Also, as for Steam charts... God... players treat it as if it's some oracle how successful is the game. Bullears, it just shows you Steam connected players and completely ignores direct client. I know many players of different games who prefer direct client as Steam devours precious system resources to operate.
As well, even if a user installs the game through Steam, that does not mean they have to play it with Steam Running. Just like you don't if you install through ARC. All you need to do is launch the Neverwinter.exe launcher directly instead of loading Steam or ARC to do so. So, even those who use Steam to install the game may not even be running Steam to play the game.
What I've also noticed is that the prices on the AH are related to the Zen Market and exchange rate, not just botters (IMO). Example , Coalescent Ward, on the zen market cost 1000 Zen. The exchange rate was 500 to 1 with Zen v AD. So $10.00 worth of Zen gave you 500,000 AD in return.
On the AH Coalescent Ward as of right now are running 448,000 AD. Before the change the same item was around 500,000 AD or more on the AH. The difference is that Zen is no longer exchanging for 500 x 1, it's now 447 x 1 or less. $10.00 worth of Zen get's you 447,000 at best.
Same with Companion's, etc, just about anything listed on the AH was directly related to the Zen cost on the Zen Market compared to what players asked for an item and the exchange rate for Zen.
One problem is the value of Zen has decreased while the price of Zen market items have stayed static. You can't run a successful business like that (IMO). It's like the Stock Market crashed and your only investment was AD.
Yes some items on the AH are coming down slightly but the value to buy Zen vs exchange has dropped as well so we're really in the same spot or worse. Only difference is that now Zen has less value for buying Zen to exchange it for AD and the cost of Zen Market's items are a greater cost considering the value of Zen per exchange rate has lowered.
Someone hinted at this already but the evidence is there. With out a doubt it cost MORE to play now than before even if the AH cost have drooped slightly. You get less for Zen vs AD exchange while Zen Market items are the same.
I've spent WAY to much real $ on this game already, I can't invest more to get less value considering it already cost me more to play this game in the last few months than any other I have played in years of playing them (with a sub and market).
That was my decision, I know but it was the only way to get 'geared' properly to be competitive with the rest of the player base and my guild in a P2W environment. How can anyone get geared with a 24K limit on AD when a GMOP cost 100,000 AD? My next upgrade for just one Artifact requires 3 GMOP plus others. A 100,000 AD GMOP was roughly $2.00 in cash, now it's roughly $2.37. I only expect that to go higher.
Like stated above, this is not the only game that is F2P and some of the others really ARE F2P with just 'fluff' market items that are not required to be competitive.
Players are spending a lot less on the Auction House, even with the prices going down, many items are just sitting there. I'm waiting for an Adventurer's Helper Pack to sell for some time now...
And the same goes for direct AD donation to the guild Stronghold coffer. It's either slowing down or even drying up completely. Do the Devs really think, that players will spend more money on this game, to compensate the loss of how much rAD they can make per day now?
Or that players will wait and just stick around until the Devs come up with some improvements... after Underdark is released... so may be somewhere next year?
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
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tassedethe13Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 806Arc User
Underdark is announced for 2015 probably mid November
I'm not being mean, or negative, but the fact you lost your "core" players and rush to get 150 account is one reason why at the first difficulty, the paint is peeling. You may have recruited newcomers in neverwinter, the kind of guy who just has reached lvl 70 and searching for a guild but this kind of player have no attach to the game, generally spend some cash and then quit a few month later because they are bored, causing a huge turnover in guild ( this is why they leave without saying a "I quit" ).
The problem is that this game, with the direction it took, tends to attract only this kind of player. Easy come, Easy spend, Easy leave.
Building a guild is a long time process, find core players, and then add a few more by recruitment wave. I Hope your guild is not too much damaged, and I hope mod 8 will be the savior and will make come back many players.
I second this. I lead the Non Exploit guild True DragonBlood. We are a small-medium guild and have seen 0 difference since they took AD out of leadership. Yes, some people where up sad and they have all the right to be, but it made none quit the game yet. I do want to add that we always recruit actively and have people coming and going all the time, while we have a few core players and growing, but there is no significant different since this change. We love to run dungeons, do raids every night and generally the atmosphere in our guild is very friendly. Most of us are not just online to play, become rich and better asap (although everyone wants that) but most come online to just have a good time and help others. Like @Tassedethe13 said, it depends on what kind of players you are looking for and "buying" players with 30mil AD is often not the kind of player that is going to stick around when things get though. I do not question your leadership or am trying to be mean, we all have our own approach and requirements
Personally I do miss AD gain from leadership, but I play often enough to catch up with skirmishes and dungeons. I do hope that they will introduce new ways of earning AD soon! Perhaps HE's with a cap of AD each day, like we now have with skirms/dungeons. The dungeons and Bind on Equip sets with GOOD set bonuses should come back as well. I think we are all sick and tired of the same old 6 dungeons we have by now... At last, they should make it so that VIP applies to the Gateway. The people that actually pay for VIP have jobs, which means they are too busy to log into the game and won't benefit from their VIP bonuses in the gateway, which is just a honest rip off (ignoring the ZAX users who should significantly drop with AD gain gone from Leadership anyway). Since they are the source of your income, they deserve better than this.
