I have a problem with the requirements of getting AD, like most people I have hardly any time to play a game (wife and kids even dog come first) so getting in a group to do a dungeon run pretty much blows for me. With the current dungeons in the game that require 1,600 or even the 2,000 item score are great since I have a whopping 2.5k item score but people want 3k for the 1,600 dungeons and 4k for the 2k dungeons.
How about you bring back epic clock tower (put it at 500 item score - so its a group people will only want 2k base) for us very casual players with our alt armies? Make it a single player dungeon if you want but have something that we can use these hordes of epic keys we are getting from vip access.. I latterly have over 3 stacks of 99 vip epic dungeon keys which are more useless then the scrolls of idenfication. or makes those keys able to open normal dungeons for us non-4k item score elitists that have more things to do than flash our item scores to get in a dungeon that less then half the required amount.
My guess: he said you must either have time to play and get AD, or have no time and buy zen with money.
Leadership was a way for guys with no time, to get AD-Zen without paying money. Leadership being on gateway allowed such guys to manage a leadership army everywhere. Now only option for guys with no time will be to buy Zen cause there will be no other way to earn ADs.
Still, being smart you can find good ways to earn fast AD. Will just be less authomatic and easy than "creating a leadership army.
Not sure if and how this will affect botters since i'm not into the matter. We will see...
My suggestions:
Make Epic Dungeons give REAL REWARDS. I mean those drops you could sell for a lot of ADs in auction house.
Make campaigns complete for all toons on same account. I mean, ok, you can sell campaign completion items from zen store to players who don't want to grind all campaigns and wait weeks to have all boons.
But if i already completed all the sh*tload of stuff you go through to gett all boons in all campaigns...why the hell i must repeat the same titanic quest for each new toon i create on my account????? It's completely alt-unfriendly and HAMSTER.
Right now, creating alts was useful only to have a leadership army and earn AD while focusing on your main toon. With these changes, who do you think will EVER try to create alts? For what purpose? To complete dungeons and PvP you need to build them a bit. Main way to build them is through boons.
I have 5 toons. 1 is main with all boons. 4 are alts i try to more or less develop a bit. I'd play them more but seriously, to make them decent i need to get boons. To get boons i have to grind each campaign basically 4 times.
You devs must be out of your mind if you think any SANE person woul ever grind Shar, Dread, Icewind, ToD and the rest more than once.
Which means, building alts is basically impossible and useless right now, after these leadership changes.
If leadership army is not useful anymore, make the game more alt-friendly.
Like giving a Bound to Character copy of your main toon's enchants to each new alt you create. If you sell the original enchant, the "copies" on your account are deleted, being basically "linked" to the original source (main toon gear).
And once you complete all the campaigns and get all the boons on one toon, you automatically get them "Account wide" on all the other toons.
Right now, we have the majority of posters in this thread saying what a ridiculous idea it is. We're probably the minority who actually follow the forums and news, and keep updated with information on the game.
Come Thursday, there'll be a whole lot of players logging in to to find their alts, be it one or two, or 'an army' can no longer generate primary currency for them with one or two logins a day. Do the developers really think these people will instead spend countless hours per day grinding normal Temple of the Spider and Dread Legion on multiple characters just to generate revenue for the insane refinement grind?
I'd imagine even the most patient players are suddenly going to realize mindnumbing repetition and minimal reward equals 'look for a new game.' MMO players are often noted for the ability to show patience with a grind, but even the most patient must have a point where common sense kicks in and they see that their entertainment is turning into a job... and not a lucrative, enjoyable one at that...
maybe not just fire, but Hasbro could revoke liscense contract because it is ruining the reputation. i dont understand these devs and business managers doing more harm than rather fighting the bots since they take big slice of cut from Cryptic, and they are the ones who voliated CoC and EULA, not the players. again, i wonder what the devs are doing, are they driving this game into the MMO Graveyard? so they can get unemployment check? no, i would forbid them, if i am CEO of other game firm, i wouldnt hire them, i would blacklist those. i would hire unemployed programmers from Kingdom of Kaldimar, those work for Studio 38 did very well and almost flawless/bug free game, they all have lost and most are unpaid since Studio 38 went bankrupted.
