Yeah, why not a chest you can loot three times a day in protector's enclave? :rolleyes: .
Better that than content designed to create a toxic community environment, with half the people insisting that you should take every shortcut imaginable -- even in PuGs, even when taking the shortcuts ends up taking more time than not taking the shortcuts -- and half the people insisting that the other half are dirty exploiters. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle; I'd rather run the dungeons legitimately, but if you need an ideal group to complete the dungeons in anything less than two hours, then I can understand the temptation to use shortcuts (even though I think they're often counterproductive).
And as for this quote, which you cited earlier as the reason that trash mobs shouldn't drop more worthwhile loot (like rank 5 enchants):
Better drops will not help. Like I said, it would help for a short while until the value equals zero and then the incentive stops.
The reasoning is flawed. Rank 5 enchants have intrinsic appeal, because they can be used to make rank 6 enchants. If the market becomes flooded with so many rank 5 enchants that people stop killing trash, then the supply will eventually dwindle, until the incentive to kill trash returns. There's an equilibrium point. The demand for rank 5 enchants won't disappear just because they're easier to obtain.
Your complementary reasoning seems to be that the proliferation of trash mobs in dungeons exists because it keeps people from flooding the market with high-end items. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked very well in practice. If the market is to be flooded either way, I'd rather have everyone (shortcutter or not) have access to the content. Or in any case, I'd prefer that the defining factor in determining a team's success in dungeons to be whether they could successfully complete the content -- not whether the team is all on the same page about whether and exactly how they're going to shortcut their way through it.
Yeah, why not a chest you can loot three times a day in protector's enclave? :rolleyes:
Also, on a slightly less serious note: if there were a chest you could loot three times a day in protector's enclave, at least there'd be a limit on how much any given person could loot it, right?
You want to limit the availability of high-end loot? Introduce a timer limiting how often people can loot a dungeon in a given day or week. Anything less than that only encourages the few people with endless time and/or game-related ambition to loot the living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of the high-end stuff -- and it encourages a lot of those people to use any means necessary (shortcuts, exploits, whatever you want to call it) to loot that dungeon as often as possible.
The dungeon delve system works as a kinda-sorta timer, but again it's implemented in such a way that people are encouraged to run each dungeon as quickly as effing possible. "Go, go go! I wanna get three dungeons done during the Delve!!!" And it appears that a lot of the high-end guilds farm the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of CN even during non-delve hours, so it only works up to a point as a practical limiter.
Also, on a slightly less serious note: if there were a chest you could loot three times a day in protector's enclave, at least there'd be a limit on how much any given person could loot it, right?
You want to limit the availability of high-end loot? Introduce a timer limiting how often people can loot a dungeon in a given day or week. Anything less than that only encourages the few people with endless time and/or game-related ambition to loot the living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of the high-end stuff -- and it encourages a lot of those people to use any means necessary (shortcuts, exploits, whatever you want to call it) to loot that dungeon as often as possible.
The dungeon delve system works as a kinda-sorta timer, but again it's implemented in such a way that people are encouraged to run each dungeon as quickly as effing possible. "Go, go go! I wanna get three dungeons done during the Delve!!!" And it appears that a lot of the high-end guilds farm the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of CN even during non-delve hours, so it only works up to a point as a practical limiter.
Making the DD event a daily quest is a great idea, unfortunately, there are more than 8 dungeons iirc. So it won't make people stop running to the last boss. Many will try to milk dungeons as much as they can to save a few real life copper coins because they don't want to buy any zen. Well, in a way, it means the devs are doing it right, since the cash shop is so attractive, but it also means they need to implement punitive mechanics if people try to cheat, because there are also non cash shop addicts willing to enjoy great combat mechanics and not worrying about how many ADs they want to get the last mount or the new stone upgrade.
Making the DD event a daily quest is a great idea, unfortunately, there are more than 8 dungeons iirc. So it won't make people stop running to the last boss. Many will try to milk dungeons as much as they can to save a few real life copper coins because they don't want to buy any zen.
That's true. There's only one Castle Never, though. The way I've seen it done in other games is that you have a timer for each dungeon. And dungeons are arranged in tiers, with a small handful of dungeons comprising (in this case) T1 and a small handful comprising T2, and then one dungeon comprising T2.5. As time passes, people at the high end tend to lose interest in running the lower-than-best dungeon as many times as humanly possible. Which makes those people more patient when it comes to walking newer people through the biggest and baddest.
And even people in the middle don't bother spending a lot of time on the T1 stuff. And so on.
Granted, I'm talking about other games, which aren't necessarily directly comparable. In most cases that I've seen, the best dungeon in our little hierarchy is usually a raid, and it's usually on a week long timer. Usually there are also lower-tiered raids, also on week-long timers. But the daily thing seems to work with epic-tier non-raid content.
I don't claim to have the answer here, but I do think the devs could stand to improve things, a lot. Closing loopholes and/or exploits is fine, of course, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere good in any reasonable amount of time by relying on a fix-it-on-a-case-by-case-basis strategy. There appears to be a systemic incentive to bypass content; the proof is that anyone who doesn't want to run shortcuts is treated like a pariah, or a weirdo, or whatever pejorative you wanna use. You can try to tackle that problem through after-the-fact tinkering/enforcement, but players are always going to be one step ahead of the developers. That's just the nature of the beast.
You can try to tackle that problem through after-the-fact tinkering/enforcement, but players are always going to be one step ahead of the developers. That's just the nature of the beast.
Fixing holes won't solve anything. There are way too many workarounds. Changing the NPC AI and chest unlock mechanics could make a difference though. For instance, if you make a total damage requirement to unlock it, sure, there are workarounds, like letting a boss spawn adds or letting pits spawn minions in spellplague, but these workaround would be so boring and tedious that people would chose to do legit runs in most cases. If workarounds are boring, unrewarding, and make people seeing legit runs as a more efficient option, then, bingo.
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thorizdenMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 0Arc User
I'm glad someone else gets it. People asking for better rewards are actually just asking for more vendor trash they will complain about.
The only solution is punitive mechanics, like the boss not spawning if there isn't a total amount of damage of X in the dungeon (a kill count would just be an incentive to suicide npcs, cheaters are always creative). You're free to kill what you want and to push what you want off edges, but you have to do it. If you like the game, it should be fun anyway.