OK, im tired of any/everyone who wants to blame LS armies for the AD changes. I've tried through posts in various threads to tell you all the truth so I'll sum it all up here and give you the full story.
First and foremost, the LS armies are the reaction to the demand for AD that cryptic itself created. Lets list in no particular order all the things cryptic has done that made the need for LS armies.
Making so many items bound.
Making enchanted keys bound.
Campaigns.
New refinement system.
Coalescent ward changes.
extremely high AD sinks.
Reagent changes.
RAD refining limit.
Artifacts.
Artifact equipment.
Mod 6.
Lets tackle these 1 at a time and explain how they forced the players into making LS armies regardless if its just a few toons or 50.
RAD refining limit. Probably the least bothersome change they made since at the time it was made you'd make far more ADs then RADs so lowering the limit from 50k to 24K a day didn't really hurt.
Making enchanted keys bound. This one was a major screw up that seriously started the need for ADs. Before they made them bound you could buy keys for around 10k-15k each and the exchange was was selling zen around 300AD per zen. The moment they made the keys bound the cost of everything started to rise. The reason is obvious and imho understandable.
Before the change demand was great but so was the supply so everything was cheap. After the change the demand was still great but the supply was petty much gone unless you bought keys with zen. So the exchange prices quickly shot up to 500ADs per zen. The prices on the AH started to rise because now the only way to get the items from the lockboxs was to buy them on the AH. Now be honest, in this situation what wold you do? Sell zen for 500AD? or buy keys and open boxes and sell the items you don't want for thousands if not millions of ADs? Its obvious to see which chice most people decided to go with since the exchange had over 2million listing for people looking to buy zen.
Also, I can only imagine the drop in zen buying this change made since people were now able to make more ADs with less zen.
New refining system. Ok this one is actually 3 changes in one. First, the old system was 4 lvl 1s to make a lvl2, 4 lvl2s to make a 3 on so on. yes, it took way more gems but you didn't need reagents, didn't need to rank up and only need cwards for the high level. Granted, it took for more Cwards but that takes us to part 2.
Coalescent ward changes. These lovely item used to not be bound and had a higher drop rate. So they were relatively cheap and easy to get even if you weren't lucky enough to get 1 from a coffer box. But with the refining system cryptic decided to make them bound to fight the "bots" ahh those pesky pesky bots. Now even though just making them BoP was more then enough to fight this problem cryptic didn't stop there. They also lowered the drop rate of the wards from the coffers and then just for poops and giggles also decided to add more items the coffer which in reality made the drop even lower.
Reagent changes. And part 3 in this lovely little kick in the collective players nuts trilogy. So while you now need much less gems to rank up you now need to find or buy these reagents in order to refine. Was never sure how this made the new system better since I now have to find the gems and a bunch of different reagents in order to make a higher level gem. But of course over time cryptic decided to mess the drop rates of reagents and where they drop. Forcing many to end up buying Mark and greater marks of potency from the AH or the bazaar neither of which is cheap. Which leads us to....
Extremely high AD sinks. I for one actually am all for AD sinks being in the game. But the problem is cryptic sets the prices so high that it makes you either not use them or curse at the high prices when you need to. I believe most don't use them unless they absolutely have to like buying Marks from the bazaar or....
Campaigns. Yep, these are really slick AD sinks but at least ones that are kind of useful, 400 more attack is 400 more attack. And while I don't have the exact amount that each zone costs I know that Sharandar for example costs 75k AD just to get all the boons and im gonna go out on a limb and say the other zones cost somewhere near that amount. So 4 areas worth of boons adds up and that's not counting the cost for other things like keys for their dungeons.
Making so many items bound. OK this is kind of obvious. If you make all the "wanted" items bound then that leaves pretty much HAMSTER to sell. Epics were a good source of ADs from selling them on the AH. This was good for the sellers and for the buyers. For the sellers, hey they made ADs. For the buyers it allowed them to get items they may not have otherwise been able to get for any number of reasons like never being able to do a dungeon run because they weren't geared well enough or being kicked for the same reason. And as always high demand plus high supply equals low cost.