Very well said!
As a former active law practitioner i have looked a few times at the contract terms under which we make a deal and i have tried once to point out to Lew, that they should change it or make a huge rework on it, cause it wouldn't stand a chance in front of a real independent court. It has more flaws in it, then correct lines. The entire word structure can be stretched like a chewing gum, a playground for lawyers.
I am very close to believe too, that they want to get out of contract and this is a "mild" way to get rid of us and being able to shut down the servers or keep them only alive like a mummy as a decoy, only with a select few on board.
Even the worst manager on earth would now, he is killing the game slowly, but surely, i have no doubts here.
Blacklist doesn't work sadly, it worked back in the past but not nowadays, but yes it would be the ultimate tool to make abusers stop playing with licences and people's money and feelings again and again. The sad truth is, that many people involved in this won't cry a tear if NWO goes to the graveyard, cause they have their fingers in many other games, many other projects, so sadly we will meet them again for sure. They are like energy, they don't get wasted, they just transform.
Off topic a bit:
BTW the entire IT industry is a big bad joke nowadays, just take a look at it closer, some examples from the IT world, 15-19 year old kids playing Mods, kicking and banning adult people, early 20's making decisions, that in the past not only a 40+ year old would have dared to make without consulting for at least a month with experts or just speak about quality, gone, just refurbished games are rolled out, it would take a miracle to brake this cycle, but i don't wanna go too deep in this.
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
0
kreatyveMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 10,545Community Moderator
strange I loaded up on the test server and when I salavaged my weapon it gave me a mark of something instead of AD.
That's because you salvaged an artifact weapon. Salvaging your artifact weapon never gave AD.
My opinions are my own. I do not work for PWE or Cryptic. - Forum Rules - Protector's Enclave Discord - I play on Xbox Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official. Any messages written in orange are official moderation messages. Signature images are now fixed!
An account wide AD limit, and then let the players chose, how they want to reach it... problem solved.
And another point, it's hard to take someone serious, when talking about players not going into foundries, while the Dev support for the foundry is really falling behind, and it allways takes days or even weeks after an update, before foundries can be played again.
You might want to look into that at some point, so that the foundry might see some love too.
I feel campaign Daily quests should give AD, most of the average player's time is spent doing dailies. Also RAD needs to go away. Everything should give AD not rough astral diamonds. We need to get something in return for the loss of AD revenue from Leadership, say a chance at a GMOP or Coalescent Ward for high level Leadership tasks. Though in truth this would make more sense as an Artificing task. Leadership needs to provide something....as a matter of fact all professions need reworked, since other than a couple tasks in Jewelcrafting, Black Ice, and possibly Alchemy the others are totally useless, aside from making undergarments.
I have a problem with the requirements of getting AD, like most people I have hardly any time to play a game (wife and kids even dog come first) so getting in a group to do a dungeon run pretty much blows for me. With the current dungeons in the game that require 1,600 or even the 2,000 item score are great since I have a whopping 2.5k item score but people want 3k for the 1,600 dungeons and 4k for the 2k dungeons.
How about you bring back epic clock tower (put it at 500 item score - so its a group people will only want 2k base) for us very casual players with our alt armies? Make it a single player dungeon if you want but have something that we can use these hordes of epic keys we are getting from vip access.. I latterly have over 3 stacks of 99 vip epic dungeon keys which are more useless then the scrolls of idenfication. or makes those keys able to open normal dungeons for us non-4k item score elitists that have more things to do than flash our item scores to get in a dungeon that less then half the required amount.
Hey I saw your post complaing about people not wanting to invite you to dungeons because they discriminate you on item level. If you are looking for a guild I could invite you to ours, True DragonBlood. We're a friendly non-exploit guild that welcome any player, no matter level, item level or level of experience. We're here to help and have fun. You have a good day - Elva
Damage report: Just imagine fellow players and dear officals, what will hit us next week, if this HAMSTER will go live, my guild, which has 97 active acounts and a weekend peak usually this time, has only 4 people online, me included. Nobody is doing anything substantial in SH, all are afraid to spend, cause nobody can see the outcome of this "fantastic" decision.
