People have lots to say about everything that has changed since mod 6 was introduced, I know I have vented as well
But the biggest issue boils down to the loss of trust that I have in Cryptic - they changed the Dragon Hoard Ent without telling us, they nerfed the old artificates without notification (I do not play on preview, nor read those posts - just play the game and read the Arc posts). Currently with Double RP, I am enjoying the upgrades, yet for some reason my upgrades are taking a
lot more tries than they have in the past. I have noticed others commenting on this as well.
Maybe it is a bad run, but the sceptic in me says "Can I trust that Cryptic are not changing the stats to 'encourage' more purchases of Coals and Preservation Wards?" After mod6, the answer is sadly, no. How do we know they are not? Where is the transparency? What are the real stats? What changes will they make without telling us in future?
I play the game, but I am dishartened by a lack or transparancy. Address this, Cryptic, or lose more players.
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Lvl 70 Oathbound Paladin
Lvl 60 Spellstorm Mage
This indeed is a huge error they made. I lost all trust in this company now. I basically blew 5 millions plus AD making four Greater Enchants, and now they suck. I consider this fraud.. and i am no frikkin BOT. And I dont even farm. I simply play the game and expect some kind of decent drop rate throughout the day, but now they are garbage. I feel like consulting a lawyer.
On the plus side they did un-perma ban me for what I assume to be for reselling items on the AH for a profit. Anyway greater hoards still had limited use since the ICD meant that lower enchants could proc at a similar rate. With this nerf it's just an extra stab. I could multislot with feyblessing but my inventory is practically full enough with 5 bags already without adding bound enchants to the mix. I could buy a runic bag, but I'd be able to buy 80 stacks of r5 for that when they're reduced so that'd take me a year to pay off at 20 drops a day. If I had another bag slot, I could get more use out of it, but I'd have to replace one and then it'd just end up bound.
The earlier blog post notwithstanding, the thought process at Cryptic still seems pretty opaque to me, which surely winds up contributing to nagging doubts about why certain changes are really being made. It's something that the folks at Cryptic can address, if they would.
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You know what else they stole from me?
The currency inventory used to be like normal inventory. They changed that to a listing view with numbers. Before they changed, I had 2500 or so drake seals. After they changed, the cap is 500 drake seals, so the 2000 extra that I had vanished. No notification. I contacted the support, no reply.
The formula is like this: Game "X" lacks integrity. It tales away things players have earned and always charges more and more money to maintain the status quo. Game x lacks integrity which also means its security is fast and loose. All of those things together mean that a game with low to no integrity is a cess pit of exploits, bots, and gold spammers. Because people don't want to ut money into something shady. So they use bots and exploits.
A bad scene all around.
Funny how it's considered theft if any customer uses an exploit or 3rd party hack of some sort to duplicate currency. Yet when the company simply "decrees" that the hours, and hours of a players time spent gathering event coinage to "save for" the next time the event comes around is worthless and simply erases their event currency that is somehow okay.
Sure changes to the game are a normal event, but invalidating hours of a player time is rude taken to an extreme.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
in this 2x event i upgrade 4 legendary gear, 4 rank 10 to rank 11, 1 artifact to legendary for about 130 preservation...which seems fine.
the rng however its striky...sometimes you even get 60 fails to upgrade a rank 6.
the best way i found to avoid this is moving in not crawded instances... may work may not its my placebo effect
Might is not always right - the powerful sometimes forget that.
The Small Band1.) Greater Bags of Holding were to become bound on equip and that any already equip would become bound. This cause many people to unequip them from many of their alt characters where they no longer wanted those bags. The problem with this is that it was a lie, if you kept it equipped, they would not become bound. Only after you unequip and equip again would it become bound. This, to many players, make them feel cheated and tricked as it did not do as was mentioned. It may help increase the sales in bags in the short run, but it causes players to distrust you more and more which may force players to leave.
2.) Glyphs stacking if they have not been used. This was part of Mod6 release notes, yet it has never worked in preview all this time. Why release this on the notes if it is not working?
More focus should first be put on fixing the multiple amount of bugs that exists in class powers(not talking about class imbalances, just making powers work as described on the tool tip and/or fix the tool tip). It is impossible to balance classes when powers do not work appropriately or described accordingly via tooltip. Having powers work accordingly and correct and truthful patch notes will greatly help recover the trust they have lost.
I'm fairly certain that something to that avail is hidden somewhere in all the legalese in the ToS...
...else their lawyers wouldn't be worth the air they breathe.
On a normal human reasoning scale you're absolutely right. But currently the whole affair is governed by some people who think like (and think everybody does and/or should think like) the hypothetical **** oeconomicus. That those never would spend neither a cent nor an hour of their time on games like this is a completely different topic...
If you're refining "old school", Lvl 60 ArtiGear, all IDed gear Lvl 60 or above will work. If you're refining new, Lvl 70 ArtiGear, then the Lvl of the gear you want to melt down into that has to be 70, too. So the 69s you get even from campaigns won't work there...
...you can, however, spend a few AD (5-10k) and buy an old belt or cloak on the AH, or use one you still have from pre-Mod-6 times, and refine that with lower gear, and eventually dump that into a new-style Lvl 70 ArtiGear item. With the known efficiency, i.e. ca. 40% RP value regularly, ca. 80% on 2x RP event time.
I'd like Neverwinter to use the same model as a very popular top-down RPG that only sells vanity items. Everything else comes from playing. textile. But it's probably too late to turn the mothership around.
Trust is easily lost and extremely tough to gain back. I hope Cryptic turns around towards being player friendly. Currently, they seem to be ambivalent at best.
Along those lines, I'd also like to point out that we all know the devs have a boss like most of us do. Sometimes, the powers that be demand things of us that we know are wrong but, if we want another paycheck, we have to do as they say. I'm not saying the devs are violating their own ethics or beliefs but that pragmatism sometimes wins the day.
Nothing will change in this game until the upper echelons realize that selling 100 $5 items is, in reality, better for the game and community than selling 20 $25 Zen "must have" items. Vanity items are a big seller but my vanity in this game ends at a certain point; usually around $5
Thats how many games do it.. you play to gear, you buy for conviences.
So in the last major mmo I played, I bought a wardrobe (account, ten dollars) a stable (account ten dollars) bag slots (ten per slot, 4 total = 40 dollars for ACCOUNT) then you would purchase things like extra bank slots (5 per character for 20 at time) shared bank slots (you got like 15 at a time for 5 bucks)
Each then release cost like 29.99 to purchase.
I would MUCH rather spend like that, get things I either could use or not and buy the mods, then do what they do here..
I was fine with thier business model until they gated RP, I like many others have constantly warned them.. we will not buy thier RP, the moment they force us to, thats it, done. Its a line in the sand issue to me, it smacks of things we cannot even mention here, so I wont.
ITs a very bad business model and frankly goes against everything that a MMO should stand for.
Excellent analysis both of you! I can only hope that those at Cryptic with the power to make decisions happen (management) will take these words to heart . . . I'd hate to see this game go down in flames . . .
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."
Seconded.
It won't go down in flames - after all Cryptic's employees want to keep their jobs. But unless something's done, and done soon, it'll go down the path of slow, wilting death of games that alienated their core playerbase. Because once the broad mass of players decides not to leave their smaller amounts of money here, the whales will lack punching balls and/or admirers and/or enviers - and leave, too.