Disappointed in Doohickey event

allybell123 · March 2016

So new event yah cant wait! Farmed all weekend because the amount of materials you need to make the Doohickey is a lot. Managed to make three of them yah! Hand in time..... first one disappointment but ok would not expect to get one on the first try....second try again disappointment ....third one harder to make time running out but made it. Again disappointment sighs three days of my life I will never get back. I just wondered if you got the new mount through exchange and how many Doohickeys it took you. Thankyou for listening to my rant

plasticbat · March 2016

I did not bother. It is easier to get and cheaper to buy those mount during Winter festival.

zibadawa · March 2016

Assuming there are enough intelligent buyers in the market, you can estimate drop chances based on market prices. With enough such buyers in the market, anything whose selling price is noticeably less than the average worth of its drops will get bought up and either resold at a higher price or converted into those other goods and sold--either way, it's an easy profit. Of course there are ways to mess this up--namely if only a small number of people have reasonable knowledge of the actual drop rates for valuable items, and they collude to manipulate prices to resemble false values. But let's make the assumption that the market had enough time to stabilize to approximately fair market values.

The packs/doohickeys were selling for about 375k. The apparatus of gond sells for nearly 900k. Ignoring all other drops from the pack, you expect from the prices to get a mount about 40% of the time; so you'd need about 2.5 packs on average just to get on, and 3 failures is not particularly unusual. Of course, that's a vast overestimation, because the pack also includes chances at non-mounts with non-trivial value. The forgehammer is around 4m, so even a 1% shot at that means nearly 40k of the pack's value is accounted from that alone. Plus you've got the pres wards, the coal ward, the insignias (I'm not sure how well they're selling in actual practice, but even green gond insignias were 6 figures last I checked), and a smattering of less important things to account for. There should be a slight inflation from the embellished mount apparently being account bound, and thus untradable, but all together I would expect the actual chance at a mount to be at most 25%, and possibly lower.

So, yeah, not that unusual at all to fail three times.

My usual advice is: if you aren't already rich, then sell the lotto tickets and buy the prizes directly.

allybell123 · March 2016

I do buy zen in game with that said I wanted to see how easy it was for all the non cash spenders to get something half decent in game seems that is not so easy to do which is a little sad but I will try again no doubt lol

bioshrike · March 2016

allybell123 said:
I do buy zen in game with that said I wanted to see how easy it was for all the non cash spenders to get something half decent in game seems that is not so easy to do which is a little sad but I will try again no doubt lol

Whenever it comes to a chance box, open them expecting to get the worst possible item - that way, if you do get something better, it's a bonus!

wylonus · March 2016

this is 3rd Gond event, it took 2 years to get that mount. event should have been longer than just 4 days.

seem devs dont want you to finish in single event, they like to torture you by waiting for next year event to finish it, and those you get on professions, there isnt enough to make gadgets. only few who got overflowed raw materials and supplies of access tools to crank out just enough.

now, just my advice for those who are not prepared for Gond event, make sure you stock up raw items, and avoid those in auction except when you need to sell for diamonds. these are very limited time to make good investment, and other times they aren't worth investing when no one buys them through out the year.

okay, now we all know. stock them up for next year.

zibadawa · March 2016

wylonus said:
seem devs dont want you to finish in single event, they like to torture you by waiting for next year event to finish it, and those you get on professions, there isnt enough to make gadgets. only few who got overflowed raw materials and supplies of access tools to crank out just enough.

Yes, for newer players it's not really possible to produce the doohickeys in the first go. But by your second gond event you can have enough characters and enough profession quality tools and profession task slots that you can produce what you need for at least one doohickey. Worst case maybe you buy a few blueprints, but ultimately spend less than you make by selling off the doohickey/pack. You just need 100% quality to guarantee the second tier of results; the third tier isn't a major improvement over the second. That's 2 purples and a blue, say. Recent profession packs have driven down the prices on these into the 8-10k range, so they're pretty affordable. And some professions are much easier to do the gond events for than others. Alchemy is god-awful, so avoid it. Artificing and weaponsmithing are a simple matter of doing lots of tier 1 collections, so are easy to do even if you do all of the collecting during the event.

instynctive · March 2016

I got a whopping 32 grommets this time around.

