VIP Withdrawal

With how intensely I've been playing for the past few months, I've been purchasing VIP time throughout most of that and actually reached max VIP rank at long last. This week I let it run out though, as I've been taking a bit of a break until the release of the next module and didn't want to feel like I had to log in every day to claim my free keys during that time.

On the occasions I do log in, I've been missing the perks like mad though! Mostly I keep trying to invoke in places where I can't, and I've previously written a post about what makes the travel signpost so attractive. Now I also miss the ability to summon a mailbox or banking portal at will.

It's funny to me how much I've come to rely on VIP features after not finding them that attractive when they first came out. I still think that the game is very easily playable without them, but once you get used to the extra convenience it's really annoying to have to make do without it. I have to give credit to Cryptic there for managing to hit a sweet spot in terms of usefulness.

Injuries And Mending

If you die or step into a trap in Neverwinter, unlike in many other MMOs, you don't accrue repair bills on your gear. Instead you suffer a growing amount of injuries, which - depending on the exact type - can have effects such as slowing your run speed or reducing your maximum hit points. If you are past a certain rank of VIP, you become immune to injuries. Otherwise, the only way to heal is to use an injury kit from a vendor or to stand next to a campfire for a certain amount of time.

This relatively minor setback can still be amazingly annoying to the casual player, as you may forget to buy kits from the vendor and find yourself unable to treat an injury out in the field, or - despite of gold being virtually useless as a currency for anything else - you might balk at the expense for the kits and waste a lot of time standing around near campfires to save money.

Recently however, I was pleased to find that the amount of time required to heal an injury "naturally" by the fire was radically slashed from 3 minutes to 30 seconds. This is a great quality of life improvement for non-VIPs. Where 3 minutes pretty much meant an AFK break, 30 seconds are as good as over by the time you've even had time to get your bearings after resurrecting at the campfire, meaning that you can get right back into the action.

Signposted

I've written before about how I used to be sceptical of the VIP program, but I think the benefit that might have sold me on it and which I unlocked only relatively recently is the travel signpost. While Neverwinter's world as a whole is fairly fragmented, with lots of instances and loading screens between zones, some of the outdoor maps are pretty sizeable and more importantly, they tend to only have one or two points where you can enter or exit, so you always need to start from there and usually go on a pretty long ride back after you finished your questing.

The travel signpost on the other hand is a perk that allows you to basically summon a "map exit" anywhere with no cooldown, and that just feels so convenient when you're zooming around the world and changing maps a lot. I really miss it when I don't have VIP now.

Lucky, Part 2

I've been buying VIP time for the past three months and have been saving the daily lockbox keys I got from it, with the plan of opening a whole bunch of lockboxes at once eventually. I read somewhere that this increases your chances of getting something good, as Cryptic wants to reward big spenders that way - I'm not sure if that's true, but it certainly sounds plausible. Either way, I got what I wanted: a Celestial Stag, the current "top prize" from the most recent set of lockboxes.

This is a win for me in more than one way, because not only do I like the stag model in general, but this is also my first mount of legendary quality, granting me a special combat power and maximum mount speed at last. On the auction house the cheapest one goes for about nine million AD! Now my pet tank finally won't be able to outrun me all the time anymore. (He got a legendary mount some time ago.)

1 Month of VIP

When Neverwinter's VIP programme came out, I figured right away that it wasn't really for me. However, since my pet tank has been very fond of VIP status and I had some Zen as well as a coupon lying around, I decided to buy one month just to see what it was like. The results were as follows:

1) The daily character reward of ten Scrolls of Identification was useful. Even while playing casually, I should be finding a use for all of them eventually.

2) The daily character reward of one Epic Dungeon Chest Key feels highly silly as a casual player, because after a single month all of my alts have more keys than I'm likely to need for the rest of my life.

3) The daily account reward of one lockbox key per day was interesting in so far as I had never bothered with Neverwinter's lockboxes before. I got a pair of boots out of one of them that was actually an upgrade, which was a nice surprise as I didn't even know that high-level gear was something that you could get from these. I also got a couple of marginally useful profession assets, but everything else was pretty useless. So many cheap enchantments and runestones! That's as if SWTOR's crates gave you nothing but a couple of blue companion gifts ninety percent of the time. If I had paid for keys specifically to open these I would have felt ripped off.

You've Got Mail

My pet tank signed up for the new VIP status, and one of its perks is that you can summon a mailbox any time you need it, anywhere you want. Nothing revolutionary there... however, said mailbox has a unique look and is damned cute! It looks like a mini-stronghold and the opening is a little drawbridge. D'awww!

Neverwinter gets a Subscription

It was already rumoured a couple of months ago, but now it's official: Neverwinter gets a subscription option. It's not officially called a sub (instead they call it the "VIP Program"), and you can buy it from the Zen store, so you don't necessarily have to shell out real money yourself if someone else is willing to trade you the Zen.

It offers the kind of perks you would expect from a good subscription option, such as XP bonuses, faster travel, discounts at vendors and a small Zen store perk in the form of a free enchanted lockbox key every day. It's pretty good value for money actually.

Usually I'd be all over that kind of thing, but something has been holding me back in this case and I finally figured out what it is. When a game offers me the option to play for free and be nagged about microtransactions or to pay a subscription, I expect the sub to make the microtransactions go away or make them irrelevant, to let me "play in peace". However, with Neverwinter's highly pay-to-win nature that doesn't work - you still have to grind astral diamonds until you're blue in the face or pay real money to get ahead. So this sub isn't really an alternative to playing for free... it's just one more service that the already paying players can shell out money for (even if it's not a bad service).