Funny how two people who don't understand economics reinforce each other's (wrong) view. Item drops can be easily managed to ensure and consistent and level value. Now, that's not the total solution since we don't want a Monty Haul scenario. The number of adds and time to the bosses should also be reduced. I'm glad to see that's the design in the new dungeon as well as the retrofits in CN.
Your idea of gating the boss based on damage or adds killed sounds like a perfect solution if the goal is to greatly reduce the number of people who want to run a dungeon.
Funny how two people who don't understand economics reinforce each other's (wrong) view. Item drops can be easily managed to ensure and consistent and level value. Now, that's not the total solution since we don't want a Monty Haul scenario. The number of adds and time to the bosses should also be reduced. I'm glad to see that's the design in the new dungeon as well as the retrofits in CN.
It's hard to imagine how rank 5 enchants would introduce a Monty Haul scenario. Rank 5 enchants actually seem like a borderline perfect solution to me: they don't drop from normal mobs, and only rarely otherwise, and so if they became a reward for epic-dungeon trash mobs, people would have a real incentive to kill the trash.
At the same time, though, rank 5 enchants are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the amount of power players can get from their enchantment slots. They're a component of higher-level enchants, so demand for them is basically a perpetual given, but players need a metric crapton of rank 5 enchants to make up anything truly dazzling (rank 8+).
Meanwhile, certain people, whether through RL-money purchases or through exploits or through farming CN's bosses to death, have managed to equip their characters in enchantments worth millions of AD. So although introducing mob-dropped r5 enchants might inflate the average player's level of power, it wouldn't do a whole hell of a lot to raise the bar that's already in place at the extreme high end.
The TL;DR version of all of my rambling is that the gear grind in this game is already designed to be almost farcically arduous for most players. Making the overall gear grind a little easier, while at the same time giving people a real incentive to kill dungeon trash, wouldn't be a bad thing.
Or the dungeons could be a little shorter by design. Or maybe some combination of both. Or maybe some sort of lockout timer could go along with the rest. In any case, the notion that players need to be punished for not clearing what they clearly regard as over-long dungeons seems counter-productive in the long run; if you force players to do stuff that a majority of them either don't enjoy or don't have time to complete, they'll leave for greener pastures.
It's just that you need the CW to push the adds off cliffs, you'll get swarmed in some places otherwise and the floor gets coated with multiple layers of red.
The bad thing is that this really lessens the benefit of bringing a GWF. He's the man to widdle the trash down, debuff the heck out of them so the CW can pick them off easier. Mobs flying over ledges don't need to be widdled down
So even if the trash did drop something decent, it's usually not worth the time or the risk.
And why not have only 1 chest per DD available per character?
Funny how two people who don't understand economics reinforce each other's (wrong) view. Item drops can be easily managed to ensure and consistent and level value. Now, that's not the total solution since we don't want a Monty Haul scenario. The number of adds and time to the bosses should also be reduced. I'm glad to see that's the design in the new dungeon as well as the retrofits in CN.
Your idea of gating the boss based on damage or adds killed sounds like a perfect solution if the goal is to greatly reduce the number of people who want to run a dungeon.
And keeping exploits in game is also the perfect solution to make people leaving the game. I see people from guild and in my friendlist logging less every day. And guess what, most of them were people using exploits. That's not a trade secret, when you get through endgame too quickly you create your own monty haul scenario.
I remember T2 drops being way higher at the begining of the game. Now, if the devs were able to fix exploits for good, maybe the old drop rates could be back in game. People would keep playing dungeons. Probably not 4-5 per DD run, one or two, and that would be enough to see some character progression. It's easy to say you speak for everyone, so let me try it: if they don't fix exploits, the game will be a dead place in 6 months.
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
The reasoning is flawed. Rank 5 enchants have intrinsic appeal, because they can be used to make rank 6 enchants. If the market becomes flooded with so many rank 5 enchants that people stop killing trash, then the supply will eventually dwindle, until the incentive to kill trash returns. There's an equilibrium point. The demand for rank 5 enchants won't disappear just because they're easier to obtain.
Yes...but no.
The concept works except for the fact people have only three things to do once they reach level 60.
Do Dungeons, PvP or Foundry missions.
As such there is a constant and steady supply of boss drops. The prices show the complete story.
All Tier 1 gear other than those that come out of the Lair of the Mad Dragon and Wolf Den are worth a pittance because those two dungeons are...well basically factually harder than most Tier 2 dungeons.
Then when we look at Tier 2 gear Helms, Ancient Weapons and boots are the most expensive gear because they are from harder dungeons which often can not be completed without an extremely high geared team and/or the right team composition.
There are only so many players, then only so many players of each class and then only so many players who are level 60 and need gear at level 60. Other than Spellplague, Dreadvault and Castle Never the other Tier 2 gear is extremely easy to obtain and the dungeons are often run and as such often sold on the Auction House to the point that the gear is no longer worth anything.
As players get better gear and teams, more players get fully equipped and the demand continues to drop the process will extend even to the harder dungeons. Very few items have maintained their value in the last month and most are half of what they were last month.
So what's going to happen? Things will reach an equilibrium because dungeons are no longer worth their time? Well that means players will no longer do dungeons, Foundry missions are already considered lacking in incentives so the only thing left is PvP which will also be taking a major hit this month.
You can't sweep this off. This is the path of the current drop program.
The less players the less demand. It doesn't fix itself.
If you want to compare this to a real world economic state it's more akin to a pyramid scam than anything else. The people who get the first get their banks worth but when the supply exceeds the demand everybody goes down.
There are thousands of Tier 1 and 2 drops being added to the game every day and while there may be thousands of people still reaching 60 now each level new 60 simply adds thousands more supply daily to a demand which is unarguably diminishing with time. The bubble will burst.
if they don't fix exploits, the game will be a dead place in 6 months.
If they DO fix the exploits the game will be a dead place in 6 months. No one wants to spend 2 hours running a dungeon for crappy less than t1 loot in a tier 2 dungeon. A dungeon where 95% of the fighting is boring and repetitive.
If they DO fix the exploits the game will be a dead place in 6 months. No one wants to spend 2 hours running a dungeon for crappy less than t1 loot in a tier 2 dungeon. A dungeon where 95% of the fighting is boring and repetitive.
