Arcanaville

Hypothetically speaking, F2P could sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, if hypothetically speaking there existed more than one MMO on Earth, if there existed a planet called Earth. As we currently have 100% of all the MMO subscribers in the known universe, its difficult to project how F2P could affect our net playerbase size. However, I have seen calculations that suggest in certain Calabi-Yau contortions there exist vibrational manifolds in which the laws of physics would permit multiple MMOs existing simultaneously. In such manifolds I could conjecture the existence of an MMO which launched with a subscription model and later converted to a tiered model of VIP subscribers and ala carte subscriptionless players. When I extrapolate the binding energy of this manifold, solving for the rest mass of the electron involves a normalization factor whereby the developers of this game focus most of their attention on licensed fantasy role playing genres.

The one person for whom giving away free game time and swag would not be a net marketing positive is probably me. Honestly, I don't even enter CoH contests because the worst possible thing that could happen is that I could win.

Instead, for every month of subscription time I'm awarded one free make-fun-of-the-powers-team's-tiny-monkey-brains token. And you better believe I'm not stockpiling those.

You're preaching to the choir. There's a solution to this problem in theory, but not one I've been able to convince the devs to investigate seriously.

Its a fair point, and one I glimpsed briefly when doing the scrapper secondary comparisons. The bottom line is that once you start getting to *extreme* levels of damage and damage mitigation discrete effects start to become extremely powerful. In particular, defense and regeneration become vulnerable to instantaneous effects that do not average out fast enough, while +health and resistance qualitative stability start to have measurable quantitative benefits.

Basically, at some point you have to acknowledge that while you might be able to survive 4000 dps on paper, nothing throws 4000 dps at you as four thousand one-point attacks in a steady stream. You're going to see many hundreds of point and thousand+ point attacks land. It only takes two closely spaced thousand point attacks to kill an SR scrapper regardless of defense and regeneration, and the survivability of that build starts to depend strongly on the mean time between seeing that event and not the actual average damage mitigation of the build. Similarly, you might be able to get Dark Regeneration to the point where it can pump out a couple hundred health per second, but to need that amount of health you have to be *seeing* hundreds of points of damage per second. Can a player react quickly enough to incoming damage that is that fast, and if damage obeys a gaussian distribution curve can the player adjust to a momentary doubling in incoming damage?

Unfortunately, these things are very complex thing to approximate with closed form equations (i.e. algebraic formulas).


Incidentally, the point at which stochastic approximations begin to diverge strongly from average calculations is around the point where the player can theoretically be killed in less than four attacks in less than ten seconds. In other words, when we're dealing with attackers capable of landing attacks that do more than 30% of your total health and can land those attacks every three seconds (collectively), the mechanical differences between resistance, +health, defense, regeneration, and heals starts to become very important.

I've seen others.

Cuz no one else wanna.

My understanding is that generally accepted international accounting rules require NCSoft to account for subscription revenue as realized upon delivery of the service: i.e. your sub money gets amortized across the duration of your subscription. Every player subscribed for the month of May counts towards the revenue for the month of May. If you're paying annually, one twelfth of your sub is being counted as a "sale" in this month.

You mean I am blaming every single change in the game from here on out on *me*.

No wait: I mean: *I* mean I am blaming every single change in the game from here on out on me.

I think Desdemona's pets are standard critters with standard tohit. I'm pretty sure the Blade Prince's dancing swords are pet class critters with 75% chance to hit. I'm not sure about Infernal's imps. I believe IDF Orbs are minions with 50% tohit except in the trials, where they have the same 64% base tohit as most Praetorian foes in the trials.

The difference is apparently nineteen ninety five.


I would laugh in the face of anyone claiming to be an expert on the free to play model, because while its fairly well understood how it works for microgames like Farmville, the precise way it works or doesn't work in class A MMOs is about as well understood as quantum chromodynamics is by Elmo. And I'm quite sure I can name just as many instances of F2P in the MMO space as you can: I've studied the model quite thoroughly.

