Neverwinter new pics - OH GAWD ITZ HEAVAN

[Zetor]

Personally I think the best solution to rewards would be to have the devs assign special rewards to any and all hand-picked UCG they find to be especially good. In STO they've got the Foundry Spotlight, and I expect there's plenty of good stuff there (I've only played one Foundry mission that wasn't a farmer, and quite enjoyed it).
(snip)

That falls into the "handpicked stories" bit, which doesn't work when you have hundreds of thousands of stories. How will the devs select the spotlight that doesn't involve "ok, let's just look at high-rated missions" or "look at what the hot buzz is in the forums"?

e: anyway, I ended up just posting my entire mad bomber manifestodebate starter material over in the NW beta forums -- http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/sh...n-the-Foundry-challenges-and-solutions-(long)

I just regret i have only one brofist to give. It's rare one sees someone that is not a computing expert or academic who realizes the pitfalls of review systems.

BTW, recommendation systems are huge-big money 'social-computing' stuff. A few years ago there was a MILLION dollars prize to improve the amazon recommendation system just by 1 percent. AI researchers, mathematicians, sociologists and statisticians in seventh pig-heaven.

/considering such a system would be worth probably dozens of millions, maybe even billions to Amazon, they got robbed but whatever.

I actually AM a computing expert... well, I have a MSC in CompSci, anyway. I'm also currently working on a user-driven recommendation/rating system for a particular module in a EU FP7 research project, though admittedly the purpose there is to have something that scales to a large number of users while building on best practices instead of being completely awesome and innovative (it's not the focus of the entire project).

 

[Zetor]

The STO foundry is filled with pretentiously wanky and useless bilge. The only good foundry missions are the ones made by those from #Farmville. I would sooner gargle my own diarrhea than play half that "Spotlight" crap. I have great difficulty imagining that the NW foundry will work differently in that regard.

A lot of players thought this way in COH. In fact, probably most players thought this way.

It's understandable, too. All UGC is made by amateurs with a VERY tiny number of exceptions (COH had a few professional / published authors playing it). Sure, they may be spirited amateurs, but that doesn't really change that, frankly, most of the content created by them is going to be bad or mediocre. Even the ones who have good intentions will probably make bad content. From the POV of a pragmatic player, it's best to keep the hell away from anything resembling uncertainty and only play "known good" stories instead... hence why everyone played the 30 or so Dev Choice and Hall of Fame arcs in COH.

I (obviously) don't agree -- there are some real gems out there. If you haven't played any of the Cheshire Cat horror arcs in COH (my personal fav is Signal::Noise), or Talos Vice, or the really quirky Audition (an acquired taste, but still amusing... especially if you're a Stanislaw Lem fan), or any of my arcs (trollface.jpg) or a lot of great stories and authors I'm forgetting, you were seriously missing out. Official COH content (except for a handful of storylines) wasn't that well-written, so in fact much of the user-provided content WAS better. More importantly, there was an absolute insane amount of it -- even if I accept 99% of it being crap, there were still 6000 story arcs out there that were worth playing. That's over 6000 hours of playtime!


edit: in fact, I levelled two characters to cap in COH only playing different MA stories every time (mostly by building on out-of-game resources for 'good arcs'). It was a pretty refreshing and varied experience compared to the usual slog. THAT is what everyone needs to be able to experience, and the ingame interface needs to support this.

 

[Zeriel]

Unfortunately, my understanding of the Foundry is that it is setup to sort of discourage that, by the inclusion of things like Dungeon Delves with better loot than the Foundry, or the simple fact that the Foundry can't have legitimate boss encounters, which puts a real cap on how difficult any Foundry mission can be. (Or, more realistically, makes any difficult Foundry mission rely on just throwing tons of easy enemies at you simultaneously to create challenge.)

I can understand that they are afraid of undermining their own content by making the Foundry too powerful, but it's still regrettable.

 

[Norfleet]

I (obviously) don't agree -- there are some real gems out there. If you haven't played any of the Cheshire Cat horror arcs in COH (my personal fav is Signal::Noise), or Talos Vice, or the really quirky Audition (an acquired taste, but still amusing... especially if you're a Stanislaw Lem fan), or any of my arcs (trollface.jpg) or a lot of great stories and authors I'm forgetting, you were seriously missing out. Official COH content (except for a handful of storylines) wasn't that well-written, so in fact much of the user-provided content WAS better. More importantly, there was an absolute insane amount of it -- even if I accept 99% of it being crap, there were still 6000 story arcs out there that were worth playing. That's over 6000 hours of playtime!

