Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Dec. 19, 04)

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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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Bioware's Comercial Campaign

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3. I am continually bombarded with e-mails and other Bioware ads. They use their forums for advertising their products.

A). I seriously doubt these accusations. I don't see Bio bombarding my e-mail with ads, but maybe you're just special. Bioware can put any adds on their forums for their products. They are footing the bill for all of this.

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The only mail we are sending is the BioWare newsletter, and only if the setting to receive the BioWare newsletter is activated in someone's account settings. http://nwn.bioware.com/my_account/newsletter.html Of course, if someone registers multiple accounts and they all have the newsletter option turned on, that may cause newsletters to be delivered for each of the accounts. You can review our strict privacy policy here: http://nwn.bioware.com/privacy.html

More:

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There have been some very valid points both pro and against the advertisements. Here are the against.

* The product is already paid for, unlike television commercials which fund the channels.
* The in game atmosphere is somewhat spoiled, and the beauty of the startup menu is compromised.
* While people are used to seeing advertisements before a presentation, advertisements during a presentation are unusual and distracting.

Here are the pro's.

* Bioware need to inform as many people as possible about Premium Modules in order to make money to fund the continuing support of Neverwinter Nights.
* To prove (to Atari?) that digital distribution is possible.

I think that one solution is to move the advertisements so that they accompany the BIOWARE credit during startup. I certainly wouldn't mind that in the slightest.

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I disagree

a) The patches you are getting two years after release are not "paid for" with the original product. Especially patch 1.65.

Please keep in mind that what you "paid for" is the right to use our product, Neverwinter Nights, according to the license agreement. And since you bring up the fact that commercials fund television channels, I want to draw your attention to the fact that the premium modules funded patch 1.65 and all further patches and free support for Neverwinter. The allegory is especially weak given the fact that commercials on TV, unless you talk about stealth product placement, block your entertainment experience (i.e. a movie) with no way to resume it until they are done. You will see neither "you are forced to watch this ad for 15 seconds before we start the game" type of ads, nor elven rogues using cellphones of a special brand or Aribeth using certain beauty cremes NWN.

In fact, the only people who I would grant a remote right to complain about anything in patch 1.65 is the people who "sponsored" it by supporting the Premium Modules program.

As explained before, without the premium modules program, 1.64 would have been the last patch for NWN. Period. If you want to stay true to the "original game experience", don't patch to 1.65 or mod yourself the old start screen back, because we are not going to do it. (And people should not even even start with "BioWare is not listening" when they really mean "BioWare is not doing what I say! How dare they").

b) The "during the presentation" is not correct. You are not playing while you are in the game's main menu. As long as we don't have the random encounter gnomes that chant "buy premium modules", it's not during the presentation. Through I like the fact that people get a lot of enjoyment out of watching NWN's grand start menu.

Maybe we should invest more time into making even cooler start menus, let's say, at the expense of other game features, since they are apparently quite important to the whole game's atmosphere, I think we can justify to pull a couple of designers and artists of the main game to ensure that the start menu of our next game will provide the best gaming experience ever.

I'm sure lot's of people are familiar with Blizzard's free Battle.Net service, which, for many years now, had advertisements related to the companies products and merchandise, on top of the server browser.

Anyway, we are happy for all the posts and fuzz about this, because in the end, this is all serving the greater goal of spreading the word about the premium modules

Oh well, it was only 8 bucks

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My only real issue is with requiring a network connection. We pay $5 now but what happens if Bioware decides they can't be bothered supporting this feature in the future? I guess we are no worse off than the MMRPG crowd who fork out $50 and another $15 a month.

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Your concern is valid. I can try to give you some ideas about how we think about it.

- We want to sell our future products. If we screwed over the people who bought the premium modules, we would screw over some of our most loyal fans who not only wouldn't buy our products in the future but also cause a wave of extremely negative feedback throughout the community.

- The authentification server uses NWN's multiplayer master server, which has been running free of charge for 2 years now. We have no intention of taking it down or charging for it (and alienating a huge crowd of loyal followers who still play NWN and are hopefully looking at buying future products from BioWare) as this would alienate our most loyal fans and customers.

- Running the master server itself is not very expensive, our daily forum traffic alone probably is more than the traffic that runs through our master server in several month. Shutting it down would likely cause more damage to our future sales (see above) than save us money. hope that helps