Great ideas in new update, but I think it goes in wrong direction.
I'm sorry, but I do not play MMORPG to stay 15min in one place and do fishing. While the idea is good, as an optional quest, but making it necessary repeatable... well that is not good. We are short of bag space (got 2 runic bags, 2 greater) and I do not have enough space... and you put all these fishes (almost 100!) in regular bag space... SERIOUSLY!? Give us a fish tank or something, please. It's even more annoying than I thought! I spend over 30 minutes in HE Fishing zone and got 100 points. Really?! WTF did you do to this ACTION MMORPG! This is not fishing simulator/game. We do not want this. Make it optional please.
I like a lot of new changes you bring up with new module. Especially new Trial, this is content we want the most. Dungeons, Trials/Raids, Skirmishes. I do hope there will be more in the future or at least come back of old dungeons. I like the direction you're taking with bug fixing. There was a lots of issues that were adressed in this update. Thanks for that.
But... The new map looks great, but requirements for this game are so huge that it either looks bad or looks great and you play with 15 FPS. Optimization in this game is horrible. I play Witcher 3 on my PC with mid/high setting with 25-30 fps all the time. This game got spikes down to 7 fps from usual 30 (i got it capped in settings). Many players asked you to limit new instances, because it's the main reason of lags, rubberbanding, bugs (cannot interact with objects). 65! people in one place, really?! with that bad engine and that bad optimization?! This is just terrible decision. Limit instances to 25 and we could talk about content, because right now performance issues diminishes any good stuff you do.
I'm not fan of reinforcement and empowered system. It just takes too much time for average player. Before this module every new campaign could be accomplished by doing daily and weekly quests, some required few special items like Linu Favor (this one you need a lot, lol) or Books acquired from completing Trials/Dunegons/Skirmishes and that was OK. But now... amount of Veinblood you need to collect is way to high! I know some people run HE for whole day and got maxed out of this currency, but this is minority. Most players do a daily missions, weekly quests, one or two HE and that is all that they can afford (and its up to 1 hour of game play or even more). And from that you get like what... 600 Veinblood? Then you complete FBI, it takes up to an hour (unless you're 4k team), and you get what... 200 Veinblood. It's a joke. Do you know that we really want to play Dungeons and Dragons, not Heroic Encounters and Farming?
I get that new items are for top players with BIS equipment, at least leave campaigns out of this rat race for 4k+ only.
To sum it up: You make great progress in bug-fixing. You did great job in content design (visual), but it's diminished by performace issue and laggy instances with 65 players. We want more dungeons, trails and skirmishes. Noone asked for more HE and mandatory and time consuming fishing games. We hate Veinblod, Empowering system, it's grind and farming. We do not have bag space for all this stuff. Refinement (artifact, thaumaturgic, regular stones - in 4 coulours, 3 bound options, enchantments&runes -12 levels, ) takes up way too much space! And now you introduce fishing with almost 100 items. It's nail in the coffin named bagspace. Give us a fish tank for all those baits & fishes and extra bag for refinement (as we have for professions).
I did 200 fish in less than 30min. U dont need to do fishing in HE. There are fishing area with light blue circle around the map. U just need to fish there.
I couldn't get my HR to bait the hook. My keybinds are remapped, but when I pressed the eqivalent-to-tab key, it just change stances, from melee to ranged or vice versa. I then remapped the eqivalent-to-tab key with the same result. I then tried to remap it back to Tab but that option wasn't available (hitting Tab as the option just tabs out of the menu) and I didn't feel like remapping my entire keyboard after resetting to default settings. So I switched to my OP and was able to bait the hook and fish with no problems (using the same keybinds the HR has).
Other HRs in chat were experiencing the same problem of Tab changing stances and not baiting the hook.
ETA: I also reloaded the character, and reloaded the game, to no effect.
Same issue as a DC with a remapped TAB key (in my case to mouse button 5), couldn't bait the hook. I was however able to fish if I set the TAB key back to default, but that's not good, as I'm very used to having the TAB function on my mouse. Remapping back to the mouse and fishing wouldn't work again.
0
lirithielMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,482Arc User
edited November 2016
A patch - not even a mod - and I have never seen so many bugs. How do you guys manage this? You've got it down to a fine art...
