As part of our coverage of mod 16 and 17 its important to state how things are in the game. Its important for new players looking to see what they have in store when joining, and old players looking to see what the general atmosphere is. So here I put my long delayed take on the whole thing. Lets get straight to it: These are not a popular mods. They are among other things obviously buggy (more than normal), gamebreaking, disruptive, and nerfing of almost every positive trait of the game. They are by any objective measure and most subjective ones, bad mods. Veteran players will have nearly all they've earned devalued and newer players will find progress to upper levels more expensive while their top end potential is more limited. Little content was added after a year long wait for a new dungeon. Developers have straight out lied to the playerbase, testers, in streams and forum posts on a repeated basis. ..so lets see how I really feel after the break. ;) This is largely posted here so that Devs in future ages can see this as a warning. ..and of course to let out the angry a bit at losing something that has been a positive part of my gaming life for years now. ) Loss of players: Thats right.. its been a general revolt. The signs are every where, in every list we have available to us. My friends list has emptied out, when it was formerly filled with active players from around the world. Our guild has lost many members, our alliance has lost massive numbers. Alliances in general are down. Guilds that have had lines for their secondary farm guilds for years, are now openly trying to recruit 10s of people for their main guilds. Steam charts numbers show this exact trend. My comments on the steamcharts numbers are here. Move around the game, which divides its areas into instances and you can verify the same thing. Areas that would regularly have 5-6 instances during busy hours even when newer mods came out are virtually abandoned. Most of them will have 1 partially filled instance, and 2 during busy weekend hours. The newest content areas that could have 30+ instances years ago, will have 10. Even with the new Legacy Campaign you will often only see 2-3 partially filled instances on the weeks they come up. So.. longwinded way of saying, the losses are real. And those losses are felt. There are fewer people to play with. Fewer people wanting to make content, to guide newbies, to sell spare eq, to mine RP, to produce professions gear (should it ever get updated). Theres even fewer trolls in p.e. abusively ranting. Come on, you know its bad when even the trolls are starving. :p Loss of content creators: Early on in mod 16 there was a bit of an insult to the streaming creators that have created content for Neverwinter for years. They gave the mod 16 premier stream to a Twitch star that had never played the game before, and was clearly unaware of how to play the game. This was not bad in itself, but they also crosspromoted that stream on their streaming network. This gave a one off stranger more promotion (which leads to income) than streamers that had been promoting the game for years. Additionally there was a early access preview that already left a bitter taste in many of their mouths from heavy handed NDAs and a lack of responsiveness to anyones feedback, public or private. Many of them had some tearful goodbyes, and many of their words echo my own in private conversations and forum posts from the time. Some of these people played and posted daily, and most have now moved on to other games. So Ill link them here if you want to see more background on the topic. Garlanx - mod 16 rip Kali Gold - He has so many, but heres one. Mod 16 Scaling is broken. Diamond Feather - Mod 16 is out, am I the only one not happy? TheNickFloShow - The Last Straw! I Rage at Neverwinter! Mod16? The Assist Man - Neverinter is No Longer Fun - I Am Taking A Break From Playing the Game Nova - Why I haven'y Played Nevwerwinter In Several Monthes (4 parts) Northside - So many to choose from here.. and with some of them you can really hear it in his voice how depressed, and/or angry he gets at the bad direction the game was taking. Why I Quit Neverwinter and Moved to ESO. ....and so on. So to answer the initial question. Yes, there is an exodus of players at every level from Neverwinter. It isn't over any 1 thing, or even any easily counted set of things. Its about a years long degradation in the relationship between the developers and their playerbase, ongoing lack of new content, consistent devaluation of any player investment, and other games (even ones released at the same time as NW) that have simply done a better job over time.
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