Eldorado

Link to the Titan Network announcement about the 31 page "pitch package" -- http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....ic,6354.0.html

Link to the Titan Network FAQ about the announcement, including "Why Disney?" and "Why would Disney want it if they've got the Marvel MMO coming out?" and so on -- http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....ic,6367.0.html

It's not about the post LENGTH, it's about the presentation and readability.

James Joyce's Ulysses"...ends with two sentences in its final chapter. The first one is 11,281 words long and the second is 12,931 words long." http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...in.WallsOfText

Each of those "sentences" goes on for 20 or 30 PAGES with no paragraph breaks to disturb the gray Wall of Text! However, just because an early 20th century, "avante garde" writer (and a raging alcoholic) did things that way, that doesn't make it RIGHT.

More recently, there's Cormac McCarthy, who wrote The Road and No Country For Old Men, which were both turned into recent movies. He's highly regarded in some literary circles, has won a Pulitzer Prize and a US National Book award for his work, but after wading through one of his books, I'll be damned if I'll ever touch another one because:

McCarthy "does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to 'blot the page up with weird little marks,'") which makes him a tradition-breaking trend-setter but also (IMHO) negatively impacts the readability of his books.

Oh, right -- obligatory Wall o' Text picture:

At the risk of going in circles here, a lot of us here have seen charts showing REVENUE coming in from CoH -- VIP subscriptions, money spent on Paragon Points, timecards and whatever else.

Has anybody seen/CAN anybody link anything concrete showing CoH's expenses such as salaries, rent for office space and equipment, insurance and everything else, OR anything else showing "net" income after expenses instead of the "gross" revenue numbers we've seen so far?

APB got shut down in 2010, got bought by a new publisher and RELAUNCHED as APB Reloaded in 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APB:_Al...n_and_relaunch

Haven't played it, know little about it, but I had more or less the same reaction as Roderick when I was MMO shopping last week and the salesguy brought it up. "I heard it shut down."

"No, it got bought and re-released. It's on 'Steam.'"

"Huh. How 'bout that?"

When I Googled it just now, the game came up as advertisements on both Newegg and Amazon -- looks like you have to buy the game itself to start playing.

[Side note: a game that got bought and relaunched successfully?!? *crosses fingers and hopes* Does this remind you of anything? ]

At a guess, I think I'd expect the RP server to be somewhat like Virtue, the PvE server to be more like Freedom, and the PvP server to be more like...well, the same mindset and chatter as I saw in PvP zones in CoH. In my somewhat limited MMORPG experience, RP servers seem to tend towards a slightly older and mature crowd while the "lol rp" crowd goes elsewhere. Hopefully there aren't too many "lol rp griefers."

I'm kind of curious about the "feel" of the community myself -- but from the one article I found, I'm betting that the feel of each server will be vastly different:

"When the dust settles on September 18, only 1 PvE, 1 PvP, and 1 roleplaying server will remain." http://www.shacknews.com/article/755...ervers-into-3#

I may have to check out TERA after all!

A couple of weeks ago, when I (grumpily) started looking for another MMO to call "home" I was looking at TERA and was somewhat pleasantly surprised at the idea of the active combat playstyle and lack of a "targeting reticle" -- apparently your attacks are all pointed at the center of your screen and whatever beastie you're facing.

THEN I started researching into the game a little more, and was disheartened to see that only four months after the North American launch, their publishing company just recently merged their 11 North American servers down to THREE (1), tried to do a positive spin article about it (2), and laid off part of their staff back in August (3). Oh, and if you had more than eight characters before the servers merged, you had to delete some of them. Sorry about all your hard work, but hey, they extended the deadline to decide which of your characters you had to axe (2). That's not much of a consolation, is it?

"Merges are an opportunity to realign player populations and address the quality of life for our players. If that means we merge to provide more rich, full player environments, easier-to-find groups, and a thriving economy, then that's what we'll do." (2)

They claim that the game is still strong enough that they have no plans to go to a "free to play" model yet -- which says to me that they want to milk the subscriptions as long as they can.

