Returning players aren't welcome back at all

Discussion in 'Gotham City (General Gameplay)' started by Offline, May 21, 2023.

  1. not serious Well-Known Player

  2. not serious Well-Known Player

    do not remove the event versions of each dlc
    • Like x 2
  3. BumblingB I got better.

    The massive wall of catching up a returning player has is pretty much skill points and artifacts.

    I'm sure a lot of the devs know that the CR skip we get is good as a jumping off point, but is also starting to lose impact. Right now, it comes with around 75-80 SP and an artifact box with enough xp that lets you get one artifact to level 80, IIRC. 80 SP is not enough skill points to really be comfortable in your role and almost all artifacts really don't start becoming useful until 120/160 and you have 3 slots to fill. (In some cases, 80 can be a hinderance to the player and make it a bad experience.)

    My proposal is to:
    • Add more skill points to the cr skip. There are a plethora of feats that can be tapped into and the reasoning why only the classic feats were used is now antiquated. The game is now openly free and no longer has paid episodes. There are also PvP feats that can be used. LPvE ones as well. (Though I know the week of LPvE is still popular.) You can start utilizing the older Episodes. (There are a lot of grind feats in episodes that are downright impossible to get groups going to complete, like CC bounties.)
    • Give 3 artifact boxes OR give enough XP to make one to 160.
    • Give augment xp equal to the gear that we are being skipped to.
    • Give a player an ally with enough xp to get them to use the first passive.
    These are just ideas, but for the most part, the skill points matters the most, in terms of the skip on players. 80 SP does hardly anything and you can't even deal with your own power consumption, if you choose play from tray.

    I know this is a paid service, but if a returning player wants a shortcut, that should be an option. Otherwise, it is a grind no matter what.
    • Like x 9
  4. not serious Well-Known Player

    or at least leave them until the dlc goes into eeg
  5. LowFlyingMoon Loyal Player


    Um... Because it's 2023. Golden era of grindy MMORPGs was 15 years ago. US server population is also much lower than it used to be, but DCUO was always more popular in US than in Europe, so they haven't yet reached the point where the game becomes practically unplayable on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day.
  6. MsTickle Fate Devoted Player

    You can't do any of the dozens and dozens solo missions in a couple of dozen open worlds? Why not?

    [...]

    And yet on US PC/PS I see people recruiting for missions non-stop in LFG. Perhaps you should consider starting over on those servers.

    Or setting aside that it's extremely unlikely you've finished all the possible solo-fulfillable SP feats in the game, you can find or join a league. Again, I see people non-stop announcing that they're recruiting for their league. Literally non-stop in US PC/PS.

    Or you can start your own league. The game is filled with people looking for fellow players to get SP. A little organization goes a long way. This is an MMORPG. It's organized around multiple players and leagues. There are plenty to try out or you can form your own with some more effort.

    [...]

    Yet every day I see over a thousand players in over 20 phases each in in SHOCK or House of Legends. I see 20 to 25 full phases every day. Every day I drop into a Shock-to-the-system phase and there are groups waiting to do the bounties. That's just one area of the game.

    That's some "dead" and "last legs."

    Cases are best made without vast exaggeration. I'm sure it's rougher in niche servers such as Switch and XBox and the EU servers, but you still have the choice of using your PC to play on the U.S. servers.
    • Like x 1
  7. LeagueOfV Dedicated Player

    For the missing older feats I believe a queue system for any sized group smaller than the max would help. So 8 or less for raids, 4 or less for alerts, 2 or less for duos. Even with the clamp, tanks can probably solo a lot of the raids without overlapping mechanics. I do see people asking for help to queue in and then people can leave, but I will see people shouting that in LFG for over 20-30 minutes when they could have been done with a smaller group in that same amount of time.
    • Like x 4
  8. zNot Loyal Player


    We can both agree that the population is lower thats the points also dont forget some EU players have moved over to US.

    Knowing this what makes you think made the population lower? What makes newer players quit before reaching latest episode or mid/early way?

    In general the dcuo community has set the bar up higher and higher over time, I mean which new player wants to continue to play a mmo where a community dictates you exactly what/how you have to play or requiere a specific number of SP,almost everyone whos new to DCUO will quit at that point especially given that this game already lacks population the bar is set way too high and this goes for all levels as i said earlier i do not think that this problem only exists for returnees/newer players it exists everywhere on PvE and i hope they will find a solution that will fix some of the requierements also on endgame even if they are making it easyier on them newer players once they reach endgame if they experience this type of gatekeeping all that was still useless they will still quit.

