EU server - the low endgame population issue

I wanted to pull focus to this in light of recent events - this was already an issue before but is now much more apparent.

Besides maybe one league the EU server is very quiet at the moment in terms of endgame players, hero or villain. To define an endgame player - a player that actively runs recent episode content, including open world, duos, alerts, raids, and elite raids. These players usually strive to get as many feats as possible from that episode, if not all, and want to get better at the game, either through the mechanics of the content, and/or their own abilities in their role or roles. This is distinct from other players who play an episode casually or cosplay or stand and socialise in House of Legends, etc. etc.

This year I have already had to play on hero side more since:

a) when content has dropped it hasn't always been cross faction

b) villain side was already very dead, and queuing in via hero then switching you don't have supercharge which is a big disadvantage in some situations especially for some feats. If I'm heal or DPS (which I am normally) supercharge can be very important when running for certain feats or certain pieces of content

Since there is no faction token, or no cross-faction LFG system where you can make a pre-made group with the opposite faction and queue into the latest endgame content together, I decided it was worth levelling some hero toons - and in fairness with the House of Legends and seasonal vault updates that has been a somewhat easier process this year.

However with certain recent events, there are issues I can no longer ignore. They directly get in the way of me being able to do the content since when I log the LFG chat is dead, the friends/league list is empty, and more. Doesn't matter which time of day it is or which day of the week it is. I'm fine doing the seasonal, open world content and duo, and the omnibus to a degree. But VERY few players now run the elite raid, or any elite raid for that matter. Or try to form a group for any elite raid. One of the main contents that I play.

I want to play DCUO and I want to continue playing DCUO. But we have an issue here. An issue that may mean the remaining endgame players on EU server stop playing once players are geared from the episode and post-bonus marks week. Will there even be an endgame player base on EU server come February?

So I ask to the devs: What are you doing to help this problem?

Are you going to find a way so that heroes and villains can join a pre-made group and queue into content together?

Can US and EU servers ever merge into one?

Are you doing any form of advertisement to get more players to join the game? With the House of Legends update, the game isn't as steep in its P2W as it was, and despite the rocky episode launch of recent there are things to be positive about.

Anyways, this is my two cents on this topic.

I've heard about this before and you guy's have my greatest sympathies I cannot imagine how this must feel, this sounds like critical red level issues I do hope they can figure something out for you guy's but also all of us in general.

It should be implemented that the villains and heroes can make the same queue, at least in all the episodes after House of Legends, since it makes sense.

There should also be some kind of option, even if it takes a week or a long wait, that allows changing the character to the other server, even if it is definitely ... Not to mention if you play on other platforms that are not PC

Sounds crappy. I’m not sure a merger would solve your issues tho. Latency issues being a thing and time zones. Like wouldn’t the EU people be playing while the majority of the US is asleep? Then The whole server shut down time issue since it would probably happen at your peak play time. Merging factions is probably the only real viable possibility

After that you have to remember that Daybreak has a very bad reputation, you can always advertise to attract people, but if people have bad memories of Daybreak it will be difficult to attract people and especially to maintain them on their game.

There is also the fact that DCUO is not a game that allows long term play and this is easily seen, people stay around 2/3/4 weeks to play the DLC and go play elsewhere, this is a long standing problem on DCUO.

I agree with this very strongly.

I do too. Problem is that that is a player made problem more than the devs. Things that the devs could do would infuriate the community and cut profits way down. Stop letting players use replays would make it so players have to spread the load. Make counter feats only count while mission is active in the journal. Make all catalysts more rare. Make currency drops lower and increase vendor prices. Imagine how well that would go over lol. New dlc comes out and 70% of the community goes into no sleep mode and finishes everything by week 2. Not the devs fault unless we all decide that 1 or 2 bigger dlcs a year is acceptable. But then instead of 2 weeks, players would do 4. Maybe.

