Episode frequency - time for a change? (Discussion)

As you may have noticed in my recent threads I have tried to encourage discussion from several sides regarding the current episode structure and current state of DCUO.

Today I'm going to throw out a suggestion which might be controversial but also possibly beneficial to the game and both sides involved with the game - the developers and the players.

In recent years we have seen a decline in quality of certain content released from an episode. We have also got a much smaller developer team than we used to, so addressing issues in-game takes longer, and if content releases in a poor state/quality with numerous bugs, fixes can take weeks or months to implement. This is particularly the case with elite raid content, as besides Birds of Prey and the anniversary raid every raid content released in the last year and a half has either been bugged and not worked as intended, or turned off on release.

You can see my discussion regarding elite raids here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dc...ith-an-episode-or-a-week-or-two-later.316229/

I'm going to throw an idea out there and I hope we can have respectful discussions on this - I have already been discussing this with a few players recently.

Is it time that we had two episodes per year instead of three?

Benefits to this could include:

1. More time for development on the content, so it doesn't release in a buggy and rushed state.
2. Better quality content. With more time to work on the content we might be able to see more creative things from this, like longer raids with more bosses, new OST, new and polished instances, and more.
3. Devs would have more time in between these two episodes to address other bugs and balance issues in the game.
4. Possibility for more work towards smaller but significant updates. For example Survival Mode could be fine tuned and worked on a little bit more.

Downsides to this:

1. There's no guarantee that content will release absolutely fine with no bugs or glitches, or will be of a night-and-day difference quality. There's no real guarantee on anything besides less content - but it will give developers/testers more time and with more time there is a better chance for better quality content releases and bug fixes.
2. Bug fixes on release may still be slow due to the dev team still being smaller.

Please discuss below your thoughts on this idea. This is presuming that we don't get a significantly bigger dev team including qa testers and more in the next year or so.

Content was a lot better until af2 came out with that elite raid. All we need is regular content. If you want to make it more difficult, then take off a piece of gear.

This would murder the population. We need more episodes a year, not fewer.

Or DB/EG7 could supply the dev team with more ressources/devs

Not everybody likes mindless button-mashing gameplay. Gear has little to do with it.

I don't mind longer breaks between the episodes.

More so if it means more content with better quality.

Hmm.. but that was tried already with the monthly episodes. The community was too demanding; if the devs needed a little more time to release a monthly episode, then players quickly burned the forums with cries of foul play because they had to wait. The dev team at that time could not keep up with that demand then, and I do not think that this current team wants to work that way now.

I think less episodes are better, especially if they are story-driven and content-rich. What is the point of passing out 4 full episodes a year or more if they are just "get in, do your stuff, get out" type of content? That gets old very fast and this community has proven that again and again.

In my opinion, episodes should not be broken up; they should be one, long episodic run. So, instead of taking 3 weeks to finish it would take 3 months to finish, which is well enough time for the seasonal and other special events to happen as well. Now, do players have time for that? Sure they do, because players can then manage their time across the entire episode, instead of having to worry about "finishing fast" before the content gets stale. If there are a lot of things to do within content, then that content will last a long time.

I do like the idea of having only 2 episodes a year; however, I also think that the devs could fill in "episode gaps" with "Meanwhile..." content. For example, as this current episode is happening, we could have content that starts to tie up the storylines of older content that were never resolved. I would expect only one or two "Meanwhile..." episodes a year, as time would be needed for full episodes.

I like this BUT to be clear and reaffirm that theres no need to rush, your “meanwhile” episodes need to NOT carry stronger gear that way theres no need to rush an gear up.
I am one that rushes elite gear. I spam the crap out of whatever raid the group is doing if its a good group and we are clearing it.
I want the gear as fast as possible so i can enjoy it longer before replacing it.
Thats the issue with people saying dont rush. Ok so if we dont rush then by the time we get that last few pieces its time to replace them.
Another way they could slow creep is chill on the stats. Next episodes colored gear could be NOT as strong as previous elite. Previous elite an current reg could be equal. Then there would not be as big a need to rush.
Either way, i love the idea as long as the “meanwhile” episodes do not come with better gear as that’d further push the need to rush.
I love 2 episodes a year especially if they are legit. I want for real raids like the FOS’s, gates, dox, nexus, etc.
The good raids that had loads of various fights an mechanics. Pretty much required mics. Pretty much required building a group rather than Q’n up blind.
Man oh man, if 2 episodes a year came with
3 legit raids (real ones as mentioned)
2 alerts
1-2 duo’s
1 solo
Legit open world stuff (not the crappy spams an crappy mod crafting but good stuff to do)

That’d be on point

Obviously I was involved in your previous discussion, sorry I never responded to your last post, I just had other stuff on again, but to continue it here somewhat naturally.

This was an element we somewhat agreed on, I did tell you, you'd get kickback though, looking at a lot of the responses in here thus far

Also you probably need to better define what you mean with quality? As you'll see you already got a response about "difficulty", you need to make it clear is your definition of quality more than just "is something hard enough for me", otherwise you'll see this quickly move off in to a subjective debate solely about whether or not content is difficult enough and whether that alone makes something "quality".

How do you stop a 3 month episode taking three weeks, when you sell replay badges?

It's fine, we kinda covered a lot of things in that conversation in the other thread and it came to a natural conclusion.