Bug: HR - Cordon of Arrows
Mobs aren't taking damage from Cordon immediately - they can walk right through the green circle and take no damage while the circle doesn't vanish either upon contact.
Our pain is self chosen.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
had some dissapointement with my cw relic weapons restoration ingredients, seems i need 2 R25 professions(weaponsmithing and artificing) to get the ingredients, thats so absurd, since cw wepons(main and off-hand) are all artificing why put an ingredient on weaponsmithing, did u guys made some mistakes with these?
Since I couldn't bait the hook with my HR remapped tab key, but could with my OP, I decided to try it on my other characters. I play all eight classes, and couldn't bait the hook on my HR, TR and DC. I was able to on my GWF, OP, SW, GF and SW.
Activate Alarm Spells quest bugged, some totems won't interact correctly. Instance change didn't do anything to correct the issue.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
edited November 2016
This is a hard one for me to pin down, but a lot of UI buttons pop up an arrow as though you were going to try to resize them when you mouse over or click them, even if resizing doesn't seem to function for that context.
Adding profession assets to a task gets an arrow in the upper left corner prior to opening the menu, for example. It adds just a little bit of delay as well, which of course adds up the more tasks you're attempting to reset.
1. So much lag 2. Camera won't make up it's what how close in needs to be. 3. Land to water and back transitions are retardedly slow.
Edit: WTF is with the exploding runechanged trolls not giving credit fro killing them. Some sort of twisted joke?
Same problem with the runechanged trolls with my SW, my HR has no problem.
G Emeral
0
arcanjo86Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,093Arc User
if ur riding ur mount to the water u walk on water for a while then boat spawns, but if u walk into water it nake char walk on whater for a few seconds and gets hipotermia damage lol, bug/needs fixing
Activate Alarm Spells quest bugged, some totems won't interact correctly. Instance change didn't do anything to correct the issue.
I experienced this bug as well, except I was eventually able to activate one that had an odd text interact, something like "read scroll to activate". I carried on and activated all four of the alarm totems but the quest does not complete properly, you cannot turn it in, despite getting the big "Ta dah" music upon final objective.
Also, your emergency maintenance did not fix the camera shake, while fishing the visuals still chimp out occasionally. You need to move slightly to get it to stop.
Activate Alarm Spells quest bugged, some totems won't interact correctly. Instance change didn't do anything to correct the issue.
I experienced this bug as well, except I was eventually able to activate one that had an odd text interact, something like "read scroll to activate". I carried on and activated all four of the alarm totems but the quest does not complete properly, you cannot turn it in, despite getting the big "Ta dah" music upon final objective.
Also, your emergency maintenance did not fix the camera shake, while fishing the visuals still chimp out occasionally. You need to move slightly to get it to stop.
Exactly, camera shake still there, at once i did nearly fall of my chair, my head was so dizzy after it.
Another bug found, i guess it's related to the Devs playing with ITC on the TR, although i nearly never use it in PVE, but none the less i had no dailies for a while and as with the stealth bug, only fix is to die, but this is clearly coming back more often for me.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Update: Went back for the 4th time, each time dropping the Alarm quest and logging out, even restarted the game client, no use so far, so now on the 4th try i have nothing on the mini map, just a big gray spot.
Update: 5th time worked, huh...
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
feanor70118Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,170Arc User
edited November 2016
1) Fish caught do not always count towards the 200 for Fish Fry (It apparently only works in HEs, which no one is running because people hate this zone for good reasons). This is seriously irritating and frustrating. 2) It is absurdly hard to land on islands. 3) Having to check in with Duvessa Shane IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ZONE to get a quest your runic fragments is nonsensical and also PLAYERS ONLY FIND OUT BY ACCIDENT. This is a huge fail. 4) The sabiki rod does not work with fishing and does not help with fishing rewards, which are far too slow and too small. Probably WAI but if so it's a terrible idea.
2016/11/9 Have not seen one HE over a small one after trying to farm for a couple hours. Not sure if this has been mentioned elsewhere but I did not see it noted.
Chains of Blazing Light: Hard to see if the damage is working, because the chains when cast, do not disappear when hit enemies in both normal and divine mode, not counting all the other issues.
Ground effect attacks that need to be set off- like DC's Chains of Blazing Light, and HR's Cordon of Arrows and Bear Trap- still have the bug from preview where their visual effect stays around for a bit after they've already been triggered.
