I get they want us to be logged in occasionally. Auto would mean reducing clicks, not making it fully unattended. Right now its 18 click per character to retrieve goods. Then its 36 clicks plus a lot of scrolling through unsorted assets to start it up again. With 8 toons, that 432 click twice a day, not counting switching characters.
At the very least - can you add a button in game to collect all finished profession tasks - this would save so many clicks.
And a collect and repeat. Anything to speed that up.
Or just bring back the Gateway. I find it really funny that it was never leadership and professions that were the issue, now all of a sudden it is. *shaking my head*
Meeting was yesterday and update was posted last night. Basically they dont k ow what they are going to do but the gateways not coming uo this week. They have an announcement planned for later this week.
Don't kid yourself it is not coming back any more than AD from invokation. This is just the next in their line of a money shakedown. They could care less about the QoL of the playerbase.
Since the issue with Gateway has now been stated by @Panderus, I would like to throw my 2 coppers into the discussion for alternate solutions to disabling the Gateway entirely and improving players QoL and reducing server load.
• Create 4 NEW level 25 Leadership tasks with a 7 day duration for the Resonance Bags, Thaumaturgic Bags, Artifact Paraphernalia, and Enchanted Coffers. Just make the rewards equivalent to rewards you would receive if running the respective 16, 12, 8, and 4 hour tasks. • Add NEW extremely long (days and/or weeks) Leveling tasks to all Professions to coincide with the required Asset to run the tasks for people that don’t care about the mostly irrelevant low level rewards. i.e. Train Leadership Level 1-6 with Mercenaries, Train Leadership Leadership Level 7-12 with Guards, and Train Leadership Level 13-21 with Footmen.
Professions are not a “fun” part of the game, but now a necessary evil especially with the required 3.1 IL for end game content.
To address another “not fun” aspect of the game, I would like to see the Invocation system overhauled. I think invocations should be reduced from 6 to 3, removing the 15, 30, and 45 minute invocations and have those rewards rolled into the remaining 3 invokes, with the 2 remaining invoke times adjusted appropriately. This would also improve player QoL and reduce server load on the Login server I suspect.
In summary, I would rather be playing the game (and reducing your server load) than wasting countless hours each week on Professions and Invocations. I think 20+ pages on this topic is a pretty good indication of how much people enjoy and rely on the Gateway when in and out of the game.
Just got back into the game purely to use gateway. Disappointing but at least I didn't spend on companions. Back to steam to find a new game
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,383Arc User
I don't care about SCA. I want profession and AH even if does not allow posting.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
Well the login server is realllllyyyyy slow tonight.
When Leadership was removed from the gateway, bots moved in-game. No doubt the same is happening now.
The best solution is to cut the gold sellers off from their customers. @panderus I have a real solution for this based on my work experience. PM if you're interested in discussing.
I've spent the past 15 minutes writing and re-writing responses to this thread... but at the end I just have no more words left to portray how I feel about this game and the studio responsible for the design decisions therein. Apathy maybe? I don't know. There's just no point in trying anymore.
Neverwinter Module 6: The only MMO expansion in the history of MMO's to remove more content than it added.
Decided to revisit the game to look at the last update and found that the Gateway is not working for quite a long time now. Funny enough, the Russian version of it still does:
dunno whether they are up to date with game updates compared to Western counterpart of NW. Much has been said in the thread, but I'd like to stress another aspect. Yes you can do all Gateway things in-game, though much less conveniently in come cases, except for one: the dice game, Sword Coast Adventures. It was not very rewarding in terms of loot, but was quite funny and entertaining by itself (and allowed to train companions off-game), so I eventually even acquired 4 purple companions just for the sake of running higher levels of it. So I just hope that for the sake of all who care about it the gateway will be back sometime. It will be quite sad to lose a not so insignificant part of the game's fun and possibilities.
Just got out of the meeting and decided that Gateway will not be coming up this week. We will have a more official announcement by the end of this week of what our plans are and why Gateway has been down.
