THey are always the same chat almost every single time, the mention their website name, AD for $'s, that they buy and sell AD, items, etc.. But they are always the same exact copy paste.. that should be easy to identify..
5. For each of your employees to take a small 20 minutes of their day is not massive, It would HUGELY reduce all these issues with the botters and spammers...
Neverwinter has been around for 3 years and still not having ingame GM's has allowed these botters, spammers, etc. to take control of the game economy. Look at all the other major and even new MMORPG's. Many of them within the first year take the time to place GM's ingame. Which keeps many of these issues at a reduced rate.
Thats all i got for now, but I hope that maybe you guys will eventually find some better solutions that do NOT hurt the players as much and hopefully find a way to bring back more players into the game.
Leadership should be killed (go hate me leadership-army-users). After this there should be a huge buff in terms of time vs reward!
It is just sad, i have semester break atm, i have a lot of time due to this and i like to play. I would alrdy be gone from this game if i hadn`t found a nice guild with fun ppl.
I play about 8 hours on a daily basis right now. Lets see how much AD i make for this playtime.
I usually make 15-24k through refining rough AD, depending if i do them in your "hour events which are actually not so good since they are timebased". i make about 50-80k sellable RP which i cant sell since i need it myself. Drops? Well the best i had in a day way making 40k AD through drops. More commonly is 10k, somedays even 0! Enchantments arent even included cause they have no real value.
As i said i cant rly sell the RP, cause i need them, and looking at the amount i need to make all artifact equipment i wont be able to sell them for a long time. But lets say i can sell them lets calculate:
20k AD per day for refining
91k AD per day for RP (when i am able to sell them in a year or so)
10k for drops
sum: 121k AD per day for playing 8+ Hours
So a player who has a 50 char account for an leadership army. Who doesnt kill any monster does any event gets not a single drop, doesnt have to run an "annoying, way to hard dungeon" can make 600k-1,2kk AD per day just for spending about 30 mins ingame, going through there chars to start leadership professions? If this numbers would be the other way around i would love this game. But where is the balance for time vs reward? I cant understand it, as it stands it looks like more of a punishment to actually play instead of making an army. I wont even start pointing out other flaws of the game, i think u all know them.
Please any of the ppl tied to the devs or mybe 1 of the devs themselves, please explain me why this is the case? Why is a person who spents actual time playing the game not rewarded? Why aren`t you changing it? I am sure i wont see an answer from any of you, but hope dies last
There is a big difference between botting nodes and botting leadership.
Botting leadership causess price inflation.
Botting nodes causes price deflation.
Why does cryptic tolerate node botters and not leadership botters?
Not certain but I can guess.
People who have 50 characters and bot leadership are probably "normal" players who simply want free AD.
People who bot nodes are often classified as "gold sellers".
Cryptic earns money from "normal" players, but probably nothing from gold sellers.
It's vital that cryptic control it's normal players in order that they continue to buy Zen.
Controlling node botters is less vital to the survival of the game.
Node botters cause price deflation only of things which are bottable.
Cryptic has absolute control over what is and is not in a node, and what drops from killing monsters.
Leadership botters can inflate prices of almost everything in game.
Leadership botters are less controllable and overall more harmful than node farmers.
Just my guesses.
The Zax exchange looks much better now than one week ago.
way to go, Cryptic!
People who have jobs and cant login from work should be spending real money instead of farming leadership.
Leadership should be killed (go hate me leadership-army-users). After this there should be a huge buff in terms of time vs reward!
It is just sad, i have semester break atm, i have a lot of time due to this and i like to play. I would alrdy be gone from this game if i hadn`t found a nice guild with fun ppl.
I play about 8 hours on a daily basis right now. Lets see how much AD i make for this playtime.
I usually make 15-24k through refining rough AD, depending if i do them in your "hour events which are actually not so good since they are timebased". i make about 50-80k sellable RP which i cant sell since i need it myself. Drops? Well the best i had in a day way making 40k AD through drops. More commonly is 10k, somedays even 0! Enchantments arent even included cause they have no real value.
As i said i cant rly sell the RP, cause i need them, and looking at the amount i need to make all artifact equipment i wont be able to sell them for a long time. But lets say i can sell them lets calculate:
20k AD per day for refining
91k AD per day for RP (when i am able to sell them in a year or so)
10k for drops
sum: 121k AD per day for playing 8+ Hours
So a player who has a 50 char account for an leadership army. Who doesnt kill any monster does any event gets not a single drop, doesnt have to run an "annoying, way to hard dungeon" can make 600k-1,2kk AD per day just for spending about 30 mins ingame, going through there chars to start leadership professions? If this numbers would be the other way around i would love this game. But where is the balance for time vs reward? I cant understand it, as it stands it looks like more of a punishment to actually play instead of making an army. I wont even start pointing out other flaws of the game, i think u all know them.
