That is the real reason. How do you determine there are few people used the non-botted features?
They would be able to tell how many unique Gateway users were accessing professions, SCA, AH, inventory, character sheets, guild interface, and so forth.
That is the real reason. How do you determine there are few people used the non-botted features?
They would be able to tell how many unique Gateway users were accessing professions, SCA, AH, inventory, character sheets, guild interface, and so forth.
Just a matter of tracking traffic.
Frankly, I don't believe they did that at all. Of course, what I believe does not matter. If they indeed did that before they shutdown Gateway, it means they planned this all along and gather all the data to make that decision.
*** 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. ***
We have quite a bit of experience in keeping the botters at bay at this point and it wasn't a decision that was come upon lightly at all. The meeting we had went over a long agenda and recounted things we have already tried to resolve this issue as well as weigh all the pros and cons. We even went through the scenario of just keeping up the non botted features of Gateway but there were still some costs that still incurred with little gains (keeping the additional specialized servers up and the fact few people used them).
That is the real reason which is the cost of maintaining Gateway. Bots?
How do you determine there are few people used the non-botted features? Read only AH, Profession, inventory, character, etc all help. These are QoL stuff.
I wonder a bit about this too. I mean, satellite-game functionality that doesn't directly give a competitive advantage and is more QoL should still be maintained imo, and even if its operating at a 'loss'. There's more there than the simple number of legit accounts using it, but a trust w/ the players that use those features (even intermittently) and their overall satisfaction at having something else to do w/ the game that is outside of the core game.
Now, maybe we will get people playing and earning things within the game fairly instead of seeing 50,0000 of their alts logging in and out all day.
I'll give you 10:1 odds that the botting issue is driven by real money traders that "play" the game entirely to sell AD and items for $$$, and not by real players that also run bot scripts. (plus the folks at a certain banned website that pull AH transaction history).
They would be able to tell how many unique Gateway users were accessing professions, SCA, AH, inventory, character sheets, guild interface, and so forth.
Just a matter of tracking traffic.
Hopefully they cross-referenced that check against the spend history of the players that use the features to understand if they are KITTENING off valuable customers. A very large fraction of players in the game presumably don't spend a dime. The more dedicated players that stick around long enough and take the game seriously enough to discover and value those other gateway features are likely to skew toward the paying side.
@panderus While I am trying to understand and cope with the decisions, I would like to please ask that you PLEASE do not put the Loyal gear in a lockbox. I would prefer it to be more readily available rather than have it in a lockbox. Trade bar store comes to mind, that way people still have to buy keys to get it, but are pretty much guaranteed to get the pieces they want/need.
Lockbox is not likely where we would put them, no.
Personally, I would like to see the Lightfoot Thief come from some gameplay related activity.
Maybe an epic level leadership profession task??
That is an interesting and flavorful place to put them.
0
plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,353Arc User
It was so hard for the devs to think about remove ALL but SCA on Gateway? And BTW, with this and premade toon I think you will have a lvl 70 BOT army in game very soon.
They are already in game. If they can run dungeon, how hard for them to run profession or AH in game?
*** 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. ***
@panderus While I am trying to understand and cope with the decisions, I would like to please ask that you PLEASE do not put the Loyal gear in a lockbox. I would prefer it to be more readily available rather than have it in a lockbox. Trade bar store comes to mind, that way people still have to buy keys to get it, but are pretty much guaranteed to get the pieces they want/need.
Lockbox is not likely where we would put them, no.
Personally, I would like to see the Lightfoot Thief come from some gameplay related activity.
Maybe an epic level leadership profession task??
That is an interesting and flavorful place to put them.
Which leads to other ideas: Tiered companion gear crafted from the appropriate profession, companions available from each profession tiered based on quality, maybe a new profession "Beastmaster".
I'm not sure why, but I'm not really upset over this. I guess it's because I only casually used the Gateway, more or less quit Leadership a year ago, and Panderus let it slip when he said he was tasked with putting the SCA rewards elsewhere. I didn't want to plant a flag on it since I realized it was an accidental slip-up and no one else seemed to latch on. It made it obvious to me though that, at the very least, SCA was going away forever, if not the whole Gateway.
Also, since the release for Xbox, I figured the Gateway's days were numbered, and with PS4, it's fate was sealed. I'm not saying the botting was a smokescreen, but the other platforms made the decision much easier. Without botting, it would have likely happened eventually anyway though.
