Cloning our artifacts 200, it's time!

I think it's high time to have this possibility for our character (s), because I don't know about you, but all the stuff that needs to be upgraded now on DCUO, it's starting to do and it's even more annoying when you have to start over and over and over again the same thing, over and over and over again, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned, artefacts don't really motivate me to do rerolls anymore, it becomes both very difficult and the pleasure of the rérolls is not really the same anymore (except for the used as farm or bank) because of that it is very difficult to be at the full potential of our rérolls and especially it costs too much dear, it can quickly become a financial pit for those who do not pay attention to it, stopped mixing passion / fan and greed!

I think it is high time to have this possibility, this in order to be able to better advance on other artifact in progress of leveling or not yet.

What I propose:

-Allow to clone the artifact only when it has reached rank 200 via the R&D machine.

- No failure of the attempt !!!

- collect a certain number of artifact elements (or new elements specific to that?) in order to achieve this (number to be defined, I think a significant number is necessary)

- Of course, object impossible to sell and not cumulative!

- Possibility of breaking or disassembling it to recover the craft elements, but not all, can be recovered 60/70% of the elements used (again figure to be determined.

Why ? only once at 200? I think it makes sense to me to be able to do this once the item is 100% complete at least 1 time and like that, the things sold in the in-game store will always remain interesting for our artifacts that are not yet LVL 200

In addition, let's not forget that the "allies" system is coming and it is still the same principle of upgrade, I think it's time to relieve us a little of that!

Awaiting feedback and your possible ideas to refine this idea, but I think the basics are exposed.

Ok but why would they do this? Artifacts are one of their biggest forms of income. If you don’t like spending money on artifacts than don’t do it. You can’t buy something then blame the company that sold it to you. A company is not responsible for controlling your spending. You either invest time or money. You have options. With the née update you will actually be able to get seals more easily. Meaning less reasons for you to spend money. And funny things is that people were asking for the ability to buy those tokens from the market place. Which at that point you might as well just buy them directly.

With that being said, it makes no sense for them to do this.

I do not know if you are completely stupid or naive or just ***-licking as impossible, but to say that it is a consequent lack of their "livelihood" is big nonsense and totally false, the game attracts many players either looking for a new MMO type game or fans of the DC Universe and just for that it is impossible that it has such a big impact as you seem to make it believe, moreover, The IDEA ALWAYS ALLOWS EXPENDITURE IN THE SHOP (which you seem to cherish time ...), and if ever it could, the fault could be theirs, by dint of making it a TOO PAY TO XP game / PAY TO WIN, (a skin shop, it pays very well too!) Unless to empty you that pays in a game, be logical, so to understand you, with your words, for you it seems normal if a citizen empty his salary (no matter how much) in a game that collects hundreds of thousands?

You are always negative when someone offers something, you are more and more uninteresting, yet the idea totally compensates both the store and the players, this idea totally fits in DCUO !!!

In a parallel universe title of this thread is: "How can DCUO do harakiri?"

I'm pretty sure personal attacks are against ToS.

Your constant demands written in poorly English makes you very hard to take seriously. For the record; I'm Danish, not being a native English speaker is hardly an excuse, when you choose to communicate on an English Forum, imo.

Nothing here seems "I do not know if you are completely stupid or naive or just ***-licking as impossiblec" to me. On the contrary, I think DeitySupreme seems to have common sense and is able to properly communicate his well-reasoned assessment.

Or just in you universe !

You apparently didn't understand that he WANTS it.... He didn't say it was for DBG's benefit....


Now do you see why they should do it?

Ok...so let's pretend that this is something they wanted to do. And assuming they were fine with taking the direct loss of revenue on Nth/Catalysts/Seals. A more reasonable request would be some sort of cloning token/process that would be a fraction of the money tied up in a level 200 arti.

Let's say you were building a 200 and buy 5 or 6 Perfected XPs and use the rest out of dropped XP (thats a lot of XP...but sure). 6 Perfected are $60. Let's also assume you had the catalysts and would buy none (some do buy...but hey, we are in fantasy land, right?). So $0 there. Then there are seals. The journey from 0-140 would probably take 10 seals at least in most instances...sometimes more, sometimes less. But to keep round numbers, let's use 10. 10 SOP is $5. Then three SOC for 160,180 and 200 - $15. So. Cash value, they are tossing out $80 worth of income (again...very rough numbers for an example, some people buy the whole thing at $100+ bucks). A reasonable request would be to maybe get some sort of clone token for $40-$50...already a decent savings and maybe the people would would NOT build up a 2nd 200 MIGHT spend $40-$50 to get one vs another year of grinding Nth/cats and spending the $20 on seals. It would work out that DBG actually makes a bit of money...win-win, right? Nope....they should give it for free. Seems reasonable.

