Hi,

after leveling to maxlevel and finding a league (guild), playing some instances and enjoying the terrbile chatsystem i changed my opinion very quickly. The hype about playing marvel super heroes wears off very fast. League does not work. The Chatsystem is userunfriendly. After reaching maxlevel the only thing to do is to grind 3 PVP-Arenas, getting all achievements, flying some air races, ganking lowlevels or grinding 3 raid areas. But i do not want to do the same grind for gear like Wow, i did before, so i decided to stop right here. There is no explorerfeeling at all in the open world of DCUO. Its just uninteresting and generic.

My review so far
Its a nice world of warcraft clone with a weird pseudoaction-system and many glitches to exploit in multiplayer. The 6 classes Fire, Frost, Telekinetik, Mind, Nature and Magic are just made up for this game. None does resemble a hero you find in dc. So you do not play superheroes out of the DC Universe, but you play some artificial made up heroes with the background of the DC Universe. It just does not feel right. I read some comic in the DC Universe but i did find no DC lore in DCUO at all. Only some locations and the most popular heroes/rogues like Superman, Batman or Joker.

You have only 6 ability slots. That was it. 6 with level 30. Yeah, exciting. Are more then 6 abitlies to complicated for console users? As a pc gamer i feel personally offended by this^^. Some units in Real time strategy games had more skills then my heroe in DC Universe.

For a moo it is really disappointing. It's technical execution is very bad and has no professional feeling at all. Nothing new at all. SOE is not known for good games at all. But for destroying rather nice games like Starwars Galaxies by wowerizing them. Ingame support is never available. If you want to try this game do not bother to buy it now. In one year or two you can play it for free. For its a bad playstation 3 port to milk some money of poor pc users, that starts very exciting but wears off really, really quick. Sorry when i misled someone into buying this game.

Have a nice day.

Some cash shop games are exploitive and are free to play only in the technical sense, since playing without paying is a miserable experience. When at least reasonably balanced, however, they give greater flexibility to the player.

Even if we take a game that's built with the assumption of about $15 a month in cash shop purchases in mind for a typical player, you've still got more options. Can't get away from work lately? Maybe the cash shop offers some options to bypass some of the grindy bits, so you can spend more time on the fun stuff. Another game has your attention? Play a few nights a month, when you feel like it, and forget the cash shop for a while. Maxed out and don't really need anything from the shop? Hop in to chat or group with your guild, free of charge. Unlike p2p games, you won't be instantly locked out and barred from entry when your subscription expires.

Some games offer few or no mechanical advantages in the cash shop at all, just silly hats and the like.

I've actually noticed support for games that offer advancement items in the cash shop from people who work long or difficult hours, especially if they also have kids to raise. They don't have the free time to spend on the game that, say, a college kid does, and so they appreciate the ability to pay extra to cut some of the fat from the game. These are also people who wouldn't find a pay-per-month model suitable to their needs, because they may not get to play all that much. I would hardly say that these folks "have more money than brains." Besides, isn't the running joke about geared-out high-level MMO players that they have more time than brains?

I'm not saying that f2p is automatically better. I'm saying that it's not automatically worse.

Five bucks isn't a lot of money.

If you refuse to pay five bucks for a 16-ounce bottle of water, you must be either poor, or a big Scrooge.

For me, no, it's not particularly expensive to pay $15 a month for a game that keeps me entertained. That's not the point, though. The point is that, compared to other games I could be playing, and especially considering the quality that I'm likely getting, it is expensive. In this age of digital distribution and steep discounts, that's more true than ever.

Just because I can spend the money doesn't mean that I should. If I spent money without thinking carefully about what I was getting in return, then I would belong in the "more money than brains" category you were talking about earlier. If it's either that or be a big Scrooge, I'll take Scrooge.

Hmm. All valid points but the my point stands I believe. The other player will be better than you solely because he just cashed out few hundred bucks on some random equipment.
Then again he could just spent last three nights grinding just to get the equipment.....
Hmmm.

