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observations w this module can potentially ruin the games future
lemonchill
Member Posts: 523 Arc User
first i would like to say i have been playing this game since beta and i loved it , the mechanics the graphics all seemed pretty good. im pretty sure most (or i would like to believe that) cryptic employes really do love the game and what they are doing. but i also have to mention ever since perfect world bought the game things have turned to the worse.the pinnacle of this catastrophe is this module.
few observations w this is by far the worst module that can potentially also ruin the game future:
lets start with pvp:
A so you get to lvl 60 do you have an option to buy lvl 60 pvp? no! u can still use blue gear 5 lvl`s below your current lvl is . so what happens when u go to do 5v5 pvp or gg 10v10 pvp? you meet much higher lvl players way better geared (lvl 65 pvp gear is by far superior to lvl 55 pvp gear. so basically you get 1 shot by... everybody. ohh you want some good pvp gear? well try the auction house maybe just maybe you will find some rare lvl 60 epic or even blue gear but wait the prices are absolutely ridiculous and those items are sooo rare!
B the imbalance of pvp , yep its is a known issue everybody knows that, everybody have been *****ing about it but this time it has gone to far. if you thought module 3 gwf were bad-***, if you thought modules 4+5 trs were all broken and op then the paladins broke all records of been a broken abused class at pvp by far!!!
now to pve:
A so you reached lvl 60 yipi , you now GET sent to ice wind dale to sharandar and dread ring ohh but wait they are lvl 70 and you are lvl 60 under geared unable to handle the difficulty of the new zones. so w the hell send me there in the first place?
B lvl 60-70 new areas and quests, one word -boring! no story line you just need to grind same quests over and over and over again until you say enough is enough i cant take it anymore.
C the lag yes that lag that everybody have been *****ing so much that so many posts were made about this subject (and fastly deleted may i add), the pinnacle is last area spiral it is absolutely impossible to play there because of the lag , the constant non stop lag!
im pretty sure there are more subjects i forgot to mention but i think the ones i wrote here are the most important. again i cant accuse cryptic ppl for trying hard but the company that owns them and give them insane undo-able
dead lines for new content to be released.
never have i seen such an ill planned module and i fear what will happen in the future i really hope things will change in the future so we the players that love mmo`s and this game can have fun again.
few observations w this is by far the worst module that can potentially also ruin the game future:
lets start with pvp:
A so you get to lvl 60 do you have an option to buy lvl 60 pvp? no! u can still use blue gear 5 lvl`s below your current lvl is . so what happens when u go to do 5v5 pvp or gg 10v10 pvp? you meet much higher lvl players way better geared (lvl 65 pvp gear is by far superior to lvl 55 pvp gear. so basically you get 1 shot by... everybody. ohh you want some good pvp gear? well try the auction house maybe just maybe you will find some rare lvl 60 epic or even blue gear but wait the prices are absolutely ridiculous and those items are sooo rare!
B the imbalance of pvp , yep its is a known issue everybody knows that, everybody have been *****ing about it but this time it has gone to far. if you thought module 3 gwf were bad-***, if you thought modules 4+5 trs were all broken and op then the paladins broke all records of been a broken abused class at pvp by far!!!
now to pve:
A so you reached lvl 60 yipi , you now GET sent to ice wind dale to sharandar and dread ring ohh but wait they are lvl 70 and you are lvl 60 under geared unable to handle the difficulty of the new zones. so w the hell send me there in the first place?
B lvl 60-70 new areas and quests, one word -boring! no story line you just need to grind same quests over and over and over again until you say enough is enough i cant take it anymore.
C the lag yes that lag that everybody have been *****ing so much that so many posts were made about this subject (and fastly deleted may i add), the pinnacle is last area spiral it is absolutely impossible to play there because of the lag , the constant non stop lag!
im pretty sure there are more subjects i forgot to mention but i think the ones i wrote here are the most important. again i cant accuse cryptic ppl for trying hard but the company that owns them and give them insane undo-able
dead lines for new content to be released.
never have i seen such an ill planned module and i fear what will happen in the future i really hope things will change in the future so we the players that love mmo`s and this game can have fun again.
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Comments
PVE: The lag and D/C issues are game breaking in themselves. The combat system is based on being able to dodge and block, if you rubberband, or get hit before you even see the attack then that makes it impossible. The lag issues are widespread and obviously not the result of a few individuals with bad rigs, or shoddy internet connections. It's an issue being screamed about by a large amount of the games population, and they were not having this issue before the last mod.
