[PC] Gateway Closing Down

strumslinger · September 2016

It is with some regret that we are announcing the closing of Gateway for Neverwinter. This was not an easy call. I'd like to remind people to please keep all conversation respectful. Insults, flaming, and toxicity doesn't help anyone, especially in this situation. Thank you.

http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/neverwinter/news/detail/10161142-gateway-closing-down

empalas · September 2016

all we get is a green companion for the inconvenience???

ironzerg79 · September 2016

"This small mechanical creature was one of the few survivors of the Great Gateway Destruction"

That's sad.

EDIT: Dev Feedback from the thread for those who are only looking for the responses:

panderus said:
It wasn't an issue of not knowing if we COULD solve the issue, it was more about how much time have we already spent and how much more time will we need to continually put into it. Botting cannot be 'solved' in some ways, you can really only setup more and different roadblocks but at an increasing cost to development each time.

We have quite a bit of experience in keeping the botters at bay at this point and it wasn't a decision that was come upon lightly at all. The meeting we had went over a long agenda and recounted things we have already tried to resolve this issue as well as weigh all the pros and cons. We even went through the scenario of just keeping up the non botted features of Gateway but there were still some costs that still incurred with little gains (keeping the additional specialized servers up and the fact few people used them).

panderus said:
Lockbox is not likely where we would put them, no.

Personally, I would like to see the Lightfoot Thief come from some gameplay related activity.

panderus said:

It was certainly one of the costs, yes. There was also the extra dev costs of keeping a feature, the extra servers and knowledge needed to maintain them as well.

How did we determine what people used in gateway? It was a website, those are very easy to track what players are doing. Also, when we are being 'aggressively botted' we could see what processes the servers were doing that was taking up the most CPU cycles.
'Recently logged in' is actually anyone who has logged into gateway within the last year if I recall correctly.

Regarding professional botters vs actual players, we believe that what was hurting the servers were professional botters simply because large influxes of them would start up all in parallel suggested a coordinated effort. Player activities are much more organic and ebb and flow with the normal game traffic and behaviors.

panderus said:
There are no dwindling players on the PC shard, our numbers have been stable for a while. We actually have seen an uptick of players just from announcing PS4 and continuing through M10.

We currently plan to remove the UI and quests that mention Gateway with the next module release. I have also already mentioned we will be looking at what to do with the SCA rewards before.

We went though the thought process of what it would take to bring SCA to the main game. All we would really save is some design and art time but it would still need a lot of UI work to implement. It is still possible we could do it, but it is a pretty big investment for a feature not that many players used a lot of. Part of why it wasnt played as much as expected was just because it was outside the game. I remember playing it a lot when it was released for a long time on an iPad while watching TV, it was nice between commercials or slow parts in a show.

rgutscheradev said:
I just wanted to say I too am sad about Gateway going down.

I had lots of fun playing Sword Coast Adventures -- I'd often play during lunch hour (it's a lot easier to play SCA while holding a sandwich than to play NW itself!). For some weird reason, I liked to roleplay more in SCA than in regular NW -- I'd send my Honey Badger into too-tough opponents because "he didn't care", or have my Galeb Duhr fight enemies armed with swords because his rocky skin would protect him (note for those who didn't play SCA: this is NOT a mechanic in the game!).

I understand why people here felt it had to go (in the end, I was reluctantly convinced myself). The bots that were hitting Gateway were thereby hitting the real game -- that's because the things Gateway does involve the real game. If you look at your gear, you're looking at your gear in the real game. If you do a profession task, you do it in the real game. If your companion gains XP, it gains it in the real game. That means botters were hitting the real game servers by hitting Gateway. This kept happening, then getting fixed, then happening again.

Can botters try stuff like this in the real game? Sure, but it's a lot harder. And it's a lot easier for us to fight them in-client. And we can and will keep fighting them in-client (note we will never win completely, but we will -- in fact we must -- always keep fighting them). But having to fight them on TWO fronts was not good. Ultimately, we want more of our resources to go to making the game itself better. Having an additional front in the (never-ending) war vs botters meant fewer resources for the game itself.

A few more things worth mentioning:
* The pet is blue, not green. It got changed after the screenshot was taken.
* It will bind to the character that uses it, like all the companions. But we put it in a BoA box so you can give it to whichever of your characters you like. (You can't sell it to other players, though -- we wanted it to be an exclusive for Gateway users.)
* "Recently used Gateway" means anyone who used it within the past year.
* If you liked Sword Coast Adventures like I did, you might want to check out the board game Elder Sign (Fantasy Flight Games).

But I still will miss my Honey Badger, my dog, my other dog (I kept getting the two mixed up), my Galeb Duhr, and all the rest of my furry/rocky crew.

panderus said:

Improving professions is something near and dear to a few of us. I would like to have an update on it within the next few modules. There is nothing planned yet but there is a lot of missed potential with how it currently is in a number of ways.

We have not yet decided a place for the SCA rewards yet, we still need to review where they would fit and make the time to do it at a time that makes sense. I don't think the community would appreciate waiting another week just to hear where we will put the rewards that they can't get yet,

Unknown · September 2016

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loboguild · September 2016

I'm missing the promised details about the botting activities. What's the harm? Gateway is dead, so what were botters actually doing? Without the info we have to assume it's as much a move about not supporting a function that has zero relevance on consoles. Foundry, Gateway. Once again botting needs to be the cover-up for other intentions. Wouldn't be the first time.

darrellmp · September 2016

cute lil companion for the botters

Unknown · September 2016

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goatfaceone · September 2016

What is going to happen to Loyal Gear? will be moved to an ingame source?

empalas · September 2016

magenubbie said:
Well it wasn't unexpected. I'm only surprised it took this long.

