Chase_Arcanum

My work here is done

Realizing that he HAD to cover up the mistake somehow, Chase used the Cupid arrow to stop Stateswidow from spilling the beans.

I now leave that thought in the hands of all the fanfiction writers, canon specialists, and roleplayers out there out there. What happens next? does it qualify as slashfiction? Was the arrow even needed to bring those lovestruck kids together? Imagine the possibilities of a "Course of a superVILLAIN romance" book, then curse me for bringing it up.

Well, you could forget about speeding to a top that hold nothing else to do (except go back through the content you sped through initially) and just meander through the game, enjoying where the journey takes you...

To be fair, said company did make that offer during the height of the financial crisis, where credit to even established businesses was all but nonexistent. Preparing for launch is expensive, and most companies take out short-term lines of credit to get them through that hump. Without that avenue available, offering lifetime subs was probably the only way they could launch at all.

http://goingrogue.cityofheroes.com/e...nd-preordering

Prepurchasing was done through the NCSoft store and got you early access to the powersets.

Preordering via the different game shops had different promotions but did not give you early access to the powersets.

You could not prepurchase the "complete collection" but you could buy a "complete collection upgrade pack" once the expansion came out.

Some people prepurchased for access to the powersets, then bought the complete collection boxed set from the stores, figuring that once you add in the 30 "free days" it came with, the physical copy was "worth it." We call these people "committed" players. Use whichever definition of "committed" you prefer :P


...I can't find any other way these powersets would have been made available early, but my search-fu may be weak

Not too surprising at all.

1) MANY of the sales of the game weren't box- they were digital preorders directly from the NCSoft store. Even if I paid the preorder back in May, legally you can't usually report it until its the revenue is fully realized (the item ordered is supplied to the client). That means that all the $$ gained by offering the pistols and demon summoning sets early to those that preorder probably wasn't realized until the quarter that the game shipped. All the revenue of the digital versions went straight to NCSoft, too.

2) The devs give us subscribers a lot of freebies (Sig story arcs, powersets, auctionhouse, stores, etc) and even gives premium folk a lot, depending on their preemie status. Heck, for all the things you listed, I haven't put a penny into the game more than my (discounted) annual subscription fee (and my wife's), and got most of what I wanted from the store on just my "free points" that come with the subscription....

Heck, even the store-sold items are extremely generous by MMO standards. In an MMO that shares a first name with a popular late-night-tv-host, a costume piece costs as much or more than ours, but is available for only 1 character, doesn't level up with that character, and counts against your (very) limited inventory count (pay more to boost that). There also aren't bonuses given to "non-subscribers that buy a lot" and subscribers just get a discount, not free points for the store.

Maybe the issue isn't the # of sales, but that the devs are too generous with what they offer?

Yep. I'd wager less than 50%. I've heard that once you factor in the distributor, the packaging, and paying for frontage (devs often have to PAY for good shelf space in a gaming boutique nowadays. MMO devs pay more than standard PC games, and PC games pay more than console games because the resale value of console games is very valuable to the boutiques) a boxed game sale barely brings in the equivalent of the "free" month subscription that the game comes with.

It depends if you're a publicly-traded company or not, and even then you can report things in a way to conceal things.