As to NCSoft's position on the matter, you're probably thinking about an interview with Jeremy Gaffney that Massively titled "Subscriptions more profitable than microtransactions." Of course, what he actually said about microtransactions was:

Q: Given you’re wearing both developer and exec hats, where do you stand on the creative issues around free-to-play and microtransactions? How much can the business model be reconciled with not compromising the game design?

Jeremy Gaffney: My take on it is that there are certain games for which it’s very appropriate, and others for which it’s really not. The kind of games which really benefit from it as those where there’s a low barrier of entry, you can get in quickly, but on the other there’s benefits to sustaining. We’ve seen some really big successes recently - League of Legends and similar games like that, where it’s really easy entry but you can double down on the microtransactions. As we’re doing it with more of our projects, I think what we’re finding is it’s a really great way to sustain a user base that’s very passionate about a game. It gives a way to invest in it. In Korea you would see for a long a time that people on the Korean version of eBay would spend something like four times as much money as they would actually pay to NCsoft. What’s interesting about that is it means in a way you’re not serving your customers’ needs, because they care enough that they want to spend this money. You’re not giving them an outlet to do it. It’s a very interesting situation.


He went on to say:

Q: How much is NCsoft still experimenting? Are you anywhere near to a unified, de facto business model for the time being?

Jeremy Gaffney: We’re a developer-friendly company all around, so our developers chase different business models that they find interesting. We don’t have a boiler plate that we stick on all our games. Guild Wars 2 has been in development obviously for a bit; Guild Wars 1 really defined, I think, the ’free’ MMO in terms of having a different business model than anything else. So we’re agnostic - I don’t think there’s a company philosophy on that so much as developers know what’s best for their games, so let the developer dictate that.

Q: You’re not feeling that the subscription age is over then?

Jeremy Gaffney: No, there’s still a lot of money being made in subscriptions right now. Worldwide there’s a lot of money being made in transactions, but there’s probably a bit more money really being made in subscriptions worldwide.

Q: How much do you think the trend of big launches from the last few years switching to free-to-play will continue?

Jeremy Gaffney: I’m not sure free-to-play is really the kiss of death, or even a resurrection method, because the games that moved over to it have made a bunch of money from it. There’s been more interest from the big publishers in moving over to it early in the life cycle. You’ll probably see more games from big publishers which launch with free-to-play from the outset. But because that perception exists, I think it also makes publishers leery to move over to it because they don’t want the perception of "oh, hey, we’re shifting over because there are fewer players now." Players in many ways demand it, you know. Anecdotally in our industry there are lot of games that have resurrected themselves by moving over to that model, players flocking in, lot more money to be made off it. In a lot of ways it’s better for players because you get to opt-in only to as much as you want to. If a game’s that important to you, you’re probably willing to put that much more money into it - or want to even, because they experience more and more of the content.


Yep, sounds like NCSoft absolutely detests the F2P model and doesn't understand it at all.

Sure, first you take away my stars, and then my post count. What's next, my avatar? Wait, where's my avatar?


The real problem is forum handles. Unique forum handles cause divisiveness, because they let people say "Arcanaville sux" and everyone knows they are referring to me. If everyone was "Arcanaville" then no one would know who they were referring to when they said "Arcanaville sux" because it could be me, or any one of the other hundred thousand Arcanavilles.

Think about how democratizing it would be if we were all Arcanaville. Everyone could claim to be the great and powerful Arcanaville. When the devs only listen to Arcanaville, that would still be everyone. No one would be more right, or more wrong, than Arcanaville. Going Rogue would have a special shout out to everyone. And everyone would have a unit of time named after them.

You probably could have saved some grief during the universal server merge, if only you implemented the Arcanaville forum merge at the same time. And if not, at most only Arcanaville would have been complaining about it.

And they say community coordination is hard. You just need to reduce the problem to its simplest form. And if everyone was Arcanaville, that's about the simplest form of community possible.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one (yet)
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Ashtoreth didn't say they weren't dresses, just that they weren't (subjectively) nice dresses.

I liked them fine myself.

