Episode frequency - time for a change? (Discussion)

There are 2 big issues I find with this idea.

1: the player base already complains after 1 week that every single dlc is dead. The 3 dlcs a year already has a good rhythm when it comes to getting all gear and stuff needed when managed correctly. By the time triple currency is about to happen you can pretty much have everything bought. Atten comes the triple currency and the final double currency and players can buy the new added items that give feats before the dlc ends. (I actually had enough marks on the day triple came but I understand not everyone is that strategic lol). The average player will have everything bought by the end of a dlc with the only thing left being on duty feats and maybe even open world boss feats. Extending how long the dlc is doesn’t help either.

2: as for the bugs. The bugs that come at the start of the dlc have nothing to do with how many dlcs are dropped each year. It has to do with 2 main points. The first being that the devs only put the new dlc on test for 2 weeks before the dlc goes live. The first week people find bugs and report as much as possible. Anything found in the second week will just be handled on live. That is a terrible system. The second issue is that they have to plug the updated versions to PC and console so things get broken during that time too. So even if they change it to 2 dlcs a year if they only allow players to test for 2 weeks than it won’t change anything.

No way, 2 episodes per year means if 1 of them is screwed up the game simply dies for half a year, plus, you'd get to know half the content you are getting for the year in 1 day.

And Longer episodes doesnt mean less bugs as well. They would have to work on more pieces of content at once, meaning more teamwork required at the same time if multiple pieces of content bug.

Not to mention less revenue and even more dead weeks. If one thing, we need more frequent updates and content to the game, not less. DCUO was always very demanding on content because of the way our progression works and changing the pace without major overhauls on character development could kill the game.

There's a pretty wide gulf between three a year and monthly (something I'm not suggesting). Quarterly would be best.

I would suggest a mix of different ideas for new episodes.

We know that monthly content is a no no. Long episodes are boring and tire easily. Many episodes per year would be less in quality and full of bugs. Elite content takes away from more regular content and is usually full of bugs. Other things too.

So, what can we do?

To start, I would eliminate the entire aspect of elite content as it tends to be delayed, bugged, and not fun to run. After that, a story line can be created with multiple missions to run that has a cliffhanger that appears later after release. The cliffhanger missions would pop up to either provide a close or a continuation of the storyline and refreshes the content with something new to run later on. Provide weekly bonuses to help those who got a late start or simply want to finish gear a bit quicker. Create more instances in total that encompasses all aspects from a bounty, solo, open world, duo, alert, and raid. Time for content to be out until next release would be about 5 months so it would be two to three episodes a year. Adding more mechanics that make use of support roles. Add in new gear options that we had back in T5 that allowed us to choose between more precision or might and extend that to the support roles.

This would help the devs to design content to have actual mechanics (unlike fttf in which the single boss is a sparring target that moves) such as previous raids like Amazon Fury 2 brought. The majority of the content will be dropped with a couple pieces down the line so the episode can't be burnt out completely on day one. And with all the stuff to run, you will have plenty of time to gather materials for generator mods, consumables, gear for both roles, aesthetic items, etc.

Example: (release dates and content dropped are open to interpretation by devs)
Day 1: Release content containing an open world, bounty, solo, duo, alert, and a raid. Players can then start to gather the new items with one of each instances.

Day 61: Release next set of instances containing an alert and duo that are set at a slightly harder difficulty as you should be geared up by then.

Day 152: Next episode is released.


This is merely a thought. If you don't agree with it, feel free to post your idea below so the devs and others can read it.

We've had only large scale Episodes in the past years. Why Not simply vary between large and smaller ones? Also the Content seems so isolated. Back then the "smaller Episodes" were rather an addition to the already existing large one. That way we had Something fresh but Not too overwhelming and fatiguing.

There's no doubt they've been understaffed for quite some time. I'm really hoping for a pleasant surprise regarding growth of the development team from the next quarterly development update in July. I'm always the first to remind people that the developers aren't charity workers and need to make a living and that those paychecks don't grow on magical trees. But their acquisition by EG7 in December came with the mission statement that included the investment of capital and resources needed to realize growth potential. Granted, it wasn't going to have the immediate impact that a lot of players hoped for (because those things simply don't move that fast), but we're now getting to the point where an investment in an increased labor budget and personnel growth should be starting to yield some fruit.

I'm hoping there's been more progress in talent acquisition than the lack of movement on the D.I. careers page suggests as it's not uncommon for a significant portion of talent to be found through other channels. But yeah, they really need it. Hopefully we get good news on this front in July.