• NCSoft gives good granular reports on a per-product level.
• A company that's very diversified making... say... televisions through gaming consoles through PC's... along with game titles and MMO's... (We'll call this fictional company "Tony") might just report the general profitability of its subdivision "TOE" rather than reveal each MMO's revenue.
• For other games, you just have press releases that don't have the same legal requirements as quarterly financials, so they may be fudged a bit... or creatively counted. They'll say they have "X million players" and let the herd believe that that means "x million times $15 per month" when in reality, 4/5 of those users are in a region where the game doesn't follow the subscriber model, but instead uses cybercafe mass licenses and/or very low hourly rates. That doesn't matter- the herd likes big numbers.
• Since nobody "unsubscribes" from a F2P game, many try to get away with counting every person that EVER signed up (ignoring that 90% haven't logged in in the past year) or "x number logged in at least once in the past 90 days" without noting that they sent a "your account is now inactive, if you don't log in at least once in the next x days, you will lose your stuff" to inflate that number.
• Subscription services are no different. Some started using "peak concurrent users" (the highest total logged in at any single time) to look at how active the subscription base was, but then others organized extremely limited-time events to drive up this number at least once per quarter without ever mentioning that part.
• Better still, a company will use different metrics each quarterly report to really make comparisons over time difficult (unless, of course, the comparison would be positive. Q1 they report "peak concurrent users." Q2 they report "median concurrent users" (to address concerns that the previous quarter's "peak" was grossly inflated by an event) but they never go back and tell you what Q1's median would have been.... Q3 they switch to "total active subscribers" and Q4 they change what they define as "active"

For all that, I cringe even more when I see people that just use percentages of vaguely-defined numbers.

Compare the following:
MMO1 announces that it will go F2P in the next 3-6 months. It fumbles the announcement badly, creating player hysteria and people that just decide to leave, saying "why should I pay for the next 3 months?" The devs start holding off on what they're releasing to the playerbase, reserving the good stuff for the upcoming MMOStore. The people that look for the new and shiny get bored and look elsewhere. On top of that, another MMO releases during that window, so even more leave to check that out, coming back when its free. Numbers drop so low that the boost from going F2P is bound to look big in comparison.

MMO2 does the same announcement, but doesn't fumble the ball. Their community managers and developers stress that they really value their premium subscribers and they plan to offer things to encourage the preems to stay around. They provide new content through the beta and up to release (denying themselves what could be quick-n-easy sales) and don't see the steep slump that MMO1 did leading up to launch. Their release attracts the exact same number of new players (and returning players) as MMO1, but MMO2 has also given away more stuff to their subscribers (and returning players) so their revenue bump is also less impressive.

MMO2 managed the transition better, probably has a more satisfied player base, and had better overall revenue, but if you went by something as comparing the "percentage of revenue gain before/after F2P launch" it'd actually look like the loser.

Several things, though:
1)that 500% has always been questionable. Note that they never indicated what the revenue was before the 500% increase.
Reports also indicate that many of those games were at a point of insolvency even after paring back to nearly-skeleton-crew development teams. They entered the F2P market mostly as a "last ditch effort" to turn things around. [list][*]If I'm making $500 and it increases to $3000, that 500% increase is an overall increase of $2,500.* [*]If I'm making $12,500 and going F2P captures the exactly same market, thus earning $2,500, I've had a 20% increase.*
(*note: math on phone while switching between apps during lunch walks are never correct)

Not saying that those represent the difference in scale between the MMO's in question, but it shows the perils of going by such off-the-cuff numbers.
[/quote]

2) Regarding "new server..."- while its true that we had a hardware update the past year, many game hosting centers similar to NCSoft now run in virtualized environments with several dozen virtual servers running on a farm of servers. If this is true for NCSoft (and there's some hint that it may be) scaling up and down as needed (doublexp weekend may see a few more CPU's pulled from reserve to add to CoH servers, then moved over to another game that's planning an event after demand goes back down). In this environment, adding a new server isn't as big of an issue- especially since you know that the VIP server population is from people moving from other servers. its a shift of resources, not an entirely new investment.

3) An MMO has many costs that scale directly with the population (bandwidth pipe needed, server resources needed) and several that can be scaled with the business's interest in growing/sustaining the budget (the number of developers to apply to continued development, advertising costs), and several fixed costs.

As a population (and revenue) declines, a game can remain profitable as these costs decline. The costs for the pipe & server resources decline with that population (reallocate servers to other games, downgrade the pipe you're paying for, etc) and you can reduce the resources invested(advertising and development budget) you throw at the game. While that resigns yourself to a slow, steady decline, you can be profitable the whole way. Some MMO developers in now-shuttered licenses joked that by the end the "development team" consisted of "that intern with the desk under the stairs."

