Falling from Grace - DCUO

I've played DCUO since the release of Halls of Power 1. It was my first ever MMORPG game and i loved every bit of it. The game was challenging to a point, no constant need of microtransactions to purchase power in the game (artifacts, allies, so on). Times were simple. The better you were at the game, more SP, more armour and knowledge, the better you were.

The game has taken its fair share of beatings over the years. The 2 pieces of content per month era sucked, stats revamp wasn't all that greatly received, Predatory Marketing strategies, Ally introduction and many more. I could name more but we would be here for a while...

With the introduction of Artifacts, it was a good thing. You could only equip 1 artifact. Those could only boost your core role stats as well as your whole group. their max level was 80-120 i believe, its been a while. Then they went to 160, eventually 200.

Then we were allowed to equip 2 artifacts as more came out. Good idea, made build crafting more diverse. Then it all went down the drain. Artifact xp came to the marketplace along with catalysts. Seals of Completion were introduced and eventually they introduced 3 artifact slots to squeeze players of even more money. Then came the worst decision ever made for artifacts...

Wolfpack Artifacts: Leveled an artifact fully? Congrats. Pay us money and you can use it for all characters! An over priced piece of equipment after draining your money already. You introduce something that many players wanted for YEARS and instead of thinking "Lets price it realistically affordable, this way more players will be more likely to purchase it and give the players what they want for an affordable amount." you jump right to the "Oh everyone wants it, so lets slap a few 00s on the end of a number because we know we have a few loyal members of the community who would pay us up to 1500 for it"

Allies were the same as artifacts. It soon turned into a huge cash grab or an ungodly grind to get them all levelled for each INDIVIDUAL character. I am half expecting Daybreak to introduce wolfpack allies soon.
It grew out of control quickly. Back then it dawned on me on how Daybreak makes it decisions.
Implement an idea. See the issues with the idea they made. Sell the solution on the market or watch the player base suffer in game to EVENTUALLY reach the solution.

I am WELL aware that the game needs to make money, I am, but with the constant time capsule releases, replay badges, episode releases, seasonal events, artifacts, allies, membership... man, this just takes the cake for the most pay to win thing I've seen in a LONG time. Even some mobile gacha games are not as bad as this lol.

NEXT

Recently I saw a comment on a thread. (i will try to link if i find it again)
The game devs/support don't do anything to help prevent/alleviate the gold seller spam as at the end of the day, the gold spammers are just bumping up the numbers of "active players" or "new players creating accounts" to please the higher ups.

Honestly, i think its true. EU lately has been a graveyard. I've looked for people to do feats with in LFG, nothing. no responses. It takes me 20 minutes to find a group for the newest alert during mid day peak times. Takes me 30mins to pop an omnibus alert and god help me if i go a raid omnibus at 4pm-9pm.

There has been more posts begging to help stop the spam of gold sellers or this "Twosundey" dude selling rare stuff for a months wage.

Posts calling out toxicity in the community, players begging to be heard over their reports. Players are sat here in the forums saying that they give up on reporting actions of others because they never hear back or nothing is ever done about it. I cant say how many times I log into the HoL and get blasted with a chat box of racist, sexist or homophobic comments. I've reported close to 10+ people multiple times already for this stuff months ago and i still see them to this day spamming in HoL shout chat. Its abysmal.

Speed hacking is still an issue. I've seen it first hand. Hell, I know how easy it is to apparently start to do so on PC after seeing someone in my old league say "Download 1 thing and you can do it for free and its super simple and easy". Is there even any attempt to stop the methods of the speed hackers tools?


