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Losing Faith
argantis
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
Mainly this post is for Cryptic and as such I am not really going to respond to folks after my initial post. I am not putting this out here to get opinions on my opinion. I am doing it to give Cryptic feedback of why I would rather watch TV, go play tennis, mow the lawn, or mess around with fantasy football mock drafts than play Neverwinter Online. Heck I have even been tempted to start up a game of Civ 5.
What is eating at me is the severe lack of flexibility in play style or group dynamic. I have everything but my cleric to level 60 right now and I have deleted two level 60 characters and several level 30-40 characters. I have run an array of tier one and tier two epics, PvPed quite a bit, and even been into Castle Never and the fiasco of what Gauntlygrym was for the few hours it was live before it got yanked.
The lack of flexibility in play speaks to why I have deleted several characters. It is just too costly to respec constantly. Not being able to max every power, not being able to easily flip around feats, and no way to reset your starting stat array or racial choice is pretty cumbersome to what the game is supposed to be. You are supposed to be able to just roll a character and go. We were assured that things would be streamlined and that this would not be a min max game, yet there are some very broken character paths available. Racial choice is not the big killer here, but the starting stat array poses problems. Not to mention several dead power choices.
To further complicate things is the fact that you must build specifically for adds and adds and more adds in fights. It is utterly boring. Every boss, every major encounter, is just a groups ability to coordinate knock downs and group control effects and blow backs. Pretty much every encounter can be summed up by the wizard or rogue tanking the boss while the guardian fighter protects everyone standing in the blue circle and everyone else dropping things like front line surge, smoke bomb, steal time, and chains, and knock backs from sunburst and shield. Once in a great while there is a "movement" fight like Marrowlake in the Grey Wolf Den where everyone runs around avoiding damage getting in hits when and where they can. But for the most part the boss mechanics are just regurgitated, rehashed, same old same old over and over and over again.
To make matters worse, unless you are an elitist, you just waste gold over and over and over again trying to be a good guild mate and friendly player. If you are in a guild that encourages players to not be static, click groups, then you pay the price in healing potions over and over and over again because you happen to have two rogues along, or two guardian fighters, or god forbid you have two great weapon fighters pre buff. There simply is not much flexibility in the group dynamic, nor even the power set that players take for the tougher instances. Every rogue must have smoke bomb, every control wizard must have blow backs, every cleric must have astral shield, every guardian must have front line surge and enforced threat, every great weapon fighter wonders what they can do besides AoE damage.
It has gotten where I don't even want to log in anymore, because the foundry is a joke, there is absolutely no reason to run it, ever. All you do is screw yourself out of being able to do skirmishes but getting XP too fast. PvP is a joke, you get face rolled in PvP by players with PvE tier 2 and 3 gear even if you are a dedicated PvP player, and the quest line while very good, gets old really fast your 2nd, 3rd, heck, I am on my 8th time through it, 12th or more for the first third or so of it, time through.
The lore hunt is garbage too, because if you miss a piece in a quest instance, you have to find some lower level player to let you into their instance. Missed that buried children's toy? Missed one of the many pieces of lore in the clockwork guild tomb? Yeah have fun hunting it down later. You can get it done with help, but you are going to be at the mercy of others and have to beg the help to get all of the lore items in the game.
Once you hit epic content you run Cloak Tower and it is a joke, a complete face roll, then you go to Cragmire Crypts and it is about right, difficult but doable, the same for Idris. But then you get to Mad Dragon and Grey Wolf Den and you are going to spend hours wiping, fail over and over, then try to put together the ideal group, then go to the AH to get gear from more elite players than you, then go back and struggle more and perhaps finally beat it.
What this causes is elitism. There is no room for casuals or average players in these parts of the game. So the good players will migrate together, be forced to be in guilds based on completing content rather than being with friends or any other social reason, and profit greatly off of the poor suckers below them struggling to play catch up. I am good enough to run in elite circles, I just choose not to. I like the guild I am in very much, there are a LOT of great people in it. However not all of us are going to be able to even see end game content the way things are. it is not just a matter of play skill, but the mindset that a player must conform to the cookie cutter character builds and group make up to succeed. It should not be easier to kill the Pirate King than any tier one epic boss. It should also not require mandatory powers from players in order to succeed.