Artifacts. These were kind of neat when they were introduced. But at the time you could only have 1. So while not cheap the level up it wasn't too bad. But now we have 4 that we can have. The cost becomes insane when you start adding up the cost to refine them, 11GMOPs per artifact? 1.1mill per artifact or 4.4mill to level all 4 up to mythic. And this doesn't include other items you might need to buys like reagents, wards, and RP items to rank them up.
Artifact equipment. While the cost of ranking these items up isn't as high as the artifacts they still can cost a pretty penny. And of course you lose all that money spent if you want to make one of the new guild artifact weapons since you need to salvage them to get an item needed to make those weapons and then guess what, you get to level up that nice new weapon so now its going to cost you even more money.
Mod 6. As pretty much everyone knows mod 6 flipped the game on its ear. All that nice gear you had pre mod 6 was now pretty much worthless. Before mod 6 I was decked out in CN gear and rocking mostly R5 gems and was able to do most of the content with no problems. Post mod 6, I found woefully under geared. Even with Elven gear, artifact necklace, belt, weapon, offhand and 4 artifacts refined to epic and R7 or gems I find myself needing to run and heal every now and then.
So there you go, these are the things cryptic has done over time to increase the demand for ADs while repeatedly reducing our ability to make ADs. Thus forcing most players to create LS armies (large or small) so they could keep up with the ever increasing demand.
At any point of the years cryptic could have made efforts to lower the demand and reduce the need for LS armies but they didn't. And if any of you really believes that this change has anything to do with bots....I got some magic beans to sell you.
For a long while it has been impossible to become strong enough just to do dungeons as you have to spent ( a damn lot) of time and real money to get your character just to survive. Devs please bring some real balance to this wonderful game. And not just one aspect but ALL aspects of the game
Also, as for Steam charts... God... players treat it as if it's some oracle how successful is the game. Bullears, it just shows you Steam connected players and completely ignores direct client. I know many players of different games who prefer direct client as Steam devours precious system resources to operate.
As well, even if a user installs the game through Steam, that does not mean they have to play it with Steam Running. Just like you don't if you install through ARC. All you need to do is launch the Neverwinter.exe launcher directly instead of loading Steam or ARC to do so. So, even those who use Steam to install the game may not even be running Steam to play the game.
People like to act as if Steam player counts don't matter too. It's still a good measure of how well a game is doing.
In Warframe the vast majority of players use the DE's launcher instead of Steam. They still have 20,000 players on steamcharts at six in the morning. Having only 2600 players on steamcharts for a F2P MMO still means your game is dying.
as a xbox one player, i came across this post and it just makes me feel sad for the future of the game.
They won't try anything like this on Xbox, on PC, we only got the difficulty changes for Elemental Evial, because they were releasing that module to the Xbox. That being said, i wouldn't be surprised, if we see at least some changes for the guild Stronghold building/upgrades resources requirements, when Strongholds is going to be released on Xbox too.
But removing AD from Leadership on the Xbox? Probably not going to happen.
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
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vinceent1Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,264Arc User
it should be completely bias if they dont remove AD from leadership on console. new cryptic record
I've played this game since beta. I was a "free to play" one, working hard to make my way thru the game spending so many, many hours. I lived all those changes, ad sinks, ref. system, artifacts, etc. and I could manage them, but when mod 6 came and most of my efforts became almost dust I said "it's enough".
That was my choice. I understand that a company needs to make money, but when I finally saw where things were heading I gave up. Life for no paying players became extremely hard and decided to leave.
I wanna say thanks to devs for all this time I played this wonderful game, for the online friends I made all across the world...I'll take all the good things and be grateful but I think they are killing slowly the goose of golden eggs.
Things in life must born, raise and die, I guess. But for sure there's life beyond Neverwinter.
