It's not that they want money, it's that they want more money.. more more more, never enough, every way they can squeeze it out of you.
Glad you're a nice puppet though, carry on.
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
Of course they want more money. That's the goal of every private corporation.
As a consumer, your goal is to vote with your wallet. Smart companies make decisions that maximize their wealth; if decisions that make the customer base unhappy maximize their wealth, whose fault is that? Not the company's. They're just doing what they're supposed to be doing. No, the fault lies in the customers, for funding activities that they shouldn't fund.
Now, what I will say is that in addition to the money question, Cryptic/PWE have to consider externalities involved, such as how this affects the Dungeons and Dragons brand. Because even if certain behavior can directly positively influence incoming revenue and/or reduce costs, if it ultimately leads to problems with WotC, that could incur additional costs in and of itself.
tl;dr version: stop complaining about how they "only want money." Complain about how they are not very good at getting money. If you don't believe the activities they're engaged in will get them less money, then you either think they have some kind of social/moral obligation that does not exist in the corporate/legal framework, or you think they are doing nothing wrong.
I don't have a problem with them wanting more money. I have a problem with how they are going about it. HAMSTER over long time players for no reason after they have invested a lot of time and effort in to their game is, hopefully, going to bite them in the HAMSTER.
My gaming experience with NWO was changed overnight, for no reason other than greed. I think you underestimate how smart these companies really are though, you say vote with your wallet.. but there are many people out there clinically addicted to video games. It's like if your dealer suddenly starts charging double, sure you could just stop using.. but you really want to. Sure, you could find someone else, but that will take a lot of time and effort, and have risks of its own. So you wind up just paying more so you can continue your addiction.
The only difference between PW and a drug dealer though is that the drug dealer actually provides you with a tangible substance.
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
Well, let me put it this way.
Cryptic isn't doing anything "wrong" by taking advantage of people, in the same way cigarette companies didn't do anything "wrong" by, well, getting a massive amount of the population addicted to a lethal product. They're just doing their job.
The failure occurs at the consumer and societal level. It's our responsibility as citizens to ensure that the culture that companies operate in is one in which ethical standards are profitable (and where the reverse-unethical standards are unprofitable). The problem isn't that Cryptic is just trying to make money; the problem is that we let them. That there's no "cost" to them trying to make money.
It may seem a trivial distinction to most people, but to me, I think it's an important one. We can't expect corporations to just be nice entities. We as a society have to force them to be.
I agree on a few points there, Cryptic is similar to cigarette companies in the way they poison their users and it is our obligation to refuse their products and services. I've already started by removing the game from my computer, and have zero desire to return after seeing how they treat their customers.
Exactly! I'm fairly sure if overnight the ability for people to earn both Dilithium and Credits got reduced to 3 dailies that completely excluded solo content. Reduced to 3 STFs and PVP. I dont suspect many over there would be all that willing to just wait and see.
For the Trekies who might not fully understand what happened here, let me elaborate. What this change did was remove Dilithium from all dailies and removed any dilithium awards from managing duty officers. Our dungeons are equal to your STFs, but most of our dungeons have been removed to be "reworked" months ago, we are still waiting for them. We have been reduced to 3. Our Skirmishes are equal to your Fleet actions. The are level locked, so while there are several, you only get access to a few at any given time. At max level that is only 3. For PVP, we only have 2 maps. Instead of dailies in the normal sense, we get rewards directly from each run. But each additional run rewards less, up to a final daily cap. The payouts are low enough that if someone did all possible activities, the maximum number of times, it would still not be enough to reach the daily refine limit.
So that is it, 3 activities, with 8 maps, as the soul means to earn regular income . Keep in mind that AD is also our auction house currency. So its like loosing both dilithium and credits at the same time. And all this because people made too much by a crafting system very much similar to your duty officer system.
That's one thing I never understood. Why use Astral Diamonds for the Auction House instead of Gold, Silver, and Copper? I mean... ADs are actually worth some amount of real money! You can trade it for Zen! Granted I never have been able to for some dumb reason. Could SELL Zen if I had any that wasn't bound to STO, but could never see the price to BUY Zen.
Also... our PvP is a joke unless you build for it and have the funds. An average player, like myself, will generally get on the recieving end of an Alpha Strike Romulan who can pretty much oneshot anything in game. We generally have only 1 space map (Ker'rat System) that ever sees action, and its an open PvPvE. The PvP queues are a ghost town. The only time I really had fun was the rare friendly match with a fleet mate, and a duel I had in Ker'rat with a Klingon that was evenly matched with me because he wasn't a PvPer.
