Say it isn’t so… A new players’ letter. (long read. no tl;dr)

Say it isn’t so… A players’ letter.

This will be long. Grab a drink. (there is no tl;dr version avail)

With the release of Game Update 41.2021 it felt like time for a new players’ letter; something I haven’t done in a while.

First of all, most of this update was a *success* and that is being overshadowed by a couple issues that are obv more contentious. The Devs tried to address a lot of the issues the community has complained about for years, and a few issues the Devs had concerns about. It was pretty ambitious so there was bound to be problems (unavoidable).

Some let's start with what the Devs were trying to do here. There's actually more to the update than this but this is the big stuff:

1) low population / players asking for server merges
2) churn. new players try the game and leave. Most never make it off the ship etc.
3) un/underused older content
4) extensive progression (13 tiers & powercreep) Difficult to *maintain* down the road while the game ultimately winds down.
5) Players wanted CR relevancy removed.
6) Players wanted membership revamped. they had to adapt the game to these changes.
7) Players wanted our ingame playtime to be meaningful instead of used up by unnecessary "busywork" instances.
8) Players wanted more interaction with Iconic characters.
9) On Duty menu. A less complicated UI was needed

The art dept did most of the heavy lifting (as usual) but there's tons of QoL updates here too that aren't being talked about (because people are largely happy about this aspect of the update). For example the loot tables have been updated and are pretty great now. But let's break it all down...

1) Because of the phase tech, player factions, and the heavily instanced nature of the game, it's hard to gauge how many people are playing at a given time so less savvy players often think they're playing alone and the game is dead when there's totally full phases running alongside theirs. The Devs did several things to address this; by giving us a manual phase shifter that exposes how many phases there are and the pop of each phase. In this update they also gave us a shared faction hub to improve the optics of the game's population (particularly for villains).

They're probably waiting to see how this affects populations and concerns on Switch specifically and classically under populated servers before they go further with any all out plans to merge servers.

2) This is an open secret. The data has been released many times over the years. It’s a good reminder that the Devs’ metrics about leaving the ship were always unreliable since a huge amount of names are parked on the ship tho. Here some assumptions are being made about the reasons players try the game and then move on.

The Devs are making the assumption that the reason players move on is because they don't have anyone to play with (tying into #1), or that the game is "too easy". The true reason for this churn is ultimately a judgement call because there's no metrics they can collect outside of feedback from players in exit surveys, and on the forums and social media. So someone at the top of development believes the niche of players who've complained about easy content and dead populations over the years thinks this represents the bulk of players who are leaving or have left; rather than players who have been offering more applicable explanations for years.

I do think the perception of a low population is detrimental to the game so, I agree with and appreciate moves taken to address this. But in my experience, the main cause of churn here has nothing to do with easy content or empty instances so the solutions offered are treating the symptoms rather than resolving the root cause of the problem.

Most superhero fans expect certain powers like Super Strength will be in the game with Superman and Wonder Woman on the key art. Most fans of the genre will expect that the powers being offered can be customized how they want them to look. Most fans of the IP will expect that the powers in the game will be based on existing characters from the universe and genre and not feel generic -- If they try a new power they hadn't thought of they'll still expect it to look and play like X character it is supposed to be based on. Most of the powersets in the game are very dated and underwhelming in appearance after 10 years, feel generic and relate very little to their inspiration characters, aren't customizable and don't play like how they would be expected. If I want to make an Amazon or Kryptonian, and I find out I have to have rock spikes or icicles coming out my butt to play, I'm going to be turned off (rightfully so). The movement powers follow the same approach with underwhelming visuals and no mechanics or synergies with themselves or full powersets making them usable but not much more than that. It was a fight just to get movement powers to trigger taunt or POT.

For the longest time the game styles were awful and looked like mutated Transformers. Thankfully this was fixed and we have some great styles and character art in the game now. Might not seem like a big deal, but a lack of connection (to a their characters) impacts the investment a player puts into to their character and that means they're not investing their time into the game.

And then there's the ultimately fossilized graphics engine DCUO runs on. It's more around 15years old at this point. It affects load times, details, and determines whether the environments have twisting tunnels everywhere. It affects lighting and the way environments look and how appealing visualfx are.

Don’t let me forget PVP. I’m not a pvp fan but many are/were. It’s totally abandoned. It should be monetized and maintained.

This is the book cover players are judging the game by when they login. Players pop in and find out they can't build the type of characters they want to play as, the VFX are rough, the environments are simplistic and the powers are really really underwhelming for reasons mentioned above. Players are not leaving because the content is too easy or there isn't anyone to play with. There would be more people to play with if the game offered what these players came here looking for in the first place. The players are leaving because the game doesn’t offer what they’re looking for in general. It’s that simple.