Only other things they can do for retention are seasonals and special events like they’ve been doing. SM will be back and that will bring a bunch of players back but they’ll only be running that so it doesn’t really help anything. Merging consoles and servers could be great or catastrophic depending where you live. Console merge probably has no real downsides minus the ridiculous USPCPS broker but some of us can go weeks playing everyday and not even use the broker so it is what it is. Could help stabilize it really. But we already know console merging isn’t on the devs to make happen.

In my opinion, player behaviour has always been linked to the game design, but I think that above all, DCUO suffers from its open world, which is really not attractive enough.

In the open world of a fantasy MMORPG you love to roam around and do everything it has to offer, or at least a good part of it, there is entertainment and a lot of quests to do here and there, in DCUO apart from quoti and hitting bosses like factory workers that's about all there is to do and that's probably what DCUO should strongly try to rework to maybe make the game more attractive in that respect.

You should see the switch servers. lol

I feel your pain and know what you are talking about, but with the recent event that happened, those players affected the whole. Were they mostly on EU side? Who knows. All I know is, if they undo it, and release all, we will just find ourselves with more players doing the same. (I know you aren't advocating this, just saying it.)

In terms of cross faction grouping, they said they want to do that, but there are a lot of problems with them straight opening it up. I would very much like it if they did. I have a villain that I like playing on, but it's a hassle to do the log hero, queue in, and switch to be reinvited.

As for the EU and US servers merging, this would be a HUGE problem in latency. I live in California and have played on the EU side and there is a several second delay on interacting with things. So if they did merge the servers, they would probably have them stationed here in the US. (Maybe even where the US ones are now.) Which can result in the same problem.

We can blame the PS3 for how the game developed. The PS3's lack of memory meant that developing more towards the Open World just was impossible to happen. Which resulted in them going instances for new open world maps. (Central City, Gotham Wastelands, etc) Then it came to a plateau with how we ended up with Monthly Content, which was strictly instance content. Really, the PS3 shaped how we have it now and it's hard for the devs to go another direction, though they try, there is always a lot of push back.

Can’t disagree there. I’ve been playing Valhalla and just the intro part of the game was 10hrs of exploring. But that’s a completely different game setup. The exploring aspect of this game is pretty non existent but that would all be solo play anyway. The open world bosses made the attempt but didn’t go over well even tho it sure had player retention. And the bonus weeks do seem to focus players into certain areas. Think it’s just a 10yr old game being a 10yr old game. It’s fighting new consoles, new xmas releases, family time yada yada. Basically, I think the issue needs players to sort out solutions just as much as devs cuz at this point, we all need to help keep it alive.

There is always complaints about this on the end of the year when we are 1-2 weeks near holidays that pretty much shutdown half the world, but I understand the corcerns. The EU and Switch servers don't manage to bring as much people back overtime as the US servers, not sure why that, but it was always the case. Plus, a lot of people went from EU to US due to population issues. Crossfaction and a server merge are the only things that can help with this, I hope they announce something on january, but other than that there's not a lot we can do besides expeculate and pray.

And...Some people talk about latency issues and timezone issues. But worst case scenario you'll have 180ms and a 10 hours timezone difference, average it would be 120-140 ms and a 5 hours difference. In fact it's not the best experience out there, but it's much better than playing from Latin America or Oceania and players from those regions do just fine and on top of it, it's much better than not playing at all, which is the case for Switch players and EU villains.

Of course they would need to solve the performance issues first, or we'd have 2 hours downtime everyday, but they seem to be working on it for over a year and maybe it's because of a server merge

I can only agree with LQ at this point.

A lot of the so called endgame players have been hit by this (and it is their own fault, 100%), but this also impacted the rest of the player base.

As I've gathered from the communcation that some have received, currently this concerns a 21 day suspension (with the risk of becoming a permanent ban eventually)

Right now, DCUO should be at the relative peak of activity, seeing a new DLC just released, I saw 30+ players online in my friend list (FL) on day 1 of the DLC (which probably hasn't happened since the previous FP DLC launch) and these usually aren't the most random players on my FL.
Now we are a couple of bumpy weeks further and I'll be impressed if there's more than 5 people online at the same time. The suspensions are impacting the player base, but that's not the only reason.