I also have a task to follow up on what to do with the things like the companion only gear, Lightfoot Thief and the companion we internally called 'Tank-dog' that will likely not include the Zen Market. Though I think the dog is in the Zen Market on Xbox since we knew we couldn't launch with Gateway.
Actually, professions are the current main cause with a secondary of the Auction House. Botters taking down Gateway has actually happened in brief bursts about once every 6 months since its existence and every time we have added extra prevention to help stop it.
My comments about the SCA items was to figure out long term plans, not that they were the cause. I probably shouldn't have said anything about them since it was misunderstood. Perhaps I shouldn't have said this either. I'm kidding... I think.
Personally I care deeply about Gateway and I have a section of my screen devoted to watching it and doing my Professions (all maxed on my main btw).
Anyway, please just sit tight while we finalize our official blog about this.
Left replying a day or two due to RL issues and waiting to see if there was any more details.
All I'd say @panderus is while a lot of us will understand varying degrees of what is likely to stress server loads and others varying degrees of the fine line between what can and can't be said, along with the fact that these are not always simple fixes if you don't want to go down the road of a bodge job that may fall over a month later it better be a hefty response rather than a few lines.
Most of us will understand if you do not ( and obviously for preventative measures to be effective cannot ) detail the exact mechanism that was being abused/exploited, however we will REQUIRE some form of detail on what was actually causing the issue.
"It was professions and AH" will not be sufficient for the Official blog response, we'll need something with a bit more meat on it like "polling scripts were querying the AH at abnormal loads" or "multiple VM botting was causing port locking eventually causing degredation to operation of the server" or "Blue Monkeys were eating all the cat5e crosslinks" or whatever was actually causing the strain, we don't need to know HOW they were doing it but we do need to know WHAT it was that was doing it if you want us to be even accepting of anything now done in relation to the Gateway and the recent closure of it with very poor handling of informing the playerbase.
As I said if I had been as slow informing people in my Job I'd be sacked. All you ( as in the company ) had to do when it went down was a simple "We're having issues with the Gateway server and it will be down until further notice, we'll have an update for you as soon as we have concrete details and a timescale.", we'd have grumbled for sure... but if you'd posted that on the friday I doubt we'd have a page of pitchforks and a page and half of kittens.
Just got out of the meeting and decided that Gateway will not be coming up this week. We will have a more official announcement by the end of this week of what our plans are and why Gateway has been down.
I also have a task to follow up on what to do with the things like the companion only gear, Lightfoot Thief and the companion we internally called 'Tank-dog' that will likely not include the Zen Market. Though I think the dog is in the Zen Market on Xbox since we knew we couldn't launch with Gateway.
Actually, professions are the current main cause with a secondary of the Auction House. Botters taking down Gateway has actually happened in brief bursts about once every 6 months since its existence and every time we have added extra prevention to help stop it.
My comments about the SCA items was to figure out long term plans, not that they were the cause. I probably shouldn't have said anything about them since it was misunderstood. Perhaps I shouldn't have said this either. I'm kidding... I think.
Personally I care deeply about Gateway and I have a section of my screen devoted to watching it and doing my Professions (all maxed on my main btw).
Anyway, please just sit tight while we finalize our official blog about this.
Left replying a day or two due to RL issues and waiting to see if there was any more details.
All I'd say @panderus is while a lot of us will understand varying degrees of what is likely to stress server loads and others varying degrees of the fine line between what can and can't be said, along with the fact that these are not always simple fixes if you don't want to go down the road of a bodge job that may fall over a month later it better be a hefty response rather than a few lines.
Most of us will understand if you do not ( and obviously for preventative measures to be effective cannot ) detail the exact mechanism that was being abused/exploited, however we will REQUIRE some form of detail on what was actually causing the issue.