I find this figure incredibly difficult to believe. Mostly because even if there were 6000 missions worth doing, I CANNOT ACTUALLY EQUIP 6000 PIECES OF EQUIPMENT.

So, as far as I'm concerned, I seek only one thing when it comes to content in an MMO: "In what way does this content provide me with the opportunities or resources to murder my opponents?". If it cannot do these things, then it is useless. In STO, this is where much of the Foundry fails: It does not provide me with an efficient means of acquiring the resources and equipment I need to murder my opponents, nor does it provide me with any actual opponents to murder.

I play MMOs to Murder Things, preferrably those other people who piss me off with their irritating and repetitive breathing. If this isn't promoting my murdering, then I may as well be in SINGLE PLAYER.

 

[Zetor]

Unfortunately, my understanding of the Foundry is that it is setup to sort of discourage that, by the inclusion of things like Dungeon Delves with better loot than the Foundry, or the simple fact that the Foundry can't have legitimate boss encounters, which puts a real cap on how difficult any Foundry mission can be. (Or, more realistically, makes any difficult Foundry mission rely on just throwing tons of easy enemies at you simultaneously to create challenge.)

I can understand that they are afraid of undermining their own content by making the Foundry too powerful, but it's still regrettable.

My one hope is that Cryptic keeps repeating that "Foundry content is supposed to be equal to normal content", and they'll eventually cave on these restrictions. Of course the real goal here is to have the author community churn out high-quality content at a good pace in order to keep the f2p'ers f2p'ing... from Cryptic's POV, free content is the best content!

I (obviously) don't agree -- there are some real gems out there. If you haven't played any of the Cheshire Cat horror arcs in COH (my personal fav is Signal::Noise), or Talos Vice, or the really quirky Audition (an acquired taste, but still amusing... especially if you're a Stanislaw Lem fan), or any of my arcs (trollface.jpg) or a lot of great stories and authors I'm forgetting, you were seriously missing out. Official COH content (except for a handful of storylines) wasn't that well-written, so in fact much of the user-provided content WAS better. More importantly, there was an absolute insane amount of it -- even if I accept 99% of it being crap, there were still 6000 story arcs out there that were worth playing. That's over 6000 hours of playtime!

I find this figure incredibly difficult to believe. Mostly because even if there were 6000 missions worth doing, I CANNOT ACTUALLY EQUIP 6000 PIECES OF EQUIPMENT.

So, as far as I'm concerned, I seek only one thing when it comes to content in an MMO: "In what way does this content provide me with the opportunities or resources to murder my opponents?". If it cannot do these things, then it is useless. In STO, this is where much of the Foundry fails: It does not provide me with an efficient means of acquiring the resources and equipment I need to murder my opponents, nor does it provide me with any actual opponents to murder.

I play MMOs to Murder Things, preferrably those other people who piss me off with their irritating and repetitive breathing. If this isn't promoting my murdering, then I may as well be in SINGLE PLAYER.

I tried to reply to this post, but it was so edgy that my fingers started bleeding.

Anyway, what you're saying is that you don't want to play (user-made) stories, but instead want to pwn noobs or whatever. That's fine; it also has nothing to do with the Foundry, so yeah.

 

[Zeriel]

Unfortunately, my understanding of the Foundry is that it is setup to sort of discourage that, by the inclusion of things like Dungeon Delves with better loot than the Foundry, or the simple fact that the Foundry can't have legitimate boss encounters, which puts a real cap on how difficult any Foundry mission can be. (Or, more realistically, makes any difficult Foundry mission rely on just throwing tons of easy enemies at you simultaneously to create challenge.)

I can understand that they are afraid of undermining their own content by making the Foundry too powerful, but it's still regrettable.

My one hope is that Cryptic keeps repeating that "Foundry content is supposed to be equal to normal content", and they'll eventually cave on these restrictions. Of course the real goal here is to have the author community churn out high-quality content at a good pace in order to keep the f2p'ers f2p'ing... from Cryptic's POV, free content is the best content!

Yeah, I saw some quotes by them where they were talking about making sure the Foundry is expanded post-release to let players do just about anything necessary to be vaguely on parity with the developers in a general sense, if not a technical sense (i.e never any custom music/VO). Very much a "wait and see" scenario at this point, though as a long-time player of MMOs I have a very, very hard time imagining them actually following through on that. An MMO with raids where players can make equivelant content? Not in a thousand years. Hell, an MMO at all where player-created content can reward competitive gear? Hard to believe. It undermines the whole developer-centric model. The only way it would ever work is if they focused on churning out the basic building blocks of content (classes/gameplay mechanics/rooms/textures/monster models) over creating zones and quests and instances personally.

