Neverwinter: PC

Ninen

Ninen

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Well, as a CW, my first at-will has never left the bar, 2 of my encounters ALMOST never leave the bar (and certainly didn't till I was in the 50's) 2 of my earliest acquired dailies swap places for one of my daily slots, and one I got in the 40's always fills the 2nd slot.

It's a tough call, imo. When you build the talent tree like that, do you put in some new shiny that completely invalidates earlier investment? Or do you make leveling anti-climactic because new abilities are always subpar? Yes, there is actually a better 3rd option: more abilities that are * SITUATIONALLY* better, as long as their not so narrow as to make you play the "o shit, next pull is X, I need to swap out these 4 abilities with these other 4! O nos, adds of Y, I need to swap 2 of those back!" game.
 
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Bahb

Trakanon Raider
10
0
Lenwen_sl said:
Holy fucking shit, has any one else have to deal with their shitty customer service? I sent in a support ticket a few days ago, only to get an automated response back (a few days later), saying that they closed my ticket to prevent it from being lost in "ticket limbo" due to high volume of tickets atm. I mean wtf, its almost like they want the game to fail.
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I've gotten this response twice in a row for the same problem. I submitted the first ticket the day open beta started and just got that response for second time yesterday. Good times.
 
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Dahlrek_sl

shitlord
24
0
Lenwen_sl said:
Holy fucking shit, has any one else have to deal with their shitty customer service? I sent in a support ticket a few days ago, only to get an automated response back (a few days later), saying that they closed my ticket to prevent it from being lost in "ticket limbo" due to high volume of tickets atm. I mean wtf, its almost like they want the game to fail.
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Yeah, I reported a bug, then realized it was my own mistake 5 minutes later and closed the ticket. 10 days later I got the same "We're closing this because we're too busy counting our money. Please submit a new ticket if it's still a problem." response. 10 fucking days, an already closed ticket, and your response is to tell me to try again? Fuck you.

Re: Code bugs/exploits - it's an interesting shift for Cryptic. Normally their specialty is game design and balance exploits.
 
Sylas

Sylas

<Bronze Donator>
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Ninen_sl said:
Well, as a CW, my first at-will has never left the bar, 2 of my encounters ALMOST never leave the bar (and certainly didn't till I was in the 50's) 2 of my earliest acquired dailies swap places for one of my daily slots, and one I got in the 40's always fills the 2nd slot.

It's a tough call, imo. When you build the talent tree like that, do you put in some new shiny that completely invalidates earlier investment? Or do you make leveling anti-climactic because new abilities are always subpar? Yes, there is actually a better 3rd option: more abilities that are * SITUATIONALLY* better, as long as their not so narrow as to make you play the "o shit, next pull is X, I need to swap out these 4 abilities with these other 4! O nos, adds of Y, I need to swap 2 of those back!" game.
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Well I like the Rogue Power's and Feat (talent) trees because leveling up you naturally rank 3 your available powers which happen to be the ones you will actually use. As you get new powers you drop a point in them, realize they are bad, and go back to using your rank 3s. then you look at the talent tree and see that you can either waste 20 talent points in shit that could maybe kinda make this new skill decent, or continue using your good skills and choose talents that complement them and doing damage in general. Really though the other skills we get are completely situational, ie situationally useful in PVP if you want to maximize stealth.
 
Haus

Haus

<Silver Donator>
11,315
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I don't know about people saying the bosses get harder in the 30's. My wife and I have been playing and neither of us died before our early 50's. And the bosses really didn't seem difficult until the level 58-60 range.
 
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Asherah

Silver Knight of the Realm
287
38
Jalynfane_sl said:
One would think they have a way to track the use of infinite stamina?
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Looked at the code and the hack basically just sets the stamina to the max value every 1ms. It would certainly be possible to detect this if you wrote some extra code to do it (or logged every user action, but that would probably not be realistic). However, this exploit is possible in the first place because they got lazy. Unlikely that they would have some detection scheme for it when they might as well have spent that time doing it right instead.
 
Sabbat

Sabbat

Trakanon Raider
1,835
760
haus_sl said:
I don't know about people saying the bosses get harder in the 30's. My wife and I have been playing and neither of us died before our early 50's. And the bosses really didn't seem difficult until the level 58-60 range.
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Mad Dragon? Gray Wolf Den final boss? with the Shadow Wolves that hit for 4k? Not talking skirmish bosses, dungeon bosses.
 