Putting the SCA rewards in the Tbar or Seal store would work, but I agree it would be nicer if it was a direct gameplay reward. It could be put in dungeon loot tables (sweetening the pot for Fangbreaker!?), but my favorite idea is companion gear as a foundry reward (LF Thief could be a rare reward)! So it isn't too crazy, could just be the first game per day per character, and could even be BtA to prevent botting.
Sadly though, it seems like the foundry is on a slow roll to the graveyard as well...
We have quite a bit of experience in keeping the botters at bay at this point and it wasn't a decision that was come upon lightly at all. The meeting we had went over a long agenda and recounted things we have already tried to resolve this issue as well as weigh all the pros and cons. We even went through the scenario of just keeping up the non botted features of Gateway but there were still some costs that still incurred with little gains (keeping the additional specialized servers up and the fact few people used them).
That is the real reason which is the cost of maintaining Gateway. Bots?
How do you determine there are few people used the non-botted features? Read only AH, Profession, inventory, character, etc all help. These are QoL stuff.
It was certainly one of the costs, yes. There was also the extra dev costs of keeping a feature, the extra servers and knowledge needed to maintain them as well.
How did we determine what people used in gateway? It was a website, those are very easy to track what players are doing. Also, when we are being 'aggressively botted' we could see what processes the servers were doing that was taking up the most CPU cycles.
@willwilco 'Recently logged in' is actually anyone who has logged into gateway within the last year if I recall correctly.
@tripsofthrymr Regarding professional botters vs actual players, we believe that what was hurting the servers were professional botters simply because large influxes of them would start up all in parallel suggested a coordinated effort. Player activities are much more organic and ebb and flow with the normal game traffic and behaviors.
@strumslinger@panderus@kreatyve gateway is gone now. ok thank you for the notice. i can stop complaining about what is happening to it.
" option for companion gear - make a merchant we can spend our gold on to buy companion gear. lightfoot thief - a sort of game to get it would be fun i like your idea - try to do a simple one though like... lore collection - make 10 lore spots that give us a feeling of the dead gateway (have this be unlocked when you put on your forth epic companion). like a signpost through protector enclave that gives us the lore behind gateway... make this once per character and allow the companion to still be sold on ah. "
i wonder how things will go for the stuff... i don't want to have to spend what little tbars i have on companion gear... making a new merchant we can buy it from for gold it better... cause right now gold is trash and we don't have a lot to spend it on... make the items cost like 50-200 gold depending on rarity of getting it in gateway to also the item themselves... like how rings salvage for less now and chest pieces salvage for ore.
the main reason i am gonna miss gateway is cause i was making easy 200k ad a day and i could do professions on it. since you are taking away gateway can ad be re-added to it? since removing ad from leadership it has become trash to actually do for time spent lvling it. rp stones don't really cut it; unless we get purples which we don't.
if i find more things to talk about here i will thing about it; but so far thanks guys for the notice.
Just so everyone knows... I happen to know EXACTLY what they are talking about. I had first hand (vague?) experience with the gateway botting. it was rampant, all you have to do is look at the auction house silly! All those nice refining stones being sold by the thousands... you think what, we... they all got those INGAME?? no... they set up scripts on gateway and made bajillions of stones and the resulting millions of AD. I'm sorry if you were farming the Loyal gear on SCA, they all ruined it for ya : C
... a bot for the botters... lololol
0
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
I got back into the game to develop companions for SCA. I even considered buying zen for this purpose. Needless to say, I'll not be spending any real money on this game ever again.
I got back into the game to develop companions for SCA. I even considered buying zen for this purpose. Needless to say, I'll not be spending any real money on this game ever again.
Sigh.. playing the SCA with them was the only reason I hoarded companions and was buying extra active slots. It was just so much fun to go with different companions, it was expensive to level them up yes, but they had a pretty entertaining use there at least.
Now all that companions are good for is as damage/stats buffers depending on their active.
What to say, a huge part of what made this game stand out across the sea of MMOs has just died for me with this latest fruit of a half-assed policy of late, poorly and unproperly.
Not only that but this is a Dungeons and Dragons game. Where is the fantasy? Where is the Epic Tales of adventure?
"Here, have endless hours of grinding, the perfect representation of Dungeons and Dragons on a computer!"