wylonus · March 2016

Zib, yeah, you got that nailed. it is rough for newer players who dont have all the stuffs prepared, even with professions might not be in 25th ranks.
there is none on leadership, and alchemy is way too expensive and deep time sink to produce vitroils to get stacks of 50s'.
you can make those in per hour with army of purple grade crafters and getting tier 3 chances for maxed amounts if we have far advanced professions and loads of raws stacked for months.
so, i was giving advice to newer players to be prepare for next year and start working to max up those professions quick as they can.

having Gond event was just a boost for my alts to get some professions hitting 25th ranks, and my other older alt got enough for leadership since they are the slowest to level up. it was just enough for me since i know how soon to finish in 1-2 weeks instead of whole month checking them.

mrgiggles651 · March 2016

instynctive said:
I got a whopping 32 grommets this time around.

And 4,952 grommets are needed for a doohickey.

hustin1 · March 2016

allybell123 said:
So new event yah cant wait! Farmed all weekend because the amount of materials you need to make the Doohickey is a lot. Managed to make three of them yah! Hand in time..... first one disappointment but ok would not expect to get one on the first try....second try again disappointment ....third one harder to make time running out but made it. Again disappointment sighs three days of my life I will never get back. I just wondered if you got the new mount through exchange and how many Doohickeys it took you. Thankyou for listening to my rant

I must have turned in 10 doohickeys.

Mounts: 0

sorce · March 2016

I crafted, so turned in 5 Doohickeys. I think the best thing I got was 5 bound Pres wards.

namelesshero347 · March 2016

Exactly how I felt the first year I did it. The professions tasks are too resource intensive. And the drops are too few. I don't bother with this event anymore. Been refining one item with whatever material i happen to have by the end of the event. Finally got it to thingamabob

jonkoca · March 2016

I made a doohickey the first time around. Kept it. Decent aoe attack. Never could understand people who just used it like an enchanted key...

hfleet · March 2016

Took me 3 events to finally make 1 Doohickey.
That's with 10 Alts cranking out special professions.

Then I bought a 2nd Doohickey to buy the bag - got a green Crescent Insignia...

A massive effort, a large cost, and nothing to show for it.

dsn1118 · March 2016

Unfortunately, the only people who make money from these events are botters.Even mounts were bound so there is no way you could make enough money to cover your costs.Everything is a ruse to sell special refinement thingie from zen market.

casey0267 · March 2016

this was the 4th time, 1 in 2014, 2 for 2015 (April & October) and 1 so far this year, so maybe they will have it again this October (here is the wiki link so you can check it for future reference: http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Wonders_of_Gond

vortican · March 2016

After grinding it out for the stuffs, failed on an 80% success rate 3 times and lost 3 gizmos. Could have sold those for 100k a pop. Continued and probably could have pushed it to get a doohickey, but already had one and don't really want the mount that badly anyway. Ended up selling the thingamabobs and made some AD instead.

Still on a free green mount for years and I will not spend a penny on this game so I'll probably still have it forever.

However, I will continue to craft many, many pairs of pants.

wildfirede · March 2016

grinded like 200(from the common ones) while leveling a alt couse gf's queue is broken and we did some leveluping. Sold them at the AH couse my rng-fu is weak.

ilmenira · March 2016

hmm, no success stories seems...
same as here: opened one i grinded and got one green insignia from it
hesitating to open second one -- i bought in AH
and still one doohickey in the mail for hard times... (bought as well)
that is: 1 grinded, 2 bought... 1 opened, 1 converted, 1 doohickey unused yet

... after reading your experiences
i'm even more hesitant to open number 2... although i could need the embellished mount for AP
will wait and see

zibadawa · March 2016

vortican said:
After grinding it out for the stuffs, failed on an 80% success rate 3 times and lost 3 gizmos. Could have sold those for 100k a pop. Continued and probably could have pushed it to get a doohickey, but already had one and don't really want the mount that badly anyway. Ended up selling the thingamabobs and made some AD instead.

Still on a free green mount for years and I will not spend a penny on this game so I'll probably still have it forever.

However, I will continue to craft many, many pairs of pants.

