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Foundry concerns?
zeruin
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
Im certainly interested in playing the Foundry, but I must admit, I'm more concerned with the likelihood of the exploiting in using the Foundry. From my understanding, people can equally level up, advance, and get loot from these user created maps, so what's stopping them from creating a super easy map? For example, creating a map with an elevation where the players are, and a lower level with melee only monsters, allowing ranged attackers to easily pick off the mobs? The creator could spawn monsters normally too difficult for players to kill in a fair fight, but by exploiting pathing and range, these monsters could easily be taken out.
There isn't really a whole lot of readily available info on the Foundry, so I could be mistaken.. but what are your thoughts?
There isn't really a whole lot of readily available info on the Foundry, so I could be mistaken.. but what are your thoughts?
Post edited by zeruin on
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Your for instance is a big concern, and in my opinion something that got brushed off way too easily by Andy the developer during the interview he did with the community. He basically said, well that's not really an exploit because you're still killing the mobs...but also said, we're going to rely on the community(not exclusively) to tell us what the exploits are and fix accordingly(and pull foundry modules). The second part is good to hear, but the first statement seemed pretty odd when I heard it.
It is also worth noting that the problem is, however, slightly alleviated by the fact that foundry content gives rewards based on average play time for the mission, and even extremely difficult mobs give very little XP compared to XP given for turning it quests.
Neverwinter Official Wiki - http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/
Hope this helps to answer some questions.
Server: Mindflayer
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Craig Zinkievich has a great talk he does in this video about UGC and the Foundry, stopping exploiting and a bunch of other things.
Exploits will happen, it is an MMO. But decreasing their impact is the biggest step to take.
Hear, hear!
Server: Mindflayer
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The sad thing is, last time I played STO they had missions like I said, for example there was a mission where I had to go to a npc talk to him 3 times and then I got xp for it. People did that everytime there was a foundry bonus event and you got a hefty ammount of xp. I do hope they've fixed this, otherwise it will ruin much of the gameplay. But they will probably find those missions and nerf them, like someone above me said, it's a mmo, people will find exploits, lets just hope they fix them fast.
STO fixed the kind of exploit you're describing, by backporting an idea from Neverwinter actually; mission rewards became based on average completion time, which made them ineligible.
This of course opened up new avenues of exploit, but in Neverwinter since UGC is going to be such an important part of the daily play experience, there will undoubtedly be players who report those quests as exploits. All PWE has to do is respond to those reports.
Unfortunately I know that CO allowed for all sorts of pathing exploits because of flying, but these are lessons learned that hopefully Cryptic will address.
So glad to hear that they fixed those missions, because they really ruined a lot of the gameplay. Hopefully they can work on limiting those new exploits you said.
For your example specifically, we can take steps to prevent this exploit.
1. We already plan to disallow the placement of multiple traps in the same spot, so we can do the same for encounters, although it would probably be something like you can't place more than 4 or 5 encounters too close to each other. This is not implemented yet, so we still need to test this to make sure it's viable.
2. If the above solution doesn't work we can throttle the rewards you receive from kills so if you've killed a certain number of enemies in a short amount of time, the rewards would be reduced on a sliding scale.
In Neverwinter, the vast majority of your XP comes from completing quests, not grinding enemies. So power leveling by farming enemies would be difficult and probably less efficient than normal questing. The exploits we need to worry about in this case are perks that reward you for killing a large number of a specific monster, which could potentially be made trivial in the Foundry. There's also loot drops, which could also be throttled if necessary. You also don't have control over an encounter's level in the Foundry, so you couldn't mix level 60 creatures with level 20 creatures for example.
It's a delicate balance, and we want to be careful to maintain fair rewards for playing content while preventing exploits. This is something we will be paying attention to both pre and post launch.
Apologies for not going into more detail in the podcast
Okay, when you get responses direct from the dev team like this, it's just awesome. Thank you!
Server: Mindflayer
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It will probably be the biggest mistake you make and will limit some very creative situations. And it will do nothing to solve the problem of exploitation.
Can you provide examples? Telling someone they are wrong, and making a mistake, but not providing any insight into how is counterproductive.
