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Please re-think your strategy moving everything to single character claim
bmcd73
Member Posts: 106 Arc User
I am seeing this trend more and more and I think it is a very bad idea from a gameplay and financial point of view. Neverwinter seems to be moving at lightspeed in this direction. We saw the adventure packs removed and each of them had an account reclaimable companion. The latest "packs" have single claim mounts, companions, etc. The newest bundles that include companions are single claim. We all expect the consumables to be single claim. We got used to bags being treated this way. But companions and mounts that were part of these packs were account claimable. I think this is very short-sighted. I know the conventional thinking is that if you make people buy the same thing over and over that it will generate more revenue. But I will offer a different take based on my own experience and those that I know and play with.
Neverwinter and Star Trek are my 2 main go-to games. I've been playing both since beta on both the PC and Xbox. I can tell you that I purchase EVERY single "pack" that STO releases. Why? Because almost everything is account re-claimable. Over the course of 10 years I've spent thousands on STO. Their market is so consumer friendly and because I like playing many different characters, it is a great value. Neverwinter, while not AS consumer friendly had many of the same conventions. I buy almost all of the "packs" that have account claimable mounts/companions/bag/etc. But this new trend of single claim items along with the AD changes makes the game feel like a hopeless grind. You want that pack...great, grind 10s of millions of AD to convert to zen so you can buy it on each character OR spend hundreds to buy that single item for all toons. Neither is something I want to do. So not only am I spending less, I am playing WAY less because it all just feels hopeless.
STO, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. I play it constantly because I know my hard work will pay off big with account unlocks. I also feel fine spending $150 on an expansion "pack" because ALL my toons benefit from it. I would have bought the Expedition Leader Pack and the Hunter Expedition Pack if they were account unlocks but passed since they are not and will continue to do so.
Please re-think these packs and your strategy going forward. I love the game and have no problem spending money when it makes sense. Spending $100+ on a single toon doesn't make sense and isn't a good value. Again, consumables as single claims make sense...but the rest should be account claims.
Neverwinter and Star Trek are my 2 main go-to games. I've been playing both since beta on both the PC and Xbox. I can tell you that I purchase EVERY single "pack" that STO releases. Why? Because almost everything is account re-claimable. Over the course of 10 years I've spent thousands on STO. Their market is so consumer friendly and because I like playing many different characters, it is a great value. Neverwinter, while not AS consumer friendly had many of the same conventions. I buy almost all of the "packs" that have account claimable mounts/companions/bag/etc. But this new trend of single claim items along with the AD changes makes the game feel like a hopeless grind. You want that pack...great, grind 10s of millions of AD to convert to zen so you can buy it on each character OR spend hundreds to buy that single item for all toons. Neither is something I want to do. So not only am I spending less, I am playing WAY less because it all just feels hopeless.
STO, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. I play it constantly because I know my hard work will pay off big with account unlocks. I also feel fine spending $150 on an expansion "pack" because ALL my toons benefit from it. I would have bought the Expedition Leader Pack and the Hunter Expedition Pack if they were account unlocks but passed since they are not and will continue to do so.
Please re-think these packs and your strategy going forward. I love the game and have no problem spending money when it makes sense. Spending $100+ on a single toon doesn't make sense and isn't a good value. Again, consumables as single claims make sense...but the rest should be account claims.
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I like to jump from one class to another every now and then, but it appears that they're dead set on destroying that particular way of playing the game now.
So for me, the only item currently left in the store worth buying is ViP, but with 317 days active time remaining... why would i buy more, when 12 is still the highest rank i can get?
I think, that the ZEN store needs more usefull packs with account-wide content in them, and not more packs that are hardly worth spending money on. One more thing, they're doing a lot to drive away the "veteran" players, but "new" players will probably not spend a lot of cash on a game they've just started playing - so, at what kind of players are they aiming at with these "buy me over and over again" HAMSTER collection packs?
Anyway, i doubt that this story is going to have a happy ending...
Oh and yeah I have VIP and the QoL boost isn't worth it really either.
I'm not interested in spending 1 year upgrading EQ for one toon at this stage of the game.
I didn't buy the ravenloft pack because I only wanted the companion for faster currency. I did buy the Chult pack with AD converted to Zen. I don't normally buy the campaign packs because I don't need to rush to get into the dungeon. I definitely find my time, my wifes time and most of my guild buddies time on neverwinter has steadily declined over the last few rounds of changes to the game.
Just look at the forum/social media/in game activity for consoles and it's still noticeable that people are taking breaks or leaving over the changes that have happened and the ones that are coming.
Sadly, just 2 nights ago we had a group of 4 to run dungeons. One DC, one OP, 2 DPS. We queued public figuring it would be an instantaneous queue pop since we only needed one DPS. It was about 5 minutes waiting for the queue to pop. For a DPS! That shouldn't even happen lol.
Nowadays i nearly have to push myself to get at least one round of profession tasks and invoking being done on my characters, since i'm pretty sure that the new professions/invoking system will just add another layer of grind to the game. And that my time and money invested in those parts of the game will be wasted.
I even went from "I'm going to reach that pesky 100k rAD limit every day!" to "Why bother?"... and that's really saying something about the changes being made to the game and the ones that will come with the new module.
Not to mention, that the Bard and the Druid should have been in the game for months or even years by now as playable class, and something like the Mad Scientist or Engineer should have been in the Barovia module.
