The Foundry was its own server-within-a-server, I believe. When it was brought down, a lot of things went away, such as getting account-wide Foundry rewards.
My signature has a Youtube link where you can see playthroughs of various Foundry quests that I captured right before it went down. They aren't all my quests, but the redcap-centric ones are. If you wanted to create a dungeon experience, you could in the Foundry, with the exception of boss fights (which was a real shame).
Thomas Foss told me that the problem with the Foundry was that the people who really understood how it worked had left the company by 2019 and its internal workings weren't well documented. It had become increasingly harder to fix it every time a patch broke it in some fashion, and they eventually decided to drop it.
Design documents, devs. DESIGN DOCUMENTS. Something as complex as a Foundry subsystem demands a robust document. Hire someone from defense. He'll know what to write.
They do still have all of the Foundry quests in some form, and I suggested that they should create an internal tool for a one-time conversion of Foundry quests to whatever their current internal format is for normal game quests. Surely they have tools already for updating normal game quest files, so after a one-time Foundry quest conversion the quests would be and remain playable. I still think they should put together something like a three-person tiger team to get that done. It would garner them lots of immediately playable quests that in some cases are arguably better than the ones we already play.
As for editing Foundry quests, I wonder if they had taken the wrong approach. Perhaps doing it entirely through a web page might have been better. It might have drastically decreased the devs' workload. The required skill sets would be different though; then you're talking about AJAX and Java, not C and C++.
Ultimately, the problem with the Foundry, IMO, is that the devs let it wither on the vine. It needed dev support to flourish, at the barest minimum things like regularly featuring Foundry quests. The devs took it down in 2019, but they stopped featuring quests in 2015. This, in my opinion, drastically reduced any incentive for people to create quests. The devs also could have (no, SHOULD have) vetted quests for regular featuring and introduced substantial rewards for playing featured quests. That alone would have ensured that players kept playing Foundry quests. Players need adequate rewards for their time spent, and the devs never supplied those rewards. All you ever got in the chest at the end was a piece of green junk. Yes, I know there was a Foundry hour with RAD rewards but those were paltry.
I've been playing this game since January of 2014 and it's been marred by bad decisions. The way they let the Foundry wither was one of them, and getting rid of it after that bad decision was another.
I urge people to watch the videos on my Youtube link to see what the Foundry could do. It was amazing.
Post edited by hustin1 on
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
While I'd love to see that enhanced, I'd be very happy just having more options.
It doesn't always require redesign, just changing how you address the problem for instance, most of the environments are already created in other content. So it likely just be a slightly customized version of that map, that unlike the stronghold you'd be able to decorate yourself--and possibly give a key to friends to visit. Also if you had different households for different characters, each could setup their own design. As I said SWTOR does that, and you set which is primary for each character on an account. Then you can also setup Exchange, Bank, and other vendors for you to do other things while waiting in Queue's or something else. It's just kind of sad you can't earn decorations from various content like you can in SWTOR, it what keeps people there running various content; even though many you can sell or buy on Auction House.
Still I'd take any improvement they'd be willing to consider.
I've become a real fan of the editor in Legend of Grimrock. It's a lot simpler than the Foundry editor in that everything is placed on a two-dimensional grid, but you still build up your dungeon from scratch. You can also write Lua scripts to really make things interesting, but the dungeon editor has a robust set of constructs like buttons, levers, triggers, and timers that you can place even without writing any Lua. Is that concept worth visiting? I even released my own dungeon for it called The Curse of Kaefin, and creating it was a real blast.
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
Add a price to it and see if Cryptic/the player base is interested...
Video game companies are a business to generate revenue. If it doesn't/can't generate perceivable revenue, especially continual/sustainable revenue, it more often than not does not come to be.
Take the foundry for instance, it required man hours to maintain, update, servers to run on, various resources all which cost the company money and did not bring in revenue directly so eventually it was canned.
Let's say access to the foundry was changed to cost ZEN...
A certain amount for 30 day, 3 month and 6 month access (similar to VIP). If you want to create content the cost would be X ZEN, if you want to simply play the content others have created the ZEN amount would of course be lower. A system like this has the potential to be a revenue stream for Cryptic, Cryptic like’s revenue, especially recurring revenue. Cryptic can get what they want (revenue generated from players buying ZEN which will fund the cost of development/upkeep and profit) and players can get what they want (player generated content). With the foundry becoming a potential revenue stream, the player base has leverage in suggesting that the foundry be brought back…
It could start small to minimize resource cost, and based on success, grow from there…
The same format could be applied to what Irene suggested…
The same could be applied to player housing, etc…
What a lot of/most suggestions/suggested systems lack is a sustainable revenue stream for Cryptic and is arguably why a lot don’t even get replied to officially. Don’t think that staff doesn’t read suggestions, those that aren’t foreseen to be sustainable by player purchases don’t move up in the process, which is MOST of them.
Profits and revenue for Cryptic is the reality the player base is in. Just look at a lot, if not all the major changes to the game over the years... Ask yourself, each time player progression was changed, did Cryptic stand to benefit financially? Does the refining/enchantment rework ring a bell? How about 4 insignia slot mounts? Legends of Neverwinter Companion Bundle? All of those stand/stood to generate revenue while not necessarily costing Cryptic a lot to implement.