 

[Zetor]

Unfortunately, my understanding of the Foundry is that it is setup to sort of discourage that, by the inclusion of things like Dungeon Delves with better loot than the Foundry, or the simple fact that the Foundry can't have legitimate boss encounters, which puts a real cap on how difficult any Foundry mission can be. (Or, more realistically, makes any difficult Foundry mission rely on just throwing tons of easy enemies at you simultaneously to create challenge.)

I can understand that they are afraid of undermining their own content by making the Foundry too powerful, but it's still regrettable.

My one hope is that Cryptic keeps repeating that "Foundry content is supposed to be equal to normal content", and they'll eventually cave on these restrictions. Of course the real goal here is to have the author community churn out high-quality content at a good pace in order to keep the f2p'ers f2p'ing... from Cryptic's POV, free content is the best content!

Yeah, I saw some quotes by them where they were talking about making sure the Foundry is expanded post-release to let players do just about anything necessary to be vaguely on parity with the developers in a general sense, if not a technical sense (i.e never any custom music/VO). Very much a "wait and see" scenario at this point, though as a long-time player of MMOs I have a very, very hard time imagining them actually following through on that. An MMO with raids where players can make equivelant content? Not in a thousand years. Hell, an MMO at all where player-created content can reward competitive gear? Hard to believe. It undermines the whole developer-centric model. The only way it would ever work is if they focused on churning out the basic building blocks of content (classes/gameplay mechanics/rooms/textures/monster models) over creating zones and quests and instances personally.

It sort of worked in COH -- COH didn't have gear, per se, but tickets you got from running missions were almost as good as normal drops, and could in fact be turned into $$$ much more efficiently. Dev's Choice and HoM missions had full loot drops, too... in fact, the only rewards disabled in MA were achievements (badges) and incarnate drops (which you ground for at max level if you completely misunderstood what COH was about and tried to play it like a standard level/quest grind game). Perhaps that's also why the Mission Architect was much bigger there than the Foundry was in STO, despite COH's smaller player numbers?

 

[Zeriel]

I'm assuming CoH didn't have tiered loot based on the number of players an encounter takes to beat it? That's basically the end-game of every mainstream MMO, and the high-end raiding stuff is always pitched to be much more powerful in terms of rewards than other stuff. If it weren't that way, no one would ever bother to go through the pain-in-the-ass of organizing tons of people to get something done. Anyway, yeah, I suppose at the end of the day it doesn't matter much if there is slight disparity in rewards if people just enjoy Foundry missions. That said... parity with five man blues, for instance? That seems like something that just _has_ to be there for even the casuals to have any interest in Foundry missions of a certain difficulty.

 

[Zetor]

Yeah, giving out on-par gear is a must, IMO... but really, having the mobs drop their usual stuff and giving out some sort of Foundry token for completing missions is the way to go. That way you don't have to think about balancing endgame drops.


Offtopic: CoH 'loot' consisted of enhancements and crafting resources / recipes, basically. You'd slot enhancements in your powers (e.g. 3 damage / 2 accuracy / 1 recharge in an attack power with the maximum number of 6 slots) to improve them, there wasn't any actual "gear" to speak of. Crafting was also only used to make enhancements and temporary powers (you can think of those as limited-use consumables... they were also either weak or very situational). Tickets that you got by playing MA missions could be sent to buy yourself drops, so to say.

Raids were handled similar-ish to GW2: everyone participating got their own loot, and the quality of that loot depended on the enemy (killing the Hamidon super-boss for example got you an uberpowerful enhancement). Most 8-man and raid content rewarded merits, which you could use to buy enhancements, crafting resources, cosmetic gear, etcetera. After they implemented the Incarnate system (blech), you could do LFR-style raids against really tough bosses for special Incarnate loot which could be used to buy really strong (permanent) powers for your character.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally I think the best solution is just making the gear acquisition a non-issue, like it's in Champions. It takes six hours of solo play (for non-optimized characters, my core toons can do it in 3-4 hours) to get Heroic gear, which is one of the two best set-ups you can have (Legion Gear has more customization, but less base goodies, and you have to gamble for it), top quality secondary gear drops while you're doing it, as well as all the tier V Mods you will need. Sure, you can grind your way up to tier IX Mods, but that'll net you maybe 5% marginal benefit.