Aamry

Aamry

Blackwing Lair Raider
2,279
1,948
I personally haven't run any actual dungeons, just the solo missions. I didn't die till my late 30's, and that was because I fell off the world. Guardian Fighters are pretty o.p. Then again, I haven't tried the other classes yet.
 
Sylas

Sylas

<Bronze Donator>
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Sabbat_sl said:
Mad Dragon? Gray Wolf Den final boss? with the Shadow Wolves that hit for 4k? Not talking skirmish bosses, dungeon bosses.
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I did both of these dungeons leveling up. I "tanked" the Mad Dragon on my rogue, never wiped, no one even died. that dungeon can probably be done without a cleric, might even be easier without one if your group is full of bads that doesn't understand how healing aggro works. That fight is quite simple, just kill adds while avoiding the AOE. 1 Person (pref a rogue) stays on the dragon, everyone else only kills adds.

Gray Wolf den is also simple. the Shadow Wolves have like minion level hp and only spawn like twice. you can AOE them to death before they ever hit anyone. Also 4k is a meaningless number. Wizards have like 16k hp at that level.

Dungeons are only hard in this game if you make them hard. Like if everyone just spam attacks the boss standing there in AOEs and lets the cleric get aggro from each and every wave of adds that spawn.

I'm rolling through the game again leveling up, as a cleric this time, and through level 25 my own AOE damage is enough to kill all the crap adds that spawn during boss fights, but I can see that changing very, very quickly. I've been PUGing it with bads for the first 2 dungeons without anyone dying but I can already tell by 30 this shit won't fly, and i'll have to start joining groups with a clue.
 
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Dahlrek_sl

shitlord
24
0
In my experience, Mad Dragon and Gray Wolf are the first boss fights where queue groups fail. In both cases I've had people drop group *before* the boss because the bosses are "too hard". Most of the people you end up with via queues are bad players, with bad gear and bad specs, who have never been in the dungeon before (I had someone in Gray Wolf ask "What does this Delve thing do?", and I was the only person that knew the answer) - and that does make those fights very challenging, relative to the previous bosses.
 
shabushabu

shabushabu

Molten Core Raider
1,408
185
Dahlrek_sl said:
In my experience, Mad Dragon and Gray Wolf are the first boss fights where queue groups fail. In both cases I've had people drop group *before* the boss because the bosses are "too hard". Most of the people you end up with via queues are bad players, with bad gear and bad specs, who have never been in the dungeon before (I had someone in Gray Wolf ask "What does this Delve thing do?", and I was the only person that knew the answer) - and that does make those fights very challenging, relative to the previous bosses.
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I was hoping for more complexity than diablo3... I can't see anything challenging about as a rogue holding down the LMB for most of the time and using the same 2 other skills nearly all 60 levels... so how can people suck that bad ? not gearing as you said i guess..


Yet, the game looks sick as hell with the saturation turned up and I am just enjoying it exploring around and such. It's too bad the spec trees are so lame and there are so few ability options.. I think if they were to improve that i would stick around for more than a f2p ride.

As long as I can resist getting annoyed at slashing skeletons with daggers with no damage reduction, i will be ok lol.
 
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Gecko_sl

shitlord
1,482
0
First state of the game letter


http://nw.perfectworld.com/news/?p=896631

First, I want to say we?ve all been tremendously pleased with the positive feedback and constant support we?ve received from our players throughout Open Beta. It?s been incredible! Game launches are always tornadoes of activity ? MMOs, especially. For us here at Cryptic and PWE, things have been absolutely crazy, but in a good way, mostly. ;D

We?ve been doing our very best to keep you up-to-date on our latest efforts using all official channels at our disposal (Facebook, Forums, Website, Twitter), but I wanted to devote some extra time to do something more personal ? a detailed but candid message straight from a developer's perspective. And hey, if you enjoy seeing updates like this, let us know in the comments!