Just because Memphis_Bill has a higher post count than me, doesn't mean people should be giving him credit for everything. After all, I found out about the DoT-amok thing also, and I might have even PMed the devs about it long ago. Just because Memphis_Bill has forum followers and time to post 2117 posts more than me, doesn't mean he knows more about the game than I do. Those extra 2117 posts translate to 35 more hours of time I've had to play City of Heroes or occasionally Angry Birds, and I've gotten really good at both playing Scrappers and avian physics in that time.

Its players like us that struggle in anonymity, ignored because of the bias that exists against people with humble post counts under 24,000, that struggle day in and day out to nerf all the fun out of the game, while meanies like Memphis_Bill take all the credit. Next time this happens, you tell them that Memphis_Bill is *not* the only person trying to ruin City of Heroes: he's just the one trying to steal all the fame for ruining City of Heroes. In fact, dare them to name one power Memphis_Bill personally got nerfed. I bet he can't even name one part of this game he personally destroyed, whereas I can name three. And that's not even counting the way I ruined Martial Arts and made that set unplayable.

Sigh. Sometimes, it just doesn't seem worth it, trying to destroy the game while other people sit back and sweep up all the accolades.

Isn't Guild Wars a no-subscription game? There's a box cost, but isn't it essentially a free to play game?

The problem with converting an existing subscription-based game into a F2P game is what do you do with all your long-time subscribers? Paragon has said many times that they have excellent retension of players, which means a lot of City of Heroes players have been here for a very long time supporting the game. What do you do with all those long time veteran players that form the backbone of your customer base? The challenge is making free to play something that offers a compelling value proposition to your existing subscriber base, and that's not a trivial problem to solve.

The truth of the matter is that no one really understands "free to play" as a model yet: its simply too new for there to be any real experts floating around. There seem to be lots of ways to do it wrong, and a few ways to do it right. But what has worked for other games won't necessarily work here. If the devs decide to go F2P, I would expect a lot more than just snapping their fingers and letting people play the game for free.

As to the numbers, the revenue drop from Q4 2010 to Q1 2011 is comparable to the revenue drop from Q4 2009 to Q1 2010, and many players extrapolated that the game probably had only two years left before essentially dropping into a pure maintenance mode, if not shutting down entirely. Somehow I doubt that is going to happen in the next seven months. Extrapolating from two data points is not a good idea. In fact, people were also extrapolating the drop from Q2 2009 through Q4 2009 and saying the game probably had only a *year* left.

What the data of the last two years tells me is that left to its own devices, City of Heroes' playerbase will very slowly drop, in fits and spurts, like most very long-lived MMOs, but also that the game has life in it insofar as people seem willing to pay more to get more, if they feel the value is worth it. Whether NCSoft and Paragon decide to strategically focus on more expansions (Going Rogue was not a success in terms of permanently increasing subscriptions, but it was a limited success in terms of generating revenue), going Free to Play, or something else entirely, I think City of Heroes still has a future for the foreseeable future.

FYI, pets and turrets have base 75% chance tohit. "Turret" is actually a class of critter (actually, a set of classes). They aren't "pets" per se. The turrets in the base in Striga, for example, are all minion, LT, and Boss-ranked turrets, and should have base 75% chance to hit.

I don't think "cynical" means what you think it means.

Its also possible that if you and everyone else didn't buy the booster packs, you just wouldn't be getting this at all. You seem to be under the impression that the art department sits in a room all by themselves and cranks stuff out at their whim, and then NCSoft decides what of that output they will give away with subscriptions, and what they will charge for in a booster pack. That's not how this works. Production and design decide collectively what an Issue will contain, and then the art department makes that. Production and design decide what a booster pack will contain, and then the art department makes that. They can certainly change their minds down the road, but most everything made for this game starts with a decision about what to create that justifies the work by specifying what its supposed to be a part of.

The Steampunk pack justifies the existence of the Steampunk costumes. The Steampunk pack did not steal the Steampunk costumes from Issue 20.