DC Chains is remaining on the ground with the damage applying, however the hold effect is not.
Mobs aren't taking damage from Cordon immediately - they can walk right through the green circle and take no damage while the circle doesn't vanish either upon contact.
My guess is that any power that puts a trap like effect on the ground and disappears when activated (chains and cordon) has been broken with whatever has been done with the change to encounter powers.
0
arcanjo86Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,093Arc User
This is a hard one for me to pin down, but a lot of UI buttons pop up an arrow as though you were going to try to resize them when you mouse over or click them, even if resizing doesn't seem to function for that context.
Adding profession assets to a task gets an arrow in the upper left corner prior to opening the menu, for example. It adds just a little bit of delay as well, which of course adds up the more tasks you're attempting to reset.
yes when i talk to an npc, the dialog window move over edges shows resize arrows ^^
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misquamacus2Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 194Arc User
1 - Looks like i can't activate Impossible to catch on most situations, specially during the use of Duelist's Flurry. Is this intended? Because the update notes about ITC are NOT CLEAR about what was changed. And i'm not the only one complaing about the loss of this survival tool.
ITC is ruined as a survival tool now since it gets queued up like other encounter powers when you use duelist flurry and does not trigger until duelist flurry is done.
Since I couldn't bait the hook with my HR remapped tab key, but could with my OP, I decided to try it on my other characters. I play all eight classes, and couldn't bait the hook on my HR, TR and DC. I was able to on my GWF, OP, SW, GF and SW.
1. Totems in Bryn Shander also seem to be bugged, same problem as in new map, 1 bugs out, but here a "simple" instance hop can fix it, still annoying.
2. SH Heroics bugged. LOL i knew my TR was fast, but i am not Flash either he he. As you can see no available middle or small sized HE and only 1 big one.
The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
That ITC change is pretty awful. Flew completely under the radar too. Ugh..
BUG: Despite this also being an obvious issue w/ the power on the shard, the reworked Vow of Enmity can still cause your Paladin to stay fixed facing the target of it, even when trying to move around afterwards. (I really wish the devs would revert all the mechanical changes to VoE, tbh)
-
"DC Chains is remaining on the ground with the damage applying, however the hold effect is not." "Mobs aren't taking damage from Cordon immediately - they can walk right through the green circle and take no damage while the circle doesn't vanish either upon contact."
Hm, not saying they're necc wrong, but I can't replicate those bugs on live atm. Despite the visual effect bug, it does seem like the hold/CC and dmg effects are working consistently when I use CoBL and CoA on my DCs and HRs. Maybe its a lag issue, or an issue in the new zone- or did they hotfix it?
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
edited November 2016
Fishing Frenzy HE - What the HAMSTER even is this HAMSTER? You try to fish, and pretty much every time you might be ready to land the fish you've been reeling, the dragon turtle kills you instead. You're in a boat, so you can't fight, and if you move, you also lose your fish. This is meant to be entertaining? Maybe it works better with more players so you all hope to take turns getting killed so everyone at least gets to catch a few fish? Jesus HAMSTER Christ.
(By the way, I am one of your players that is more receptive to fishing to begin with. But... just gonna go off by myself where it's quiet to do. It isn't any fun at all to be trying to reel the fish and get killed.)
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
Reclaiming a khyek only gives you the 50% speed one, so you have considerately left players with the ability to screw themselves over while trying to make inventory space. Someone last night was very upset because he'd tossed his 80% khyek after people in chat told him "oh, you can get another" and he found out that it was the slow one again.
How can you design things that will do this to players - and they WILL because you have likewise designed so much bag clutter - and keep a clean conscience?
Fishing Frenzy HE - What the HAMSTER even is this HAMSTER? You try to fish, and pretty much every time you might be ready to land the fish you've been reeling, the dragon turtle kills you instead. You're in a boat, so you can't fight, and if you move, you also lose your fish. This is meant to be entertaining? Maybe it works better with more players so you all hope to take turns getting killed so everyone at least gets to catch a few fish? Jesus HAMSTER Christ.
(By the way, I am one of your players that is more receptive to fishing to begin with. But... just gonna go off by myself where it's quiet to do. It isn't any fun at all to be trying to reel the fish and get killed.)
