Quality of Life Suggestions to the Developers From a Dedicated Player

Discussion in 'Gotham City (General Gameplay)' started by AZPrime, Apr 29, 2017.

  1. AZPrime Active Player

    Hello there, my name is AZPrime, or just Prime if you prefer. I’ve been playing DC Universe Online for over five years now, and yet I stayed silent on voicing my opinions and ideas on these forums. At least until recently, with my first post ever being in the Livestream Q&A thread from back in January. However, after playing this game for so long, collecting my thoughts and otherwise watching how things have and haven’t changed since I created my first character, I thought I could offer some suggestions to the developers on a number of quality of life improvements they could make to make our experience in this virtual world of heroes and villains a better one.


    Before I get to that though, a prerequisite; this is not a message of criticism. While I know things like the forthcoming stats revamp and changes in playstyle are hot button issues, this thread is only to point out problems the game has had for a long time and give the developers suggestions on changes that can make our time playing the game better, not to patronize what they have planned for the future.


    With that out of the way, here are some suggestions to improve the quality of life for the playerbase. I’ve divided them into sections for easier reading.


    Section I: Inventory

    Inventory Stacking Limits

    This was the first thing I ever posted about, so I feel it’s as good a place to start as any. As long as I can remember there have been limits to the older items that can be stacked in your inventory, including exobits and exobytes, simple/complex materials, and soder colas of all kinds. Back when the game was young, having limits like this made sense; eight exobits make an exobyte, so you knew having a stack of sixteen would make two. Mods only needed a few exobytes to create, so a stack of sixteen of those was convenient. Likewise, it was unlikely that you would need more than one stack of a dozen soders for something like Khandaq. We also didn’t have so many different items, so purchasing additional inventory and bank slots was an easy option to relieve a full inventory.


    But times have changed. Now our inventory space is full of several different items. Exos and materials now have to share space with other crafting materials, most of which have niche use outside of specific recipes, along with motes and others. Banks do help to alleviate this (see more on that in Section II), but that only helps the situation so much. Not to mention that with so many exobytes and collections coming out of Time Capsules, our inventories tend to get quite cluttered.

    The easiest way to alleviate this would be to allow us to stack all items up to the maximum limit that’s currently set by more recent items, being 999. If we can have hundreds of posters, monstrous essence and motes reach that high, surely the same can be done with exos, simple/complex materials, focusing elements and colas.


    Inventory Sorting

    Having a large, expanded inventory has a tendency to make organizing it a tedious, slow task that requires dragging and dropping items everywhere to make it look nice and keeping things where they belong. The stacking idea would definitely help with that, but I think having some kind of option to auto-sort your inventory would help as well. Either alphabetically, by type or by cost at a vendor. The ability to drag and drop whole groups of items around together could also be useful, if possible.


    Section II: Banks

    Bank Space Management

    Using the bank in this game is like having a second inventory. It comes in handy for organizing and keeping your extra things here and there. However, managing the bank space and while keeping your inventory in line can be a hassle. Expanding the bank can help, but when it comes down to it, keeping things like multiple sets of equipment for other armories, things you want to sell on the broker or materials you might want to use for later can take up a large chunk of space.


    Right now we only have two sections of the bank, the regular bank and the shared bank. My idea for this is to add a new section for the bank, much like how the league hall has multiple banks (more on that in Section IV). Ideally this would be a full bank for which you could buy additional slots - if not just buy the whole bank outright - but if that’s undesirable, an alternative idea would be a special section just for storing equipment attached to armories. That way when you switch out your armory you know exactly where the item goes in the bank.


    Shared Bank Slots

    The current amount of shared bank slots is very low, especially with how much inventory we tend to accumulate these days. I remember reading something a while back about not wanting the players to just use the shared bank as another regular bank, but having to make multiple trips between multiple characters to move large amounts of inventory is time consuming, moreso considering most players make whole throwaway characters just to hold inventory for them. Giving us the option to expand the shared bank further would cut this down significantly.


    Money Sharing

    Currently, the only way to share money between your own characters is to mail it from one character to the other one that needs it. This service is slow and annoying since it requires you to switch characters and wait for the mail to go through to receive the money, which at peak player hours can be a rather lengthy wait.


