Episode 28: Another Update to Rewards

so basically the test complainers said that 6 daily missions is too much to do because then they would have no time to play with their alts. got it.

That's the thing, though - there is not a 6 month delay between new content. There will be new content around September; it's just going to be a free to play major event. And like Starro, the amount of new content in the event will be about what we get in a quarterly dlc.

The issue you and others have (which you repeatedly fail to articulate) is that you don't like the major events format. You want all new content to be purchasable dlcs with top level progression; and that change would reduce each dlc's projected longevity to 3 or 4 months. We're getting 3 to 4 dlcs worth of content this year; it's just that half of it is free to play and not top level progression.

But for the record, I never complained on the AoJ grind - I was fine with how it was, and fine with how it is. The changes just put the daily / weekly open world content almost identical to AF3 (AoJ having an extra weekly bounty). The difference is AF3 only had one open world area. If they wanted to do things this way, then AoJ only needed one open world area. Creating two open worlds was a waste in the end.

nah, there are plenty events and seasonals they will be adding inbetween dlcs. which scared the testers that if you have a seasonal , a dlc, and an event to run that its too much playtime in one day to do it all. thats the real reason the testing community wanted the daily reductions to content.

Mepps the vendor cost vs the marks we get per week lined up with AF3 to AoJ. 70% increase to both. The 3 helmets and 3 OP items do not line up with AF3 because we get a 70% increase in marks but these items got a 200-246% increase in cost. Which leads to longer playtime of AoJ.

AF3 had 2 OP items that took 6 weeks to get the marks for the 2 collection pieces. U guys increased this to 3 OP items in AoJ but doubled the amount of grind time to 12 weeks. If 2 OP items were added, for a total of 4, then this would be ok. Imo the increased cost does not add true longevity. Also grinding for those 3 OP items is tied to max CR.

A player grinds 3 months for the vendor gear to increase CR by 9 points. But then needs to grind another 3 months for a 2cr increase. The same amount of grind time with a 7cr difference. With AF3 a player could have all the vendor rewards done in 5.5 months. With AoJ it takes 7.2 months to finish all the vendor rewards. Both dlcs have roughly the same amount of content. Even if u say AoJ has more content well it leads to my next point....

...Im not sure how others feel but i personally do not want to run the same dlc for 7 months. When i say dlc i mean any content w/in that dlc. Whether i run it on 1 toon or 5 toons it leads to burnout and boredom. Because to finish all the rewards i have to log on every single day and run that same content. People have lives, jobs, families and life just happens. I play daily. But sometimes i do miss some days here and there. I shouldnt be punished for that because the grind is so long. Also when all the content can be beaten on day 1 w/out any need for the vendor gear or OP items i question what is the grind even there for? What reward are we getting? A few sp? And if the next content is an event where we are all clamped i dont feel like that grind was worth it at all.

I know the feedback i gave regarding this topic and i certainly didnt request any content be removed from the episode. My main point was running any and all of the AoJ content for 6-7 months was too much of a grind. Maybe i didnt word this clearly enough. But i feel there is a fine line when it comes to how much content there is to run vs how long we have to grind that content, meaning the # of months. I was certainly ok with the dailies that were removed staying in the game. But i do not want to run those same dailies and same 2 alerts for 6-7 months. It doesnt matter that there was 6 dailies per day chosen from a pool of 18. At a certain point it all blurs together because of the 6-7 time frame. Hope this is clear enough and i tried to be as constructive as possible and compare AF3 to AoJ and give my opinion/concerns.

1 last question. When we got quarterly dlcs it took 1.5-2 months to get our gear and the last month or so was used to enjoy being geared up and for SM. The only real complaints i saw about this was from the people who spam replays and finish everything in a week. This still happens now with the replays. So my question is why was this changed? And why wasnt it considered to go back to quarterly dlcs when monthly content ended?

Lol not sure how that makes sense, more open world solos is actually more friendly on alts, because you can get them done at your own time without having to worry about being carried by groups because you're lower cr.

Please dont blame the testers wildly like this since its clear, you are wrong and just wanting to find someone to blame. It was a combination of Testers,some who liked and some who didnt and then the MAJORITY of players here on the forums who outright didnt like it.

The Testing Community are of different people but if you look at the Feedback threads from during that testing, youll see a difference between those who test and those who only show up to complain. Testers provide feedback on what is on Test on what works and what doesnt and asks questions around it. The majority of complaining about the grind you can certainly find it in the Announcement section.

1. What was the intended timeframe for AF3? I'm not a mind reader, so when you say a similar timeframe for gearing with EP27/EP28 its unclear on what you actually mean? In other words was the timeframe always going to be from November 2016 - June 2017, or did it change to that at a later time due to Stats Revamp taking longer than expected?