I understand that every fight is an add fest and a race against killing them and controlling them. I understand that the development and game design could not come up with anything more complex than this and avoiding splats. As such the powers that facilitate group damage and control always win out. I only hope that a lot of growth is coming. An MMO can grow a lot in its first couple of years in live development. As an MMO vet I understand this and will stick around and check in from time to time. However, not everyone is like me. If you (Cryptic) think that you have carte blanche to throw any old thing out there at your customers, and that they will find their way back just because you are a free to play game, then you have the blinders on. Hopefully the egos are not so big as to get in the way of progress and allowing Neverwinter Online to fully reach its potential, rather than being just another successful niche MMO. I am encouraged by what some of what is coming in Fury of the Feywild, but we need more of that, and we need it fast.
P. S. Giving a free respec to every character upon reaching level 60, one that would also allow a reroll of starting ability scores, would go a long long way in helping, but to truly allow players to experience the game unencumbered, there needs to be system that allows a fairly gentle cost to a respec in game with a lot cheaper and better versions of health potions as well. You should not have to rely on Astral Diamonds, the auction house, and Zen store to progess in the game. Currently that is the case for most players. Casual gamers get our your wallets, and the world of Neverwinter is yours!
What is eating at me is the severe lack of flexibility in play style or group dynamic. I have everything but my cleric to level 60 right now and I have deleted two level 60 characters and several level 30-40 characters. I have run an array of tier one and tier two epics, PvPed quite a bit, and even been into Castle Never and the fiasco of what Gauntlygrym was for the few hours it was live before it got yanked.
The lack of flexibility in play speaks to why I have deleted several characters. It is just too costly to respec constantly. Not being able to max every power, not being able to easily flip around feats, and no way to reset your starting stat array or racial choice is pretty cumbersome to what the game is supposed to be. You are supposed to be able to just roll a character and go. We were assured that things would be streamlined and that this would not be a min max game, yet there are some very broken character paths available. Racial choice is not the big killer here, but the starting stat array poses problems. Not to mention several dead power choices.
To further complicate things is the fact that you must build specifically for adds and adds and more adds in fights. It is utterly boring. Every boss, every major encounter, is just a groups ability to coordinate knock downs and group control effects and blow backs. Pretty much every encounter can be summed up by the wizard or rogue tanking the boss while the guardian fighter protects everyone standing in the blue circle and everyone else dropping things like front line surge, smoke bomb, steal time, and chains, and knock backs from sunburst and shield. Once in a great while there is a "movement" fight like Marrowlake in the Grey Wolf Den where everyone runs around avoiding damage getting in hits when and where they can. But for the most part the boss mechanics are just regurgitated, rehashed, same old same old over and over and over again.
To make matters worse, unless you are an elitist, you just waste gold over and over and over again trying to be a good guild mate and friendly player. If you are in a guild that encourages players to not be static, click groups, then you pay the price in healing potions over and over and over again because you happen to have two rogues along, or two guardian fighters, or god forbid you have two great weapon fighters pre buff. There simply is not much flexibility in the group dynamic, nor even the power set that players take for the tougher instances. Every rogue must have smoke bomb, every control wizard must have blow backs, every cleric must have astral shield, every guardian must have front line surge and enforced threat, every great weapon fighter wonders what they can do besides AoE damage.
It has gotten where I don't even want to log in anymore, because the foundry is a joke, there is absolutely no reason to run it, ever. All you do is screw yourself out of being able to do skirmishes but getting XP too fast. PvP is a joke, you get face rolled in PvP by players with PvE tier 2 and 3 gear even if you are a dedicated PvP player, and the quest line while very good, gets old really fast your 2nd, 3rd, heck, I am on my 8th time through it, 12th or more for the first third or so of it, time through.