CoH is nowhere near that level- so looking for the game to shut down is a bit premature.

Thanks.

I'm curious how much this chart would change if weighed against currency exchange rates, though-- since most of the revenue is in US currency, but the reporting is in Korean Won.

According to Google Finance, back in 2004, the Won was worth ~.0009 dollars, climbed to ~.0011 in 2007-2008 before crashing to ~.0007 before rebounding back to ~.0009 today.

Normalizing against the exchange rate might give a better picture of the state of the customer base over time- right now, the peaks and troughs of the exchanges would affect the overall chart, perhaps exaggerating (or trivializing) actual changes in market sentiment.

Someone's obviously teamed with Rian_Frostdrake.

I TOLD him he needed to trademark that "Holiday Frostdrake" look, but he told me that when he tried, all he got back was a letter on USPTO letterhead saying "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!" over and over again.

Agreed.

I have enough alts. My strategy is:
- Hit 50
- T3 the level shift slots
- T1 the others
- Go enjoy my lowbie alts
- Dabble occasionally in trials when I'm bored, improving whatever I can whenever I can, on whoever I want to play. If I ever get that far, I'll opt for different T3's ( a "barrier" and a "clarion", for example) for the improved adaptability before I specialize on a tier 4.

More than that, actually. Right now, when you see someone else in-game, you've got to be sent the code for the costume piece at each location and the color codes for both colors... essentially repeated for each part. This information is sent as "low-overhead" as possible, meaning that there's not often an in-data deliniator for these

(in English: rather than sending something that looks like "chest=34,color1=23,color2=12;chestdetail=1,color1 =11,color2=12) it would more likely be sending "342312011112" (in binary, of course) ... with the client code knowing "the first 2 characters indicate chest, next 2 are color 1, next 2 are color 2, etc." That keeps the data packet as lean as possible- only sending the minimally-needed traffic.

It sounds trivial in the days of broadband, but when you think of how much traffic must enter and leave those central servers, reducing every bit possible saves the devs money (they don't have the luxury of a "unlimited bandwidth" data plan) and lets them keep the costs of hosting the game down.

It does mean, though, that you've got to find EVERY place that parses and handles that data packet and update it correctly if you add more info (like color 3 and color 4) into it. These are some of the oldest (and usually the least-document) parts of a system with any change having a great deal of potential to generate all sorts of unintended consequences. The rule in most games is to do as much as possible within the existing data structure and avoid changing it if at all possible. THOSE "lessons learned" are better left for the sequel.

----


Back to the OP: As others have said, I have my pet peeves with the system, but it IS remarkable that almost 8 years after its release, no game has really come along with options that offer more diversity and more customization that what we've found here- even when those games have double, triple, or even (reportedly) 10x the original budget of this game.

The devs did good here. There's always room for better, but the competition has shown that when the bar is set as high as CoH, "better" isn't easy to attain.

Keep in mind that if all you're interested in is the male stuff, it's almost always more cost-effective to just buy piecemeal.... so why worry about the 'pack?

In reality men have fewer "acceptable" clothing options than women. Look at the variety of typical business attire that's considered acceptable for both... or the selection in your typical department store... or any online boutique. When the devs are thinking of a theme, there are bound to be a few items that are uniquely female, but very few that are uniquely male. Similarly, in any themed pack, there are going to be more viable "uniquely feminine" options uncovered than "uniquely masculine." (granted, some of the costume elements like the clock-belt-buckle, could have been ported over to male)

To me, the Pocket D Valentine's pack strikes a good balance- the jeans and shirt realistically would be acceptable for either sex, but the strappy dress just isn't as universal....

