Player retention and burnout discussion

Long thread incoming. First off, this is hopefully not another “doom and gloom, game is dead” discussion, but rather one where we can point out issues with the game that is causing longtime players to burnout and quit playing. My perception is that as of late, more and more dedicated players are leaving the game. Why? Hopefully this thread can churn up some discussion and provide some feedback to the dev team.

But first, some background on myself for perspective: I am a longtime player that started playing on PS3 around when Lightning Strikes came out. I loved this game and played it at a decently high level until about halfway through Sons of Trigon, when I got busy with school and other real life stuff (and other games like MOBAs and competitive FPSs). I tried coming back a few more times over the years, but didn’t really get back into the game until last year, when STU came out and all the episodes were free. There was so much that felt new to the game. I lost my old account, since it was on PS3, and I was now playing on PC. This new DCUO was exciting, and albeit, a little overwhelming, since I had to literally start from scratch. I was lucky to be a part of a small friendly league that helped me get back so speed.

I’m now currently sitting on 3 endgame characters (1 of each class), my main being at CR 378, max arts, and quickly approaching 600 SP. Yes, I grinded (ground?) very hard to get caught up to where most dedicated endgame players are at now. Now, I am starting to feel the burnout. Finally, I have some similar perspective of players who have been playing this game consistently since release, and I have some opinions as to why it feels as if player retention has become a huge problem for DCUO.


There are three main issues I feel that are actively hurting DCUO’s player retention:

Problem 1: Lack of meaningful progression/depth in content. Something that irks me is when people say that there is not enough content in this game. There is actually an insane amount of content to this game! The problem is, there is no reason to keep grinding the same content because there are not enough systems in place to make it worthwhile. The feat system is pretty much the entire reason endgame players run old content (disregarding source mark spam). I love the feat system, and I wish the game offered more reasons to revisit older content. What about more chase items? A more robust gear crafting system with crafting material drops in instances? In-instance quests?

Believe it or not, I hated Hand of Fate when it dropped, but I do believe it offered some interesting ideas on ways to revisit content and the open world, via the motivation of tangible rewards. Save the Universe should be a time to refresh old content by adding extra mechanics, feats, quests, minibosses, and drops, but instead it’s just poorly upscaled rehashed instances. If newer content is going to take longer to create, then more systems are needed to keep players engaged with older content.

Problem 2: Nothing to do when idle. There really isn’t much to do in this game when you aren’t running content. Most other MMOs have proficiency skill systems (ie. Runescape, WoW) that you can passively improve over time (like hunting, crafting, etc.). Everyone makes fun of endgame villians standing in the HoD typing in shout/trade chat, but really, what else is there for them to do? It’s an open secret that open world PvP is beyond dead, and arenas are dead except for 1v1s. Okay, fine. But what else do players get for filling in that “dead time” while queuing, LFGing, or just tired of running content? As of now, there’s nothing. Unless, that is, you want to farm exobits or do dailies 1000 times like it’s 2013. What if there were missions or activities to do to slightly improve gear or abilities over an extended period of time? Players need more systems that keep them busy in their free time.

Problem 3: Cohesive open world is no more. Today, DCUO open worlds feel almost like mini single-player worlds stitched together with a clunky fast travel button. It no longer feels like a connected, living world, with new superheroes and supervillians roaming the streets, ready to take you out. I think this is a bigger problem than people give credit to. Some intrigue and excitement is lost when the immersion of the game flies out the window like it has as of late. There just isn’t any reason to group up and head out into the open world with friends anymore. Bounties are a step in the right direction, but doing them hundreds of times over the course of all the recent DLCs has really worn me out.

There is so much of the base game’s open world that is still unused. Look at South Gotham! Downtown Metropolis! It’s strange to me that the decision was made to put these unbottled locations into tiny DLC open world instances. Ideally, the best way to revitalize the open world feeling of this MMO is to make another major open world. What about Central City? Star City? Maybe add more islands to the existing Gotham and Metro? Or maybe treat it as a “DC rebirth” and completely remake those cities. Implement new incentives to be in and explore the open worlds.


I believe that the combination of these three issues have really hurt the longevity of the game, especially during times of “content drought.” If the content was more deep and meaningful to progression, then players would be spending more time running it. If there were more robust idle/free time activities such as skill proficiencies, overhauled armor crafting, and more, then players would have more things to do in their down time. And, if there was more interaction and intrigue in the open world, players would be more incentivized to leave the player hubs and do more in the game’s world. What do you guys think about these issues? Are you feeling burnt out yourself? How can the devs make the game fun for you again?