So what exactly does " that have recently used Gateway " mean? Nobody has used the gateway recently. You shut it down, remember?

I was thinking the same thing

andorrabell · September 2016

I want the companion gear in game NOW. Tradebar store, cheap. Ditto thief and dog. If yall dare to make them zen purchases it will not go well. I can't believe this decision was released without more information.

And I don't understand this awful augment companion. Why not the thief, dog and a full set of companion gear. I'm surprised they didn't just go with 5 pres wards. Naw, 3 pres wards.

razor4lpha · September 2016

You will have to find a new way where loyal gear can be obtained, as soon as possible.

empalas · September 2016

professions definitely needs an overhaul then as was being discussed in the one thread since being able to log in at any time of the day isn't going to be doable now

dioriel · September 2016

Please answer the question about companion gear. Will it move to professions or some other in-game source? If not, it once again kicks new players in the gut, while the long-term, super-rich players will still be able to afford it (or already have it).

If you want to attract new players to the game and retain them, this sort of thing isn't the way to do it.

Unknown · September 2016

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purpenflurb · September 2016

I am incredibly disappointed that you are only providing compensation for people who have used the gateway. I never got to use the gateway because I started right after it was taken down, but I was promised the gateway and sword coast adventures in the game tutorials. When I was starting, I actually thought the gateway was one of the coolest features. And I was excited to try sword coast adventures once it was back up.

I am now at a juncture of deciding if I want to invest some money in the game and continue playing, and I would feel much better if I at least got some sort of compensation for the removal of a feature that the game told me I would have access to.

cambo1682 · September 2016

Another annoying hit to quality of life for the game. I will miss it somewhat, it was a convenience, especially while away from home. The apparatus is a cute gesture, but honestly, how about instead of tossing players a few crumbs when you make these changes you come up with something that offsets the impact...like say a "collect all" and "repeat last" button in profession tasks on live. Or just remove the problematic portions of the gateway itself. The recent limitations placed on low level players is also over the top.

diogene0 · September 2016

What? This is a joke, right? How do I get companion gear now?

beckylunatic · September 2016

And is it one companion per account? It's cute (but that tooltip really is sad), and I guess I'll have to bind it to a character that I view regularly but don't play seriously. Having really neat companions that you can't enjoy looking at is also sad. Or is it like the Caturday package and will be for all characters that existed prior?

The devs need to disable any of the system level-up mail messages that reference using Gateway.

And the profession system needs a complete overhaul. It was very obviously designed to only work well with out-of-game access, and it's horribly cumbersome without it, which lesson was already being driven home by console players.

The in-game AH UI also needs to feature the kind of sorting options that (while buggy) were available using Gateway.

I am deeply going to miss being able to view inventory without logging in characters. I used Gateway to check currency totals all the time, and to locate items I know I have... somewhere.

ironzerg79 · September 2016

Yeah, so the obvious questions...what happens to the gear and companions that you could only earn through the SCA. Also, the SCA was a great time waster, too...sad to see that's being blown up along side the Gateway.

Any chance we can at least see the SCA moved to be in game somewhere?

meirami · September 2016

Awful decision and no word on what will happen to the Loyal companion gear.

(The augment is cute, though.)

apathycurve · September 2016

Translation: you were looking for a reason to abandon the Gateway project so you could focus more man hours on creating lockbox content, and "cuz botters" is as good an excuse as any.

samaka · September 2016

Well, this sucks... sorry to see the Gateway go, I didn't use it as much as I probably should have... especially since I didn't realise there was some nifty companion-only gear to be had there. Please, add the companion gear to the tradebar store, or some other in-game method of obtaining them, but please, please, do NOT put them on the Zen store.

As for the free companion... why not just make it claimable by everyone on the Rewards Claim Agent? I mean, how recent is recent to qualify for the companion? Also, I am going to guess it is one-per-account? More info would be good!

kvet · September 2016

Can you throw in a free companion sack enlargement - mine's full. Don't want to spend ZEN for a companion that's not useful anyway.

Instead of some silly companion, how about something valuable like a pack of Coal wards.

andorrabell · September 2016

defiantone99 said:
Can the loyal gear at least be made account-bound? Most of our alts are now out of luck.

This, in the next patch, would be a bone I'd actually enjoy unlike this random weak companion.

Unknown · September 2016

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oldbaldyone · September 2016

The only game that I have ever seen that consistently removes more content than it adds. Unbelievable.

The number of people surprised by this move: 0. SO many other options ignored, 40k+ views on the thread about it.....

Just sad guys.

agilesto · September 2016

I'd summon this new little bot in memory of the late Gateway

lwedar · September 2016

@strumslinger @panderus

I would like to know how this will correct the botting? You have mentioned that this step was taken to be less reactive and more preventative.

However you have already tried removing items from the gateway (AD from professions) and the bots just start doing it in game. How does removing the gateway in this case resolve the problem? We have clear evidence from the recent year that proves otherwise

dandeloreon · September 2016

I am also saddened by this... I often used the Gateway to queue up ( and claim) profession quests while at work... Any chance that the mini-game from the gateway will make it's appearance on mobile devices, or possibly in the main game? If it's in the main game, I think it would not hurt to place it as a side option on the character select screen personally.

jamesbond007 · September 2016

I respect your decision and hope to adapt to these changes even though its going to result in a little bit more in game time, and thanks for the companion I will cherish it and keep it as a reminder of gateway.

I just realized the companion looks like a robot, I see what you did there.

krakenc · September 2016

Look developers, I myself am a programmer with over 20 years experience in about 12 programming languages on various platforms. I for free will help with this problem if you would like to keep the gateway open. with use of OTP, RegEx, and a couple alogorithms I am sure we could have this problem resolved

[PC] Gateway Closing Down

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