P.D.: BLUNTFORCE, we will meet us in the next mmo, maybe in Black Desert Say hi to those amazing mates, specially Eon if he's still playing.
frozenfirevrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,475Community Moderator
Well said @checkmatein3 That's exactly what I have in mind... The pre-mod days were awesome and I totally wasted 'em, not knowing what to do and how to do... None of my pre-mod characters even exist
steam logins at peak are 1/4 of what they were a week ago..... arc dosnt share its login infor but judging from steam figures everyone that joined for mod 7 has left already and its back down to the same level as july after the mod 6 debacle. ive been playing cryptic games solely apart from a short try at archeage but thats also a p2w korean grindfest. im currently looking for something with NW's comabt style but with some content or atleast not somuch grind before you can hang out and play
for the record anyone joining now needs to fork out about $us4000 to gear up off cryptic about 1/2 that from bots or spend 1250 or so days farming for 2 or so hrs a day to get 24k ad for anyone that wants to compare figures this is the steam chart http://steamcharts.com/app/109600 you will still get noobs joining but they arnt going to stay noone invests 4000 per char into a game with 3 endgame pve dungeons and 3 pvp maps no mater how good the combat system is, nw dosnt have a monopoly on that kind of system anymore either i have been discovering
but this was a obvious hack job, who disables the guy you get seals of triumph off on the same day that you release a new pvp armour set? like i was ok i pvp heaps i have piles on multiple chars but anyone who maybe thought about trying pvp with the new content, no ad from it and cant even get one of the components for the armour in game anymore
I am a guild leader of a moderately-sized, semi-casual guild. We managed to save the guild from the previously depressing mod 6 hack job, officer abandonment, and promote activity from June through the first 20 days of Mod 7. We have been able to recruit fun, active players of all levels and playstyles to help build the structures in Strongholds and hold a massive guild lottery event (giving out prizes totalling over 30Mil in AD). Of the 150ish accounts in the guild, over 70% were active within 1 week of play. We were always able to do DF successfully and store up fangs for the new armor sets. It was fun to come online and go in the guild hall and see 25-40 of your friends at any one time running around doing quests, dungeons, DF, whatever. The coffers went up from regular players and big donors, alike. There was a great spirit of comraderie. The mob change to reduce the dmg from mod 6 and the hp nerf helped even more. The previous sins of the developers (removing unbound, set-based epic gear from dungeons; implementing burdensome AD sinks in enchants, artifacts, artifact-gear, and strongholds; etc) were almost forgotten. Almost...
Then, the removal of leadership came. With Guild Hall 8 and Market Place 4 already collected for and waiting to be built (construction times are the enemy), the online participation of the guild has dropped to less than 15%. I have asked for a courtesy 'I quit' message if anyone does decide to leave the game. I have received many such emails already. Regardless of what the developers say or what forum moderators edit, the latest change COMBINED with all the previous changes has caused the immediate reduction of active play. There can be no waiting. Even with the new PvP, the game is in throes. The economy is filled with AD sinks everywhere. Those of us who have been around since open beta know of what the economy was like prior to AD sinks. You did not need salvage or Refine points or greater marks of anything because the enchant system was superior (yes, it was) and the unbound epic sets that were earned from dungeon runs had no rp investment and had tremendous party based bonuses. Run a set of T2s and get your epic set, or... buy a set from the AH from those who ran it and are selling it for some nice AD. Do you want different sets? Run different dungeons. There was plenty of space in bags (yes, enchants took up space to level up, but not as much as all the rp does). Everything was unbound until you equipped it. And you could run a plethora of dungeons. Were you bored of Castle Never and the epic T2 drops? Go run Pirate King. Or, Frozen Heart. Or, for a challenge with little reward...epic Dread Vault (dungeons that 2 modules of new players have no idea about).
But, through the small changes, there were no options for players to earn a good income of AD, legitimately. So, the result were leadership armies. Remove the source of AD from gear and implement AD sinks in artifacts and artifact gear (which now, serendipitously have the set bonuses, but weak ones in comparison to the old sets), and players turn to what they can get. Then, through the painful dance of leadership this and leadership that, the removal of AD has left no means by which players can earn AD. The market will correct itself on some things. But, the AD sinks are still everywhere in the game. So, donations to the coffer are down. Participation is down. Morale is down. And the only hope is mod 8, with a new class (maybe), a nerf to the paladin (my guess since new class is always overpowered at beginning), and the return of dungeons. But, this is not sufficient. The restoration of a free economy with no AD sinks must happen first, and quickly. I do not know how long even the most loyal of players can hold out for these changes. But, the proof is in the proverbial pudding. Our guild is suffering since.
Thank you for your time in reading this.
BLUNTFORCE TRAUMA. Officer in Guild Myrmidons
QUoting this entire post because you devs need to pull your collective heads out of your collective butts.
you think bot farming is what's keeping your profit margins low? No, you stupid morons, it's the fact that your managers want you to get stuff done on time rather than MAKE GOOD STUFF.
Gamers are sick of rush job BS. Give us some quality or just close the freaking game down and let us move on.
You people are a freaking embarrassment to developers everywhere right now.