You just told an online community of gamers that this extensive list of costume pieces was done in your SPARE TIME! Tell me, did Zwillinger slap the back of your head before or after he posted in this thread? THESE boards -the manifest convergence of gamers and internet forumites- the very place where the sheer mass of self-entitlement borders on singularity- and you posted THAT!?

If you make something look easy here, its appreciated the first time and expected from then on. They'll demand more and more, slowly draining your soul and hardening your heart into a tiny black rock until you're transferred to marketing. Look at Black Pebble- unless you want that to be YOU someday, you need to change your ways ASAP. Manage expectations- make sure things don't look easy... or were at least the product of sufficient suffering that no sane person would ask more of you.

Maybe your first post could be more like,
I'll admit, its not my best work- only 3 cups of java so far today- but it should put you on the right track.

Oh, and thanks again.

Hmm.... well, you'd have to consider how the wall styles would fit on the new room structures. will they stretch or contract poorly on the curved/angled surfaces? If so, and you have to add code to address when these shapes appear, you're probably stumbling toward legacy code that's best classified as "for GOD's SAKE, MAN, DO NOT TOUCH THIS!"

Then again, if you just added large angular and curved pieces to the "floor/ceiling trim" you could get close to a rounded-corner or even octogonal look. You're just adding more data options to the existing data sets (if they haven't run out of identifiers)...

What kind of base improvements would you be looking for? I'd wager that "adding new items" to bases (and adding new tilesets) would possibly be the easier changes, since it should be just adding data to existing datasets, but anything else probably would get really wonky really fast.

Take, for example, trying to make base raids feasible again. Even if all the code issues were addressed, you'd have the issue that, since that idea was conceived, we've allowed base item placement in ways that would be easily exploitable in raids-- to the point that you'd need to either create a validator that would flag a base as "raid-compatible" or not (or invalidate so many of the creative base designs that we have out there.

So... maybe make bases more of a "social space?" with more interactions with objects (like click-to-sit-on-chairs, etc).... you know... make them something that will get USED more often... well, that runs into one of the other issues with bases- according to Positron, they consume more resources than other instanced maps... and from what I can see via my end, he's right- for many of these bases with staggering numbers of items, it consumes a LOT more resources.

That's not necessarily bad, but additional resources means additional costs.... and in a FreetoPlay system, you try to stress the opposite- encourage play that takes less resources.

When you realize the resources that are just used to instantiate an extremely-decorated base just so a character can rez in the base and run out the nearest teleporter, it really does seem to be a ridiculous waste (and I AM one of those people that loves to tinker with ridiculous base settings). I'd half expect them to offer new base enhancements that'll let you use the base teleporters, storage, & medbay without ever entering the base, just to eliminate this drain. Whether that would be seen as a "base improvement" by the people that use bases, though, remains to be seen.

...few people end up working within their major, but here you are- not just a community manager, but a for a *gaming* community. You don't get much more drama than that.

Well, we have to work with different assumptions here on how people come, try out the game, and leave. The devs would have the actual metrics.

- If you get a regular "churn" of players- people coming and going and coming back, then this number of potential 'lost customers' is going to be larger, so it may benefit them to have the costume pieces be available year-round.

- If you get a larger bit of "veterans" that at least visit at the holidays during events, then perhaps the time-gated nature of the pack will prod more of them into buying the set when they have the chance.



I expect that these kinds of metrics are being heavily-monitored by Paragon studios. I'm betting that we'll see a mixed bag here- special limited-time holiday sets taking advantage of the surge in players that show up for those events and more permanent general-purpose sets that are release during lower-traffic times.

Just to be 100% sure:

• Is it the FASHIONS (the costume pieces) that disappear after March 6, 2012? (This seems most likely, based on other holiday stuff)
• Is it the entire contents of the pack, meaning that the "not so new" pieces (dance, vip) go with it? (this seems unlikely, as you go out of your way to specify fashions)
• Is it only the bundle that disappears after March 6 2012, with the pieces available individually afterward? (this seems the most player-friendly, as it makes these available to new players... for a price... and these pieces aren't as bound to a holiday-themed event as others.... Parties can happen anytime, after all. ).

