Update: Marks of Power

Here's how it would go right now, as each DLC is released, one with smaller content, then large, then small, etc. This is for best mark gear only.

First DLC>All players can get the gear - Second DLC>Only large group players can get the gear - Third DLC>All players can get the gear - Fourth DLC>Only large group players can get the gear....Get it?

Months at a time where you're not just alienating solo players, but you're also restricting the, I assume, very large group of players who dabble in all sizes of content. If you absolutely have to switch to different marks for each DLC in a tier, then the composition of each DLC MUST change. It's so simple and easy to understand that a thread like this being started, couldn't possibly be anything but a load of crap.

You had time to make two 4 mans and three 8 mans.

Take one of those 8 man raids and change it into a solo and two duos, or two solos and a duo(future reference). No matter what you do, there will never be enough content, so you might as well cover all sizes of content to keep all players moving forward in each DLC.

Hell, one solo and one duo would be better than none.

Simple. What the problem is?

I'm not talking about the best gear dropping from the raids, that's not going to change, ever. Even Spytle said that today. I'm saying that using the same currency for both DLCs and increasing instead the gear cost will harm those casual players. To me it's cool either way, if they split the marks, I will use MoF for getting the rare style feats and some old T5 styles I'm missing. If they increase the gear cost I will still do the same thing and gear up with CR 94 even faster, for me it's a win win situation. But many people here are talking for the sake of the casuals, when in fact increasing the gear costs may harm them since they will need to grind a lot more than before.

Thx devs for making AF1 = LAst laugh 2
And for taking out most of the fun out of HOP1- yea 3 raids but 2 instances of the dlc are League Halls. I felt ppl were more excited about DLc 7's raids than these tbh. I mean the artificat weapons are only instance only and no new weapon styles. I mean i don't see the point anymore..why go to SOE?....i mean everything the devs say may or may not be true-subject to change. Now that DLCs are skippable just buy a dlc you really like...like just wait til the HOPpart 3 when you can actually face off Darkseid... or just wait for a DLC that has a new weapon or new power.

I wish you guys loved DCUO as much as we players do...we want a tier 6 to be have variety and DLCs to remain relevant as long as possible. We players THOUGHT tier 6 was going to do that when you DEvS posted new DLC plan going forward....players even convinced others that wanted to leave that the best is yet to come..and then you oppose this garbage and at the last second too. I can no longer say the best days are ahead of us.

You're better off converting your Fury to Triumph and buying Scion of Ion gear if you want to buy gear for prestige.

I wouldn't mind a new Mark for a new DLC if the previous Mark rewards of the same Tier DLC were converted over to the new Mark as well. I understand that the Devs don't want people to buy all the new gear at once, but as many people pointed out there is no point of possessing certain DLC's. I understand that this will still cause some gripe, but seeing where we are at the moment, I think losing our initial Marks into a new DLC is not as awful as only having to run certain content for certain marks.

Have to disagree with you. For someone who relies solely on open world solos for progression, I know I won't need HoP gear to run the WotL 2 solos... I certainly didn't need full T5 Prideful or Scion gear to run SoT or WoTL missions, so a person won't need HoP gear to run later T6 open world content either. When I first started running Gotham Under Siege I had five pieces of Prideful and two Scion and did just fine, it was a bit tougher at first, but got easier as I gained better gear; thus I am not worried about missing gear from any particular DLC.

Also, you have to consider that they understand (or at least I hope they do) that in order for people to play content they have to be geared for it, so they wouldn't make small content DLCs significantly tougher than the previous small content DLC; in other words, having WotL 2 gear will be enough to run T7 HoP 2 small content open world missions.