3,4) A dev team wants all content to be played. It's a huge waste of time, labour, resources etc to create content that doesn't get play. In this case it was played initially (so there was ROI) but wasn't played after because it was made out of relevancy, effectively killing it.

The Dev team wants new players to start and play through all the content, and wants them to have someone to play with. That's fair. However, how do they do it and who do they play with? And this is where things get contentious. Are there enough new players to play with themselves (no pun) or do they need existing players to play with? I guess there isn’t enough of them so they chose to limit source marks to older content to push existing players into that content and support them.

On paper this is mostly reasonable but in reality it’s another story. The Devs realized there's too many hurdles for new players to jump through to reach endgame and this is all too much to maintain in the coming years (staff needed). So, the changes take the shape of streamlining 13 tiers of content into 6 tiers, stats clamping that wipes out the *earned* progress of existing players, and forces their existing players into old content they've run hundreds and thousands of times already to help out with the new players. And of course, being clamped, these instances now take more time than they have for years, and significantly more time if the player is stuck with a very bad group. An experienced player won’t be able to overcome a weak group by outgearing them anymore.

Stats clamping obviously makes the game strictly more difficult. Everyone is different tho so mileage will vary for each of us how difficult that feels. Personally, I don’t find the difficulty a bother but I recognize that some might (especially in weak groups). And we’ve tried this experiment with increasing difficulty several times in the game’s history. In beta there was a hot month shortly before the game went live where they experimented with reducing our power levels and the game became a chore to play fast and no one felt super at all – beta players stopped logging in. We repeated this experiment several times after that like during the release of Origin Crisis, again around the time the PVP mechanics were added to PVE (but not referring to the addition itself), then we tried actual stats clamping on test, and now here we are yet again. It’s always met with the same response – players’ progress is stolen, and no one feels like a superhero and players stop logging in bc the game becomes a slow slog and chore. Wash.Rinse.Repeat. And before anyone jumps in with GeT GuD--it's not really about difficulty. In the end we’ve run this content to death already so no amount of added time to complete is acceptable.

So there seems to be a calculation being made here that it's safer to sacrifice existing players' enjoyment for the new players' experience. So is there really that many new players able to prop up the game if these changes drive away enough of the existing base?

It could have been done differently. 6 tiers of content is really still too much from a new player perspective. The content would have been better off restructured related to the nature of the enemies. For example, all street level threats that Batman would fight would be tier1. Meta threats Superman would fight would be tier 2 and godlike threats for WonderWoman would be tier 3 and all of the content could progress sequentially in each tier and make sense--also reducing the need for stat clamping. Alternatively, a lot of this content continues stories setup in the campaign content so it could have been adapted to be bridges from that content (since the campaign is considered to be the best content in the game still after 10 years) and just extend that leveling content with "endgame" only being the newest content unrelated to the campaign missions.

As it stands now, players will just run the shortest instances to get the fixed 10 marks and call it a day. They’ll form premade groups or run content exclusively inside their friends groups and bypass the new queue entirely keeping it empty – ultimately solving nothing these changes were intended to solve. We could have had CR Relevancy removed, source marks shifted to pre-endgame still, but instead of stats clamping and penalizing the existing playerbase, the sourcemarks reward could have scaled with the age of the content and how out of relevancy it was (fragments of sourcemarks instead of full marks with the amount dictated by the relevancy window) – this was actually suggested in the membership thread. All of the carrots without any sticks needed, and no clamping of player power or progress, and still enough reward to incentivize players into the older content. The further above the relevancy window a player is the less rewards they’d get from the instance, so naturally it would attract players closer to the intended CR window effectively letting them self-filter with the highest CR players least likely to play in that old content while closest in relevancy would play it. So. There was a way to check off all the boxes without throwing the playerbase under the bus.

5) We wanted CR relevancy removed. Anyone new or returning often experienced enjoying older content they were catching up on, and would have been happy to stay in that content a while longer to enjoy it but then they equip gear that bumps them out of relevancy and they’re basically forced into the next tier of relevancy so there’s no incentive to stay in the content they were enjoying anymore. Sound familiar? Or even if you were an endgame player you might have wanted to go and play some of your more favourite content but had no incentive because it didn’t reward anything relevant to you at endgame.

Removing it but deciding to clamp everyone just seems like a little “careful what you wish for” happening.

