Lord Nightmare wrote:

The problem comes with people like me who don't like to suffer from Altaholism. I had 2 villains and 6 heroes over the course of 6 years (CoV launch to Sunset), and some people I know had even less than that, choosing to play 1 character and 1 alone. What this sounds like is that we'd have a slot set aside to create a character, level to cap to unlock whatever piece or set we get, delete character, and repeat until all sets are unlocked.

We may be in the minority, but I'm with Nightmare on this. I'm sure I leveled less than 10 tunes to 50 in 8 years. And there were only three that I really played a lot and one that I finally totally settled on.

Personally, I like the idea that GW2 did with their cash shop for a long while. Everything, save for equipment skins and PvP killing blow replacers, was available in the game. The difference was that some items such as Black Lion keys, certain dyes and (after an update in 2014..) transmutation stones would be MUCH rarer than the common items got from exploration or random drops. So you could feasibly never pay for anything, but would have to rely on luck from drops when it came to wanting something.

How would this translate into a game like CoT? Basically the same way. Costume sets that are in the cash shop would probably be split into pieces and gained from around the world, some requiring easier tasks to earn (or earn the ability to buy) while others would be full on Event Level tasks similar to the Rikti Warzone/Invasion or Holiday events. Champions did something similar back in the day with the Lucha, Zombie, Redeemed Villain, and a few other costume sets. You could (in the case of Redeemed Villain) defeat 5000 of each group to get that once piece, OR you could just pony up money to unlock them all at once.

Radiac wrote:

I'd rather just make all costume unlocks happen on a toon by toon basis, like the cape unlock in CoH. I know some people think it's more "work" to get that on each alt, but really, all you have to do is play the game with that alt, do that content, and get the unlock. When just doing a mission turns into "that's too much work when I've got 30 alts" then maybe you have more alts than you can reasonably maintain. That's your problem, and it's one you brought upon yourself. So it's not the game's fault.

So you want a DCUO style costume unlock system, where you are very limited to what you can make your toon look like from the start, and in many cases can't finish the looks of it until late "end-game" or after lots and lots of grinding for that one rare drop (regardless if which toon does the grinding)?
To that I say "hell no". That was one of the major reason I was put off DCUO.

I can understand the cape mission since it unlocked a group/class of costume items, not individual items, though I still wouldn't like it.

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I think shortcutting it such that you can get the unlocks on all your toons by doing the content with just one guy one time only reduced the amount of times that the content get's run by players and basically has the same effect as actively discouraging people from actually doing that content.I want the content in this gamesto be as repeatable as possible, and part of that would be making sure no content is ever "do this once on one toon, never have any great reason to ever do it again".

So you want content to be done primarily for the rewards and not the content itself?
I'd rather see MWM make it so people re-do content because they found that content itself enjoyable rather then feeling "forced" to re-do it because they wanted that specific costume piece (or other reward).

Just give me one good reason that we should not be able to create our "perfect" right look in the character creator, but rather be initially locked to small static subset and have to "piece it together" over the course of our game play on every individual toon.

The one good reason I have for making every toon have to unlock every "unlockable" costume piece (and how many of those are we even assuming we're going to have?) by doing the content on that specific toon is that it gives people a tangible gain to be had be doing the content, and thus more people will end up doing that content more times, which is good for the game overall, I feel.

To act like people (some of us at least) should want to do all content for content's sake is, to me, pretty unrealistic. Some people want to do literally every mission as if they're collecting missions somehow. Those people already want to eventually do all of the content with all of their toons anyway, so you're not saving them anything by making costume unlocks account-wide. Some other people, like me, will focus on content that get's us the specific rewards we want. In CoX I wanted the Rocketman badge for ONE of my toons, because it was on-theme for him, so I did the content to get that badge on THAT toon and then promptly left Warburg for like, ever, and didn't do that badge on any other toon ever again, despite the fact that Warburg was usually empty anyway. but if someone asked me to help them do that content to get the badge for themselves I would have been up for repeating it with a different toon of mine just to help the other person and have fun and get something for myself in the process (the nuke if nothing else). I did a lot of Statesman TFs, Incarnate Trials, Respec TFs, etc with a lot of people and I feel like a great many of those TFs wouldn't have gotten started if there weren't a Synthetic HamiO, or a respec, or Merits or a Badge or something waiting at the end for everyone. I probably would have skipped all of the content that unlocked all of the stuff in the game (capes, auras, the extra costume slots, etc) on all but one of my toons if those unlocks were global, which means a whole lot less spent playing the game for me.

My point is, rewards drive people to do content, that's just a fact. You can like or dislike it, but you can't tell me it's not true. Not all rewards will drive all people to do all content, sure, but in general, most rewards will drive many people to do much content. Rewards might not be the ONLY thing that drives people to do content, but they are one pretty big thing that does that in many cases, most of the time, for many players.

