andorrabellMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 437Arc User
@panderus Have you all considered the inverse relationship between ability to play SCA and mess around with our professions and auctions and time available to troll the forums?
I would lose all hope that the game will actually get better, if they remove the Gateway. This is just one more thing in a long line of things that have supposedly been removed for some other reason than money... but just conveniently makes it to where we will potentially spend more money on the game.
Removing VALUE from a game and then replacing it with more work... hmm.
I am honestly having a moral issue with the idea of recruiting more people into my guild... considering how the Devs are choosing to manage things. I'm seriously considering limiting our recruitment to higher IL people that are already invested in the game (and hopefully already knows how this company operates) rather than get some new guy and help him get NW addicted, lol.
I care about PEOPLE in the game more than the game itself.. and if I feel that people are being abused, neglected, or taken advantage of... I surely don't want to be an accomplice in those things.
I've tried to isolate my guild from the most negative elements of the game community here... but what can I do if the most negative element of the my member's gaming experience is the Developers themselves?
No.. this isn't only about the Gateway.... it's about a systematic disregard of Quality of Life issues in game and an orchestrated campaign (I believe all this was planned long ago) to remove as much of the easy "free" parts of Free to Play from the game.
FBI is a BEAUTIFUL addition to the game... the dungeon itself is very challenging and fun... it's rewards are decent, (until prices adjust to supply). But, it's one example of how the cost of FREE in this game is going up in regards to the currency of TIME. the most precious resource anyone has.
The gateway saved us a lot of time... so guess what... *snip*
“Improvise, Adapt and Overcome!”
― Clint Eastwood, Heartbreak Ridge
Guild Leader of Ardent Justice HQ: Always recruiting People not Pixels.
The number of young nobles that have likely perished without their guards is truly a travesty during the last 2 weeks.
Although my soldiers have been escorting about as many wizards to Saskatchewan as normal.
Mine have gone on strike. Just no time for all that now. Any time I log on, I have guild issues and whatnot to deal with. I end up forgetting to reset professions after collecting them and whatnot. It just takes a lot longer because I'm chatting in between.
The task I referenced is a long one that I never ran more than once per day anyway.
I also sometimes forget to reset professions after collecting them.
I am completely Gateway-addicted as far as character management goes. I can't easily check if I've set professions on everyone. I can't easily check if I've skipped anyone while invoking by counting their refinement bags; I've missed the last one for one character or another so many times now because I am cycling doing the last ones and somebody goes onto their 90-min cooldown instead. I spent an absolutely stupid amount of time trying to figure out who was holding my stack of strongbox keys during the 2xGuildmarks event.
And console players have to deal with this kittens all the time....
I am completely Gateway-addicted as far as character management goes. I can't easily check if I've set professions on everyone. I can't easily check if I've skipped anyone while invoking by counting their refinement bags; I've missed the last one for one character or another so many times now because I am cycling doing the last ones and somebody goes onto their 90-min cooldown instead. I spent an absolutely stupid amount of time trying to figure out who was holding my stack of strongbox keys during the 2xGuildmarks event.
For once, i will give back what becky usually states. XDDD.
+1 to this
+2 to this
0
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
I've been reduced to only running professions on a single character.
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: 12,400Arc 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. ***
0
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.
Comments
Have you all considered the inverse relationship between ability to play SCA and mess around with our professions and auctions and time available to troll the forums?
>:)
https://www.theholycrusaders.com/
Removing VALUE from a game and then replacing it with more work... hmm.
I am honestly having a moral issue with the idea of recruiting more people into my guild... considering how the Devs are choosing to manage things. I'm seriously considering limiting our recruitment to higher IL people that are already invested in the game (and hopefully already knows how this company operates) rather than get some new guy and help him get NW addicted, lol.
I care about PEOPLE in the game more than the game itself.. and if I feel that people are being abused, neglected, or taken advantage of... I surely don't want to be an accomplice in those things.
I've tried to isolate my guild from the most negative elements of the game community here... but what can I do if the most negative element of the my member's gaming experience is the Developers themselves?
No.. this isn't only about the Gateway.... it's about a systematic disregard of Quality of Life issues in game and an orchestrated campaign (I believe all this was planned long ago) to remove as much of the easy "free" parts of Free to Play from the game.
FBI is a BEAUTIFUL addition to the game... the dungeon itself is very challenging and fun... it's rewards are decent, (until prices adjust to supply). But, it's one example of how the cost of FREE in this game is going up in regards to the currency of TIME. the most precious resource anyone has.
The gateway saved us a lot of time... so guess what... *snip*
― Clint Eastwood, Heartbreak Ridge
Guild Leader of Ardent Justice HQ: Always recruiting People not Pixels.
FOUNDER and OWNER of the SKT3K Channel: SKT Only Content 3k+. http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1228278/skt-content-for-the-non-elite-video-links-provided
I also sometimes forget to reset professions after collecting them.
I am completely Gateway-addicted as far as character management goes. I can't easily check if I've set professions on everyone. I can't easily check if I've skipped anyone while invoking by counting their refinement bags; I've missed the last one for one character or another so many times now because I am cycling doing the last ones and somebody goes onto their 90-min cooldown instead. I spent an absolutely stupid amount of time trying to figure out who was holding my stack of strongbox keys during the 2xGuildmarks event.
And console players have to deal with this kittens all the time....
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
@panderus please keep us posted!
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.