2. Is there any chance of some solo missions back for the village area? For A51 you have a solo and a daily bounty which imo is fine, but the village you do a 2 minute solo mission and then you're done in there for the day (besides weeklies I suppose). You put a lot of time and effort into the village especially, so seems a bit of a waste just to go in there for one daily solo mission per day. I feel the village needs to serve more purpose than it does now compared to say last Friday.

A clamped duo, alert, raid, and end game raid is not the equivalent to a quarterly dlc in my eyes and i know i am not alone in that opinion. Oh 3 dailies too. But regardless of opinion lets look at the amount of content in the starro event compared to AF3.

AF3 had 3 dailies, a duo, an alert, and 2 raids. Starro had 3 dailies, a duo, an alert, and 2 raids.

So both had 3 dailies. Both had a duo. Both had an alert. And both had 2 raids. How is 1 the equivalent to a quarterly dlc but the other is a 6 month dlc? Im seriously asking. Cause the only difference i see is the elite raids. And honestly its hard for me to say the normal and elite are 2 different pieces of content when they share a loot lock Even tho the starro raid was the same instance it didnt share a loot lock.

Oh AF3 had a weekly too. Sorry forgot about that. I guess that is the difference? 1 weekly mission is what qualifies as the difference between 3 months and 6 months? Now u didnt say that. But its the only difference i see. Some of the labels of content just dont add up for me.

I dont think he meant it the way u see it and i agree it was to many dailys considering the additional events and major event content in the future, it would have been even for one main character to much if someone has responsibilities in reallife... not to think about alts , those would have died completely out for those players.

I agree, but there is also the problem that the content that they created is WEAK. The daily mission of destroy 5 turrets, for example, takes an entire two minutes to complete and is not fun and engaging IMO. So you take WEAK content and combine with it needing to last 6-7 months and WHAMMO total boredom and disengagement.

If you made exciting, unique interesting content, maybe it could last 6-7 months and people wouldnt think of it as a grind - but you didn't so it is a boring slog and killing the game.

Well, we can start with this - Starro open world had 4 dailies and 3 weeklies.

Secondly, you latch onto "clamped". I was referring to content (i.e. maps, bosses, mechanics, etc) - making it clamped or not clamped is programming semantics that is easily changed. If they turned it into a purchasable dlc, it would not be clamped.

Frankly, I find it hard to believe you don't know the above or somehow misunderstood. But in truth I believe you're just trolling, and I'm not interested today.

I realize I am just one man but made it known every time I possibly could that AFIII and AoJ were not even close to being adequate as far as content goes to last 6 months. An atrocious grind to a normal sized DLC does not magically make the DLC some large scale DLC.

Best gear being on the vendor along with OP items is a fantastic idea. Problem is, when you guys did it you turned around and made the stuff cost so dang much that it would take a ridiculous amount of time grinding to get them. I've said it before and I'll say it again, AoJ is a beautifully designed DLC Mepps. However you guys turned around and slaughtered the enjoyment I thought I might have from it once I saw the cost of the gear, items, and realizing you all went again with the 6-7 month DLC time frame. It was an incredibly disappointing moment for me that resulted in, for the first time in my DCUO history, me cancelling my sub. Membership just sadly isn't worth it anymore if we are only getting a normal sized DLC once every 6-7 months.

First, to correct a few things - Starro had 4 Dailies and two weeklies. AF3 has 3 Dailies and one weekly. Starro really only had one raid (or two: Reg/Elite) while AF3 had two (or four depending on how you are counting).

However, Starro also had a robust crafting component to the Event, which kept many people engaged throughout the entire two months. The Membership Bonus Chest was incredibly significant (for myself at least) when taking a look at that what the event provided from a value standpoint. Add to that the fact that alts became far more useful in the Starro Event (partly because the content was clamped, so I could use all 16 alts to farm materials - partly because rewards were actually tradable unlike in some Seasonals) and I think that the Starro Event was actually more kind to members than Age of Justice is.

Secondly - Take a look at things from the devs' point of view for a second. They have the ability to produce content every three months or so. They could produce an Episode that only 1% of the population can enjoy ... or they could produce an Event that 100% of the population will enjoy. I can totally see why they have shifted their release cadence. We've entered the Event Era of DCUO.


Now none of this addresses the real problem that is making so many so angry: the constant devaluation of our subscriptions. We are now going from 4 DLCs a year to 2 (and we're getting the short end of the stick in dozens of other ways, as I've written about at length in the past), and that is the HUGE elephant in the room as far as Daybreak is concerned. It's possible they simply want to phase Membership out. Maybe they want to go fully F2P, where players just log in two or three times a year and play for a month. I don't know. I do know that their current course of action is causing a lot of folks to reevaluate their subs, and that just doesn't seem healthy to me.