"It was professions and AH" will not be sufficient for the Official blog response, we'll need something with a bit more meat on it like "polling scripts were querying the AH at abnormal loads" or "multiple VM botting was causing port locking eventually causing degredation to operation of the server" or "Blue Monkeys were eating all the cat5e crosslinks" or whatever was actually causing the strain, we don't need to know HOW they were doing it but we do need to know WHAT it was that was doing it if you want us to be even accepting of anything now done in relation to the Gateway and the recent closure of it with very poor handling of informing the playerbase.
As I said if I had been as slow informing people in my Job I'd be sacked. All you ( as in the company ) had to do when it went down was a simple "We're having issues with the Gateway server and it will be down until further notice, we'll have an update for you as soon as we have concrete details and a timescale.", we'd have grumbled for sure... but if you'd posted that on the friday I doubt we'd have a page of pitchforks and a page and half of kittens.
You do realize that he told you to sit tight while they finalize their official blog on the issue? WAAAAGH WALL OF TEXT CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO READ WHAT I'M QUOTING is the best way to get your feedback ignored. Players making ultimatums and false equivalencies like you are makes devs crawl back into their caves and ignore the forums like they have for decades in every other game ever made.
• Create 4 NEW level 25 Leadership tasks with a 7 day duration for the Resonance Bags, Thaumaturgic Bags, Artifact Paraphernalia, and Enchanted Coffers. Just make the rewards equivalent to rewards you would receive if running the respective 16, 12, 8, and 4 hour tasks.
If you mean "remove level 21 - 24 reward tasks and make them level 25 rewards lasting for 1 week task", then, this is one of the dumbest suggestions i have ever read on these forums...
I said "Create NEW". I did not suggest removing the removing or replacing the lower quests. Once you hit level 25 on Leadership, I don't see why there can't be longer duration tasks, similar to the 12 day Unified Element task in Alchemy. For example, a 7 day Resonance Bag quest that give 10 Resonance Bags as a reward.
I have to agree with some that this is as much a design issue as a botting issue. Professions are botted because it's a repetitive task in which the tasks with a shorter duration also grant more rewards. That has to stop. No human individual can start tasks every four hours, two hours, one hour, 30 minutes. So why do they even exist? I'm sure there are other ways to reward activity. Most players prefer the long Leaderhsip tasks anyway so they can forget about professions for a day or whatever.
This is also where you realize that professions is a system that completely works besides the game. If you actually had to go out in the world to do professions every day, than no bots, or much less.
I'm not sure what wrong with the Auction House, but I guess people automate reposting their auctions there to constantly undercut the competition. If that's the case, the easy fix is to disallow posting auctions on the Gateway. That would also instantly kill the need to monitor the Auction House for botters, and with that a big chunk of traffic. I'd be pissed if I couldn't browse or buy stuff on the fly, but posting auctions can be very much done ingame. But I'm not a powerseller, so I don't know what that would take away from them.
Another option would be to only grant the VIP AH benefits while ingame. That might already do it as well, because nobody can infinitely repost auctions and make profit in that case.
For example, a 7 day Resonance Bag quest that give 10 Resonance Bags as a reward.
Increasing the rewards with long-term tasks in return for sparing the server..I see where you're going with this and it might prove to have some effect. You'd even win a little time. (7*24)/16=10.5, aka 8h time profit and 1 extra bag every 2 weeks.I'd probably take it, if for no other reason than that I only have to set the task once a week. convenience is always a nice thing to have.
But while it may alleviate the server pressure, it doesn't fix the actual problem: The server seems unable to handle the traffic. And most of the traffic doesn't come from professions. It comes from SCA and the AH. Mostly the AH I think. Database searches can be quite intensive. Especially when you can do 60-? searches a minute if you bot it. Much more than just opening a link and pressing ok, which you can do only about 400-450 times a day per account.
Then people start using heroes on a 7 day task and the AH gets flooded.
Bring back SCA and leave out the AH, ZAX and Leadership, that is the way to go.