If you need 2h to complete a legit dungeon run then i suggest you think harder to your build/your game style. I can do a legit spider run within 30 mins, a frozen heart within 45, Spellplague within 50 (the boss has a crapton of HPs), and karrundax within 35 mins. And no you don't need awesome mega epic gear, all my characters have around 10k GS, that's not much.
There's also another reason i want exploits to be fixed: i'm a good player and i can do dungeons faster than most people with my friendlist team mates. The better you are, the more ADs you earn, if we talk about legit stuff. I think it's not an outrageous expectation.
If they DO fix the exploits the game will be a dead place in 6 months. No one wants to spend 2 hours running a dungeon for crappy less than t1 loot in a tier 2 dungeon. A dungeon where 95% of the fighting is boring and repetitive.
I think the reason you (and i for the most part) percieve the loot (or a lot of it) as "crappy" is directly connected to the exploits (and the rewards in the the dd that are too hight).
Because of exploits, more people can do more runs during a dd event and get more loot. The marked is filled with items that are cheap because of that. Because they are cheap and so much top gear is in the ah, the perception is, that a lot of the loot is "crappy". If people could only do one, maybe two runs in a dd event, combined with a reduced reward at the end, items that a lot of people now think are not even worth it to put in the ah, could become very desireable over the time.
The exploits are killing the game and the value of items. A full T2 set should be something special, something valueable but because people get the stuff so easy and so frequently, it is not.
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tang56Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
If you need 2h to complete a legit dungeon run then i suggest you think harder to your build/your game style. I can do a legit spider run within 30 mins, a frozen heart within 45, Spellplague within 50 (the boss has a crapton of HPs), and karrundax within 35 mins. And no you don't need awesome mega epic gear, all my characters have around 10k GS, that's not much.
There's also another reason i want exploits to be fixed: i'm a good player and i can do dungeons faster than most people with my friendlist team mates. The better you are, the more ADs you earn, if we talk about legit stuff. I think it's not an outrageous expectation.
Do you stream or record? I think a 30 min spider or 35min Karru is worth watching.(some of it)
I'd like to see what party you take.
If you need 2h to complete a legit dungeon run then i suggest you think harder to your build/your game style. I can do a legit spider run within 30 mins, a frozen heart within 45, Spellplague within 50 (the boss has a crapton of HPs), and karrundax within 35 mins. And no you don't need awesome mega epic gear, all my characters have around 10k GS, that's not much.
There's also another reason i want exploits to be fixed: i'm a good player and i can do dungeons faster than most people with my friendlist team mates. The better you are, the more ADs you earn, if we talk about legit stuff. I think it's not an outrageous expectation.
This doesn't make sense to me. The boss fights are the only somewhat challenging part of any dungeon, how does clearing trash fast make you a pro player? You do spider in 30, congrats, I do spider in 15 by rushing through and taking 2 TR's. The only remotely difficult part is final boss.
Guild Master of <Enemy Team>
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
This doesn't make sense to me. The boss fights are the only somewhat challenging part of any dungeon, how does clearing trash fast make you a pro player? You do spider in 30, congrats, I do spider in 15 by rushing through and taking 2 TR's. The only remotely difficult part is final boss.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why so much efforts to get purples if all you do is skipping stuff, running and dying? You do spider in 15 mins, congrats. You get a nice worthless loot you don't need since you won't use your shiny gear. And if the issue is saving time, I hope you know an extra work hour will likely get you a lot more stuff than farming in a game.
Oh, and can i have your stuff? You'll likely get bored soon.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why so much efforts to get purples if all you do is skipping stuff, running and dying? You do spider in 15 mins, congrats. You get a nice worthless loot you don't need since you won't use your shiny gear.
Oh, and can i have your stuff? You'll likely get bored soon.
I have 1 of every class, 3 of them are 60 and I'm getting close with the other two. I still enjoy this game very much, but when I can make AD on my fully geared CW to gear up my alts why wouldn't I do that vs. having to go through all T1's and then progress to T2's etc. I have ran those a lot on my CW, I don't want to do T1's and PvP to get base gear so I can progress to T2.
I mainly only run CN now, which I can do in under an hour with the many good players on my friends list. Would I run CN if all exploits were removed and it took 2 1/2 hours to clear? No. That is what would make me get very bored of the game. Point is these exploits keep people playing, I only have a couple hours a night to play if at all, and I'm not going to spend that entire time on 1 single dungeon, especially with a 1 in 5 chance at getting loot in the first place.
Edit: It's really simple to fix "exploits" just delete some of the trash that is just skipped anyway...
Guild Master of <Enemy Team>
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
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thorizdenMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 0Arc User
And keeping exploits in game is also the perfect solution to make people leaving the game. I see people from guild and in my friendlist logging less every day. And guess what, most of them were people using exploits. That's not a trade secret, when you get through endgame too quickly you create your own monty haul scenario.
You're correlating two data points and assuming that they have a causative relationship. Your entire premise is completely invalid because:
1) Your friends list & guilds IS NOT a representative sample all "exploiters" nor all everyone who is no longer logging in regularly.
is due to short cuts? I think there are many reasons, not least of which is the fact that there hasn't been any new content since the launch and we're in the lull waiting for the first module to be released.
I remember T2 drops being way higher at the begining of the game. Now, if the devs were able to fix exploits for good, maybe the old drop rates could be back in game. People would keep playing dungeons. Probably not 4-5 per DD run, one or two, and that would be enough to see some character progression. It's easy to say you speak for everyone, so let me try it: if they don't fix exploits, the game will be a dead place in 6 months.
First, there will always be a most efficient way to run a given dungeon. It can be brought closer to the average speed so that the time for all runs follows a normal bell curve distribution, BUT until we see changes in how dungeons are designed the players are highly incentivized to spend hours looking for short cuts. Its far more efficient to spend hours in the normal mode version of a dungeon figuring out how to skip content and cheese bosses knowing that it will take weeks if not months for Cryptic to fix the current most efficient set of short cuts. Its far more practical to simply change the reward systems, in a NON-punitive way, so that players aren't as motivated to spend that upfront time figuring out all the cheap tricks.
The concept works except for the fact people have only three things to do once they reach level 60.
Do Dungeons, PvP or Foundry missions.
As such there is a constant and steady supply of boss drops. The prices show the complete story.
