It has been a little while since DCUO has entered its f2p phase of existence. Despite my better judgment I’ve walked back into a game that kept me in it for over 400 hours during a time in my life where I should have been focusing on a lot more than gaming, all at the whim of a friends suggestion. Since I’ve been back I’ve clocked over 30 more hours, retired the illusionist military jester and traded up to a yellow lantern wielding demon, and I even made him a brother in arms as an aggressive artillery based healer. I’ve started an electrical mayhem causing fiend to join their ranks but that will be for later. So how has f2p worked for SOE?
Hits and misses really. I feel that SOE’s basic idea on the in game marketplace is well founded. Nothing in the market that really breaks the game. Nothing stat altering or anything. The f2p players are able to see all the original release content and are able to purchase the DLC that lets them into the large chunks of new content. If, like me, you decide to pay for the service, you get everything you always had since the beginning. No real issues there. The que priorities put paying customers ahead of free-loaders in terms of entering the server. They combined all server into one, which I am a huge fan of. The game can take the extra bodies, and the phasing system keeps the shards from getting to congested, but you can still play side by side with your friends. I can level in the PVE server to move quickly then switch to PVP when I’m leveled with a basic amount of gear. The overhaul of the combat system since last I played really worked out. Combat feels really smooth, despite people on forums griping like hell over people who seem to be hacking. And that is the one thing I didn’t like that was still around since the last time I played.
Forum trolls. Despite at the time of writing this there being between 5,000 and 6,000 people playing through Steam alone right now, there are still people who sit in several forum sites and non-stop trash talk a game that they obviously know nothing about. And since f2p went up, it hasn’t slowed down. The truly weird part in all of this is that no one notices that all the complaints seem to be coming from the same small group of people. There is never anyone coming forward to put down any of the falsehoods perpetrated by these people either. Its like all the players who are loving it have a “don’t feed the trolls” policy. It makes it very hard to find any legitimate information without having to dig through hours of nonsense.
As of today the latest major DLC release “Lightning Strikes” has come out. I plan on working towards testing it out. Kind of disappointed that the new city added seems not as intricate as I thought, but until I get the gear to get in, I won’t know for sure. Hopefully my lazy ass friends get their shit together and help me kick the crap out of some heroes.
