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Exploits . . . .
dissengulp71
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 24 Arc User
I have played a total of four MMOs (DDO, LoTRO, DC Universe and Neverwinter) over a period of 8 years and this the first I have seen exploitation so openly used by players with no qualms about it. When we began running Fardelver we would occasionally pull in one non-guild member via the queue and more often than not this player would turn out to be an exploiter. Just makes you wonder is this the player culture of NW?
Frothy Ironanvil, Lvl 60 Dwarven Cleric
Leader, Stormblades
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To me the question becomes: are they skipping content because they just want the end rewards? Or because they don't feel the standard mobs are worthwhile?
Perhaps the best solution might involve properly incentivising killing the mobs so that players don't feel encouraged to skip them?
That really is a secondary problem, though, compared to the shortcuts. I can promise you the shortcuts which get reported get resolved as soon as the team can get to them, but players seem determined to skip content so once one hole is patched another one is found but things are improving with time!
Moderator's Notice: Any shortcuts that you guys know about must be reported privately. Do not post them on the forums!
If this occurs even one time this thread will be closed.
I completely agree with this. Folks skip content to get the coins at the end. In other dungeons, people will look for content to skip in order to get the most rewarding drop in the game, the T2 chest during DD or the kill of the boss itself. A lot of people feel that there is no incentive to kill trash if it does not benefit them. Giving players proper incentive might reduce how many folks look to exploit and make the game more enjoyable for those that do not like to exploit.
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This very much not unlike WoW, where skipping content usually comes back to haunt you. Skipping a pack of mobs that takes 30 seconds to kill many times will lead to far more time involved getting past them after a wipe.
Don't the devs actually have an intern who can run through the dungeons and find these? This would be just a few hours of work, then a few more to lay in some polygons with no textures to wall off places you don't want players visiting.
All I'm saying is be creative about it, don't false wall the game, make it painful to exploit, kill them instantly for taking a route that they shouldn't, make a boulder fall on their head.
fardelver and CN is not fixed. they just made it harder to be exploited
i agree. the game should have testers and do dungeon runs so that they would be able to find out themselves before others find it and abuse it
this ... i agree
doing exploits/shortcuts makes a player feel someday that they are doing nonsense and will quit for sure. No players = game dead
AND THE GAME IS LIVE :eek:
This I do agree with. Most instances just have too much trash- it'd be better if they were a bit more complex, hit a bit harder (actually needed some tanking) and were less numerous. It's also a no-brainer that mobs in T2s should have a slightly improved loot table, with a small chance for trash purples, and so forth. Hell, just dropping more crafting mats might be a start.
Obviously, the instances would need to be a little better constructed to avoid permastealth rogues exploiting the hell out of this, though
Things are a little different with Castle Never- which is tedious and slow, even for a very heavily-geared group (barring exploited fully rank 10/perfect types, like certain PvP guilds farming.. but they're the most cheat-friendly of all). It simply isn't a good return on time for most folks. I have never seen a group who wanted to shove their faces into the large tedious meat grinder. There is simply no point, when you can skip most of them with tedious mountaineering, campfire tricks, and so forth. A couple of hours of punishing and totally unrewarding trash onslaught for no reason is not really that interesting.
Ironically, the trash in CN is quite nasty- and is probably pitched about right for the instance.. there is just far too much of it.
Balance is, essentially, totally out of whack all over PvE, in this game. It's almost as though it hasn't been properly playtested at all.
* No, I won't go into details. Obviously.
Replace their instance's final boss with a Tarrasque.
:V
On a more serious note: they could apply invisible additive fractional percentage buffs (say, damage resistance and damage dealt) to each miniboss that stack for each statically-placed mob leading up to them, with the final boss acquiring the sum total of those additive buffs. If you do a full clear of all mobs in the dungeon (minus the ones that infinitely respawn, of course) then you have a much easier boss fight than if you skip most of the level just to get to the end boss.
Ideally, there should be a balancing point for the buffs to turn negative, so if you clear the whole dungeon of mobs, you actually get a bonus applied to the boss fights so as to reward players for spending all that extra time clearing dungeons of trash mobs (how to implement: drop the boss' affected base stats by, say, half of what the additive buffs apply, and make the additive buffs apply up to, say, 33% for each miniboss, up to 100% for the final boss - clear the whole dungeon, boss is far easier to burn down, but leave most mobs standing, and the boss encourages mass ragequits).
With such a system, you'd have to clear at least half of the mobs on the map just to get the end boss' stats as they are now, with skipping nearly everything making the end boss 50% tougher and a total clear making the boss 50% easier. Incentive and penalization in one neat system, complicated only in the math for applying the buffs for each dungeon (unless you rely on placing the same number of mobs on every dungeon, leading to fewer, harder fights and less time wasted prior to the final boss anyways).
