April Producer’s Letter

Hello everyone. Since this is my first official Producer's letter to the DCUO Community I thought it'd make sense to offer up a very short bio.  My name is Larry Liberty and as of February 1^st I am the Executive Producer of DC Universe Online.  I've been a game developer for more than 16 years.  Prior to SOE Austin I worked for keen games, Killspace, Obsidian, Atari, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Neversoft.  I was an engineer at SOE San Diego during the early days of EverQuest, PlanetSide, and Star Wars Galaxies.  A few of my favorite credited titles: Fallout: New Vegas, The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Tony Hawk 4.  Looking at that list I hope you can tell that I like adventure games and RPGs, with a dash of action.  As a life-long comic book fan, DC Universe Online offered the perfect gameplay mix for me – great narrative, fantastic characters, action, and role-playing.

Since there's been quite a bit of activity on the DCUO forums regarding recent updates to PvP mechanics, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the changes we've made, what we have planned, and our general philosophy for PvP combat in the future. 

The first noteworthy changes were included in Game Update 12.  One change was a simple bug fix – we resolved an issue that could cause revive bars to display progress incorrectly.  You've probably noticed Precision bonuses are now always present when players are in a PvP arena zone, so you don't need to hit an enemy player for them to take effect.  It seems the most discussed so far is the change in Critical Hit damage calculation.  We've basically reduced the ceiling on how much damage output a Crit can deliver.  We want to reduce the importance of luck and the importance of a good virtual dice roll in combat, and increase the importance of skill. 

The overarching goal for our PvP system changes is to emphasize intelligent tactics and skillful play over lucky die rolls and raw stats.  There will still be an element of luck in battle, but we want to reduce its importance.  Likewise, stats are going to remain important – a dramatically more powerful enemy is still going to be just about impossible to take out one on one – but what we want is a system that makes it possible for a really skilled player to employ superior strategy to take out a stronger opponent.

Here's a quick look at some of what we have planned in Game Updates 13 and 14 for PvP:

• Reduce burst damage and burst healing, which is mostly a factor of a lucky die roll, and the need to rely on that lucky die roll to win
• Increase Health values while reducing Toughness for non-Tanks (going from less "effective" health to more "real" health)
• Increase survivability offered on entry level PvP gear (to reduce the barrier of entry to PvP)
• Re-emphasize the importance of counter attacks by restoring them to their pre-nerf state of +1 bonus damage per Precision
• Add new Counter Attack Bonus mechanics to give those taking focus fire or in many-on-one situations more of a fighting chance. We will reward players who make a successful counter-attack with a brief period during which they are immune to counter attacks, damage, and control effects.
• Tone down Tank anti-Controller immunities and improve some Controller debuffs  (Tanks can currently remove controller de-buffs, and if you stack enough Tanks you may never see de-buffs)
• Reduce cost on Tier 2 equipment and weapons
• Add new Tier 3 PvP equipment and weapons (GU 14)
• Tweak arena scoring to emphasize the different game modes
• Add cross-faction PvP queues 

As you can see, we have a LOT planned for PvP in the Game Updates leading into DLC4, and even more once we get there. I'm sure you're all just dying to know what's coming in DLC4, too, but we'll have more on that as we get closer. You might want to keep an eye on our website, forums, Facebook, and Twitter, though, if you're not already.

Larry Liberty
Executive Producer