You failed, you outright failed. The SCA had that spark of adventure, buy the companions you want to see going in an adventure through the sword coast, level them up to make them stronger, and watch them face challenge after challenge.
Yes you had barely put any effort into it. Yes the art assets were laughably bad. Yes it could had been so much better.
But it still had that spark of adventure that makes Dungeons and Dragons what it is. A tale of fantasy and adventure.
Where is the adventure, now that I face Demogorgon for the 1000th time, hoping to finally brute-force my way through the ridiculous RNG behind the +5 ring I need?
Where is the fantasy, looking at expenses of ~2.000.000 Million Astral Diamonds per significant upgrade to my gear, that I can only feasibly pay by running repetitive content across dozens of alts in the most mind-numbingly way possibly.
The decision to take down the SCA proves that you as a company failed to even grasp the spirit of fantasy and adventure this game should embrace.
I do not know what kind of north you are setting sails for, Cryptic.
But I know that you've just thrown down to the sea one of the very few remnants of the land of fantasy you were supposed to take us to.
The stars are falling, and the old gods silent as death, with the blood sworn to rip you down from the night sky, what cost will pose too high?
0
minotaur2857Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,141Arc User
I didn't like the interface for professions, I don't own a smartphone. My use for gateway - while searching which of my characters had an item I'd stored away, I keep getting disconnected when switching through all my chars in game, so it was much faster in gateway. I also played SCA a bit.
This sucks, but is not game breaking for me. The loss of the companion gear however ... A vote for adding them to professions.
2. Trawling the AH with botters BREAKS the AH. This is the reason gateway is down. The servers got FRIED because some thousand accounts, set to trawl AH prices, so overworked the servers that they CAUGHT FIRE!
Source?
20 years of experience, time gateway servers were down is approx what would be needed to do physical replacement, wiring repair and testing. Plus another few days to come up with patches that obviously didn't work(only up for an hour before dropping again).
Yeahh... no. They took the gateway down intentionally -- and they brought it back up accidentally for a short time. They explained as much in previous posts in another thread. There was no physical damage. It was killed on purpose, accidentally brought up after regular maintenance (probably as part of the server reset routine), then taken down on purpose again shortly after along with an apology for accidentally bringing it back and notes that it was definitely not coming back up for the rest of the week... and a developer noted that after a meeting, we'd get an official announcement regarding the gateway later, but in the meantime, they had a task to find other ways of inserting SCA content into the regular gameplay.
Neverwinter:Gateway it is now permanently down like i knew it would be, because some people cheat, everything is being stolen from, first ad from professions, ad from invoking, now this. The is the long road from the neverwinter developers to p2p right now it is f2 almost play. it use to be f2p they will blame the botters blah blah blah, there will always be cheaters in the game. Even people that make the games give themselves back doors sometimes to make beta testing easier for them. Fbi has no real rewards worth it. going to repost this on my facebook as i know they won't let it last long if at all... i use to spam my buddies telling them about this game because they didn't have to pay... just work like me maybe pay a little to start and you can make ad/zen with time and get what you want... i don't tell them anymore. 2 weeks after i got lvl 25 leadership, they took ad off of it. i got major irl agro for spending so much time on gateway., This is the next straw that broke the camel's back, only this time it was his neck. lets not forget coal wards from bar merchant and other "minor" stuff like that
they give us "rewards" to comphensate the face we are in fact being HAMSTER. Most people like myself cannot spend $50 every week on zen like some of my buddies. i put 3 years into getting where i am today. my fiance 2 3/4 years. now that i had over lvl 20 leadership on my most of my chars you are even taking away making a little from refining stones (what i don't use to work on the 4 chars i play alot) i think it is time for a refunds for all the vip's that were put into this game, i am right now burned 12 months and on my next 6 months. I have recieved 1 epic companion in all this time by the way with multiple different lockboxes by the way. i have a better chance to walk outside on a sunny day. get hit by a truck and struck by lightning at the same time.
0
obsiddiaMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,025Arc User
;_; I bought and built up all my classic favorite AD&D monsters so I could play the epic SCA. I loved the dice game! Played it endlessly while I was ill.
Can we PLEASE somehow play the dice game? Build it into the main game as if your character is playing a board game. (If bots were playing SCA then make the winnings bind to account!)
I'm so stunned right now. I actually played SCA over 1,000 times. Such an adorable game, lost.