Advertising anywhere could be interesting, however, can you imagine starting to play this game as a completely new player?
I tried to bring this up at some points before, but there's a LOT needed to reach the point of becoming a said endgame player (CR, SP, Artifacts, allies, ..)
I understand that you can't be there in one day, or heck even a month, but I don't see how a new player can catch up anymore.

If you compare this to the likes of WOW, that admittedly hasn't been doing great either, you can start as a new player, usually if you buy the newest expansion you will receive a character boost.
You can run class trials, boost a character of your liking and just play the newest content without a huge mountain of catching up to you.

If you decide not to boost, before Shadowlands, they shortened the leveling experience to make it all more accessible again.

Isn't there a way for DCUO to do something similar?

RP wise having complete crossfaction seems a bit weird, but I think this is a step in the right direction for at least the few villain players left.

Server merging wouldn't be so bad either, I would take a full Watchtower House of Legends with server restarts during daytime over what we have now.
People from US side, which still has a somewhat healthy population as far I've gathered, don't seem to realise how bad it is, but running elite content is not as easy as it seems anymore.

I can't imagine latency being a problem, I've played on USPC about 8 years ago (I think, when was the OC DLC around?) while being located in EU (Belgium), usually on a public wifi from my ISP. I played PVP and PVE, never had any actual impact from latency.

There might be more technical / resource issues left, but that's what even DCUO / Daybreak has employees to solve these issues for, I hope.

This is always an issue I have a hard time to judge. As one living in Germany and playing on US servers, I find gameplay to be rather smooth; however, logging in, zoning and interacting with vendors or switch out gear to often take a second or so to register.
"Several seconds" does sound extremely bad and has me think it's less about client-server distance, but rather one's ISP quality.

Over the years (started playing on US in 2016) I noticed that I have a general delay of maybe half a second, so had to adjust to that and am doing very well to the point I've started (practicing) trinket and artifact swapping recently with some success. And I manage to often pull off some pickup and interaction snipes

Also, there are a lot of Europeans playing on US already, I know plenty and they all do well

Im not disagreeing with you, just offering a counter anecdote, the objective truth is most definitely somewhere between our experiences. But from my point of view, I think it would do more good than bad for the game as a whole, especially villain side.

edit: Correction: Logging in and switching toons always takes a significant amount of time, up to a minute in extreme cases, about 20-30s on average. Forgot to add that when restructuring the post for the nth time ^^

Hey, ISP matters a lot in this. US companies still aren't upgrading their systems.

But in the end of the day, you judge playing on the US fine and I know other do too, but you aren't speaking for the whole and Mepps/Devs have gone on the record that latency is the key factor they don't want to merge US and EU servers. Mine and your anecdotal story aside, it really would affect the whole. As EVERYONE would be filtering to the same servers. Latency will go up.

It also seems like most of the banned players were from EU Ps/Pc or atleast a larger number % wise based on the active population there, Not sure would be interesting to know the data.

I'd be curious to know where in the EU people are playing from and if the restrictions on "surprise mechanics" in several EU countries had much of an effect on the server population.

It's also 2-3 days away from Christmas.... ... ...

This is almost always the case for me in november and december, then the friend list gets a boost on the anniversary event. Last year was even worse with the Legion Episode (They just can't manage to hit a good episode on the end of the year lol) in my personal experience, then the 10th year anniversary was huge in player numbers.

At this point I'll just wait for the january announcements, there are a bunch of movies next year the studio can use to advertise DC and I hope they have stuff in mind to fix the server issues and do a merge. I just hope they won't waste their time doing something in the likes of the Omnibus and then delivery a lackluster Episode right after. A lot of people were putting fate on Legion of Doom and it turned out to be buggy and empty.

My hope is with the House Of Legends update and if seasonal vaults continue as they are, a new wave of endgame players should come on the EU server by the next episode. But by no means a guarantee.