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 love it. Finally the non-players who had 10 characters all running leadership purely to generate AD will have to actually play the game to earn money. Insane prices on some items will finally fall to where normal players can afford them. Wallet warriors will still be able to spend money and casual players with an hour or so a day to run a dungeon will be able to actually make AD. People will have something to shoot for and gear will become worth something again. They should have made this change long ago, not that the AD mongers will not still find ways to farm endless AD, but at least they can turn off the easiest method that any schlub with too much time on his hands can use to generate AD and inflate the economy.
Well, I play my 11 characters, thank you. And even as a casual, I depend on the LS profession to get the marks and wards required to advance my toons. More so because I've got not so much free time than because I've got too much of it. The point is: there was (since a year or so), is, and will be (with the anounced changes) not enough AD to make in game, except for the BiS crowd, especially for casuals, which often don't hit skirmish times and don't have time for more than one or two dungeon runs on most days. It's NOT motivating to see a demand of 1m AD (fixed by Cryptic and no reduction proposed) or more just to upgrade one single artifact of eight on one single character out of eleven, while only able to earn about 10-20k AD per day (not per character).
I'm laughing all the way to the dungeon and I hope folks can take it in good humor. It's not theft; nobody is entitled to make waves of AD for virtually no effort. That's been a problem with this game from the start.
In my book, if you sell me something (DH upgrades, LS assets, etc.) and take it away shortly later it IS theft, quite the same like the web shop which take money in advance and never delivers. And if you do that more than once, you're bound to lose paying customers: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".
That's why such a behavior is call "bad business practice".
Not to mention the fact that the official stated reason, "to stop botters", doesn't pass the smell test. Either the designers are out-of-touch (or incompetent) to an astonishing degree or it's a flat-out lie. To be brutally honest, I'm leaning towards the latter. I can only wonder if the designers have too much hubris to realize the degree that players now distrust their honesty. In my experience, there is nothing more toxic to a business than when customers feel like they have been lied to.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
Damage report: Just imagine fellow players and dear officals, what will hit us next week, if this HAMSTER will go live, my guild, which has 97 active acounts and a weekend peak usually this time, has only 4 people online, me included. Nobody is doing anything substantial in SH, all are afraid to spend, cause nobody can see the outcome of this "fantastic" decision.
Well, it looks like they only want big guilds with deep pockets to have all those Stronghold benefits. And i think this will even get more interesting, when they throw in Stronghold PvP... I'd say we have some very intersting times ahead of us.
I have 23 toons, all are different and I play each one. I don't play everyone everyday, but they all get played. Yes they all do leadership, but I don't "Farm" them daily... and certainly not multiple times a day. I have been playing for over 2 years.
When I do gather the AD from them it's to purchase something from the AH for one of them. I don't use the ZaX for Zen purchases. I do spend cash for the occasional big ticket item, and to bump some AD into the mix for my AH purchases.
None of my toons are Uber or have rank 9s or 10s... I do have many fashion items and companions spread out over all my characters. (i'm a collector of sorts and I really like my characters and their diversity)
So yes... I think this will hurt me. Mainly because of the dwindling population, and I won't be able to collect the things that I don't have time or patience to grind.
I have all 8 sigils from the vault of the nine by doing the campaigns enough to get my classes through to IWD. But any new class will in all likelihood be unplayed as a result of the changes.
Sorry, maybe I'm not your typical player, and I don't think I'm a whale. But I can count the more than $1500 hard earned dollars I put into the game for the fun of it. Now that it seems far less fun, my funds have been diverted to other things.
One big thing, that Cryptic always forgets, is that they first should deliver a quality product, then, but only then stretch out their hands for more money.