The old level 60 campaigns are now level 70, you can't expect the old level 60 gear to work there, you'll get pawned. They still let you in at lev 60, but the mobs have been buffed up to lev 70+.
Leveling to 70 in the elemental quests was not that hard. I managed to solo it in the new green and blue gear provided, but by the gods it's redundant. 3 areas of 16 vigilance quests each times 4 elements...192 vigilance quests. After the first 96 it's mind numbing.
I think a lot of us were expecting the simple adding of a new campaign, one that took a character from 60-70 and was harder and more challenging for those who were not challenged before. Completely changing abilities, enchants, and the difficulties of levels people were already doing and enjoying was to many a complete shock. Not surprisingly this has caused a lot of folks to become upset.
Neverwinter has been out for quite a while now, heck I've been in it for 2 years. Most folks interested in this genre of game have heard about and tried it. You are not going to attract new customers at the rate you did when first launching a new product, thus extreme care should be taken to keep customer loyalty. My suggestions for doing that are:
Far more communication: Do a weekly pod cast and have devs come on and tell us what they're planning and working on, why some things are not practical, answer some questions, and educate us on the process. You could also enhance your community relations with a few contests, some asking for community input, maybe even the devs taking on some players in PVP, or leading a dungeon crawl. Other game publishers do this and IT WORKS.
Have content for as many types of players to enjoy as possible: Some folks like to solo, some like PVP, some will have epic gear and want an epic challenge, others will be more casual. Once hitting 70 (or what ever your top level becomes) you will have a wide spread of what folks find challenging and fun, this depends on player preference, gear, skill, play style etc. The campaigns at lev 70 need to run the gambit from easy, for the soloing guy just making 70 and in green and blue gear, to hard core for the guy who is highly skilled, has epic gear and enchants, and wants an epic challenge. The more people that can find an area they find fun to play in the more people stay and spend money to have more fun.
Allowing players to select from multiple difficulty settings would (potentially) allow all players to access and enjoy all content. It would provide for increased longevity by allowing players to up their choice of difficulty level when they've got enough gear together. Those who are geared to the max can be provided with more challenging game play by simply providing another difficulty level.
It is probable that as with most things the range of players fit into a fairly broad bell curve distribution with most being moderate/casual gamers and a small percentage at either end of the distribution. Adding difficulty levels would split that curve into multiple smaller narrower bell curves but with those at either end able to move up or down if they so desired.
Any game that is targetted to appeal solely to the bellends will most likely fail because there won't be enough of them to sustain it.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
- Remove vigilance quests mechanics and replace it with structured chain of quests. Arc story quests are fine enough, but they need be more focused on getting player into lore. Doing first set of vigilance quests makes incredibly bad impression. How many times do you need to go in these mines? 4-th zone looks fresh new, even rehashed Celadine Tower. But let me ask, how much effort spent on implementing these flying quests? They are unique. They feel awesome, but game has so many bugs. Not many players even know how to do them, can be easily skipped.
- If goal is "end game", why slow process to get to 70? It is at endgame people spend money, not in 61-69, right ? Give more XP.
- Give back old normal 5 man versions of 15-59 dungeons. They were fine. Allow 70 players to jump into it but level debuf should be stronger.
- DR, Sharangar - rewards - still to level 60, but i would recommend any new player to team up and start doing boons. DR is no brainer once you unlock daily liar quest.
- Dragon - easy exterior zones, Ghost Stories - very opposite, weird very armored NPC.
- IWD - enemies were always tough and boring for non-DPS class, no business here for solo adventurer with R5 and green gear.
Nine Vaults class artefact reward can be get right after hit 60 now, grab mission in IWD, team up in PE and go. Leveling to 60 is still matter of 3-6 days. All gear is green, no blue drops (unlike 51-59). Mission reward gear is not so good.
Fraking lifesteal in Elemental weapon set for DC is another disappointment. Seriously, it is not well thought marketing move. Why would player pay money to refine this weapon?
— (The unwritten rule)
Sounds reasonable but the problem of maxxed out characters whining about the difficulty will return. Implement difficulty levels and it's a problem that is easily fixed, which would free up resources for creating new content.
its bugged, there was no level scaling for the inside part, i think its fixed with this patch
Pretty much everything said here.
And pretty much everything here as well.
I dare say that the maxed out whiners are in the 2% of the player base. Instead of allowing player to choose difficulty, a simple fix would be to scale monsters based on item scores once level 70 has been reached.