I tried the Frenzy thing once. Died 3 times due to the turtle, got very little for my effort, and decided I had had enough. Never knew fishing would be so violent.
Fishing should be an option, not an integral part of a game not titled "Sega Bass Fishing". I have no idea where they are getting their feedback from, but the decisions they are making around what we feel is engaging gameplay is WAAY off the mark lately.
1
plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,383Arc User
edited November 2016
I don't know if that is meant to 'entertain'. I used more health potion in one fishing session than the total I used in a month. May be that is their way to help me to reclaim bag space. I was not killed by the Turtle though. I was hurt because it was too 'cold' and stayed idle for too long. I guess fishing is not a good physical exercise.
*** 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
beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
I have not actually gotten far enough into the update to access dailies, so I have no personal sense of how much time goes into "mandatory" fishing. Likewise, with the marks from Svardborg, I don't know if skipping the Elk Tribe unlock means that you have no way to get a particular reagent without using Zen keys, but it has kind of sounded that way, as each of the three new marks correlates to a particular chest... not really sure.
I don't feel like I spent a huge amount of time fishing once I abandoned that abomination of a misbegotten HE. I fished up two bottles, but only had time to track down one map, and that scored me an epic fishing pole right off the bat, which actually does please me.
On the subject of "getting into the update", I had the same feeling from SKT, but I don't think I've really gone off on it thus far. So these are some feelings on how these campaigns have been introduced and how the progression feels as you go.
NW's earliest campaigns have had introductory bits that take... oh let's call it 20 minutes or so to play through even if you're quite slow. Anywhere that there's more first-day content to it than that, you are earning the campaign currency that will allow you to start seeing some progression. Weekly missions add a substantial boost to some area of currency shortfall, which builds in a lot of flexibility for taking a slower or casual approach to each campaign. More recent campaigns have been structured quite differently, but the deeper story portions have been very well-received. And in most cases, players wanting even more depth could turn to the lore entries added to their journals.
Starting Storm King's Thunder, you begin with a brief and amusing instanced quest. So far, so good. You reach Bryn Shander, except... you have to do one bullhamster quest after another before you actually get anywhere with it. The material rewards for the quests aren't bad, but it takes forever while you get dragged all over the map, tripping over relics you can't dig up because you can't get a trowel yet (unless you got the epic one, but... yeah... no), and fending off seemingly endless waves of mobs, and every time you think you might be done, you get told to go fight a ton of hamsters again except over somewhere else now. The biggest chunk of background story is buried in the voiceovers from the pseudo-HE at the town gates (this is incredibly easy to miss, incidentally). You finally get into town and have to do a whole bunch more bullhamsters and the entire process probably takes several hours, give or take depending on personal DPS, whether you've done it before, whether anything gets bugged, and whether there are other players around doing bits like the pseudo-HE.
Finally, you get dailies, many of which are buggy and/or time-consuming. You get a weekly, which is disappointingly underwhelming in payoff, particularly for the length and difficulty for many players (these modules include far too many DPS checks when their ultimate grouped content is meant to require the participation of support classes). When you reach a certain reputation threshold, you get sent to Lonelywood, then latherrinserepeat for Cold Run later. And going to a new zone each time requires yet another sequence of what are primarily time-consuming quests with very little story and no lore. Most of the quests are just a non-repeatable version of something that will be offered as a repeatable quest for all eternity once you get access to it. But if you get burned out or bogged down on the zone intro, your reputation progress grinds to a halt, because you're locked out of dailies for the duration. The weekly quests don't offer enough to make up lost time. The idea of alts is just... basically, I don't want to have to do this again. And again. It's numbing. If we're looking at the module and going "well thank goodness the boons suck so I don't have to feel bad if I don't do it"... something's not right at all.
And the Sea of Moving Ice does the same thing over again with the volume turned up to 11. I spent between 2 and 3 hours on it, allowing a lot of sidetracking for fishing and treasure-hunting, and I think I might be half done the introduction on a single character. I'm a slow player. I read dialogues. I wander around and gawk at the scenery. These optional activities actually are right up my alley, which is why I didn't skip them for now to focus on the quests. So I'm letting myself get set back by more days yet again.