But i guess from now on it's all about increasing the allmighty ItemLevel of a single character and nothing else beyond that.
This actually started at mod 10, which is why I hated that campaign and that zone, I did parts of it on three toons and never finished it, so time consuming and boring. After I unlocked the Dungeon on a those three I did a few boons like up to 3 or 4 and quit.. I so hated that zone, maybe someday if they rework them Ill go finish it (every mmo Ive played went back and reworked things after basically 2 years to streamline and allow players to catch up.. I still figure they will have to do that here at some point)
The double chult campaign seems a bit over the top (if you allowed at least full account unlock of omu that would've been nice, instead of having to regrind the bottom campaign, even if you open it on another toon, (though bavoria isnt that bad, can be done on a few alts at the same time)
When you start putting the sheer amount of time the campaigns take away, the removal of salvage and leadership, the random queues that focus basically on one toon (because anything beyond RIQ requires a bit of gear to be useful) and viola its very hard to play more then one toon anymore, or even care to play more then one.
Again, to me this started in Mod 10, which almost drove me from the game, they seem to vacillate between a mod of sheer boredom to get 2-3 toons to , to a more easier catch up one at some point. Wish they would stabilize it a bit and just make them all a bit faster to get through, I mean there is no real reason to have them ultra boring, most gamers dont care about makign campaigns longer (in fact the vast majority would rather have them faster and easier) we just want to log on and do things with people, not ride around doing HAMSTER like picking up vblood or running across vast maps to accomplish a repeat quest for the 50th time..
Basically its down to weeklies , a few ransom riq/leveling dungeons and invoking now for alts and well winterfest.
Everything else is actually hurtful to have more then one toon.
Im not asking for like complete boons if you do it on one toon (though guild wards does that basically, you do something on one toon and you get it on the rest (mounts and such) , but like the chult campaign, wouldve been nice to allow poeple to skip redoing the bottom campaign and just go to omu and use the early stuff on boons only, so you didnt have to waste so much time redoing boring quests on a second toon.
You know small things like that go along way.
On the one hand, they gave us the ability to unlock dungeons across our account by completing the campaigns on one toon.
Then they give us things like AD refining limit & rAD gained once per queue per account. So who cares if all my toons can run the dungeons if the main motivator is gone.
They give us double events and then aren't pleased that people were holding things to use during events to maximize value.
They get us used to taking parts in events to earn epic mounts for minimal grind (the griffon was easily attainable during siege(?) by just showing up. Now they give us an epic mount that we have to grind for and pay for.
I'm not saying one decision is better than the other but it feels at times like someone, maybe like a....team lead... should be making a road map of where the game design should be heading as a whole unit. Too many times it feels like the guy working on one side has no clue what the other devs are up to. It becomes obvious when new ideas don't seem to flow together naturally.
It's not an easy thing to get all your "departments" working cohesively. It's the difference between a great game/app/anything in existence that was made/etc and a game that feels lost within itself at times.
And i don't understand, where they got that crazy idea from, that messing up the item shop is going to push players buying more ZEN - when they can't even get a single ZEN charge promotion from start to finish without one hiccup after the other in it.
Or why they believe that "we" will continue spending money here, when the game starts to feel like building something on quicksand, where we never know when something we've invested in will just vanish.
In short, give us something worth spending money/time on, and respect our investment...
Really please, think out the events in advance and give players a reason to play
When I first started playing, I had 4 accounts, etc with the max 2 toons. My guild mates suggested just going with one account and buying slots so that is what I did. Then with the move towards AD account limits and dungeon run limits, it actually makes more sense to run those 4 accounts. IDK, this seems like a complete cluster HAMSTER of a message for your player base.
I'm all but ready to simply say bye bye NWO due to all the changes to the game around account vs. character and forcing me to focus on just 1 character.
I would like to see this fixed but given that it was done for financial reasons I'm pretty sure it won't be fixed or resolved. If that is the case, other games like ESO, Red Dead Redemption, etc... will be getting what money I would have spent on NWO.
The devs can make changes for themselves to ensure higher revenue and we the players also can make steps to show that we disapprove of these changes by not buying into NWO any more and putting our money elsewhere. It is called a choice and we have that as players, always had and always will.
I enjoyed NWO for the past 2+ years and I want to continue to play it but there are to many changes that I see myself saying so long NWO...
I actually like these changes to keys, RAD, salvage and even the LB. The key changes will be similar to what we had prior to key gate about 2 years ago but now we can reroll and maybe get something we want instead of leaving out anything...it is a neat change IMO.
As for salvage vs. getting RAD from content - right now you don't need to run a dungeon to get AD this floods the market with AD and causes issues with the zen exchange. Now you have to play dungeons to earn RAD, this is a good change of pace and should have been in place a long time ago.
Hopefully the armor we get from chest or other content we can convert to RP or sell for gold.
As for the game in general...I play an AC DC and a CW. My AC DC is fine come mod 15 but my CW will need respect tokens and I'm pretty sure they didn't hand them out once again and that is a bit of annoyance if they did not give these out considering how big the changes are for TR, HR, CW, DC, etc...
The bad, those that bought packs in the past can neither buy the new ones nor upgrade the old ones in any way.
The ugly, no official response on this HAMSTER for weeks now...