All Tier 1 gear other than those that come out of the Lair of the Mad Dragon and Wolf Den are worth a pittance because those two dungeons are...well basically factually harder than most Tier 2 dungeons.
Then when we look at Tier 2 gear Helms, Ancient Weapons and boots are the most expensive gear because they are from harder dungeons which often can not be completed without an extremely high geared team and/or the right team composition.
There are only so many players, then only so many players of each class and then only so many players who are level 60 and need gear at level 60.
[snipped for brevity ... lots of stuff about T1 and T2 items]
T1 and T2 gear isn't equivalent to rank 5 enchants. You need approximately six bajillion rank 5 enchants to make a rank 10 enchant. And since you have to pay a king's ransom to transfer an existing high-end enchant from one piece of gear to another, there's a built-in enchantment sink. Ergo, there will always be demand for more enchants. Yes, the prices on rank 5s would go down, but they wouldn't drop into the cellar permanently.
We agree on one thing: the key to fixing the economy (to the extent you think it's broken) is to fix the dungeons one way or another. If people are leaving, it ain't just because they can buy a full T1 set the moment they hit level 60 for a few thousand AD; they're leaving (in part) because the environment in the high-end group PvE game is toxic. They're leaving (again, in part) because they feel like the game is rigged in favor of the few people who have access to the real endgame gear in this game, which is comprised primarily of enchantments worth eleventy bajillion AD.
The difference between us is that you seem to think the gear grind is too easy, and that that's driving people away. I think the gear grind is only too easy if you ignore that a fully kitted out character in this game costs the AD equivalent of something like $400. And fully kitted out characters enjoy immense advantages, both in PvP and (to a lesser extent) in PvE.
The first stage of the gear grind is too easy, perhaps. But the notion that somehow hordes of players are maxing out their characters in a week and then logging out forever because they've "won" strikes me as bizarre. I think they experience exactly the opposite sensation -- that it's easy enough to get epic-dungeon "ready" but that everything after that is a soul-crushing grind unless you either spend a fortune in real money on the AH, or unless you've had CN on farm status since day 1. And oh by the way, if a newer player wants to try to learn CN (or really, any of the harder dungeons), he has to figure out a bajillion shortcuts that may or may not appeal to him ethically -- but in any case, whether he cares about shortcuts or not, they add an extra and entirely gratuitous bar to entry to the new player.
And on that note, we're arguing about the wrong thing here. The topic is about improving the dungeon experience, not biting our nails over the AH value of set items, the market for which -- as you've noted -- is already in the toilet.
is due to short cuts? I think there are many reasons, not least of which is the fact that there hasn't been any new content since the launch and we're in the lull waiting for the first module to be released.
First, there will always be a most efficient way to run a given dungeon. It can be brought closer to the average speed so that the time for all runs follows a normal bell curve distribution, BUT until we see changes in how dungeons are designed the players are highly incentivized to spend hours looking for short cuts. Its far more efficient to spend hours in the normal mode version of a dungeon figuring out how to skip content and cheese bosses knowing that it will take weeks if not months for Cryptic to fix the current most efficient set of short cuts. Its far more practical to simply change the reward systems, in a NON-punitive way, so that players aren't as motivated to spend that upfront time figuring out all the cheap tricks.
I really thought you'd be smarter. Of course there is a relationship betweek lack of content and exploits. You consume 45 mins content in 20. Thus you reduce the time this content was supposed to last. That's why the devs have to fix this anyway. This game won't go anywhere if people keep burning through content faster than expected. Sure, they can make very short 15 mins instances, but they will drop the set drop rates accordingly. In STO (another cryptic game), the "dungeons" are supposed to last 15 mins, but the purple items drop rate is so low that you might see one per month at most. Not sure that's what you want, but if you really want that, expect pain and sweat to get a full set. It's the same company after all.
IMO it's a lot better to have 1h long instances with healthy drop rates rewarding skilled players and giving a chance to casuals if and when they succeed.
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bpskibbenheimsMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 210Bounty Hunter
edited August 2013
Short cuts and creative use of the terrain I am all for ... IMO It falls into the realm of exploitation when your glitching through walls and running in the skybox.
It's kind of a shame. For a game with such fun combat mechanics, people seem to have more fun trying to find ways to skip as much of the dungeons as possible. It's all about farming bosses. I know people tend to want the most efficient means possible of getting their purples, but it's kind of ridiculous that every group I've been able to get into (and it's quite a few) wants to exploit or launch mobs off of ledges.
Frankly, the game is ruined by it, since it's just a mirthless loot grind. I hope the devs fix their game, because as it stands now, there are major problems with how it's being played.
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
And on that note, we're arguing about the wrong thing here. The topic is about improving the dungeon experience, not biting our nails over the AH value of set items, the market for which -- as you've noted -- is already in the toilet.
The issues are one and the same.
The only way to improve the dungeon drops, incentives, rewards and to some extent the ease of completion is to do so while considering the implications of the changes on the market.
The way I see players suggest the dungeons improved come down to a few main suggestions:
1) Give more drops (I.E. Making the DD Chest Permanent)
2) Shortening the dungeons
3) Making them easier to complete
The problem is each one of those suggestions effects the economy and would take an economy that is, as you put it, already in the toilet and flush it. If items players put a lot of time, effort and/or astral diamonds into are overnight made worthless it would simply drive players out the door.
It's all intertwined. Dungeons can't become shorter or easier unless the drop rates go down. Drop rates going down are counter-productive to the general desire of the player base.
It's a catch 22. A rock and a hard place.
And sadly at the end of the day I think everybody will have to accept that drops, for the good of the game, shouldn't be guaranteed anymore. Shouldn't have been from the start. But such a change would have to go hand in hand with improving the drops of trash and increasing the ability for dungeons to be completed with non-perfect groups.
And while it will always suck to not get a reward...
It's a far better joy to get properly compensated for doing dungeons and occasionally getting a good reward than getting meh rewards and improper incentives all of the time.
Not necessarily. The market for most T1 and T2 set items (and a lot of purple neck/ring/waist items) is in the toilet. We can all lament that that's true, and speculate about ways to fix it, but for the purpose of this discussion, that ship has sailed. And obviously people are still speed-running and/or short-cutting and/or exploiting their way through even the dungeons that drop the devalued items, so there's no obvious causal relationship between the depressed value of those items and the issue at hand (the dungeon experience).