6,7) Member benefits have been criticized for being outdated since the game went f2p. Moving to a fully f2p model is really a great move and needs to be appreciated. I’m specifically happy that we don’t have to do stabilizers and vaults anymore. This is busy work that didn’t value our ingame time at all. During the anniversary especially it was such a chore to slog through the event, the anniversary, your dailies, plus your stabilizer and vault runs—am I forgetting any? And multiply this by any alts we’re working on. But again, the purpose of asking for these instances to be turned into basic daily login rewards disappears to an extent because the rewards aren’t per character (non-tradeable) so many players have no way to work on their alts now. And yes, it’s great to get back that ingame time but it’s being negated by the artificially increased time spent in old content we didn’t have to do before.

Instead the daily rewards window should popup on login so players don’t miss their claims, and the rewards should be non-tradable like the vault loot and per character.

8) For years players have wanted more direct interactions with Iconic characters. It’s a safe bet mostly. But here comes Allies. Blink and you’ll miss them tho. We have a lot of problems with graphics pollution, blocking and so on during combat so it’s natural to want to make a system like this stay on screen a short time, but having them leave in under 5 secs is just so underwhelming. I would have rather had them on screen as long as typical pets, at least, and make them all share the same cooldowns so players have to choose who’ll be out with them. This would have reduced overhead with exponentially less pets, backup etc out at the same time. The live build is at least less obstructing compared to what was on the test server but it’s still pretty bad. This system is going to be largely unused outside of the passives and it’s pretty underwhelming that iconics have been reduced to less than pets.

9) On Duty. Wow this is a hot mess. The menu was unnecessarily complicated for sure. And overwhelming for new players to look at. But the current build is all over the place. I think this is going in the right direction; but it simplifies the process by taking away options/player control – that’s not good. Hide the options in a collapsible menu or something but don’t take them away (expect the old menu to be phased out after enough time) and force players into random content. Eesh. And the colours of this menu make it very difficult to read because of the shades of blue and green being too similar to each other. Good luck if you’re colour blind. There's no contrast and nothing stands out enough.

Right now players are telling each other to get gud and form premade groups. Sounds good right? Except it's counter productive to all of the goals behind most of the changes in the update -- if players form premade groups instead of using the queue new players still won't have anyone to play with. All of this will be for nothing. Players will always find and take the path of least resistance.

Now, all that being said, it's still just week 1, so we won't know the full impact of all this for a few weeks still, but I wrote this because there’s a lot of players outright feeling betrayed by the devs right now. It seems fairly obvious at this point that one of the biggest issues with the game's development right now is that the Devs (in leadership) don't play the game. When I say that I don't mean they don't login--we all know they do for work and testing or marketing purposes etc. What I mean is that none of them plays the game because they enjoy it and are invested in the game the way any of the player fans are. It shows with most of these changes.

Hopefully this helps put some perspective out there and helps players understand the issues but I can’t help feel like there isn’t any point anymore. Instead of taking the requests and suggestions from the community and improving the player experience, it seems like someone really felt they couldn’t give players too much without a bit of a lesson in bootsraps. And this philosophy of game design is just very antiquated. Modern game design (and the world in general) is more progressive and understands that people/players respond better to carrots than they do sticks (especially for our hobbies). A generous development approach leads to happier players and they’re more likely to play and stick with the game. Unfortunately a lot of these changes really read as a slap in the face of the playerbase tho. I’ve already subbed in the hopes that the update would be solid, and then unsubbed again yesterday after playing the live version. You win DCUO you got my money again... But our entire league is disappointed with this update, and everyone we know ingame is too. The best people are able to muster is that they’re waiting to see how the hotfixes go. Where do I/we go from here? Is this a toxic relationship many of us need to finally breakup from? Feels like it. Subbing/unsubbing is a player’s only leverage at this point, so, at least I get to answer the exit survey again.

Very well said
Plz add (in the hopes devs read it) that the daily login is a 24 hr times and does NOT reset at reset OR at restart
This means we will log in daily but NOT get daily rewards. My example is today. Silundays i go in to work a 12 hr shift at 7pm, during the week i cant log on till kids get to bed 8:30pm ish so i can only get rewards 6 days a week rather than 7 because by the time i left for work today rewards had not refreshed meaning i missed it.
And this will happen every week and will happen to lots and lots of players.
Over time, its quite a bit of rewards to miss out on each week collectivly

Extremely well done!

You covered so much of the issues. I just started posting on the forums for the first time and I have been playing for years, that is how extreme this "update" has been. After test I never thought they would actually go so far as to remove the super feel from the superhero game using stat clamp and yet here we are. We warned, we explained, we talked about making it a choice and it's like we were not even there which is why so very many abandoned test and now live.

You're my hero.

