Foundry Farewell

It was via The Ancient Gaming Noob of all places that I found out that Cryptic is finally closing down the Foundry for good in both Neverwinter and STO. I say "finally" because it's been down so often by now, I wasn't even sure whether it was still functional to begin with. The official subreddit received the news with a resounding "meh", and few people even considered the announcement worthy of an upvote. I'm clearly not the only one who never really cared about this particular feature.

I only ever made two posts on this blog that carry the Foundry tag. The first one was a brief explanation of what it is, while also mentioning that I didn't use it much, and the second one just mentioned as a brief aside that astral diamond rewards were being removed from Foundry missions.

While I give kudos to players who used it in creative ways and also to Cryptic for how hard they initially tried to integrate it into the game (what with the harpers advertising it in pretty much every zone), I just never developed much of an interest in it. Even back when there were some rewards for running Foundry missions, they seemed like a very time-consuming way of earning them, and the quality of the missions could be hit and miss. Both Telwyn and Roger also talk about just how this sort of player-created content has frequently ended up being abused, which resulted in Cryptic having to add more and more restrictions over time.

I do have some fond memories of a few missions I played. There was the one that Telwyn's partner created, the one with the NPCs that were wannabe Power Rangers (or something?!), or the one where the creator had had a lot of fun with the editor and made the player go through a whole section where everything was upside down. I also remember Wilhelm writing about doing some missions that were basically recreations of popular WoW dungeons.

Ultimately though, even when they were decent, Foundry missions always seemed like a distraction from the "real" game to me. So it's a sad day for those who actually used the Foundry, but I suspect I'm part of the majority when I say that these news don't elicit much more than a shrug for me.

No More AD From Leadership

General chat caught my eye today because people were arguing about a change that had been announced on the forums but nowhere else so far: the removal of astral diamond rewards from the leadership profession (and the foundry).

The driving force behind this is an unbalanced economy caused by "AFK-playing" and botting. Leadership rewards astral diamonds just for logging in and pressing some buttons, and Cryptic wants to stop that. In fairness, some players have taken this to pretty insane levels, farming leadership on fifty alts or even multiple accounts. Cryptic wants people to gain AD by actually playing the game, and I can't blame them for that.

However, I still think that the proposed changes are terrible, because after this the only ways of gaining astral diamonds will be dungeons, skirmishes and PvP (plus the pittance you get from invoking these days). But that's only a small part of the content! In practice this means that a lot of players will effectively have no source of AD anymore.

Take me as an example. I've found dungeons and skirmishes at max level to either be extremely dull or unforgivingly hard to the point that they are a pain to do in pugs. And PvP in this game is terrible in my opinion. Nonetheless I rack up a considerable amount of hours playing each week: I do dailies in the campaign areas and work on my guild's stronghold. None of this awards astral diamonds. If anything, things like unlocking campaign boons and upgrading your stronghold cost AD. Where is that currency supposed to come from in the future?

This seems like another one of those changes that hasn't really been thought through at all, or is simply driven by blind greed. ("If we minimise the ways of gaining currency in game, people will spend more money, right?")

The Foundry

The Foundry is a seemingly unending source of content, but I hardly ever use it. Levelling up for the first time, I mainly wanted to see the developer-created content, and it awarded more than enough experience that I never had to look for additional XP sources. Being at max level now, I want to do content that continues to be rewarding and makes my character even stronger, which means that the Foundry falls short once again. (During the last Foundry mission I did, the reward chest at the end was actually completely empty.)

While Perfect World has made an effort to integrate the Foundry into the world, with an (unrewarding) daily quest and NPCs that guide you towards it on nearly every map, I'm not sure whether it has truly found its niche. Using other players' ratings as a guideline, you can easily avoid the truly terrible creations, but the catalogue still makes it quite hard to find missions of a particular type that you like, even with the addition of tags. And style and tone of the player-created content can be all over the place, thereby making a lot of the stories feel disconnected from the rest of the game. Still, I may eventually try to see how the Foundry holds up as a source of alternate levelling content for alts of different classes, now that I've seen all the "official" stories.