Next to a "Bug Squash" Season dedicated to NOTHING but fixing bugs (which some people just don't understand isn't even possible to do yet still demand it), PvP is one of the most requested things outside of a new Exploration system to be worked on.
I like how you related it to the STO equivelent, and I can see where you're coming from. I guess I'm just not high enough level in Neverwinter to really feel the impact. I've only got a single character working through the Underdark right now dealing with the Dark Elves so... I think I'm in the 40-50 range or so...
I'm not even in a guild yet, although I have been trying to get some friends together to form one. Just never seem to get the coordination right since some of them aren't even on Steam to coordinate with.
1. I'm not actively playing Neverwinter at the moment since I've exhausted the fun of the current content.
2. It'll be really nice to not login a couple of times a day just to do leadership. It was easy AD for the time involved but it was horribly tedious (I have one character of each class).
The unknown at this point is whether future AD income for casual solo play will be adequate to cover expenses, within a reasonable time. I expect not, so I imagine I'll at least try whatever new class or content arrives until I hit the point where the AD grind or expectation of money to suplement progress begins. I don't mind spending money on games but I don't spend for time, only for content. Since that goes against the f2p progression style business model, I just scale my goals down to something that is achievable for me.
this last update just screwed the game for me so i no longer play this game,and went back to Guild Wars2 and since NW new update my guild in GW2 has gained 47 new members so ty Cryptic your doing a good job of making players leave and if you keep going the way you have been soon you all be looking for new jobs.
I mostly solo and I think the changes have good intentions for the game but I am a bit wary of these frequent large scale changes. Leadership has caused an inflation of AD in the game over time and makes a single player doing leadership on one character fairly insignificant. If the AD market settles over time to be more similiar to the one on Xbox I think that would be good. Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of AD in NW that is just sitting around on many characters and stemming the flow of new AD will hurt newer and less invested players. I would like to see AD rewards added to Campaign Dungeons in some amount simply to give players a source outside of group activities for AD.
The only other problem I have with the changes is what value do tradeskills have now? You can make some rings with Jewelcrafting and some shirts or pants with some armor tradeskills but on the whole most tradeskills are fairly weak. The way gear is done in this game makes creating weapons or normal armor through tradeskills pretty unrewarding. If Leadership still ends up as the best tradeskill and people bot it for refinement points what have we really solved other than making people upset that they never hit their AD refinement cap? Deflating the AD market will also cause upgrading resources such as Greater Marks of Potency to be more expensive in the time a player has to put into gaining the AD to purchase them. I understand this may make buying Zen more attractive which is good but you also need the players that aren't going to purchase Zen as frequently to want to play as well.
There're also whole guilds leaving for WildStar, which is going to be F2P at the end of this month.
@rattler2 In short, you don't have the slightest idea about NWO.
Get to 60+ and start the Elemental Evil areas. Refine your artifacts beyond rare. Get to 70 and go through Dread Ring and Sharandar areas. Unlock the boons from each campaign. Refine your artifact equipment beyond rare.
When you do get a guild together, pay 150k AD for the first guild bank tab, 300k AD for the second, 450k AD for the third... And then start building and upgrading your Stronghold.
If you manage to get that far, you might understand this change a lot better.
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
Zen will be less attractive, because the price of zen in terms of AD has gone down. Therefore, the purchasing power of zen in terms of Greater Marks of Potency has declined.
Granted, the purchasing power of zen in terms of AH items may end up going up, since it's no longer constrained by the 500 AD cap. Only time will tell.
There're also whole guilds leaving for WildStar, which is going to be F2P at the end of this month.
@rattler2 In short, you don't have the slightest idea about NWO.
Get to 60+ and start the Elemental Evil areas. Refine your artifacts beyond rare. Get to 70 and go through Dread Ring and Sharandar areas. Unlock the boons from each campaign. Refine your artifact equipment beyond rare.
When you do get a guild together, pay 150k AD for the first guild bank tab, 300k AD for the second, 450k AD for the third... And then start building and upgrading your Stronghold.
If you manage to get that far, you might understand this change a lot better.
I think I got a pretty good idea considering I'm not as active as I am on STO. Neverwinter is F2P, so long breaks aren't a problem like they would be in a sub game.
Also... I'm a casual player.
And WildStar... I think I looked that one up before. Sci Fi style game right? Might check it out. Add it to my collection of F2P games that includes Defiance and STO.
There're also whole guilds leaving for WildStar, which is going to be F2P at the end of this month.
@rattler2 In short, you don't have the slightest idea about NWO.
Get to 60+ and start the Elemental Evil areas. Refine your artifacts beyond rare. Get to 70 and go through Dread Ring and Sharandar areas. Unlock the boons from each campaign. Refine your artifact equipment beyond rare.