Did you really think anyone could steal the power of the god of thieves?
@panderus While I am trying to understand and cope with the decisions, I would like to please ask that you PLEASE do not put the Loyal gear in a lockbox. I would prefer it to be more readily available rather than have it in a lockbox. Trade bar store comes to mind, that way people still have to buy keys to get it, but are pretty much guaranteed to get the pieces they want/need.
Lockbox is not likely where we would put them, no.
Personally, I would like to see the Lightfoot Thief come from some gameplay related activity.
Don't forget the Damaran Shepherd...
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
@panderus While I am trying to understand and cope with the decisions, I would like to please ask that you PLEASE do not put the Loyal gear in a lockbox. I would prefer it to be more readily available rather than have it in a lockbox. Trade bar store comes to mind, that way people still have to buy keys to get it, but are pretty much guaranteed to get the pieces they want/need.
Lockbox is not likely where we would put them, no.
Personally, I would like to see the Lightfoot Thief come from some gameplay related activity.
Maybe an epic level leadership profession task??
That is an interesting and flavorful place to put them.
Well, we did just have a short discussion last night in guild chat on whether weaponsmithing and artificing were useful to level up anymore. Losing Fallen Dragon weapons seems to have made them obsolete.
Harper Chronicles: Cap Snatchers (RELEASED) - NW-DPUTABC6X Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
martelis1981Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 121Arc User
edited September 2016
Unbelievable, this is the worse and the dumbest decision that you could take. I don't understand how is possible that you Cryptic don't realize that bots will do their activties:
IN-GAME
increasing the lag. Gosh!! is so simple. Why no better say that you want to close the game and stop wasting our time.
Sorry.. no one can buy the 'we're so experienced' and 'we've been dealing with bots for a while' and 'it takes too much time'. ...especially within the same post.
The devs here clearly have no idea how to deal with bots that they perceive to be an existential threat, and have no idea how to make any additional appealing products beyond what was provided for them by previous devs. This is a piece of what has been the slow degradation of this game, eating it self alive.
Taking content, access, and tools away from real players in order to get at bots that provide a service within this game that has such a messed up economy in the first place is a fools errand. Yes the economy is different then the consoles, but different is not necessarily worse.
If the devs spend a tiny %age of the amount of time implementing new content .. even just cosmetic content, they would bring in additional $. That is a win win for all involved.
Eventually you will win you're war against the bots. But it will be a pyhrric victory, accomplished by shuttering the entire game.
Comments
Just a matter of tracking traffic.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
If they indeed did that before they shutdown Gateway, it means they planned this all along and gather all the data to make that decision.
<CO docs> .: Petco :. // Base DPS Sheet (needs revision) // PSA on Power Activation Delay
- Themed Tanks // Misc Build Dump // Ayonachan's Gift Horse (stat data)
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
/ExportGuildMemberList C:\Temp\myList.csv
Thanks to @kvet for that one.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Also, since the release for Xbox, I figured the Gateway's days were numbered, and with PS4, it's fate was sealed. I'm not saying the botting was a smokescreen, but the other platforms made the decision much easier. Without botting, it would have likely happened eventually anyway though.
Putting the SCA rewards in the Tbar or Seal store would work, but I agree it would be nicer if it was a direct gameplay reward. It could be put in dungeon loot tables (sweetening the pot for Fangbreaker!?), but my favorite idea is companion gear as a foundry reward (LF Thief could be a rare reward)! So it isn't too crazy, could just be the first game per day per character, and could even be BtA to prevent botting.
Sadly though, it seems like the foundry is on a slow roll to the graveyard as well...
How did we determine what people used in gateway? It was a website, those are very easy to track what players are doing. Also, when we are being 'aggressively botted' we could see what processes the servers were doing that was taking up the most CPU cycles.
@willwilco 'Recently logged in' is actually anyone who has logged into gateway within the last year if I recall correctly.
@tripsofthrymr Regarding professional botters vs actual players, we believe that what was hurting the servers were professional botters simply because large influxes of them would start up all in parallel suggested a coordinated effort. Player activities are much more organic and ebb and flow with the normal game traffic and behaviors.
gateway is gone now. ok thank you for the notice. i can stop complaining about what is happening to it.
