Astral Diamonds – MMO Fallout

The latest Neverwinter development blog is available and the topic of conversation are strongholds. Guild Strongholds were created as a method of improving player engagement, which while it has worked out great for larger guilds, the smaller groups are finding the costs of progression to be rather frustrating. In response, the Neverwinter team has been gathering data on how to make the process less cumbersome and annoying.

Issue number one became the need for Astral Diamonds, a resource integral to just about every other part of the game meaning that smaller guilds with more casual players would wind up having to give up all of their Astral Diamonds to the coffers, effectively making them unable to participate in other parts of the game. The answer was to reduce Astral Diamond costs, improve rewards for donating harder-to-obtain currencies, and allowing people to collect guild resources through professions.

The changes discussed will go live in the Maze Engine update.

(Source: Neverwinter)

Perfect World’s continuing efforts to make Astral Diamonds more readily available to players, while heading off bots and zen farmers, has been ongoing for the past few months dating back to the initial changes to the Gateway tool in July. Still, the game is in need of improvement. As Perfect World agrees, Astral Diamonds take far too long to obtain in-game and prices for goods like companion upgrades are ridiculously steep.

In the latest dev blog post, executive producer Rob Overmeyer discusses how Neverwinter’s Astral Diamond problem will be addressed, primarily through boosting how much players can acquire and refine each day. Leadership changes to reduce botting resulted in the per player average of Astral Diamonds plummeting from 171,000 all the way down to 34,000, before further updates increased that amount to 60,000.

It turns out that managing economies is hard and complex. Dealing with two economies is even harder, but we are up for the challenge. There are several things that need to happen in the short term. We know players need ways to earn enough AD, and that AD vendor prices need to be in a place that makes sense. We want to make sure those things are true. Right now, we think it’s sometimes too hard to earn AD, and some of the prices are too high, so we’re making some changes. We’ll keep watching, and we’ll make more changes if needed.

The plan to introduce more legitimate Astral Diamonds to the economy involves a 50% bonus to AD earned through dungeons, skirmishes, PvP, and weekly quests. In addition, the cost of companions will be greatly reduced, as well as the price of upgrading them. You can read more about the update at the link below.

(Source: Neverwinter)