Survival Modes and their Loot

I believe the original motivations where that by giving upper tier players a reason to keep coming on they maintain their subs and are less likely to move on. I suspect that's less of a motivation these days as you don't really need a sub to acquire top gear and maintain competitiveness. It is possible they looked at the metrics and saw that not to be the case which is why it's been relegated to a lower priority.

PVP is a similar example. I don't have the data so I can only say anecdotally, but I know back when PVP was a more regular activity a lot of the people I played with were not subbed and didn't feel the need to sub to PVP. So when PVP breaks where's the cost/benefit to tasking person hours on it?

If they could build a more predictable revenue stream or cost/benefit from SM that might change but then I suspect people would scream blue murder if it were changed in that regards.

The devs probably thought SM was the reason players spammed RB's, in order to get their CR/stats as high as possible in preparation.

They've since discovered that players will spam RB's for no apparent reason regardless, so don't feel the need to bother with SM.

If the players stopped spamming RB's for no apparent reason, maybe the devs would be inclined to give them a reason to spam RB's.

I believe in companies being transparent, and the old adage of 'as advertised'. The Survivor Mode stuff was never advertised as something that would not return. In fact, I believe a lot of us were under the impression that Survivor Mode actually WOULD continue to appear seasonally from time to time. Stuff that was said to be exclusive, like the Founders trinkets or the old Server emblems, those things should definitely stay exclusive, just like advertised. Stuff that was never said to be exclusive should not then be turned exclusive at a later time without a heads up. A great example right now would be the Superman Emblem from Doomsday Tributes: it's spelled out clear as day that it becomes unavailable after December 31, 2018. If you miss it, that's on you. And if a player joins or returns after 12/31 and wants it, it's a 'tough luck' situation. It would be entirely a different situation if they randomly decided now, without warning, to never run the Halloween event again and never make those styles available through any other means. Those were not advertised as exclusives; we believed we would have future opportunities to get them and made our decisions accordingly.

If the decision is made not to do any further Survival Modes, then those resources are fair game to be farmed out into other sources instead. And there will always be the titles for people to use in order to showcase their actual participation and success.

If I had to guess, the priority order is most likely:

1. New PVE DLC (this includes TC updates, seasonals, etc)
2. Upgrade/fix PVP system, mechanics, etc
3. Upgrade/fix SM

Each of these has a smaller relevant population than the one above it, or at least I believe that to be the case. Basically, anything PVE related as far as new DLCs or updating seasonal content goes will have the widest reach and bring something to the table for 95% or more of the game population. My guess is that the relevant population for a PVP fix would far exceed that of the relevant population for an SM fix. In terms of the "pain" involved, an SM fix will probably go faster (could probably be done if they skip one DLC) because there aren't many factions of people trying to influence how SM works the way you have them trying to influence PVP. PVP is the hot mess it is now because of too many conflicting suggestions from these factions that were never fully vetted before they were implemented. To undo and fix PVP would likely involve hiring an entire team who can peel away at the layers and figure out what is going on vs what should be going on... oops, there goes one DLC. Once they get that, then they can actually implement what needs to be done... and there's another DLC gone. Let's add to the fact that the avid PVPers cannot agree on what's right, wrong, and nice-to-have in terms of a fix. Determining that... uh, yeah... that's yet another DLC gone.

Yeah, definitely! I guess I may have mistranslated a bit by using the platinums as an example. Knowing the community, variants of these styles going onto a vendor wouldn't be recieved well.
Here's an idea!: They could, you know, expand on these current SM styles by bringing the gamemode back. :/

i would not mind them coming back into a vendor at all

It was a lot of work and skill to earn them. It would be total bs to put them on quark vendor. I for one would be willing to lose a dlc to see sm return.

Looks like I called it, because SM styles are exclusive, people don't want them to be put in the vendor or anywhere else because they earned them at the time and now that SM is gone.

It's exactly like the Back from the Hack cosmetic argument lol.


That said, I wouldn't mind Variants of the Existing SM styles or Variants of the SM pets and Base items.

Variants would be different and would still make having the OG item or cosmetic still feel special for those that earned it.

I am totally fine if it is a Variant of the Style and Pets from SM that get put on some vendor for people to obtain. I don't think that a Variant is warranted for Base Items though, those should be good just to be put straight up on it. I honestly just don't want these great items and styles to be lost forever.

So what could be done with the Styles to create a good but desired variant?

- Exo Suit I think the easiest part to make a variant is the back where the reward color could be set to straight Black maybe. I'm not sure what to do for the Chest/Pants though. Maybe mix up the channels some but I would want to keep the Shoulder channel as a glowing channel for the Chest.
- Trigon maybe change the locked black chest color to a grey color.
- FoS for this could maybe the Insignia portion be turned into an Emblem slot and keep the rest as is?
- Happiness Home could maybe have a color lock change on the gear to something fitting.