^ This. Evolution has proven that it isn't the strongest or the smartest species that survives, but the one that has the ability to adapt. Change can be hard to accept, but as time moves along many changes are often imperceptible. As hard as I have and can be on the Devs, I don't believe they set out on a path to purposely deceive us. I just believe things can change, and quickly.
Being in a profession where we must conference weekly, sometimes daily, situations are fluid. We can start on one path, and quick move into another.
The only problem I have with any of this, is the way we found out. The moment the change happened, and BEFORE the adjustment was made to the test server, Mepps should have made an announcement in the forums. No communication results in no understanding and/or empathy. Just reading this thread has drained me mentally and emotionally. I can't believe I'm going to say this but : There is no area 51 for DCUO. There is no X-Files. Stop the conspiracy theories. Just Dev's trying to accommodate so many players and at the same time slowing down the steamrollers, which in turn will lead to decisions we may not like. Let's just wait and see what happens.

Thanks, Sore. This describes me to a "T".

Actually, there is.

welp.
I feel kind'a stupid now.

I've spent about 80% of my 'Marks of Fury' on four Vendor 22 style pieces to finish off 3 style feats (preferring to focus on older skill points before newer gear stats).

I felt safe in the knowledge that 'Marks of Fury would carry through DLC11"

I thought that I would have two new DLC11 alerts and DLC10 Content to earn marks for 'Amazon Strategos' gear ... I currently have no 92 gear (just 92 weapon & neck). I felt that I did not really need the 92 gear for AF as I am geared in modded Vestments, Ion of Scion & Amazon Soldier (loved the Iconic Visions) . I used my 91 gear drops for my off role.


So.... that sucks.

What is worst is, I'm indifferent and just not upset about it.

PS. Start saving your Lockboxes folks.

I would love to agree with you on this but it assumes they do not change the rare vendor to MOP, which they will surely do because that style vendor reflects the current highest mark. If they do a no notice drop, like they did with AF, then they are wasted (I was considering this too).

There are two rare vendors, one working with MoF and other with MoP.

I think a mark per tier is the way to go.

If you have 2 DLCs with the same mark, then that's one tier and the next 2 DLCs are the next tier. Call it whatever you want: Tier 7, Tier 6.5, Tier 6.25, Tier 6B, etc. It is the "next step" even more pronounce by having a mark distinction.

I want to think that all the T6 DLCs will end up being this collective menu of meaningful content to run:

I have 3 hours to play today: we have a good alert group going? then let's do all the T6 alerts starting with Themyscira Divided, which we haven't run in a while now...

During the weekend: Today I have all afternoon for myself and the game and the league is on, let's do the raids! *Spends the next 5 hours running raids back-to-back.

Right now, breaking the content up by DLC, breaks the menu up. There is no incentive to run Amazon Fury content when everything is said and done. At least the marks would have served a purpose.

Hello Everyone
We have been reading every post in this thread. A lot of the suggestions and points you are making were brought up when we made this decision.

Spytle and Mepps have pointed out several of the reasons why we made this change. This has actually been a problem since DLC8. I agree the timing on this was bad. It was not malicious in any way.

I would like to answer some of the concerns people have been bringing up:

• I only play solo or duo content, so now I have nothing to do:
  • We did our research on this and only ~2% of the player base never plays an alert or a raid in a given month.
  • While we do strive to take into account all players, we really strove to give large group content players something to dig their teeth into.
• I have all these Marks of Fury and nothing to spend them on:
  • You can purchase any of the DLC10 gear if you haven’t yet
  • You can purchase the styles from DLC10. That’s 560 Marks (8*70)
  • You can purchase the styles form DLC11. That’s 560 Marks (8*70)
  • You can purchase Synthetic mods for the new gear you will be acquiring.
  • You can purchase Soders
  • You can convert them to Prestige
• This was done as a money making scheme:
  • We balance our vendor purchases based on someone never spending money on replay badges
• Solo players are going to skip DLC11:
  • Players have been able to skip DLCs for a long time. What we are doing in Tier 6 is letting you purchase/play DLC10 or DLC11 to have the minimum CR for access to DLC12 and/or DLC13.
• I cannot get ahead:
  • Correct. We have always tried to balance our content to allow a casual player (time based, not group sized based) to earn all the gear in ~2 months
• I don’t have enough to grind:
  • Yes, that is true to some extent. You only have DLC11 content to play to earn DLC11 gear. You can grind the Marks of Fury for the styles and other items listed above
• Why not let DLC 10 & 11 share marks and start at DLC 12?:
  • Shared marks have decreased playtime and therefore play value of the DLC. Our focus has always been the ~2 month for casuals.