    To make it easier, make an actual bank that can hold whatever amount of money you deposit that can be implemented into the shared bank screen. It would allow you to have funds readily available on every character while still having the option of keeping their individual monetary amounts. To keep it from being abused or so that it won’t override escrow, make its use a full membership perk.


    Section III: The Broker

    User Interface

    The broker, while a useful tool in making money by selling rare or otherwise wanted goods for a set price, is hampered by its rather slow and outdated UI. Searching for exactly what you want is cumbersome and time consuming. For example, looking for a stack of 16 complex materials at a decent price requires slowly scrolling through page after page of single and lower-numbered stacks before finding what you want. Listing items can also be annoying since the numbers aren’t separated by commas when you set the price, so being careless with a zero or two could make you oversell or undersell your wares.


    The easiest solution here is a UI overhaul for the broker. A search function with more filters, like looking for a listing with the number of items in a stack you’re looking for, would go far in making this better. More results per page, or a better window with more info about each item without having to highlight it would help too. A better screen showing you comparative prices to an item you want to list or even an average listed price for that item would go a long way in disparaging the unfortunate practice of price gouging that tends to happen far too often.


    Funnily enough, while researching the broker for this section, I stumbled upon this YouTube video of a prototype reimagining of the broker from several years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgZk8cOemYc). Perhaps it might be time to reconsider developing it?


    Section IV: Lairs

    Mainframe Upkeep

    Having to pay for your upgrades every two months is fair enough. It gives you more than enough time to earn the 35 marks to pay for your upkeep. The only issue with it is that the game doesn’t do a very good job of telling you when your upgrades are set to expire. You have to go to your base to do so, and even then the box telling you when your upgrades expire is limited to how many days you have until you can renew it, or in the case of being there on the day of renewal, how many hours are left until the system will let you do it. This can result in being in a hard raid and suddenly finding yourself without a much needed supply drop or an orbital. And while having some bots on hand can help to renew stuff out in the field, it doesn’t help when you’re currently in a fight.


    There are multiple ways to fix this issue. The first and easiest would be to allow players to renew their upgrades before they expire. While there is the possibility of accidently renewing the same buff twice, the battery renewal screen features a warning when you try to renew it with over 50% energy left, so that can possibly be implemented for this as well. Adding in a countdown timer to when exactly the upgrade expires would also be helpful in keeping track of this without having to make estimated guesses. And finally, adding this information somewhere you can see, like a new tab in the inventory screen or displayed on the welcome screen would really help to remember when you need to renew.


    Teleporter Base List

    Almost everyone has a teleporter in their base. It’s a great utility for getting around the game world quickly. That is, except for people with a large amount of friends with lots of bases. Right now the list of base destinations has every base listed by grouping all the player’s characters together by account in each city, a rather confusing list when you have lots of friends with alts who all give you access to their bases. As far as I know, there’s no way to sort or remove them from the list.

    If a removal or sorting tool would be too hard, at the very least a search bar that filters the results as you enter names would be handy, much like the search bar that filters the base items in the base decoration menu.


    Section V: Leagues

    League Banks

    The banks in the league halls are useful for storing all kinds of things a league will need to function. Different kinds of colas, etc. However, inventory space can be cramped to work with, especially for larger leagues with lots of active players constantly putting things into the bank that others might need, like collections or exobytes. While there are four banks, each of them individually aren’t very large and the unlockable storage slots don’t add much either.


    While addressing the stacking problem I mentioned (see Section I) would help in alleviating this problem, I do think making more bank slots available to purchase would be beneficial as well.


    Also, like the idea I mentioned earlier about banking money (see Section II), a way to pool the league member’s money in a collected bank could be helpful. I know several leagues that have a dedicated “banker” to hold their money, and this would potentially be safer than just leaving it all to one player. Maybe having the bank collect compound interest every month, like 5% or so, could be an incentive to use it.


    Proficiencies

    Much like the personal buffs from lairs, league proficiencies suffer many of the same problems. Thankfully you can renew them ahead of time, but there’s no system in place to tell you when they run out or to automatically renew them for you. Either of those would be helpful options.


    League Hall Amenities

    As I recall, one of the main reasons that we don’t have more amenities in the league hall aside from the R&D station and the mailbox is because it would take away reasons for owning the amenities yourself for your personal lair, as you’d have everything in one place. While this may be the case for some players, having amenities in the league would still be beneficial.