And we already have the ability to break it and receive 50% of the Nth in a 200 Arti. They even up that to 100% on 2x XP weeks. That's better than your 70% any day.

Now, don't get me wrong....I hate breakthroughs as much as the next guy, but I also get that DBG is a business, and in the end they are here to make money. Artifacts are part of that, so although we might want some refinement in the breakthrough/leveling process, I'd never expect them to write off the tons of money made by Artis...especially for those who feel the need to have more than the 6 needed to run 2 roles for most players. If someone needs 7+ Artis, why would DBG shut those obviously motivated customers down?

Damnit that gif made me laugh to hard lol.

As a company that needs to find ways to produce income in order to keep they company going yes they need to find ways to get people to spend. It would be one thing for a gaming company to make a product that has an impact on game play to be purchasable without allowing for a way to also be earned in game. However the game does do this. Let’s look at what cost a player can do in order to level artifacts.

Nth metal can be purchased from the market place. It also drops as an item just by playing the game. So options.
Catalyst can also be purchased from the market place. It can also be bought from Constantine for source marks which are received by playing certain missions.
Seals which are needed to push breakthroughs can also be purchased through the market place. Previously this was only available to players with membership as a 1 per month deal when using loyalty points. When the update goes live free/premium players will be able to get 1 free this coming month (possible 1 per month if it stays as a pattern) and members get an addition 3 more. These are by using destiny tokens from the new daily login. And players can also use the loyalty points to buy them too. So again, available through the game.

So you do not need to spend a penny to upgrade artifacts at all. Especially with free/premium getting 1 token which can be used to buy it per month. So it comes down to time vs money. That’s a choice that is given to players. Do you as a player value time or money more. So being able to duplicate items will just dig into their profits for no reason other than players wanting it to be easier to get artifacts. It’s not their responsibility to manage what you spend.

Now you could argue that some players do have addictions. That’s is a different story. In those cases I don’t think there’s anything they would be able to do. At least not in response to artifacts (time capsules is different since it falls under gambling addictions which is a real thing). For that case I would hope that the players friends try to be their and hopefully stop them. But duplicating artifacts? They don’t have a reason to do it.

If anything it might not even change anything. The give players to duplicate artifacts for alts. It wouldn’t be something as simple as you got it for 1 toon so you get it for them all. Instead it would have a price tag attached to it and possible wouldn’t even unlock it at 200. You could argue that you’d get the new artifacts with enough experience to be 200 but the breakthroughs are a different story. So now you’d have to do breakthroughs and what ever other feature that would be introduced to do this.

As for the name calling. Do that as much as you want. Doesn’t bother me. But if you want to have a civil discussion I’ll be happy to continue explaining why it wouldn’t happen.

It is sad to see how much pay to win has become the revenue model for this game. The only thing you can't buy at this point is new skill based feats. Cloning artifacts would likely involve a marketplace item(s). Alts and experimentation definitely paid the price for this new revenue model.

But you can level artifacts without paying a penny. The game is as pay to win as you make it. A player could have 3 maxed artifacts with 4 maxed augments all by the first alert if they want to. Or the same player could take months to level them instead. Maxed artifacts are not required to run anything. Players tell each other that they must have them. Not the game. Do artifacts make content easier? Absolutely. That’s what it’s there for. But the game isn’t force players to get them ASAP.

That is the definition of pay to win. There was a time when buying XP or source marks would have been unthinkable. It's bean counter game development.

Than every mmo is pay to win. Every mmo offers ways to spend to lower the grind. If there is a way to progress using money someone will find it. The thing that matters is if the game gives you options to get said items or benefits. I’m not saying that dcuo isn’t extremely monetized. It clearly is. But the game gives you all the options in the world to progress without spending and no content requires you to pay to play anything. If you bought your artifacts with money and I grinded mine over time, yours won’t be any better. You got it sooner yes. But yours wouldn’t be better

It didn't use to be that way is all that I'm saying. If you think the game is better with a pay to win option, you're the ideal player for the game in its current state. I would rather a pay for content & cosmetics model.

The other mmo I play is Elite Dangerous and there is zero p2w it's DLC and cosmetics only.