The lore hunt is garbage too, because if you miss a piece in a quest instance, you have to find some lower level player to let you into their instance. Missed that buried children's toy? Missed one of the many pieces of lore in the clockwork guild tomb? Yeah have fun hunting it down later. You can get it done with help, but you are going to be at the mercy of others and have to beg the help to get all of the lore items in the game.
Once you hit epic content you run Cloak Tower and it is a joke, a complete face roll, then you go to Cragmire Crypts and it is about right, difficult but doable, the same for Idris. But then you get to Mad Dragon and Grey Wolf Den and you are going to spend hours wiping, fail over and over, then try to put together the ideal group, then go to the AH to get gear from more elite players than you, then go back and struggle more and perhaps finally beat it.
What this causes is elitism. There is no room for casuals or average players in these parts of the game. So the good players will migrate together, be forced to be in guilds based on completing content rather than being with friends or any other social reason, and profit greatly off of the poor suckers below them struggling to play catch up. I am good enough to run in elite circles, I just choose not to. I like the guild I am in very much, there are a LOT of great people in it. However not all of us are going to be able to even see end game content the way things are. it is not just a matter of play skill, but the mindset that a player must conform to the cookie cutter character builds and group make up to succeed. It should not be easier to kill the Pirate King than any tier one epic boss. It should also not require mandatory powers from players in order to succeed.
I understand that every fight is an add fest and a race against killing them and controlling them. I understand that the development and game design could not come up with anything more complex than this and avoiding splats. As such the powers that facilitate group damage and control always win out. I only hope that a lot of growth is coming. An MMO can grow a lot in its first couple of years in live development. As an MMO vet I understand this and will stick around and check in from time to time. However, not everyone is like me. If you (Cryptic) think that you have carte blanche to throw any old thing out there at your customers, and that they will find their way back just because you are a free to play game, then you have the blinders on. Hopefully the egos are not so big as to get in the way of progress and allowing Neverwinter Online to fully reach its potential, rather than being just another successful niche MMO. I am encouraged by what some of what is coming in Fury of the Feywild, but we need more of that, and we need it fast.
P. S. Giving a free respec to every character upon reaching level 60, one that would also allow a reroll of starting ability scores, would go a long long way in helping, but to truly allow players to experience the game unencumbered, there needs to be system that allows a fairly gentle cost to a respec in game with a lot cheaper and better versions of health potions as well. You should not have to rely on Astral Diamonds, the auction house, and Zen store to progess in the game. Currently that is the case for most players. Casual gamers get our your wallets, and the world of Neverwinter is yours!
Post edited by argantis on
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Comments
I completely agree with you. I too have deleted several characters and started over from scratch, because the cost of respecs is too high (IMHO you should not have to pay to respec your character!).
As for dungeons, you hit the nail on the head there. I've stopped running them. Most hateful game mechanic I've ever experienced.
As of now, I'm just playing Neverwinter like a single player game. I like the main story line, but you're right, it gets a bit boring when you've played through it several times.
Anyway, once I've played every class, I'll probably be done with the game, cause there's really nothing more to keep me here.
So I just wanted to say, I agree with you and I feel the same way.
With all due respect to Jack Emmert, he screwed up on this one. His philosophy of adds, adds, and more adds is BORING! I am so sick of every boss fight being about managing adds that I could barf.
The level progression in Neverwinter was way way way too fast. That seems to be because of big Jack opening his mouth and promising that leveling would not be slowed upon open beta. What a massively gigantic mistake. There is not enough content in Neverwinter to give out the massive XP that you get. I leveled to 60 in about 50 hours of play time. That is ridiculous. It should take at least two hundred play hours to get sixty levels. Because leveling was too quick it has placed way too much early pressure on the devs to release new content.
Honestly I did and it wasn't even hard.