If there's a problem here that relates to the depressed value of those items, it's that people can and are encouraged to loot those chests over and over again, despite the low value of the items inside them, because nothing else in the dungeon is worth anything at all. In other words, speed running has become the default behavior, even when the rewards for it are fairly insignificant. PuGs exhibit exactly the same "Go go go!" behavior in Lair of the Mad Pirate that they do in CN.
That's a systemic and/or playerbase-cultural problem, and it ain't gonna be solved by worrying about the fact that T1 set items are trivial to obtain. As I pointed out at length in my last reply, T1 set items (and even T2 set items) are only the tip of the ice berg that comprises the Neverwinter gear grind. Do you disagree with that? I noticed no response on that front; you just keep acting as if my arguments center around items that I have explicitly dismissed as unimportant.
The only way to improve the dungeon drops, incentives, rewards and to some extent the ease of completion is to do so while considering the implications of the changes on the market.
The way I see players suggest the dungeons improved come down to a few main suggestions:
1) Give more drops (I.E. Making the DD Chest Permanent)
2) Shortening the dungeons
3) Making them easier to complete
Yes, exactly. I have argued that adding rank 5 enchants wouldn't have a deleterious long-term effect on the market. I have argued that making the dungeons shorter wouldn't have a deleterious long-term effect on the market, provided the developers are willing to take steps otherwise to limit the frequency with which players could loot certain dungeons, if necessary.
You haven't replied. I wish to improve player retention (and thus, preserve the market's health to the extent that it can be preserved) by improving the experience of running dungeons, and thus improving the culture that surrounds dungeon runs. And although I agree that any attempt to improve the dungeon experience shouldn't ignore potential market consequences, I couldn't care less about the aspects of the market that have already been flushed down the toilet. As far as I'm concerned, those things have nowhere to go but up, almost regardless of what happens elsewhere. You don't dismiss otherwise beneficial changes on the basis that something already broken might get slightly worse.
If the dungeons are fixed in a sensible manner, the bottom line is that the economy should take care of itself.
The TL;DR version of my previous post is this: the dungeons are already effectively shorter than intended, because people are bypassing the content. So any argument that starts with the premise, "you'll ruin the economy if you take away trash mobs," is doomed before it begins. You're shooting down a potential quality-of-life solution to the high-end dungeon-running environment on the basis that it won't fix a tenuously related problem that's already as bad as it's gonna get.
It's kind of a shame. For a game with such fun combat mechanics, people seem to have more fun trying to find ways to skip as much of the dungeons as possible. It's all about farming bosses. I know people tend to want the most efficient means possible of getting their purples, but it's kind of ridiculous that every group I've been able to get into (and it's quite a few) wants to exploit or launch mobs off of ledges.
Frankly, the game is ruined by it, since it's just a mirthless loot grind. I hope the devs fix their game, because as it stands now, there are major problems with how it's being played.
Yes. I blame the "MMO crowd" who sees nothing special about Neverwinter. To them, Neverwinter is just another MMO to grind/farm.
In Gauntlgrym, there are constant requests for "speed runs" or "coin farming". Almost every T2 epic dungeon run during dungeon delves contains one or more players who wants to skip (or cheese) as many mobs and mini-bosses as possible. And if you dare oppose them, you will be insulted or possibly kicked. Some farmers are so arrogant. When I'm party leader, sometimes a farmer/exploiter will demand that I give them leadership. Instead of continuing to fight, they stop to argue and complain and make demands. It's a very unpleasant experience. Makes me want to stay out of most T2 dungeons.
The situation is so bad .... Today, I went into Fardelver crypt. As usual, everyone is farming it. TR starts to run. I am running second. TR starts demanding that I stop running. Only he runs because "it's TR job". If I don't like it, I should "find a new party". He was not even the party leader, and still he is making demands. I just want to enjoy playing the game. I will not stand by a campfire while someone else plays the game for me.
Right now, I am standing in Protector's Enclave.
A person asks "why does nobody queue skirmishes?".
The first reply is ... "they're mostly a waste of time".
To the MMO crowd, playing Neverwinter is a waste of time, unless there are rewards.
Comments
Better that than content designed to create a toxic community environment, with half the people insisting that you should take every shortcut imaginable -- even in PuGs, even when taking the shortcuts ends up taking more time than not taking the shortcuts -- and half the people insisting that the other half are dirty exploiters. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle; I'd rather run the dungeons legitimately, but if you need an ideal group to complete the dungeons in anything less than two hours, then I can understand the temptation to use shortcuts (even though I think they're often counterproductive).
And as for this quote, which you cited earlier as the reason that trash mobs shouldn't drop more worthwhile loot (like rank 5 enchants):
The reasoning is flawed. Rank 5 enchants have intrinsic appeal, because they can be used to make rank 6 enchants. If the market becomes flooded with so many rank 5 enchants that people stop killing trash, then the supply will eventually dwindle, until the incentive to kill trash returns. There's an equilibrium point. The demand for rank 5 enchants won't disappear just because they're easier to obtain.
Your complementary reasoning seems to be that the proliferation of trash mobs in dungeons exists because it keeps people from flooding the market with high-end items. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked very well in practice. If the market is to be flooded either way, I'd rather have everyone (shortcutter or not) have access to the content. Or in any case, I'd prefer that the defining factor in determining a team's success in dungeons to be whether they could successfully complete the content -- not whether the team is all on the same page about whether and exactly how they're going to shortcut their way through it.
Your mileage may vary.
Also, on a slightly less serious note: if there were a chest you could loot three times a day in protector's enclave, at least there'd be a limit on how much any given person could loot it, right?
You want to limit the availability of high-end loot? Introduce a timer limiting how often people can loot a dungeon in a given day or week. Anything less than that only encourages the few people with endless time and/or game-related ambition to loot the living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of the high-end stuff -- and it encourages a lot of those people to use any means necessary (shortcuts, exploits, whatever you want to call it) to loot that dungeon as often as possible.
The dungeon delve system works as a kinda-sorta timer, but again it's implemented in such a way that people are encouraged to run each dungeon as quickly as effing possible. "Go, go go! I wanna get three dungeons done during the Delve!!!" And it appears that a lot of the high-end guilds farm the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of CN even during non-delve hours, so it only works up to a point as a practical limiter.
