Test Discussion GU94: Episodes 27-31 Currency Conversion

Can I ask an honest question? Without naming names, when this first comes up in a dev meeting, does anyone raise their hand and say "Didn't we tell them the collection/style prices were so high to give them incentive them to run old content past relevancy....won't removing the episode marks basically give them incentive to NOT run the same content?"

Is the goal to force everyone to only run endgame or near endgame content? Cause it seems like it.

For the record, I do like the one stop shop gear vendor....but if getting rid of the ep currency was the only way to get that working, I'll do without it. How about a one stop 'non-gear' vendor so I can see all the overpriced collections/styles from 27-31 in one place too?

Reinheld

Not quite, there are legitimate reasons for concern, especially for new/returning players. Recently we've had 4 returning league mates who were away for 2+ years. They are doing that older content for the currencies to get the the feats associated with the episodic vendors. At the moment they can farm 5 DLCs in parallel and earn all 5 currencies. Those currencies also don't cut into the currency they are spending on cata caches as well as rare vendor styles that they are missing.

After the change, instead of getting 5 DLCs worth of currencies they will be getting only 2 and they need to share this currency for catalyst purchases, vendor style purchases and mainframe upgrades. I have all of those feats, so from my perspective this change doesn't affect me, but for the new and returning players it changes a lot, it makes it harder for them to get the vendor feats in both the episodic vendors as well as the rare vendors.

To account for the loss of currency income, prices in the vendors which will sell for source marks, need to be slashed by 3/5 (or 60% which is how much currency they will be loosing) and that's without factoring that they will be spending their currency in catalyst caches and rare vendor styles.

At the moment I dont have access to test server to check how much the prices have been reduced or if they have been reduced at all, if they are reduced 60% or close to that, then its fine and it doesn't change all that much.

So, running old content becomes pointless? I love having something to look forward to once I've finished my top end content. But this will limit not only how much I do but will mean it takes a much longer time to build up to get all the items from the various dlcs. So I'm working on elite gear from Amusement Mile Gang War and Earth 3. With this update I can't save for both at the same time but have to limit my activities to just Atlantis and Chaos Gotham. I will have less to do and plenty of reason to look at other games because it will take me twice as long to get that gear since only cr relevent content drops the source marks. Please don't do this. You will lose a lot of players who like grinding feats and various currency. Making it take longer to get collections, gear and other feat content related to the vendors while further limiting the means of getting that currency is like shooting yourselves in the foot.

Raise the cap on MOV, yes. This is good. Don't turn the other dlc currency into the same currency that can only be gotten from one to two episodes at a time. Aside from getting feats from older content there will be no reason to run it. Further, it will make it harder for players levelling up because they will have to rely on strictly people at their cr level to queue for that content. I can't imagine there are that many players levelling up compared to the number of players at end game level. You are making it easier for people to leave this game and find something else to do. I don't think that's what you want.

Please listen to all of us; don't make all currency into source marks.

But they get to farm 3 episodes worth of source marks, Teen Titans, Atlantis and JLD. It's 104 marks for an entire set of previous episode gear and before this GU it was 480 marks that is a 128% COST REDUCTION LOL and you only wanted a 60% slash, your league mates should be getting on their hands and knees thanking the devs for reducing their grind for the old style feats. You can get 3 whole previous episode style feats for the price of 1 pre-gu94 cost breakdown. You can easily get 104 source marks between the 3 current episodes each week so every week your returning league mates would be able to knock off a old style feat which is something they'd never be able to do before. They'd have to farm countless weeks in order to get 480 marks per episode normally where now they can use normal progression through the newest content to knock off the older feats in less than a month.

Are you sure Titans will drop source marks as well? I believe the CR relevancy exceeds after 262, unless that's changed on test server.

Also the reduction you mentioned of 128%, is that before or after completing the favor feats?

My husband and I are longtime players we too have been here since close to day one and seen it all. Though we have taken many breaks from the game we do always comeback to DCUO....
A simple solution would be thru episode 27-31 to reward source marks to that content since the old marks are being converted anyways. A lot of us long time players have a lot of characters at max CR or close to it, so going back thru the old content to pick what we missed for specific feats, etc has been what we do when our end game content is done for the day, or week, so please don't limit us loyal players to just 2 episodes for our marks. Also make "SOURCE MARKS" account bound like quarks, loyalty points, replay badges, etc, that would make it easier to get marks for us that have 32 toons and 2 accounts.......

Loyal Player Moonsugar

Um....a 100% cost reduction would be free as X - 100*(.01*X) = 0...so a 128% cost reduction means they are going to give us 134 marks each time we 'buy' a gear set? Ok....now that's a change I can get behind! Where is that vendor at?

Reinheld

The reduction is before completing the favor feats, as after the favor feats the gear price is 52 source marks. Episode 32,33,34 are completely unaffected by GU94, absolutely nothing changes i'm cr271 on test and looking at the creds vendor

I was doing the percentage difference, if you want to be that specific and have the percentage change that its 78.3% reduction which is still greater than your desired 60%

Obsidian

Thats actually pretty good, I guess they also accounted for the currency that will be spent on the other stuff which will be purchasable with source marks like catalysts rare vendor etc. Thanks.