Another contributing factor to this is the fact that the same costume pieces that are unlockable in the game might well be for sale in the Cash Shop too. The more content you have to do to get the costume pieces unlocked for free, the more valuable it is to the people paying money for it. That is, if the unlocks are super-easy and only have to be done one time on one toon to get the item as a global account-wide unlock, this fact all by itself lowers the price you can expect people to pay for the costume item in question. On the other hand, if you have to do a fairly large amount of content with a given toon to unlock some costume piece(s) for jsut that toon, and the content is challenging or takes a long time or requires a team of 12 or something, then your cash shop buyers should be willing to pay higher prices to just get the costume the quicker way instead.

So making people have to do content for unlocks as rewards get's the world populated with people who are willing to do content (with each other) which is a good thing because it makes the game environment seem more full and populated and it gives people reasons to do content. Letting them buy the costume pieces for money is good because it get's the company money for it's efforts. If you remove the grinding you have to do to get the unlocks, you take away the incentive to spend the money and then you're left with a game where nobody will want to do a lot of that content, like ever, after the first few months of the game, and they won't feel the need to spend money to buy said items either. So you lose on both fronts. Game is a ghost town full of people who don't want to do unlock content with newbies, and you make no money on costume parts.

Would it have been "better" for me to have gotten the Rocketman badge on all of my toons after doing the content for it just one time on one toon? It might seem that way at first, but think about the newbies that come along a few years later. Some fresh-faced new person makes and account and wants to do all of this content that unlocks these items only to hear people tell them "nobody does that content anymore, we all got that global unlock like 2 years ago, good luck, new guy". I personally would MUCH prefer that the game give veterans like me something to gain for ourselves in the long run by teaming up with that new person and unlocking the items together on a different toon.

I absolutely LOATHED the manner in which DCOU handled costume pieces. I say make em all available...and if you feel the need to put something in the cash shop then throw em in there for purchase and allow such purchases be account wide. although, these pieces in the shop should be something special....might be a good place to stick those costumes that people paid for...their year is up and the costume is available for general use...stick it in the store. just a quick thought.

Tannim222 wrote:

Take this with a grain of salt, as it is my own personal opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect any actual direction we may use for the game. My preference lies in understanding the difference between character-specific actions and player (or account-level) actions. For costume pieces (or other aesthetic choices), this would mean if doing specific missions / earning specific badges awarded a costume piece, emote, animation, etc... those are specific to something the character did and therefore, is only available for that character.
Puchasing those same (or other) costume pieces, emotes, animations, etc...from the cash shop is a player specific action performed on the account-level. Anything purchased this way applies to the entire account.
Now I can sympathize with the desire to not have to unlock everything with a new character previously earned on another character. But this is both a game and a business, the game should make this available for the player to do within the game, and yes, individual character unlocks encourages the player to play through content again on an alternate character. The longer a player plays, the better it is for the business (keeps the game populated, increases chances of wanting to purchase something from the cash shop, subscribe, etc...) Using the cash shop as a way around that also helps the business, it can't be the sole driver of the business (costmetics only go so far), but it can be a pretty good incentive to purchase if it is too much to play through content.
Keep in mind our content will play through a little differently the longer the game is running, as we will have chances to improve content branches so even if the same mission unlocks a costume piece (or badge award), how the player got there may be different based on the choices the player made with a new character.

Something that I plop money down for in the store is unlocked account-wide while things unlocked via gameplay (for "free") apply to that one character? I can get behind this - a very sensible approach in my view. Like you said it keeps people playing missions while also offering the incentive to outright purchase it. Of course this all hinges on the nature of the missions (chore vs fun) and the cost of the item in the store, but in principle it seems alright to me.

It seemed to me that COX, in an effort to harvest low-hanging fruit and milk every asset they had, would make available for unlock and/or purchase a bunch of stuff that was basically already in the game, like Vanguard costume pieces, witch hats, the Crey CBX-9 Pistol, etc.

I can see making people do specific content to get specific costume pieces like that (defeat X Rikti in a Mothership raid, get the merits to get the Vanguard outfit, makes sense) but there may well be costume pieces that roll out as time goes on which don't fit that really, and it feels strange unlocking a costume piece by doing content that's basically unreleated to the costume in question.

It would seem to me that the "not affiliated with any faction" costume pieces would be good fodder for purchaseable (but not unlockable) costuming, while the "strongly affiliated with a specific faction" costume pieces might be better suited to "unlockable, maybe also purchaseable in time, maybe not" type of deal.

In any event, I still say make them unlock whatever can be unlocked on a per character basis only. I'm fine with purchased items being account wide.