To start, I think it?s worth sharing that Open Beta has been a huge milestone for us. I will never forget the day Neverwinter opened to the world. Because it's how we operate, everyone here was on high-double-dragon-bold-alert. We had projectors all over the office displaying server and game monitoring tools across any bare surface we could find, and someone even brought in a birthday cake that was modeled after the in-game Mimic chest! As a team, we watched our online player base grow to a level beyond any we?ve ever seen before OBT (we'll have some official numbers soon as we get investor relations clearance). The positive comments from players and press started flowing in, and almost everyone in the office was watching a livestream of Neverwinter while they monitored services and interacted with the community.

However, like with any game launch, we also had issues to address (we still do). Since Open Beta started, we?ve been in crunch, working to fix bugs and address connectivity issues to the best of our ability, and tirelessly.
The first things we focused on were, of course, remedying unexpected hardware issues at our data centers during those early days of OBT. Predicting spontaneous line card disruptions within enterprise level routers is quite the challenge, but it turns out correcting the issues just requires shoving dozens of engineers into cages for days at a time. Thankfully, as I mentioned, we were all-hands on-deck from moment one, so we jumped on them and turned out the fixes as fast as possible. We then honed in on identifying and patching exploits our players identified, issues with PvP, things that could adversely affect the economy, character corruption issues, and general network performance. Here?s a list of some of the major items that have been fixed so far:

Characters are no longer able to use a set item exploit to deal millions of damage in a single strike.
The exploit that allowed Astral Diamonds to be gained illegitimately through an auction house bug has been eliminated.
Several chests that could be looted more than once were fixed.
It is no longer possible to disconnect other players from the game by stacking Daze skills.
It is no longer possible for Tab Slot powers to be lost
The issue where certain powers could be placed on unintentionally high-duration cooldowns no longer occurs.
The Dungeon Delve bonus chest now properly shows up at the end of successfully completed dungeon runs.
Several quests that could be exploited if shared can no longer be shared.
Improvements have been made to the Foundry to prevent players from creating ?speed leveling? missions.


As always, you can keep an eye on our latest changes in the Patch Notes. We?ve made a lot of progress and still have a long way to go. Here?s a short list of some of the top things our team has been working on lately ? things we hope to have updates on very soon:

Network performance and overall connection stability
Queue system issues (wait times, teleportation issues, group composition)
Party Loot issues (better allowing players to win the items they legitimately need)
Making gear progression feel more visually and mechanically meaningful
Improving the PvP system to better reward participation
Aggro and threat balancing
Auction house bug fixes and UI improvements
Monitoring the economy to ensure that appropriate actions are taken to remove any remaining illegitimately gained currency and items

This is just a list of some of the top things that come to mind. In truth, we?re discovering new issues every day, and plan to continue working hard to get everything smoothed out.

The next thing I'd like to address is server uptime, as we often see players inquiring about the frequency of our maintenances. While we do try to keep the number of maintenances to a minimum, most of the issues we?ve been resolving have been critical enough to warrant almost immediate downtimes and we'd rather take the game down and make it right than leave it up in a poor state. Keeping the game fair and balanced is critically important to us, so when we discover a new exploit, or something that can cause one player to negatively impact another player?s experience, we do our very best to get that fixed right away. Other spontaneous forms of downtime (those hardware issues I mentioned) were addressed early in OBT.

On the opposite side, we do have a lot of things in the works (including the list above) that we?ve been spending much more time on, rather than trying to rush them out the door as quickly as possible. Because we are treating Neverwinter as a live game, we?re making sure to spend the appropriate amount of time planning and testing these changes before they go live.

Speaking of testing, as we progress through OBT and near the official live launch, we'll be standing up a Public Test Shard or PTS. That way we can make "Wild West" changes on there and ensure that only quality fixes make it into the OBT. To those who have played our other games, you probably know that this is one of the main ways that we fix bugs, collect feedback, and stress test our games before the content goes to the live servers.

As I spoke about earlier, another thing we are addressing is our network connectivity. Those who have been with us since Open Beta began probably remember the week where we had a couple of situations where our network equipment failed unexpectedly. The silver lining of this issue was the fact that at those times, our games experienced the highest number of concurrent players that they?ve ever seen, but the issue was still critical for us, because there?s nothing worse than having players not being able to play our game. During that time period, we flew our engineers out to our various data centers, replaced and upgraded a significant amount of our hardware, added more hardware for redundancy, and developed additional monitoring tools to help us keep an eye on the performance of the live game in real time. At the time of this writing, we?re confident that we?ve got things to be pretty stable, but we?re still monitoring them very closely to ensure that they stay that way.