    Also the clamp made this much worse for newer players before we were able to carry new players now they are expected to contribute equally which has set these requierements,It was simply a terrible decision to implement stat clamp.
    • Like x 1
  9. inferno Loyal Player

    These are the initial experiences that a returning player may have to deal with and it may vary with how long they have been out.

    Clean-up - usually when a player leaves it's gradual and their inventory is usually a mess. If they were subs and lapsed out; the shrunken inventory space and any returned mail items would be dumped into their inventory; the same with bank inventory. Their inventories could be overflowing.

    What follows may be their reactions:
    --Look at all this stuff, I don't want to deal with it and Log out.
    --Look at all this stuff, I don't want to deal with it. I'm just going to go ahead and do some missions. Assuming this player knows where to go for missions. He/she goes around does a few, turns in the missions for reward...and nothing. Why can't I complete the mission? Journal says completed but won't give me the rewards...finds out that a full inventory won't allow you to complete missions..No space..and Logs out.
    --Look at all this stuff, what can I delete for space? What's important? What's expensive? what is all this? Depending on how cluttered or full your inventory is, this clean-up can easily take 10, 15 or 30 minutes. You look for base items, collections, soders to equip or delete. You salvage old gear. Assuming the player knows about augments and fortifying them, this could get them space. How many players leave during this clean-up? How many players leave right after cleaning up their inventory on 1 toon? and go to their next toon looking for inventory space to dump from the shared bank; only to see the same situation in that inventory and then just logs out?

    So you just cleaned up your inventory and stuck around to play something. - maybe they will try to go the last open world they remember and do some missions to get re-acquainted with gameplay? Maybe they will even figure out the new On-duty UI. Maybe they'll figure out what "event" versions mean. Are they still part of a League? Do they have anyone to ask for help or information? How many will go to chat and say they're out of practice and have no idea what's going on and ask anyone for help? If they know how to use chat properly?

    The amount of information and changes that DCUO has gone through becomes more overwhelming the longer the period of absence of the player. Now assuming they stuck around and were helped around by anybody; this player now has to deal with Skill points, allies, artifacts; the items that have now become vital and requires either a long continued play of the game to level up OR invest real money to level up quicker.

    I don't have any suggestions on how to make these issues easier to process but I thought I'd list it out. I'm sure there's a few more I didn't list but as it is the post is long.
    • Like x 1
  10. LowFlyingMoon Loyal Player


    The fact they have a lot more and better options for online multiplayer than they did 10 years ago. Newer games, with graphics and performance not designed for PS3. Games don't last forever, almost all MMOs on the market have been bleeding players for at least a decade. Wondering why fewer and fewer people want to play a 12 year old game that wasn't cutting edge when it came out is like asking why people don't go to game arcades anymore.
  11. zNot Loyal Player

    I dont think the age of the game matters that much by that most would already not even try the game or reach level 30+ etc if they disliked it,i think this is more about how a new/returnee player experiences the challenges/problems while trying to level up but as OP said hes not even allowed to participate due to requierements.
  12. the solowing Unwavering Player

    I dont think the days of grindy mmorpgs are over, hell games are grinder then ever before given how games are these days, its just killing 20 mobs for x quest wont cut it anymore as an experience.
  13. undrline Issue Tracker Volunteer

    Some tough things for me (not related to the OP post), off the top of my head:
    • Inventory. not knowing what in my inventory was now junk. After a while I saw a tooltip in the description "obsolete," and fortunately found out I could feed them to the new items before I deleted or sold them. It would be nice if I didn't have to look at each one individually, but that speaks to a greater want of being able to filter/search/sort inventory better. Now that things stack higher (yay!) it would've been nice to have a "free up space" button to auto-stack things.
    • Where am I. it was a problem trying to figure out where I left off and what was relevant. tiers switching around meant I couldn't really just go by what I remember last running.
    • Re-joining my league. A league request system would be good on multiple fronts. It would help people who are on by themselves to add their alts to their own league, and it would help to not have to go to every toon and find a leaguemate that was online to add that character. I'm sure there are leagues that gatekeep and only have certain people who can add players, so those leagues wouldn't have to get that person online to do the inviting.
    • Journal. I had a lot of journal entries that were erroneous ... early missions like queue up for gorilla island. I know I had done these before and cleared them. And, ofc, I've done all those on-duty things
    • Area missions. Hopping back into content every single modern dlc made me talk to someone or queue something up before I could get the daily missions for that area. After a couple of runs of the event I was geared for all of them and I was holding up a raid group worth of people in my league while I had to listen to dialogue or watch cutscenes before they could run their weekly bounties etc. Don't get me wrong, it's an MMORPG and the story matters, but unless I'm getting a chest piece or my first artifacts, I didn't see why I couldn't just go the world and grab all the missions.
    • Armories. my armories not working at all. I couldn't even grab my look and items, with the error that it was for the wrong powerset. I assume that's because of the addittion of Accessory and because some powers had changed.
    • Powers. Mastery was there but it took me a bit to figure out that weapon mastery and advanced mechanics weren't there anymore.
    • Artifacts. I'm still trying to figure out artifacts and all the dlc-specific exo's and crafting materials. I'm sure there are more, but so far only the Atlantis vendor seems to have the dlc-specific artifact, and I need to figure out where the others are.
    • Feats. I'm scared of not consuming a base item because a feat might be associated with them. I know there's a new feat reorg coming, I haven't looked at it, but I'm hoping that it'll come with a lot of needed stuff. Knowing what feats are associated with items in their description/tooltip. Okay, so I'm in 31st Century but what DLC is this again? And, the same way feats are now in the scorecard, maybe I can have what feats are associated with what world I'm in. Or, in queuing up, to see if there any feats for that instance before getting into the instance. Things like that.
    • Like x 2
  14. LowFlyingMoon Loyal Player