Quality = new open world, longer raid instances with 3+ bosses, detailed room/boss mechanics in all content. And most crucially no content going live that is either turned off, or buggy/rushed/unplayable. Possibly one extra content in those two episodes where possible, and perhaps some new interesting soundtrack. Soundtrack can really set the mood of the content if done right, and there's very few OST in DCUO that makes me feel 'wow' about it. I kinda had that a little in Metal Part II with the Drowned soundtrack in the alert. But soundtrack needs to be more epic and add to the illusion of the content, rather than just the same reused OST.

Compare FFXIV soundtrack with DCUO:



(also note the views)



DCUO soundtracks can sometimes be alright, but compared to FFXIV there's notable differences.

I do reference FFXIV a lot as I have started playing it recently and a significant amount of my friends and leagmuemates have also started playing FFXIV recently. It's good to compare what makes FFXIV work and where DCUO can do better.

Perspective is important too, and looking at more well received MMOs and what they have done can be lessons going forward for DCUO too. I don't know how much perspective other players on the forums have with DCUO over its lifetime, and compared with other active MMOs out there.

Would you be horrified if I told you I've played virtually 10 years with the music turned off in DCUO

It's the little things, you know.

Please stop asking for less and stop trying to lower the bar.

If they do less updates, the ones we get will still come out with bugs and players will still claim it's because they're rushed. This won't solve anything. The only difference is we'll get less content and you'll still have bugs. Plus it will kill the population. People stop playing when they finish the new content and they come back when new content is released. The less often the game gets updates, the more the public perceives the game is done and they will move on. This would send that signal and people would leave.
The game isn't rushed and that's why it's buggy. And the dev team also isn't smaller either. MMOs are live products and they're complex and this one is using a graphic engine from 2004ish so it's compatible with less and less hardware (serverside/hosting and local hardware) and there are fewer devs familiar with the old tech to resolve these incompatibilities.

The solution *IS* more updates, not less. And no, that doesn't automatically mean monthly. The game should be reliably releasing updates every 3 months. To do it they would have to do a bit of hiring to account for increase in workload in some depts.

The reason why monthly didn't work when they tried it was because they released the same amount of content from a quarterly update but spread it out over 3-4 months piecemeal. This upset players because they were getting one instance a month. If they released the full amount of quarterly content, but monthly, everyone would have been happy. It wouldn't have been sustainable though because they would have had to ramp up their staffing for doubled+ workload and DLCs apparently don't sell too well so they wouldn't get a return on that labour investment.

Same here - Somewhere i read or was given the "tip" - very early on - that the music made it harder to hear collection/exobit sounds etc and turned it off and now the few times I turned it back on It felt so distracting I turned it back off almost straight away lol

Sorry, but I do not agree with releasing content every 3 months if the quality of that content feels cheap and rushed.

LQ isn't asking for the bar to be lowered, LQ is in fact asking that the bar be raised, just that they perceive the best way to raise the bar would come from "quality over quantity".

It is a common perception that sometimes "more can come from less" when that less is actually of better quality in the first place, LQ has a perfectly valid point that it doesn't matter if there's more, if that "more" is just more trash.

In terms of the quality LQ is talking about it's obviously overall quality of product. I'm not speaking for LQ and they can correct me if I'm wrong I'm certain, but it appears to largely stem around content being more engaging, bug free and deeper in terms of experience i.e. thought out mechanics and quality of overall story telling such as engaging music and story lines.

This is more easily achievable when you spend the appropriate amount of time developing something and not rushing it out because you need to make a 4 month deadline above all else.

It isn't out of the ordinary for an MMO to only receive 1 or 2 expansions per year and this is probably more common in fact than DCUO's rather rapid content releases by comparison (take a look at WoW and SwtoR and FF14 just as 3 examples)

In fact I wouldn't be surprised, at all, if DCUO now don't shake up entirely the existing premise of content release given they've moved the episodes to "free", they don't need to sell well now, because they're not selling them at all, they also don't need to release everything at once.

In fact as LQ and I discussed previously, they could even expand everything out further and make it more like Origin Crisis, make the upper bars of the difficulty slider really difficult and even stagger the release of gear sets. In fact I'm pretty sure I saw Mepps or Charon suggest the other day they're going to 'shake things up', we'll find out exactly how but the next few months and releases could be interesting.

if you're going to references for FFXIV OSTs, you should always go with this.





kidding aside, you should always go with Twinning

I'd be more inclined to agree if the player base had shown the patience to wait for new content releases. But unfortunately there have been WAY too many times that an episode delay or a wait for a seasonal has been met with the "pitchforks and torches" crowd. And I've really not seen any indications that such behavior is in the past.

Well...

Requiring a higher CR leveling path to get to endgame and cutting back on the stat buff by at least half (or remove it completely, as I prefer, yikes!) would help with that in my opinion. Larger episodes would take longer to complete, even with using replay badges if there is enough content (imagine combining Amazon Fury 1, 2, and 3 into one episode, for example).

However, the obvious answer would be to raise the cost of replay badges needed to replay the content missions and the lower raids. Missions/Raids that cost 87 replay badges would not need to be changed. Since replay badges can now be purchased, higher replay costs should have been slowly introduced. I think 15 to 20 max replay badges per content mission is fair. The other side of this coin would be to remove the option of using replay badges for certain missions, but I know that would not go over very well.