Please any of the ppl tied to the devs or mybe 1 of the devs themselves, please explain me why this is the case? Why is a person who spents actual time playing the game not rewarded? Why aren`t you changing it? I am sure i wont see an answer from any of you, but hope dies last
Leadership is a way for anyone who doesn't have 8 hours a day to play to make AD. I get about an hour a day and almost never get in when an event is running. So, for me, I don't have the in game time to make much AD
at all and leadership helps me make a little more than I could just playing. I only have 3 characters and only 1 at level 20 leadership so I don't make that much AD from leadership anyway. 100k every 20 days ( maybe less if lucky ) just on that 1 character and on most days, I get nothing with the other 2. And since most everything decent at AH cost so much AD and you need now ungodly amounts of RP, it will take me many many many months to gain enough AD to level up my stuff. Without the leadership profession, I would just have to go find another game because I could never get enough in game time to make enough AD to ever get anywhere.
Before mod 6, you could run about 6 to 8 skirmishes in an hour and make a little more AD that way. But now, at least for me, if I can get 3 done in that hour, I got lucky. I don't bother doing them unless the event is running and usually don't even then. I don't do the foundry quests anymore. With mod 6, they are just to much of a pain. Not to mention time consuming. For the casual player, leadership is about the only way to make any AD in the game now. They have pretty much tried to force people to spend money on zen by making it harder to get AD in the game which only makes people want to spend less money on the game. And making everything cost so much RP to level up, also only causes more people to lose interest in the game and spend less money. Taking leadership away from the gateway only hurts them more because a lot of people used that to do their profession(s). People will just move on to another game as this one continues to punish the regular and even more so the casual player every time you turn around.
This is all just my opinion and how I feel. So just take it as that.
To prevent an army of alts from botting would be to remove the army. I don't see a reason why there are mechanics in place to allow so many alts. I mean really, I can see having a total of 3 toons for each class as a max since each class has 3 paths, it would make sense to allow everyone to create an alt to play each path of each class.
Having any more alts than that is the open door to massive botting. Real people don't have time to manage that many toons, especially with all the game mechanic changes in the last couple of months.
I say limit the amount of alts, limit the amount of accounts that can login from one IP address, hire 3 real people (3-8 hr shifts to cover 24/7) to monitor the zones for possible bots hanging around. Pay them minimum wage and offer a bonus for each bot they discover.... to give them incentive to search and destroy the bots. This would also take care of a lot of in-game bots as well.
Implement this strategy and I think half or more of the bots problem will be eliminated. All these nerfs to combat the bots hasn't and will not work as long as people can create armies of them. It has only served to make the player base upset and left with the feeling of being ripped off yet again.
Another simply implemented measure would to be the use of capcha's in the gateway login and again that pop up randomly to get the human factor of control back.
The amount of time that management consumes to prevent botting will become less which leaves them more time to actually work on the game mechanics, bugs, exploits, NEW content instead of recycled content..... and the list goes on...
Just my 2 cents worth .....
Take the extra time to do the job right and it will never come back to bite you in the A**
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
I generally agree with the "why do we expect people to have so many characters?" thing.
To all the players who legitimately have like, 20 alts, I acknowledge your pain on this matter. But you have to consider whether or not other players have that kind of time; if a game is designed so with due effort, you can keep two or three chars at max tier, then someone with 20 should probably find themselves hobbled just a wee bit.
I actually only have 1 character of any effectiveness, personally. Everything else is just for professions and invoking.
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grogthemagnifMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,651Arc User
Let's expand on the lowering the number of characters to 16 (but only if you bought the slots or got them from buying packs/giveaways) for the first computer (not account, computer) at a physical address, a second computer would only be allowed 8, a third allowed 4 and 4th and above allowed 2. If you really wanted 50 characters you could get them by buying and maintaining 13 devices on your Neverwinter shard ( Neverwinter Preview and Owlbear shard would be unaffected). The buying and monthly cost of paying for 13 devices would reduce the number of accounts. Players can get around this by lying, but there is a cost for that too.
Another possibility is to reduce the number of items available for sale on the AH from 40 per character to 40 per account.
I am surprised no one has pointed at the irony of the "leadership armys" and "gateway" and the fact.. they LET US have 50 characters per account... seems like.. if you only let us have like.. 10.. or 15... you wouldn't be in this pickle or at least not as bad as you made it sound..
These changes speak to the maturity and capabilities of the organization(s) behind the game. Gateway repeatedly forgets the PC I use to connect to Gateway and throws us down a path of code verifications for each browser. Pretty elaborate and effective.
The Protector's Enclave chat bots have been around since before Mod 4 as far as I can recall - seems they are still working just fine at present. Where is the elaborate verification for this? Why can't that issue be resolved?
