League Interest Already Dead

Tonight I signed into DC to play with friends and league-mates. Hoping on to do dailies, I noticed that I was the only one on. Usually its around 9-15 people (current CR and 450sp+ players) on do the same things as I was. Especially grinding the ridiculous open world feats away.

Kind of curious as to why I was riding solo for the evening, I hopped onto Discord to see where all me league-mates where. One after the other I was getting message after message from people saying "I went back to____."

After a little fact finding, the overall consensus was that they burned out on this DLC after one week. ONE WEEK. Because they felt that the content was just too grindy and they didnt want to spend the little free time outside of work doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. Because they know full well that if they lapsed even for a moment, those open world groups wouldnt be around anymore after a certain period of time.

There has got to be a better solution for this than tinkering with how many people can make it into the phase. Running the one raid we got has been a struggle because people are too focused on grinding the feat, and now my league-mates are already sick of the content.

I love DCUO so the dev team needs to learn from this. This game should still focus on fun and objectives not lazy grinding. and if you do put in a grinding feat, dont make it so ridiculous that you are pushing players away. There is little to nothing appealing about the product the devs just put out. One well designed raid map doesnt make up for all the terrible crap and glitches that came with this DLC.

I don't think there's any winning for the devs in this state of the game, it seems everything they make and release has to be attainable on day one for the community or else they hate it or think its poorly designed or "too grindy." Once they do the opposite, they get even more complaints saying "there's nothing to do" "it was too easy" "is that it?" I kind of feel for them.

I get the concern about there not being entire full phase groups available for the bounties eventually, but they have been actively watching and making adjustments based on what they see so that even once those huge groups are gone you should still be able to gather up a raid sized group and kill the bounties.

This new try at the bounties is something a little different and of course bound to have flaws, I have a feeling they may not do something like this again in the future. Or they'll try something similar but different enough to get a better response. From what I see, they're actively looking at the state of their game and trying different methods till they find whats suitable for everything. You can see this in the fact that there's been different layouts and methods throughout all the dlcs, while some other more recent ones adopt similar methods of past ones that worked well.

Providing your own feedback as to what you feel should be changed or improved upon helps tremendously, but there's no need to insult the devs. They already ARE learning from this, they are constantly learning. Maybe we could learn some things too, and give things more of a chance. I know I was in a similar stance, voicing my own frustrations about all of this, but suddenly I've noticed more what they have been going for and so I'm seeing it for what it is. I know they will continue to try and ease all of this for us and make it more user friendly and all that, but of course they don't want to just hand everything to us.

I recommend to just give the DLC time. Not everything has to be completed within the first week or two and they're still making adjustments and fixes as always. If that means you want to take a break from the game then go ahead, breaks are healthy anyways.

This is a general message to everyone and not all targeted at you.

Honestly, I've mostly blown off the instanced content to focus on the World Bosses. My experiences with Bounties in previous Episodes has always been if you didn't farm those feats right away, you probably would never get them. Once people hit those feat counters, they walk away and never look back at those painful grinds. Especially since these World Bosses are very poorly balanced towards needing groups of 20+, doing them after the Episode leaves Event status is going to be almost impossible. When was the last time you saw 20+ people in Chaos Gotham or Starro Central City, for example?

And then, because of the crashing issues, and the phasing issues, it pretty much means once you get into a phase that is successfully running them, you're going to stick it out as long as you can, because once it falls apart, you're probably hosed. Getting an invite into a new phase is rough, and then there is a wait while you spam your Phase To trying to nab an opening. And in the meanwhile, just one cycle of the bosses takes 30 minutes, so this is a grind that is going to take a lot of doing. This is not one that is just going to happen naturally over the life of the episode.

It's poorly designed and poorly implemented. Not since Hands of Fate have they tried this open world garbage, and it massively stunk back then too.