In the examples shown in the conference vid, STO had exploit with people stacking low level mods on top of each other for quick AOE XP. Obviously, this already doesn't work as well in NWO, due to the scaling factor. But part of the fix there, was to limit the number of groups that could be spawned in a given area. So this seems like a common sense move.
The 1st two potential exploits I can think of off the top of my head with this system would be creating the shortest possible instance with trivial trash mobs and and a boss with the best yield in loot. A 5 minute instance that will give me phat lewt and fast mission xp. I haven't read the full write up on the Foundry so take it with a grain of salt.
Every time they idiot-proof something...they make better idiots.
The amount of mission XP you'd get would be small as the XP is based on average play time of the mission.
You are right that you would get whatever that boss monster drops normally though, but that's not really exploitative because you actually did beat the boss mob(assuming its a mob you actually had to truly fight.) and normal boss mobs aren't gonna drop as good of gear as what you'd get simply grinding level appropriate dungeons.
Neverwinter Official Wiki - http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/
From what I have heard you are not correct about the loot. The loot you get from end bosses and chests depends on a lot of things. Some of those things are number of people in the group, how many enemies you killed and their strength, and time. Not sure if there are other factors as well.
Be limiting, I agree. The biggest mistake they make, hardly. You can't solve all exploits with one solution. This does solve one large exploit that they have already run into in STO.
Lock it from further changes and set your baby free into the world after all the revisions...nice.
First post here, so hey all!
Just to explain this a bit more, how I see it anyway...
The problem with the example isn't so much the grouping of monsters as it is the player characters perching in an unreachable spot.
A lot of genuine quests may require the raising of the number of clustered monsters to provide challenge to a group, as there are not, so far, many other ways to raise the difficulty of an encounter.
It also removes an element of gameplay if you cannot *genuinely* use the environment and player tactics to your advantage. For example, funneling monsters to choke points, etc.
While I am sure no one wants to see exploitable quests, we also would wish to have options for creating challenge. It would be better to find a way for the monster a.i. to deal with unreachable targets.
Anyway, just how I see it. The Foundry looks like a really fantastic draw for this game and it would be a shame if there were too many problems with it at launch.
1) There is a cap of how many loot items you can get out of Foundry missions per day. Once you hit that point, mobs simply cease to drop any loot at all in the Foundry.
2) Dilithium and experience rewards now scale based on the average length it took to finish said mission.
3) Mob experience gain is nearly zero and is entirely based on mission completion (NW works this way as it is right now).
No, I don't know how 'long' a mission is expected to be for full rewards, nor do I know what the item cap is exactly.
Ravenloft
Look for@Apocrs1980 or visit the main page here or Ravenloft here
Question:- Can I do the above when said "fix" is not implemented? Answer:- Yes.
Question:- Can I do the above when said "fix" has been implemented? Answer:- No.
Can I exploit the system after above mentioned fix is implemented if I want to? Answer:- Yes. {Not going into details how}
EDIT:-
As most players have a preference for simpler quests, preferable handheld ones with golden path - the foundry seems to be catering to them. However that is in initial period when people have not got bored with same missions. After spending enough time with game (like a few months) they would look for advanced scripting quests like above. If the features that make quests like above possible have been removed already, there will be no way to make such quests later which is the real purpose of foundry.
Also by removing such features, many author who are there to make only unorthodox quests would have left already. Even if they include such features later it will be of much less use to them.
As of creation I believe there is only one account/adventure. However very likely it is not forbidden to ask people to join on creation of a Foundry quest together like nobody cares if you discuss your adventure with other creator alive with both video and voice communication. In theory a group of creators could divide the task. However it would be still that only one account would get praise and reward for creating that adventure. There is one account/player.
I'm positive that they mention the vetting process in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pn7iU4EwTc but I am at work right now so cannot confirm or give at what time etc
If I remember correctly he says that once you complete your work it does not get published immediately but is vetted by alpha testers before being approved, I'm sure they are not testing for quality of story or spelling etc but for exploits and bugs and just downright horrible people that would set up an area to insta-gib anyone who enters etc
I guess it is just one of those things to "see how it goes" and it will no doubt come down to the community to some degree police themselves by reporting and not using the exploits.