NEXT

Community feedback. Do you actually listen to us? While i get its hard to view so many suggestions, opinions, ideas and so forth when you come to look at the forums, there could be at least SOME communication on these matters.
You posted about upcoming seasonal items and styles as per usual. You showcase some things. Many of the new items look really cool and nice, maybe somewhere the community requested them or its a touch up of old items from back in the day (I know there are already bar items on the event from like 2014). I have no issue in the showcases, in fact I wish we had much more showcases. Like an insight to concept art for upcoming episodes etc. Would be really cool to let us speculate the next episode for us to build our own hype instead of you guys saying "Hey new episode is this. we will tell you more a day before release "

Anyways. The upcoming seasonal has met some controversy. Players in the community flocked to the thread containing the information and throughout the entire thread, its clear that MOST of the comments there are talking about how over priced and ridiculous the prices are. A while later, a dev comes to the chat and says "Oh, I'm sorry guys. We had to remove some things, but to make it fair on the rest of the seasonal content, we have DOUBLED the price of one of the most expensive pieces to 'BALANCE' things out". This obviously was met with a "Wtf" reaction from everyone who disagreed with the prices already.

This sort of stuff is what makes me think that there are HUGE communication issues within the dev team or somewhere in the chain of development. How often do you see game companies take all the criticism they get, really read deep into it and then say "oh, uhm. Lets make the bad problem even worse, that could work"?

Its coming to the point where the community as a whole is seeing so many cracks in the game and daybreak where its just becoming unbearable to see the game we love be beaten down over and over. Everyday now its like we get a new post complaining about something in the game.

END
While i don't speak for the community at all. I can only speak for myself and see if others agree. For a while now I've wanted to see more communication between the devs and the community. Next gen updates when? What are the plans going forward with content? what is the direction of DCUO? Besides Episodes, what are you focusing on? What bugs are being addressed? Honestly at this point its just "Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?" because we know nothing at all.
Sorry for the long post, im well aware not everyone will read it. Im passionate about the game, have been since i first experienced it. It was my gateway to comics, internet gaming as whole, MMORPG's. Of course i see things in rose tinted glasses, i just wish for the game to start actually noticing problems its causing to itself and to at least try to rectify it.

Thanks.

I’m worried that now Elite content will go the way of PvP eventually. Players are already complaining it’s broken and too easy and that if powers or artifacts aren’t balanced it’ll get worse. Like PvP before a lot of Elite players have left especially around SOBA and Shock some even earlier with mass exodus of Devs and EG7 kiboshing updates. More are leaving as the weeks with no communication from DI. Like I know some people considered Elite as gatekeeping other less experienced players but arguably it was the last unique thing that DCUO had. If we only from now on get two episodes a year with less content the Elite community will dwindle even more. I think when that happens it’ll be just casuals and whales left and DCUO is close to being done. No sugar coating it that’s a reality of the situation. But I don’t think the new devs or remaining ones have it to make more challenging content or fix the existing balance issues now so it’s looking bleak for the future.

I agree with you. Some think that in dcuo you can reach the max without paying and that means that the game isnt so pay to win, but for me they decisions looks frequent as cash grab tendencies.

Fall"ing"?

Welcome to the club finally, but I must say you are preaching to the choir :3

Been tryna say all this for years, but you said it better than I could. Very well written.

I agree with some things you said, what is worrying me is the lack of an official announcement for the next episode and if it is being worked on, all we have was a tweet from a former developer who was working on the next episode, one simple official announcement would at least keep my spirits calmer about this year, because in the course of everything that is happening, the game situation is worrying me and I am running out of desire to play, and I love this game, but the game in my view seems being without a path,how i will going to get excited about playing a game without a path? a simple announcement of the next episode(like, yes we are workin on the next episode) would help a lot, in the best case scenario an announcement about the planning for 2024, I know that there is a possibility that they are planning because of the layoffs, maybe because of the resources available too, but none of these seasonals will keep me excited about the game, it's March and nothing from the ps5 client, just a rant from a fan of this game, and i will always wish the best for the game.

Oh i know its already fallen. It happened years ago, its just everyone needs the constant reminder of it. Its always going downhill, has been ever since like... what? 2017-2018? The thing that killed it off for me was the day Artifact XP came to the market, that for sure is what ended it all, now its just a mess

I though you meant E would be like PvP in the fact it would be full of speedhackers and meta cheezers.

Oh, wait....I guess it can be 2 things at once.

