Lockbox Opening Experience

Having accumulated 177 lockbox keys from several months of VIP, I thought I'd go and open some lockboxes for a change. Not having done so in ages, the biggest surprise to me was that Cryptic implemented a special UI for this at some point, making sure that the items from your box are represented by larger images and unveiled with as much fanfare as possible (similar to how other games with lootboxes handle this already). When you get a particularly rare item, there's even an angelic choir-like "ooh" sound effect.

Unfortunately this UI change was already the most exciting thing about the whole experience. I complained about Neverwinter's lockbox contents being largely useless in the past, but I vaguely recall that they were at least a little more varied back then, including items like gear pieces, fashion etc. This time around I found that the drops were brutally utilitarian - which is the opposite of useless I guess, but boring. Aside from a single companion, everything else in those 177 boxes was either a refinement stone or an enchantment. For a system that's supposed to entice people with "surprise mechanics", I've got to say that's remarkably uninspired.

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.

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.)

Bear Cub

I'm a sucker for cute things. The New Life Lockbox was what pushed me over the edge into buying a month of VIP time, because I figured that I'd quite like using one of my daily lockbox keys on one and ending up with an adorable little baby pet. Of course I didn't actually get one, because you never get what you want out of these boxes - that's pretty much the business model.

I didn't really think much about it afterwards, but my pet tank remembered my desire for a cute little companion and when he saw that you could buy a bear cub directly from the trade bar store, he decided to get me a little gift.

The little fella is so cute that the whole guild gathered round just to look at how adorably he rocks back and forth while wiggling his toes. You just can't beat the cute.

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.

New Mounts with New Powers

On the launcher today: The next lockbox will drop a rare mount that gives you a permanent run speed increase whenever you have it on your bar. There's also an extra special version that is faster than all other mounts in the game and which you can summon in combat to assist you with dps.

There are no possible downsides to this, right? Right?!

...

Lucky

I finally convinced my pet tank to get back into the game as well.

Since he's not averse to buying things from the cash shop, he bought a lockbox key after some questing and opened one of the boxes in his inventory.

It got him a drake mount.

He immediately bound it to himself, but I looked it up on the auction house and there was only one for sale, for the price of five million astral diamonds. Lucky bugger!

(This was also the first time I saw someone I know trigger one of those admin announcements about people winning rare lockbox prizes. Initially it didn't even register with either of us since we're so used to ignoring them, but then I just had to scroll back up to take a screenshot.)