21/12/2018

Fishing Farewell

Hey, the winter festival is back! I may be feeling a bit meh about the game in general, but I always enjoy this event.

Unfortunately I immediately ran into another downer when I went to do some ice fishing and found that the ice on the lake had been smashed and you are now supposed to just fish there using the same mechanics as in Sea of Moving Ice and Chult.

Now, I like that fishing mini game, but I kind of liked ice fishing more. More importantly, the latter was just a completely different beast from "regular" fishing, a fairly fast-paced mini game that was more about racing across the ice effectively and beating other people to the good fishing holes than about anything else. Now you just stand around and fish for ten minutes.

Also, they trashed all the fishing poles that I crafted last year and are making us start over with a new and crappy pole, because for some reason these things are never allowed to carry over from one activity to the next. Not happy.

16/12/2018

Meh Module

Funnily enough, after I complained about my workshop's unending deliveries, Cryptic went ahead and patched that out this past week, so the goods now arrive instantly and fill up your delivery box the moment you log in. I guess that was a bug instead of a feature?

I was also pleased to see that they finally fixed the Chult Signet of Patronage. I momentarily got really excited when I saw that they had finally added a signet for that campaign with Heart of Fire, but of course it launched in a broken state and couldn't actually be used. Now it can, but my initial excitement has tapered off and I'm busy with other things already.

Unfortunately this whole module feels very "meh" to me so far. The workshop is ultimately not great, and my pet tank and I have even put the new campaign on hold for now because rerunning the same couple of story quests to crawl up a giant's butt week after week got old really, really quickly.

In the community I've seen mutterings about this module being the worst addition since Elemental Evil. It's probably not quite that bad, but I haven't felt this disengaged from the game since early Chult.

05/12/2018

Unending Deliveries

One aspect of the new crafting system is that you can tell your crafters to repeat a task "indefinitely", which in practice should simply mean "until your delivery mailbox is full". So if you have ten slots in your inbox and send your artisans out in the evening to craft as much as they can overnight, you should then wake up to ten items in your inbox, right?

Unfortunately in practice the game doesn't do the calculations for this while you're offline, and not even instantly when you log in - instead, every crafted item takes several seconds to be processed and to actually appear in your inbox, and this process doesn't even start until you actually log in.

So what now happens to me every time I log on is that I dash to my delivery box and find it maybe half full (as far as the game managed to calculate its contents in the time it took me to get there). I take everything out, and the game continues to fill it up. Again, and again, and again... until I actually run out of materials or the calculation decides that in the x hours since I last logged in, that's the maximum amount of items my artisan would have been able to craft in terms of time.

I guess I should be glad that the offline crafting is so efficient, but on the other hand it's actually kind of annoying that I now basically spend the first fifteen minutes of any given play session just sitting next to my mailbox and gradually emptying it out over and over again. I guess I could just let it hit the space limit but that would then feel wasteful. It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't.

01/12/2018

Workshop Woes

My initial enthusiasm for the workshop has definitely come to an end. I climbed the wall of having to earn 500,000 trade credits to upgrade my main's workshop from level 2 to level 3, just to find that the next upgrade required me to do the same thing again, only this time for 5 million credits. Also, where a big part of my initial push had been made possible by the conversion of old crafting materials to new (via a horrible vendor interface that makes you want to bash your head against the wall), I was fresh out of tradable materials by that point. The cherry on top was the realisation that instead of earning 5 million trade credits, you can just pay 5 million AD for the upgrade instead. Neverwinter has a lot of pay-to-win aspects, but they aren't always this blatant.

It also hasn't helped that without consulting any kind of guide, I went about my business very inefficiently initially. Having opened a workshop on my first alt, I'm now trying not to commit the same mistakes again, but just the thought of having to go through the whole unlocking and upgrading process on seven more characters is somewhat deflating.

It might not be so bad if you're a new player and learning things as you go, but as a more casual player who previously maxed out her professions over several years of casual play, having to start over at this point and being faced with this much grind just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.