Good Refund Experience

I've done a fair amount of complaining about Cryptic on this blog, so I think it's only fair to also give them credit for doing things right when it happens.

Last week I meant to buy a bundle of Zen, but after the transaction had seemingly gone through, I received an error message saying that it couldn't be processed and when I checked my balance, no new Zen had been added. This led to me trying two more times, just to run into the same error again and again. Ten minutes later I suddenly received three email notifications at once, showing that all three purchase attempts had in fact been successful after all and I'd just spent more than £100 on Zen. Aieee!

I wasn't sure whether this sort of virtual currency was refundable at all, but still decided to open a ticket to explain my problem. Working in e-commerce myself, I'm actually quite understanding of this kind of glitch; the question is how the company deals with customer contacts about it afterwards.

And what do you know, I had a response within a few hours and they happily refunded the duplicate transactions without any fuss. So thanks, Cryptic!

Currencies

Neverwinter has a lot of currencies, and unlike in SWTOR you don't get a warning if you're about to hit a cap on any of them, so I've more than once been in the annoying situation of accidentally having maxed out a useful currency since I wasn't realising just how much of it I had been earning already.

It's really hard to keep track of what to do with each one too. I got a lot of Tarmalune Trade Bars during my lockbox opening spree a few weeks ago, but I'd never actually spent any. This weekend I finally visited the vendor for the first time in ages and was shocked to find that he actually sells rank 15 enchantments directly.

It was also only a couple of weeks ago that I actually spent Alliance Supplies for the first time (after clicking on the vendor more or less by accident), a currency that you earn in the Maze Engine campaign (which came out more than four years ago).

This inspired me to take a closer look at my currency tab, and I realised that aside from gold, Zen and astral diamonds (both refined and unrefined), I have 114 (!) other currencies on there. I think if Cryptic wants to flag anything else for a revamp some time soon, the sheer amount of currencies might be a good candidate.

More Free-to-Play Maths

Back in June 2015 I did some maths to figure out how much money I had spent on Neverwinter, especially compared to an old-fashioned MMO subscription. I thought it would be interesting to do a follow-up on that three years later, especially since I realised that I haven't spent any money on the game in one and a half years.

Fun fact: They did actually switch to charging me in £ instead of € eventually, which is why the total will be ever so slightly incorrect as I had to do some backwards currency conversion, but the margin of error should be negligible.

So, looking back at my receipts, I spent £247.95 on Zen in the past three years. Based on blog activity, I was only completely inactive in game for about six months during that time, so spread out across the months in which I actually played that comes to only £8.265 per month, a bit less than your average monthly sub. Go me!

What's interesting to note is that my spending wasn't spread out evenly across that time frame at all. At first I spent a small-ish amount on Zen every three to five months, then I made one slightly bigger purchase that lasted me for about half a year, and then I decided to go all in on a charge rewards promotion that really appealed to me, just for Cryptic to mess up the rewards for that big time. They did eventually resolve the issue, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.

Since then I haven't spent any money on Neverwinter at all, though funnily enough this had less to do with being grumpy with Cryptic about the messed up promotion (though I certainly was, at least at first) and more with not knowing what to do with all the Zen I bought. Oh sure, Cryptic does have ridiculously expensive bundles in their store I could theoretically buy, but those just never struck me as good value for money, so all I've been spending money on for the past one a half years has been a month of VIP here or a few extra bank slots there. From a fairness point of view it really feels like I should give them some money again considering how much I'm enjoying the game, but I still have over 10k Zen in the bank with nothing I particularly want to spend it on, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Charge Rewards Resolved

I got an e-mail from Cryptic last night that they resolved the Black Friday charge rewards issue. They did what I suspected would be the easiest way of dealing with the matter, which was to give everyone affected free extra "reward points" so that they'd be able to actually buy all the rewards they had been promised (shock, horror).

In fact, I suddenly had enough points to hit "claim" on the owlbear a second time! Not that this actually resulted in a second owlbear in game, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I can't really complain about not getting a second owlbear as that certainly wasn't what had been promised.

I am mollified for now, but I'll certainly approach any future promotions like this with a lot more scepticism.

The One Time I Decide to Give Cryptic Money...

... they have to go and fuck things up.

Lured in by their Black Friday sale for Neverwinter, I decided to buy their biggest Zen bundle for $200/£160. I hadn't given them any money in nearly half a year while having a fair bit of fun with the game, so it seemed only fair that I should buy some Zen again - I had just been holding out for some good charge rewards. Then I saw this page, which included the all-important line: "If you charge in any tier, you’ll receive all items in the tiers below, so charging $20, will grant you both the Zhentarim Warlock and the Neverwintan Noble Title." So I would get $200 worth of Zen, a bunch of bonus Zen, three mounts, a companion and a title? Sweet!