You can't blame the developers for the stuff that is coming out. The only people you can blame is the upper management all the companies. The CEO has to have his 12M+ bonus at the end of every year and that is what it boils down to, the all mighty buck. Reduce, reuse is the management's motto which is why the Mod 6 areas are all copies of what already is.
Checkmatein3 made very valid points. Our guild players have gone on "vacation" as well. We would have 20 to 30 people on every evening and this past week, we have had at most 12 to 13. Hopefully, once they decide they would rather play than pay to play they will be back but I am NOT holding my breath on that one.
The real thing that needs to be changed on this AD discombobulation is that you have to make the AD as part of the chest pick up and not as a drop at the boss level. People have found a way to cheat other people out of their AD and keep more of it for themselves. They just don't pick up their drops until everyone is gone, then they get to keep their whole share while you, as the honest player, lose out on several thousand AD each day. Please make this change ASAP!!!!!
Last post on this issue for me. A simple fix could be to add AD as an award for completing objectives (missions). This is the ONLY MMO I have ever played that doesn't reward some amount of 'main' currency for completing a mission.
That would at least make it possible to make AD, even for a casual player that doesn't run Dungeons or PvP.
I also don't understand having a cap on AD when it's extremely hard to make it anyway, now at least. After hitting your AD cap for the day, why play any longer? At least increase it so it's possible to afford the AD sinks they have implemented to the game.
I'll tell you, the only thing I have done since this 'fix' is to log in and get my VIP rewards then back off. That won't change until something is done.
If it's not changed by the time a unmentioned game goes F2P later this month (11 day's), it's see ya later.
I tried running eLoL right now, and i'm being rubberbanded all over the place right back into the "red" areas. I have no idea why, since i did a skirmish run through the "new" skirmish with a lower level character without any issues. And i'm not that type of player, that just hang back and let the other team players do the work...
So unless they either improve whatever is causing these rubberbanding, or give us rAD through quests, i'm only getting rAD from invoking...
The funny part is that the currency sellers are, more than likely, making more RL money off their sales everyday than Cryptic is off their ZEN sales since the change. Appears that the "Peter Principle" clearly apples to whomever made the decision to execute this change.
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santralafaxMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,896Arc User
AD costs more for Zen buyers now. Why would we buy less AD for RL$ when the game flagrantly cut us off at 24K in-game. Double slap in the face.
AD costs more for Zen buyers now. Why would we buy less AD for RL$ when the game flagrantly cut us off at 24K in-game. Double slap in the face.
probably because alot of the "big ticket items ( non enchant)" are 1/3 to 1/2 of what they were last weekend. while zen has only dropped 15% or so. enchants are slowly falling too. and will drop like a rock once the gmop price change occurs( at least sub r11).
Botters are profiting from this whole mess... while the normal players just have to deal with the fallout.
How are botters going to profit? Without the enormous amount of AD created via Leadership, they're botting up enchants far faster than people can buy them. I don't know if you've noticed, but the price on R4 and R5 enchantments has absolutely plummeted. Stacks of R4's were 900 AD this morning. A few more weeks of this, and the supply is going to be outrageous and the enchants they're farming will be essentially worthless.
Plus the only reason bots exist in the first place is because players are buying AD from 3rd party sites...if players didn't buy from them, they wouldn't be in the game.
Botters are profiting from this whole mess... while the normal players just have to deal with the fallout.
How are botters going to profit? Without the enormous amount of AD created via Leadership, they're botting up enchants far faster than people can buy them. I don't know if you've noticed, but the price on R4 and R5 enchantments has absolutely plummeted. Stacks of R4's were 900 AD this morning. A few more weeks of this, and the supply is going to be outrageous and the enchants they're farming will be essentially worthless.
Plus the only reason bots exist in the first place is because players are buying AD from 3rd party sites...if players didn't buy from them, they wouldn't be in the game.
meanwhile you could get twice to 3 times the ad from a botter than from the Zen exchange. it costs them next to nothing to bot. so 900 ad per stack that cost 1 cent worth of power to farm. it it makes them more than 1 cent they'll keep doing it. and bots have moved to other instances farming the r5's from iwp.
until it costs more to farm than to buy they'll keep at it. and if it costs more to farm than to buy the game will be dead already.
however there are methods cryptic could put in place to mitigate bots that dont involve shafting the player base. but they cost money to implement, and that obviously isnt going to happen any time soon.
edit: not sure why i bother posting. you'll just delete any negative criticism of cryptic.
Botters are profiting from this whole mess... while the normal players just have to deal with the fallout.