The bottom line is that by buying those packs, we contributed more money to NCSoft. If you believe NCSoft took that money and bought hookers and champagne, we got screwed. On the other hand, if you believe NCSoft put that money back into Paragon Studios in terms of hiring more staff and getting more resources, then the net result is that we the players ended up with more game. The notion that if we didn't spend as much money, we'd still get the exact same game but for less money is only true if you believe the Booster Pack revenue goes into the Paragon Studios Carnival Cruise fund or that some guy in Korea that looks like Chiun from the Remo Williams movie is getting rich off of us.

Take money away from NCSoft, and by extension Paragon Studios, and we get less game. That's inescapable. And when the devs produce less game, we all lose. Sure, no one wants to pay more, but that's the fundamental equation. More money equals more game. Less money equals less game. There's simply no way to calculate how much more game we have because of the revenue NCSoft has collected from Booster Packs, but its almost certainly substantial. Maybe they haven't spent as much time on the specific things you want as you would like. But that would probably still be true if they produced less game overall.

The question is: is it worth the trade. And the nice thing about booster packs is we can decide for ourselves individually. If we want them, we buy them. The customers that don't want them or can't afford them don't have to pay for them. They still indirectly benefit from the rest of us funding more game, and we directly get what we want and can afford to pay for.

As I mentioned previously, I've generally dialed back my replies for length, as measured by character count within the post. But in the past, my post size has averaged significantly higher magnitude character length; generally at least once per week I would post a message which exceeded five thousand characters. The original post character count limit is actually preserved within the Scrapper analysis, which was split in half due to that limit. The limit would have been reached within about one third of the end of the second post of that sequence. You don't see that sort of post from me these days, usually, even when doing a point by point response.

I do edit prior posts when there is information that is in error within them and I catch the error quickly enough, but since readers do not always go back and read edits or can easily detect them, if the error is caught after more than a few posts have been added to the thread I will post a correction post instead. This prevents stealth edits from changing content in a way people haven't read.

Edit: in this case, I didn't, except I did.

Unreasonable syllabication incontrovertibly discombobulates communication antediluvianly.


Also, since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a puppy:

And a slightly different bit of tech at 0:55.

That's already been done by the original development studio of this game.

That would be the corruptor version: Pain Archery. The good news is that it has a heal arrow that targets allies. The bad news is that its modeled after Life Drain. But technically, it is a heal that targets allies.

Oh I read Sam's posts, but I think I'm competitive. Plus, I had a streak of a couple years where I was regularly hitting the post character limit, and at one point any thread where I was posting simultaneously with Pilcrow was guaranteed to add another million characters to my total.

The numbers above are rounded to the nearest percent; this is what that that specific table looks like for very high values and rounded to hundredths of a percent:

100% 20.48%
120% 20.70%
140% 20.83%
160% 20.92%
180% 20.98%
200% 21.03%
250% 21.10%
300% 21.13%
400% 21.17%

As a practical matter, I think its fair to say you're not likely to see defense values higher than about 21% on squishies. In fact, I can say you aren't going to see higher values than 21.22%. The DR equation is a bit complex, when B < 1 its a diminishing returns curve which means if you increase the value high enough, you will get increasing values (but at a decreasing rate), but when B=1 like it is for defense its actually an asymptotic curve, which means it approaches but never exceeds some very specific value. In the case of defense for squishies, that value is ... 2/3/pi, or about 0.2122. And I hate trigonometric calculus.

For reference, the asymptotic limit for class B (melee) is 64.305%, and for class H (HEATs) its 42.44%.

Note again: this property only happens for DR curves in which B = 1, which are things like Defense and ToHit. For other attributes like damage strength, there is no asymptotic limit: stack more, get more, just less the more you stack. But at no point do you hit or approach a limit.

And no, I don't think that was a good idea to do for defense and tohit, but that's what it does.

Defenders were going to get Empathic Archery. It would have heal arrows, adrenalin arrows, clarity arrows, fortification arrows, rain of healing arrows...

Except for the greens that debuff regen and healing, that's enough regen to tank the nucleus (~200 dps) or a yellow mito (~250 dps). Even most regen scrappers that could tank the nucleus back in the day couldn't tank yellow mitos effectively.

I wonder if that is enough regen to tank Lord Recluse in the STF while tower buffed. I've never stopped to calculate what would be required to do that numerically.