Recent reviews by dpunk

This game is one of a kind. Well, along with Civilizations 1, II, III, and IV.

If you enjoyed other Civilizations games, it's highly likely you will enjoy this one as well.

There are a few things that are notably different from other versions of Civilizations.

The most obvious is the units per tile restrictions. In Civ 5, there is only allowed 1 unit type per tile, meaning only 1 combat unit can be on any tile. In some ways it's better, in some it's worse, but it does lend itself to strategy of positioning of your army being much more important than in earlier versions.

Another is that cities, when attacked, take damage themselves instead of any unit defending. I believe it's related to the 1 unit type per tile, because it would be odd if you only had to kill one unit to take a city.

These two differences from earlier versions does give the game a different feel from earlier versions, but it does still feel much more similar to Civilizations than it does to a game like Colonization/Civ4Col, although not that it would be a bad thing if it was similar to Colonization, another great Sid Meier game.

Overall I highly recommend it to anyone considering, just make sure you have time to play because you will be hooked.

Whenever you play a MMO published by a Chinese or Korean corporation, you can expect certain aspects of the game and payment model to be different. Neverwinter is no exception. This game happens to be run by a Chinese corporation called Perfect World Entertainment. It is their "North American" division of Perfect World.

The big issues brought up by many North American and EU players is Pay2Win. Something that is rampant and very accepted and acceptable in Chinese, Korean, and SEA cultures among PC games. Neverwinter is an attempt to get away from some prevalent Pay2Win features otherwise present in their Chinese counter-parts and to a degree, has almost found an acceptable amount for NA players in their action games, such as Blacklight Retribution and Tourchlight. But these are exceptions to the rule, and these are not MMOs.

Neverwinter does have Pay2Win aspects, make no mistakes. Without paying any cash, it will require a hardcore player months to be on equal footing compare to what a paying customer can achieve in a week or two if they take their time.

These aren't the things I personally have an issue with the game though. Because, with the exception of the price of coalescent wards constantly on the rise, an item required to craft high level weapon and armor enchants, most things a player can attain in a few months play, if their okay with settling for rank 7 and 8, maybe rank 9 enchants, instead of rank 10s.

The issue I have with PWE is that forum discussions about the game among players almost exclusively happens on their official forums, which are heavily censored. Not surprising coming from a corporation that formed in Beijing, outside of China's Special Economic Zone(SEZ), their quasi-capitalist zones. Even though these areas aren't officially ran as communist zones, their strongest political party remains the communist party, and many North American and EU peoples would be unable to differentiate between the two because their are so many similarities to a full on communist country.

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To get a quick idea of internet censorship in china, check out the wikipedia of Internet Censorship in China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China

Here is another link to a similar topic, a news.aky.com journalist story about Facebook having issues entering the Chinese scene because of internet censorship.
http://news.sky.com/story/1206329/the-great-firewall-blocking-facebook-in-china

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You don't have to read those links, they are just to give you an idea about why a corporation in a different culture might have different views of what's acceptable.

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Discussions about Pay2Win, so that potential customers can decide whether they want to invest time into this game or not, are full censored on the official forums.

Drop chances for dungeons are censored on the official forums, luckily these are large enough chances that they are generally well known, just don't post on the forums.

Drop chances for lockboxes, which function as in-game gambling using Zen(cash) are fully censored and users can be banned from the forums for posting results of their findings. Users that have opened over a thousand lockboxes worth thousands of dollars, have been censored and banned for posting their results.

Please individuals reading this, understand that when I say gambling, I mean wagering money for the chance of something of value, in this case, in game items. I actually saw a PWE forum moderator tell somebody that whether something is considered gambling or not is only determined by a court of law instead of the definition of the word and what the large majority of people understand it to be.

It is believed among some individuals whom commonly open large amounts of lockboxes, that the chance to receive the rare item, which typically sale for between 300k-1m AD, which is equivalent to the price of 6-20 *keys, that the chance for an item fluctuates depending on a proprietary algorithm, and that a player's chance can be higher or lower depending on how long it has been since the last grouping of rare items were distributed from the boxes.

Of course their is no way to know this, all we can know, is that it's over a 99.99% probability that a player has less than a 1% chance to receive $10+ item per box, which costs $1.25 to open. That it takes over $120.00 in keys purchased through PWE to average 1 of these $10+ items.

One of the excuses moderators of the PWE forums use to delete such threads, is the claim that players present the data as factual drop chances while not knowing for sure because it's a proprietary system. Not only is this not true, because the players have only presented information as data representative of a sample, but is in actuality only used as an excuse to censor the information from the players. It is PWE forum policy to censor this information, they are the most strict regarding winning from their lockboxs.

