Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Apr. 11, 06)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

12 Apr 2006 - BioWare Writing Contest Winners
I'm going to post the following to address some of the voting issues in case you were compelled to speak as well:

Congrats to everyone for the tremendous amount of work and support for this rather new thing for BioWare. The responses as I have mentioned was far greater than we had anticipated by a factor of about 10. I kid you not. I was expecting maybe 30-50 entries at the most and would have considered the contest a success if we have even 20. 313 was much better.

A few questions have come up regarding judging and what happens now. The ten listed winners will be contacted by me so I can arrange for the fine, fine BioWare swag to be delivered mentioned in the original info about the writing contest so no worries there. I could not contact each of you before because...well that would ruin the surprise.

As far as judging goes I asked Maximus for a list of the top ranked modules. When we received that we removed those that had been picked as part of the judges top 5. After that we used a combination of the stated rank and our discretion because this contest is about quality of writing and at a certain point it is impossible to judge one type of writing ‘better’ than another so we wanted to put together the best list we could with all the great submissions. We were very reluctant to outright disqualify a quality module based on factors such as word count, number of characters and we were even a tiny bit flexible on submission time because our legal stuff took more time than originally thought and we had a very short window of for those submissions. The stated parameters were followed to an exceptional degree in nearly all cases and it made Kevin’s job of taking a good look at the writing that much easier which was the point. He is ecstatic on the turnout and hopes we can run this again. He is still looking at modules as we speak by the way and his interest has indeed been peaked.

A point that should be stressed is that all of you who have created and submitted a module have now completed the hardest part of applying for a job at BioWare as a writer. It is no secret the contest submission parameters are nearly identical to the formal writing submissions requirements. If I was interested in pursuing a job here I would take my module, winner or not, read very carefully Kevin’s advice on what he saw when reviewing the modules and do a second draft of your module. Really pay attention to what he is saying in all the interviews we have from him regarding this contest and most importantly do not be afraid to judge your work in a very different light and rebuild your story. After that, you have something that you can submit in a more formal way to apply for a job here knowing you have already gotten closer to what BioWare looks for in a writer.

You see this whole thing was a sneaky way to help writers get past the very difficult task of getting started and getting something finished. Now take your work and re-forge it with Kevin’s advice. BioWare needs writers. If you’re exceptionally talented, motivated and have the stuff we are looking for you will get hired.

If in doubt…keep in mind they hired me.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

New to The Community
Welcome to our community.

In regards to your fears regarding your CDKey, registering them on the site is optional, but highly encouraged and we only allow plot and spoiler and technical support discussion for registered game owners.

As a registered game owner (which does NOT require any kind of personal information, just the CD Key), you have write access to a variety of forums (including the plot and tech support section), the game secrets library on our webpage as well as a advanced forum features such as a larger set of available portraits based on the games you have registered.

If it helps your 'security related fears', we use state of the art protection technology to protect your CDKey (after all, it is in our best interest to ensure that valid CDKeys don't leak, so we don't have to shut them down for being used by multiple accounts at the same time).

Whether or not you actually register your CDKey here on the website makes no difference in the way the game works when you connect to a multiplayer game. Your public CDKey (and only your public CD Key) is always transmitted to the master server to verify it as valid and to check your account credentials and prevent access to your characters for clients without the proper password combination.

In fact, the BioWare community account on this webpage is identical with your multiplayer login to the game and both account name and public cdkey have already been communicated to our server at that point.

Registering your CDKey will not store the actual CDKey on our website (just the public part of it) and only if you decide to flag it as 'available for retrieval' you will be able to to recover it if you lose it - so if you perceive that as a security issue, you can always chose not to do that.

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The mere fact that their are pirated versions may be the indication, aside from people just giving the keys away, probably 95% of them.

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Given that you need a unique, valid CDKey that actually was sold through retail to play the game multiplayer, and given that keys that are detected as compromised (i.e. used by several users at the same time or found on the internet) can be invalidated on the fly, this is not really an issue.

Anyway, welcome to the BioWare community.

Patch 1.67 FAQ

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It should be possible to change the colors back by editing the pal_*.tga files though Im not sure exactly which row it is.

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Yep, we can change it back ourselves but I don't think we should have to. Retro changing stuff like this, especially when it really isn't necessary, seems to go against recent Bio-methodology. Why stuff up older products when it ain't necessary?

The replacement 'pure black' is actually quite cool, since it has torso highlights etc, but that isn't what someone trying to design real 'shadow critters' etc necesarily wants...

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The changes are necessary for upcoming content. You'll see in time