The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

[Magnificent]

With DCUO going F2P this month there is going to be a rather large influx of new players, many of them transient.  This can have many ramifications.

The Good:
More gamers means more fun.  Hopefully this will mean more villains as well so the PVP queus will move a little faster and have more variety than WAR members.  With the limitations on trades and cash totals the lower-level accounts can have, this should bring prices on Collection items down a good bit (lots more supply but demand will be stifled by the price ceiling the cash limits create).  So if you are wanting to make some cash, spend some time finding Superboy statue rubbings and selling them for a couple mill in the Trade channel.  One F2P hits, the market is going to settle down a bit.

The Bad:
With so many new players and SOE not seeming to do much about speed hacking except make lots of noise, Legends could quickly become hack-tastic (since you don't need gear for it).  Arenas might follow as well, but I would think that would be to a lesser extent since there is indeed a big difference between a character with no PVP gear and one in full T2 or higher.

The Ugly:
One word - Lag-tastic.  I've got an i3 processor with 4GB RAM and an NVidia 250 (1GB RAM) video card running Vista Ultimate 64-bit (yeah, yeah... I know ;p).  Although my machine is far from "uber", it doesn't exactly suck either.  I play with resolutions high, but I still get fits and spurts of lag when zipping through the Day-After-Thanksgiving-In-A-Mall level of population in the Watchtower.  I can't help but wonder if Sony has anticipated properly the amount of folks that could show up with F2P and if they have upgraded their hardware enough to compensate.  This may be much ado about nothing, but I still remember when EQ1 first went Live.  It was... brutal.

Thoughts?

[BigAl1775]

I think you're wrong! No one hacks and no one sells anything for 50x its value on AH!  Yeah, I can't wait for "real" noobs that want to duel. (Meaning not the hackers that will hit me once=death!) As it is, most heroes have figured out my pvp disguise, so I can't look noobish anymore  And I too notice a little slow down when more than enough crawlers leap from the ledge during boss 1 of FOS1 and they aren't cleared away. And some times when I 1st eneter the tower, most toons' looks take a second the materialize (ie. they have bodies but capes and helms take a second to load).