It's important to understand that this is a form of gambling that is not only unregulated, but is completely proprietary with chances and even results of other players kept secret. There is a reason this kind of secrecy isn't allowed in any gambling recognized by a regulatory body. It is for this reason it is unsurprising, that any discussion about winning rates be kept completely secret, and any discussion of Neverwinter's lockbox system being compared to gambling being a bannable offense.

It is my belief that PWE, being a branch of a Chinese corporation, doesn't understand that this kind of censorship is unacceptable to North American and EU players. It is understandable that they don't understand this, but a corporation will have no idea that it is unacceptable to their customers unless we say so. The problem is they censored us!

Game is decent, unfortunately updates consistantly wipe progress, so expect that. Publishers are known to not give people microtransaction refunds after a character wipe.

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(Dec 2015 Edit: Not sure if wipes still happen, however I'm technically locked out of my account and support has stopped responding to me, so for Steam users that never migrated to an email like me, our items are officially locked out, paid or not)
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Every time there has been a character wipe, they say they will correct it next time, but they never do and it's been this way for years. It's come to the point that people just accept it and most people don't even complain about it anymore. Unfortunately it's not something you will see listed on the store page or in their microtransaction shop.

Recently there is a new issue with this game. Some steam users that didn't link their account to an email are no longer allowed to access their RotMG account. I happen to be one of these users, yet another slap in the face. As far as I know this only is affecting steam users and those affected have no way to play the game through their steam account, they can't even start over.

If you are absolutely certain you won't be spending a dime on this game, it might be worth a try if you like dungeon crawlers, it's about as good as dungeonland but with worse graphics. Otherwise stay away, spending cash for temporary items is no fun, losing all your hard work is even less fun still.

""""Steam account can't connect - 02072900

Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, this case has been closed.

If your problem has not been resolved, please submit a new case and we will reply as soon as we can.""""

""""Kabam Support
To Me
May 13
Hello Ujil,

Thank you for writing in with your concern! Are you still experiencing this issue? Have you tried logging in via the web version? Due to new security measures, everyone must change their passwords via the web version before being able to play. It appears that this account is associated with a different email than the one you are contacting from. We can provide the email used but I must first verify account ownership with the following questions:
How much have you spent on the account?
How many character slots do you have?
How many chests do you have?
How much Gold do you have?
About when did you open the account?

You can read more about this here:
http://community.kabam.com/forums/showthread.php?245835-Realm-of-the-mad-God-Security-Updates-and-Changes

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding this issue, thanks for your continued support of the game!


Regards,
Synistrr
RotMG Support""""

Please reviewers, keep in mind my account is tied ONLY to steam and even has a stead ID associated with the account, it is impossiple for me to change the password I used for this account because an e-mail has never been tied to the account and to change the password requires the registered e-mail.

and now my favorite one

""""Sent on March 6th

Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within one business day.""""
Notice I didn't even get another response back until over two months later which basically asked me for my password for my login information, which had always ben tied to my Steam ID.

At the end of the day, read my first quote of responses from Kabam support and you'll see """"this case has been closed.""""

They don't care, maybe I am not as important as a lot of the other players that aren't having issues with the game, maybe they don't care about me at all, I'm just here telling you what they will, are capable of, and have done to at least 1 person, in this case it's me.

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(Dec 2015 Edit: My entire review was written in 2013, and edited in 2014, so the dates listed in the review are 2014 dates.

I just tried to log in today, I was able to get to character select screen and actually had my hopes up that my account was fixed. NOPE, it asks for username and password after I double-click my character.
-Still, they already KNOW my username because it's in the upper-righthand corner of the screen,
-they KNOW I don't have a password because my account was created using my SteamID back when the game allowed,
-they KNOW i don't have a email associated with the account because you didn't need one when they allowed SteamID to be the only identifyer,
-they KNOW I have no way to change my password because you NEED an email associated with the account to change the password.
-they have stopped emailing me and completely stopped trying to help at all.
-this time all my character unlocks and account and items are, for all practical purposes, officially unuseable.)
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The game is one of a kind. I would say however, to make sure you have a gamepad if you plan on playing, it works really well and I'd imagine it just wouldn't be the same with keyboard; pretty sure it was designed to be used with a gamepad.

The game is definitely high quality, so whether it's worth it really comes down to price while considering the length of the game. I'd say if you can get it for under $5, it's a must have. If you only have the option to buy at the full price of $15, it's harder for me to recommend, but only because the game is quite short. Consider the game will probably last you 6-7 hours for a main story playthrough.

Keep an eye out because the game goes on sale every now and then and it has also been on humble bundle before.

Try this game out before it's gone at the end of the month, it's pretty good and F2P