I am going to finish it. I'm almost to the halfway point on the world boss grind. But after that, there will be very little left to do. So in all reality, I'll be shifting back to World of Warcraft or Star Wars Old Republic. I can put up with one or two more weeks of this garbage open world grind, but once I'm done with it, I am done. I'm not running it even one more time "just for the weekly" or anything. And with only a challenge, alert, and 1 raid, the episode really doesn't provide very much content once we can finally wash our hands of this open world garbage.

If they would have designed the open world boss fights like they do raid fights, and attached feats for accomplishing certain tasks like a raid feat, this would have been totally different. 500 boss fights is asinine. That doesn’t take skill that takes the fun out of the game.

I agree! I’m about 60/100 on all of them right now, but this feels like a second job.

I know the open world boss fights are a hard angle to pull off... but what if they did it like Paradox raid. Big boi in the middle, and a bunch of sub bosses pop out at once, forcing people to form teams to take them down separately, and then join up for the big chungus at the end?

Open wild bosses need raid feats. Not just excessive grinding. This DLC just came off as unimaginative and lazy. The grind to skill feats needs to be about 40:60.

But what do I know I’ve just been playing since 2012 lol

This is because people are thinking about the open world boss fight with the same perspective and frame if mind as bounties from previous DLC’s which leads to them making assumptions based on their previous experiences with bounties. This is an error as the open world bosses serve a very different funtipn and purpose from bounties in previous DLC’s.

I think people are scrambling to complete them bc once most people grind it out, they will never come back to it even if they need marks for raid feats. The number of strong groups will diminish significantly.

Let's see. The differences between the Open World Bosses and the previous Episode Bounties:

- Open World Bosses require even more players than previous Episode Bounties. Groups of 15-20 players can still easily fail, meaning that you are even more dependent upon finding extra people to play with.
- Open World Bosses have a hard timer DPS check as a victory condition. It is not good enough to simply beat them, you must beat them in 3-4 minutes or less, or else it counts as a failure. So a solid group where everyone is following mechanics and doing everything right can still fail just based on not having enough fast, single-target DPS.
- Open World Bosses are on a 30 minute timer, so you cannot simply pop over and join in for a kill whenever it is convenient. You must instead be a part of a larger group that commits to at least 30 minutes so that you can kill all four bosses to even spawn the Hydra, and then kill the Hydra.
- Open World Bosses award variable rewards ranging from full credit to getting NOTHING for a successful kill, based on your DPS contributions. So if you are a support player, for example, and do not have an invite into the group, there is a likely chance that you receive reduced or no rewards for your healing or debuffing or running water barrels or doing pick-ups or whatever. You are essentially obligated to do this as a part of a larger raid group, with the bosses denying loot to straggler players who join in solo to help out.

Which of these key differences makes you think this will be easier to do at a later time? I agree, the World Bosses are not the same thing as previous Bounties. They are far, far worse. Due to the mandatory grouping and the large number of players needed, they are flatly impossible on the Switch platform, and even on the highly populated USPC/PS, they tend to fail during the off-hours playtimes, like mornings and late nights. Since they require even more people, with each passing day where players finish their grind on them, the chance of being successful reduces.

Mark my words. Before this Episode ends (barring some sort of significant re-balance), we will reach a point where even on USPC/PS, there are not enough players interested in running them for the runs to be successful. I was able to run Calculator-Bot and Metahuman Experiment right at 2am after resets, with there being enough people to cobble together the small group needed any time day or night. Week one of the World Bosses, for more than half the day there are not enough players interested in running them to be successful. It's easy to see these are going to be a lot harder to do, and a lot slower to get done, so if you don't get a move on it now, you're not going to finish it before the interest dies.

Well, "interest" is a liberal word, because nobody actually seems interested. More like "begrudging willingness".

Correction, these are not DLC they are episodes. You must be fairly new because there is a vast difference in quality between the two. This means that they could "never" be mixed up with on another.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. I agree DLC isn't the best term, but by difference in quality are you saying the "DLC" is better than "Episode" or the other way? Are we talking about between different games or just this one?

Just this particular game. Also, what I was saying is that the DLC of this game in the past was of vastly higher quality than what we are receiving in episodes today. Now this is also my opinion but there is a pretty big difference between the two.