    For example, the R&D station there is almost entirely useless without an R&D vendor to go with it. Right now, the only reason to even use it is if you have all of the necessary components to craft what you want, and just happen to already be in the league hall. Otherwise there’s several other places you can get to that have a table to craft with, including a marketplace trinket you can carry around with you. Just giving us an R&D vendor to go with the table would help a lot, or even allowing us to buy a special league hall amenity from the marketplace could work too.


    Likewise, being unable to look at the vendor while in the league hall can be annoying. We already have eight mailboxes up there, so turning four of those into vendor kiosks couldn’t hurt.


    League Hall Teleporters

    Seeing as every league hall comes with six teleporters, I think it would be a cool idea if we could edit at least three of them. Keep three on one side for going back to the HQ, and the other three can be slotted like the base teleporters to go to customized locations.


    Prestige

    It’s no secret that leagues need prestige to be able to pay their upkeep, unlock bank vaults, change the theme of their halls, etc. Their biggest obstacle in this matter, however, is the caps on prestige, both the total cap of 400,000 bankable prestige and the weekly cap of earning prestige through content. For example, if a league wants to have all 13 proficiencies active, that costs 325,000 prestige, leaving them with a measly 25,000


    While there are ways of making this easier, such as renewing a set amount of proficiencies per week instead of all at once, there are a lot of factors to keeping that system working. Part of this is determined by how large and active a league is, but it also has to do with remembering to renew the proficiencies; forgetting or being unable to renew them can result in the flow of prestige to suffer and cause more prestige to be spent in a week than what was earned.


    There’s also the opposite problem, reaching the weekly hard cap on prestige too quickly. This can result in players not using replay badges when replaying content because they otherwise don’t have anything to gain, especially those at endgame with maxed out CR.


    Then there’s issues when those leagues want to spend prestige on statuaries and bank slots while also maintaining the proficiencies. Most leagues have a hard decision to make at first; get the proficiencies and grind out slowly for the extras, or get everything else first and then start getting proficiencies?


    A simple solution to all of these problems would be to raise the maximum amount of prestige from both the weekly caps and the total cap of 400K. Raising the total cap would give larger leagues more breathing room when there’s a slowdown in activity or when they want to do something else with the prestige, like changing the theme of their league hall. It would also help smaller leagues earn more prestige through replays and to be able to fill their league halls and renew their proficiencies at the same time.


    Section VI: Misc


    Legends PvE Feats

    I understand the need for long term goals in feats. When it comes to LPvE feats however, the word “grind” doesn’t even come close to aptly describing them. Considering that you need to run each variant set of characters (Arcane, Knight, Light, etc) up to 750 times, that means you have to run LPvE at the very least a whopping 5,250 times to get all the feats, none of which are higher than 10 points in value. And that’s not counting the Men/Women and Hero/Villain of Legend variants, which go up to 1,000 a piece, though at that rate you’re likely to hit those way before you finish the rest. In any case, simple math will tell you that even with doing one LPvE run a day, it would take players 14 years to complete those feats. Even doing multiple runs a day, considering how long some of those instances are, queue rates and the like, it would still take a very long time.


    Honestly, the only way I can see to make this better is to restructure the feat tiers to make them easier to get to without making it arbitrary. In other words, lowering the requirements of each feat and combining levels to make the feat point numbers consistent. Much like regular Legends matches feats, I think the 5>10>25>50 structure would better benefit the feats. Even if you made them go to 100, just changing the last two tiers to 25-point feats would keep the amount of points they grant the same as the current structure, just faster and easier to get to.


    On Duty Queueing

    For the most part, the On Duty menu works pretty well. However, I’ve noticed that its only real problem is the wait time for queues to pop. Depending on what you want to run, a queue could take anywhere from a few seconds to several hours, and though LFG is a great resource in finding like-minded players looking to run content, it’s unlikely that you’ll find enough people wanting to run things like Assault and Battery and . While there are walk-in teleporters available for some of these instances, they’ve pretty much been discontinued past tier 5, and even one of these - for Paradox Wave - has been disabled for quite a long time.


    I’ve seen lots of ideas to solve this, from offering walk-ins for all content to a teleporter mod that can get you into those instances, but the former can take up a lot of space and the latter can cause issues with grouping, if previous experience with walk-in teleporters has taught me anything. Instead, I think a good option would be a checkable box on the “ready” screen of the On Duty menu that, when checked by the player when alone or everyone currently in the group, would queue them into the instance without searching for other players.