Think of it this way:

I've already got the robot pack and the teleporter, so the bulk of the 'pack discount is lost to me. At this point, unless I can foresee a use for each and every piece, it probably makes sense to buy them piecemeal. As it stands, I can see a use for maybe 5 or 6 of these pieces, so a piecemeal purchase saves me a few bucks... especially if I wait until I actually USE them in a costume to buy them.

BUT...

If I know that they won't be available after X date, I may be tempted to buy them all NOW just in case I discover a good use for something later on and can't get it.

It wasn't much better in other industries back then, either. One of my projects around 2002 was to modify a product that had just been rewritten from scratch for Y2k compliance a few years previously. It was over 13,000 files with a rather counterintuitive folder structure that led us to believe that MC Escher had a role in its initial framework.

The design document was three sheets of paper that didn't say much more than "make it look like it currently looks, work like it currently works, but not break" in abridged corporate-speak.

A bit flabbergasted, my team asked if there was anything else we could reference. With great pride, they showed us their "extensive documentation library" - a very long closet with binders upon binders upon binders. Someone's idea of "extensive documentation" was a complete printout of the codebase.

EVERY
SINGLE
FILE.



Fortunately, standards have changed now and I've moved on to a better calibre of employer. I'm confident that if our current VP of product development was given a three-page Word document as a project's design document he'd reject it immediately. He prefers Powerpoint.

Others have mentioned there's already a gladius in the powerset, so what they're "reserving" is a specifically-styled roman weapon. You could make a viable centurion without it, thus its not as critical to defining the character as, for example, the roman pack in general.

No, that's a form of semantic relativism that sounds nice but serves no functional purpose whatsoever. "Critically defining" is used for a specific purpose here. It's the point where an asset is essential to having any chance at representing a character in-game, as opposed to just wanting that asset.

In design, a good "trophy" is desirable-- having a high "want" factor, but is NOT critically-defining- not having it doesn't thoroughly bar you from a concept.

Look at the Vanguard Armor (also now available via the store) and Roman Armor. Before the store additions, I couldn't make a hero that's a vanguard grunt from level 1. I could possibly do is make a paramilitary guy in combat gear that'll eventually earn that uniform... but the visual tie- the critically-defining look was missing.

The lack of roman armor access was likewise an issue, but now I do have an avenue to define my character as a Centurion from level 1 on. While I may not have the specific sword I WANT for that character (yet) nobody would point at my character and shout "that's no a Roman Centurion! He has the wrong sword!" (in part because our mitten-hands can't point... but I digress). The loss of the sword isn't CRITICALLY defining, but lack of access to the rest of the costume really made it tough to create a roman centurion.

Had they made variant set(s) (same mesh, different details, like how we have 3 sets of samurai armor) and gated one of them while making the other available, that would have given them a distinctive "trophy set" but made it less "critically defining." You might WANT that armor variant, but you could have still made a centurion using the other sets.

As much as I'd like a motorcycle, it won't happen. We'll get this instead. Simpler animations, possible product placement revenue, quicker return on investment.

Not really.

1) Not offering certain things at all is perfectly valid

Prior to this offering, they didn't offer ANY of these pieces before. They were all restricted to the completion of an event a certain badge in-game and only unlocked to that character when you earned that badge. They've been doing this for years- the ITF has been around for ages- and it really isn't too uncommon for games to put a few "trophy" pieces as rewards for completing certain events.

By offering the costume pieces that they have, they effectively reduced the value of that trophy- making the amount that are truly unique and event tied MUCH smaller. This change effectively reduces the impact of what you're complaining about while still putting (less critically-defining) pieces aside for rewards.

2) I really can't see how this is a "larger issue" when so few pieces are locked away (and even LESS with this change). This seems much less a "missing the forest because of the trees" and more like "mistaking a shrub for a forest."