*applause*

You have hit on many great points like this one about the games engine I've brought this up before but in any dcuo trailers they have released recently it looks great imo and it's obvious they are updating character's models/NPCs as they go along. But as you scroll the comments it is 9/10 about how old and dated this game looks and I'm sure they are doing what they can with unreal 3 as I said the art team has done a damn good job like Atlantis House of legends looks awesome and I loveee chaos Gotham.

But if you want to see an explosion of new players they Must highly consider getting a second team specifically to start upgrading to unreal 4 or 5 if they haven't already because you will see hundreds of comments and thousands of likes of people wanting to play but don't and when they do they don't stay and one reason is because the powers look like crap to them you can't customize them and visually dcuo looks to old and dated to them.

Dcuo on unreal 4 or 5 would elevate to mass appeal and when a dcuo in unreal 4 or 5 trailer drops they will see player's flock in numbers that will have them doing double neck turns. I love dcuo it's definitely one of my favorites baby's and for me I like unreal 3 but it's time to let it go and move on and up and away from it . The one issue is time however but if the amazing awesome Jack Emmert stumbles on this I wanna say to you personally go ahead and have a team upgrade to 4 or 5 you won't regret it bud and one day I hope to play with you in-game on your Sorcery toon lmao oh yes yes.





Apollonia said, And then there's the ultimately fossilized graphics engine DCUO runs on. It's more around 15years old at this point. It affects load times, details, and determines whether the environments have twisting tunnels everywhere. It affects lighting and the way environments look and how appealing visualfx are.

They already announced they were making a native PS5 version. I'm hoping when they make a release announcement it would include an engine upgrade. Since this would make an obvious progression. New game system + New engine.

*cross fingers*
*cross toes*

Yeah I've thought about that to I hope so I really do dcuo deserves it.

Well said Apollonia, I agree with most of the points you made, I like when you make good threads like this, also I feel anything you want to get off your chest, create threads like these so the developers can see what you see.

Youre right the game very much does looks dated, but upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 is like rebuilding the game from scratch. Also whats the return on investment looking like? The hardcore diehard minority cannot fund a entirely new game and its development while not understanding they will put themselves into a years long content drought. It took this 1 update for players to be in a uproar about "lack of content" imagine 6 years on a content drought, are you going to stick around with no new content for years?

You really hit on a LOT of good points. Well said

If they keep upscaling old content I would actually lol we have some great stuff within the game now but unfortunately I feel allot wouldn't dare stand for it.

Same for me. I would love all old content upscaled, I have 0 desire to run clamped. People do not seem to realize the difference between the two. Should have just upscaled new players like they have been for years in newest content in all content.

This whole setup is like a pessimist vs an optimist. In the end, it's mainly the same but one feels better than the other by a large margin. Plus, we would still be able to carry players. Was in instance chat and heard a guy saying he'll be at 150sp soon and then can stop grinding cuz that's plenty. Almost choked to death laughing and had to have him repeat himself a few times. But if they started the game over at t1 upscaled, we would be able to go probably over a year without it feeling bad while other things were worked on

Adding deterrence to enter an instance without stat clamping doesn't erase face rolling from random queue. Face rolling should not be an option in random made queues via duty queue, period. No one should have that right over any stranger. The dice rolls of your chances of running into face rolling is almost over and eventually should be over. Players want to move quickly through instances, than their actions per minute should "improve".

Note: The devs should look into players being able to 2 shot adds and sub bosses (ex: smallville).

Mepps mentioned that this is a bug and supposed to reset at midnight PST.

Are you trying to say all this ruckus how about being depowered is completely abstract? That players just do not like the "IDEA" of being depowered? There isn't any "tangibility" or pragmatism to it at all? This game was all but broken (you break bosses, objectives and levels by face-rolling) and depopulated (impart; there probably were ppl that left because of face-rolling) for years---for that?

If this is true--Dimensional Ink--you need a new community; hopefully these changes help get you one.

Mental blocks are just as important to many people as actual physical blocks. I can tell you my unclamped stats for 4 toons. No idea what they are clamped and I don't care to look. I have 10k more might than most cr 340s but if myself and that 340 went into clamped content, we now have the same base stats. So why bring down what you could bring up? Keeps us all feeling powerful and no more 1 shotting stuff. Supposedly. I still don't get that statement. I can 1 shot brand new content adds. I can kill an elite solo boss in under 15secs. And if I play old elite content unclamped, I had the same results. The real issue is that everyone ran wimpy content. If they really wanted to experience difficult content, they would have qued up PCE instead of PCR. Nothing in there was a 1 shot last week. Just like old starro or atlantis. But good luck to them now cuz ain't no over gearing that so either you can beat it day one like a lot of us can or you better get it while its 3 dlcs old. Anyone that needs omega omega elite is going to have a heart attack now

Lol omg omg He said 150 would be enough oh my gosh.