Dev Discussion Update: Time Capsules, Quarks, and Costs

I think a better example would be discontinuing a product they once sold for a couple bucks, only to bring it back a few years later but only available through purchase via reward points you get for shopping with the store

Two questions:

-How often are you planning to refresh the vendor? Once per time capsule release? Twice a year? Once a year?

-Are you planning to keep the same items on the vendor and just add more, or will some items be removed after a certain amount of time?

I understand that the team is still in the initial phases of this launch and these kinds of decisions may have not yet been made, but any insight you might have would be helpful as far as planning out our purchases.

A good portion of end game players pay of this game, and have done so for many, many, years. I'd say the first 3 to 4 years, rarely did we see reused maps. Now we see them with each DLC. All new content should be in new maps. Not really sure what else to say, new DLC SHOULD EQUAL NEW MAP!

This last year and a half Daybreak has obviously made a killing off TC. Does the content that is thrown at us seem worth it to you, really?

I'm pretty sure every dlc since The Last Laugh has reused maps. But what if the story dictates we return to a certain area? Should that area have been inexplicably completely rebuilt every time?

Again assumptions, for all you know time capsule money could directly go to an off shore account to fund global cooling...

You mentioned water release - Its been planned for years, well before time capsules, no? I bet it was mostly finished already, easily implemented, and required little to no additional funding by time capsules.

You mentioned some of the new content, but wasn't content released before time capsules? So why now do they have to have this stream of income if content was previously available without the capsules?

You mentioned the revamp, I happen to agree it was needed, its debatable what actually paid for it though...

Where does the sub money we pay go? The replay badges? The skill point unlocking funds? The episode money for those that are premium?

Face it. Fact is you do not know where any of this money actually goes...

Have to agree, people naming everything that has came out since the introduction of time capsules do not count as "where is our capsule money going" because it's all stuff they either had planned for awhile or have been doing for years, which is still arguably worse then how it was done in the past. So, where is the capsule money really going to? Is there a secret hidden project we don't know about? Maybe shedding a little light into their book of agendas will ease some people's minds.

Nope. Episode six did, but most episodes after had new maps. The raid map was used in the alerts, solos, and duos, but it was a new map.

And yes, if we have somewhere new to go it should be rehashed. Open world stuff I understand like the starro and current stuff. Open worlds would cost a fortune to remake, so I go get that. But reusing banes are, when we are doing joker content makes a lot of sense. Use the hotel where his mission was and build off of that. There are lots of options with little results coming to us.

I want more value for the money I spend on the game, not less.

Conceptually time capsules are a nice addition but it seems your concepts and actual implementation are worlds apart, Other games have rng loot boxes that are exclusively cosmetic but instead you decide to include progression into this RNG fest. you completely disregard the feedback and advice of most players and only listen to the ones who would rather suck up to you such as a few people in this very thread.

Completely done with this game because the design decisions are incredibly poor and i cant see the game improving in the near future.

You said it better.

This is kinda of a surprise coming for you (not in the bad way), you are probably the one who most supported this game. Time Capsules aren't a bad idea, the way they implemented it is wrong, as you mentioned, in a game like OW, the boxes don't impact the gameplay and we can also get ALL cosmetic items without spending a single cent. If time capsules worked like this they could implement many more ways to sell it. i don't know if it would generate more revenue, but would definetelly help with the game longevity, since many players started to leave when the p2w thing began.

And get rid of the RNG on how many Quarks you get from opening a time capsule. Example of situations that shouldn't be happening but could be currently:

Player 1
50 openings
10 quarks - 20x
13 quarks - 20x
~27 quark average - 10x

Player 2
50 openings
10 quarks - 20x
13 quarks - 20x
50 quarks - 2x
106 quarks - 1x
40 quarks - 7x

Player 1 has 730 quarks.
Player 2 has 946 quarks.

