The Neverwinter shards are down in order to stop an exploit, which allowed users to generate thousands of real US Dollars worth of ingame currency through a bug within the official website. Thousands of dollars, because said currency can be bought with real cash both legally through Neverwinter's website, as well as the ever-present goldselling platforms that provide players with currency through not so legit means.
This isn't the first time the economy has been drastically altered by exploiters, though. Until recently, a certain armor set would provide a buff, which allowed characters to dish out enough damage to one-shot just about every endgame boss in all of Neverwinter. A bug which had been known for about a whole week, had been reported multiple times, but rather than actually fixing the exploit and halting regular gameplay until the problem had been fixed, Cryptic chose to delete all forum threads mentioning the exploit and let it run its course. So how would this affect the economy, you might ask? Simple: Every piece of endgame gear can be sold on the auction house. And that's what the exploiters did, some of them claiming to have earned enough currency to sell it off to goldselling platforms for well over 6,000 USD.
How much of that is actually true and what's just exaggerated bullshit from people craving attention is anyone's guess, of course, as only Cryptic really knows what really happened and on what magnitude. The fact, however, remains that the exploit was there, it was known and it had been tolerated and ignored for days. If you do a Google search for 'Neverwinter guardian fighter exploit' you will find tons of recently deleted forum threads discussing exactly this problem. Websites such as elitepvpers still discuss the exploit in full detail. It was there, they knew, half the community knew, and Cryptic didn't care to fix it for a whole week.
Today people tripped over a whole new exploit, which incorporated the use of the 'Neverwinter Gateway', an official website which lets you take care of things such as mail, crafting and auctions without actually running the game client. Lots of people created near endless amounts of currency up to a point where some wisecracks started handing out free cats to random people. Which sounds funny if you don't really play Neverwinter, but basically it means that exploiters have spread one of the most powerful ingame pets, which normally costs around 20 USD worth of RL currency, around the servers to random players for free. And then Cryptic shut down the servers. I wonder if they would have reacted at all if the exploiters had not begun devaluating Cryptic's very own cash shop right there.
If you take a look at the official forum thread, provided you can even get into the forums at all right now, you'll see people losing their shit left, right and center. Half the community demands server-wide character wipes, the other half already demands their money back, threatens to never touch Neverwinter again and of course there's the usual customer rights debate going on, with people threatening to take this issue all the way to their respective government if their characters will be in any way affected by possible wipes and rollbacks. Almost makes you wish people would get that involved when some real problems are going on in the world.
Personally, I don't think Cryptic would have bothered to make this problem official in the first place, had it not reached a point where the auction house came crashing down, people were being handed free stuff by the exploiters and every last idiot realised that something was seriously wrong. The one thing that pisses me off is having to read stupid crap like this:
"Thanks for your support and patience as we continue smoothing things out during Open Beta!"
Open beta, my fucking ass! You're charging people 200 Bucks for founders' packs, 40 Bucks for a mount, five bucks for a respec, but when you fuck up and fail to cover it all up and/or delete all evidence in time, you apologise by telling your paying customers it's all open beta. Where's your fucking QA department? What the hell where they doing the whole time? What happened to all the tickets and forum threads which reported all of these exploits before they got out of hand?
It's not the end of the world to me if they wipe the whole thing clean and go for a fresh start. I had many hours of fun, for as mediocre and disappointing as the whole experience was. But I don't think I'd want to start over. There are countless other, cheaper, better games out there. But who knows. Maybe they're just gonna ban the exploiters (ban accounts in a fucking F2P game, DAMN that's gonna sting!) and leave it at that. Might stick around for a bit if they do. I knew Cryptic/PWE were scumbags when the lockboxes ruined Star Trek Online for me, so it's not like any of this is a huge surprise.
Oh well. Tera is F2P now. Bored me to tears when I tried the closed beta, but there's nothing to lose here but time. And I have plenty of that. Onward!
-Cat
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