here it is in a virtual nutshell..
$25 PWE card = 2500 zen = 1,5 Mil AD ($12.5 : 750k AD)
( IIRC never bought one but I think I'm close)
Correct the math if needed
Now if ya look at 3rd party websites that are running these bots, exploiters:
On avg. $7.50 - $8.00 per mil AD. which I dont need to do the math but.
Lets say you want to buy 5 Mi AD to further your game...
PWE cost; 4 $25 PWE cards = $100 for 6 Mil AD
3rd party site topend cost $8.00 per Mil AD = $40.00 = Approx 5 Mil AD
And yez Cryptic PWE, forum moderaters, etc will tell you that they will scam you, hit ur acct, not safe, etc. but tbh, many, many of my friends ingame and 100's of other players have bought from them countless times without any of the above happening. How did they kno about these sites? Hmm chat spammin???? in game Moderaters could have stopped this early..
So in simple math PWE/ Cryptic is in a losing battle with them and not looking god for them anytime soon
Killing the leadership gateway is not going to stop this, they will only find another way. and how will they do this?
They will simply do what so many real players do with Leadership armies.
Except they will bot the program to log in each acct. complete and start the leadership tasks, then autolog next alt, etc, etc,,,
So to stop them at this point.. Its what over 75% of many MMOs have done within the 1st year.. Put GMs into the game... Which is where PWE has failed..
So until that happens, simple math.. 100's + players will continue to buy from them vs PWE..Cheaper way to P2W..
This is where PWE/Cryptic needs to change.. Lower the rates to in the zen market to compete with thse sites..
Or find a way to give ur player base a REAL reason/Reward to buy from you instead of the other guys until PWE will see the light and get ingame moderaters..
Comments
how about this: 10$ for epic mount 1 million ad and a whole other things will make a lot of players out there actually open their wallets and invest in game, whole lot more then the ones that do pay cryptic right now.
sadly cryptic fail to understand this and think they know best,so it is a losing battle against 3rd sites etc.
ppl do "market Research" and come to the conclusion: why should i pay 40$ for epic mount when i can pay 10$ and get way way way more!
Crptic should have each of their employees who are directly involved the game. programming , etc (with the ability and permision to permaban) actually login to the live servers and spend 20 - 30 min once or twice each working day ( RANDOMLY)..
This would do and help in the following:
1. Catch any gold/AD spammers and ba them
2. Actually get to kno their customers(Us the players)
3. Be able to help players with many game problems
4. Maybe even start to gain some real respect from the players.
5. Maybe even get some great feedback on future ideas or even possible solutions the devs didnt think of
6. Run dungeons with the players to actually see how difficult or help find bugs that players use to exploit.
7. Or just simply to play thegame to relieve some workload stress...
Thats just a few key positives that would hugely improve the game, the AD market, and even give more people to come to playing NW...
There are 0 reasons why this would not help the game... Just wonderonf why they havent done this...
Even botters value their time, and will bot the most valuable resource in the game, which is Refinement Points. Why would they need to bot leadership for AD when they have a community of players with leadership armies to do it for them?
The main problem is Cryptic failing to reward players for playing the game and instead thinking that removing rewards and adding more AD sinks and increasing RP grind is fixing the problem. Their solution is only perpetuating the problem.
The demand for RP is so great, that players will rather spend their time building leadership armies and turning over their hard earned AD to botters for RP. The botters in turn sell these large amount of AD to players in demand of AD and Zen for profit.
Leadership AD should never have been introduced in the first place, but since it exists, Cryptic's measures to protect the game economy have historically proven to only punish players instead of putting dents to botting.
...and that - in reverse - also sums up what the games ails from.
Posting a second time to explain you're on mobile site because you can't edit?
Seems legit.
A character even with low leadership rank and only a few slots unlocked could generate 10.000 AD per day only in a few weeks of "training".
An account with 50 characters could generate 500.000 AD easily per day. After a few month such an account can generate almost 1 million AD per day.
Now multiply this by 1,000 or even 10,000 and you get an idea how much illegal AD are floating in the economy. To ban such accounts only slow botters down. In a game where you can freely generate accounts to ban the account of a botter is nothing that would put him out of business.
