Dead dlc open world zones - Bring life back to them with Operations instancing

Old content = dead content.

Yet they still feature reward marks and SP that, unfortunately, will require other people to assist with obtaining.

LFG doesn't work. You can sit there shouting for hours to get people for old content and rarely ever get enough people.

Following suggestion is a work around for some of the dead zone issues.

For solo players a 'Solo Operations' tab could be added to the on duty menu. This would target solo missions in these DLC areas and would automatically warp the player into that zone and assign them a mission chain for all the solo oriented content in the area. Beat mission 1, it chains to the next, then the next, etc.

When they are all completed, a CR check is done to ensure the player has access to the next DLC episodes open world zone. If the player does not have access, the mission chain ends. If they do have access, the mission chain updates telling the player to warp to the next area, and a special warp portal appears in a set location, with beacon guidance, that whisks the player to the next DLC zone and starts the first mission of the next chain, and so on.

For group play, the same thing is for all 8 player oriented content. In most cases this hovers around open world bounty missions, but can also include weekly mobkill missions. These can either be limited to chaining these missions only for the specific episode's zone, or do the same as the above and immediately chain into the next episode group content. Issue with that is players in the group not having the CR requirement to continue causing players to leave the party bit by bit, so may be better to keep it DLC centric.

This would also see changes to the Hand of Fate Ops content with portals for the group to travel to and fro appearing at each site, to prevent players having to split up and warp all over the place and wait for them to rally at the next field to continue.

Note: For DLC2 content, this would focus only on the Rogues that are in Central City - not the open world Gotham and Metropolis bosses. This would be due to the issues with the not having scaled difficulty and being relatively easy to solo.

This would add a significantly more convenient way for players to fill these areas with the assistance of the duty/queue system, with the added ease of warping portals to facilitate keeping the group together

Depending on the tech involved with Operations, maybe it would be possible to keep the group chain going at the end of one zone's last group mission being cleared. If players are offered an opt in option to stay in group and continue, then it could keep instancing open, meaning the 'find more player' function could then be used to try to pick up replacements for any lost players who leave. Not only would you have the raid groups patrolling through these areas with a purpose, but if this coincides with any solo players that also are being strung through these areas, zone chat could still be used to get assistance from other players, so there would still be some overlap assistance as we see with the latest DLCs chat requests and such.

This would also assist ALL future content is future proofed with the same features so that content is that much harder to 'age out'.

I’d rather have a daily or weekly Steve Trevor random mission: “Assist in the takedown of - “have a checklist here of 3 specific bosses”

Keeps it simple and funnels people to the same older content. I think a daily rotating mission could be useful here.

This is very well thought out and just goes to show both the enthusiasm and creativity of our community for finding solutions to address ignored areas of content and invigorate player participation!

I hope your ideas will assist in inspiring the creative team to give it a look and maybe try to implement it or perhaps a form of it.

It is posts like yours that gives me hope for this game that we all love because it shows people do care about DCUO.

Thank you JLAxPower Girl!

Maybe if open world wasn’t clamped

"QQ get rid of clamp" trivializing 75% of the game isn't the solution.

It’s a blunt way to say that old content is dead.

Back in the day ppl would run a lot of stuff and that included old content for marks, feats, styles, collections, etc. We would/could be overpowered and have little difficulty farming an item or obtaining a feat that was rather difficult at that time.

Now since we are thrown back in time (clamped), it is a good way to discourage going back there because our progression is taken away and forces us to group up just to do a bounty or to complete a 4/8 player instance when we could just walk in and solo it for fun…not anymore. The only reason some ppl go back is for the meta bounty runs. That requires a group to swing through the dlcs and knock out the bounty for a quick 8 marks. If the bounties gave less marks, it wouldn’t be ran and it would totally be dead. Bounty spams due to “kill it 100 times” would be that last thread keeping ‘some’ content used until that feat is completed, but that is not playing the content if all you do is come by once a week just to participate in a bounty.

I honestly have no desire to play old stuff clamped. No way. Give me back my stats and I’ll reassess my answer.

Time traveler from future with high tech armor and weapons goes back in time to play some content and finds his stuff is clamped. Now they have to defend themselves with a rock and a stick and no defense. Doesn’t seem fair does it. Devs increased our stats a bit to give us a fortified rock but that doesn’t really mean dirt, now does it. We go from God Mode to Caveman Mode and that’s lame. Devs want us to play content but also strip our stats at same time sooooo….. which is it…. play with stats or no play with no stats. Hmm.

Typical selfish player, 'forum resident' response. Cares nothing for the quality of the game and is entirely oblivious to the damage to the quality of the game and its rep over the years by not having appropriate balancing measures in place. (And in case you didn't notice, it's already getting out of hand with the stat bleed through effect and artifact imbalancing -- as players are once again able to damn near one shot everything in the lower tier content outside of the bosses themselves, thanks to their higher health pools, and will only escalate further in due time)

And that's not including the speed hacking issue.

Stat clamping killed old content.

or add rare drops to the world bosses

I still want those misted lantern iconic styles they had back in WoL

Making the argument for speed hacking.

Correction: New content killed old content.

Addendum to Correction:

Old content suffers from a malignant problem caused by loss of interest. The reasons of this loss of interest are varied and I will not speculate on specific potential causes.

The challenge lies in how to re-invigorate interest in older content that goes beyond offering Source Marks. It should be appealing to both new & old players. Omnibus is an attempt to address this loss of interest but it is not a final solution.

I am an End Game player. Old content holds no value to me, it has nothing to offer to me, and for my own reasons I avoid it unless I am participating with my league mates & friends. I am not enticed by the lure of Source Marks. If something could be offered to make EEG content attractive to a player like me, then purrhaps the game as a whole will be reinvigorated.

Interesting that a huge loss of interest in old content happened right after they added the stat clamp.

This is actually not true …

There was no interest in old content prior to stat clamp

You could wait hours for missions to pop same as today it’s no different

You’re just not allowed to easily get feats that were intended to be harder to get now

The forum has been round and round about stat clamping and stat clamping is here to stay.

I agree it’s hard to get certain things done like world bosses now and it really stinks when before you could just go in there and be the only person in there most the time. And one shot world bosses til you got whatever feat you needed.

They just need ways to make people go back there

There’s lots of ideas on how the devs just need to figure out the best course of action to get groups back in there

There wasn’t a bunch of people clamoring to do the Dr. Light bounty before stats clamp…and there still isn’t a bunch of people clamoring to do the Dr. Light bounty.

I think some people only started recognizing that certain things were designed to be group endeavors after the stat clamp was put in place…possibly a kind of frequency bias, or a kind of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (People who own a BMW tend to notice more BMWs on the road)…meaning struggling to complete older content was seen as new information…so now you’re more aware of it.

the only things that would entice people to go back to old maps is

1. double Source Marks for weeklys
2. Rare items or styles/mats
3. Dev invasion

only a few people in lfg would respond to someone who needs help at an old map, if any. The population in this game who still log on weekly are burnt out. We love this game but it gets stale even with the newer content. I've helped people go back to old maps to get feats but once you're end game its really pushes the threshold of doing it so often. We're talking about instances that are over 10 years old with no updates. I don't know, maybe add a new boss for a feat in these instances ? who really gets hyped about killing Tiny at Gorilla Island?