Yes and no, anyone who works with software will tell you that end users are far more resourceful when it comes to breaking software than any tester.
A common comment I heard in college whilst learning programming was that you can spend half a year testing and fixing the bugs that come up in testing, only for twice as many more to show up when you release it to the public.
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
But without an incentive, people just aren't bothered to go whack the useless mobs. There will be no grinding if there will be no reward.
If you ban a troll from a forum, he will create a new account. If the troll thinks he is trolling, he keeps doing that. Usually admins make the trolls posts are only seen by others and themselves trolls.
I mean that Exploiters should get allways the worst items (but still purple items) or the less valuable items (from AH). They should have "bad luck" allways, but they will keep exploiting if they dont see his exploit fixed.
I agree that trash mobs should drop blue purple items sometimes, or something more valuable.
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I've sent some tickets about dungeon shortcuts but never got any answers. The tickets about exploits often get lost mysteriously, not even a "oh thank you, we didn't know about it and will make sure to pass your feedback to engineers".
I'm currently doing a demo record of ALL exploity (not skipping one pack, the terrain design failure ones) shortcuts in game, but honestly, i doubt someone cares about it at cryptic.
So just because they dont answer you means they havent taken the bug report seriously? Do you know how many tickets these guys get? Grow up and realize they wont answer everyone if they dont need to.
Who do you think you are to tell me "grow up"? Grow up and learn something about people: when you send a message, you often wait for an answer, even if it's a generic message they send in such situations.
I think you're just a troll and frustrated because someone wants to see exploits fixed in game. And i really wonder why. :rolleyes:
Cryptic could easily fix this entire issue by having all of the trash mobs you bypass on the way of the boss join the fight if they are not killed. To be fair the trash mobs do NOT drop anything of value, are not difficult and exist only as a time sink. If the trash mobs dropped useful items/rewards people would not go to such lengths to bypass them. It's not as if they are difficult just a total waste of time.
Yes because I must be an exploiter for knowing how ticket systems and bug reports work. Send in all the bug reports you want and guess how many responses you will get? Like I said before grow up and quit wining because someone didnt answer you.
Because Cryptic are so good at quickly fixing all the game-breaking non-revenue affecting bugs....
A lot more than if they actually fixed the bugs/exploits more quickly, or rather less unbelievably slowlyyyyyyyyyy......
Ironically (but I realise inadvertently) this is true.
The majority of the problems with the dungeon maps could have been found with a couple hours and an unpopulated map. The fact that this stuff keeps making it into live means the maps were not rigorously tested and or they were all made months ago and never gone over once exploits started popping up.
It's all a bit silly.
I love this suggestion.
Would be absolutely mind blowing if they put this much work into a system instead of just moving static packs into smarter places, adding more doors, and sealing up porous walls.
I'd love to see a boss in NW that summons no adds but can call in trash from the dungeon. Make "optional" rooms full of tough trash you can bypass but the boss will summon mid fight.
Sounds like a great suggestion. Everything you skip (including mini bosses) is summoned during the boss fight, and they don't disappear when the boss dies. Would be awesome.
Well, making it a punitive mechanic is dumb. I'm talking about trash designed to be possible to bypass but comes back as part of the boss if you avoid it.
Continuing to make maps that are so easily exploitable is the fault of the designer. There is a competitive element to this game that ensures people will take whatever advantage they can get. Farm hard and farm early.
Dungeons need more doors or gates.
Oh yes it's entirely the designer's fault. The quest design allow exploits: slay boss 1, slay boss 2, slay final boss, and that's it. It's like a huge incentive to use all borderline, grey, dirty, (rogue) builds and skips to get asap to the final chest. Yep, players are free to skip what they can/want, and it only leads to unfun dungeons where the purpose is only to loot the boss and the final chest.
I've played a Castle never and a Frozen heart instance today. Both of them had players using exploits. In CN, due to a very well know and widely used rogue exploit, all we did is:
- porting to the first boss spawn camp thanks to a well-known exploit
- someone suiciding the first boss
- killing at most 15 packs in the dungeon to reach the second boss
- killing boss 2 from a safe spot where adds and the boss can't reach you - but you can hit the boss.
- dying, respawning to the next campfire
- porting to boss 3 campfire thanks to the same well-know exploit
- Killing boss 3
- exploit-teleporting to the final boss campfire
- bugging mobs to do the last boss without adds.
Awesome. Boss fights weren't even remotely challenging due to exploits, and we killed like 50 npcs in the "hardest" dungeon in game. I'm playing because i enjoy the combat mechanics, and i've been denied enjoyment because people only care about their precious chest.
Not posting methods, just telling how frustrating it was. I hope it's ok.
Ohhh I like this idea, but lets take it one step further. Leave the exploitable shortcuts there, if someone uses them, have it generate an auto three day ban for them.