By this time next month we should have episode 30.

With af3 you pretty much got your 410 done just doing your missions every day. Maybe you had to kill a few extra, but it wasn't much. You only had to grind if you weren't playing every day. In AoJ, things fell a bit farther behind, you weren't killing as many things for your daily missions, so you had to grind more. With rwc, 42 of the 333 are guaranteed as part of the other weekly mission, so it's 291 that you need to kill. Unless I'm forgetting something, the daily missions get you a minimum of just 77 kills. That's a lot of excess grinding for this weekly, and there aren't good clumps of adds this time.

Players offer explanations either because they have some kind of understanding of the situation or a good enough guess for things the Devs won't divulge (for a variety of reasons), or it has been answered before and some of us remember that answer. If the search function in here worked better most of us would just find the post(s) with the answers and link to them. Since that's not an option, and since Mepps is not in the habit of repeating himself, players (like myself) have taken it upon ourselves to inform or enlighten other players on what they might have missed.

Speaking of that and the portion I highlighted above...it has been answered before (to some degree...i'll explain). It was stated some time ago that the amount of time to create content wasn't dependent on the type of content...meaning it doesn't make a difference if it's a raid or a solo...still takes them around the same time and resources to make. You might ask "what about rehashed content". The time they save in reusing assets is spent in other areas of the new content (like the brand new maps that get made, particularly if there's a strong chance of reusing those maps as well).

Now, I don't know if you've been paying proper attention, but it's pretty clear that they have particular content size formula...and you need only look back at the whole monthly episode thing to see this pattern. What I mean is every episode is broken up into 6 pieces of content. How that math works out change from episode to episode, but here's to samples of what it looks like:

Amazon Fury 3:
Olympus (Raid*), God of Monsters (Raid*), Underworld Trials (Alert), Raising Hades (Duo), Seeing Shades Again (Solo Mission in Gotham Under Siege), Typhon's Monster Invasion (Open Word Daily Solos with Weekly content). Add that up and it's six pieces of content.

Age of Justice:
Justice For All (Raid*), Ultimate Soldier (Raid*), War Crimes (Alert), Saving Justice (Alert), Time Torn Area-51 (Open Word Daily Solos with weekly content #1), War-Torn Village (Open Word Daily Solos with Weekly Content #2). Add this up and it's also six pieces of content.

Riddled With Crime:Gotham City Zoo (Raid*), Rise of the Bat (Alert), Turf War: Team Joker (Duo), Turf War: Team Riddler (Duo), Amusement Mile (Open World Daily Solos with Weekly Content). This one is technically five pieces of content because the solo stuff is all in one area only, which makes it the only aberration from the 6 pieces of content formula. Then there's whole Event-turned-to-episode thing.

Despite the anomaly that is Riddled with Crime, they've continued the same structure they started with Halls of Power part 2 which bled into the whole monthly episode content (HoP2 had 2 raids, 1 alert, 2 duos, 1 open world...six pieces of content). Every six new pieces of content would replace the six oldest pieces of content and so on and so on.

Based on the whole time it takes to create content (which they have explained before), it would seem that in order to maintain the release schedule they had, they couldn't add another piece of content...otherwise it would greatly delay the release of the content. Of course, now you'll site the long time between Episode 27 (AF3) and Episode 28 (AoJ) and the answer to that was events. You specifically as well as others didn't consider it content solely because it wasn't permanent, but it still counts because the development time was still the same and it still adhered to the structure they had established.

If the answer I gave isn't good enough for you...fine, so be it. You still have the option of looking for the answer that was given before or you can choose to believe it was never answered at all. I know I read it somewhere some time ago, but can't recall exactly which thread has it, especially since it's the kind of question that was asked in several threads.
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TL;DR...They have a schedule and budget they'd like to adhere to, so they stick to the 6 (sometimes 5) pieces of content formula. The configuration of the formula doesn't change the time table.


*[Elite doesn't count since it's not a different instance, just a harder version of the same content]

I'm with you. I enjoy chipping away at them each day, or spending a day off lazily working on them while listening to music or a podcast or something. And they are a good thing to spend time on while waiting for the eternal queues to pop. But yeah, I understand why some folks don't like them.

I adore the open world stuff in the last three DLCs. The ability to have something to do while waiting for a group to form or to run with a couple of leaguemates is very nice. You aren't stuck doing them solo if you don't want to, but you aren't stuck waiting for others, like all the instances.

All good and i agree with some of your view on it. Im not calling em lazy either. I was simply listing reasons. I also get the point that its never been done. But TCs were never done in this game before. BBs too. Quark vendor. List goes on and on. Imo they should focus much more on content. Content, good content, is what makes players stick around. The new shiny of a style wears off quickly. Sometimes in less then 24 hours for people. Plus every video game ive ever played that was good was always about the content. The way the game plays, the instances, the fun factor, etc. This game needs more of that, badly imo.

Because over the last year the content has not been that great and we seem to keep getting less when it comes to content overall. And when i say content i mean instances and the rewards in those instances. And again the praising of less the average content is simply silliness. I get some of it can be subjective. But when comparing episodes an episode that functions properly and has a minimal amount of bugs is always better then 1 thats full of bugs and has multiple broken missions. I guess the argument can be made that RwC went live with many bugs and had less content compared to other episodes. So how could they create a bigger episode with minimal bugs? So i get it.

But i feel the lowering of the bar/expectations around here needs to end. Some players seem so happy to get mediocrity. So content with broken stuff. Happy to get less and even expect it

I mostly agree. You also bring up a good point about TCs and the like but considering that they probably won't stop TCs it also makes the demand of a relatively extreme amount of content unreasonable IMO. They also have several issues in game such as PvP and bugs. Although it's unfair to us players, demanding them to focus all their time and resources on DLCs might mean certain bugs and PvP won't be looked at.

I agree with this second paragraph, particularly the part about bugs.

You have a point here but can you really blame them? When players had high expectations after monthly content began they were disappointed. Players also had high expectations for PvP ever since Belle Reve was released and then a year later nothing. Hopes were raised due to the revamp yet months later we have nothing about PvP, then that odd survey comes along. I agree that we should set the bar higher for a better quality game (we deserve it, especially if subbing still takes the same amount of money) but it's also important not to have false hope and hope for them to do something they've never even done in the past, let alone doing that something now with TCs in the way. IMO the focus is just too high on TCs.

Suggesting open world activities, a better open world area, an extra instance, certain mechanics, less bugs, etc, is a lot different than demanding 3 of each instance, an awesome open world and no recycling. With such demands there's a good chance you'll be highly disappointed.

the 43 for riddled with crime is nice. if we had more transporters or bagmen it'd be even better.

better open world would be nice really. like having iconic drops being the reward for finishing bounties. i'd be ecstatic to beat say avatar of sin if i could get his wing style. also why can't we have some of our more exciting raid and alerts environments be open world? like ranx, mogo, halls of hades, gotham zoo?

I just hope they do Owlman some justice.

Dude is by far the most unpredictable and dangerous of the Crime Syndicate.



Whatever content he's in needs to be the most difficult.

I also hope they include the ENTIRE Crime Syndicate in the episode as well - with the Cyborg, Atom and Firestorm variants.

tbh I wish it'd go back to 2 alerts, 3 raids (1 easy, 1 medium, and 1 hard) making you have to gear up via solos, duo's, and alerts and possibly the easy raid before being able to do the medium and hard raid. Like it use to be.