Currently i see only bugs in the game and some new ninja nerfs. What idiot would pay more, if he can't play on normal pace, like having 2 sec lag, unplayable maps, 3 year old bugs, WD-40 and EoA premades trolling GG PVP against 2k item level PUGs, cause we have not a bit of ELO or real matchmaking. Waiting time for a q for those few remaining dungeons is unbearable, just to name a few i have seen in these 2 hours, but i could go on for a day, my list would fill the entire thread. They really should be lucky, we supprt them so much and are still here playing their game, cause we love the initial product and DnD.
So dear Cryptic, before you even think about asking for more money, please command the different departments to do their job properly.
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
After a lengthy read this fine morning I find that my head hurts. 35 pages of Pros/Cons, Suggestions/Demands, with only a few "we'll wait and see" type answers.
Will this slow bots down? Not a chance, they will adapt. Bots are going to continue to exist, no matter what is implemented, no matter what changes are made, as long as things can be collected and sold, there will be bots. It makes zero difference that the items may sell for less than what they do now, they will continue to collect and sell. Those that have the AD will buy, and those that don't will go without. Nothing is going to change there.
As for Leadership Armies, it takes an incredible amount of characters to generate substantial amounts of rAD. I have 17 characters on my account and at one time I played them, actively. The AD I got from Leadership wasn't that astronomical. It paid for GmoP's, Enchants, Runes, and Equipment, with a little left over to convert to Zen every now and again. I make, or now made, just as much if not more, running content and selling on the AH, salvaging, whathaveyou, than I did working Leadership. Now the players with 30+ characters (some over multiple accounts!) dedicated to Leadership Farming? They're going to take a hit.
The changes, to me, seem promising. After all, you will no longer have to wait for Skirmish Hour, or hope that a Delve Hour is going to happen during the time you can play that day. You can just log on, Invoke, start your Dailies, get your AD, change characters, rinse and repeat. All without the worry that you won't have enough time to finish this Skirmish before the hour is over! It will be kinda nice to not be constrained to a certain block of time.
The changes, to me, seem promising. After all, you will no longer have to wait for Skirmish Hour, or hope that a Delve Hour is going to happen during the time you can play that day. You can just log on, Invoke, start your Dailies, get your AD, change characters, rinse and repeat. All without the worry that you won't have enough time to finish this Skirmish before the hour is over! It will be kinda nice to not be constrained to a certain block of time.
How many people are seriously going to run normal Temple of the Spider and Dread Legion over and over and over and over... on multiple characters, just to have an income that barely scratches the surface of refining/upgrading?
Even if they reintroduce the missing dungeons, people will always go for the most time effiecient runs, so it'll just be one loooooong boring, mindless grind.
Who wants to spend their free time like that?
At least with alts and Leadership, you can set them up then play content as you choose on your main character.
Instead of making yourself angry about this, best leave the game, maybe.... maybe then they will see what they did, let the game over to the people that buy astral diamonds, because they don't do anything about that and come back in a few months to see what became of this game.........
As long as people spend money, no one cares about what we want and that's the reality.
Comments
1. Increase the amount of RP stones (Gear,enchantments)
2. Set everything ONLY Account bound- (NO more character bound)
3. The Possibility to craft a "GMOP"
4. craft items with with 16h /24hours or higher, Need definitely a Greater value Rewards on it.
5. Focus on attractive Rewards for lv 70 Players (I don't mean XP)
6. Changes to get all different Greater Marks
7. Last one,- ADD Preservation Wards for Leadership max level Blue/Green-
on for the Longest processing Time-
YES PLEASE
How about you bring back epic clock tower (put it at 500 item score - so its a group people will only want 2k base) for us very casual players with our alt armies? Make it a single player dungeon if you want but have something that we can use these hordes of epic keys we are getting from vip access.. I latterly have over 3 stacks of 99 vip epic dungeon keys which are more useless then the scrolls of idenfication. or makes those keys able to open normal dungeons for us non-4k item score elitists that have more things to do than flash our item scores to get in a dungeon that less then half the required amount.