I WAS sort of excited at the prospects of this game, but now I'm leery, to say the least, about subscribing to a game that looks like it could be in trouble already.

(1) http://www.shacknews.com/article/755...ervers-into-3#
(2) http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/09...d-game-health/
(3) http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08...-with-layoffs/

Yes, I DO realize that NCSoft/PS didn't get to decide what to advertise! It's up to the advertisers to know their market -- how many Covergirl and Maybelline cosmetic ads do you see on the track or on the TV at a NASCAR race? How many Ford truck ads and Pennzoil commercials did they run during "Sex and the City"? (I never watched that show, but I'm betting "not many.")

There's a reason there's a phrase: "selling ad space." It's a two way street between the advertisers and the newspaper/magazine/TV/billboard people, and while I'm not aware of the inner workings of NCSoft/PS's ad department, there are some companies that would have benefited more from finding out about the COH billboard project. AARP and "health insurance for seniors" would have been a bad fit. Burgers and pizza and Mountain Dew? Better fit.

No argument about the size of the target audience -- it was/is small, but how do YOU know how much they were charging, either? It was a relatively new idea to reach a small audience -- hopefully they weren't charging an exorbitant amount of money for the billboard space, but they only managed to get TWO advertisers, which suggests that they wanted too much or else pitched the idea badly. Maybe they could have given the space away for free to gauge how much interest advertisers had and THEN started charging for the space.

While we have freedom of movement and get to move in three dimensions here, there are just some places where billboards in the game were destined to get more "views" than others based on traffic flow, just like in real life. Unfortunately, I don't think the developers who planted billboards in the game at the beginning were thinking about potential revenue -- they were putting them in for decoration.

There are two billboards I can think of offhand in Peregrine Island: the one that is planted perpendicular to the main "north south" route that a lot of players travel repeatedly. That's a major route, kind of like a freeway. Zone in by Ghost Falcon, need to run to Portal Corp or the trainer or the Hero Corps rep? Pass a billboard. Get a mission down south? Pass it again. Was that one used for advertising? I can't remember, but I don't think so. Then there's the one over by the parking garage near the Arena and hospital -- my scrappers never faceplanted that much, I never used the Arena for PvP and only seldom used those "stores" so I didn't pass that billboard much, but that one WAS used for advertising.

"Hassle and potential loss of player goodwill?" I don't know how difficult it was to "re-skin" a billboard, but I know that there was a program out there that the players could use to re-skin whiteboards in supergroup bases, so I'm guessing that reskinning billboards wasn't exactly rocket science. There WERE a lot of people who DID quit (or at least VERY vocally threaten to) on the forums when the advertising was announced, because of "the principle of the thing," who weren't mollified by the "well, you can turn it OFF" feature, so the goodwill was already damaged.

It's all water under the bridge now -- I think we can all agree that while a little extra money from advertising couldn't have hurt, it wasn't going to be enough to save the game on its own.

You know, I never really did buy this part of the reason why the experiment failed.

Right now Flight is capped at 58.63 mph. I just logged on a character with Super Jump who leaps at 78 mph, and it look like Super Speed caps at 92.5 mph. A well designed billboard shouldn't take more than a second or two to read, in either the virtual or real world. If we're flying and leaping past billboards too fast to read them, does that mean that the billboards that line the US freeways are a waste of time, too? Most cars in my state are moving along at close to the Super Jump speed, even though it's over the speed limit here.

According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, advertisers spent 6.38 BILLION DOLLARS on outdoor advertising in 2011! ( http://www.oaaa.org/marketingresourc...ndfigures.aspx ) It's hard to believe that they'd spend THAT kind of money if they thought that the cars on the freeway were going by too fast.

Now THIS I completely believe -- trying to sell athletic shoes to MMO gamers makes about as much sense as a food stand trying to sell venison burgers at a PETA rally! (Okay, maybe some of us SHOULD get off the couch and get a little more exercise, but an in-game billboard for shoes isn't going to make us race out and buy their product.)

Energy drinks, fast food, gaming mice and keyboards, bigger and better video cards, other computer gear -- THOSE would have been the types of things to try and sell to us, the target audience.

