They have players like me in mind, that usually would rather die than running the boring event stuff daily. I actually used to buy some currency back then, but i stopped doing that. I will definitely not pay money anymore to get these items and i hope nobody else does unless they sincerely want to support the game the sake of it, and not because they fear of missing out on items/feats they would otherwise not be able to get. Truly a shame how the seasonal events are the way they are when we know that the devs know how to make an exciting event - even if its only for a couple of weeks (Anniversary event).
I understand that. I'm actually in favor of them adding more open world quests (for less resources) to existing seasonals. (kind of like when they added Mera to the Valentine's event.) If they let us earn more marks it might've been less problematic, but we barely earn anything - and the rewards are so expensive. It's not like It's a episode reward (which if It's a chroma it costs around 400 marks). I have all seasonal feats beside Anniversary, I think I ran with you and Sira one time when we did the elite version and I was healing, it was actually really fun and rewarding. They don't have to make new seasonals. They could expand on existing ones and make them more fun and give them variety of stuff we can do. The alerts are not fun, but I still run them for the marks so I can decorate, lol. And with EU being less active, It's hard to get the seasonal alerts done aswell after maybe the 3 first days. I play on two servers now - it makes it even harder to get enough currency for items. Not enough hours in the day! I have 30 characters on EU, and started to build my alt army on US aswell. It's just making decorating not fun at this point. And It is literally my favorite part of DCUO. And even if I got 100 marks by paying, It's still not enough.
Just here to echo the same sentiment as others have pointed out- the pricing is quite egregious, as it was with Halloween as well. 15 marks per base item is ridiculous unless that base item is interactive/animated in some way. Interactive/animated objects we need very few of in base, they're usually what I call a Focal Point piece, so paying upwards of 25/50 for them isn't a huge deal. However, items such as dividers, doors, windows, floor mass, we need A LOT of them to create a base and for those to be priced at nearly x3 what they usual are is absurd. For example: running one character could get you almost 30-35 piece a furniture in a monthly seasonal cycle at the current 15 mark range. A base has 700 spots. Will all those piece be seasonal furniture? No, but if you want to make a magical gingerbread village, you can assume that 400-500 of those pieces need to come from the Winter Seasonal. Imagine trying to collect Snow Clouds, Snow Piles, Snowman, Holiday Bridges, and all the other accruements ON TOP of the 10-12 essential gingerbread items from 2023 it takes to make the smallest version of a SINGLE gingerbread house. Insane. Again, this is for A SINGLE BASE as well! A lot of us work on multiple projects throughout the year, so whereas you only need one cosmetic per character, you need MULTIPLE base items. Us decorators just want to create and the pricing for that is predatory at all angles. We're already at the mercy of the insane prices on the broker as it is, we don't need to be combatting this against the dev team too. It's gotta stop. It's wonderful the team is creating such awesome furniture for us, but frankly, it means nothing if we don't have the means to use it. Drop the price so we can.
I've been a long time player since the launch. I've continued to come back because I really enjoy playing this game. I definitely enjoy playing the seasonal events but the pricing on these seasonal events is no disrespect but it's ridiculous. Like I agreed like special animated items should be 25 or 50 but base decor 15 or 10? These events run for a month. Heck, valentines event run for 2 weeks it's not enough time to run any of these events. I'm still trying to collect styles and feats from two years ago halloween and winter event. Something gotta change.