Leadership was a way for guys with no time, to get AD-Zen without paying money. Leadership being on gateway allowed such guys to manage a leadership army everywhere. Now only option for guys with no time will be to buy Zen cause there will be no other way to earn ADs.
Still, being smart you can find good ways to earn fast AD. Will just be less authomatic and easy than "creating a leadership army.
Not sure if and how this will affect botters since i'm not into the matter. We will see...
My suggestions:
Make Epic Dungeons give REAL REWARDS. I mean those drops you could sell for a lot of ADs in auction house.
Make campaigns complete for all toons on same account.
I mean, ok, you can sell campaign completion items from zen store to players who don't want to grind all campaigns and wait weeks to have all boons.
But if i already completed all the sh*tload of stuff you go through to gett all boons in all campaigns...why the hell i must repeat the same titanic quest for each new toon i create on my account?????
It's completely alt-unfriendly and HAMSTER.
Right now, creating alts was useful only to have a leadership army and earn AD while focusing on your main toon.
With these changes, who do you think will EVER try to create alts? For what purpose? To complete dungeons and PvP you need to build them a bit. Main way to build them is through boons.
I have 5 toons. 1 is main with all boons. 4 are alts i try to more or less develop a bit. I'd play them more but seriously, to make them decent i need to get boons. To get boons i have to grind each campaign basically 4 times.
You devs must be out of your mind if you think any SANE person woul ever grind Shar, Dread, Icewind, ToD and the rest more than once.
Which means, building alts is basically impossible and useless right now, after these leadership changes.
If leadership army is not useful anymore, make the game more alt-friendly.
Like giving a Bound to Character copy of your main toon's enchants to each new alt you create. If you sell the original enchant, the "copies" on your account are deleted, being basically "linked" to the original source (main toon gear).
And once you complete all the campaigns and get all the boons on one toon, you automatically get them "Account wide" on all the other toons.
Right now, we have the majority of posters in this thread saying what a ridiculous idea it is. We're probably the minority who actually follow the forums and news, and keep updated with information on the game.
Come Thursday, there'll be a whole lot of players logging in to to find their alts, be it one or two, or 'an army' can no longer generate primary currency for them with one or two logins a day. Do the developers really think these people will instead spend countless hours per day grinding normal Temple of the Spider and Dread Legion on multiple characters just to generate revenue for the insane refinement grind?
I'd imagine even the most patient players are suddenly going to realize mindnumbing repetition and minimal reward equals 'look for a new game.' MMO players are often noted for the ability to show patience with a grind, but even the most patient must have a point where common sense kicks in and they see that their entertainment is turning into a job... and not a lucrative, enjoyable one at that...
As a former active law practitioner i have looked a few times at the contract terms under which we make a deal and i have tried once to point out to Lew, that they should change it or make a huge rework on it, cause it wouldn't stand a chance in front of a real independent court. It has more flaws in it, then correct lines. The entire word structure can be stretched like a chewing gum, a playground for lawyers.
I am very close to believe too, that they want to get out of contract and this is a "mild" way to get rid of us and being able to shut down the servers or keep them only alive like a mummy as a decoy, only with a select few on board.
Even the worst manager on earth would now, he is killing the game slowly, but surely, i have no doubts here.
Blacklist doesn't work sadly, it worked back in the past but not nowadays, but yes it would be the ultimate tool to make abusers stop playing with licences and people's money and feelings again and again. The sad truth is, that many people involved in this won't cry a tear if NWO goes to the graveyard, cause they have their fingers in many other games, many other projects, so sadly we will meet them again for sure. They are like energy, they don't get wasted, they just transform.
Off topic a bit:
BTW the entire IT industry is a big bad joke nowadays, just take a look at it closer, some examples from the IT world, 15-19 year old kids playing Mods, kicking and banning adult people, early 20's making decisions, that in the past not only a 40+ year old would have dared to make without consulting for at least a month with experts or just speak about quality, gone, just refurbished games are rolled out, it would take a miracle to brake this cycle, but i don't wanna go too deep in this.
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
Any of my comments not posted in orange are based on my own personal opinion and not official.
