We (The Gamers) Are The Vicious Cycle

1. Do We Even Know We Want?

Really bad because most the time we complain in forum we go to the game and it's a totally different complaint in game chat.

2. Do We Understand The Ramifications of Change?

Developmentally speaking. This game does not run off of individual values but a complete numbers system of balance that adversely affects other values when they are changed.

This is could be simple. Maybe a little questionnaire to measure player proficiency against claims of broken mechanics or cries to buff/debuff/nerf powers. To help maintain the overall balance in numbers and associated gear/item/cr values proficiency has to be an equally deciding factor along with the number of claims. People that deliberately defy mechanics has to know and practice satisfying the mechanics and if the mechanics fail then the devs need to know.

Some players have trouble jumping and/or moving but will complain of mechanics. Even high SP members many times fail mechanics (deliberately by overestimating a high SP and run off to wipe leaving the tanks or healers to have to pick them up) and ultimately stalemate by wiping too frequently and rapidly and thus everyone to disbands in doubt of completion.

In lieu of all this I would love to hear feedback about Raid/Alert experiences playing with other players because there is a huge disconnect between the forum community and the In-Game community.

As a side note PVP is still broken because every forward direction possible was complained away so there was no way to possibly engage PvP development in a meaningful way. PVE players complain about PVP feats but not about feats that are attached to events that go away that we can no longer get. That is 100 times worst because as long as PvP is there you would still be able yo play and get. I personally hate re-running content but I have to for the SP. So pve having to play a little pvp for more feats shouldn't even be that big of deal just like pvp having to both buy legendary and play pve for most of the feats.

If anything feat requirements could be lightened a bit as to they cause most of us to be much less productive in real life. The game can be both fun but terribly distracting with such rigorous requirements. Other than ridiculously implemented feats like 1000 times anyting lol feats should be maximized like research feats. Pvp feats. Helping members feats. Follow the company on twitter feat. Log in with twitter feat. Post on the forum feat etc. (Making them get more engaged rather than "just" rerunning content I think this is negatively affecting the players socially) Elitists become horribly insulting as well as discourage players from engaging the game because of rigorous feat hunting while players are just trying to have fun not go to work lol.

Please excuse grammatical errors and typos I am typing from a phone lol

Of the countless suggestions I’ve encountered both here and in-game, the best by far was a series of “Feat Helper” feats. Anytime you’re in a group and a feat pops that you already have, it would count towards it. You’d get a 10pt feat at 10, 25, 50 and 100, a 25pt feat at 250 and 500 and a 50pt feat at 1,000. Or whatever. Take a minute to think about the positive impact that would have on multiple aspects of this game. More LFG groups will get formed and going instead of sputtering out at 5/8. More queues will pop in lower content. People in all places in the SP spectrum will progress more/faster to one degree or another. The maxed elite gear 450-526sp people won’t be whining that there’s nothing to do. IMO, the ripple effects would be massive community gamechanger, literally.

I hate that the player base has basically turned raids into dps competitions on the backs of hard working support roles.
Alerts, on the other hand, are far more enjoyable and place an equal amount of stress on all the group members.

Nah people would just make a toon and have 7 people help them through leveling missions and pop all those feats. Rinse and repeat until it was done.

Thats the point. More points for positive social engagement.

1. Do we even know what we want?
To a greater degree: We do.

On a general level this community from post after post generally wants:

• Better use of the Marketplace, more cosmetics on there. The Marketplace can be very underwhelming given what IP this game has and generally it'd be a nicer rule of thumb to be able to buy something proto and wear it on your toon.

• No more feats in time capsules. Now it's admittedly hard for this to be done because some of the people who vouch for this very principle are also some of the ones who buy time capsules regularly to keep up, apart of the cycle if you will.

• A PVP fix.
• A balanced game(never likely to happen given Power Respec Tokens sell like hot cakes but it is what it is.)

Now I'll fundamentally disagree with you here: Every forward direction indeed has been "complained away" however, I'll gladly remind you that It was Tunso whom was handling those updates at the time.
One point your not mentioning and I know from those threads is that Tunso's approach to "PVP fixing" was abysmal at best. Every-time Tunso implemented a small PVP tweak for the community, he would also make it pointless because he would roll out another Advanced Mechanic or Weapon Mastery Update, each of these updates while PVE targeted affected PVP and only made it more unbalanced. On-top of all that, communication between Tunso and the PVP community was very poor. Tunso would implement a fix, get feedback from testers, and virtually nothing else happened afterwards before one of those threads were closed.

The PVP updates "were complained away" sure, however, Tunso's poor handling of the entire thing justified the complaining players did back then.
Fast Forward from 2014 to 2020: Legends that were promised never came to fruition. Gorilla Grodd never happened, and mind you: his inclusion would've meant he could be playable in LPVE today if he was made. Tunso's gone and Batuba is in charge, Batuba did a lot of the core changes which involved the stats revamp but nothing happened for the PVP community at all. In-fact: The very last word on PVP was from Mepps saying "they would love to do it if they could find the time and resources." Aka: PVP is a very low priority on their list and unlikely to ever get fixed.