Hello, I have been summoned by the base crafting community to rally against seasonal inflation. There are indeed a lot of new winter furniture pieces this year. I counted 18 new items, and they all cost 15 marks each. I made a quick table of the number of winter base items introduced by year (an estimate only.. it's possible my count wasn't perfect): 2023 - 18 2022 - 5 2021 - 40 2020 - 11 2019 - 68 !!! 2018 - 38 2017 - 15 2016 - 18 2015 - 12 2014 - 9 2013 - 13 2019 had the most by a landslide. However, a closer look shows that many of the items introduced in that year were variations on the same item (e.g., a blue, green, orange, red, and yellow version of the same candy cane light construct). Considering that, the number of unique items introduced in 2019 is probably closer to 20 (give or take a few depending on how you group the items). That's fairly close to the same number of new items introduced this year. The all-important point here though, is that in 2019, all base items only cost SIX marks (thanks to Multiverse for showing this in his 2019 winter seasonal video!!). Yes, SIX. So... roughly the same amount of "new" base items, but the cost jumped by a factor of 2.5x from 6 each to 15 each. As a side note, I wasn't playing this game in 2019, but I imagine the opinion may have been that since there are many variations to the items, you could still collect "all" the base items from that year. Like, you could collect a blue candy cane, and wouldn't be too disappointed that you couldn't pick up a yellow candy cane because they were basically the same item. The gingerbread items, on the other hand, are MUCH TOO ADORABLE not to collect each one!!! The two-windowed gingerbread wall absolutely has a different personality and utility than the door/entrance gingerbread wall, for example. In my honest opinion, I believe 6 marks for the gingerbread items, specifically, are too low. But, with equal emphasis, 15 marks are unequivocally too high. A good compromise might be somewhere in the middle (i.e., 6-10 or 8-12), and not all of the items have to cost the same. I made an example list with 3 tiers (keeping in mind all base items used to cost 6 marks across the board). Someone may want multiple copies of the gingerbread chair, but they would only need one copy of the gingerbread table to go with it. In that case, the chairs should cost less. 06; Candy Pane Window 06; Decorative Post - Candy Cane 06; Decorative Post - Peppermint Stick 06; Frosting Covered Door 10; Gingerbread Ceiling 10; Gingerbread Ceiling - Angled 08; Gingerbread Chair 10; Gingerbread Table 10; Gingerbread Table - Desserts 10; Gingerbread Oven 10; Gingerbread Wall - Entrance 10; Gingerbread Wall - Door 10; Gingerbread Wall - Plain 10; Gingerbread Wall - One Window 10; Gingerbread Wall - Two Window 08; Gumdrop Cluster 06; Wall Mint - Swirl 06; Wall Mint - Wheel It doesn't have to be exactly these numbers. I just feel something like this would be a much fairer cost for the items, and it would be in line with some items costing more in recent seasonals (like the gumball machines during the homecoming seasonal). You'd keep the base community happy, and overall, the amount of grind... ahem, I mean, player engagement, wouldn't really decrease. Only conjecture of course, but I'd imagine the more base items a player can afford, the more time they will spend placing them in their bases! That is to say, making the items more accessible can help casual players to engage more in the base-building side of the game, especially with the great furniture additions from the Cursed Gotham episode that players (such as I) have likely collected without a second thought and have yet to actually place them. By the way, I have seen some players in the game chat each seasonal complaining that they've already bought all the items and that the feats are too easy to get. Raising the prices actually won't change their opinions at all. They will play for a few more days than they would have otherwise and then send the same message through the chat window. I don't think the inflation we have been talking about was in reaction to that at all, but I just wanted to mention it as an amusing sidenote! hah! Anyway, thanks for reading!
I’m afraid I must agree as well. The prices should be reduced from 15 back down to 6. I do understand making them more expensive is a way for people only interested in collecting one of each for the feat and then abandoning the event the rest of the month to remain engaged. I get it. However making them that expensive is unfair to people that intend to genuinely decorate with the pieces rather than just build a single small gingerbread house in their base. Especially considering several of us have multiple alternates to buy for as well. It’s not just RunfromDanger Man I’ll be buying for. I’ll also be shopping for UndercoverVillainMan, Chloro Phil, Species 8472 and Chief Boyardee as well. and some of my friends have a full 16 (or whatever the max is) characters to shop and decorate for. In our younger days when we were just students maybe we could’ve done it but now that we are approaching middle age and therefore have full time jobs and familial commitments to take care of as well we won’t have the time to grind that much. With other more necessary requirements taking up money such as family, doctor bills, and recreation for the entire family as opposed to just us we won’t be able to afford buying the currency for anywhere between 5 and 16 (and people with both US and EU servers possibly upward of 32). Sorry for the length of this but basically, I feel it’s unfair to increase the cost 150%. While I would appreciate it going back down to 6, if it must go up then why not 8? That would increase the grind for crafters enough that it would be frustrating for us but not completely unreasonable the way a 150% increase would. Thank you for your work. Thank you for listening and considering my suggestion. Please don’t forget to remind the engineers that while I love all y’all, they’re my favorites. And finally, if the developers would like examples of what I mean about those of us that try to put as much effort into our bases as possible to make them genuinely fun (for the sake of perspective) send a personal message to me here or in the game. I will try to coordinate with my friends and ask them to give permission to whichever name(s) y’all provide and get back to you. So that you can possibly see what we want to do compared to what a 150% price increase will likely prevent us from doing.
