Calling all DC fans who love making iconics

Bravo my friend. Bravo.

I will still say the steam numbers are indicative of the population.
I understand there are certainly more players on console than pc.
But, if you compare that to a game that is just about as old as dcuo (referencing eso), the steam numbers are over 1tx that of dc.
It only bolsters my statement regarding the healt of the population on console because if you look at eso steam numbers, it demonstrates a connectio. You referenced: Nearby tab in eso on console; there are pages of players whereas dcuo is 1 page .

I degress. My whole point was for the other guy to not be so naive regarding the health of dcuo. He blindly defends the game and attempts to bolster dcuo population numberd when ots clear the game is dead. There are just enough console players to keep it going.

Twitch streamers have moved to other games because there are not enough people playing to generate views

Youtube content providers have ditch that game for same reason.

I was veteran player myself from lunch and ran one of the largest iconic leagues in the game. But, even a hardcore and dedicated player from launch such as myself isnt as naive as that guy.

The games is in great decline.

ESO is roughly 3 years younger than DCUO, which was released in 2011 already and ESO was released in 2014. Top of that, ESO had of course a better start since it did not "move" to the PS4, but was made for it. So with 3 years younger and the better start from the "tech" end, it's normal that there are more users in ESO.

I think the more devastating numbers are from City of Heroes, which had more players around for most of the time back then when both games (DCUO and CoH) were in competition. There was only a short period during launch of DCUO when CoH was really close to empty, but since the hack happened shortly after launch, a lot of players went back to the older game. DCUO's short lived success did not start until the devs changed the game access from subscription only to the mix of f2p, micro-transaction and subscription that is basically still around. Just the micro-transactions are more of a rip-off nowadays

CoH on the other hand had the real comeback even after the DCUO folks returned there, when the shutdown was announced. The players filled a lot of server instances on shutdown day, something no Sony Online Entertainment game (that was Daybreak before being sold to Russian investors) did ever achieve that on shutdown. And DCUO won't do so either IMO.

Another thing about the ESO comparision: Fantasy seems to beat other genre whenever it comes to MMOs. WoW - most famous MMO and fantasy. Neverwinter beat Star Trek Online in user numbers by far (same publisher for both games, launched on consoles about the same time and they proudly announced when they cracked the one million player mark back then). Does not make STO the worse game nor moves it in the danger of being shut down.

As for DCUO, I have to admit I expected it to be gone before 2020. I may be wrong on this one, since the core players still being around here seem to be willing to sink insane amounts of money (per head) into this. And as long as they get into the blacks, Daybreak won't shut it down, no matter how tedious it becomes for new or returning players to catch up by playing the game. They offer a lot of methods to catch up by paying for that

Social media are IMO the most unreliable source for facts I hope this part of "culture" vanishes fast again with the new privacy and copyright protection laws the EU is pushing.

Yepp, it is in decline. But it is so since release, since going F2P, since Origin Crisis or Sons of Trigon or stat-clamping or time crapsules etc. depending on the different people points of view. But TBH - if (formerly) paying customers ever want to get into a position of getting quality products again, bug-infested cash grabs like DCUO actually need to go away and signalize the gaming industry "change your ways, we've had it!" So I'm not too worried, despite sitting on numerous now inactive accounts with tons of iconic and near iconic toon names and costumes etc. I'd be if more of the game was actually intact, working as intended and somewhat fun.

I'm actually tempted to get the pre-order of RDR2 out of boredom, though I don't expect it to be anywhere near Red Dead Redemption in points of quality and fun since I already stopped "playing" DCUO again and am back at cleaning out inventories....

Naïve, huh? Well, we'll get to that later. Story time first.

Star Wars Galaxies had a system in place called the Galactic Civil War system. Players who joined up with either the Rebel Alliance or the Empire could participate, with players getting points for engaging in combat with the opposite faction to help "control" certain planets on the server. It encompassed all aspects and levels of the game; space combat, PvE or PvP fights, even crafters could get in on the struggle. It could be done at just about any level, but most of the focus ended up being around end-game players.

Now, even though you could get points from PvE encounters (I logged a LOT of hours in my various spacecraft for GCW ranks and the perks that came with ranks LOL) you'd get more points for PvP fights than you would for PvE. The idea was to help encourage PvP but still give those who didn't want to fight other players the opportunity to participate. They also put in leaderboards for your faction so you could see how you were doing in participation, and those boards would reset after a week.

This is one of the last leaderboards for the Rebel faction on my server (Bloodfin), right before the game was shut down.

That character at the top with over 90% of the points for that server? That's my Jedi. I got that spot on the leaderboard just by doing PvE combat, usually a mix of space missions and fighting some ground-based Imperial NPCs. That may not seem like all that big of a deal, but Bloodfin was generally regarded as the unofficial PvP server for the East Coast region. So the fact that a lone PvE player got 90% of the rank/points on a PvP-heavy server is a pretty good indication of where the server sat just before the game shut down.