SCA is also the main thing that I miss. I got back into the game specifically because I was looking forward to playing SCA at lunch and such. There are a ton of free-to-play MMOs out there these days, and in general they're all pretty similar. Sure, some have this feature or that feature that make them more or less appealing to different types of players. But at the end of the day, most of them boil down to running around and killing bears and collecting logs (or killing demons & collecting magical shards, etc).
What really set this game apart, in my eyes, was having the browser-based aspect of the game that I could muck around with during lunch breaks at work. I enjoyed playing SCA, and it was fun to be able to score some cool things for my characters while I was still stuck at the office.
Personally, I wouldn't be opposed to them making the gateway a VIP 1 perk.
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micky1p00Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,594Arc User
Remove all the short timed tasks, make longer tasks. Tasks should be either more or less immediate (in seconds - for events, masterworks due to it's complexity) Or very long. This will reduce server load, and increase the value of the crafting people. Also the gateway can be made read only (or disabled), and the access can be tied to certain in game elements like ViP, gametime played, and even campaign, quests, or dungeon completion.
For example, a 7 day Resonance Bag quest that give 10 Resonance Bags as a reward.
Increasing the rewards with long-term tasks in return for sparing the server..I see where you're going with this and it might prove to have some effect. You'd even win a little time. (7*24)/16=10.5, aka 8h time profit and 1 extra bag every 2 weeks.I'd probably take it, if for no other reason than that I only have to set the task once a week. convenience is always a nice thing to have.
But while it may alleviate the server pressure, it doesn't fix the actual problem: The server seems unable to handle the traffic. And most of the traffic doesn't come from professions. It comes from SCA and the AH. Mostly the AH I think. Database searches can be quite intensive. Especially when you can do 60-? searches a minute if you bot it. Much more than just opening a link and pressing ok, which you can do only about 400-450 times a day per account.
Then people start using heroes on a 7 day task and the AH gets flooded.
Doubtful. Do you post your weekly rewards from leadership at the end of the week? I don't. People would still wait for either double RP or until they have a full stack. And you're not generating more items either, so how would it flood the AH? Worst case, heroes (and profession packs) would get more expensive. Which I don't mind. Another lockbox item actually worth selling.
Prices drop during 2x RP so I wouldn't be surprised to see people start posting earlier.
But the root problem (up to 50+ chars x 9 manually slots on each char) will still remain, which means that some players will still bot the Gateway. Making Profession more noob, player and alt friendly would solve the problem for good.
I am pretty sure that Joe Common who plays the game and uses scripts to have his 50 man army running leadership tasks is not the problem. The real problems are the so called "Gold Sellers" (who do not sell gold as such). They use expensive equipment to double the number of active players at any time and sell you resources for real money. They are the issue. Cryptic could not care less if you bot your 50 toons on the gateway or not, as long as you do not misuse the system.
Post edited by zebular on
Imaginary Friends are the best friends you can have!
But the root problem (up to 50+ chars x 9 manually slots on each char) will still remain, which means that some players will still bot the Gateway. Making Profession more noob, player and alt friendly would solve the problem for good.
I am pretty sure that Joe Common who plays the game and uses scripts to have his 50 man army running leadership tasks is not the problem. The real problems are the so called "Gold Sellers" (who do not sell gold as such). They use expensive equipment to double the number of active players at any time and sell you resources for real money. They are the issue. Cryptic could not care less if you bot your 50 toons on the gateway or not, as long as you do not misuse the system.
Oh, they care, it's just not something they are going to actively pursue. It's sort of like the small time drug dealer on the corner. If a cop sees him, they are going to bring him in - but they aren't going to bother setting up a sting to catch him.
Post edited by zebular on
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andorrabellMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 437Arc User
you should get a reward from doing leadership or any profession on ONE character with a modifier based on the number of characters on an account with max profession of the same type. SH equipment coffer is basically useless now.