Speaking as someone who LOVES the base building aspect of the game as well as the community that has sprung up because of it, I have to agree about the price hikes being a BIG blow for us. It's bad enough that the broker prices are near impossible to get key items we want for our bases, but making those event items so hard to get just kicks us while we're down. Many of us don't just decorate one base with single items. The Base building community is so passionate about what we do that we even have regular community driven competitions led by leading members of that community such as Achikah, Ryll, and Zoe. The prizes donated by other members of the community or farmed specifically for each competition (just type in base tours on or Base Off YouTube and you'll see what I mean) I UNDERSTAND interactive items or animated items SHOULD cost a bit more, these are typically centrepieces or things used as features in bases (15-20 is acceptable). I think base pets costing more is also fair (20-50 depending on size and effects) as those are something extra special... BUT... generic items shouldn't be subject to those costs. Farming base items is already SO time consuming. Even when farming those items with multiple characters, it's hard to get enough to fill out the bases that we want to build. As some others have stated, many of us have alts who we also end up wanting to build bases for because of how prolific our base building is. We spend real money on base styles and base item packs as well as the regular in-game purchases that we all end up making. I do understand that base builders are somewhat of a smaller percentage of the player base, but we are still PAYING CUSTOMERS, yes, I will concede that most players just want the feats but myself and others like me LOVE the base building aspect of the game, for some like myself its the very reason we stay and keep playing, the dev team has done AMAZING work creating these features and items and I for one get excited every time I get to see the new base items roll out. So come Devs, give us base builders a break and make the prices more agreeable for EVERYONE.
I wanted to mention one more quick thing while it’s on my mind. I understand this conversation and thread is intended to be just about the 2023 Winter event but our concerns about pricing would like spread across all events and might even be worse in some events. For example the St. Patrick’s day event that is much shorter than all the others. If pricing will be going up by 150% across all seasonals then how will a 150% increase effect our ability to get a hold of what we want when an event is only a couple weeks I believe it is? While typing that I also thought of new players that need feats from previous years. If they have no choice but to spend too much time working toward getting stuff from this year’s seasonal feats, they won’t have time or currency to catch up on feats from previous years.
Yea...the pricing is kinda on the high side for the new items. They all look great but they equate to a lot of frustration of dealing with those players going afk in events.
I have written about this since last October 2023 when all of this embarrassing nonsense began! Haha! At this point The lack of attention to it at all is just going to cause a vitriolic response. Most of my year has been spent doing seasonals, and then complaining about the seasonal prices. So I've done seasonals for the last 9 months and virtually every single thing I bought I ended up buying off the broker because base items are an absolute rip off now. And that is partially my fault. Well more specifically. I rallied for base items, I rallied for a vendor; that information was taken back like a Xerox copy utterly void of context to people who are absolutely disassociated with the game and they just ticked a box to raise the price. This has been going on for several years now in terms of the silliness involved with acquiring items for bases, styles and other such nonsense with seasonals. The DLCs have collapsed, and so the seasonals and all of their prices will have to prop up the diaspora. When Robin Flodin left it has become a squeeze the cheese process. Just toss it out cuz it stinks. If any of you remember when Robin was here and people complained, THE CHRISTMAS PRICES ON MOST ITEMS WERE REDUCED TO THREE COINS. I believe that this behavior will continue regardless of what you say, what any of you say, and the 15 cost is a subjugating reminder of when your mouth gets too large, they will then reduce the prices to 10, which will still be 40% higher than anybody else. Who cares about 10 coins either? It's still a hundred coins for 10 base items. Ridiculous. I've done all the math and I've spoken about it it's just over. The creepy fences this year from Halloween that I would have liked to have bought last year for six coin basically just dropped in the vault. Incoherent. Well, another response to another thing that has stayed exactly the same since my previous response to all of the other things that had to do with how base items drop. Are any of you actually certain that anybody is actually reading your posts and taking them to anyone who can do anything about it? I don't think so. The EG7 video that obsidian chill posted showed a single key point in how your game is developed for you. All of the points showed all of the sales and all of the drops of all of the styles. What is weird about that? This is a video game not a vending machine. If you are consumers, enjoy your vending machine. I'm going back to what I believe that this video game was designed for... Play.