Now, why did I tell that story? Because it's a prime example of the kind of data needed to convince me in a data-driven argument: data from the game itself. The leaderboard info came from in-game activity on that server, and even though GCW participation wasn't 100% or mandatory, it was information generated by the game itself. In the MMOs I've played (SWG, Champions Online, DCUO), the GCW leaderboard is the closest thing I've seen to players having the same sort of information to look at as the devs, and even that was limited because it only looked at the GCW aspect of the game.

Steam numbers will only tell you how many players log in using Steam, and with the game available on multiple platforms that don't require Steam (including PC) it's just insufficient for knowing (or even guessing) anything about the game other than how many people use Steam to log in.

RDR2 Is going to be sick. A lot of people are "chomping at the bit" for that game.

I agree with pretty much everything you stated above.
I just think some people on here are in denial this gsme is in bad shape

Sorry brother. Not trying to to ruffle youre feathers. Im not trying to convince you. If you like the game, then enjoy it. Personally, I wont be a part of a game that no longers functions well. I like games that are healthy. One of the other posters even knows the game is in great decline. But you believe what you want.

Okay, I was going to multi quote here between a few of yours and Tickle's posts, but I think I will just go with this one.

There are two big aspects to an MMO game like DCUO. The game itself, and the online social community. There are plenty of people who play this game on a daily basis, who are way past the storyline of the game, have high CR & SP, and they have pretty much gone through those weekly raids. What else is left for them to do but to socialize with other players in the game? Its called making a connection, talking to friends, and just mingling. Not everyone gets it, that's fine. Some people are here just to play. Others are here for the role playing. Some for the style & look of either their toons, their bases, or both. And some are here just to chat it up. This all can be summed up in four words.....

"To each their own."

Going with the topic of this thread, I'm a little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B. A lot of times I get an inspiration to make an iconic, not always with just DC. Just the other day I nailed a pretty good likeness to Magneto, but I couldn't figure out what power I wanted for him between Mental and Quantum. But since I wasn't planning on taking him very far, I didn't finish making him. If I make an iconic, I want to take that toon farther than just the end of the mentor storyline. And I've made a number of originals too. Trying to stay away from some of the common ones, I try to make some obscure, less known iconics. For example, I made two toons based on Superman Blue with Electric powers, and Superman Red. I had no clear definition on what type of powers Red had, so I just went with fire for him. But I nailed down the look pretty well with them. I just wish I could get the Superman emblems for both. I have also made myself a Damian Wayne toon, mainly cause I just like the character from the animated films. I've made a few other iconic toons, as well as originals that make up not only my list of 13 out of 16 slots, but also in my league.

Youre right. Great post

Thank you.

Thing is, I don't think you can really convince anyone using Steam numbers. With the game available on multiple platforms and Steam not covering all the players on the PC platform who play DCUO (along with not covering the PlayStation and Xbox platforms at all) the information on Steam is just too incomplete for use in guessing at population.

Anyhow, I suppose this is as good a spot as any to address the whole "naïve" bit while I'm at it. If I was the naïve kind, I'd ignore or disregard this kind of info when considering the game overall:

• It's a seven year old game
• It has had a rocky (if not troubled) history
• It is only one of six games listed under the Daybreak banner
• It is a licensed game, so Daybreak doesn't have complete control over what happens with the game
• It has never had the sole focus of attention of the company, both in the SOE days and the current Daybreak era, and it probably never will
• Outside of the exception to the rule/800 pound gorilla of the MMO landscape (WoW), MMOs lose significant portions of their population after launch
• DCUO is a niche game in something of a niche market (most MMOs are fantasy-based)
• Anything we see in the game is going to be only a portion of what's going on overall, especially with the game being heavily instanced and multiple phases available on the PvE side

That's just off the top of my head. Given time I could probably add to that list, but I keep all that in mind when I look at the game. I take everything on that list into account and form my opinions based on what I see in the game compared to that list. And even though it's a small window to look through, the game meets what I'd expect and at times exceeds it.

I see players in the Watchtower/Hall of Doom or the starting police stations/nightclubs on a regular basis as I'm traveling through the game. I'm constantly getting annoyed by the number of players who get in my way (even if they're trying to help) when running the outdoor portions of the seasonal events. My wait times on seasonal queues or the Stabilizer duo are pretty minimal. The Doomed Metropolis content is still active even months after it launched, and I'd imagine the queues for the instanced Doomsday fight will pick up as we get closer to the date that they stop offering the Superman emblem on the vendor.

That reminds me, I need to run that. LOL

If the game was half as dead as some would make it out to be, none of that would be the case.

