One of the MMO’s I’ve been playing, and enjoying, for the last couple years is DC Universe Online. The fights feel fun, there’s room for exploration and achievement hunting, and I love being able to interact with my favorite DC characters. As much as I tend to prefer games where my character can play any role, there’s also fun to be had in the creativity of coming up with new characters – I’ve got almost my limit of 16.

The game has a number of changes planned for an update that’s coming up, and there’s a section of those changes that I hugely do not like. The short version (to the best of my understanding) is that instead of getting less, but still relevant, currency for running things below your level, you will now get zero relevant currency (so only item drops and achievements where applicable) if you run things below the set of missions deemed to be appropriate for your level.

I primarily play DCUO as my wind-down, relaxing game; once I got into endgame with my main characters I stopped pushing so hard to get all-of-the-gear-asap and prefer to rerun old content. Having said that, I do still need to feel like I’m making some form of progress, so gaining currency slowly by running easier content is exactly how I play.

Obviously, I’m not super thrilled with the proposed change. It got me thinking, though, about the way I react to something like that, how others react, and why I react the way I do. (Note that this is not meant to call anyone out. Anything I mention is something that I’ve seen across games and across years of gaming, not trying to launch rockets at anyone in particular.) Continue Reading