They did listen when we asked them to reconsider the SOBA treasure base items prices. Can't say they don't listen at all. This is *Exactly* the thread for it too. Where else do you want us to talk about it? This thread is for feedback. And yes, I trust Mepps is taking this feedback to the Devs. We didn't really comment on it when it started because we didn't think it will continue or get worse. But we are making a stand now.
The time it takes for progressions on stats and artifacts and marks for gear is rewarding. But the high cost for seasonal items isn't rewarding. Not casual friendly for those who enjoy though casual play and base decorations. Something that players can enjoy casually without any limitations and forced to progression for the marks for items that does not benefit stats, but seasonal items and base items that benefits them for how much they do enjoy base decoration that they put alot of time into.
When I just started playing, I mostly played PvP, I had little interest in anything else (PvE was just a necessary evil for me and my league, needed to strengthen in PvP) when the opportunity arose to decorate the bases ... from the beginning I didn’t even paid attention to this... but as PvP began to die and after I lost my old ACC and returned to the game with a new ACC... PvP became an ugly, almost unplayable shadow of itself... I gradually began to look for something to keep myself busy, building bases became such an activity... I simply fell in love with this activity (if anyone is interested, you can see my bases here: https://www.youtube.com/@aristarxzhelezovski4758 )... I created base after base, I created an army of alts for farming base items, I have 23 completed project and a lot of ideas for new ones... but the prices for base items in recent seasons have disappointed me so much that despite the magnificent base items (very, very good base items, my deepest bow to the creators) and that for my new ideas I need a lot of them... I stopped using more than half of my alts because the efficiency has dropped so much ,that for a positive result you need to invest so much effort... that after that there is no strength to build the base itself... I’m afraid that if the price trend remains as it is, despite the fact that the quality of base items is only growing, my interest in this activity will go away (and since this is a very important element of the game for me... then my interest in the game will also go away...)...
A solution as a cap to how much they can be sold for in the broker. And on the rarity and quality. It's likely gonna take a UI revamp to have entire variety of base items in vendor for source marks. Maybe a base amenity vendor with the right UI for this. Because it's gonna take a big room and several vendors due to many players being bunched up on them for this great feature. Having them at several locations will help so don't get stuck in a bunch of players trying to get a vendor.
I really want to use the base items. I have a deed ready to be used for Sweet Chaos. Knowing the pirces will limit me just makes me want to not run the seasonal at all or at bare minimum. I 100% agree with you.
I have am 'out there' suggestion... Why not make it possible to BUY the items in the cash store as bundles for SOME of the basic items for each seasonal that typical base builders would use and have ONE animated/special feature base item. This means base builders can have easy access to the things they want but will still have to do the grind for the feats as it doesn't contain ALL the items. this would solve a LOT of issues with access to the items. This puts an ease on the casual players, gives you another influx for cash because the feat chasers would buy the bundle just to cut down the grind a little, and would give more incentive for the devs to make the base items much more appealing. You could cost them the same as the batman, or Flash base item bundles, so not unobtainable, but still worth the effort.
“…would likely spread…” I know that correction is unnecessary and a waste of space but it matters to me.
i think il just wait until next year when the prices drop to a more reasonable level before buying any of this.... way overpriced on all of it.
