Update 2 - Thursday, June 07, 2007

Bug Fixes

* Fixed a bug that prevented players from entering a Challenge Mission in Hard Mode.

* Removed inaccurate changes to several skill and attribute descriptions.

Miscellaneous

* To prevent exploitation of the Nightfall starter quests "Take the Shortcut", "Rally the Recruits", and "Never Fight Alone", the gold rewards for those quests were reduced to 25, and the reward for the starter quest "Honing your Skills" was increased to 250 gold to compensate.|||Glad that hm is again available in challenge missions, but I'm wondering why they said this was a bug fix... before they said they actually intended hm to be unavailable in challenge missions. This isn't a big deal to me, but can't they merely say what they mean?

Makes me wonder if the other change was actually a "bug fix" as well, makes me wonder if it was actually a leak. If it wasn't for the first line I would have thought that maybe the changes to the skill descriptions was in fact a bug, but not now.

As for the other update, nothing major, but why don't they do stuff like this in Factions as well? If they think 250g for three quests is bad, just take a look at the quests in Factions. Either way, do people just keep creating new characters to take advantage of these "exploits"?

Sorry if I'm not being nice to them, I usually approve of all their decisions, I'm just confused on their wording and their decisions in these last few updates.|||I *suspect* they meant to make the challenge missions themselves only available with one difficulty (or make it clear that this was so, or correct drop rates and exp being increased for HM when difficulty wasn't increased, I never tried a challenge mission in hard mode so I don't know what was the case before), and accidentally made it so you couldn't leave from a challenge mission to an explorable area in hard mode.

As for the skill things, it may well have been a leak. But if so, it was *also* a bug, because the skills were not functioning as per their description. A skill not working as per its description is a bug, and correcting this is a bug fix.

And yea, it sounds like people were taking advantage of these quest rewards to gain gold quickly in some way. The factions quests start off with smaller rewards (meaning it takes longer to get serious rewards, making less money over time from trying to farm it)... the very first quest in Nightfall and two right after it were 250g rewards.|||Well, here is what Andrew Patrick said:


Quote:




The Hard Mode function will be back on for Challenge Missions shortly. It seemed illogical to be using Hard Mode in CMs since it would simply make it more difficult to get on the ladder, but if players are using it to farm, we will put the option back in.

Sorry for the trouble, it will be fixed soon!




I would like to take the time to say that I think it is great that they listen to us and change the game if they realize they made a mistake, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I merely wonder why they call something they deliberately put into the game a "bug".

They took hm out of the options to go into the challenge mission and out of the options to go into the instances on purpose (they may not have been thinking about what this second part entailed, but they did do it), so it wasn't really a bug imo. Feel free to disagree with me of course, just try and understand what I'm getting at.

As for your other points, I thank you for clearing that up, I'll admit the skill descriptions were a bug, and that those three quests should be changed to keep people from exploiting them... I just wish the later quests in nf gave better rewards :S

Oh well, at least they upped the reward on one quest, lol.|||Yeah, I witnessed the bots in Chahbek Village and was very humorous. Seemed a bot was creating characters on a very specific naming scheme, walking in, accepting reward from first spear jahdugar (sp?) and then leveling to level2, and then disappearing to be recrated later on.

It was obvious because they were all turning level 2 on accepting and each name was VERY VERY similar. I even have screen shots of the levelup readout - i'd share, but cant show names here so rather pointless to share....suffice it to say...it was VERY exploited. I used to contemplate creating character to do those quests make some quick cash but was too much work to be constantly creating and deleting.