They were shooting for that from the very beginning, and only managed to make it happen once (from what I can recall). They can't do it, so three a year is what we can get.

I'm personally just tired of how fast we turnover our gear. Its exhausting at this point. I've played this for a long time. Always enjoyed it. But lately the "aquire marks buy gear" every 3 to 4 months has just become meh. We get gear enjoy it for a month or 2 if your lucky then back at it again. Its such a short time it almost feels pointless other than just to get the style feat. Most things in the new dlc can be beat with the previous DLCs meh gear or even current DLCs average gear.

Id rather them release some DLC each year but have one off on on. One DLC introduce new gear then give us a new DLC with just new content to run. I get most of why people run content is for gear so idk if it would work. But I'm personally just tired of getting and shedding gear so fast. Its become less fun and more of a chore. And no. I dont need a break. I play other MMOs and it doesnt feel this way.

Quality doesn't equal quantity.

We had monthly content and that didn't work when it became too rushed just to meet deadlines.

Then a few months of wait and we had Amazon Fury Part III, an episode which I'm pretty sure a lot of people on this forum enjoyed and regard as one of the best episodes released.

I think we are at a similar point now with the frequency of content.

Final Fantasy XIV release one episode (or expansion as they call it) every 2 YEARS. They still have a large player base and content lasts.

I'm not saying by any means DCUO should do the same, but with episodes being spaced out more and planned out accordingly we may improve the quality of content that gets released.

Population gets murdered by releasing buggy, easy, rushed content with no real alternative, so players log out either for the episode or once they fully gear their main toon. Something needs to change and soon.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

There's a difference between noise on the forums and players actually logging out of the game. Most of the time, anyway

Communication and a degree of transparency does help as well. The devs have gotten somewhat better with this with some of the development updates.

I'm trying to raise the bar.

Quality of content > Quantity of content

1. Depends on the DLC. Wonderverse for me stayed alive for a lot of the episode and not just because of the open world bounties. There was plenty to do in the solo and raid/elite raid, and the alert was interesting too. We could have delayed Legion by a couple months and I still would have found things to do in Wonderverse.

2. I've discussed this on another thread* recently and I agree, episodes need to be on test for longer, especially elite raids as they seem to always release rushed, bugged or turned off. Live server testing shouldn't exist period, would help if the dev team had a QA team behind the scenes checking the content rather than being too dependent on players having a PC and getting onto test server.

*https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dc...ith-an-episode-or-a-week-or-two-later.316229/

If the dev team gets larger and there's a noticeable difference in quality of released content, then sure keep it as it is.

At this time it just doesn't work.

Again look into other MMOs and see what works for them.

No one is asking for monthly.

This is not FFXIV and I'm not sure if your obsession with comparing it to DC is healthy or realistic.

There will not be a bigger population killer than slowing down content releases. You want a healthier population, increase the frequency of episodes to quarterly. I'm totally fine with mixing up the size of those episodes or their content (perhaps a new approach to turning over gear is needed) but yeah, the idea of less frequent DLCs is one of the worst I've seen suggested.

This is subjective and we will have different opinions on this. We also have the artefact system to consider.

I agree that currently elite content releases delayed and bugged, but it just needs more development time and testing. Again quality > quantity

Removing it altogether would be disastrous for the game at this stage and more players will leave. Every raid would be a 5-10 minute tank and spank raid like currently, and probably with a few bugs as well.

I guess the question to the community here is, would you want normal raid content to be more difficult than currently? Perhaps significantly so?

It's good to take notes from other MMOs that are more successful than DCUO, in terms of quality of content, In terms of active players, and in terms of reviews. Better quality of content will often get higher praise, which then leads to positive word of mouth for the game.

Depends on said content releases. If the dev team gets larger and they can really focus on the quality of episodes released then the game will improve.

I'm of the quality > quantity mentality so clearly we are on different sides of the argument here so I will agree to disagree with you.

I did suggest this in another recent thread but the idea didn't go down too well.

The games are apples and oranges. They're just not that similar nor do they need to be. DC shines in its combat and its deep superhero lore and styling. They also attract somewhat different players-- many folks are DC Comics fans first, gamers second. FF is a different beast in that it's a videogame franchise whose fans tended to be more hardcore players. So, sure, FF is more successful but it's so very different from DCUO and expectations around DC can't really be fairly compared to FFXIV imo.

Regardless, less frequent DLCs will 100% crater the population.

They are more similar than people think, I play both games.

Bit in bold I'll agree with you there