This would be glorious. Like Andorra Bell sets her leadership but uses: LIST TOON NAMES in tow, set it once but effectively run it with all toons with access to the quest? ++++ I'm sure coding would be a problem and also rare tasks but I'd love to see little heads of my other characters in the "optional assets" slot.
Even if it was just one that would cut the hell in half.
But the root problem (up to 50+ chars x 9 manually slots on each char) will still remain, which means that some players will still bot the Gateway. Making Profession more noob, player and alt friendly would solve the problem for good.
I am pretty sure that Joe Common who plays the game and uses scripts to have his 50 man army running leadership tasks is not the problem. The real problems are the so called "Gold Sellers" (who do not sell gold as such). They use expensive equipment to double the number of active players at any time and sell you resources for real money. They are the issue. Cryptic could not care less if you bot your 50 toons on the gateway or not, as long as you do not misuse the system.
Oh, they care, it's just not something they are going to actively pursue. It's sort of like the small time drug dealer on the corner. If a cop sees him, they are going to bring him in - but they aren't going to bother setting up a sting to catch him.
I've never understood why people don't understand that botting is in fact cheating. Everyone sees it as if it's something the devs have given a pass on when pretty much every MMO ever discourages it. If they really were fine with everyone automating tasks they'd have made it a feature in the game. The fact that it's a pain to reset professions is why we even have them rewarding at the level that they do.
I have to agree with some that this is as much a design issue as a botting issue. Professions are botted because it's a repetitive task in which the tasks with a shorter duration also grant more rewards. That has to stop. No human individual can start tasks every four hours, two hours, one hour, 30 minutes. So why do they even exist? I'm sure there are other ways to reward activity. Most players prefer the long Leaderhsip tasks anyway so they can forget about professions for a day or whatever.
This is a very astute observation and one we feel strongly about as well in discussions the future and past of Professions.
I'd make all professions tasks take 30 seconds. Then I'd limit the "good" tasks by making their resources only available once a day or once a week. The gameplay of crafting should be gathering the ingredients. Currently the gameplay is employee management and robot bosses are outperforming humans.
I'd make all professions tasks take 30 seconds. Then I'd limit the "good" tasks by making their resources only available once a day or once a week. The gameplay of crafting should be gathering the ingredients. Currently the gameplay is employee management and robot bosses are outperforming humans.
Limiting the good tasks is sort of the route the old Dreadring/Sharandar weapons and Masterwork tasks have taken in the past and I feel have had good results by 'costing' the player to do some amount of gameplay first.
Comments
Are you having a Relapse?
And a collect and repeat. Anything to speed that up.
Or just bring back the Gateway. I find it really funny that it was never leadership and professions that were the issue, now all of a sudden it is. *shaking my head*
Id pay zen for that even.
Well hope the Gateway comes up sometime soon.
• Create 4 NEW level 25 Leadership tasks with a 7 day duration for the Resonance Bags, Thaumaturgic Bags, Artifact Paraphernalia, and Enchanted Coffers. Just make the rewards equivalent to rewards you would receive if running the respective 16, 12, 8, and 4 hour tasks.
• Add NEW extremely long (days and/or weeks) Leveling tasks to all Professions to coincide with the required Asset to run the tasks for people that don’t care about the mostly irrelevant low level rewards. i.e. Train Leadership Level 1-6 with Mercenaries, Train Leadership Leadership Level 7-12 with Guards, and Train Leadership Level 13-21 with Footmen.
Professions are not a “fun” part of the game, but now a necessary evil especially with the required 3.1 IL for end game content.
To address another “not fun” aspect of the game, I would like to see the Invocation system overhauled. I think invocations should be reduced from 6 to 3, removing the 15, 30, and 45 minute invocations and have those rewards rolled into the remaining 3 invokes, with the 2 remaining invoke times adjusted appropriately. This would also improve player QoL and reduce server load on the Login server I suspect.