- Changing the enchantments > Coalescent motes purchases became relevant - Adding another insignia slot to mounts/increasing the iLvl requirements for end game content > Insignia upgrades/purchases became even more relevant - Etc., etc…
ALL Rights Reserved for any and all suggestions, ideas, etc. from this user.
“There are changes that can be made that don’t require coding...” - TriNitY "No amount of coding will change human behavior" - TriNitY
Comments
My signature has a Youtube link where you can see playthroughs of various Foundry quests that I captured right before it went down. They aren't all my quests, but the redcap-centric ones are. If you wanted to create a dungeon experience, you could in the Foundry, with the exception of boss fights (which was a real shame).
Thomas Foss told me that the problem with the Foundry was that the people who really understood how it worked had left the company by 2019 and its internal workings weren't well documented. It had become increasingly harder to fix it every time a patch broke it in some fashion, and they eventually decided to drop it.
Design documents, devs. DESIGN DOCUMENTS. Something as complex as a Foundry subsystem demands a robust document. Hire someone from defense. He'll know what to write.
They do still have all of the Foundry quests in some form, and I suggested that they should create an internal tool for a one-time conversion of Foundry quests to whatever their current internal format is for normal game quests. Surely they have tools already for updating normal game quest files, so after a one-time Foundry quest conversion the quests would be and remain playable. I still think they should put together something like a three-person tiger team to get that done. It would garner them lots of immediately playable quests that in some cases are arguably better than the ones we already play.
As for editing Foundry quests, I wonder if they had taken the wrong approach. Perhaps doing it entirely through a web page might have been better. It might have drastically decreased the devs' workload. The required skill sets would be different though; then you're talking about AJAX and Java, not C and C++.
Ultimately, the problem with the Foundry, IMO, is that the devs let it wither on the vine. It needed dev support to flourish, at the barest minimum things like regularly featuring Foundry quests. The devs took it down in 2019, but they stopped featuring quests in 2015. This, in my opinion, drastically reduced any incentive for people to create quests. The devs also could have (no, SHOULD have) vetted quests for regular featuring and introduced substantial rewards for playing featured quests. That alone would have ensured that players kept playing Foundry quests. Players need adequate rewards for their time spent, and the devs never supplied those rewards. All you ever got in the chest at the end was a piece of green junk. Yes, I know there was a Foundry hour with RAD rewards but those were paltry.
I've been playing this game since January of 2014 and it's been marred by bad decisions. The way they let the Foundry wither was one of them, and getting rid of it after that bad decision was another.
I urge people to watch the videos on my Youtube link to see what the Foundry could do. It was amazing.
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
It doesn't always require redesign, just changing how you address the problem for instance, most of the environments are already created in other content. So it likely just be a slightly customized version of that map, that unlike the stronghold you'd be able to decorate yourself--and possibly give a key to friends to visit. Also if you had different households for different characters, each could setup their own design. As I said SWTOR does that, and you set which is primary for each character on an account. Then you can also setup Exchange, Bank, and other vendors for you to do other things while waiting in Queue's or something else. It's just kind of sad you can't earn decorations from various content like you can in SWTOR, it what keeps people there running various content; even though many you can sell or buy on Auction House.
Still I'd take any improvement they'd be willing to consider.
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
Video game companies are a business to generate revenue. If it doesn't/can't generate perceivable revenue, especially continual/sustainable revenue, it more often than not does not come to be.
Take the foundry for instance, it required man hours to maintain, update, servers to run on, various resources all which cost the company money and did not bring in revenue directly so eventually it was canned.
Let's say access to the foundry was changed to cost ZEN...
A certain amount for 30 day, 3 month and 6 month access (similar to VIP). If you want to create content the cost would be X ZEN, if you want to simply play the content others have created the ZEN amount would of course be lower. A system like this has the potential to be a revenue stream for Cryptic, Cryptic like’s revenue, especially recurring revenue. Cryptic can get what they want (revenue generated from players buying ZEN which will fund the cost of development/upkeep and profit) and players can get what they want (player generated content). With the foundry becoming a potential revenue stream, the player base has leverage in suggesting that the foundry be brought back…
It could start small to minimize resource cost, and based on success, grow from there…
The same format could be applied to what Irene suggested…
The same could be applied to player housing, etc…
What a lot of/most suggestions/suggested systems lack is a sustainable revenue stream for Cryptic and is arguably why a lot don’t even get replied to officially. Don’t think that staff doesn’t read suggestions, those that aren’t foreseen to be sustainable by player purchases don’t move up in the process, which is MOST of them.
Profits and revenue for Cryptic is the reality the player base is in. Just look at a lot, if not all the major changes to the game over the years... Ask yourself, each time player progression was changed, did Cryptic stand to benefit financially? Does the refining/enchantment rework ring a bell? How about 4 insignia slot mounts? Legends of Neverwinter Companion Bundle? All of those stand/stood to generate revenue while not necessarily costing Cryptic a lot to implement.
- Changing the enchantments > Coalescent motes purchases became relevant
- Adding another insignia slot to mounts/increasing the iLvl requirements for end game content > Insignia upgrades/purchases became even more relevant
- Etc., etc…
“There are changes that can be made that don’t require coding...” - TriNitY
"No amount of coding will change human behavior" - TriNitY
Ongoing Issue: Legitmate Players Banned for Botting (Console) and the Future for "Dedicated" Players
Suggestions: (Implemented) \/\/ Rearrange Character on character Select Screen