Team Spode

DC Universe Online has had a problem. It’s the most popular of Daybreak’s MMOs, but its spandex tights flies under the radar of most MMO players. Recent content dumps (called “episodes”) are still very crowded. Recent changes to show exactly how many players are in each zone (and across how many instances) shows that the most recent hub areas support hundreds of players at any time of the day – and this isn’t counting the Nintendo Switch players, who have their own sets of servers. ...

When all the bosses are dead, building is all that’s left.

I probably should have waited one more day to blog about Valheim, as last night we took down the Goblin King, Yagluth, in an epic fight.

I don’t really play survival games. I liked Minecraft until an update broke my roller coaster. I spent a lot of time on that. I tried that Age of Conan one, but grew bored. I never thought I would play another tree puncher. But Team Spode got to talking about Valheim on one of our DCUO nights. It was blowing up – it still is – and we all very much liked the option of not having murder hobos crashing the server, killing everyone and blowing stuff up. ...

I just read that DC Comics and DC Universe have been hit with massive layoffs. While I doubt DC Universe Online will be much affected, I have been playing this game for ten years now and have a little bit of time invested in it. I hope everyone there does well and lands on their feet. The latest DC Universe Online episode, “Wonderverse”, dropped last week. And… it’s not bad, it really isn’t. ...

Me and Huntress saving a cowering Superman from the Hive. Poor Supes. The earliest picture I have of DC Universe Online is from 2008. It’s of my son standing at the DCUO booth at a (then) Sony Online Entertainment Fan Faire. I was mostly excited about the upcoming Free Realms at the time. Twelve years later, Free Realms is gone, and DCUO remains. Since then, I’d joined a static group eventually called Team Spode, and we drifted from game to game before eventually coming to DCUO somewhere probably around 2014, though it may have been earlier. The earliest screenshot I have is from late 2014 and it’s clear the team was working on end game content. ...

Kickin' back with Raven We’ve been working on the T7 DCUO alert, Desecrated Cathedral, for a few weeks. The basic plot is that the demon Trigon’s miscreant sons are fighting over the scraps of their father’s power. Trigon’s not that interest in giving them any of it. HE wants to share his power with his daughter, Raven. SHE keeps waffling between being evil and good. When she’s good, she’s a member of the Teen Titans and stops robbers and stuff. When she’s evil, she is a psychic juggernaut who infects your dreams and is totally awesome. ...

Sinestro needs Hal Jordan's LUUURVE Team Spode kinda left GW2 and kinda went back to DC Universe Online over the past couple weeks. Apathy toward the upcoming GW2 expansion may have contributed. Many of the top Spodians had already finished all of the story and had grinded through the long process to make their marginally better endgame gear. Personally, I liked my Asura engineer fine. I didn’t find the group content very compelling, and upgrades had long stopped dropping for me, so the gear progression I enjoy stopped happening. The story chapters felt tedious. Most importantly, my role in a party seemed ill-defined. I much prefer games where I know what’s expected of me. Many people enjoy the sort of wild mixture of roles in GW2. I liked choosing my turrets for the night and focusing on placement and all that – playing my own mini-game while everyone else played theirs. I wasn’t sure I ever actually contributed, though. ...

Team Spode took our third trip into Guild Wars 2, Sunday. The first week we explored Queensdale, last week we played around in Metrica and killed a fire elemental. This week, we had our sights on a Son of Sam Snow Shaman in the Norn newbie grounds of the Wayfarer’s Foothills, and the guild jumping puzzle in the nearby Snowden Drifts. That was the first thing we did that required a guild, but, we weren’t enough people to both dislodge icicles from the cavern ceiling and plug steam vents with them once they’d been dislodged, so we failed that. ...

It’s been a whirlwind few days since I mysteriously hit CR 106 and became eligible to play the newest endgame content in DC Universe Online. “Mysteriously” is the word. I’ve been at CR 105 (CR = Combat Rating, the gating factor for endgame content). The CR calculators we use showed that I was quite a long way from CR 106, a trip that would require a lot of upgrades and mods. Clever Clara sent me some mods that would help, but even with those, it would be a long stretch. ...