Yet once again - the 'legitimate' players get punished by extreme changes and the end results are summed up to 'thanks for your concern and suggestions, because truly you're the only one concerned'. This medieval way of dealing with problems is appalling and immature of a software development organization.
The tone and position of this organization since mod 6 has been consistently in decline with paywalls and will no longer continue to create a relationship with it's player base as mutually beneficial.
Thankfully Cryptic does NOT own the D&D IP. Here's hoping someone else will build an alternative to their attitude.
I see a bunch of people speculating on how it will effect the economy etc and they make some bone headed statements, they simply don't understand basic economics.. Maybe the Dev team needs to hire a economist consultant to explain things to them.
If..and I say a big IF, botting AD is the real reason they are taking leadership off the gateway (I actually think it's a red herring myself) then there are actually several ways to combat botters on the gateway (of course that would only drive them in game to do the botting). One real simple method would be the query counter query method, an actaul human would have to type in the 5-12 characters that appears in the small banner pane that a bot can't translate, a human has to interperate what it means to do so. So you log on to gateway account and it shows that little pane with spagetti alpha-numerics and the bot is stopped cold, it can't translate what that means and don;t get in to bot the skills.
Back to the economy: 2 maxims always hold true in market forces.
1. Things are only worth exactly what you can convince someone else to pay for it, period.
They can lock in a vendor GMoPs cost but that only sets the upper edge value, if someone wants to sell it on AH for less, and someone pays that, that was the ACTUAL cost.
2.Value is set by supply vs. demand, ALWAYS.
The actual value of zen is somewhere in excess of 500AD, they have artificially set the cap at 500, thats why zen for AD trade requests sit forever unfilled, those that have Zen to trade actually buy what they want with the Zen and rarely trade for the AD value, if they released the cap then the actual value would float and settle at the real value exchange rate. This would make people fell the AD route was a better value and they would spend real live money to get zen, then buy the REAL value AD, then buy what they wanted, if it was GMoPs etc. they thusly "destroyed" AD and fixed the economy. The other reason botters do it isn't the amount each day they get from the actual leadership skill, it's the RP items, they get far more for those from the AH and get around that other artifical cap..the 24k/day limit. If they lifted the Zen/AD exchange cap this too would pass, they would have to drop their prices as the AD dried up from the real exchange rate. Thus reducing the financial incenetive to bot.
I keep seeing people making the assumption that if they dry up the AD from leadership that somehow things are going to get cheaper, more plentiful etc. This is false logic.
Consider this as an example of their false logic: The baker on the corner Fred calculates what it takes him to produce a loaf of bread, he factors the labor and material costs, the rent and power etc etc. He then tacks a tad more to that figure so his family can eat and his kids get braces etc and that sets his real true cost of a loaf to the public,
Now last week John his 1 loaf a week customer had a good job and was flush with cash and could afford a loaf every week. But this week, his boss cut his pay in half and he had his cash on hand dry up. Does the fact that john has less money in his pocket make the actual cost of a loaf of bread drop? No, it means john can't afford a loaf a week, he either cuts back to a loaf every other week, or cuts corners elsewhere so he can get that loaf.
Drying up AD actually does not make things cheaper, it just makes things go out of those with less moneys reach.
The gateway was intended as a simple fun dice diversion for those that couldn't get to actual game time. The interface was a bit faster and easier for those that wanted to set their profession skills, especially if your skill timer ran out you could use your mobile device and reset them. The "solution" they have enacted isn't going to give actual bots a pause, it will only punish those that are following the rules, as usual jerkwads acting bad make it bad for everyone else.
With this solution they killed 9/10 of any reason I would go to gateway now, I used to go to gateway and set all the skills on my main and alt, then log in game and invoke, then get to the actual game playing, it was far faster to do that and actually dive in the game, now all my game time is spent logging between characters in game, and the botter that has no time constraints at all? He is still botting, just in game now.
On the economics lecture, I fundamentally agree to a point, but you also have to remember that the price of zen is affected by zen speculators and "irrational exhuberance." NWO's market systems are pretty unrestrained (aside from the 10% cut the AH takes), so free market rules mostly work. But for the zen market especially, I think that part of the reason why the price stays at 500 is because people know that it's going to stay at 500. You can make money by taking advantage of the limited amount of zen, which means people buy zen not because they want to use it, but because by buying zen they deny others from having it, which means the value of their resources on the AH becomes inflated.
Put another way, if the cap of 500 on zen wasn't there, the actual price the market would be willing to pay for zen would be different, and I don't necessarily mean over 500; the idea is that it's possible that the "true market value" is only greater than 500 because of the cap in the first place.