It was fun to play for a while and the combat - though a bit brainless - can be exciting. But once you hit the max level and start trying to find things to do you will come up short in a matter of days. Easy epic dungeons are too easy. Hard epic dungeons are way too hard. And it makes no sense that dedicated pvp players will have to put up with subpar pvp gear compare to dedicated pve players who has never pvped once until they hit max. The price in item mall is ridiculous and -while it's probably making PWE ton of money - I truly pity those teenagers and new mmo players who actually bought something from a game as hicked as this.
If you've played as many mmo - especially one that is associated with PWE - as I have you'll know that real changes only happen when you not care about the game and/or quit, and that's if enough people feel the same way. You can make 1 thousand posts begging them to open their eyes, they'll laugh at you (lawl you're just part of the minority) and continue sipping their coffee (brb coffee) while working on contents that they actually fooled themselves to believe it mattered (exciting content coming up~~ a new dungeon! new loot! new 60 dollars mount in zen store!)when critical bugs are not fixed and key issues are not addressed. But if enough player quit instead of showing just how much they're addicted to the game, then maybe - just maybe - they'll get their things together.
And that's a massive 'maybe'.
I agree with the OP in every point, we are a little guild and often we have to pick-up a random tank and another class (usually TR) from the queue system.
I've tried to make all the 8300 dungeouns (we all have around 10k gs), i'm a CW, read many guides for my class, i know what to do more or less, i recharge AP quite fast, singularity all the times, lots of controls, stun, shield, etc...
The only 8300 we are able to finish atm is the pirate one, all the others we usually arrive to the last boss (after 1h 30m of stupid and boring mob pulls with dozens of enemies), we make a couple of wipes then the picked ups just leave and the dungeoun is ruined.
why they write 45 mins, 45 mins is the time to get to the first boss most of the times!
what i miss more is the ability to INVITE other players if someone goes away, wasting a 2h dungeoun just because the tank gots bored and leaves is a mess, i will not waste anymore time in this way.
not to say that basically all bosses works the same way, insane amount of adds and same mechanics over and over and over, you cryptic have you even played WOW at least once? a bit more fantasy on the dungeouns and bosses would be nice.
Not to mention that i'm an european player so i have to react way faster than an US player, so the game is even more difficult for us.
End game is very bad developed and after the last patch the chances to finish an 8300 picked up dungeoun are very low, most of the times you will find newbies that doesn't event do damage and does not even have a stupid rank 1 enchant on their equip, where do we go with those players ?
Another problem is that one of my guildmate we often play togheter is a CW aswell, bringing 2 cw on the dungeouns is not that bad, but we miss the TR a lot on boss fight and while trash mobs are faster, boss fights becames veeery long and chances to being it by something after 20 minutes of boss fight are high, expecially for us EU players.
the companion (stone/cat) is severely overpowered and should be counted for the GS because having that or not makes huge difference.
i'm getting really bored of this game, and if we don't do dungeouns what we do at level 60? i did some foundries, ok funny but is not something i want to invest my time as they are now, pvp sucks, just 1 game mode, and you need a proper feat configuration in order to be competitive (and an epic mount) else you suck.
there are lot of structural problems, same problems that was in the past with wow in 2004 (maybe more) problems that has been solved and tweaked over the years in wow, here we are ages far, ok the game is new, but it's 2013 and there are many mmo out there to pick up ideas from.
The leveling part was fun and very well done, but that's it, game over at 60.
My guildmates thinks the same, we are now searching for another game to move on, maybe we'll be back in a couple of years, maybe there will be a server in europe and the end game will be better and more various and we will be able to invite people in dungeouns when someone leaves, we are adult players, 35/40 years old, we have 2/3 hours time to play after dinner all togheter, and wasting all the nights on boring dungeouns without even finish them or without having the ability to make some tries at final bosses is not what we are searching for and is not even fun.
so bye bye and good luck with your game.
Check out my small list of broken game, ah market, AD and class mechanics.
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?374702-Never-Played-a-game-i-disliked-more-in-my-life
The game has great potentials, but is managed like it ends at level 60 where the only thing that matters is gear in therms of fashion/e-peen, not progress, because frankly there isn't any progress past max-level. The real issue is that you can reach max level in a heartbeat probably because there isn't enough content to keep you from levelling up that fast.