The goal for any questing game should NEVER be endgame. It should be about the journey, not the destination. Unfortunately, everyone wants to be the highest level with BiS, then complain that there's nothing to do, or that everything is "too easy". Well, no <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
Im not talking about just the new zones, I mean everywhere I go in the game.
I am one of those unfortunates who, after even zeroing or switching all video options off,
still lags in all zones.
Prior to the new expansion,' I was able to run the game at normal settings.
Now even with everything I can off or no value, its still lagging everywhere.
So the new content doesn't mean that much to me ATM, because I cant even play,
my low level alts properly, doing quests in old existing low level zones.
I don't know what went wrong but its critical for me lol.
If it still lags everywhere after todays patch, then I don't know what I am going to do.
.
None of this would work in such a MMO. Selectable difficulty will not work, it's not a solo game, it's a persistent world with an economy. You're going to completely ruin the economy, which is a cornerstone of how cryptic makes money with this game. With easy content you also bring back bots. Tons of bots, affecting the bottom line and making the game a gold seller's paradise.
Scaling npcs won't work either. What's the point of getting better gear if it's not to progress on a ladder? It also requires to design multiple levels of difficulty for the same content, ie doing 4-5 times more work on the same dungeon. With the amount of recycled assets, that's daydreaming.
So the most sensible approach to make everyone happy is to make the campaign areas easy so that Mr casual can come after working for 16h in the forge or the mine, so that he can enjoy mindlessly smashing the keyboard to increase some virtual currency counters, and leave dungeons as they are so that people who enjoy MMOs have something to do too. Then you have content for everyone.
DDO has selectable difficulties for quests and raids and that never seemed to hurt the economy. (*cough* exploits *cough*)
Scaling npcs won't work either. What's the point of getting better gear if it's not to progress on a ladder? It also requires to design multiple levels of difficulty for the same content, ie doing 4-5 times more work on the same dungeon. With the amount of recycled assets, that's daydreaming."
I don't want to plug any competitors by name in NW's forums; but there are A LOT of MMO's that offer "Nightmare" and or "Hardcore" content to challenge those who want an extreme challenge as well as far easier content for "Mr. Casual". All seem to have working economies, and are not over run with bots. It can be done and has.
However, even if you do it by making the dungeons the challenging content as you suggested there are ways to make the game enjoyable for the wide spectrum of players who want to play. It is up to the design staff to test various methods and find a way to make that happen. The wider you make your player base the more reliable your revenue becomes.
I'll do it for you. SWTOR and DDO. The first one is incredibly successful and I am sure Cryptic/PWE would LOVE that kind of success for NWO. Neverwinter is better than either though, and could be even better than that with select-able dungeon difficulty. I won't talk much about DDO because it is a stale beat game imo. SWTOR has real depth in terms of story, is a ton of fun as mmos go, its economic system is simply awesome. But for all of that it is a wow clone which means the combat action is ugh.
BTW you can always hit "quote message" to auto-quote the post you are responding to. If you want to break down a post even further for a line by line response, just put the quote you are responding to between [ quote ] and [ / quote] without the spaces. Much easier to read that.
The game you're refering to is not an MMO, as only a few players can be in any instance at once...
And yes, it is loaded with bots. I would not be surprised if that franchise has been populated by as many bots as all other MMO(ish) games combined.
OK games MMOS that allow you to choose the difficulty of your play/ mission. DDO, Firefall, Rift, Warframe...I could go on. They all do it in different ways, but they all allow you to select a level of challenge. All are successful.
Selectable difficulty is perfectly feasible, relatively easy in fact (or should be), there's no reason for people to choose to solo if they don't want to they can group up at whatever difficulty they like (but only with players at the same difficulty level). More people are happy/having fun, more people play...sounds like an MMO to me.
I didn't test all these games but I can tell you that SWTOR is quite boring. Tab targeting makes games too easy IMO and I got bored quickly. Even the hardest mode felt very casual friendly. Warframe is challenging only because 100% of the content is made of horde modes, which is a specific kind of content, not a new thing, but yes, it's missing in Neverwinter. That doesn't mean difficulty is selectable, it's just that the longer you play, the higher the rewards are, but you also face much tougher npcs that may kill you in one hit if you're not careful.
Currently, neverwinter has three tiers of group content:
- levelling dungeons
- T1 (ilevel 1600)
- T2 (ilevel 2000).
Each tier has its own merits, and T2 content can be explored in levelling dungeons already. The issue is that there will always be people asking for the hardest content in-game to be nerfed so that they can do it, no matter how many tiers of content there are. It happens in every single fantasy MMO with dungeons. There's always someone not skilled enough throwing a tantrum because he wants that epic thing only skilled veteran players can acquire, and that's really irritating when you're enjoying the content that some people want to see nerfed.