Making the DD event a daily quest is a great idea, unfortunately, there are more than 8 dungeons iirc. So it won't make people stop running to the last boss. Many will try to milk dungeons as much as they can to save a few real life copper coins because they don't want to buy any zen. Well, in a way, it means the devs are doing it right, since the cash shop is so attractive, but it also means they need to implement punitive mechanics if people try to cheat, because there are also non cash shop addicts willing to enjoy great combat mechanics and not worrying about how many ADs they want to get the last mount or the new stone upgrade.
That's true. There's only one Castle Never, though. The way I've seen it done in other games is that you have a timer for each dungeon. And dungeons are arranged in tiers, with a small handful of dungeons comprising (in this case) T1 and a small handful comprising T2, and then one dungeon comprising T2.5. As time passes, people at the high end tend to lose interest in running the lower-than-best dungeon as many times as humanly possible. Which makes those people more patient when it comes to walking newer people through the biggest and baddest.
And even people in the middle don't bother spending a lot of time on the T1 stuff. And so on.
Granted, I'm talking about other games, which aren't necessarily directly comparable. In most cases that I've seen, the best dungeon in our little hierarchy is usually a raid, and it's usually on a week long timer. Usually there are also lower-tiered raids, also on week-long timers. But the daily thing seems to work with epic-tier non-raid content.
I don't claim to have the answer here, but I do think the devs could stand to improve things, a lot. Closing loopholes and/or exploits is fine, of course, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere good in any reasonable amount of time by relying on a fix-it-on-a-case-by-case-basis strategy. There appears to be a systemic incentive to bypass content; the proof is that anyone who doesn't want to run shortcuts is treated like a pariah, or a weirdo, or whatever pejorative you wanna use. You can try to tackle that problem through after-the-fact tinkering/enforcement, but players are always going to be one step ahead of the developers. That's just the nature of the beast.
Fixing holes won't solve anything. There are way too many workarounds. Changing the NPC AI and chest unlock mechanics could make a difference though. For instance, if you make a total damage requirement to unlock it, sure, there are workarounds, like letting a boss spawn adds or letting pits spawn minions in spellplague, but these workaround would be so boring and tedious that people would chose to do legit runs in most cases. If workarounds are boring, unrewarding, and make people seeing legit runs as a more efficient option, then, bingo.
Funny how two people who don't understand economics reinforce each other's (wrong) view. Item drops can be easily managed to ensure and consistent and level value. Now, that's not the total solution since we don't want a Monty Haul scenario. The number of adds and time to the bosses should also be reduced. I'm glad to see that's the design in the new dungeon as well as the retrofits in CN.
Your idea of gating the boss based on damage or adds killed sounds like a perfect solution if the goal is to greatly reduce the number of people who want to run a dungeon.
It's hard to imagine how rank 5 enchants would introduce a Monty Haul scenario. Rank 5 enchants actually seem like a borderline perfect solution to me: they don't drop from normal mobs, and only rarely otherwise, and so if they became a reward for epic-dungeon trash mobs, people would have a real incentive to kill the trash.
At the same time, though, rank 5 enchants are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the amount of power players can get from their enchantment slots. They're a component of higher-level enchants, so demand for them is basically a perpetual given, but players need a metric crapton of rank 5 enchants to make up anything truly dazzling (rank 8+).
Meanwhile, certain people, whether through RL-money purchases or through exploits or through farming CN's bosses to death, have managed to equip their characters in enchantments worth millions of AD. So although introducing mob-dropped r5 enchants might inflate the average player's level of power, it wouldn't do a whole hell of a lot to raise the bar that's already in place at the extreme high end.
The TL;DR version of all of my rambling is that the gear grind in this game is already designed to be almost farcically arduous for most players. Making the overall gear grind a little easier, while at the same time giving people a real incentive to kill dungeon trash, wouldn't be a bad thing.
Or the dungeons could be a little shorter by design. Or maybe some combination of both. Or maybe some sort of lockout timer could go along with the rest. In any case, the notion that players need to be punished for not clearing what they clearly regard as over-long dungeons seems counter-productive in the long run; if you force players to do stuff that a majority of them either don't enjoy or don't have time to complete, they'll leave for greener pastures.
The bad thing is that this really lessens the benefit of bringing a GWF. He's the man to widdle the trash down, debuff the heck out of them so the CW can pick them off easier. Mobs flying over ledges don't need to be widdled down
So even if the trash did drop something decent, it's usually not worth the time or the risk.
And why not have only 1 chest per DD available per character?
and of course, my favorite: epic skirmishes.
And keeping exploits in game is also the perfect solution to make people leaving the game. I see people from guild and in my friendlist logging less every day. And guess what, most of them were people using exploits. That's not a trade secret, when you get through endgame too quickly you create your own monty haul scenario.
I remember T2 drops being way higher at the begining of the game. Now, if the devs were able to fix exploits for good, maybe the old drop rates could be back in game. People would keep playing dungeons. Probably not 4-5 per DD run, one or two, and that would be enough to see some character progression. It's easy to say you speak for everyone, so let me try it: if they don't fix exploits, the game will be a dead place in 6 months.
Yes...but no...see the following...
Yes...but no.
The concept works except for the fact people have only three things to do once they reach level 60.
Do Dungeons, PvP or Foundry missions.
As such there is a constant and steady supply of boss drops. The prices show the complete story.
All Tier 1 gear other than those that come out of the Lair of the Mad Dragon and Wolf Den are worth a pittance because those two dungeons are...well basically factually harder than most Tier 2 dungeons.
Then when we look at Tier 2 gear Helms, Ancient Weapons and boots are the most expensive gear because they are from harder dungeons which often can not be completed without an extremely high geared team and/or the right team composition.
There are only so many players, then only so many players of each class and then only so many players who are level 60 and need gear at level 60. Other than Spellplague, Dreadvault and Castle Never the other Tier 2 gear is extremely easy to obtain and the dungeons are often run and as such often sold on the Auction House to the point that the gear is no longer worth anything.
As players get better gear and teams, more players get fully equipped and the demand continues to drop the process will extend even to the harder dungeons. Very few items have maintained their value in the last month and most are half of what they were last month.