I agree. I want to add that speedhackers make difficult content meaningless. Dcuo turned into a pure pve game (wich i like) but if you can cheat the system, there is no point for many players to actually try and enhance their skills.
Currently the game is a bit more inactive again due to "content drought" but 99% of all players havent finished Swe+. If youre not somebody that finds enjoyment in a tough challenge, why would you? The only incentive to run Swe+ currently are many nearly impossible feats (even if you manage to beat it) and the source shard supply drop wich is almost worthless due to speedhackers farming them.

Something to add to your 3rd problem:
The way they design open worlds makes it easier for the devs to get the right setting and visuals. Aside from that practical aspect, its also a lot easier to start from scratch than going into old gamefiles you havent touched in years (or ever) and then try to bring new content in that system. Bugs are almost impossible to avoid and i think we had some serious issues during the hand of fate dlc regarding open worlds.

I also want to mention that any game has burnout periods. Its nearly impossible to keep players active in a pve based game unless you have the resources to create 3x the content dcuo puts out or if the playerbase finds enjoyment in challenging themselves by honing their skills. I was checking the steam charts for dcuo and it seems fairly consistent. I know that steam is only a small part of the playerbase but since those are the only numbers openly available, i assume its similar on all platforms.

Yep....burned out. Repetitive content, re-used maps and mechanics. Busy work feats to make you think you HAVE to keep up on them OR spam them into oblivion the first day, a daily login, and several timed drops that require you to be on and active OR miss out/spend cash to make up for it.

Back years ago, you could log in 2 or 3 times a week, and 'keep up' or if you wanted to be in all the time, the things you 'must' do were small in comparison to what you might want to do (like PvP or whatever). At this point the game feels more like a job than my job does.

I definetly feel like that the endgame content doesnt reward us enough or pushes us to finish it also the gear/progression system is outdated and kinda meaningless.

The endgame Content has almost no longevity or longterm difficulty overall because the devs dont like to balance overperforming things in the game so even the hardest content feels underwhelming and boring if right tools are used alot of dedicated players wont stay in such a enviroment longterm.

I think what made dcuo fun for dedicated players back in the days was that content was based around skill not based on your artifacts and other non-skilled based tools. We have a more and more selective community asking for „need buff troll“ need art swap“ need eog dps“ need eog heal“ its just not healthy for the game longterm.

I also do think the devs have tried to retain this part of players by focusing on content like elite+ for raids/alerts aswell as elite duo/solo.

Agreed. They definitely need to go back and rework or add to some older content with extra bosses or what not. That would still be a dead end tho imo, a better thing to add is a leaderboard of sort. Even if u max out on skill points, artifacts, allies, whatever have you, there should still be a Leaderboard to keep you going, with end of season rewards and all. Example : fastest time for completing current alert/raid/solo or most damage done , or most pve instances completed idk ( maybe that exposes the speedhackers too, who knows)

That's certainly true, and I agree in that I'm not expecting Daybreak to reinvent the wheel or be the first people in the world to make a game endlessly playable, but I certainly think there is a lot more that could be done to make the slumps (like we are currently in) less rough.

The biggest problem they have right now is the dearth of new content. The Wall Raid has become stale, and currently end geared toons are walking through the other content. This certainly is not intentional, and I know behind the scenes staffing issues are slowing things down, but it doesn't help

I think the addition of elite and elite+ is certainly a step in the right direction. Survival mode is really cool too (I've never played SM before, so I'm looking forward to that). Since content creation seems to take forever, making multiple variants of content is a good idea. However, like you said, the rewards need to be more tangible. I would argue that this E+ raid is a little too much (especially those dumb E+ feats). If they made it a bit easier, and added E+ only gear/styles, it would be much more worth the time spent grinding it.

Not to get too sidetracked, but regarding the whole DPS game balance (I think all the support roles are pretty well-balanced), I think most of the balancing on the Might side is pretty good, minus the supercharges and some rough powers like Rage ranged and Nature single target. However, the Prec side of things is a total mess and I'm genuinely confused why it hasn't been addressed in such a long time. Eye of Gemini is the only artifact that is so broken that it is harmful to endgame balance. It is totally overpowered and detrimental to the game's health. I doubt anything will be done about it, but I know firsthand that many players are burned out from the EOG meta.