For instance, I used to buy Preservation Wards and then sell them on the AH at a profit, no risk. You basically get astral diamonds just for putting your money in the exchange. I don't do that as much anymore since the backlog tanked so I expect zen items on the AH to be reduced in price, and also because I've been using my alts to get coupons which I use to purchase zen items and sell on the AH (since the coupon allows me to extract a profit margin, where otherwise most items actually don't sell for a profit).
I have to LoL when I hear them blame bots for ruining the economy. Bots with 1 exception improve the economy! Look at what botters ACTUALLY do. The leadership tasks they are actually doing the most aren't the AD ones, they want the chest ones, the ones with the RP items. The AD ones are capped at 24k AD a day. The most they can make on those accounts are 24k AD per toon.
However, the chest ones drop RP items that earn far in excess of 24k AD a day. With the introduction of the artifact refinement content, it takes massive amounts of RP to level your gear and enchants/runes. Did I say massive? I meant MEGA-MASSIVE! That's stacks and stacks of STACKS of L4+ refinement item points to level, that's stacks of refinement materials like marks power,union,stability etc.
Players don't want to wait a 2yr. of self gathering a billion points of RP, they don't want to pay $10+ for the coal wards etc. Cryptic knew at the time they put in the artifacts and the new refinement system it was going to take millions of points and the average player would NEVER earn that much points.
So a botter gets the RP items from the chests and AHs them in stacks, he wants to get around that 24k/day cap, he is making them plentiful thusly. The average player would take months to get a stack, there they are on the AH in stacks for a bit of AD. The average player is actually benefiting from this, they are getting access that they would normally get. The economy benefited.
Now the 1 bad thing botter does. They are, through market means, creating alternative currencies. They are setting the real price for GMoPs etc. Not what Cryptic wants at 100k ea, but maybe 60k. Whatever the market will bare. What is the ultimate alternate currency? It's not the 1 trillion AD they got, or the 50 GMoP. Botter is the diamond card holder, he burns AD to light his cuban cigar and his butler wipes his rear for him with AD. They use the AH to buy up the rarest of the rare items and then repost them for even vaster amounts of AD (can you really have to many AD or to many mansions?) So that's the bad thing, they soak it to the wallet warriors. The wallet warrior wants BiS, he has to pay the botters high price of rarity.....BooHoo, I can live with it.
The botters are the RL equivelant to gold and silver hoarders. They know that the paper money is just phony money, that the governments manipulate currencies all the time, they want something that holds it's "value" and isn't made worthless by promise based money. In NW cryptic is the currency manipulating government, the botters are trying to weather each Mods new currency rates. They are so evil, they want an actual value to what they have worked for...bad botter.
Cryptic has known for a long time about the under market, EVERY MMO has a under market. They, with the artifact content/ new refinement, as much as admitted by their actions they know this, and were trying to out manipulate the botters in the currency tinkering game. Why the hell would they make something take a billion RP to BiS if they didn't know there was a way for players to get the RP? Why with ea patch did they kill the old BiS and add another and at the same time not make the artifacts a 1 for 1 refine? You lost 1/2 your RP when you upgraded your "new" BiS artifact? They were trying to dry up what they consider "excess" AD.
They have gone all about it the wrong way, don't try force, it don't work. Remove the incentive. Take the caps off of everything, let markets float, they will set their own "real" value. If you feel there is to much "excess" AD then fix supply vendors in place that eats the "excess". The vendors are the "government", they are eating profits with "taxes".
What do billionaires do with to much "excess" cash? They either reinvest making more. They get charitable and help the down trodden (you can't donate AD, you can't "help" other players and burn excess off in NW), or they buy another yacht or mansion (providing jobs for people building the yacht/mansion and the people maintaining and staffing the yacht/mansion) (the game equivelant would be enchants etc. in a guild vault)
Well, right now you can exchange AD to ZEN instant for 500 AD to 1 ZEN. Have to wait and see, if that changes, when there are more bots working on creating AD ingame...
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
You had me until you went on and on about your gold bugism.
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soditalloverMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 88Arc User
just had a check and its official the botters already have a 100% workaround not going to talk about it nor condone it but yet again the solution given does not hurt the ones intended just everyone else
why not just make the gateway subscription based on real money if you are so hungry for money?
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
That's ... an interesting idea.
Of course, you'd have to be careful about the rate. The bots are making money off of their endevours. If the gateway increases their return by X dollars, they'd be willing to pay X dollars per bot to keep the gateway. But, since bots work by having a truckload of bots active at once, X is pretty small.
Still, free to players would 100% balk at the idea of the gateway being pay for, and the cries of pay 2 win would be nigh universal, methinks.
why not just make the gateway subscription based on real money if you are so hungry for money?
*snicker*
The gateway is a lead-in item. A loss-leader.
Like "come one, come all to the mega low cost car sale this weekend! We will have clowns and face painting and bounce castles for the kids! We will have burgers and hotdogs...bring your kids....bring your spouse..but don't miss the mega-low cost car sale this weekend!"