    And most people do exactly that, which is why there are fewer and fewer new players, which leads to lower population, which makes the game unplayable for those that do try it out. It is what it is.


    OP had been back for a week when they posted their rambling demands for the artifacts and SP to be clamped. I wouldn't necessarily rely on their testimony. You can't expect to take 5 years off, not even having max stats/arts available at the time and then be invited to Elite raids, or whatever, within days of returning. It's not that kind of game.
  15. LowFlyingMoon Loyal Player


    Sure, sure... Most popular games lists are littered with MMORPGs in 2023, are they?
  16. DuffleBagBoii Well-Known Player

    For years people have made these threads and pointed out the flaws in the skill point system. Sure these guys say join a league, but thats alot of relying on other people.. it was hard enough to get others to run a 6 year old raid before the stat clamp… now i feel bad even asking 7 people to run a old raid especially if i need one of those feats that take multiple runs.

    I see no problem with the artifact and ally system, sure its pay to win but man… Atleast its a easy way to get you back into the game after losing your grind…

    Idk maybe i view arts/ allies differently because i buy 2k every year
  17. TheLQ-DCUO Loyal Player

    1. Make allies/artifacts significantly more easier to level. These are very important to playing endgame. Though steps have been made in recent years to address this, more needs to be done. Have Seals of Preservation/Completion drop in content (last boss) for example as an account bound loot drop.

    2. The game lacks tutorials on how to use your powerset, make a loadout etc. Many players don't take notice of the combat log, what you parse in damage, mechanic names etc. The communication of this could be better, even some kind of training instances to train players how to do all this. Also mechanic names should not be restricted only to the combat log, there should be onscreen text (maybe next to the health bar of the enemy who is doing said ability). For example in The Terrorium raid when Apokoliptian Nightmare is about to use Scornful Blast and spawn orbitals on players, there could be a cast bar with Scornful Blast next to the boss health shortly before. Though this is more for beginners, players who haven't played for an especially long time may not be familiar with the changes the game has had.
    • Like x 2
  18. Raven Nocturnal Devoted Player

    Even though Xbox has US and EU merged, there are only 3 phases in Dakota City :(

    These guys have it LUCKY XD
    • Like x 1
  19. Raven Nocturnal Devoted Player

    Great observations. Even I as a vet it has gotten frustrating on alt when membership ran out alone (on a separate noob account where it doesn't have slots purchased, that I was trying to set up for a family member). I could only imagine a returning player...
  20. Derio 15000 Post Club

    Overall it is just bad. If I didnt have friends that still played this game and welcomed me back I would have tried it for a while and then quit again.

    First off the pugging experience with the stat clamp in place. Omnibus doesnt help simply because their are many players who get enough source marks from simply doing their daily and current DLC weekly missions. Secondly Omnibus have no real penalty. If I wanted to get a easier raid in omnibus I could just leave, take the 2 minute deserter penalty and try to queue again. The reward for the easiest raid and hardest raid to pug in omnibus is exactly the same. Improving Omnibus reward structure would go a long way to improve the overall health of the game.

    The damage variance between your average player and your high end player is astronomical. Not including artifacts or allies or trinkets the base powers themself have a reasonable damage gap, and when you add in artifacts and allies you see a tremendous jump that I dont think devs can really fix this, however I notice this does put off alot of returning players/ new players. If you could find a way to reduce the damage gap that would go a long way.

    Lastly I believe alot of DLCs get missed or even skipped. If there was a better version of the ingame journal that could walk you through each DLC in a more structured manner with improved rewards, that would be much more appealing. Players who come back can be very overwhelmed when they log back in after years and get bombarded with oracle messages.
    • Like x 4