Monday 24 October 2016

NWO: Cryptic Abortion

It's too late in the evening to post one of my current running stories, so I thought I'd instead talk about how Cryptic is continuing to "Abort" it's baby Neverwinter Online. They certainly love taking things out of the game.

A: Foundry is too hard to support, lets get rid of that.
B: I know, lets remove some dungeons! Yeah less content is awesome!
C: Oh, and the Sword Coast Adventures! Yeah, no one plays that.
D: What the game will be if this continues: Broken and Dead.

To me, Cryptic has more than a few problems as of this posting which I feel like listing out right here and now.

1) Serious connection flaws on their end prevent me from playing when I want to play. If I could connect right now I would but instead, here I am listing their failures.

2) Greed. More and more things that help players progress either keep getting removed, or put behind a paywall or an incredible grind. Also comparing their real world money conversion into ZAX to say, Mabinogi's Nexon cash is a real eye opener on how much of a premium they put on their pixels.

3) They like lying. Often blaming the slow abortion due to bots, or reclassification of bugs or whatever else. It would probably better if they just went "We need more money". At least that would be honest. There are those also still waiting on the promised reduction of stronghold influence since... last year?

4) They don't listen to their player base. If you saw that 48+ page post I linked to of people raging against that change, or the numerous calls to reduce the required amount of influence (or add methods to gain influence) for Strongholds, I think we're out of luck.

5) There is a disconnect between content designers and D&D. This is one that really pisses me off. A repeatable fishing quest in a level 70 zone and more fishing in a level 70+ zone? So you are sending characters who have likely defeated Baphomet, Orcus, Tiamat, a number of Balors and armies of who knows what else off to catch (regular) fish? If this was a table top session how would you swing that and keep people interested?

6) There is obviously a disconnect / lack of communication within their own company too. The latest module features Frost Giants who seem to enjoy throwing boulders that they pick up from the ground. That's cool and looks neat. But then you fight around 33% of said Frost giants ON WOODEN SHIPS. Of course they retain the boulder throwing attack which is idiotic.

7) They abandoned the one thing that made them stand apart: the Foundry. As a foundry author myself, that really upsets me.

8) Cryptic encourages Elitism. Those new dungeons / zones require some pretty high levels of gear to participate in. I'd personally always favor inclusion over exclusion but I have to let it slide because people asked for it and apparently the few metrics I can see also make it valid in the "majority rules" sense.

Anyway, enough venting for tonight. More regular content will continue tomorrow.

6 comments:

  1. I haven't checked in on Neverwinter in a while, so it came as a shock to hear they're abandoning the Foundry! I never sat down with it to see what I could make, but it was my favorite part of the game. I'm really bummed about that. :(

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    1. While it's still available, it's clearly at the bottom of their "features" list now, openly claiming earlier in the year that there would be nothing done with it till next year. No bug fixes, no new AI or constructs nada.

      Also, no more featured quests, and the biggest one that stopped many from playing foundries: they removed the AD reward from doing 4(?) daily foundry quests.

      Because apparently "the bots" love foundry quests? Really? >.<

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  2. Just to comment on the illustration : i found it really out of place and quite shocking. Are you sure you want to compare a game to that ?

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    1. While I do like having some shock value every now and then I honestly would rather not compare NWO to that picture. Alas, thanks to Cryptic's behavior it seems all too fitting to me.

      Instead of encouraging their game to grow they literally are dismembering it piece by piece.

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  3. Wow, that forum poll is evidence that only the top 1% frequent the forums to begin with more than anything else. 60% of voters have a gearscore of over 3200? I only just got my main just above 2500 the other day...

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    1. My 2 chars are just over 2500 as well, so I was equally surprised by the poll result. :P

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