    Now, I understand there are drawbacks to this, from players getting into instances without the right roles to beat it, or having it be abused by players to level up quickly with league mates (that already happens as is, but still). This can be avoided by limiting this option to the player until they pass the point of relevancy in that content, which by then doing that content without the required amount of players should be more than doable.


    This system would actually solve a different problem the community has had for a long time now; carrying. For example, a 190+ CR player queueing into something like Oolong Island while looking for a style to drop is going to obviously end up one-shotting and wiping out all the enemies. This isn’t bad if they get paired with others at similar levels, but when teamed with three other people who are at level for the content, it becomes a carry. The high CR player ends up doing all the work while the other three either take pot shots at enemies here and there, or in some cases, do nothing and let the high CR player take everything out. This has two consequences; boredom for everyone involved, and, more importantly, robbing the lower CR players in letting them properly learn their roles. This inevitably has a compounding effect at endgame levels, as people who were carried up from such instances never learn their roles and thus make for ineffective teammates.


    With this system in place, the high CR players can farm the content for things they need while lower CR players can team together to properly learn the game mechanics. More instances would be entered across the board, and farmers would definitely spend more replay badges if they could regularly get into the necessary content to look for what they need.


    Conclusion

    That’s all I have to share. Thank you to all who take the time to read and respond to this. I know it was a daunting read, but I hope my words won’t land on deaf ears. I’ve stuck with this game for the longest time, and I look forward to experiencing whatever it throws at us next.
    • Like x 45
  2. SocratesGS Well-Known Player

    I agree with this entire post! Lots of good things that would improve life in DCUO.
    • Like x 2
  3. Here2Help Devoted Player

    I do like a lot of the suggestions.

    Specifically regarding LPvE, I do agree that it's too much. It really is. However, I just feel that it's just too late to tweak them now. Some people have spent so much time in there, and for them to change it now is a real backstab. That's why when they first released the feats and people started working out how many runs it would take, I really pushed for some changes and to get a definitive answer from the devs about changing the feats when they also agreed that it was too many runs, but nothing happened, and I do feel now that it's too late and it sadly needs to remain how it is.

    I'd also like to add an idea. Let us spend prestige on unlocking new areas to teleport to using the teleporters in the league hall. By new areas, I'm talking about content (Oly etc.). It gives us another reason to spend prestige, makes the league halls much more relevant and it's a feature many players have wanted for a very long time now.
    • Like x 2
  4. Crimson Mayhem Loyal Player

    I don't think there's a single point in this list that I disagree with. Great analysis and suggestions! You have my full support.

    About Prestige, I'd like some more sinks to spend it. I've seen and made a lot of suggestions about that ranging from unlockable amenities to league base item vendors. Hopefully league halls can get some attention again after the revamp.
    • Like x 4
  5. SilkyPawz Bunny

    Very good ideas, well I liked all of them :rolleyes: , hopefully as you stated doesn't fall on deaf ears.
    • Like x 4
  6. ThePhilosophy Loyal Player

    5 year 270SP player here and I love your post. Thanks for taking the time to type it all out and format it professionally. It's a great breath of fresh air from the devs constantly having to read terrible grammar and posts with terrible logic and derogatory comments.


    I've been guilty of it too, a few times, but nothing as bad as what I have seen people type on here.

    Just a reminder: the devs are people too and we should still be respectful to them despite the games problems.
    • Like x 4
  7. MsTickle Fate Devoted Player

    I endorse all of AZPrime's suggests, requests, and observations. Spot on.

    And the importance of quality of life issues can't be over-stated.
    • Like x 4
  8. quirkers Well-Known Player

    I like agree with it all!

    Under Inventory, along with different types of autosort, I would also like separate tabs for different role gear(s), crafting materials and additional items.
    • Like x 4
  9. Gimpy Loyal Player



    Exceptionally well done.


    +1
    • Like x 2
  10. xoHLxDPSox Steadfast Player

    to add on what you said about the broker section:

    1) Allow us to type in a collection name and it bring up all the collection pieces within that collection set that we still need / are missing.