- For the Lantern pets I think they could just swap up the colors between the different pets.
- For the FoS pets again just change the color of them.
- For the Trigon pets again change the color of them.
- For Happiness Home pets again change the color of them.

so is it wrong to take the opposing stance on the issue without getting laughed at? were you around when servers went down for over 2 months in 2011? did your credit card company change your credit card number because it was exposed from the 2011 hack attack? that's just nice that you think it's a laughing matter.

I'd like to ask you a question:

Let's assume Daybreak would be hacked badly from next December to February, and affected account data would again have Daybreak suggest to get the CC number changed etc. Daybreak would decide to re-imburse affected accounts with the same feat and mask because the incident got them close to shutting down forever and there's not enough manpower to create other re-imbursements and there were only few accounts from the original hack left anyway. Those few would get 6 months of free subscription to make up.

How would you feel about that since in that situation, the people getting feat and mask would go through the same scenario as the people back then ?











The point is: there is a difference between exclusive items and items that have become unobtainable. Sometimes items are or are considered to be in both categories, sometimes they are just exclusive (but can still be earned the same way) and sometimes they were not meant to become exclusive/unobtainable, but suddenly due to game changes or legal trouble (BvS emblem kits) they become. And a certain group of players will not even start an MMO of which they know upfront that it comes with a long list of things they will never be able to obtain, hurting the new player numbers.

I think the styles and pets should be exclusive to SM, so as such they should not return unless their respective SM returns with it.

That said, I think there should be some way of obtaining the base items. There were several cool base items, and they were all tradeable, which unlike exclusive styles from Booster Bundles didn't have as much of an indication of being there for a limited time in the long run. SM was an event which for a while rotated and came back, so stopping it means those who wanted or now want SM-exclusive base items are for the most part out of luck.

Bring back the base items somehow, while keeping the exclusivity of the SMs with the style and pet rewards.

Seconded.

Base items were tradable. Those are also in hands who never stepped in SM even so giving them out again won't hurt but styles and pets were character bound and are an indicator for your character as to how far you made it. Same for titles though Round 10 titles were laughable freebies.

Not all titles

Sorta like this approach, but it leaves room for uproar. Imagine the devs bring back each respective SM as events, open from level 10 onwards and statclamped at CR34, all the goodies except for the titles.... or even with the titles but no longer with the year in it....

Im curious about the mentality here.

It seems SM players and I've got stuff from SM myself, want all things locked away; or at the very least opinion is split down the middle

Im not quite sure i see the reason for it, keeping say the styles and titles and pets, maybe, although i don't personally care, but base items too.

I just find it to be stifling of creativity to preserve a sense of self indulgent elitism.

Sure we got rewards for competing and participating in the content but to completely lock out others in the future?

Im becoming more sympathetic towards the players who missed out as time goes on.

I mean i don't know if people noticed by halloween introduced modular versions of OG auras, i saw no outrage then over that, seemingly went completely unnoticed.

Perhaps variants can be introduced to appease both sides.

Variants are fine but I'm definitely in the camp of don't bring back the original stuff and just give it away for marks or sell it.

That or they could just bring back Survival Mode and let people try for it. *Yes I know this is not happening, I'm just being silly.*

I think ideally everyone acknowledges that the best solution would be to bring back SM.

I think it's just more a case of being realistic about what should happen should that not eventuate.

I agree variants would work.

It comes down to the fact that I don't think there is much of an argument against the styles and pets remaining gone forever unless SM comes back. The only argument is for the base items, why? cause people just "want them" for whatever reason to finish their lair or keep some theme going but there are no feats tied to them etc its just players apparently "want" the base items again.

What about other base items that are gone forever or so it would seem they don't come back.
-Past Anniversary Posters
-Past Membership Gifts
-The mischievous question mark
-SOE Live base items
-Patriotic Rewards base items (no PS player in the games history can even own any of these)
there might be some others but you get my point where no one has brought up or cared to mention those ones so I guess we just need every single base item every created in the game to always be available to all players on a base item vendor to make everyone happy? Is this it? Things are allowed to be gone that is how you distinguish yourself from playing a game for years and years. So just because a player picks up dcuo he should have access to everything for the past 7 years to create the lair he wants?

I'm not trying to be mean or come off as overly elitist, despite all evidence to the contrary i'm just saying I think we've had enough handouts in this game and need to draw some boundaries in terms of just giving away everything that players can't earn or was in the past.

Bring back SM