It's a App item to cross market from, when someone is at work and can't log on to the server, they can from their mobile device, it's a platform to "back-of-mind" market from, you just got to click it at work, you got to click it while your in-laws yammer on about their vaction slide show etc. So that when you get home it's been in the "back of your mind" all day and you log on to the actual game to do whatever, but hopefully spend money on zen.
If they started charging for the gateway it would make it moot.
Post edited by lewstelamon01 on
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khimera906Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 898Arc User
This is my honest opinion and I am speaking for myself, not anyone else.
First of all, I value the fact you come here of your own accord and try to put things in perspective. Kudoos. It takes some guts to move away from the flame shield that you cannót help but need. You're only the messenger after all.
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You're making a lot of sense, my friend. Knowing Cryptic, though, it will go unnoticed.
@ op
You don't like people's reaction? What did you expect, when this change was managed so poorly? In the blog there's talk about more AD rewards in game and double AD events. I say talk is cheap. They should have removed Leadership only when the the appropriate changes in rewards were ready.
I hate dancing with Lady Luck. She always steps on my toes.
Comments
My main problem is that this is not the first time that months of playing ends up useless. Something always change in bad ways. I say thats enought for me. There are tons of games deserve more atention of players then this grinding ****.
Theres no any sense of achivement in this game, and I think there never will be.
I say stop playing neverwinter online till you didnt wasted more time in it.
If..and I say a big IF, botting AD is the real reason they are taking leadership off the gateway (I actually think it's a red herring myself) then there are actually several ways to combat botters on the gateway (of course that would only drive them in game to do the botting). One real simple method would be the query counter query method, an actaul human would have to type in the 5-12 characters that appears in the small banner pane that a bot can't translate, a human has to interperate what it means to do so. So you log on to gateway account and it shows that little pane with spagetti alpha-numerics and the bot is stopped cold, it can't translate what that means and don;t get in to bot the skills.
Back to the economy: 2 maxims always hold true in market forces.
1. Things are only worth exactly what you can convince someone else to pay for it, period.
They can lock in a vendor GMoPs cost but that only sets the upper edge value, if someone wants to sell it on AH for less, and someone pays that, that was the ACTUAL cost.
2.Value is set by supply vs. demand, ALWAYS.
The actual value of zen is somewhere in excess of 500AD, they have artificially set the cap at 500, thats why zen for AD trade requests sit forever unfilled, those that have Zen to trade actually buy what they want with the Zen and rarely trade for the AD value, if they released the cap then the actual value would float and settle at the real value exchange rate. This would make people fell the AD route was a better value and they would spend real live money to get zen, then buy the REAL value AD, then buy what they wanted, if it was GMoPs etc. they thusly "destroyed" AD and fixed the economy. The other reason botters do it isn't the amount each day they get from the actual leadership skill, it's the RP items, they get far more for those from the AH and get around that other artifical cap..the 24k/day limit. If they lifted the Zen/AD exchange cap this too would pass, they would have to drop their prices as the AD dried up from the real exchange rate. Thus reducing the financial incenetive to bot.
I keep seeing people making the assumption that if they dry up the AD from leadership that somehow things are going to get cheaper, more plentiful etc. This is false logic.
Consider this as an example of their false logic: The baker on the corner Fred calculates what it takes him to produce a loaf of bread, he factors the labor and material costs, the rent and power etc etc. He then tacks a tad more to that figure so his family can eat and his kids get braces etc and that sets his real true cost of a loaf to the public,
Now last week John his 1 loaf a week customer had a good job and was flush with cash and could afford a loaf every week. But this week, his boss cut his pay in half and he had his cash on hand dry up. Does the fact that john has less money in his pocket make the actual cost of a loaf of bread drop? No, it means john can't afford a loaf a week, he either cuts back to a loaf every other week, or cuts corners elsewhere so he can get that loaf.
Drying up AD actually does not make things cheaper, it just makes things go out of those with less moneys reach.
The gateway was intended as a simple fun dice diversion for those that couldn't get to actual game time. The interface was a bit faster and easier for those that wanted to set their profession skills, especially if your skill timer ran out you could use your mobile device and reset them. The "solution" they have enacted isn't going to give actual bots a pause, it will only punish those that are following the rules, as usual jerkwads acting bad make it bad for everyone else.
With this solution they killed 9/10 of any reason I would go to gateway now, I used to go to gateway and set all the skills on my main and alt, then log in game and invoke, then get to the actual game playing, it was far faster to do that and actually dive in the game, now all my game time is spent logging between characters in game, and the botter that has no time constraints at all? He is still botting, just in game now.
This would be terrible... this is just another way to annoy the hell out of players who would only login to set their professions. It actually does nothing for a bot.
Now a player botting at 25 has less to worry about than a player botting before level 20.