Apart from stability, we?re also working to make sure that everyone is able to play the game smoothly, with as little lag or rubberbanding as possible. This has been an ongoing effort for us, and we?ve made a lot of progress, but do understand that there are some players who continue to experience lag-related issues. We?re continuing to review these reports and collect data in order to further optimize the experience for everyone. We?ve also got a team of technical support agents (in addition to our regular Customer Support team) helping users one-on-one to get into the game and maintain a solid connection.

Additionally, a small number of players identified a couple ways to exploit our game during Open Beta, allowing them to progress, obtain gear, and gain in-game currency at a rate that was higher than it should have been. While most players who saw these reported them to us, rather than utilizing them (because our community is awesome ? thank you!), there were a few who took advantage of the exploits at an extreme level. As much as we hate to ban players from our game, in this particular situation we had to permanently close all exploitative accounts and coordinate a 7-hour rollback of all characters and currency transactions. Balance and economy are extremely important to us, and to protect these two integral aspects of the game, we can?t allow characters to exist in the game once they go this far outside of the intended mechanics.

We believe that we have eliminated the majority of the currency that was earned through these exploits. We?ve also investigated the reports of exploitation or illegitimate currency that our players have sent in. Fortunately, in many of these cases, we found that players who claimed to have retained illegitimate currency in chat or on the forums after the issue was resolved did not truthfully have the items that they claimed to have. Still, we continue to investigate reports of potential exploitation every day.

To prevent exploits as we move forward, we?ve beefed up our QA processes with more checks, based on lessons we?ve learned from the previous bugs. On top of that, our hope is that the public test shard will give players an opportunity to help us identify potential exploits before they make it to the live servers.

Additionally, since the exploitation issues caused extended downtime followed by a character rollback on Sunday, May 19, we?ve put together a thank you package for all of those affected, as a way of demonstrating our gratitude for your patience, understanding, and support.

I?d also like to talk about class balance. Like any online game, class balance is a huge discussion, both internally and externally. We are definitely hearing this feedback and watching the evolution of PvE and PvP strategies in an effort to help bring everything into alignment. Right now there are a handful of powers and feats that still have bugs associated with them, so we?re working on getting those issues ironed out first. Once we?re able to make sure everything is working properly, our next step will be to start diving into the balance feedback, and do our best to not only make things fair, but also ensure that all of the classes are fun to play in every aspect of the game, from solo play, to group PvE content, to PvP.

Of course, fixing issues isn?t the only thing we?re doing. We?ve got a lot of new content in the works that we definitely feel will take Neverwinter to the next level. Right now, we?re putting the final touches on some new end game content: Gauntlgrym. It will be our first raid-sized, competitive PvP/PvE experience, and our current goal is to release it to OBT within a few weeks. On top of that, we?ve also got new companions, zones, mounts, mechanics, Paragon Paths, and a new class. I can?t share the details about the new class just yet, but as a hint, it?s going to be a ?ranged? one. So, while our engineers, testers, and other team members are addressing maintenance, upkeep, bugs, and network issues, our content creators and artists are working on lots of new things for the game.

We also have a lot of updates in the works for the Foundry. It's been great to see our players helping each other out, sharing their missions in our brand-new Foundry Spotlight forums, and contributing to the Official Wiki. Right now we're bringing in more player-requested assets, along with expanded functionality for three dimensional editing. We're also working to better organize missions in the catalog and aggregate legitimate peer feedback.

On the Gateway side, we?re continually fixing bugs and optimizing the mobile experience. We?re also adding more functionality to it to give you more ways to develop your character, interact with other players, and manage your character?s various areas of progression.

Finally, we?ve got a few big surprises coming with Module 1, which we plan to share more info about very soon!

As we get closer to the official launch of Neverwinter, we plan to keep working hard to identify and address issues on a daily basis. On behalf of the entire Neverwinter team, I want to send out a huge THANK YOU to our fans who have participated in the Open Beta with us, and who have shown their support for our game. Having worked on the game for the past several years, it means a lot to us to see so many people enjoying our game, and engaging with us on our social channels.

I hope this update helps share a little more info about what?s going on over here on the dev side. If you have more questions or would like to share your feedback regarding what you?d like to see in Neverwinter, feel free to post them here!
 