When you do get a guild together, pay 150k AD for the first guild bank tab, 300k AD for the second, 450k AD for the third... And then start building and upgrading your Stronghold.
If you manage to get that far, you might understand this change a lot better.
I think I got a pretty good idea considering I'm not as active as I am on STO. Neverwinter is F2P, so long breaks aren't a problem like they would be in a sub game.
Also... I'm a casual player.
And WildStar... I think I looked that one up before. Sci Fi style game right? Might check it out. Add it to my collection of F2P games that includes Defiance and STO.
Yes, WildStar is more Sci Fi.
1-60 is the easy part in NWO, from 61-70 it starts to get more... interesting. Imagine filling your bathtub with water by using a regular spoon... now you have an idea of what this change means.
That sounds like our 50-60 grind in STO. The story missions in the Delta Quadrant are generally 1 per level, but they don't give nearly enough to level up so you gotta go grind your butt off just to continue in the story.
Out of my... 8 characters (3 of which I play more of) only 3 are lv 60. The rest, except for my KDF Delta Recruit, are in the 50s.
A friend once described the 50-60 grind as the equivelent amount of XP to level from 1-50... again.
I'm guessing Power Points are like STO's Specialization Points so... nothing new to me. I have only filled up Intelligence Officer Specialization, half of Pilot, working on Commando, and have not touched Command Officer.
That sounds like our 50-60 grind in STO. The story missions in the Delta Quadrant are generally 1 per level, but they don't give nearly enough to level up so you gotta go grind your butt off just to continue in the story.
Out of my... 8 characters (3 of which I play more of) only 3 are lv 60. The rest, except for my KDF Delta Recruit, are in the 50s.
A friend once described the 50-60 grind as the equivelent amount of XP to level from 1-50... again.
the 60-70 grind in NW is the 1-60 grind six times over : |
To get enough AD to progress your character is one thing.
To fill the overflow with 1.7 million XP over and over again, to have a chance to get one needed power point, will be the other thing.
Welcome to Neverendinggrind online.
And overflow exp is essentially the equivalent of doing 1-60 twice over. And you need to do it until you have ~ 8 points for PvE (depending on your class I guess).
I want to believe they will add ways for solo players to earn AD soon, but I don't believe it anymore. Not after they spent 2 months thinking about how to fix Leadership, then just removed the AD from the tasks without adding replacement rewards for the tasks. The level 25 task gives 1000 LESS XP than the L23 task and it takes SIX times as long!
This change is much worse than I originally thought, Solo players are completely screwed unless they spend real money now. I've been playing since Beta. I had just gotten 5 of my characters to 25 leadership and was finally going to make some AD to slowly equip all of them, but now there is no way for a Solo player to make AD at all.
Don't get me wrong, I had spent some money in this game for Zen market mounts and things, but now... I logged in yesterday to run some dailies with characters, but after seeing how screwed up leadership is and no way to upgrade anything without spending real money, I just exited the game. It has lost any fun for me
Comments
It's not that they want money, it's that they want more money.. more more more, never enough, every way they can squeeze it out of you.
Glad you're a nice puppet though, carry on.
As a consumer, your goal is to vote with your wallet. Smart companies make decisions that maximize their wealth; if decisions that make the customer base unhappy maximize their wealth, whose fault is that? Not the company's. They're just doing what they're supposed to be doing. No, the fault lies in the customers, for funding activities that they shouldn't fund.
Now, what I will say is that in addition to the money question, Cryptic/PWE have to consider externalities involved, such as how this affects the Dungeons and Dragons brand. Because even if certain behavior can directly positively influence incoming revenue and/or reduce costs, if it ultimately leads to problems with WotC, that could incur additional costs in and of itself.
tl;dr version: stop complaining about how they "only want money." Complain about how they are not very good at getting money. If you don't believe the activities they're engaged in will get them less money, then you either think they have some kind of social/moral obligation that does not exist in the corporate/legal framework, or you think they are doing nothing wrong.
My gaming experience with NWO was changed overnight, for no reason other than greed. I think you underestimate how smart these companies really are though, you say vote with your wallet.. but there are many people out there clinically addicted to video games. It's like if your dealer suddenly starts charging double, sure you could just stop using.. but you really want to. Sure, you could find someone else, but that will take a lot of time and effort, and have risks of its own. So you wind up just paying more so you can continue your addiction.
The only difference between PW and a drug dealer though is that the drug dealer actually provides you with a tangible substance.
Cryptic isn't doing anything "wrong" by taking advantage of people, in the same way cigarette companies didn't do anything "wrong" by, well, getting a massive amount of the population addicted to a lethal product. They're just doing their job.