A regular player with 30-50 lvl 25 leadership alts can do all of this without botting because they only need to do two logins per day.
So in retrospect the players who have been botting the longest are not affected at all.
Once again this change really only affects the average player trying to scrape by.
Do you understand that what bot has and what normal Joe does not have? What bot has is time. It does not care if your delay is 1 hour.
I am one of the many players who doesnt get very much ingame time overall.. I work hard 6 days a week and use the gateway to try to at least least make some kind of AD when I am not able to play 6 days a week.. I am only able to play in game on saturdays and on a limited internet unfortunately, which I know I'm one of many players who are in the same boat..
Cryptic claims that the botters are destroying the AD market in Neverwinter. I have to agree to this to an extent, But the way you guys are going about this the wrong way.. To put a block on the leadership profession in gateway is not the way to do it.. you guys think that this being the first step to stop them is a honestly a joke..
Here are the problems and current circumstances:
1. All these botters are in game as well.. and willing to place my bet with my char's that each and every one of those accts have at least 10 or more char's running the leadership profession. Which why I understand the gateway block.
2. Many of these botters are more then likely on autokey running around ingame also making tons of AD via skill kits, using enchants to gather RP and other items of value.
3. and I imagine there are many other ways that they are abusing the game.
Place in game GM's..
The many ways of how this would help not only reducing the overwhelming amount of the many problems you guys have with botters and spammers.
Possible solution.:
1. have each of your employees RANDOMLY login into the game and spend maybe 15-20 each day.. Important that each one them has the ability to recognize them and the ability to BAN
2. do NOT set a schedule for the above.. make sure its 100% random logins so that the spammers, autokeyer's, and botters would never know when they can safely come into the game and blow up the LFG, trade, and Zone channels..
3. This would help you guys' gain so much more respect from your customers (us the players) when we see you guys in the channels chatting with us and maybe even helping us with some ingame problems, getting in realtime feedback about the current and upcoming ideas of Neverwinter.
4. Place and background program in game that recognizes these spammers chat text that they post literally every 30 seconds to 1 minute in all the channels constantly. ( I have over 300 ignored @names from this).. THey are always the same chat almost every single time, the mention their website name, AD for $'s, that they buy and sell AD, items, etc.. But they are always the same exact copy paste.. that should be easy to identify..
5. For each of your employees to take a small 20 minutes of their day is not massive, It would HUGELY reduce all these issues with the botters and spammers...
Neverwinter has been around for 3 years and still not having ingame GM's has allowed these botters, spammers, etc. to take control of the game economy. Look at all the other major and even new MMORPG's. Many of them within the first year take the time to place GM's ingame. Which keeps many of these issues at a reduced rate.
Thats all i got for now, but I hope that maybe you guys will eventually find some better solutions that do NOT hurt the players as much and hopefully find a way to bring back more players into the game.
It is just sad, i have semester break atm, i have a lot of time due to this and i like to play. I would alrdy be gone from this game if i hadn`t found a nice guild with fun ppl.
I play about 8 hours on a daily basis right now. Lets see how much AD i make for this playtime.
I usually make 15-24k through refining rough AD, depending if i do them in your "hour events which are actually not so good since they are timebased". i make about 50-80k sellable RP which i cant sell since i need it myself. Drops? Well the best i had in a day way making 40k AD through drops. More commonly is 10k, somedays even 0! Enchantments arent even included cause they have no real value.
As i said i cant rly sell the RP, cause i need them, and looking at the amount i need to make all artifact equipment i wont be able to sell them for a long time. But lets say i can sell them lets calculate:
20k AD per day for refining
91k AD per day for RP (when i am able to sell them in a year or so)
10k for drops
sum: 121k AD per day for playing 8+ Hours
So a player who has a 50 char account for an leadership army. Who doesnt kill any monster does any event gets not a single drop, doesnt have to run an "annoying, way to hard dungeon" can make 600k-1,2kk AD per day just for spending about 30 mins ingame, going through there chars to start leadership professions? If this numbers would be the other way around i would love this game. But where is the balance for time vs reward? I cant understand it, as it stands it looks like more of a punishment to actually play instead of making an army. I wont even start pointing out other flaws of the game, i think u all know them.
Please any of the ppl tied to the devs or mybe 1 of the devs themselves, please explain me why this is the case? Why is a person who spents actual time playing the game not rewarded? Why aren`t you changing it? I am sure i wont see an answer from any of you, but hope dies last
Botting leadership causess price inflation.
Botting nodes causes price deflation.
Why does cryptic tolerate node botters and not leadership botters?
Not certain but I can guess.
People who have 50 characters and bot leadership are probably "normal" players who simply want free AD.
People who bot nodes are often classified as "gold sellers".
Cryptic earns money from "normal" players, but probably nothing from gold sellers.