This game doesn't have a wealth of open world environments that exist within other MMO's although it does obviously have the two large ones Gotham and Metropolis, there are also a bunch of other small ones relevant to DLC's that could easily be expanded or better utilized.

What the game also has going for it is obviously its wealth of instance content that now is clamped could be better utilized to create a more relevant quest experience for EG players looking for something to do, it just needs to be better incentivized.

What the game has to do is get past the sub set of EG players hell bent on keeping the game only relevant to the last 3 episodes and allow the entire game to be better utilized.

I agree with you that the game lacks rich side quests that serve to better expand horizontal progression rather than vertical. It does obviously have allies, artifacts and augments that provide some level of progress outside of strict EG content, but I don't think this is what you mean, nor is it what players really want or certainly not by itself.

If we take an example from something like SWTOR, there's side quests like collection of Datacrons that improve your stats and have to be hunted down and can be done in down time.

We could do similar things within this game as well, through research and development for example.

We could create an artifact weapon system where you continually improve your weapon even if only incrementally through the collection of rare materials spread out throughout the entire game.

One upgrade could be the collection of Zamaron Crystal shards for example where I have to collect enough to imbue my weapon with sapphire crystals and the only way to get them is to run Zamaron related content...

They could create something like a Personal Boom Tube Teleport Device that sits in your inventory and works like a base teleport and has to be constructed by searching for and collecting materials out in New Genesis open world and Apokolips related instance content.

There's literally lots of ideas, but these are the types of things that could help keep players busy and incentivize them to play all of the game outside of the last 3 episodes which will inevitably lead to boredom and disengagement.

Yeah, this is the sort of stuff that I think would keep people interested. Especially stuff that minorly and incrementally increases power in our gear. It would even be cool to add special properties to gear, like the gear from the Wonderverse vendors did. R&D and crafting in general is criminally underutilized. All the blueprints are there for a new unique system in R&D, but there is no substance or thought to it. Horizontal progression by running (hopefully somewhat refreshed) older content, and not just mindlessly doing the same 3 instances weekly for 6 months - this is something that would keep me more interested.

That's a great idea too about adding special properties, to expand on it, hunting down R&D material in specific content to imbue your weapon in that content so that your weapon does extra damage in that specific content, Basically makes your weapon similar to the weapons from Wonderverse and Legion but through a raft of other content.

Adding some extra content to old content as well I think would be useful.

Instead of new rewards just on the most recent vendor spread some of them out, put them on other vendors that are relevant and push players backwards.

The iconic weapons were also a great idea, perhaps they need to attach feats to them, add new feats to old content, keep people feat hunting old content.

Create an account wide legacy type system where you somehow obtain account wide unlocks - source mark costs reductions, increased nth metal yields, minor account wide stat bonuses.

Imagine for STU, they actually treated it like you were going back and "fixing" the past. For example in FOS2, before the final boss, imagine Future Lex Luthor shows up to take the Fortress energy for himself, and there is an extra boss for that raid. Or, maybe Baron Von Savage and his army appears in the middle of a Gates run in order to take the Flame of Change for himself. These bosses could drop special unique items, or a currency for STU.

Allthough i like the idea of Elite+ i think the devs could also try to design raids for us to customize which boss and how many we want like we could during Paradox that also increases difficulty without making whole new difficulty like elite+.

I think elite+ completion rate is most likely extremly low is it still worth it for them to work on it? and i think for now its better to start balancing things like EoG before investing ressources into elite+ theres alot of gatekeeping in elite itself they should try to fix that first and they should aim to bring players together and really limit the selectivity we have so players dont get kicked for not using a specific artifact or buff playstyle. I think many players are interested in elite content but all this makes it hard for potential new elite players to enter endgame with all that gatekeeping that the devs havent fixxed yet.

Haha, zNot finally coming around to what I told you months and months and months ago

I think an ideal world, the end game population would be bigger, but this game just doesn't have the population base, certainly not presently, whether or not it ever gets back to where it was in say around 2013-2016 when I reckon it probably peaked, who knows.

Unfortunately this means that the likes of Elite+ is just a waste of development resource, I'm also not saying that disparingly either towards the people that do enjoy it, it's just that you can't be spending copious amounts of resources on content that's at this point probably appealing to less than a few hundred players if that.