How are botters going to profit? Without the enormous amount of AD created via Leadership, they're botting up enchants far faster than people can buy them. I don't know if you've noticed, but the price on R4 and R5 enchantments has absolutely plummeted. Stacks of R4's were 900 AD this morning. A few more weeks of this, and the supply is going to be outrageous and the enchants they're farming will be essentially worthless.
Plus the only reason bots exist in the first place is because players are buying AD from 3rd party sites...if players didn't buy from them, they wouldn't be in the game.
More people are probably buying from them, even with the increasing prices and the AH cut, it's still more then you will get for buying ZEN and placing it into ZAX for AD.
And i don't know if you have noticed, but botters are also running dugeons, skirmishes and even PvP... just ask around.
Also it doesn't really matter for how much those low rank enchantment stacks are selling, it's just a numbers game... if they get less AD from selling, they adjust their prices for AD, or throw more bots into the farming grounds.
Not to mention, that some botters are still selling AD at the same low rate. Overall it looks like those botters know how to farm large amounts of AD without Leadership.
But let us entertain the thought, that botters are really using leadership... they could still sell RP stones and assets/resources for AD over the AH. And again it boils down to a pure numbers game, if the prices for those items go down, they just put more bots onto it.
Right now i'm just wondering how many more botters the servers will be able to handle, or when Neverdeath Graveyard Ghost Stories botting will be the reason for a server collapse...
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On the AH Coalescent Ward as of right now are running 448,000 AD. Before the change the same item was around 500,000 AD or more on the AH. The difference is that Zen is no longer exchanging for 500 x 1, it's now 447 x 1 or less. $10.00 worth of Zen get's you 447,000 at best.
Same with Companion's, etc, just about anything listed on the AH was directly related to the Zen cost on the Zen Market compared to what players asked for an item and the exchange rate for Zen.
One problem is the value of Zen has decreased while the price of Zen market items have stayed static. You can't run a successful business like that (IMO). It's like the Stock Market crashed and your only investment was AD.
Yes some items on the AH are coming down slightly but the value to buy Zen vs exchange has dropped as well so we're really in the same spot or worse. Only difference is that now Zen has less value for buying Zen to exchange it for AD and the cost of Zen Market's items are a greater cost considering the value of Zen per exchange rate has lowered.
Someone hinted at this already but the evidence is there. With out a doubt it cost MORE to play now than before even if the AH cost have drooped slightly. You get less for Zen vs AD exchange while Zen Market items are the same.
I've spent WAY to much real $ on this game already, I can't invest more to get less value considering it already cost me more to play this game in the last few months than any other I have played in years of playing them (with a sub and market).
That was my decision, I know but it was the only way to get 'geared' properly to be competitive with the rest of the player base and my guild in a P2W environment. How can anyone get geared with a 24K limit on AD when a GMOP cost 100,000 AD? My next upgrade for just one Artifact requires 3 GMOP plus others. A 100,000 AD GMOP was roughly $2.00 in cash, now it's roughly $2.37. I only expect that to go higher.
Like stated above, this is not the only game that is F2P and some of the others really ARE F2P with just 'fluff' market items that are not required to be competitive.
And the same goes for direct AD donation to the guild Stronghold coffer. It's either slowing down or even drying up completely. Do the Devs really think, that players will spend more money on this game, to compensate the loss of how much rAD they can make per day now?
Or that players will wait and just stick around until the Devs come up with some improvements... after Underdark is released... so may be somewhere next year?
Personally I do miss AD gain from leadership, but I play often enough to catch up with skirmishes and dungeons. I do hope that they will introduce new ways of earning AD soon! Perhaps HE's with a cap of AD each day, like we now have with skirms/dungeons. The dungeons and Bind on Equip sets with GOOD set bonuses should come back as well. I think we are all sick and tired of the same old 6 dungeons we have by now... At last, they should make it so that VIP applies to the Gateway. The people that actually pay for VIP have jobs, which means they are too busy to log into the game and won't benefit from their VIP bonuses in the gateway, which is just a honest rip off (ignoring the ZAX users who should significantly drop with AD gain gone from Leadership anyway). Since they are the source of your income, they deserve better than this.
First and foremost, the LS armies are the reaction to the demand for AD that cryptic itself created. Lets list in no particular order all the things cryptic has done that made the need for LS armies.
Making so many items bound.
Making enchanted keys bound.
Campaigns.
New refinement system.
Coalescent ward changes.
extremely high AD sinks.
Reagent changes.
RAD refining limit.
Artifacts.
Artifact equipment.