There used to be A PVP channel discussion in the Official DCUO discord, but the state of PVP and the lack of address from the development team meant that channel was DOA(Dead on Arrival.) And therefore you can no longer find it in their discord.
The PVP community is frustrated but dedicated; say what you want about them. But it's not just "Sheer whining" that caused PVP to be in the current state as it is. I've think I've said more than enough on this piece... moving on.


2. Do we understand the ramifications of change? Of course we do. There are players on the forums who are divided over how content gets changed. There are people who want content made easier and there are veterans who claim the content it's self is too easy. It's a situation that leads to developers not being able to sastify anyone group, however, more often than not they'll side with the folks that want the content made easier with the only exception I know of in recent memory being Darkside War Factory.

There were players on the forums here that were telling me that they were annoyed with the fact that the best gear and rewards were involved in Elite and not the regular gear vendor. I was on the opposite end of that player and argued that they can still progress and that Elite rewards become irrelevant in the next episode anyways, I'm firmly on the stance that if someone wants to run the hardest raid they should get the best rewards.

I still support Elite having the best rewards, but it's clear there are some people on that front who just want to keep it in the vendor so they run the regular version of said content instead.
That's not to say the community pushes for bad change however, a number of players on here push for Good change such as improving the tutorial.

In your OP you've mentioned that there are players who'll fail and complain about mechanics... well did the game actually teach them that mechanic? Or did another player have to step in and do it?

Did the group communicate with each other or did they start hurling out insults in the trade chat?

There's been numerous calls from individuals here on the forums to vastly improve the tutorial system in the game, teach players how to learn their support role, and so on. Over the years, the developers have nerfed the only existing tutorial in the game. Players can complete the tutorial and by-pass basic fundamentals like learning how to block, block break, and interrupt respectively. That's terrible design choice.

Honestly, everyone's raid and alert experience will vary and the best runs you'll undoubtedly have will always boil down to running with your league. That's just a fact.

But the process of learning and teaching in my view shouldn't be shouldered onto the players, it should be fundamentally improved where it counts from the developers especially as this game grows older and releases more high CR skip tokens.


Feats: I agree on a fundamental level, but look where we are sitting at right now: There are lots of players who are asking for LPVE's tedious feats to be reduced... The only response: "We're considering it"..... Those feats aren't done because they're fun, those feats are done just because somebody has a lot of patience to knock it down in a single sitting(All the 400 and 500 SP guys, I know you did this and kudos to yall respectively.) These feats are very unpopular.. so why is it a consideration to remove it? There'd be little to no argument here.

Sure.. there'd be feats players can no longer get, but why have the feat if it doesn't feel satisfactory to obtain in the first place? We go from being "oh yeah, we owned ZOD" when we got the medic feat to... ugh, another LPVE feat to do. Bad direction if you ask me.

Elitist and new players are a touchy subject for me because I've seen and I've tried to help newer players out with the game and alerts, even their roles, ultimately there are players with high ego's that think they know everything and get very toxic when they get destroyed by a boss or something.
Some of the end-game folks can be the most knowledgeable and helpful guys you'll ever meet in the game, but if your one of the newer players that decide they want to be toxic about their help... you deserve what you get.

There are also lots of players who use Youtube as the end-all be all for powersets and guides; and I've said time and time again I disagree with that approach to the game. There's also a lot of Toxic Content on youtube which doesn't bold well for the community and the game.

For instance, if your known to be a supporter of a dev decision: There's about a 99.9% probability some guy'll include your name and make a video called" InsertNameHere EXPOSED". if you PVP, I cannot tell you how many "X Guy EXPOSED!" videos I'll see, and what's disturbing about that for me is: That content often ends up being the content with the most views meanwhile I'll see channels like Multiverse and Torikumu's, and their content is more positive and actually helpful to the game; but it's buried by all the crappy drama for click videos that exist on the platform. Just ugh.


Obviously, you should progress through the game at a pace you enjoy; and everyone needs to respect that. If there are some that won't, don't run with them.


We are a vicious cycle because for some of us, we cannot comprehend how the other person is playing the game. Cannot comprehend how somebody'll support a developer decision. And there's also the cycle of developer involvement which goes very-back and forth.
Is it all vicious? Maybe, but as with every Dark Tunnel; there awaits Light at the end of it. Whether that'd be: Finding a league that'll treat you right, finding folks who'll give you the best memories of DCUO, being excited for a cool update like Style Unlocking(I need Phase 4 devs... lol.). The list goes on. Or some people who just want to play this game whom are off work.

As with everything on the internet, DCUO & it's players are never perfect and some of us just don't get along and I'm perfectly okay with that as long as I can continue to enjoy the game at hand I'm happy.


I know this is a long read, but I thoroughly enjoy topics like this and I feel like as someone who's been here from 2013 to the Weapon Mastery Era to the stats-revamp Era.. there was a lot of input I could give.