Almost all my artifacts were grinded without spending a penny. This last bonus nth exp I leveled 2 arts to 200, 5 to 160, and 6 to 120. All without spending a penny. I just played smart. Pay to win would’ve been if there was some part of the artifact that would need to be paid for that you wouldn’t have access too without spending.

I also said this this game was extremely monetized.

Right, so the game isn't pay to win its 'extremely monetized'. Whatever definition suits your ego is fine by me. But, if someone pays for a launch day dps advantage sooner than anyone can grind it, we'll just say they used extreme monetization to win?

First I’m gonna start by saying that technically p2w is just a term players have come to an agreement to define certain undesirable traits of games. I was mistaken I’m saying that all MMO have some pay to win. I’ve actually never heard of that game. But most MMOs do actually have it in some form or another. You play one of the few games that doesn’t. So I stand corrected.

That aside there is a technical difference between pay to win and pay to progress. Normally everyone calls both aspects as pay to win and to a certain degree this is true. Including your statement of dcuo. But a more accurate way to describe dcuo would be pay to progress. Pay to win would be getting items or stats that would otherwise be unobtainable without paying money to gain an advantage. No amount of grinding or farming could change that. Pay to progress would be spending money to achieve the same stats available to everyone but faster. Either way these are just terms players have come to use. Just depends on how strict you want to be with the definitions. I’m taking the terms more literal while you are taking it more loose as an umbrella term. Which is fine. If you believe pay to win and pay to progress are the same thing than for you yes dcuo would be pay to win.

So we can agree to disagree. It’s perfectly fine either way.

okay - late to the party here:

Couple things: defending the current artifact system as a cash-cow for DCUO - while logically sound, because they do make money off of it - is also ignoring the fact that it's incredibly off-putting to both long-term invested players (says a player with 5 200 DPS arts on main and around 15 160s spread out throughout alts) and more importantly, new players.

Expecting every new player to come in and whale the system along just because some of us have done that is a big ask. I literally don't ask other people I know to play this game because that would basically be me saying "hey, you got like 700 dollars burning a hole in your pocket, right?".

And before one of y'all flies out the wings with a "WeLl YoU cAn MaKe ArTs JuSt By GrInDiNg" - we all know that's a fairly ******** response, the discussion wouldn't have ended up where it did if that were actually a practically applicable avenue of development. I work a full-time job, I have a life and responsibilities outside of DCUO, and to be blunt? It's tedium like that that makes a game unplayable. We already have enough (defensible) grind in game. Skill Points, the actual non-CR skip climb from level 30 to 342, every single time a new DLC is released we have to drop everything and go crank out a new set of gear. Things like that.

Now, I'm not actually playing at the moment because of the above reasons (and also because 'new job training' and 'writing' are more important to my personal future than DCUO is) - I'm waiting to see if the new DLC's modified approach to Nth metal propitiation is functional enough to make a grind meaningful, instead of right now where Nth metal drops are functionally just present as an enticement to spend money for meaningful gains by demonstrating how slow the alternative is. But that's a tomorrow-me issue.

Regarding the subject matter at hand here though : I think something like what the OP is suggesting is actually MORE likely to make the current system profitable, because if I could CLONE a level 200 Art, I would first have to HAVE a level 200 Art, and that's a lot of money coming in by itself. Someone who sees that 200 level Artifact as a stand-alone cash sink will do what I did - deck out their main, then say "you know what 160 is good enough", if I could duplicate a finished version artifact I'd probably have closer to 12 level 200 arts instead.

Other players who currently say "no way" to the idea of even ONE 200 art might change their mind about that if it were also possible to deck out an alt as a reward for putting in that combination of money and time. And finally - just because I put that money in doesn't mean I think anyone else should HAVE to in order to enjoy the game too - this "keeping up with the Jonses" crap is pretty much the reason why our peak active daily players is only 500 now, and the once-lightning-fast Trade/LFG scroll is now functionally a crawl.

If people keep defending this "exclusivity/entitlement mindset", that's only gonna get worse. These changes to membership wouldn't be happening if it wasn't already at a fairly critical point. At any rate.

Agreed, during the last 2x XP I leveled 3 Arts to 200(strat, cog, and EOG) and a purple to 199, for max benefit and spent maybe around $100 bucks which includes consuming a previously leveled 200 and a 160 art from past 2 x XPs, that I spent maybe $30 or $40 on. So in reality that $30 or $40 was already paid for so technically I paid around $60 for 3 200s(which includes taking a 160 art and turning it into 200 art and a transfer of XP from one 200 art to another 200 art.

It really depends on appropriately taking advantage of the sales and weekly events that are provided, while hoarding metal.