Mod 6.
Lets tackle these 1 at a time and explain how they forced the players into making LS armies regardless if its just a few toons or 50.
RAD refining limit.
Probably the least bothersome change they made since at the time it was made you'd make far more ADs then RADs so lowering the limit from 50k to 24K a day didn't really hurt.
Making enchanted keys bound.
This one was a major screw up that seriously started the need for ADs. Before they made them bound you could buy keys for around 10k-15k each and the exchange was was selling zen around 300AD per zen. The moment they made the keys bound the cost of everything started to rise. The reason is obvious and imho understandable.
Before the change demand was great but so was the supply so everything was cheap. After the change the demand was still great but the supply was petty much gone unless you bought keys with zen. So the exchange prices quickly shot up to 500ADs per zen. The prices on the AH started to rise because now the only way to get the items from the lockboxs was to buy them on the AH. Now be honest, in this situation what wold you do? Sell zen for 500AD? or buy keys and open boxes and sell the items you don't want for thousands if not millions of ADs? Its obvious to see which chice most people decided to go with since the exchange had over 2million listing for people looking to buy zen.
Also, I can only imagine the drop in zen buying this change made since people were now able to make more ADs with less zen.
New refining system.
Ok this one is actually 3 changes in one. First, the old system was 4 lvl 1s to make a lvl2, 4 lvl2s to make a 3 on so on. yes, it took way more gems but you didn't need reagents, didn't need to rank up and only need cwards for the high level. Granted, it took for more Cwards but that takes us to part 2.
Coalescent ward changes.
These lovely item used to not be bound and had a higher drop rate. So they were relatively cheap and easy to get even if you weren't lucky enough to get 1 from a coffer box. But with the refining system cryptic decided to make them bound to fight the "bots" ahh those pesky pesky bots. Now even though just making them BoP was more then enough to fight this problem cryptic didn't stop there. They also lowered the drop rate of the wards from the coffers and then just for poops and giggles also decided to add more items the coffer which in reality made the drop even lower.
Reagent changes.
And part 3 in this lovely little kick in the collective players nuts trilogy. So while you now need much less gems to rank up you now need to find or buy these reagents in order to refine. Was never sure how this made the new system better since I now have to find the gems and a bunch of different reagents in order to make a higher level gem. But of course over time cryptic decided to mess the drop rates of reagents and where they drop. Forcing many to end up buying Mark and greater marks of potency from the AH or the bazaar neither of which is cheap. Which leads us to....
Extremely high AD sinks.
I for one actually am all for AD sinks being in the game. But the problem is cryptic sets the prices so high that it makes you either not use them or curse at the high prices when you need to. I believe most don't use them unless they absolutely have to like buying Marks from the bazaar or....
Campaigns.
Yep, these are really slick AD sinks but at least ones that are kind of useful, 400 more attack is 400 more attack. And while I don't have the exact amount that each zone costs I know that Sharandar for example costs 75k AD just to get all the boons and im gonna go out on a limb and say the other zones cost somewhere near that amount. So 4 areas worth of boons adds up and that's not counting the cost for other things like keys for their dungeons.
Making so many items bound.
OK this is kind of obvious. If you make all the "wanted" items bound then that leaves pretty much HAMSTER to sell. Epics were a good source of ADs from selling them on the AH. This was good for the sellers and for the buyers. For the sellers, hey they made ADs. For the buyers it allowed them to get items they may not have otherwise been able to get for any number of reasons like never being able to do a dungeon run because they weren't geared well enough or being kicked for the same reason. And as always high demand plus high supply equals low cost.
Artifacts.
These were kind of neat when they were introduced. But at the time you could only have 1. So while not cheap the level up it wasn't too bad. But now we have 4 that we can have. The cost becomes insane when you start adding up the cost to refine them, 11GMOPs per artifact? 1.1mill per artifact or 4.4mill to level all 4 up to mythic. And this doesn't include other items you might need to buys like reagents, wards, and RP items to rank them up.
Artifact equipment.
While the cost of ranking these items up isn't as high as the artifacts they still can cost a pretty penny. And of course you lose all that money spent if you want to make one of the new guild artifact weapons since you need to salvage them to get an item needed to make those weapons and then guess what, you get to level up that nice new weapon so now its going to cost you even more money.
Mod 6.
As pretty much everyone knows mod 6 flipped the game on its ear. All that nice gear you had pre mod 6 was now pretty much worthless. Before mod 6 I was decked out in CN gear and rocking mostly R5 gems and was able to do most of the content with no problems. Post mod 6, I found woefully under geared. Even with Elven gear, artifact necklace, belt, weapon, offhand and 4 artifacts refined to epic and R7 or gems I find myself needing to run and heal every now and then.
