Cross-Faction Grouping

There are a small handful of instances that are faction-specific, but not enough to really cause too many issues. Of course it can still be a nuisance, but I'm not sure what much they can do about it because that is how they were designed (different instances for each side, some of them are different entirely including the name).

They can quite easily just add them to the opposing faction. The technical aspect of it isn't too difficult, they're basically just instances restricted from one faction or the other. It might not be as simple as flipping a switch or checking a box, but changing them from faction specific to universal like the majority of raids shouldn't be too difficult.

Sure, why not? During the Valentine's Day event, it was a toss-up whether I'd get the villain or hero version, regardless of which faction I played. It was even odds that my hero have would fight Star Sapphire or that my villain would have to fight Mister Freeze. I mean, if you really need some justification for a hero doing a villain mission, just pop that "Task Force X/Suicide Squad" commo from Amanda Waller on the screen.

A reasonable start would be making the remaining specific faction only instances that share the same name open to both factions. It gets a little more complicated for specific instances with different names such as the ones from the Hand of Fate DLC. Cross faction LFG chat/grouping/trading, and rallying anyone in open world should all come in the same update.

I mean from a technical aspect, it seems each instance has a hero and villain version, some have no discernable difference whole some like the Valentines Day instance have different bosses, while others like FOS3 are 99% identical nut with slightly different NPC dialogue. I would surmise that with faction-exclusive instances, the opposing faction instance assets don't exist - so at most the technical aspect would be setting up the opposing faction side(which could hypothetically be just some copy/pasting of code, with minor alterations), and of they did want that storytelling narrative, said task force x/Amanda waller prompt. That's assuming maximum effort scenario, these things may have already been setup as a requirement just to function, and the opposing faction side really is just disabled and they only need to edit a few lines of code to enable access, then whatever additions would need to be made for the task force x commentary.

Regardless, I know I'd just appreciate having these missions actually queued in the omnibus. As of now, the hand of fate instances aren't included in omnibus queues.

I just re-listened to what Mepps said about the AMA. It's for the art team. Oh well, maybe they will start doing AMAs again for other departments.

You can invite player from a opposite faction into a in-progress instance. But you cant group up outside of the instance.

I know. I've done it a bunch of times. But it doesn't seem to work in every instance. I tried helping some hero players with feats in Brothers In Arms. We went into the operation with a full group, me on my hero alt, then I switched to my main villain and they tried to invite me, but it didn't work. I think they got a message to the effect of "Player is of the wrong faction", or something.

i apologize i was just replying, foruming while working lol Didnt see the OP

You can actually usually tell which instances cannot be done cross-faction because it will lack the "red bullseye " icon in background of the instance information (after clicking) in the On-Duty menu. Some seem to be glitched recently though and don't show it even if they are cross playable.

Thank you. I remember seeing that symbol before and wondering what it meant. I should have connected the dots.

That explains so much. Like - why some of the lower tier instances never pop on villain side... I wonder why they're not available for Sucide Squad/Taskforce X. Is it just because of story? That seems dumb. I hope it changes at some point.

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It's probably time somebody did something about this issue. People are clearly interested in it.

Already in the works, just technical things from back in the 2010 or even before as SoE was cookin up DCUO.

Diving into legacy code must not be easy since it doesnt seem to be modular (from what im getting).

More like this i guess? Unraveling something like this that was never designed to be unraveled to fix a future oversight that was a gaming norm at the time and not expecting the gaming landscape to shift, So it didnt seem the team (at the time) accounted for it. So the system was never future proofed.

Most of the tier 1 instances in the base game seem to be faction specific, but not sure what their criteria is at least in terms of story. In the early days of the game they at least made distinctively different versions of instances such as some lantern ones and Hand of Fate.

There is one where heroes can queue into where we help Circe defeat and trap Wonder Woman, but for Brothers in Arms/Family Reunion we can't help Batman/Lex if we're the opposite faction?

Family Reunion is cross-faction, but Brothers in Arms isn't, which is what makes it confusing, because they're very similar and from the same episode.

That is strange indeed given Family Reunion has a very heroic/villainous ending depending on which version you get. Devs should take a look into cross-faction for older instances, some are very difficult to queue into such as Bombshell Paradox and Unholy Matrimony.

Yes, they should. I've been queuing those 2 (and quite a few others) for months on my main, who's a villain on EUPC/PS and they haven't popped even once. Hand Of Fate Operations are the worst to get into, because not only are they faction-specific, but also not in included in Omnibus.

If they can get the game engine updated in that revamp, then it may be easier to get this done.

Butchaknow what would help in the meantime?

AI allies/companions to help you get into content, like thems other games allow, ya know.

Just had a neat idea, like if you have 3 allies equipped you can select them to be "+3" toward group size (if not full). But let's not get too off topic XD

EverQuest 2, another game run by Daybreak, has this feature. So perhaps it's not too far off of an idea?