You realize you can use pres wards, right?

kvet · March 2016

Most of the smallish events like this (Gond, the Alchemy one, etc) are pure resource sinks and something they can put on for the same of an event every once in a while. They are, simply put, not worth the effort. In the case of Gond, they really needed to examine to ROI for the doohickey and also be honest on the chance of getting a mount. They said a "high" chance, but we know that "high" to cryptic probably just means something like "not a fraction of 1%" but certianly isn't what we would think of as a "high" chance. I'd consider a high chance of success as being something north of 60% - high meaning "I'm successful more often than not"

The cost (in time, materials, resources, whatever) of obtaining a Doohickey FAR exceeds the common reward - a green insignia? Please. 5 green wards? Still not remotely worth the effort seeing as you can get enough AD to buy 5 wards in about 2 hours of play time if not less.

It's a very common problem with Cryptic - they are very VERY poor at evaluating what a player would consider a good ROI for his/her time and money investment. That is to say, they vastly overestimate the relative worth of their stuff.

EDIT: I should note, they seem to have been getting better at this with the more recent lockboxes. The "worthless" trash one commonly gets is still potentially useful in a real way OR valuable enough when sold on the AH to at least not feel like you got ripped off, or at least not TOTALLY ripped off anyway.

wylonus · March 2016

i know why, they got cryptic's brown-nosed "yes-men" saying it is all good, they really have no clues how or what the players feelings. it is bad, really bad.

it was suppose to be "Fun Event" instead of another pure grinding events where everyone almost get nothing, just burned.

wylonus · March 2016

Kvet, mentioning recent lockboxes, i agreed with you, been getting worthless items for almost 3 months, not a single legendary or decent epics, only best ones i have got was few companion tokens or some rank 8/9 runes, and a few genie's gifts.
been getting blue packs day after day.
once i get blackice pack, i was hoping for steel or mithril gauntlet, but i keep getting same bisel carving thingy and no longer need them, i never seen gauntlet, it become so mythical and out of reach, i checked auction house, forget it, it is so damn overpriced and unbelievable.
it seem these programmers are not fully trained and not actaully professionals, they seem cant even count numbers or coded correctly since they makes more bugs, and too slow to fix so many problems and all they do focus on diamonds and zen markets for several months and ignoring what players need, and they have did bait and switch too often.
some players are on "giving last chance" for them, make a bad mistake, some players will leave or freeze up their wallets by refusing zen market.
if they want money, make it cheaper and they will sell more and players will come back.

kvet · March 2016

I think the programmers and artists at Cryptic are actually pretty good. Any major development project like Neverwinter will come with a lot of bugs. Cryptics QA process isn't that bad either. If you want to blame someone, blame the management for setting bad time-drivers that force the developers to rush their product and force the QA team to rush their process and then forces the game to deploy despite the large volume of feedback given by players on Preview that indicates the product isn't really ready for prime time yet. Management is to blame for making the go/no-go decisions that put copious numbers of well known and in many cases well documented bugs into the game and Management is to blame for making the decision to prioritize other things over fixing bugs.

Developers (including, collectively all the programmers and artists that make Neverwinter a reality) and QA folks aren't prioritizing work- Management is.

If you want to blame someone, blame the management layer at Cryptic - they're the ones at fault here.

rollingonit · March 2016

kvet said:
snip

For an event that has been reoccurring at least once a year for a few years now; with the exact same repeated feedback; it's a fault as a company as a whole to respond.

It's been one of the defining attributes Cryptic/PWE has shown it's player base. I could link probably 1000+ pages, but thatd be a waste of time.

Edit: More constructive response, we have given them 3 years of the same feedback on this event. NOW, just a suggestion, after the 2nd year, marketing/Mods here/devs should of CLEARLY stated; "It's an event where you'll accumulate pieces, that you may not complete, but wait half a year and you might be able to next time.". That's all theyd had to say the first time the event appeared, and youd of seen way less criticism.

But instead you have marketing say, "Buy blueprints, expedite through cashshop, we are not peetoowin, but buy this now so you can complete in 1 go!"

Money > any feedback you can give this dev and pub (unless it involves, giving them more money)

urlord283 · March 2016

I never really liked that event

ilmenira · March 2016

opened my second wonders pack: found a barbed green insignia + a sapphire.

zibadawa · March 2016

ilmenira said:
opened my second wonders pack: found a barbed green insignia + a sapphire.

Barbs are good, at least.

Disappointed in Doohickey event

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