So what's going to happen? Things will reach an equilibrium because dungeons are no longer worth their time? Well that means players will no longer do dungeons, Foundry missions are already considered lacking in incentives so the only thing left is PvP which will also be taking a major hit this month.
You can't sweep this off. This is the path of the current drop program.
The less players the less demand. It doesn't fix itself.
If you want to compare this to a real world economic state it's more akin to a pyramid scam than anything else. The people who get the first get their banks worth but when the supply exceeds the demand everybody goes down.
There are thousands of Tier 1 and 2 drops being added to the game every day and while there may be thousands of people still reaching 60 now each level new 60 simply adds thousands more supply daily to a demand which is unarguably diminishing with time. The bubble will burst.
If they DO fix the exploits the game will be a dead place in 6 months. No one wants to spend 2 hours running a dungeon for crappy less than t1 loot in a tier 2 dungeon. A dungeon where 95% of the fighting is boring and repetitive.
If you need 2h to complete a legit dungeon run then i suggest you think harder to your build/your game style. I can do a legit spider run within 30 mins, a frozen heart within 45, Spellplague within 50 (the boss has a crapton of HPs), and karrundax within 35 mins. And no you don't need awesome mega epic gear, all my characters have around 10k GS, that's not much.
There's also another reason i want exploits to be fixed: i'm a good player and i can do dungeons faster than most people with my friendlist team mates. The better you are, the more ADs you earn, if we talk about legit stuff. I think it's not an outrageous expectation.
I think the reason you (and i for the most part) percieve the loot (or a lot of it) as "crappy" is directly connected to the exploits (and the rewards in the the dd that are too hight).
Because of exploits, more people can do more runs during a dd event and get more loot. The marked is filled with items that are cheap because of that. Because they are cheap and so much top gear is in the ah, the perception is, that a lot of the loot is "crappy". If people could only do one, maybe two runs in a dd event, combined with a reduced reward at the end, items that a lot of people now think are not even worth it to put in the ah, could become very desireable over the time.
The exploits are killing the game and the value of items. A full T2 set should be something special, something valueable but because people get the stuff so easy and so frequently, it is not.
Do you stream or record? I think a 30 min spider or 35min Karru is worth watching.(some of it)
I'd like to see what party you take.
This doesn't make sense to me. The boss fights are the only somewhat challenging part of any dungeon, how does clearing trash fast make you a pro player? You do spider in 30, congrats, I do spider in 15 by rushing through and taking 2 TR's. The only remotely difficult part is final boss.
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
This doesn't make sense to me. Why so much efforts to get purples if all you do is skipping stuff, running and dying? You do spider in 15 mins, congrats. You get a nice worthless loot you don't need since you won't use your shiny gear. And if the issue is saving time, I hope you know an extra work hour will likely get you a lot more stuff than farming in a game.
Oh, and can i have your stuff? You'll likely get bored soon.
Why would i do that? Just make big pulls, get the CW bumping stuff or do aoe damage with shield/singularity/steal time.
I have 1 of every class, 3 of them are 60 and I'm getting close with the other two. I still enjoy this game very much, but when I can make AD on my fully geared CW to gear up my alts why wouldn't I do that vs. having to go through all T1's and then progress to T2's etc. I have ran those a lot on my CW, I don't want to do T1's and PvP to get base gear so I can progress to T2.
I mainly only run CN now, which I can do in under an hour with the many good players on my friends list. Would I run CN if all exploits were removed and it took 2 1/2 hours to clear? No. That is what would make me get very bored of the game. Point is these exploits keep people playing, I only have a couple hours a night to play if at all, and I'm not going to spend that entire time on 1 single dungeon, especially with a 1 in 5 chance at getting loot in the first place.
Edit: It's really simple to fix "exploits" just delete some of the trash that is just skipped anyway...
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
You're correlating two data points and assuming that they have a causative relationship. Your entire premise is completely invalid because:
1) Your friends list & guilds IS NOT a representative sample all "exploiters" nor all everyone who is no longer logging in regularly.
2) The causative relation for the people on your friends & guild lists and exploitation isn't demonstrated. Many people have stopped logging on regularly, in fact there is a thread about people who log in just to invoke and do trade skills. Do you posit all the people posting here:
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?426581-Does-anyone-else-only-login-to-pray-and-refresh-tradeskill-actions
is due to short cuts? I think there are many reasons, not least of which is the fact that there hasn't been any new content since the launch and we're in the lull waiting for the first module to be released.
First, there will always be a most efficient way to run a given dungeon. It can be brought closer to the average speed so that the time for all runs follows a normal bell curve distribution, BUT until we see changes in how dungeons are designed the players are highly incentivized to spend hours looking for short cuts. Its far more efficient to spend hours in the normal mode version of a dungeon figuring out how to skip content and cheese bosses knowing that it will take weeks if not months for Cryptic to fix the current most efficient set of short cuts. Its far more practical to simply change the reward systems, in a NON-punitive way, so that players aren't as motivated to spend that upfront time figuring out all the cheap tricks.
T1 and T2 gear isn't equivalent to rank 5 enchants. You need approximately six bajillion rank 5 enchants to make a rank 10 enchant. And since you have to pay a king's ransom to transfer an existing high-end enchant from one piece of gear to another, there's a built-in enchantment sink. Ergo, there will always be demand for more enchants. Yes, the prices on rank 5s would go down, but they wouldn't drop into the cellar permanently.
We agree on one thing: the key to fixing the economy (to the extent you think it's broken) is to fix the dungeons one way or another. If people are leaving, it ain't just because they can buy a full T1 set the moment they hit level 60 for a few thousand AD; they're leaving (in part) because the environment in the high-end group PvE game is toxic. They're leaving (again, in part) because they feel like the game is rigged in favor of the few people who have access to the real endgame gear in this game, which is comprised primarily of enchantments worth eleventy bajillion AD.
The difference between us is that you seem to think the gear grind is too easy, and that that's driving people away. I think the gear grind is only too easy if you ignore that a fully kitted out character in this game costs the AD equivalent of something like $400. And fully kitted out characters enjoy immense advantages, both in PvP and (to a lesser extent) in PvE.