I apologize for that comment. I think microtransactions create bigger gap between players than time you spent playing. It is also easier to abuse I believe.
The thing is that this is what I don't like about mmorpg. time sinks (or with microtransactions money sinks). Therefore i made that stupid comment without actually thinking it through. Yes. It does make mean that if you are on a desert in the middle of the day without any water.

Context 15 dollars for a car? Cheap
15 dollars for a loaf of bread? Expensive.

You are saying that it is expensive. 15 bucks for a MMORPG even tough you can buy games of higher quality.

That's just an opinion. Not argument on whether games are expensive or not. Like my argument on microtransaction.
its irrelevant.

What makes something expensive or cheap is context. 15 dollars is not a lot of money to spend on game which supposed to give tens of hours of entertainment. This is the goal of MMORPG, at least the bigger titles. Not five hours a month. That would make the game expensive.

What you saying, what Velvet said is that mmorpg are expensive FOR YOU. It does not make them expensive tough.
Its just your opinion without taking into account everything else.

The twitch, of course, is that there's typically no limit on what you can spend in the cash shop or how quickly you can spend it, whereas the flow of time doesn't work quite the same way.

That's my whole point, though. The amount of money doesn't matter. What you get for your money, and what you could be getting instead, is what matters. It doesn't make sense to call someone either poor or a scrooge for balking at a monthly subscription fee. I could just as easily call you a scrooge for not supporting my favorite charity, when it only costs fifty cents a day. You're telling me you can't spare fifty cents a day?

I never said that MMOs are too expensive for me to play. I play MMOs. I've spent hundreds in total on Everquest 2 in particular. That doesn't mean I just click 'subscribe' without thinking carefully about what I'm paying for. You don't have to be a pauper to decide that it's not worth it, and the increasing abundance and quality of f2p alternatives means there's more pressure than ever on subscription games to provide a high-quality experience.

I'm not sure we actually disagree very much on that. I think I took issue with your choice of words more than anything else.

Wow, well this is the same disappointment I've had with just about every MMO I've played (I did like Warhammer Online at max level for awhile, but it was a different kind of game).

Thanks for the update, it takes guts to say you were wrong after your initial impressions and I respect that.

I'm guessing he is trying to say that if you otherwise would really love to play an MMO but don't because of the $15 sub then you are being cheap. I get that, I guess.

My thing is more of a principle, I don't think it is worth that much so I won't pay that much, even if I would enjoy it.

It's a principal thing for me too. It's not like I don't drop any cash on f2p MMOs, I do, but it's not very much (to me anyway), less than a normal sub, certainly.

MMOs are designed as a timesink, often, it's not for the player's benefit, to give them some sort of sense of achievement or challenge. No, it's more like the relentless rep grinds in WOW: you will kill 5000 of these critters, you will come back every day for a month and spend 45 minutes running through these same quests that were boring the first time. That kind of thing blows, if I have 45 minutes to play, why can't I be doing something I enjoy?

Exact-a-mundo.

That's one of the things that brings principles into it, you design a game with the specific intent to keep me playing, rather than to keep me having fun, and I say no thanks.

I agree with both of you, except that for me it's not about the principle, but the suckiness itself. Why pay $15 to play a sucky game for even more hours?

Obviously that's down to personal opinion. I have fun with MMOs, including p2p MMOs, but ultimately, I usually don't stick around for more than a month or so unless I find a solid guild to play with (which I usually don't). The social aspect is the only reason to play any MMO long-term, in my opinion. Even the best MMOs out there don't have the depth, breadth or quality of content to make me want to play alone forever.

They had balance swing problems that they were slow to address and it killed entire servers in Warhammer Online, I can say that it was the only p2p MMO where I was consistently having fun because most of the "grindy" parts were stuff you were there to do anyway (pvp and rvr). Now there were parts that sucked, city sieges (which took tons of tough rvr to pull off) turned into some instanced NPC kill-fest once you finally kicked down the doors, originally at least, and that blew.