Lockbox Tutorial

Last night I played a lowbie character for the first time in months. Now, the game's always had this box of goodies that you get for free and that levels up with you for a while, while spitting out some simple items such as scrolls of identification and injury kits every couple of levels to help the new player along. That's not new.

What was new to me however, was that upon hitting level 20 I suddenly received three "Shimmering Lockboxes", highlighted by a voiced tutorial that told me to buy keys for them! I did check the Zen store and the keys were actually free; clearly the idea is just to make people use the interface. Then you open them, and what do you know, they contain a few things that are actually very useful to a new player, such as a free stone of health and a green quality mount.

That means lockboxes are good and well worth your time, right? Hrm.

I'm usually not someone who minds lockboxes very much, provided they are optional and don't award anything too powerful, but even I have to say that trying to lure new players into buying keys by making them open a bunch of rigged "trial lockboxes" that are guaranteed to award something nice is a whole new level of skeevy.

Fishing for Treasure

Early on while participating in this season's Winter Festival, I noticed that I would occasionally fish up "treasures" during the fishing contest. As treasures are usually what Neverwinter calls vendor trash, I didn't think too much of it.

They weren't marked as vendor trash however, so I eventually looked them up and learned that there is a vendor who trades these for various campaign currencies. He's located on a pedestal behind the daily quest giver in Twilight Tor and has a somewhat unusual-looking face, which immediately made me wonder whether he was modelled after a real person... But I still shrugged it all off - I'm generally fine just playing through the campaigns the normal way.

Then, two days before the end of the event, I learned that ten fished-up Treasures of Tiamat can be traded for one Linu's Favor, the annoying-to-come-by campaign currency that has stopped me from officially completing the Tyranny of Dragons campaign to this day. And this option has been in game since 2016???

I went on an emergency fishing spree on my main, but even with the top fishing pole it took forever to get enough of the right treasures, so I eventually gave up on it again. I briefly considered buying a few sabiki rigs from the Zen store (special lures that increase your chance of getting a good catch), but then told myself that this wasn't much less "paying to win" than just buying full campaign completion.

Maybe I'll remember to start fishing on my main in time next winter...

Boons

Boons in Neverwinter are an interesting concept. Basically they are a way for you to keep gaining power at max level beyond upgrading your gear, by permanently adding to your character's stats and abilities. You usually get to choose from one of several boons upon completing a certain amount of campaign tasks. Some of them are fairly mundane, such as "you gain 2000 extra hitpoints", while others can involve interesting procs along the lines of "every time you get hit in combat, you have a chance of striking your opponent with a bolt of lightning".

One the one hand, this is a neat form of progression beyond merely grinding for gear, but on the other hand it's not very alt-friendly, considering that there are more than half a dozen endgame campaigns in the game by now and each one is supposed to take you about a month to complete. None of my own alts have finished more than a couple of those campaigns for example.

Cryptic does actually offer a way of catching up more quickly... but it's via buying campaign completion from the cash shop. I'm sure that those who are heavily invested in the game and enjoy running endgame on alts are grateful to have an option at all, but it is yet another thing that adds to the game's pay-to-win flavour.

Endgame Drama

Via Neverwinter Unblogged I found out that there's been drama about an upcoming change to endgame gearing. Basically players require keys, which (among other things) can be bought from the Zen store, to unlock the reward chests at the end of a dungeon run. The rewards in these are random, and currently you have the option to decline the reward and retain your key for the next chest in hopes of a better roll. This will be changed so that the random reward is instead forced on you as soon as you decide to open the chest.

I honestly have no feelings about this because I'm too casual about endgame in Neverwinter to ever have worried about this kind of thing. (When I get to a dungeon chest, I open it and take the rewards no matter what because who knows when I'll see the next one? I always have way more keys than I'll ever need.) But it reminded me of the current SWTOR outrage about the planned changes to endgame loot in Knights of the Eternal Throne, which will also suddenly leave people at the mercy of RNG.