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Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
10,034
3
I just got my cleric up to level 33? I think last night. The game is so much more enjoyable as a cleric compared to my GWF who I got up to 50. It's not even survivability, it's just on kill speed. The Paragon at-will attack for a GWF hits for shit damage.
 
Sylas

Sylas

<Bronze Donator>
3,147
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Avast is now flagging the patcher as malware and automatically deletes it (well moves it to the virus chest) Ran into this issue and haven't been able to get on all morning. Finally found the answer on their tech forums. basically have to restore the program then turn Avast's file manager off when launching the patcher. Only need to turn file manager off for 10min so you can get the launcher to load.
 
Sylas

Sylas

<Bronze Donator>
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I've ran my cleric through every dungeon thus far (lvl 39) with PUGs and the only dungeon that my group has died on was Throne of Idris. queue group was TRx2, GWF, CW, and me a DE. We wiped to Idris twice before downing her, but then again we almost wiped several times to zone trash. First fight of the dungeon we almost wiped. this was basically a PUG of Bads. Not only did know one understand how aggro works in video games (my companion was the only thing that could taunt, everyone else had sellsword companions for the DPS or some stupid shit like that) no one understood how to kill shit either. I burned through over 60 pots keeping myself alive because not only was all the trash minions on me but every other mob as well. Everyone just single target damaged their own enemies down slowly while everything was hitting me, always. CW didn't understand what AOE was nor that he could kill all the trash with it freeing me up to not be stunlocked/permaAOEd etc. Rogues, ok Single target away but try teaming together to down the minibosses that are beating on me please? no one cares how hard you crit a decrepit skeleton off in the corner by yourself (also aggroing another group of shit that's on it's way to beat me up). I somehow finished the dungeon 3rd top damage using only Sunburst (AoE dmg/heal) and my daily flamestrike (another AOE). I also had 2mil healed.

The way we finally downed Idris was me running around the pillars exploiting LOS so all of the adds couldn't catch me while occasionally throwing AOE heals on the group in the center killing idris, then she'd teleport to me and i'd run across to the other set of pillars and repeat.
 
Ninen

Ninen

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
2,261
7,960
Sylas_sl said:
I've ran my cleric through every dungeon thus far (lvl 39) with PUGs and the only dungeon that my group has died on was Throne of Idris. queue group was TRx2, GWF, CW, and me a DE. We wiped to Idris twice before downing her, but then again we almost wiped several times to zone trash. First fight of the dungeon we almost wiped. this was basically a PUG of Bads. Not only did know one understand how aggro works in video games (my companion was the only thing that could taunt, everyone else had sellsword companions for the DPS or some stupid shit like that) no one understood how to kill shit either. I burned through over 60 pots keeping myself alive because not only was all the trash minions on me but every other mob as well. Everyone just single target damaged their own enemies down slowly while everything was hitting me, always. CW didn't understand what AOE was nor that he could kill all the trash with it freeing me up to not be stunlocked/permaAOEd etc. Rogues, ok Single target away but try teaming together to down the minibosses that are beating on me please? no one cares how hard you crit a decrepit skeleton off in the corner by yourself (also aggroing another group of shit that's on it's way to beat me up). I somehow finished the dungeon 3rd top damage using only Sunburst (AoE dmg/heal) and my daily flamestrike (another AOE). I also had 2mil healed.

The way we finally downed Idris was me running around the pillars exploiting LOS so all of the adds couldn't catch me while occasionally throwing AOE heals on the group in the center killing idris, then she'd teleport to me and i'd run across to the other set of pillars and repeat.
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Get used to tanking, I'm told that the MOST successful epic groups run 2 clerics, 3 dps and just cleric tank. Part of that would be the aggro issues, part due to the multiplicative stacking of one of their dailies. Doesn't help that warrior threat gen and taunts are so weak, nor that most people gear out to be glass cannons and thus need more heals.
 
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Syringed_sl

shitlord
104
0
Auction house just got closed down and there's currently about a million phoenix birds in the instance of Protector's Enclave I'm in. Looks like rollback number 2 will be happening soon.

The Neverwinter Forums continue to provide an endless source of entertainment stemming from this. Kind of amusing how many fanboys that defended this game are making thread titles threatening to quit after defending the game for so long for being "open beta".
 
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