Black Pebble

Take a late lunch! Or a long bathroom break.

That won't be a problem. I've got my Black Pebble costume.

I'll be mostly in two areas. Staying in Overland Park, but also visiting some folks east of the airport. I'm also free tonight, as well.

And yeah, Kansas seems to be a bit more spread out than the Bay Area.

GASP ! MY MORTAL ENEMY!!


Ps: Floyd, follow me on Twitter so I can beat Sean, my other mortal enemy!

Woot. After 3 on Friday would work for me. If one of you guys could help coordinate, I'd appreciate it. Maybe Frozen Yogurt if you guys have a good place.

First+Last ACMWMG sounds great to me if we can pull it off. It looks like right now there's you, Larcen3 and myself. That's already a pretty cool crew anyway.

Best times for me would be Thu/Fri probably. And I don't think there'd be enough time for anything too long, but we could do a quick snack/gossipfest.

I wouldn't say this was "the best," considering I engineered the Flowbee-haircut of Positron.

It may be "craziest" though.

Back when we were launching City of Heroes Going Rogue, I had an idea for a promotion. One of the challenges we had was that back in 2010, the phrase "Going Rogue" didn't necessarily apply to our game (thanks to a published autobiography at that time), and we were vying for attention through Google Searches.

So I had an idea to capitalize on the confusion.

Send in a copy of Going Rogue (the autobiography). Each copy would qualify as an entry. At the end of the month, we'd pick a name from the entries, and the winner would receive some amazingly awesome prize (I forget what the prize was, maybe it was signed copies of the game or something not as cool as a car). There were also plans for a grass-roots campaign to bump up our "Going Rogue" up higher in Google searches.

Legal approved it, believe it or not.

But other forces conspired to nix it.

I'd like to take this moment to announce a new effort.

Please help Alpha Wolf stay at Level 1! We need the community to really band together to help train as many purple mobs to Alpha Wolf, wherever he is. Don't think of this as griefing, think of this as helping him become a stronger, more durable and more seasoned player. It's like how Daniel-San learned how to be a Karate Master and a better person by having all of the cool kids in his high school relentlessly harass him, beat him up, and even break his leg so he could learn how to fit in.

The winner will find out Alpha Wolf's secret identity of Clark Kent!


Whoops.

I first read this as you asking about "despicable philosophies..."

Setting prices in the Paragon Market was a mix of art and science. As Freedom continued, we had more and more data that we could use to understand purchase behavior. That combined with feedback from the community itself helped us to set the prices.

There wasn't a one-size-fits-all philosophy though. The thought processes for setting up costume prices versus power prices versus consumable prices were all different. Different players had different opinions on what was valuable, so we had to take that into account as well. This meant determining the elasticity of demand for different categories. We also had to evaluate potential reach - how many players would see this item as valuable?

Probably the biggest success were Super Packs. They were pretty tricky to figure out internally, but what really helped us get the right target price was the feedback from the "Freedom Focus Group" we held last year. Because Super Packs were completely new, we weren't quite sure what the right price range was. We had ideas, but they weren't meaningful until we talked to the players.

As for regrets? I really don't have any. There are things I would have liked to have been able to spend more effort on, however. One of them being coming up with consumables that would benefit a wide range of players. Unlike most other MMO's, consumables have never been a critical staple in COH. We did have plans to grow that space more, though.

I'll break these down into one post per question.

So you want to know about specific marketing efforts. I'm assuming you're wanting projects that involved external communications. In that case, I would define success with hitting the following criteria, not all of which are easily quantifiable.

1) Did it increase awareness of the brand outside of the existing customer base? This can indirectly be measured by looking at things such as account creations, website traffic.
2) Did it generate a noticeable increase in press coverage?
3) Did we get more out of it than we put into it?


Probably the most recent activity that we did was the live press preview of the Magisterium Incarnate trial. This was when we invited several journalists to hop onto beta with us and run the Magisterium trial before anyone else got a chance to see it. We normally didn't do this, the last time we did something like this was back in Issue 19, but we thought we'd be a little more ambitious this time around.

It was a ton of fun. I think we had around 12 or so devs on and around 4-5 press. Matt was leading it, Jeff, Sean, Cord, a bunch of others were also on and providing some awesome conversations as well. I was on as well, playing a Rad/Rad Corrupter because well....I'm rad.

It got us front page coverage on MMORPG.COM, a bunch of new players who came in because they liked what they saw on the livecast, and helped to get the existing players excited about I23. It was also great because not all of the journalists were familiar with COH, so we got to walk them through the game and ended up meeting some really great people like Grakulen from MMORPG.COM.

And it was fun.

The epicness of his story cannot be contained by AE!

The main reason for it comes down to resources.


I am the marketing department. There are no legions of minions at my beck and call. It's a pretty lean operation.

Until 3 weeks ago, I spent 12+ hours each day at the studio. I could go into details, but there's a lot that needs to be done on a daily or weekly basis. Every screenshot I make means it's time spent away from doing this week's sales analysis, and truthfully, making screenshots and videos isn't really a great use of my time. It's fun, but they don't bring in a lot of revenue.

Why don't we hire someone to do that? Resources again. It's non-trivial to bring on additional marketing resources. We've all wanted additional internal resources for creative production and other projects, but that means that's one fewer designer, artist or engineer we can bring on. And Paragon is a studio that's led by the exceptional development team.

We have engaged in advertising throughout the years. We've done print ads, site takeovers, banner ads. We also regularly do less obvious things such as paid keyword searches. These all have varying degrees of effectiveness. At the end of the day though, it still comes down to a return on investment, because every expense needs to be justified.

If we spend $X producing a trailer, will it bring us $X+Y in new subscriptions and sales? If we spend $Z producing tv commercials, can we prove that those commercials bring us $Z+Y in revenues?

When you're launching a brand new game, you don't need to be as diligent about answering those questions. For an established game, however, there is far less flexibility.

Any perceived lack of advertising was never due to skepticism or a lack of desire on our part. If the resources were there, every Issue release would have been accompanied by full-age ads in every magazine and comic book. We'd have had multiple trailers and even TV buys. And there'd have been much more fanfare and hoopla.

Paragon Studio was a small studio, but we consistently produced incredible work that far larger studios couldn't even hope to match. I think an unintended consequence of that was that we gave the impression that we were much bigger than we actually were. We just managed to do a lot more with a lot less.

FPAUG (First Post After UberGuy)

I think it'd be best to avoid all questions such as the above for now. I do see there are active debates on it, but I don't think I'm in a position to resolve those.

I don't know if this new tech would have been implemented into existing Power Set. My guess is no, but then, I didn't think Dimension Shift was going to be changed either.

Odds are it's something that no one internally noticed was broken, or cared enough to do anything about. Demorecord wasn't a highly used functionality, so any fixes or enhancements had to be prioritized. For example, I noticed that powers customization on the Umbra Beast didn't work properly in demorecord, but fixing it would have required having a coder take a deeper look at what the underlying issue was, and they were at that time swamped with trying to get I22 out.

That was probably one of the most consistent challenges we all had to deal with, acknowledging the trade-offs that every decision required. Pretty much every idea was a great idea, except for the terrible ideas. But time and resources were rarely on our side.