It's strange to see to see a similar situation from the point of view of an uncaring casual player, and makes me once again wonder about the respective sizes of the more outspoken (and often angry) parts of the player base.

Slow Down

One of my guildies got temporarily locked out of buying any more Zen; apparently he bought too much of it in too short a period of time.

And here people say that companies like Cryptic only care about extracting as much money from their players as possible!

I'm not sure whether I'm more surprised by my guildie's spending or by the existence of such a barrier to spending too much at once.

Level Up

It's been quiet on here because in the past month my attention has been elsewhere once again, which is why I only found out today that ten days ago, Cryptic introduced the option to buy max-level characters from the Zen store. It's actually kind of surprising that it took them this long, considering how many other MMOs already do this and Crytpic's general tendency to let you buy advantages for real money in every possible area of the game.

I'm never really tempted by these offers because I actually enjoy levelling, but this one comes with an extra perk: Every boosted character gets to choose one of five painted owlbear mounts for themselves (picture from the official news post):

Owlbears!

Seriously, who wouldn't love to own one of these? I especially like the purple one.

Of course, then I checked the actual price of a boosted character on the Zen market, and it's 5,000 Zen. Even if you buy the biggest bundle to get the most bang for your buck, that's still about thirty quid. No owlbear is worth that to me.

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).

More Invocation Changes

When they changed the invocation system a couple of months ago, one of the new perks of the multiple invokes per day was that one of them would grant you a refinement stone of some kind. What was funny about this was that it was initially randomised which kind of stone you would get, but then you would get the same stone every day, forever.

The result of this was that if you were lucky and got a useful stone the first time, you would continue to get something useful every day. This was true for my cleric and my rogue for example. If you were unlucky, you might end up like my great weapon fighter, who has a pile of over fifty stability stones (bound to character of course) and no stability artifact to use them on. This system seemed rather odd and like it was probably bugged.

This seems to have been confirmed with the latest patch, since they "fixed" it now so that invoking grants a goodie bag instead, which will then contain a random stone. This is good news for my great weapon fighter, but bad news for my other characters, who now suddenly have a chance of getting something useless. Worse, since you can now get something different out of a whole selection of useless items, it's going to hurt your inventory space, and much worse than those 50+ stability stones ever did.

Also, never one to leave out an opportunity to monetise, Cryptic seems to have programmed the system in such a way that you also get a coupon for the Zen store from every single one of those goodie bags, which I find quite annoying. I don't mind finding them out in the world on occasion, but having multiples of them dumped in my inventory every day seems kind of... pushy.

I know it won't happen, but I kind of want that bug back.

Pay To Campaign

Module 4 released today, but I haven't actally looked at any of the new content yet. I did however log in to invoke and update my professions. Since the Zen store icon was flashing, I had a quick look at that as well.

Two of the newest items: buy instant completion for the Sharandar and Dread Ring campaigns for five thousand Zen each.

I really shouldn't be surprised, as it's perfectly in line with their theme of letting people pay for every advantage possible. Somehow I still find it disappointing however.

Mounts

Mounts are one part of the game where I feel that spending real money gives you a considerable advantage over a free player, especially while levelling. The basic mounts you can buy for gold are very slow and offer only minimal protection against being dismounted. You might be able to acquire a slightly better one during an event, but the really good ones generally only come from the Zen store. At max level you can grind out Astral Diamonds to buy a Zen store mount from another player, but while levelling you're basically hosed if you don't want to shell out real cash.

Admittedly not everyone will perceive the increased dismount protection the same way, but I found it very noticeable. On a basic mount you get knocked off if you take three hits within five seconds. On a purple quality mount five hits are required. This may not seem like much of a difference, but you have to consider that most groups of enemies in the game consist of three to four mobs. On a basic mount, your chance of getting dismounted and being forced into combat at a bad time (which might possibly even lead to your death) is therefore pretty high. On a purple mount, you'll be able to continue riding even if every mob in any given group gets a hit in.

I know that for me, buying a fast mount made a huge difference and made the mere act of moving around the map a lot less stressful. If you're going to spend real money on anything at all, I recommend a mount.