So there you go, these are the things cryptic has done over time to increase the demand for ADs while repeatedly reducing our ability to make ADs. Thus forcing most players to create LS armies (large or small) so they could keep up with the ever increasing demand.
At any point of the years cryptic could have made efforts to lower the demand and reduce the need for LS armies but they didn't. And if any of you really believes that this change has anything to do with bots....I got some magic beans to sell you.
In Warframe the vast majority of players use the DE's launcher instead of Steam. They still have 20,000 players on steamcharts at six in the morning. Having only 2600 players on steamcharts for a F2P MMO still means your game is dying.
That being said, i wouldn't be surprised, if we see at least some changes for the guild Stronghold building/upgrades resources requirements, when Strongholds is going to be released on Xbox too.
But removing AD from Leadership on the Xbox?
Probably not going to happen.
I lived all those changes, ad sinks, ref. system, artifacts, etc. and I could manage them, but when mod 6 came and most of my efforts became almost dust I said "it's enough".
That was my choice. I understand that a company needs to make money, but when I finally saw where things were heading I gave up. Life for no paying players became extremely hard and decided to leave.
I wanna say thanks to devs for all this time I played this wonderful game, for the online friends I made all across the world...I'll take all the good things and be grateful but I think they are killing slowly the goose of golden eggs.
Things in life must born, raise and die, I guess. But for sure there's life beyond Neverwinter.
P.D.: BLUNTFORCE, we will meet us in the next mmo, maybe in Black Desert
Keiser.
you will still get noobs joining but they arnt going to stay noone invests 4000 per char into a game with 3 endgame pve dungeons and 3 pvp maps no mater how good the combat system is, nw dosnt have a monopoly on that kind of system anymore either i have been discovering
also i have no intention of coming back to a new mod to enjoy more AD sinks lmao
Checkmatein3 made very valid points. Our guild players have gone on "vacation" as well. We would have 20 to 30 people on every evening and this past week, we have had at most 12 to 13. Hopefully, once they decide they would rather play than pay to play they will be back but I am NOT holding my breath on that one.
The real thing that needs to be changed on this AD discombobulation is that you have to make the AD as part of the chest pick up and not as a drop at the boss level. People have found a way to cheat other people out of their AD and keep more of it for themselves. They just don't pick up their drops until everyone is gone, then they get to keep their whole share while you, as the honest player, lose out on several thousand AD each day. Please make this change ASAP!!!!!
That would at least make it possible to make AD, even for a casual player that doesn't run Dungeons or PvP.
I also don't understand having a cap on AD when it's extremely hard to make it anyway, now at least. After hitting your AD cap for the day, why play any longer? At least increase it so it's possible to afford the AD sinks they have implemented to the game.
I'll tell you, the only thing I have done since this 'fix' is to log in and get my VIP rewards then back off. That won't change until something is done.
If it's not changed by the time a unmentioned game goes F2P later this month (11 day's), it's see ya later.
And i'm not that type of player, that just hang back and let the other team players do the work...
So unless they either improve whatever is causing these rubberbanding, or give us rAD through quests, i'm only getting rAD from invoking...
"Cryptic....Cryptic never changes..."
Plus the only reason bots exist in the first place is because players are buying AD from 3rd party sites...if players didn't buy from them, they wouldn't be in the game.
until it costs more to farm than to buy they'll keep at it. and if it costs more to farm than to buy the game will be dead already.
however there are methods cryptic could put in place to mitigate bots that dont involve shafting the player base. but they cost money to implement, and that obviously isnt going to happen any time soon.
edit: not sure why i bother posting. you'll just delete any negative criticism of cryptic.
And i don't know if you have noticed, but botters are also running dugeons, skirmishes and even PvP... just ask around.
Also it doesn't really matter for how much those low rank enchantment stacks are selling, it's just a numbers game... if they get less AD from selling, they adjust their prices for AD, or throw more bots into the farming grounds.
Not to mention, that some botters are still selling AD at the same low rate.
Overall it looks like those botters know how to farm large amounts of AD without Leadership.
But let us entertain the thought, that botters are really using leadership... they could still sell RP stones and assets/resources for AD over the AH.
And again it boils down to a pure numbers game, if the prices for those items go down, they just put more bots onto it.
Right now i'm just wondering how many more botters the servers will be able to handle, or when Neverdeath Graveyard Ghost Stories botting will be the reason for a server collapse...