It's impossible not to notice that "kill 10 minions" quests have ballooned into "kill 40 minions" and what used to be "kill 3-5 champions" are now "kill 10 champions plus their very powerful unavoidable friends". Environmental doohickeys we're asked to go fiddle with have gotten farther and farther apart, and you can't just tap them, but have to sit there while a progress bar fills. Collecting macguffins, instead of them dropping from the majority of mobs killed so that you can finish quickly, drop rates are typically set low so you have to kill a ton of excess mobs to gather enough macguffins. And none of this is engaging. It doesn't matter if any individual quest takes 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 20 minutes to complete, because all those quests are doing is standing in the way. They are an obstacle to be overcome before players will let themselves free to do what they want in the game, whatever that might be. If you burn us out on a bunch of tedious and exhausting grind, we never get to do what we like. Keep the "mandatory" stuff short and sweet, so we can knock it out quickly and then go have fun. As long as there is something fun to do, we'll keep doing that, of our own free will. You never needed to put us in grinding jail if you'd been able to keep producing content that we wanted to play a lot just because it was so fun.
Comments
Bug: HR - Cordon of Arrows
Mobs aren't taking damage from Cordon immediately - they can walk right through the green circle and take no damage while the circle doesn't vanish either upon contact.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
had some dissapointement with my cw relic weapons restoration ingredients, seems i need 2 R25 professions(weaponsmithing and artificing) to get the ingredients, thats so absurd, since cw wepons(main and off-hand) are all artificing why put an ingredient on weaponsmithing, did u guys made some mistakes with these?
Eleonore - CW Mof Renegade 17.5k
Harlgard le Vieux - OP Prot 18.3k
Valrik - DC AC 18.2k
Furiela - SW Temp 18.1k
All use the same remapped keyboard layout.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Eleonore - CW Mof Renegade 17.5k
Harlgard le Vieux - OP Prot 18.3k
Valrik - DC AC 18.2k
Furiela - SW Temp 18.1k
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Adding profession assets to a task gets an arrow in the upper left corner prior to opening the menu, for example. It adds just a little bit of delay as well, which of course adds up the more tasks you're attempting to reset.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
G
Emeral
Also, your emergency maintenance did not fix the camera shake, while fishing the visuals still chimp out occasionally. You need to move slightly to get it to stop.
Another bug found, i guess it's related to the Devs playing with ITC on the TR, although i nearly never use it in PVE, but none the less i had no dailies for a while and as with the stealth bug, only fix is to die, but this is clearly coming back more often for me.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
Update: 5th time worked, huh...
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
2) It is absurdly hard to land on islands.
3) Having to check in with Duvessa Shane IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ZONE to get a quest your runic fragments is nonsensical and also PLAYERS ONLY FIND OUT BY ACCIDENT. This is a huge fail.
4) The sabiki rod does not work with fishing and does not help with fishing rewards, which are far too slow and too small. Probably WAI but if so it's a terrible idea.
Edit: My guess is that any power that puts a trap like effect on the ground and disappears when activated (chains and cordon) has been broken with whatever has been done with the change to encounter powers.
1. Totems in Bryn Shander also seem to be bugged, same problem as in new map, 1 bugs out, but here a "simple" instance hop can fix it, still annoying.
2. SH Heroics bugged. LOL i knew my TR was fast, but i am not Flash either he he. As you can see no available middle or small sized HE and only 1 big one.
Robert E. Lee
I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself.
Winston Churchill
The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.
David Icke
BUG: Despite this also being an obvious issue w/ the power on the shard, the reworked Vow of Enmity can still cause your Paladin to stay fixed facing the target of it, even when trying to move around afterwards. (I really wish the devs would revert all the mechanical changes to VoE, tbh)
- Hm, not saying they're necc wrong, but I can't replicate those bugs on live atm. Despite the visual effect bug, it does seem like the hold/CC and dmg effects are working consistently when I use CoBL and CoA on my DCs and HRs. Maybe its a lag issue, or an issue in the new zone- or did they hotfix it?
<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!
(By the way, I am one of your players that is more receptive to fishing to begin with. But... just gonna go off by myself where it's quiet to do. It isn't any fun at all to be trying to reel the fish and get killed.)
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
How can you design things that will do this to players - and they WILL because you have likewise designed so much bag clutter - and keep a clean conscience?
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Fishing should be an option, not an integral part of a game not titled "Sega Bass Fishing". I have no idea where they are getting their feedback from, but the decisions they are making around what we feel is engaging gameplay is WAAY off the mark lately.