It's natural to expect higher tiered content to be more difficult. Trash mobs in unrestricted dungeons might as well not attack at all because their damage is so low. However, the ramp up in difficulty isn't linear and really makes no sense.
Leveling Dungeon: Tank a whole room of mobs.
T1: Survive 2-3 hits from trash. Maybe 1-2 from boss.
T2: Survive 1-2 hits from trash. Definitely 1-shotted by boss.
It's also expected to actually have some kind of team composition required to do content. However, what team content is saving you from adds attacking as soon as they spawn, surely taking a DPS or two, if not your whole party, down within a second or two?
They wanted to make the dungeons harder but right now they're mostly only cleared with bugs or exploits. I'd like to see a party in T1 blues clear GWD or CC legit.
Also, no, it shouldn't be expected to simply "wait" a few months to rank up Black Ice for better gear.
Go Cryptic!
PS - I quit.
Multiple layers of defense. DR, straight damage reduction, auto dodge, damage immunities. All of this works pretty well and means a T2 boss may hit hard but is in no way a one hit kill.
I'll be sure to change my ad to specify only DPS classes with defensive stats equal to BiS GFs.
Go Cryptic!
PS - I quit.
what happened to a regular quest chain with different quest hubs?
I like that we can actually choose what quests to do, but still I prefered to more lore oriented quests from regular zones.
How about this:
You remember Icepire Peak, the quest where you had to beat the 3 icegiants? Well, you could wallop them and be fine with it. But you could also go all the way up and flog the 4th, much tougher icegiant and by doing that unlock a secret objective.
Why not design dungeons to be quest-complete at 75% of the way. After that, the real trouble begins, but noone enforces you to go that way. Let a good lvl-70 group with uncommon gear finish a dungeon at 75% with a fair chance. Give the hardcores the possibility to go beyond, the farther you go, the more likely you'll get rare drops. Same goes for epic dungeons, where you should have a chance to get epics after the 75% exit and reach it at a fair chance having rare gear.
As you had few trouble to knead well known dungeon-parts together into "new" dungeons, those insert exits should be no problem
ROFLcopter.
And that's why, among all the games in the market, you chose Neverwinter, where almost everything is full autoaim (maybe 25% ground-target-AoE) - and now cry for challenge.
Reality check, please...
I am at the point where I hope it doesn't.
Even the lead designer admits there have been a host of errors, and has apologized to the community. Game difficulty on the top of his list. So please stop saying everything is perfect as is.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/neverwinter/news/detail/9213383-neverwinter%3A-looking-into-elemental-evil
We get it. You like a challenge. You like lording over the close to 400 people now that have posted they find the difficulty too hard that you find it great and they all play the game poorly. But even if you are 100% correct, you need the novices paying to run down the bunny slope to fund the game. I fully support giving highly skilled players highly difficult and challenging content, but I also believe that the casual player needs to have fun too. That is not happening, and obviously needs to be addressed. Honestly as long as you get your high challenge areas, it confounds me why you even care how easy the lower tier areas are. As stated you are beyond them, so however easy they chose to make those areas it will not affect you.
Today's patch on the 23 with the continued bugs, lag, and now even more bound items say more then your apologies ever could. The fact that there are press releases saying this is the #1 game for the North American market only goes to show just how crappy the competition has become. Not that I believe what I am reading. I think ESO is a way better game then this one. It definitely runs alot better.
This is fairly standard in all games of the loot'n'level genre...
The level typically is an exponent in an equation, and the base to that exponent is higher for the reds than it is for players. One example where I know the numbers off my head is Borderlands 2:
Players: _ 1.14^Level
Monsters: 1.17^Level
This formula yields the factor by which everything - HP, base damage, etc. is multiplied. This factor also comes into play with down- or up-leveling for e.g. the old style Call to Arms events, or nowadays almost everything campaign, dungeon, or skirmish.
It's also the factor with which gear bonus is multiplied to match level. You could do the math with equally named greens of different levels to elucidate the base (or probably find it somewhere in the forum archive), but as the game all but completely happens at cap level, I found this fairly futile. And as this, when you combine it with NW's old Diminishing Returns curves, would lead to everybody haveng high figures all but without any benefit, the curves had to be linearized with the level upgrade...
Agreed. Now if you'll kindly provide your readers with his name and mailing address we'll get on it. You see, no one knows who you're talking about or how to get in touch with them.