It's vital that cryptic control it's normal players in order that they continue to buy Zen.
Controlling node botters is less vital to the survival of the game.
Node botters cause price deflation only of things which are bottable.
Cryptic has absolute control over what is and is not in a node, and what drops from killing monsters.
Leadership botters can inflate prices of almost everything in game.
Leadership botters are less controllable and overall more harmful than node farmers.
Just my guesses.
The Zax exchange looks much better now than one week ago.
way to go, Cryptic!
People who have jobs and cant login from work should be spending real money instead of farming leadership.
Leadership is a way for anyone who doesn't have 8 hours a day to play to make AD. I get about an hour a day and almost never get in when an event is running. So, for me, I don't have the in game time to make much AD
at all and leadership helps me make a little more than I could just playing. I only have 3 characters and only 1 at level 20 leadership so I don't make that much AD from leadership anyway. 100k every 20 days ( maybe less if lucky ) just on that 1 character and on most days, I get nothing with the other 2. And since most everything decent at AH cost so much AD and you need now ungodly amounts of RP, it will take me many many many months to gain enough AD to level up my stuff. Without the leadership profession, I would just have to go find another game because I could never get enough in game time to make enough AD to ever get anywhere.
Before mod 6, you could run about 6 to 8 skirmishes in an hour and make a little more AD that way. But now, at least for me, if I can get 3 done in that hour, I got lucky. I don't bother doing them unless the event is running and usually don't even then. I don't do the foundry quests anymore. With mod 6, they are just to much of a pain. Not to mention time consuming. For the casual player, leadership is about the only way to make any AD in the game now. They have pretty much tried to force people to spend money on zen by making it harder to get AD in the game which only makes people want to spend less money on the game. And making everything cost so much RP to level up, also only causes more people to lose interest in the game and spend less money. Taking leadership away from the gateway only hurts them more because a lot of people used that to do their profession(s). People will just move on to another game as this one continues to punish the regular and even more so the casual player every time you turn around.
This is all just my opinion and how I feel. So just take it as that.
Having any more alts than that is the open door to massive botting. Real people don't have time to manage that many toons, especially with all the game mechanic changes in the last couple of months.
I say limit the amount of alts, limit the amount of accounts that can login from one IP address, hire 3 real people (3-8 hr shifts to cover 24/7) to monitor the zones for possible bots hanging around. Pay them minimum wage and offer a bonus for each bot they discover.... to give them incentive to search and destroy the bots. This would also take care of a lot of in-game bots as well.
Implement this strategy and I think half or more of the bots problem will be eliminated. All these nerfs to combat the bots hasn't and will not work as long as people can create armies of them. It has only served to make the player base upset and left with the feeling of being ripped off yet again.
Another simply implemented measure would to be the use of capcha's in the gateway login and again that pop up randomly to get the human factor of control back.
The amount of time that management consumes to prevent botting will become less which leaves them more time to actually work on the game mechanics, bugs, exploits, NEW content instead of recycled content..... and the list goes on...
Just my 2 cents worth .....
To all the players who legitimately have like, 20 alts, I acknowledge your pain on this matter. But you have to consider whether or not other players have that kind of time; if a game is designed so with due effort, you can keep two or three chars at max tier, then someone with 20 should probably find themselves hobbled just a wee bit.
I actually only have 1 character of any effectiveness, personally. Everything else is just for professions and invoking.
Another possibility is to reduce the number of items available for sale on the AH from 40 per character to 40 per account.
The Protector's Enclave chat bots have been around since before Mod 4 as far as I can recall - seems they are still working just fine at present. Where is the elaborate verification for this? Why can't that issue be resolved?
Yet once again - the 'legitimate' players get punished by extreme changes and the end results are summed up to 'thanks for your concern and suggestions, because truly you're the only one concerned'. This medieval way of dealing with problems is appalling and immature of a software development organization.
The tone and position of this organization since mod 6 has been consistently in decline with paywalls and will no longer continue to create a relationship with it's player base as mutually beneficial.
Thankfully Cryptic does NOT own the D&D IP. Here's hoping someone else will build an alternative to their attitude.
On the economics lecture, I fundamentally agree to a point, but you also have to remember that the price of zen is affected by zen speculators and "irrational exhuberance." NWO's market systems are pretty unrestrained (aside from the 10% cut the AH takes), so free market rules mostly work. But for the zen market especially, I think that part of the reason why the price stays at 500 is because people know that it's going to stay at 500. You can make money by taking advantage of the limited amount of zen, which means people buy zen not because they want to use it, but because by buying zen they deny others from having it, which means the value of their resources on the AH becomes inflated.
Put another way, if the cap of 500 on zen wasn't there, the actual price the market would be willing to pay for zen would be different, and I don't necessarily mean over 500; the idea is that it's possible that the "true market value" is only greater than 500 because of the cap in the first place.