    2) For collections have all collections organized so it list all collection SETs not each piece, so all you have to do is click the collection set and it opens up the set so you can see which collections you need from that set still.

    if they did these 2 things for the broker it would save alot of time just for the collection section alone.

    for styles it would have all the style sets listed and then a 'MISC' for rare styles like scarecrow clever, this section would still be broke down in sections as it is now 1h, 2h, HB, head, back, chest ect.
    • Like x 2
  11. dark emptiness New Player

    too much common sense, db will not go for it. they need to uninstall
    • Like x 1
  12. light FX Steadfast Player

    Zone unavailable bug is back again. Just had it happen about 3 mins ago. In the watchtower and all of a sudden my screen goes black and im teleported to a different part of the WT and chat says zone unavailable in red. Fixing bugs is part of quality of life for the game and its really disheartening to see the same bugs pop up over and over or remain in the game for a very long time.

    And i see people mentioning the broker. The lag when using it has been even worse this weekend, worse then the 1st day of a TC release. Considering the broker is a big part of TCs and making money is such a big part of the game now i feel the broker should be priority. The lag is highly annoying :mad: The broker lagging out and causing people to make mistakes when selling high priced items can be 1 of the most infuriating things about the game right now. Also the mental exploit has been in the game for a very long time now.

    All 3 things i mentioned here can affect gameplay in a major way. Please look into this stuff. All 3 have either been in the game for months or are recurring bugs. And everything said in the OP is spot on. Cant be said any better. I agree 100%.
    • Like x 5
  13. Ekart Committed Player

  14. AZPrime Active Player

    I could've sworn they did something similar to a different feat in the past, lowering the amount so if anyone was past the new threshold they were automatically granted the corresponding feat. In any case, even if there are a handful of players that would've lost time grinding out these feats previously, I think the benefit to the community at large would definitely outweigh the backlash. I mean, just look at how people reacted when the skip-to-CR100 token granted people some of those long, grindy exobit and safe-related feats.


    I do wonder though, just how many people - if any - have actually completed all or even most of the LPvE running feats? LPvE was introduced in December 2014, so doing a little math tells us that, if someone were to get all of those feats as of today from running it as much as they could since it was released, they'd have to run LPvE instances 188 times per month between release and now. I don't think anyone would have the patience for that.



    I've always had the mentality that diplomacy and manners always gets you farther than ranting and reacting irrationally. Doesn't mean I haven't lowered myself to that from time to time (especially with some of the more... abrasive people on the internet), but when it comes to something important like this, the high road is always better.
    • Like x 1
  15. Wade Spalding Loyal Player

    Your list needs to be longer. The ingame mail system is a mess, especially when it comes to contact handling/sorting. The teleporter list revamp is something that had been asked on the forums for.... since they released them :D And it could be cleaned up even more.

    Sadly: as long as they don't find away all these improvements can be put into TCs, they won't do anything about it....
  16. MsTickle Fate Devoted Player

    OMG, you don't have to quote screen after screen after screen of something we've all read, just to add a one line statement of approval. Please *edit* what you're quoting down to what's relevant. Which in this case would have been nothing. Please.

    Not directed just at you, of course, but at everyone who just hits "reply" and adds a line after quoting entire superlong posts. All we need to see in a quote is enough to know what you are responding to. And that's all.
    • Like x 4
  17. IamINC Dedicated Player

    +1

    Fantastic post and agree with everything you said , there's more that can be added as Light alluded to but sorting out what you suggested will make the game so much smoother and enjoyable.
  18. Darth Piper Loyal Player

    For in-game email, I would like to be able to send to multiple people. Last time I tried, I could not specify a comma-separated list of people, which means I have to retype the entire message when sending it to multiple friends.

    OP's list? Bravo!

    Regarding teleporters, the change I would like to see is to have some in the WT/HOD (whatever your HQ is), the safehouses, and in the league halls that act as if they were the teleporters in our individual bases and would have destinations set as if they read what we have in our generators. The animation involved? Insertion of a key card or a palm print... it recognizes us then makes a connection with our generators and lists our destinations. If this is too much, how about just one that takes you back to your bases? It seems really silly to use "Warp to Base" when you are in a secure location such as HQ, a safehouse, or your league hall where you would have a fixed teleporter that could get you to the proper destination.
    • Like x 1
  19. Mepps Sr. Community Manager


    Great post. Thank you for taking the time to share.
    • Like x 9
  20. Proxystar #Perception

    Are you allowed to share any details on any plans the devs might have in relation to any of the op?
    • Like x 4