^Why does Player 2 get $10-20 worth of quarks more just from RNG. For a vendor that's supposed to be a guaranteed path toward a cosmetic item, there shouldn't be RNG to bias how long that path takes. PvE vendors have a set cost and content drops a consistent currency in order to attain said vendor items. Instead of playing a game of technicalities and saying that you can get 10-100 quarks when you have the RNG values tuned toward the lower values to actually average at <30 over a long time period, you should just make it whatever average value you wanted people to have and it be locked at that value.

As long as feats are included in TC's and even just the smallest part of the Quark vendor, those items are no longer considered OPTIONAL. Feats are part of progression. We've just started to settle down after a pretty large disruption with the revamp to do exactly that....make sure SP (which comes from feats) contributes to progression in a meaningful way.

As long as feats are tied to TC contents and Quark purchases, there will ALWAYS be a sense of obligation to pursue them, whether you wanted them or not. That basic approach is why I disagree with the vendor; not for its own sake.

I fully appreciate the need to justify the costs that go into licensing and building cool styles. I 100% believe that not everyone likes every style so that makes outright selling of said styles unpredictable and therefore risky. I don't have a good alternative suggestion. All I can say is this approach is not good.

An alternative would be to put a featless version on the marketplace, then an enhanced version with feats attached in time capsules. So those that want the style without having to play the lottery can just buy it, and if they want the feat they can go earn it with the enhanced version.

Super Great!

Firstly, thank you for listening to the feedback and taking a look at the pricing, how far the appreciation goes naturally depends on how reasonable the pricing becomes.

I think in general much of the community was in consensus that the pricing was horribly absurd.

Having said that Mepps, coming quickly to time capsules. I agree they are in a large number of games, but when you look at the other games they tend to have redundency systems in place; however, Daybreak does not.

You can continue going on and on and on forever getting nothing other than items you do not want.

If we take Blizzard and their overwatch boxes for example they have a redundancy in place, within their odds which basically gives you a "legendary" item with every $10 spent. They also award coins for all duplicate items separately, allowing you to just outright buy what you want from all styles available.

When people put forth this vendor idea in the first place it was given as an opportunity to have such a system in place so that if you didn't get what you were seeking, you could simply buy it outright in time.

It's all good and well to have other items on it, but it doesn't change the fact it's very difficult to get what you want from the capsules; in fact it's more likely to make that harder given people will take extra quarks instead of duplicate capsule items.

I'm not sure I've seen quite exactly the same vendor in other games, Mepps, but that aside, you need to price this stuff reasonably.

If we do take another game for example SWTOR, which heavily used RNG boxes, they've even changed their tune and started adding the rare stuff "direct to market".

The only difference is they're doing it at a reasonable price; most things go for $25-$40. This is what I've been saying to you all along $25-$40. Making something potentially upward of $250 is just absurd, I'm not saying some people aren't going to pay that, of course you'll get some whales doing that, but that doesn't make it any less absurd.

Even if it means you take the RNG out of the quarks and make it a flat 10 every capsule so that it's a stable system and source of revenue, then so be it, that would be better than the pricing you've currently got going on.

I understand you're factoring in "free stabilizers" into the pricing equation too, so dependent on what you come back with I'll have a reasonable look at it. But what came out yesterday was truly mind blowing

I"m all for TCs adding cosmetics and whatever, but not when they have the feats attached to them. They could've made them purely cosmetic and generated revenue that way, but think about what they did when they added the feats to them. They're not just cosmetic anymore. BTW we had changes before that were also considered revamps such AMs, WM, CR relevancy, removing those things that never should've gone into the game is on them, they wanna call it a revamp? Ok. How do you think previous changes were done when there were no TCs? We had changes and powers coming out before TCs existed so I don't understand why you think we need TCs for any of that.

One thing's for sure. PT Barnum was right.

Technically we did have *a* new map with EP29 with the Zoo.

But throughout DCUO history we've tended to have rehashed content, its just become more of an occurrence with time.