So much illegal AD devalues the AD of legitimate player, pushing the backlog further and further, the prices spikes up. Currently we have no backlog but we are still stuck at 500 AD per Zen because many people lurking for a better ZAX price but after a while even the ZAX will drop, even if it takes time till we get another double RP event.
They're speculating on the market, when there's a several day delay to get zen it makes sense to keep it as zen, when there's no delay and the exchange rate could fall it makes sense to keep it as AD.
The reason botters chose to mostly use the gateway is the same reason we do - it is more time efficient, especially switching between toons. They'll just switch to bot in-game. They already run invoke bots in-game so it's no big deal to get those doing Leadership too. And none of this is rocket science. A quick Google turns up a whole host of invoke bot scripts and I'm sure Leadership scripts will be just as prevalent in a week or two once they have had time to polish them a little.
So the Gateway thing has merely interrupted the bots for a few days/weeks. They'll be back with a vengeance and I think we'll see leadership completely removed or nerfed beyond usefulness in the coming months.
This started with "we've seen a huge number of players botting Leadership in the Gateway". I don't know why they didn't just *delete* the accounts of anyone caught doing so. It's quick and free to create a new account but it is neither of these things to get Leadership to a rank where it can generate significant AD. A sustained effort on deleting the bad guys for a week would have had a much greater effect on botting. They could even have made a press event of it like WoW did a few weeks back.
We are talking about 750,000,000+ that can easily generated per day. Such a huge amount of AD easily shifts through the economy. I mean, after a while they hit their character limit of AD which was a reason it was in the backlog to turn into Zen.
The Holy Crusaders guild leader ♚ Mod 10 PVE Destroyer GWF guide ♚ Founding member of the Relentless Alliance
or the sales of zen are that big.
i don't understand what the fuss is all about.
people seem to buy loads of zen in cash shop.
2 or 3 days it takes if there's a 2 or 3 million zen request.
means pwe is selling lots of zen.
like a million a day.
so about 10.000 dollar each day.
guess that's not enough.
LOL! That's pretty funny . . . and true!
As I've said before, bots are just going to log-in to bot leadership now. This removal of leadership from the gateway did NOTHING to reduce botting for AD. It just made some casual legit players mad. I've even stopped playing the game completely for now - I have not logged -in nor worked leadership since the change was made . . .
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
Interesting. I just checked out Forsaken World - looks an awful lot like NW - classes, races, occupations, pets, PvP, guilds, auction house, etc. Maybe we should all "forsake" NW and start playing FW?
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
The reason "farmed" AD is "cheaper" than what PWE sets the price at is because the gold farmers have zero interest in actually maintaining the game. Neverwinter could fail tomorrow, and they wouldn't care. They'd just move on to the next MMO.
And their AD is created via exploits, botting and flat out stealing from other players. And so when people purchased AD from these sites, it creates incentives for them to continue to exploit, bot and steal.
If no one purchased from the farmers, they wouldn't have reason to exist.
If it was up to me, I'd not only track the bot accounts, but I'd track who they're moving AD to, and ban these accounts as well. If people knew for certain that they'd get their account banned for buying AD from gold farmers, that would act as a strong enough incentive to NOT buy from these guys.
But for those people out there who buy from 3rd party sites, just remember this:
Every time you see /zone being spammed, it's your fault.
Every time you see bots running in and out of instances, it's your fault.
Every time you hear about someone's accounting getting highjacked and all their stuff being stole, it's your fault.
Every time you hear about someone's guild bank being looted by a random member, it's your fault.
Again, Cryptic and PWE owe it to the people who are supporting them financially to provide a game that's free of exploits and botters like that, but when other players are literally PAYING 3rd parties to break the game, it's an uphill battle.
This has already been covered. They have done nothing but inconvenience the real players that have jobs and used the gateway while at work or on the way to work. The "real" bots just do it ingame.
They really have no common sense and just don't think through the consequences of their changes.
Thanks for the info!
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
If you ignore the doom-mongering bit of that, what he is basically saying is that the rewards for updating the bots are not enough to justify the effort in doing so. He might be a fantasist or he might be real but there is no doubt that botting in-game is much harder than through gateway. And I would have thought it should be easier to detect third-party scripts from the client.
One thing we should also keep in our sights is the rest of that blog where they said they would be giving us other ways to earn AD in-game. I'm hoping that is not an empty promise.
Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official.
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