I would love to play the Foundry in STO, but as said the other aspects of the game call for attention first (I'll probably get around to it after enough of my toons have been fully geared and repped, as well as the Codex Fleet is in a good spot, though right now we are in a pretty good spot and Norfleet here can farm for like twenty average dudes by himself).

 

[Zeriel]

Zetor

Well, well. Your thread got an official response from PW. Now let's wait and see them implement none of the suggestions! (My cynicism is out of control, yes.)

 

[Norfleet]

Anyway, what you're saying is that you don't want to play (user-made) stories, but instead want to pwn noobs or whatever. That's fine; it also has nothing to do with the Foundry, so yeah.

Not quite: I'm saying these user-made stories must somehow serve a relevant purpose to the game. Otherwise I am just reading someone's badly written porn. I can do this without a GAME. Except I'd really rather not. If I'm going to have to suffer through this, it has to serve some manner of USEFUL purpose. Foundries may produce a lot of unique content, but...

I would love to play the Foundry in STO, but as said the other aspects of the game call for attention first (I'll probably get around to it after enough of my toons have been fully geared and repped, as well as the Codex Fleet is in a good spot, though right now we are in a pretty good spot and Norfleet here can farm for like twenty average dudes by himself).

Yeah, and there's two of us here, so it's really more like 40 average dudes, which is why despite being a below-average-sized fleet, we're progressing like an above-average, if not enormously huge-sized, fleet...except for one obnoxious bottleneck: WE REQUIRE MORE VESPENE GAS!

 

[Zetor]

Zetor

Well, well. Your thread got an official response from PW. Now let's wait and see them implement none of the suggestions! (My cynicism is out of control, yes.)

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Lip Service".

 

[J1M]

Zetor

Well, well. Your thread got an official response from PW. Now let's wait and see them implement none of the suggestions! (My cynicism is out of control, yes.)

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Lip Service".

Similar to community concerns about DX2 they will say they know what you are talking about and have thought of it already. Then they will proceed to make extremely basic mistakes due to arrogance and time contraints.

 

[Crispy]

I really want to try this. Are there beta keys available? Is it open beta? Where's the download (I'm lazy). Vaarna_Aarne help me!

And when is this game scheduled to be released?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The beta keys are either lottery, those who shell out money, or the lifers of CO and STO. No definitive release date yet beyond "early 2013."

 

[Zetor]

Based on what I saw in the last beta weekend (and what the Foundry alpha testers are saying, NDA and all), I don't see this game being released before late may / early june (and maybe even after that). There are just too many systems missing and even more things unpolished right now for this game to go live in Q1 as originally planned.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally I'd prefer it like that. Means less to bitch about on launch.

 

[MicoSelva]

So, I've watched some beta footage on YT earlier today and the non-MMO combat looked really cool (for an MMO anyway). Much better than much-hyped Age of Conan shit, anyway. I thought to myself. Maybe, just maybe this finally is the MMO I will be able to stomach. Maybe?

But a few minutes later there was this town with people with exclamation marks over their heads and a golden trail leading to your next quest and it turned out to be the same as every fucking other MMO out there. So, no, I won't be able to stomach it after all. meh.

Graphics are nice, though.

 

[Zetor]

Zetor

Well, well. Your thread got an official response from PW. Now let's wait and see them implement none of the suggestions! (My cynicism is out of control, yes.)

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Lip Service".

Similar to community concerns about DX2 they will say they know what you are talking about and have thought of it already. Then they will proceed to make extremely basic mistakes due to arrogance and time contraints.

Well, I just got in the Foundry alpha/beta (there's an NDA, but I can say I got in... heck, they have the "Silverstar" title on the forums just for that), and I'll do my best to keep their feet to the fire about this. We'll see.

 

[J1M]

Grats, I doubt I will be seeing it any time soon. From what I saw, people who signed up for the beta several months ago are somewhere below people who click "like" on facebook in terms of priority.

 

[Bruticis]

I just clicked this link http://www.geforce.co.uk/games-applications/pc-games/neverwinter/deals-promotions, signed up and got a key instantly. Installed the client and fired up the game and had instant access, wasn't much to it and didn't require any facebook crap, etc. There's no NDA so I just uploaded a bunch of screenshots on steam (http://steamcommunity.com/id/brutic...westfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall). Screenshots are on max settings, looks kind meh but I guess they are going for the light on the system specs thing.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Signed up and got key, am downloading now.

It's a free beta weekend or something, first come first serve.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well then, let's see how the basic gameplay for Great Weapon Fighter is like, and if there's additional options in character creator this time around.

 

[Fens]

The year is 50 B.C. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Compendium...