Any messages written in orange are official moderation messages. Signature images are now fixed!
And another point, it's hard to take someone serious, when talking about players not going into foundries,
while the Dev support for the foundry is really falling behind,
and it allways takes days or even weeks after an update, before foundries can be played again.
You might want to look into that at some point, so that the foundry might see some love too.
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
And if you do that more than once, you're bound to lose paying customers: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".
That's why such a behavior is call "bad business practice".
Not to mention the fact that the official stated reason, "to stop botters", doesn't pass the smell test. Either the designers are out-of-touch (or incompetent) to an astonishing degree or it's a flat-out lie. To be brutally honest, I'm leaning towards the latter. I can only wonder if the designers have too much hubris to realize the degree that players now distrust their honesty. In my experience, there is nothing more toxic to a business than when customers feel like they have been lied to.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
And i think this will even get more interesting, when they throw in Stronghold PvP...
I'd say we have some very intersting times ahead of us.
When I do gather the AD from them it's to purchase something from the AH for one of them. I don't use the ZaX for Zen purchases. I do spend cash for the occasional big ticket item, and to bump some AD into the mix for my AH purchases.
None of my toons are Uber or have rank 9s or 10s... I do have many fashion items and companions spread out over all my characters. (i'm a collector of sorts and I really like my characters and their diversity)
So yes... I think this will hurt me. Mainly because of the dwindling population, and I won't be able to collect the things that I don't have time or patience to grind.
I have all 8 sigils from the vault of the nine by doing the campaigns enough to get my classes through to IWD. But any new class will in all likelihood be unplayed as a result of the changes.
Sorry, maybe I'm not your typical player, and I don't think I'm a whale. But I can count the more than $1500 hard earned dollars I put into the game for the fun of it. Now that it seems far less fun, my funds have been diverted to other things.
Just my feelings. Thanks for reading.
Currently i see only bugs in the game and some new ninja nerfs. What idiot would pay more, if he can't play on normal pace, like having 2 sec lag, unplayable maps, 3 year old bugs, WD-40 and EoA premades trolling GG PVP against 2k item level PUGs, cause we have not a bit of ELO or real matchmaking. Waiting time for a q for those few remaining dungeons is unbearable, just to name a few i have seen in these 2 hours, but i could go on for a day, my list would fill the entire thread. They really should be lucky, we supprt them so much and are still here playing their game, cause we love the initial product and DnD.
So dear Cryptic, before you even think about asking for more money, please command the different departments to do their job properly.
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
Will this slow bots down? Not a chance, they will adapt. Bots are going to continue to exist, no matter what is implemented, no matter what changes are made, as long as things can be collected and sold, there will be bots.
It makes zero difference that the items may sell for less than what they do now, they will continue to collect and sell.
Those that have the AD will buy, and those that don't will go without. Nothing is going to change there.
As for Leadership Armies, it takes an incredible amount of characters to generate substantial amounts of rAD. I have 17 characters on my account and at one time I played them, actively. The AD I got from Leadership wasn't that astronomical. It paid for GmoP's, Enchants, Runes, and Equipment, with a little left over to convert to Zen every now and again. I make, or now made, just as much if not more, running content and selling on the AH, salvaging, whathaveyou, than I did working Leadership.
Now the players with 30+ characters (some over multiple accounts!) dedicated to Leadership Farming? They're going to take a hit.
The changes, to me, seem promising. After all, you will no longer have to wait for Skirmish Hour, or hope that a Delve Hour is going to happen during the time you can play that day.
You can just log on, Invoke, start your Dailies, get your AD, change characters, rinse and repeat. All without the worry that you won't have enough time to finish this Skirmish before the hour is over! It will be kinda nice to not be constrained to a certain block of time.
Branch Lead
Even if they reintroduce the missing dungeons, people will always go for the most time effiecient runs, so it'll just be one loooooong boring, mindless grind.
Who wants to spend their free time like that?
At least with alts and Leadership, you can set them up then play content as you choose on your main character.
As long as people spend money, no one cares about what we want and that's the reality.