" option for companion gear - make a merchant we can spend our gold on to buy companion gear. lightfoot thief - a sort of game to get it would be fun i like your idea - try to do a simple one though like... lore collection - make 10 lore spots that give us a feeling of the dead gateway (have this be unlocked when you put on your forth epic companion). like a signpost through protector enclave that gives us the lore behind gateway... make this once per character and allow the companion to still be sold on ah. "
i wonder how things will go for the stuff... i don't want to have to spend what little tbars i have on companion gear... making a new merchant we can buy it from for gold it better... cause right now gold is trash and we don't have a lot to spend it on... make the items cost like 50-200 gold depending on rarity of getting it in gateway to also the item themselves... like how rings salvage for less now and chest pieces salvage for ore.
the main reason i am gonna miss gateway is cause i was making easy 200k ad a day and i could do professions on it.
since you are taking away gateway can ad be re-added to it?
since removing ad from leadership it has become trash to actually do for time spent lvling it. rp stones don't really cut it; unless we get purples which we don't.
if i find more things to talk about here i will thing about it; but so far thanks guys for the notice.
... a bot for the botters... lololol
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Now all that companions are good for is as damage/stats buffers depending on their active.
What to say, a huge part of what made this game stand out across the sea of MMOs has just died for me with this latest fruit of a half-assed policy of late, poorly and unproperly.
Not only that but this is a Dungeons and Dragons game. Where is the fantasy? Where is the Epic Tales of adventure?
"Here, have endless hours of grinding, the perfect representation of Dungeons and Dragons on a computer!"
You failed, you outright failed. The SCA had that spark of adventure, buy the companions you want to see going in an adventure through the sword coast, level them up to make them stronger, and watch them face challenge after challenge.
Yes you had barely put any effort into it.
Yes the art assets were laughably bad.
Yes it could had been so much better.
But it still had that spark of adventure that makes Dungeons and Dragons what it is. A tale of fantasy and adventure.
Where is the adventure, now that I face Demogorgon for the 1000th time, hoping to finally brute-force my way through the ridiculous RNG behind the +5 ring I need?
Where is the fantasy, looking at expenses of ~2.000.000 Million Astral Diamonds per significant upgrade to my gear, that I can only feasibly pay by running repetitive content across dozens of alts in the most mind-numbingly way possibly.
The decision to take down the SCA proves that you as a company failed to even grasp the spirit of fantasy and adventure this game should embrace.
I do not know what kind of north you are setting sails for, Cryptic.
But I know that you've just thrown down to the sea one of the very few remnants of the land of fantasy you were supposed to take us to.
This sucks, but is not game breaking for me. The loss of the companion gear however ... A vote for adding them to professions.
All of this was planned.
they give us "rewards" to comphensate the face we are in fact being HAMSTER. Most people like myself cannot spend $50 every week on zen like some of my buddies. i put 3 years into getting where i am today. my fiance 2 3/4 years. now that i had over lvl 20 leadership on my most of my chars you are even taking away making a little from refining stones (what i don't use to work on the 4 chars i play alot) i think it is time for a refunds for all the vip's that were put into this game, i am right now burned 12 months and on my next 6 months. I have recieved 1 epic companion in all this time by the way with multiple different lockboxes by the way. i have a better chance to walk outside on a sunny day. get hit by a truck and struck by lightning at the same time.
play the epic SCA. I loved the dice game! Played it endlessly while I was ill.
Can we PLEASE somehow play the dice game? Build it into the main game as
if your character is playing a board game. (If bots were playing SCA then
make the winnings bind to account!)
I'm so stunned right now. I actually played SCA over 1,000 times.
Such an adorable game, lost.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
http://gateway.startrekonline.com
Perhaps, we should warn them.
IN-GAME
increasing the lag. Gosh!! is so simple. Why no better say that you want to close the game and stop wasting our time.The devs here clearly have no idea how to deal with bots that they perceive to be an existential threat, and have no idea how to make any additional appealing products beyond what was provided for them by previous devs. This is a piece of what has been the slow degradation of this game, eating it self alive.
Taking content, access, and tools away from real players in order to get at bots that provide a service within this game that has such a messed up economy in the first place is a fools errand. Yes the economy is different then the consoles, but different is not necessarily worse.
If the devs spend a tiny %age of the amount of time implementing new content .. even just cosmetic content, they would bring in additional $. That is a win win for all involved.
Eventually you will win you're war against the bots. But it will be a pyhrric victory, accomplished by shuttering the entire game.