As a player who is currently grinding Earth 3 dailies, I applaud these changes to smooth out gearing such that I don't NEED to wait for long raid queues every reset to earn enough currency to make any progress toward endgame.

However, I also worry that once I do reach endgame, it will be extremely hard to complete Duo/Alert/Raid and Collection feats, since experienced players will receive no currency reward, and have negligible incentive to queue for old group content.

Please consider a middle ground solution, such as mark "fragments" from out of relevancy content, or a rotating "Daily/Event Quest" to drive queues toward specific low end duties to support leveling players, and endgame feat hunters.

I dont think players will stop playing that content because of no currency rewards. People do that content for collections and/or styles and that wont change. If what Chill is saying is true, that the vendor prices are reduced by 78%, then that's big enough discount that wont slow down the time that players need to complete the vendor feats. That was my only worry with this change.

So did anyone check the prices of the OP collections, are they also reduced?

As of now...they are not. That's one of the things most people are complaining about. Gear price reduction...fine. Collections still costing 800 marks in AF3...not so fine. AOJ and RwC are less so, but they also will expire for relevancy faster. E3 has less, but there is an extra incentive to get the Elite set as it has feat points attached. That gear is reduced however.

Reinheld

I have a Major issue with the change of MoV to Source Marks. By keeping the CR relivance on rewards and turnning all the rewards to Source Marks you now make it so the only way for people to obtain content from Episodes 27-31 once they are outside CR relivance is to use the Source Marks they can obtain from the CR relevant content and use that to buy Ep 27-31 rewards.

This is an issue I have had a gripe with all the former content that used to have its own currency. This change totally KILLS the open world aspect of these DLCs as people who aren't CR relevant no longer have any reason to run this content unless they still need some Feats.

Don't get me wrong I like making it easier for people to get the gear sets at a cheaper price but in doing so you are also killing the content. People are now only going to go into the Open World of these DLC/Episodes if they Need Feats, Want Armor to Deconstruct or want a chance at some Base Items. The same thing goes for the Instances associated with them.

You also say you altered the costs of items on the vendors to match those of previous content. Well starting with Ep 27/Amazon Fury III you added Collections and with Ep 31/Deluge you started adding special Pets and Auras yet the prices for all of these are all still the insanely high costs they have always been. Yes now we can use our Source Marks to earn them from the CR relevant content and thus have more ways to get your Marks to buy them but you also have these same Marks being used for Styles on ALL content Episode 31 on down, for Artifacts and Catalysts, for Qwarks, for Base Perks while removing the original means to buy these items.

We don't even get Alternative Rewards Boxes from the 27-31 quests like we do the 26 and unders. These rewards boxes need updates as well and should drop Source Mark stacks as a possible reward.

You are KILLING the older content Open World and Instances with the change in the way you are doing it. When eps 26 on down had the change to MoV with a 200 currency cap from their own marks and the CR relevance cap was instituted you killed these pieces of content outside of people pushing to get Feats, Base Items and Styles from drops. What you really need to do for QUALITY OF LIFE in addition to change to Source Marks is to REMOVE the TOP LIMIT of CR Relevance. Make it so ALL content is relevant for you. This would give people a real reason to back into every part of the game to run its content. It will also give people real diverse options the higher in the game they are on what content they want to run to keep the game 'fresh and fun' for them.

You say its a problem for us to be able to run early easy content to get rewards from those 30 episodes later. Well you create such a problem when you consolidated the marks in the first place. I would rather have all those episodes of content to run and get rewards than to be limited to the latest 2 or 3 episodes. People are taking huge breaks from the game as they blow through the new content and get bored in the 4 months between episodes. That could be lessened if they didn't only have 2 or 3 episodes of content to run and actively help their characters.

Cool thanks. Well even if they remain the same price, I think its not that bad because the reduction of the price of the gear sets is more than it should have been. Getting those styles will be faster now and if the OP collections remain the same, I guess it kind of equalizes, so all in all it doesn't change much when you take the currency cost per DLC into account. There's only one more thing I'm not clear on and that's the rare vendor styles. Do you know if they remained 70 a piece of they have been reduced?

Hmm....

Do you mean the Rare Vendor in the HQ? The one in the Watchtower Aquaculture area still has the same prices.. one has a 70 mark pricetag and the other is the 10 mark pricetag.

Yeah those two vendors. So you checked on test server and they remain 70 and 10 source marks, correct?

Yes Vendor 22 is all 70 source marks per style and vendor 00 are all currently 10 source marks

Yes, confirmed for the test server.

OK thanks. So basically besides the gear sets from ep 27-31 which are reduced by 78% like you said, nothing else is reduced in price, OP collections remain the same as well as the other styles like materials auras etc?

So, if a player needs the styles in the 00 and 22 vendor, as well as the styles from Ep. 27-31 the rate of obtaining them will be decreased if I understand this right. I'm operating under the assumption that Source Marks will be earned at the same rate as we earn MoT at the moment, which is practically 2 DLCs of relevant content.