Constructively and respectfully:

Open world missions seems that were designed taking in consideration that the player will have to do about 6 of them every day instead of just 2 and no Solo or Duo to compliment. So the amount of time to complete a mission is shorter than what it take an AF3 open world mission (just for the sake of comparison). Even with a higher and better gear, it takes a player more time invested in a single AF3 mission than a single new mission from AoJ.

Once the players got a taste in day one of doing all missions in the live servers with the current population it felt great but the next day the lack of available missions felt so huge that my league mates were asking if there was a bug in the daily missions. Currently in my case I do all that I have to do in the new Village map in about 5 minutes taking it easy. So finishing all open world including the Paradox bounty is done faster than the AF3 open world missions.


This Episode don't have a Solo challenge or Duo. So the small size content (1 player and 2 player content) felt insufficient with the missions reduction.

Vendor price, yes they can be high but that gives something to attain while the next Episode appears.

Positive things about this Episode is the amount of 4 players and 8 players content. But we are lacking in the 1-2 player content and the amount of time enjoying those new maps you guys put effort in designing to just be used for 5 minutes and this is week 1 of the release.

My 2 cents

AF III had 4 dailies. You're forgetting the Shades one in Gotham Under Siege.

That question has been addressed a few times. What the plan is basically or ish is a cycle of episode then major event then episode then major event so on and so on so even if the episode is meant to be out for 6 months we will have something in roughly 3 months ish

Ah yes, thank you! We were talking about Open World Dailies, but you are totally correct.

So AF3 had 3 Dailies, 1 Weekly, 1 Solo, 1 Duo, 1 Alert and 2(4) Raids.

Mepps, the underlying problem is that you had feedback from groups with entirely different goals and the implemented change was only targeted at one of those groups.

The first group, the most vocal in their complaints about the cost of the rewards are those players who are driven to "complete" the most recent content and have the newest and best gear in the game. The cost of the rewards seemed to require far too much effort by completing all of the available dailies in the game to remain "competitive" with the rest of that subgroup.

There is second group of players who are more interested in having as many different things to do in the game as possible, preferably new things that are fun and engrossing. That group may have raised eyebrows at the cost of the AOJ rewards but they were planning to constantly play the game and complete all of the dailies which would have resulted in them acquiring the gear on the timeline the Dev team would prefer.

A third group of players, the casuals, may have seconded the complaints of the first group but that group cannot ever be the focus of how the major rewards are structured as doing so shortens the value lifespan of rewards for the first two groups of player. Casual players must accept that they will always lag in acquiring gear and should be happy enough with the loot drops from the missions as they make it easy to acquire and complete new sets of gear.

The crux of the issue is that your solution only partially addresses the concerns of the first group by changing the effort required by players to acquire enough War Bonds for a complete set of AOJ gear to match an expected timeline. The solution totally ignores the interests of the second group of players as it took choices away from the daily menu.

Admittedly, there is no easy solution. The Dev team has a vested interest in content and rewards lasting for a specific time frame while the players are divided in exactly what they want from an Episode beyond something new and different to do. An idea that comes to mind would be to figure out some sort of real time progression for unlocking gear items on the vendor that is independent from how a player earns the currency to make the purchases. (EQII's Ascension Classes and Epic had time locks, so it can be done.)

I feel there is like a language barrier or something when it comes to the Devs and players, or the interpretation of what people are asking for.

Proxy posted in another thread about having a Open world, Solo, Duos, Alerts and 4 raids.

What I have seen happening since the launch of AF3 is you turned the game into a repetitive grind, I saw no where that peoples asked for that? I did see people address issues an concerns, I myself being one of those people. Making the game a grind to craft items so you have to constantly run the same thing day in day out takes the fun out of it, and it is something the game never had before.

I can't complain about the DLC because I do like it, I think Ocean's did a great job on War-Torn village.

I don't agree with anyone saying Events are DLC, it is Content but it is not DLC. I personally my own opinion is I hate events I hate clamped content. I did read Jacks response to Proxy's thread why they do clamped content, but in all honestly you are driving people away by so many changes an money grabs. Long time players are leaving the game because their requests fell on deaf ears.

Instead of enticing people to get membership by having better perks it is so devalued no one wants to get membership or needs to when you cater to F2P.

I think there should be a Dev or someone in the game, playing the game, even testing the game your own product not have players who are biased because they like playing a certain way an that effects the majority of players.

We have been asking for over a year now to increase Marks of Victory we need so much of it why is it still at 100 it should be increased, it's small things like that an life quality changes that are lacking.

Took 6 to 7 months to develop the DLC with only 1 set of gear an the gear an style is something we already have in the game, after so so many people posted ideas on the forums again fell on deaf ears.

All I see is people attacking each other because of the changes some like it some don't not everyone will be happy, there needs to be a medium ground an I don't see that happening anytime soon. The game is dying a sad slow death !!

Thanks, I been on and off the boards for a while. Good information!