I don't really understand the decision of using this interface (which suits more fps players or gamers that want skill-based actions) with a strong and established RP environment like D&D, a game that has nothing to do with fast reaction. No puzzles, no factions, not much lore. The game is too easy for those who like action games and too hard for those who prefer roleplaying and this created a steep separation between different groups because you simply can't carry people who aren't pulling their own weight in the dungeons (which is the only content past levelling). The dungeons aren't really all for the same gear, there should be a progression even in the same tier. You aren't really going to beat spider temple or dread vault if you only farmed cloak tower for t1 gear.
Looking for group is just a total mess and players are left with /zone (which forces you to idle in enclave) or random queue which has no disclaimer like "most random queue in t2 are going to fail before the first 15mins".
Foundry is limited to a single-player game, dailies are a chore (do 4 times this or that) and the catalog doesn't help you filter anything but language. It may have a lot of potential, but I don't really see them focusing that much on it rather than adding new mounts or b****s that you can buy with real money.
Pvp... let's not even start on that. It's the only real thing you can do over and over with some diversity between games, and has 2 maps and 1 game-mode. For the kind of game this is, pvp is perfectly suited, despite has nothing to do with D&D especially when you have no stated enemy (that's like a sport).
This is just what the game is in therms of design, if it worked. But it's a shameful collection of bugs, broken mechanics and broken economy. PWE should learn to release things. Deadlines can be moved when they are going to hit hard on the quality of your game.
The open beta bull**** is another thing that won't really play in their favor... I mean, I even like to spend time figuring out if mechanics are broken, but 5$ for a respec? I should be paid to beta-test these things at this level, I can do it for free, but paying THAT much is an overkill. You are milking a dead cow.
I was really interested in spending a lot of time in the future on this game, I like it in many aspects and I can stand the fact that many things aren't working because of bugs/exploits. I know how this industry works and know how to deal with it. But what scares me is the total lack of disconnection between devs/publisher (I don't know who's responsible for this) and the community. ZERO communication, no acknoledgements of any kind about bugs, terribly undefined patch notes and such. This unfortunately speaks by itself, you don't have people dedicated to manage the community, which seems to indicate you are kind of attracting people who are going to play very few, very "casually" and for not a long time. And I'm not that kind of player.
Aye, this and what OP said is more or less what I think too. I absolutely loved my first character. I had no concern for min/maxing, just enjoyed being a tiefling rogue on a big spider trying to hide while being followed by a flaming bird. I have nothing but kudo's for the folks who set up the whole questing system. The environment is great and it really feels like an accomplishment to cruise back from an area to report to Knox.
Then I hit 60 and had still the Underdark to do. I tried pvp to get the gear, but it was horrible. Killed in under 3s, stunlocks... I rolled new characters to min/max a bit better with but pvp is still the same, it's just now that better gear makes the toon one of those classes that gets to kill in under 3s or nearly unkillable.
I feel it's a weird kind of end-game. There are dungeons to do over and over and over again, and there is pvp which, if not for the very boring area's, is the only thing unpredictable. The loot from the dungeons (or lots of money) is absolutely required to even stand part of a chance in pvp.
So it's either extreme boredom from hours of repetitive mobkilling or extreme frustration of being roadkill for those that did. To make it worse imo, they put the worst of this together in their move forward with Gauntlgrym.
But underneath a complaint there's usually a wish. I like this game, I want it to succeed, I want the things I like to get better and the things I don't like (yet) to be improved.
I like the game a lot better pre-60, everything seems to work with a lot more synergy without purple gear.
Frankly, what OP said does not only describe this game. It is the entire MMORPG genre. Many games don't even allow you to respec more than once or twice in the entire lifespan of a character. So, why just complain in this game? If you don't like MMORPG then don't play MMORPG.
Lmao this.
I seriously have no idea how these people do not look at the date.
If it doesn't say "Today" or "Yesterday". It's not god darn recent lol.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
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