Lots of people complain about bugs that go unfixed and even in this thread we're talking about ideas right that would help lead to better player retention and engagement and unfortunately elite+ doesn't do that, so those resources would be better spent on this very stuff we're talking about in here.

An attempt needs to be made to more seriously grow the game again rather than appeal to a incredibly small minority of players at the upper end who probably at this point are invested in the game in so many ways, they're not going anywhere even if elite+ weren't being made.

Personally I think its time to scrap the whole elite+ thing and focus on improving other aspects of the game, but that's just me

I was one of those who wanted elite+ but it doesnt fix the underlying issues,we simply overperform due to the unbalanced/overperforming things.

Definetly dcuo doesnt have the luxury anymore to be able to split the endgame population into elite and elite+ we need to dismantle elite+ And like you said invest those ressources into things that would improve gameplay for everybody especially imo interms of balance to give more players a less selective community requierements to enter elite raids.

Especially now that allies are becoming bigger and bigger deal widening the meta gap further the devs need to seriously go back and the fix/nerf overperfoming things.

Well it's not just the over-performance of course which I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing about, it's just the sheer math of it all.

There's not enough players, playing it generally let alone succeeding to justify its ongoing existence. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the devs have some data, but the perception in game of that content certainly wouldn't tend to lead me to believe it's being run that much.

edit - Oh not to mention and I'm going to say this bluntly - not towards you of course.

But sticking that source shard supply drop behind the elite+ wall was the dumbest thing ever, it just created a speed hackers broker dream.

Exclusive rewards from elite would work if this game got a lot more serious about removing speed hackers, until then they're actually doing more damage to the game.

I know no one asked but, I've had my longest break to date and I'm not quite ready to jump back in just yet but it's close and, I just know it's gonna cost me a bloody fortune to catch up. That or grind til I'm 80 but, what can ya do?

Game needs money to live but, even paying to catch up, the end game grind feels like a never ending chore

if any dev reads this pls consider giving us a modest but long term nice leisurely something or other to do to offset the grind

ty

I think they should be more generous with the member benefits to be honest, players returning can then catch up that way.

They say member Nth metal for example is 150%, sure doesn't feel like it to be honest though when the bulk of the Nth metal drops are blimmin 10's.

It honestly feels like members should get a 300% boost

Perhaps even it is time to introduce a second tier membership which would give extra bonuses like that, where you pay another $15 in the month and get a bunch of extra ally favor, Exobytes, Source Marks and Nth Metal

Me what irritates me the most about this game, is that the game remains on a design formula of 11 years ago it is now overtaking, it no longer holds the players, It’s time for DCUO to evolve FOR REAL and come a little closer to the MMORPG 2022 to continue to follow the race and especially to keep it community over the long term!

It’s sad to say, but now, DCUO is MMO only between restart and reset on Thursday and during a profitable event...

I agree up to a point, yes to me, I feel like members are taken for granted. 'Eh, we can treat them however we want, they will keep subbing', is the feeling I am starting to get. I DON'T like the idea of another tier of membership, not at all!!!! Why segment the member community? If another tier of membership were to be introduced for an additional $15 per month or any cost, I can promise all reading this that I would never sub to DCUO again.

What the game also has going for it is obviously its wealth of instance content that now is clamped could be better utilized to create a more relevant quest experience for EG players looking for something to do, it just needs to be better incentivized.

What the game has to do is get past the sub set of EG players hell bent on keeping the game only relevant to the last 3 episodes and allow the entire game to be better utilized.

As one of the players mentioned who plays only the relevant last 3 episodes, there is a reason for this, a very big reason as to why I will only play EG. EEG takes something very precious away from me. EEG makes a mockery of all of my years of hard work, the hours I put in, the $$$ I spent. So yes, I will only stay in EG where everything, everything, that I worked for, that I earned, that I achieved, still matters and means something. I know you & others don't understand why I & some like me feel the way that we do. What was done was for the greater good of the game, I get that, I truly do, but it should have been done in a less heavy handed, punishing way that honored what End Gamers achieved. But hey, I get full stat piercing in elite, yay, thanks for the crumbs. When I look at that CR number, and I know that I am so, so, so much better than that, it makes my blood boil.

Proxy, I admire & respect you, please know that. On EEG, I just can't agree with you and participate in any of that content, nor will I try to change your convictions. I am merely offering up my reason to all to review for why I stay in EG where I belong.