In summary, I would rather be playing the game (and reducing your server load) than wasting countless hours each week on Professions and Invocations. I think 20+ pages on this topic is a pretty good indication of how much people enjoy and rely on the Gateway when in and out of the game.
When Leadership was removed from the gateway, bots moved in-game. No doubt the same is happening now.
The best solution is to cut the gold sellers off from their customers. @panderus I have a real solution for this based on my work experience. PM if you're interested in discussing.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
https://gateway.nw.ru.perfectworld.eu/
dunno whether they are up to date with game updates compared to Western counterpart of NW. Much has been said in the thread, but I'd like to stress another aspect. Yes you can do all Gateway things in-game, though much less conveniently in come cases, except for one: the dice game, Sword Coast Adventures. It was not very rewarding in terms of loot, but was quite funny and entertaining by itself (and allowed to train companions off-game), so I eventually even acquired 4 purple companions just for the sake of running higher levels of it. So I just hope that for the sake of all who care about it the gateway will be back sometime. It will be quite sad to lose a not so insignificant part of the game's fun and possibilities.
All I'd say @panderus is while a lot of us will understand varying degrees of what is likely to stress server loads and others varying degrees of the fine line between what can and can't be said, along with the fact that these are not always simple fixes if you don't want to go down the road of a bodge job that may fall over a month later it better be a hefty response rather than a few lines.
Most of us will understand if you do not ( and obviously for preventative measures to be effective cannot ) detail the exact mechanism that was being abused/exploited, however we will REQUIRE some form of detail on what was actually causing the issue.
"It was professions and AH" will not be sufficient for the Official blog response, we'll need something with a bit more meat on it like "polling scripts were querying the AH at abnormal loads" or "multiple VM botting was causing port locking eventually causing degredation to operation of the server" or "Blue Monkeys were eating all the cat5e crosslinks" or whatever was actually causing the strain, we don't need to know HOW they were doing it but we do need to know WHAT it was that was doing it if you want us to be even accepting of anything now done in relation to the Gateway and the recent closure of it with very poor handling of informing the playerbase.
As I said if I had been as slow informing people in my Job I'd be sacked. All you ( as in the company ) had to do when it went down was a simple "We're having issues with the Gateway server and it will be down until further notice, we'll have an update for you as soon as we have concrete details and a timescale.", we'd have grumbled for sure... but if you'd posted that on the friday I doubt we'd have a page of pitchforks and a page and half of kittens.
This is also where you realize that professions is a system that completely works besides the game. If you actually had to go out in the world to do professions every day, than no bots, or much less.
I'm not sure what wrong with the Auction House, but I guess people automate reposting their auctions there to constantly undercut the competition. If that's the case, the easy fix is to disallow posting auctions on the Gateway. That would also instantly kill the need to monitor the Auction House for botters, and with that a big chunk of traffic. I'd be pissed if I couldn't browse or buy stuff on the fly, but posting auctions can be very much done ingame. But I'm not a powerseller, so I don't know what that would take away from them.
Another option would be to only grant the VIP AH benefits while ingame. That might already do it as well, because nobody can infinitely repost auctions and make profit in that case.
What really set this game apart, in my eyes, was having the browser-based aspect of the game that I could muck around with during lunch breaks at work. I enjoyed playing SCA, and it was fun to be able to score some cool things for my characters while I was still stuck at the office.
Personally, I wouldn't be opposed to them making the gateway a VIP 1 perk.
This will reduce server load, and increase the value of the crafting people.
Also the gateway can be made read only (or disabled), and the access can be tied to certain in game elements like ViP, gametime played, and even campaign, quests, or dungeon completion.
The real problems are the so called "Gold Sellers" (who do not sell gold as such). They use expensive equipment to double the number of active players at any time and sell you resources for real money. They are the issue. Cryptic could not care less if you bot your 50 toons on the gateway or not, as long as you do not misuse the system.
Even if it was just one that would cut the hell in half.
Make it so!!!
https://www.theholycrusaders.com/
Stop the bots!
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min