I don't feel like I spent a huge amount of time fishing once I abandoned that abomination of a misbegotten HE. I fished up two bottles, but only had time to track down one map, and that scored me an epic fishing pole right off the bat, which actually does please me.
On the subject of "getting into the update", I had the same feeling from SKT, but I don't think I've really gone off on it thus far. So these are some feelings on how these campaigns have been introduced and how the progression feels as you go.
NW's earliest campaigns have had introductory bits that take... oh let's call it 20 minutes or so to play through even if you're quite slow. Anywhere that there's more first-day content to it than that, you are earning the campaign currency that will allow you to start seeing some progression. Weekly missions add a substantial boost to some area of currency shortfall, which builds in a lot of flexibility for taking a slower or casual approach to each campaign. More recent campaigns have been structured quite differently, but the deeper story portions have been very well-received. And in most cases, players wanting even more depth could turn to the lore entries added to their journals.
Starting Storm King's Thunder, you begin with a brief and amusing instanced quest. So far, so good. You reach Bryn Shander, except... you have to do one bullhamster quest after another before you actually get anywhere with it. The material rewards for the quests aren't bad, but it takes forever while you get dragged all over the map, tripping over relics you can't dig up because you can't get a trowel yet (unless you got the epic one, but... yeah... no), and fending off seemingly endless waves of mobs, and every time you think you might be done, you get told to go fight a ton of hamsters again except over somewhere else now. The biggest chunk of background story is buried in the voiceovers from the pseudo-HE at the town gates (this is incredibly easy to miss, incidentally). You finally get into town and have to do a whole bunch more bullhamsters and the entire process probably takes several hours, give or take depending on personal DPS, whether you've done it before, whether anything gets bugged, and whether there are other players around doing bits like the pseudo-HE.
Finally, you get dailies, many of which are buggy and/or time-consuming. You get a weekly, which is disappointingly underwhelming in payoff, particularly for the length and difficulty for many players (these modules include far too many DPS checks when their ultimate grouped content is meant to require the participation of support classes). When you reach a certain reputation threshold, you get sent to Lonelywood, then latherrinserepeat for Cold Run later. And going to a new zone each time requires yet another sequence of what are primarily time-consuming quests with very little story and no lore. Most of the quests are just a non-repeatable version of something that will be offered as a repeatable quest for all eternity once you get access to it. But if you get burned out or bogged down on the zone intro, your reputation progress grinds to a halt, because you're locked out of dailies for the duration. The weekly quests don't offer enough to make up lost time. The idea of alts is just... basically, I don't want to have to do this again. And again. It's numbing. If we're looking at the module and going "well thank goodness the boons suck so I don't have to feel bad if I don't do it"... something's not right at all.
And the Sea of Moving Ice does the same thing over again with the volume turned up to 11. I spent between 2 and 3 hours on it, allowing a lot of sidetracking for fishing and treasure-hunting, and I think I might be half done the introduction on a single character. I'm a slow player. I read dialogues. I wander around and gawk at the scenery. These optional activities actually are right up my alley, which is why I didn't skip them for now to focus on the quests. So I'm letting myself get set back by more days yet again.
It's impossible not to notice that "kill 10 minions" quests have ballooned into "kill 40 minions" and what used to be "kill 3-5 champions" are now "kill 10 champions plus their very powerful unavoidable friends". Environmental doohickeys we're asked to go fiddle with have gotten farther and farther apart, and you can't just tap them, but have to sit there while a progress bar fills. Collecting macguffins, instead of them dropping from the majority of mobs killed so that you can finish quickly, drop rates are typically set low so you have to kill a ton of excess mobs to gather enough macguffins. And none of this is engaging. It doesn't matter if any individual quest takes 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 20 minutes to complete, because all those quests are doing is standing in the way. They are an obstacle to be overcome before players will let themselves free to do what they want in the game, whatever that might be. If you burn us out on a bunch of tedious and exhausting grind, we never get to do what we like. Keep the "mandatory" stuff short and sweet, so we can knock it out quickly and then go have fun. As long as there is something fun to do, we'll keep doing that, of our own free will. You never needed to put us in grinding jail if you'd been able to keep producing content that we wanted to play a lot just because it was so fun.
Neverwinter Census 2017
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