Except, once they had my money I was redirected to a page where I was prompted to spend my "reward points" and lo and behold, there were nowhere near enough of them to buy all the rewards I had supposedly earned. I was relieved to find on the forums that I wasn't the only one who had noticed this.

However, Cryptic's response so far has been less than impressive, as it basically comes down to "oops, we'll look into it after the weekend" while also quickly removing the "you'll receive all the items in the tier below" line from the promotion page. Apparently the promotion was never meant to work as advertised. Can you say "bait and switch"? I really would have expected more professionalism from a company that is happy to take these amounts of money from their customers.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I have to admit this ad made me laugh. If you think that Valentine's Day is just a capitalist ploy as it is, you haven't seen Cryptic wanting you to love their virtual currency.

And yeah, it did make me buy some Zen - it was about time I gave them at least a little bit of money again anyway.

Life After the AD Changes

Cryptic implemented the announced changes to the leadership profession and to astral diamond gains a little less than two weeks ago.

The leadership changes were a typical Cryptic hack job - they literally just removed astral diamonds from all the missions that gave them as a reward and didn't replace them with anything worthwhile. (I think some of the missions had their XP output increased, but who does leadership for the XP?) The result is that there are a lot of high-level missions now that are very much not worth doing as they simply offer no worthwhile reward whatsoever, while often taking twice as long as comparable low-level missions. There's also at least one rare mission that does still reward AD, which might have been an oversight.

On the plus side, this has inspired me to start levelling some other professions which I never paid much attention to previously. I'm not sure if anything good will come of any of it, but if nothing else it might allow me to unlock another profession slot.

The demand for astral diamonds on the ZAX has remained high, so that one Zen is down to being worth less than four hundred AD by now - never thought I'd see the day.

At least Cryptic took the effect on the economy into account fairly quickly and drastically slashed the prices of marks of potency, which are one of the main astral diamond sinks in the game (they are an expensive reagent required to upgrade high-level enchantments and gear).

I haven't done any dungeons or skirmishes in a while, so my max-level characters are down to an astral diamond income of 3000 per day, which is exactly what they get from invoking six times a day. For the moment that's enough for me since I don't have any major outgoings, but I don't know what I will do when/if the day comes where I find myself running out of in-game currency.

Panic Buying

The Zen and astral diamond exchange (ZAX for short) has been in a weird place for a long time. Cryptic put a hard cap of 500 on how many astral diamonds you could buy for one Zen, but this hasn't matched up with supply and demand in a long time. The end result was that any Zen that was being sold was snatched up pretty much instantly, while there was always a backlog of millions of astral diamonds waiting for buyers (because they could only be sold at a rate that most buyers would have considered unfavourable).

The leadership changes announced on the forums aren't even live yet and already panic buying has set in. People ask themselves where all their astral diamonds are supposed to come from in the future. Within two days the entire backlog has more or less disappeared as people are trying to buy up AD while they are still available.

Pack Sale

This week Cryptic had a 25% sale on all its "packs" for Neverwinter, combined with the news that they are now available in the Zen store. (Up until now you could only buy them through the Perfect World website.)

I previously bought the Knight of the Feywild Pack and allowed this sale to tempt me into adding the Guardian of Neverwinter Pack to my collection. I'd already been thinking about getting additional companions and mounts for some of my alts (I love my sparkly unicorn, but it doesn't seem quite right for my great weapon fighter for example...) and this seemed like a good opportunity. The packs aren't cheap, but nothing in this game is cheap - things are pretty much either free or expensive. Getting another rank three mount and purple quality wolf companion for all characters on my account (including future ones) just can't be beaten when mounts and companions of equal quality and which are limited to a single character can come in at 30-40 euros a pop.

Note that the "Medium Adventurer's Horse" from the Guardian pack is a rank 3 mount despite its blue quality level. (Thanks to Telwyn for pointing this out to me ages ago.)

In The Shop

I just came back from a holiday in Austria and was quite surprised to see Neverwinter in the gaming section of an electronics store there. "But what are they selling?" I thought. "The game is free to play from the ground up, there isn't even a subscription option!"

The answer? For ten Euros, you would get a code for a forest bear mount and two hundred Zen. I guess they wanted some sort of presence in the shops, even with digitial distribution being on the rise.

It's only after I came home that I found out that the High Forest Bear is actually an account-wide mount that's exclusive to these German "starter boxes". Almost makes me wish I had bothered to spend that tenner.