For instance, I used to buy Preservation Wards and then sell them on the AH at a profit, no risk. You basically get astral diamonds just for putting your money in the exchange. I don't do that as much anymore since the backlog tanked so I expect zen items on the AH to be reduced in price, and also because I've been using my alts to get coupons which I use to purchase zen items and sell on the AH (since the coupon allows me to extract a profit margin, where otherwise most items actually don't sell for a profit).
Bots likely unaffected.
However, the chest ones drop RP items that earn far in excess of 24k AD a day. With the introduction of the artifact refinement content, it takes massive amounts of RP to level your gear and enchants/runes. Did I say massive? I meant MEGA-MASSIVE! That's stacks and stacks of STACKS of L4+ refinement item points to level, that's stacks of refinement materials like marks power,union,stability etc.
Players don't want to wait a 2yr. of self gathering a billion points of RP, they don't want to pay $10+ for the coal wards etc. Cryptic knew at the time they put in the artifacts and the new refinement system it was going to take millions of points and the average player would NEVER earn that much points.
So a botter gets the RP items from the chests and AHs them in stacks, he wants to get around that 24k/day cap, he is making them plentiful thusly. The average player would take months to get a stack, there they are on the AH in stacks for a bit of AD. The average player is actually benefiting from this, they are getting access that they would normally get. The economy benefited.
Now the 1 bad thing botter does. They are, through market means, creating alternative currencies. They are setting the real price for GMoPs etc. Not what Cryptic wants at 100k ea, but maybe 60k. Whatever the market will bare. What is the ultimate alternate currency? It's not the 1 trillion AD they got, or the 50 GMoP. Botter is the diamond card holder, he burns AD to light his cuban cigar and his butler wipes his rear for him with AD. They use the AH to buy up the rarest of the rare items and then repost them for even vaster amounts of AD (can you really have to many AD or to many mansions?) So that's the bad thing, they soak it to the wallet warriors. The wallet warrior wants BiS, he has to pay the botters high price of rarity.....BooHoo, I can live with it.
The botters are the RL equivelant to gold and silver hoarders. They know that the paper money is just phony money, that the governments manipulate currencies all the time, they want something that holds it's "value" and isn't made worthless by promise based money. In NW cryptic is the currency manipulating government, the botters are trying to weather each Mods new currency rates. They are so evil, they want an actual value to what they have worked for...bad botter.
Cryptic has known for a long time about the under market, EVERY MMO has a under market. They, with the artifact content/ new refinement, as much as admitted by their actions they know this, and were trying to out manipulate the botters in the currency tinkering game. Why the hell would they make something take a billion RP to BiS if they didn't know there was a way for players to get the RP? Why with ea patch did they kill the old BiS and add another and at the same time not make the artifacts a 1 for 1 refine? You lost 1/2 your RP when you upgraded your "new" BiS artifact? They were trying to dry up what they consider "excess" AD.
They have gone all about it the wrong way, don't try force, it don't work. Remove the incentive. Take the caps off of everything, let markets float, they will set their own "real" value. If you feel there is to much "excess" AD then fix supply vendors in place that eats the "excess". The vendors are the "government", they are eating profits with "taxes".
What do billionaires do with to much "excess" cash? They either reinvest making more. They get charitable and help the down trodden (you can't donate AD, you can't "help" other players and burn excess off in NW), or they buy another yacht or mansion (providing jobs for people building the yacht/mansion and the people maintaining and staffing the yacht/mansion) (the game equivelant would be enchants etc. in a guild vault)
Of course, you'd have to be careful about the rate. The bots are making money off of their endevours. If the gateway increases their return by X dollars, they'd be willing to pay X dollars per bot to keep the gateway. But, since bots work by having a truckload of bots active at once, X is pretty small.
Still, free to players would 100% balk at the idea of the gateway being pay for, and the cries of pay 2 win would be nigh universal, methinks.
*snicker*
The gateway is a lead-in item. A loss-leader.
Like "come one, come all to the mega low cost car sale this weekend! We will have clowns and face painting and bounce castles for the kids! We will have burgers and hotdogs...bring your kids....bring your spouse..but don't miss the mega-low cost car sale this weekend!"
It's a App item to cross market from, when someone is at work and can't log on to the server, they can from their mobile device, it's a platform to "back-of-mind" market from, you just got to click it at work, you got to click it while your in-laws yammer on about their vaction slide show etc. So that when you get home it's been in the "back of your mind" all day and you log on to the actual game to do whatever, but hopefully spend money on zen.
If they started charging for the gateway it would make it moot.
@ op
You don't like people's reaction? What did you expect, when this change was managed so poorly? In the blog there's talk about more AD rewards in game and double AD events. I say talk is cheap. They should have removed Leadership only when the the appropriate changes in rewards were ready.