EP1 - All new, no rehash.
EP2 - All new, no rehash.
EP3 - All new (ish, with maybe the exception of one of the then deserted areas of Gotham)
EP4 - Rehashed instances.
EP5 - Rehashed instances.
EP6 - Mostly rehashed instances although we did get bases and villains got Steelworks.
EP7 - Some new instances but some locations we returned to, like Central City and the Iconic solos. Alt Gotham/Metropolis is debatable.
EP8 - All new, no rehashes.
EP9 - Mostly rehashes aside from Mogo/Ranx.
EP10 - Some rehashes, but some new instances too with the Paradise Island/Docks instances, and daylight Gates.
EP11 - League halls and Necropolis, otherwise rehashes.
EP12 - Mostly new aside from open world in metro and the Ferris Aircraft mission. And first part of Impurity.
EP13 - Some new instances with raids but otherwise rehashes, but rehashes done well imo.
EP14 - Some rehashes, but we got New Genesis open world, some Apokoliptian factories and last part of NGN.
EP15-17 - Mostly rehashes besides FMB duo and the dam part of BSP.
EP18-EP20 - Mostly rehashes aside from the awful The Demon's Plan instance and last part of BN.
EP21-EP23 - Mostly rehashes aside from Phantom Zone, some of Science Spire (the first part is the Winter Seasonal event instance), and BBS.
EP24-EP26 - Less rehashes than other monthly content here. DWF is a nice instance, as is Iceberg Lounge. EP26 got badly rushed and Wayne Manor is just a giant Gothic base lair with enlarged base items randomly spread. Kandor was rushed as well, had so much more potential.
EP27 - Some rehashed instances, but some really nice new instances too on Olympus. Some of the newer parts of the Underworld in the duo were nice as well.
EP28 - Village is nice, but the Savage Stronghold is annoying and so many narrow corridors. Otherwise rehashed.
EP29 - Mostly rehashed aside from the Zoo.

Going by this pattern I'd expect more new instances in EP30 than we had from EP28 or EP29. Maybe as I said in a thread before we just get 2 or 3 less good episodes followed by 1 or 2 better episodes in return. Maybe the revenue from TCs is heading towards an incredible EP30! Who knows?

Getting back to the thread, I do think that if you guys want more people to be genuinely interested in TCs, they should not include feats, the vendor is a good idea but only to contain existing rewards from TCs, and make sub-capsules tradeable again for the members who don't want to buy loads or that many stabilisers. Maybe then it could lead to better things going into 2018 (one can maybe hope).


But RNGing everything, including existing styles that weren't originally RNG, is just going to lose even more players and ultimately cost the game.

Mepps, the 1 thing that I take from this post is that your company's idea of supporting the game is purely financial.

There are people out there who have probably supported the game financially via a sub for it's duration who will never see most of the premium TC items. But they have also supported the game through teaching players who had no clue what they were doing (given the lack of in-game tutorials) & have indirectly led to a lot of money being made because people they taught hung around & subbed instead of quitting.

There is currently a lot of cynicism & distrust. I personally had 4 saved stabilizers, 1000 lp & was gonna throw another $20 at these TC's (cos the gear & a couple of the auras are pretty awesome imo) but there is a nagging doubt that DB are trying to get every penny they can out of us players before closing down, & it's therefore difficult to justify spending much over & above my sub. The population is slowly going down. Now I'm not saying it's all down to TC's, there's the revamp, there's the content/lack of content/lack of quality content in part due to the resources being used on the revamp. TC's play a part though. A good handful of pretty prominent forumites have said the quit based on the quark vendor prices being the straw that broke the camel's back.

Is there no way you would consider a different vendor for obtaining TC items, etc? By all means make it super grindy, like 3 months of running all content in game to obtain a material. Think the original game feats for running so many alerts, etc. This way you're still getting the income from the 'must have it now' types & the people who occasionally throw $20 or $40 at TC's in the hope of getting lucky, but for those who are maybe saving to put their kids through college to be the next game developer there is another way of getting an item if they want it bad enough. This would also hopefully get people playing all the great older content again & might stop an exodus of new players who give up before putting much money into the game because they hit a brick wall levelling.

I think most people want to see a plan, a long term plan & to see what the money they're putting into the game is going towards.

Woops - remove this post, was trying to edit another post and made this one by accident.