Not really. The last laugh and Amazon fury 1 were dlcs not episodes and had a lower quality than the ones we had after monthly content ending, besides maybe zoo and deluge

This is one of my main issues with this vocal minority that is complaining constantly about this dlc. When’s the last time I saw 20 people farming those bounties? Literally all the time. A toon I made less than 3 months ago has the Titan robot, the man bat, the large crab thing in Atlantis and the starro feats. You think I solo’d? Most of these complaints make it seem like you don’t mean what you say or you don’t play the game. Those bosses were getting farmed constantly before a new dlc dropped and they will get farmed again once the dlc is a little older. And I don’t believe an active league suddenly dropped off the face of the earth all at the same time because this content was too grindy. My league is more active than ever and so are the two other leagues I run with. These posts don’t have the desired effect. You aren’t fooling them they know their numbers are up not down.

It's just marketing. The started calling them episodes to set themselves apart from other games since it fit with the comic theme. This is a pointless semantic argument.

Agreed. This DLC is bogus. Until the fix on phasing. I couldn't do much other than weapon taps and dropping orbitals, pets, etc. to try and get credit for boss fights. After the fix, I can kind of play my toon. Not really though. I shot off heat vision, 35%, tornado pull, and dead. You get into the right phase and these bosses melt in a min. There is no chanllage to staying in the back, and letting all the newbie level up 30 folks die one right after the other.

Sorry, this is not what we want. This isn't Elder Scrolls. I quit that game because most of it is farming world bosses, which is what we are doing now.

I've finished my weapon, neck, and rings. Working on the 3rd piece to the OP head now. I won't be finishing the generator mods. Remeber when the devs said from spin's damage was a math error and was never intended to hit as hard as it did? Well, someone made the same error in thinking 12 generator mods that cost a total of 1800 marks is equal to the OP head. If costs the same. The benefit of those mods is minimal. Feat or not feat, I'm not wasting 2 or 3 days to try and get those. Why days? 92 marks per hr at a min. of 5 hours equals about 3 days. That's if you have time to grind 5 hours a day.

Those prices are ridiculous.

Elite content and rewards as a dps are non existent now. Why you say? The first two tiers are the only ones a dps really cares about. You don't even have to beat elite to get this. Why are people not good enough to be in elite being allowed the same perks for grinding bosses that they are not really helping to kill?

This idea that everyone in the game needs a chance to be equal is so beyond ridiculous. One thing that might have saved this DLC would have been an overhaul of all elite perks. Sure, let crap players get the might bonus for having four pieces. At the same time, give some type of incentive towards the real elite players for obtaining 12 pieces.

Good luck to players that aren't working on these outside feats also. Like others said, when I'm done out there, I'm done. I might run my dailies, in case they add more crap during the double and tripple mark weeks, but that's it.

It was a little more than just marketing. They changed the name to denote that the content that was coming out was story based (War of the Light, Amazon Fury, Halls of Power) because they had decoupled it from other downloadable content (new powers, weapons and other big items of note). They wanted to be able to release story content and not be held back by other items that weren't ready to drop at the same time.

yeah..i finished all bounties thursday night and im done with that mess! Only on Thursdays from now on! I have all the elite pieces you can buy and all 12 mods to include op head! The grind was not fun!

Anyone who has been around long enough should remember these EXACT same things being same about the doomsday bounty. “Hope you’re getting your 100 in now cuz it’ll be impossible later”. Fast forward a couple years and you still see people farm groups for the feats AND it’s only takes a few players now. This won’t be any different. Just like there’s still starro farm groups and still manbat farm groups. You guys must only stay within your leagues and have lfg turned off. All the old bounties still get farmed and these will too.

ive seen these shouts and it still takes them a very good long time to get a group together to run those things. granted yes some of these things require less people due to the CR now being higher then before but it still takes a while to form groups. the people in this thread have a point still.

You’ll see “huge starro spam going phase now” plenty