The first stage of the gear grind is too easy, perhaps. But the notion that somehow hordes of players are maxing out their characters in a week and then logging out forever because they've "won" strikes me as bizarre. I think they experience exactly the opposite sensation -- that it's easy enough to get epic-dungeon "ready" but that everything after that is a soul-crushing grind unless you either spend a fortune in real money on the AH, or unless you've had CN on farm status since day 1. And oh by the way, if a newer player wants to try to learn CN (or really, any of the harder dungeons), he has to figure out a bajillion shortcuts that may or may not appeal to him ethically -- but in any case, whether he cares about shortcuts or not, they add an extra and entirely gratuitous bar to entry to the new player.
And on that note, we're arguing about the wrong thing here. The topic is about improving the dungeon experience, not biting our nails over the AH value of set items, the market for which -- as you've noted -- is already in the toilet.
I really thought you'd be smarter. Of course there is a relationship betweek lack of content and exploits. You consume 45 mins content in 20. Thus you reduce the time this content was supposed to last. That's why the devs have to fix this anyway. This game won't go anywhere if people keep burning through content faster than expected. Sure, they can make very short 15 mins instances, but they will drop the set drop rates accordingly. In STO (another cryptic game), the "dungeons" are supposed to last 15 mins, but the purple items drop rate is so low that you might see one per month at most. Not sure that's what you want, but if you really want that, expect pain and sweat to get a full set. It's the same company after all.
IMO it's a lot better to have 1h long instances with healthy drop rates rewarding skilled players and giving a chance to casuals if and when they succeed.
Frankly, the game is ruined by it, since it's just a mirthless loot grind. I hope the devs fix their game, because as it stands now, there are major problems with how it's being played.
The issues are one and the same.
The only way to improve the dungeon drops, incentives, rewards and to some extent the ease of completion is to do so while considering the implications of the changes on the market.
The way I see players suggest the dungeons improved come down to a few main suggestions:
1) Give more drops (I.E. Making the DD Chest Permanent)
2) Shortening the dungeons
3) Making them easier to complete
The problem is each one of those suggestions effects the economy and would take an economy that is, as you put it, already in the toilet and flush it. If items players put a lot of time, effort and/or astral diamonds into are overnight made worthless it would simply drive players out the door.
It's all intertwined. Dungeons can't become shorter or easier unless the drop rates go down. Drop rates going down are counter-productive to the general desire of the player base.
It's a catch 22. A rock and a hard place.
And sadly at the end of the day I think everybody will have to accept that drops, for the good of the game, shouldn't be guaranteed anymore. Shouldn't have been from the start. But such a change would have to go hand in hand with improving the drops of trash and increasing the ability for dungeons to be completed with non-perfect groups.
And while it will always suck to not get a reward...
It's a far better joy to get properly compensated for doing dungeons and occasionally getting a good reward than getting meh rewards and improper incentives all of the time.
Not necessarily. The market for most T1 and T2 set items (and a lot of purple neck/ring/waist items) is in the toilet. We can all lament that that's true, and speculate about ways to fix it, but for the purpose of this discussion, that ship has sailed. And obviously people are still speed-running and/or short-cutting and/or exploiting their way through even the dungeons that drop the devalued items, so there's no obvious causal relationship between the depressed value of those items and the issue at hand (the dungeon experience).
If there's a problem here that relates to the depressed value of those items, it's that people can and are encouraged to loot those chests over and over again, despite the low value of the items inside them, because nothing else in the dungeon is worth anything at all. In other words, speed running has become the default behavior, even when the rewards for it are fairly insignificant. PuGs exhibit exactly the same "Go go go!" behavior in Lair of the Mad Pirate that they do in CN.
That's a systemic and/or playerbase-cultural problem, and it ain't gonna be solved by worrying about the fact that T1 set items are trivial to obtain. As I pointed out at length in my last reply, T1 set items (and even T2 set items) are only the tip of the ice berg that comprises the Neverwinter gear grind. Do you disagree with that? I noticed no response on that front; you just keep acting as if my arguments center around items that I have explicitly dismissed as unimportant.
Yes, exactly. I have argued that adding rank 5 enchants wouldn't have a deleterious long-term effect on the market. I have argued that making the dungeons shorter wouldn't have a deleterious long-term effect on the market, provided the developers are willing to take steps otherwise to limit the frequency with which players could loot certain dungeons, if necessary.
You haven't replied. I wish to improve player retention (and thus, preserve the market's health to the extent that it can be preserved) by improving the experience of running dungeons, and thus improving the culture that surrounds dungeon runs. And although I agree that any attempt to improve the dungeon experience shouldn't ignore potential market consequences, I couldn't care less about the aspects of the market that have already been flushed down the toilet. As far as I'm concerned, those things have nowhere to go but up, almost regardless of what happens elsewhere. You don't dismiss otherwise beneficial changes on the basis that something already broken might get slightly worse.
If the dungeons are fixed in a sensible manner, the bottom line is that the economy should take care of itself.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
The TL;DR version of my previous post is this: the dungeons are already effectively shorter than intended, because people are bypassing the content. So any argument that starts with the premise, "you'll ruin the economy if you take away trash mobs," is doomed before it begins. You're shooting down a potential quality-of-life solution to the high-end dungeon-running environment on the basis that it won't fix a tenuously related problem that's already as bad as it's gonna get.
Yes. I blame the "MMO crowd" who sees nothing special about Neverwinter. To them, Neverwinter is just another MMO to grind/farm.
In Gauntlgrym, there are constant requests for "speed runs" or "coin farming". Almost every T2 epic dungeon run during dungeon delves contains one or more players who wants to skip (or cheese) as many mobs and mini-bosses as possible. And if you dare oppose them, you will be insulted or possibly kicked. Some farmers are so arrogant. When I'm party leader, sometimes a farmer/exploiter will demand that I give them leadership. Instead of continuing to fight, they stop to argue and complain and make demands. It's a very unpleasant experience. Makes me want to stay out of most T2 dungeons.
The situation is so bad .... Today, I went into Fardelver crypt. As usual, everyone is farming it. TR starts to run. I am running second. TR starts demanding that I stop running. Only he runs because "it's TR job". If I don't like it, I should "find a new party". He was not even the party leader, and still he is making demands. I just want to enjoy playing the game. I will not stand by a campfire while someone else plays the game for me.
Right now, I am standing in Protector's Enclave.
A person asks "why does nobody queue skirmishes?".
The first reply is ... "they're mostly a waste of time".
To the MMO crowd, playing Neverwinter is a waste of time, unless there are rewards.