The failure occurs at the consumer and societal level. It's our responsibility as citizens to ensure that the culture that companies operate in is one in which ethical standards are profitable (and where the reverse-unethical standards are unprofitable). The problem isn't that Cryptic is just trying to make money; the problem is that we let them. That there's no "cost" to them trying to make money.
It may seem a trivial distinction to most people, but to me, I think it's an important one. We can't expect corporations to just be nice entities. We as a society have to force them to be.
I just hope more people follow suit.
Also... our PvP is a joke unless you build for it and have the funds. An average player, like myself, will generally get on the recieving end of an Alpha Strike Romulan who can pretty much oneshot anything in game. We generally have only 1 space map (Ker'rat System) that ever sees action, and its an open PvPvE. The PvP queues are a ghost town. The only time I really had fun was the rare friendly match with a fleet mate, and a duel I had in Ker'rat with a Klingon that was evenly matched with me because he wasn't a PvPer.
Next to a "Bug Squash" Season dedicated to NOTHING but fixing bugs (which some people just don't understand isn't even possible to do yet still demand it), PvP is one of the most requested things outside of a new Exploration system to be worked on.
I like how you related it to the STO equivelent, and I can see where you're coming from. I guess I'm just not high enough level in Neverwinter to really feel the impact. I've only got a single character working through the Underdark right now dealing with the Dark Elves so... I think I'm in the 40-50 range or so...
I'm not even in a guild yet, although I have been trying to get some friends together to form one. Just never seem to get the coordination right since some of them aren't even on Steam to coordinate with.
1. I'm not actively playing Neverwinter at the moment since I've exhausted the fun of the current content.
2. It'll be really nice to not login a couple of times a day just to do leadership. It was easy AD for the time involved but it was horribly tedious (I have one character of each class).
The unknown at this point is whether future AD income for casual solo play will be adequate to cover expenses, within a reasonable time. I expect not, so I imagine I'll at least try whatever new class or content arrives until I hit the point where the AD grind or expectation of money to suplement progress begins. I don't mind spending money on games but I don't spend for time, only for content. Since that goes against the f2p progression style business model, I just scale my goals down to something that is achievable for me.
The only other problem I have with the changes is what value do tradeskills have now? You can make some rings with Jewelcrafting and some shirts or pants with some armor tradeskills but on the whole most tradeskills are fairly weak. The way gear is done in this game makes creating weapons or normal armor through tradeskills pretty unrewarding. If Leadership still ends up as the best tradeskill and people bot it for refinement points what have we really solved other than making people upset that they never hit their AD refinement cap? Deflating the AD market will also cause upgrading resources such as Greater Marks of Potency to be more expensive in the time a player has to put into gaining the AD to purchase them. I understand this may make buying Zen more attractive which is good but you also need the players that aren't going to purchase Zen as frequently to want to play as well.
@rattler2
In short, you don't have the slightest idea about NWO.
Get to 60+ and start the Elemental Evil areas.
Refine your artifacts beyond rare.
Get to 70 and go through Dread Ring and Sharandar areas. Unlock the boons from each campaign.
Refine your artifact equipment beyond rare.
When you do get a guild together, pay 150k AD for the first guild bank tab, 300k AD for the second, 450k AD for the third...
And then start building and upgrading your Stronghold.
If you manage to get that far, you might understand this change a lot better.
Granted, the purchasing power of zen in terms of AH items may end up going up, since it's no longer constrained by the 500 AD cap. Only time will tell.
Also... I'm a casual player.
And WildStar... I think I looked that one up before. Sci Fi style game right? Might check it out. Add it to my collection of F2P games that includes Defiance and STO.
1-60 is the easy part in NWO, from 61-70 it starts to get more... interesting.
Imagine filling your bathtub with water by using a regular spoon... now you have an idea of what this change means.
Out of my... 8 characters (3 of which I play more of) only 3 are lv 60. The rest, except for my KDF Delta Recruit, are in the 50s.
A friend once described the 50-60 grind as the equivelent amount of XP to level from 1-50... again.
To fill the overflow with 1.7 million XP over and over again, to have a chance to get one needed power point, will be the other thing.
Welcome to Neverendinggrind online.
http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Experience
And you don't hit the brick wall the AD changes present until after that. And overflow exp is essentially the equivalent of doing 1-60 twice over. And you need to do it until you have ~ 8 points for PvE (depending on your class I guess).
Don't get me wrong, I had spent some money in this game for Zen market mounts and things, but now... I logged in yesterday to run some dailies with characters, but after seeing how screwed up leadership is and no way to upgrade anything without spending real money, I just exited the game. It has lost any fun for me