Having gone through SWG's shutdown and playing right until the end, I've seen firsthand how slow things can get on a server as population drops. We're nowhere near that level, no matter what some numbers on Steam might say.

Well, the last one is something off, since I have not come across a second open PvE instance all this month - considering it's seasonal, that is somewhat of a "weak population" indicator.

Been there and at the lockdown of CoH/CoV as well. CoH was well populated when shut down was announced and skyrocketed in population afterwards when players formed their ingame protests (to a point of crowded places in over one hundred server instances). SWG was different, with TOR announced people expected the shut down and, with SOE running SWG, the game being always in discussion of being lacking, ill-managed, underachieving etc.

However, SWG is a good example for how the perception of "active player base" is subjective and flawed. They didn't shutdown all servers at once, they picked a couple of "weak populated" servers before and shut them down, allowing people playing their to move their toons to a different server for free. My main server was among that first wave, and at the time of shutdown our player cities were still well populated - just the folks on that server preferred to stay in their own cities instead of welcoming the noobs in Mos Eisley. Also, as a bounty hunter who only moved on at least 7 digit targets, I can say for sure the PvP participation was low there as well. Still: we had much fun gaming there, a little less fun later after moving to the exile-server (due to some chars having lost their names, cities needed to be rebuild etc.) There was a significant return of players arolund shutdown, but not nearly as many as in CoH.

Since SWG, the "world" value of SOE/Gamebreak driven MMOs has significantly gone downhill. DCUO could have been a way bigger and more significant part of the MMO market, if the right decisions were made at the right times. Point is, the devs at Gamebreak went from setting trends, trying new stuff to following other game structures. Like a horde of lemmings....

I felt comfortable using it for two reasons.

First, when I created a league for myself (had another account that I made for Clone Wars Adventures back in the day, YES I'm a Star Wars nerd, so what?! LOL) and was taking my regular characters to the CWA account character to be put into the league, I did have to put the CWA character on a friend list and phase to them. It didn't happen with all of my regular characters, but it happened often enough.

Second, when I go into a particular zone using a Watchtower/Hall of Doom teleporter, it's not a 100% guarantee that I'll see the person who used the teleporter ahead of me when I enter the zone. Sometimes they're right there in front of me again, or I'll see them on their way to get/run missions, but other times they're nowhere in sight.

At the very least it's a reminder that we can't see everything going on in the game at a given moment.

Dude. This game is dead. You can talk 100 pages all I care. Hardly anyone plays this game anymore.
Not to mention, it is severly outdated.

Actually that is a matter of perspective. Sure, players expecting tons of people in MMOs will say "It's dead" - however, from what it obviosly looks like on Daybreak's end, the game still seems to be in the blacks (Daybreak is ATM hiring, content planned already for after Atlantis release etc,)

That's the paradox of these times - 25k players sinking 100 bucks per month into their game (stabilizers, RBs, subscription) can keep an MMO alive nowadays. Spread that over 2 servers and lots of timezones per server and lots of server areas and you barely see people online, yet the money is there to keep such a game alive - even though people still playing it feel in majority like being around some post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Dude. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard the whole "this game is dead" train of thought get brought out when talking about any MMO that I've been playing. It gets pretty tough to take it seriously when people keep trying to go to that particular well, and I'd have a good amount of money if I had a quarter for every time someone made that claim without much in the way of hard data to back up their assertions.

But I am curious about something now. If, as you say, the game is dead and hardly anyone plays it AND it is severely outdated, then why bother starting a thread trying to get players who make/play iconic characters together to play?

I love the game. But Im not in "Denial" like some of other players. Little Bo was bustling with players, so was the Watchtower. The queues were fast or at least reasonable. No longer the case. Fine if people enjoy the game. But, to say the game is healthy, Now youre just being ridiculous and not woth taking seriously.

Let me offer some friendly advice. No snark, no sarcasm, I swear.

Things change as time passes, and MMOs are no different. So take the game for what it is, not for what it was because it is highly unlikely that things will be as they were in the beginning.

Seriously, no one wants that. Big hype, way bigger disappointment, huge part of initial player base leaving again and shortly after the hack came down on Sony. The game didn't really catch on until going F2P....

If you want to run content without being in an iconic dc league together I'm all up for it

I have these heroes
Dc Themed

Jericho
Signal
Fracture
Pollux (clone of flash from 90's series)
K0n el
Mortal Kombat themed heroes

Mk Sm0ke
Mk Quanchi
Mk Reiko
Mk Tremor

Dc Themed Villains

darkspeeddemon 187 (Amalgam comics mesh up of Ghost rider, Etrigan and kid flash)
Ravage (version of Grant Wilson)
Maj0r Warhead (themed off atom smasher)
Ragefilled Archer (themed off red arrow)

Marvel themed heroes

Morph

Marvel themed Villain

Vampirebynight