We agree that the timing on this was bad. We are sorry about that. Please remember this isn't a new concept, this problem was really introduced in Tier 5. We will continue to monitor the feedback, and address questions.

I think the problem here is the lack of continuity with marks vs content. The more DLCs that work with the same marks, the more problematic the issues you listed here become. One easy way to fix that while maintaining your desire for multiple marks would be to tie small and large DLCs together as DLC Duos with their own mark. instead of 4 marks for 4 DLCs, group the DLCs together into pairs based on their content set and do 2 marks for 2 DLC pairs per Tier.
We have Amazon Fury as small group content and Halls of Power as large group content: let them both use Marks of Fury and designate them as Fundamental T6 (or whatever you wanna call it). There will be some mark carryover between the two DLCs, but people will still be limited to two DLCs' worth of content to for the mark type earned, something neither we players nor devs had a big issue with when we had just Origin Crisis and Sons of Trigon for Tier 5's marks of reality.
Then when you roll out WotL2 (or whichever the next small group content DLC will be), you can introduce a second T6 Mark of <insert name here>, which signifies Tier 6 Advanced, which will carry over into the next large group content DLC. This way, each type of mark has both small and large group content available for earning, no single DLC pack is viewed as immediately rendered obsolete by the next one, all the while allowing Devs to have a bit more leeway in maintaining a decent rate of progression.
There won't be too much skipping, since each DLC pair will encompass everyone's desire for different content and the content will support natural progression from solo and duo to group to raid drops before the next DLC pair begins. This also encourages players that tend toward opposite sides of the spectrum to work the other side without making them feel forced into content they may not normally enjoy.
This also helps a bit with overhead, since at the end of each tier, you'll only have to worry about converting 2 sets of mark rewards to Marks of triumph instead of 4.

Hey Spytle! Here's my thoughts....The problem with DLC9 was not how many Marks of Reality we could receive from running all the T5 content....the actual problem with DLC9 was the fact each players was GUARANTEED 3 superior gear drops to what we can buy from the vendor in each run. This meant that lots of people were kitted out in the best gear in just a handful of runs. Marks was never the issue here. The problem was further compounded by the fact all the best gear dropped in one 8-player operation, which in all honesty was very straight forward so players replayed it to get the best gear as we all were guaranteed 3 drops in AnB.

What you have done with DLC11 is commendable, in that the best gear drops in the raids but it is quite rare. You either get a Mark (very often) or a top notch un-attuned gear piece.

Where you have gone wrong is in proceeding to give DLC11 and every other one after it, its own unique Mark which I find baffling and down right.....well....horrible. Why? Well, you are rotating between small and large group content, which means the players who prefer the small group stuff will get shunted big time. Not only this, but this way of moving forward actively encourages players to skip DLC's i.e. not buy them or un-sub until the next one comes out. But THE biggest problem is that, it makes every DLC that came before the latest one useless, a graveyard.

Please re-think this change. I support Sore's view in that 2 DLC's (a small group one followed by a large group one) should share the same Mark. Alternately just stick to what was working fine.

P.S. I and others are grateful for your feedback in this thread but can we get some 'actual feedback' in the "Hard-light GU38 Improvements" thread in dev discussions as the distinct LACK of ANY feedback is really riling and angering the HL community, as 99% of what we say has been brushed aside with no response.

Much appreciated!

I thought the problem only occur ed in T5 because you guys said you screwed up the order of the DLC releases in terms of Large Small. You guys are doing it correctly now thus i think it probably shouldn't be a problem

I like the idea of having AF1 and HOP1 sharing marks and then dlc12 starting with new marks. This way covers the whole spectrum of the player base and doesn't single anyone out.

Maybe if you guys added more style set in vendors with each dlc like were in Battle for Earth dlc that would add to the replay value and give players a reason to run content.

Yes and no. We did have problems with launching a new tier with raids first. This didn't give people time to really gear up. Raids are naturally harder. But because it was the same Mark, you could get the vendor gear extremely fast.