Console bound players should just go play Neverwinter. Artifacts there are account-wide once you max one out, as are their version of augments. The AI allies aren't, so those are still a grind, but otherwise it's much more player and alt friendly than DCUO became after Jack contaminated it with all that "Jackster" in the gears. Odd that he was at the helm for Neverwinter, too, and somehow Cryptic managed to get those bits right.

Played NWN.... and much as I love D&D and was happy to see my friends Minsc and Boo..... even with all it's flaws.... DCUO is a much better game.

Pretty sure they are working on the next episode...... but.....

Why Oh Why are they not announcing it??? Hard to guess at this point.

There is no reason.... no reason why they cannot at least let us know what the DLC will be.
A BAtman DLC?? a Superman DLC?? a Ambush Bug DLC???

How hard would it be to tell us at least that much????

Unless they are waiting for approval from like.... James Gunn???
Nothing Nothing Nothing justify keeping us waiting this long just to announce the next DLC.

But..... maybe??? maybe they are making a Superman Rebirth DLC and need approval from James Gunn???

Other then that...... no good reason for waiting this long...... unless......

Unless the SS VS JL rumors are true??

Guess we will have to wait and see.

Would like to add:

We have reported bugs for YEARS and not a single thing has been said or done to even fix the bug. Take "Lightbringer" in Act of Defiance. It is IMPOSSIBLE to complete as it bugs out during a cutscene. It was reported more than 4 years ago... still nothing

They fix the bugs that convenient the Company. Not the players. Its stupid.
Im still able to get into the hall of doom as a hero
The UI bugs out 90% of the time i go to upgrade an artifact/augment
Some feats are physically impossible.
but god forbid we are allowed to use exobytes to level up artifacts or the ability to get fast source marks via a bug in open world activities...

Edit: Looking back on the update threads. Most fixes are text based, artifact related or current content only.
Seems like they dont care for old content other than the early game tutorial (which 99% of players i assume skip if they have done it once) or early tier 1 instances.

Well I started playing in 2018, and it wasn't so bad (at least on Xbox, plus I wasn't around to see hoe it was prior). It was always going downhill slowly since I started. Picked up speed a year or two later. But it REALLY started to go brutally downhill when the um.. youknowwhat was implemented. Xbox is now practically a ghost town (in-content, there's still a consistent 1-2 phases of people arguing, dueling, and cosplaying in HoL and Lil Bo. HoD and WT became completely barren and desolate after HoL release.

I played around the time for a few years when capsules existed (not sure for how long). I brang up the point many many times here on the forum, how even though the style of capsules/monetization supposedly originated from Neverwinter, I do not recall artifacts there ever being a "requirement" for end-game. I remember that there was rare cosmetics mostly, and the chance for an artifact that gives a small bonus or QoL. The one I had gotten from opening a few, was like this big rock that tanked for you and then exploded. Was cool, but definitely not needed in any content. Why DCUO got nasty with capsules and P2W who knows, but I'm just saying I never remembered Neverwinter being that way. And EverQuest 2 (also went F2P route and run by daybreak), never ever went that direction either. They only sell cosmetics over there.

EU PC/PS - Currently as of 19:05
Currently 121 people in HoL across all phases.
No one stands outside LB anymore
LFG is currently a gossip chat (Bare in mind, LFG is locked to 1 post every 30 or 60seconds. No posts for content in any of this lol)

The Irony:

New booster bundles
https://www.dcuniverseonline.com/news/dcuo-booster-bundle-march-2024

Yup exactly, in which is why I made this response to the usual "but 2011 blah blah blah" here:

Addressing Community Concerns and Suggestions for DCUO's Future

Its comical. More money grabs when its clear the top posts are the community hating on it all lol. comedy

Absolutely! I also just couldn't resist following up that post after learning of this new information lol not sure if you saw it

Just plain sad

This studio has decided to dig, the game is in a state of abandonment, and now the objective is clear: to make money from the rest of the players...

Yeah this is probably my last month of subbing for a while til we get some kind of idea of what’s going on … I’ve bought a few games I have been neglecting for this one … looks like they won’t be neglected.