Victim blaming?

What event goes away and never comes back?

Aside from "Back From The Hack" "event."

All the seasonals are annual. When you miss them, you get the same opportunity for weeks the following year.

If we did that, either everyone would pretty quickly reach the current ceiling for SP, except that the ceiling wouldn't exist and SP would rise ever indefinitely higher.

Do you really want to play against/with someone with 7000 SP? How would that be a good idea? Or how would it be a good idea of almost everyone was running around with 500+ SP?

Basically, this would give so many feats so quickly that there would be infinite feat and SP inflation. That would not be a good.

99.9%, eh? So I guess there must be at least a hundred videos calling me out. Or, if you're accurate, maybe three to five hundred.

Please link to three. Or even one. Of course, the only way your statement could be accurate would be if you could find over 400 videos including my name, so that's the goal you really need to reach to prove your point.

Thanks!

No you missed my point. They wouldn't be in lfg or just help out random people. They would do it as a league and as soon as it was done it would be back to normal. A bunch of people would not feel inclined to help others still.

I think you misunderstood the suggestion. Only 1-2.5 total SP would be added to the max total. It’d work the same way a single series of bounty spam feats work or the Battle for Eaerh Duos work. But instead of bounty kills or duos completed adding to your running total, it’s number of times you completed an instance and feats popped that you already have.

DCUO should start selling feat points..

Its like 10 threads this week already (about feat points)

They already do.

I'm not sure if we can go down that line of thinking. We as players can't be absolved of any blame because we are part of the process.

Even though it may not look like it at times, the devs do take into account our feedback, comments and actions when it comes to the decisions they make. They will ask for our input. The testing feedback threads alone show that we are involved, never mind occasions where polls are used or even player feedback helps bring about changes (Cosmic material being able to be colored comes to mind). Add in the data they have available to see what we are running (and how often we are running it) and most likely using that to help determine any focus they have going forward? We're in the loop, plain and simple.

Players are not completely at fault for any problems or difficulties that may arise in the game's development. But we are involved enough that we can't claim to be blameless.

Sooooo I share blame in them removing the counter mechanics from atomic, Hard light, Rage, celestial in pvp? I'm to blame for pvp gear not getting and update or a new set since 2017/2018? I'm to blame for 19 different iterations of time capsules since 2016 without pause? Now if you're speaking generally then I can understand you're not necessarily pointing fingers at me a other players who don't hop on the forums to try and make changes.

I don't need to prove anything Fam, I don't make this crap up.



There's plenty of examples of what I'm talking about all over youtube, these videos are dime a dozen.


Also: If your going to Quote me & try to dismiss the facts I pointed out about DCUO content on youtube, notify me and I'll bring your proof like I just did here, your welcome.

You quoted my message, but left my name out in the process.. I wonder why that is


Did I exaggerate my point? Sure, but my point's vaild none the less. This content is out there, and goes far beyond just the youtube scene. Being snarky at me for "proof" doesn't change that fact.

*re-reads my initial post*

Huh, I don't seem to have called out anyone by name, so yeah I'm pretty much speaking generally.

But the fact remains that we are part of the process. And since you brought up TCs, let's use that as an example.

As much as players may complain about TCs and all the things they don't like about them, the devs wouldn't keep making them and putting them out if they weren't seeing sales for them on a consistent and/or regular basis. The stuff that sells is what ends up on the Marketplace, and the stuff that doesn't sell tends not to make any further appearances. And if those sales for Stabilizers, Unlocked TCs, Resurgence capsules and Booster Bundles are far greater than any outcry against them from the forums or in-game chat, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to get more weight in an argument.

Some of the dev decisions can and have come out of left field at times. We are not always in the loop, but that doesn't me we aren't part of the loop at all. Our actions, comments, decisions and spending can and will have an effect on the direction the devs take. I've seen what happens when players are kept out of the loop or the devs seem to make decisions in a vacuum. It's nothing like what happens here.

Glad you clarified you were generalizing, you can imagine my confusion when someone uses words like we are involved enough that we can't claim to be blameless, or We as players can't be absolved of any blame because we are part of the process.

Can't argue your point on time capsules because you're right. At the end of the day they go by the numbers, and the numbers show that time capsules are a success. Shoot even with the recent changes (that they recently undid) where time capsules were no longer able to be traded from ps to pc vice versa, and people still dumped money in towards TC.

What I asked:

So, can't come up with even three such videos. Or one.

I am shocked, shocked, at this development.

So, you got nothing better to than strawman what I said?

I too am shocked at this development, I thought there was a debate to be had; but for someone who has a record 444 SP (meaning you've more than likely been playing this game for years and know the type of content I'm talking about, the type of players I'm talking about, and so on.) you want to act like what I'm talking about doesn't exist.

You even left out the fact I mentioned PVP when I was talking about the type of "insertnamed Exposed" here content in my quote; but I digress. Have fun playing Gotcha here on the forums, I'm not participating in this condescending matter.

Thanks but no thanks.