IMHO, they could have tried to sell twice as many ads for half as much and run them for half as long, because after a while the shoe ads DID start to blur into the scenery, but I recognized the second billboard the day it came out and stopped to read it. "Hey, cool! Uh -- what IS it?" And then before long, they became part of the scenery as well.

You're allowed to love the game, but the math simply doesn't add up:

8.5 years x 365 days in a year = 3102.5 days [and that's rounding UP -- I'm not going to sit here and count the individual days from April 27 until Sept 6, and there's a couple of leap years in there too]

3102.5 days x 24 hours a day = 1,132,412.5 hours of patrol time.

Yet you claim to have played your main for 77,338,822 hours?

Were you somehow playing your main on 60 computers AT THE SAME TIME???

You were paying $575 a MONTH for this game?!?

Wow -- I feel positively destitute just now.

(And to the OP, yes, I could still swing an extra $10 a month for my two accounts.)

They've changed the "minimum system requirements" over the years, though. From another old thread on the topic:

[Can't seem to "quote" the link above: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...6&postcount=13 ]

The computer I had when COH came out died long ago, but was having trouble running the game by 2006; the rather crappy computer I bought in 2005 and upgraded along the way could barely run COH a couple of years ago.

Your mileage may vary.

<applauds>

Well done, and bravo! And yeah, I've BEEN on that task force -- a few times now!

(And a big "thumbs up" to konshu's "read the wiki" as well -- I've been known to do that A LOT myself after the dust clears.)

It depends on my mood and what I'm doing there. If I'm just soloing and wandering around, even half-lost, it's still fun for me, up to a point.

If I'm on a team and everybody else is on the map while I'm still running in circles looking for the door? That's not so much fun.

Even better still was having a bunch of friends with level 50's who enjoyed running missions on "Unyielding" or "Invincible" back in the day and bringing my lowbie and leveling rapidly, then becoming one of those 50's and returning the favor. (And now we can just do the same thing on +something/x8 even if we don't have a full team!)

Having fun with friends and leveling quickly as a side effect seems more enjoyable to me than doorsitting or running the same old farm over and over, but there's a lot of different ways to have fun here, which explains why the game's still going strong after eight years.

Yes, those are exactly what I'm talking about! Enemy aggro or reaction time or something has been changed, tweaked, buffed, nerfed, or pick your own verb! It doesn't seem to be a problem most of the time, though, because....

...it's not a playstyle that particularly appeals to MOST of the playerbase these days! This game has evolved (or devolved, depending on your point of view) from a game where we sometimes DID have to think strategically to a game where the only strategy is "zerg" and "zerg faster," and from one with five difficulty levels and one-on-one sidekicks to one with four difficulty SLIDERS, super sidekicking and reduced xp penalties for dying.

Back then, there WERE times you wanted to pull groups in twos and threes (and ones if you wanted to show off) but now the strategy is "kill moar faster" and "pop a bunch of inspies if you gotta."


I'd mentioned that when I said "I surely wasn't the first person to learn about "tele-pulling" through walls with Teleport Foe and creative camera angles, but I was the first one in my first supergroup to know about it!" above -- the problem (again) seems to be that the aggro mechanism has changed. I used to be able to pull minions from the fringe of a group "through" walls all day long without aggroing the main group, but that's changed -- I'm not sure if Residual Ether is a new addition since the "old days" or not. Using camera angles to teleport villiains "through" walls could be (could have been?) seen by the devs as an "exploit."

Thanks for an alternative that works! And while I'm glad jumping to avoid animation times and "rooting" has always been YOUR baseline playstyle, I think a few of us would prefer a power that works as advertised and as it used to -- but as I said above, with the changes to the game over the years I suspect we're in the vast minority. *shrugs as well*

It CAN still be done, but it's a) not anywhere near as easy as it used to be (and yes, "easy" assumes one knows the "rules of engagement" for pulling as I listed above) and b) it's a LOT harder to pull "singles" than it was a long time ago.

In the past, nobody had to jump through hoops like "queue it...and immediately jump back as it goes off (so the animation plays during the jump)."

I'd target something, I'd hit "Taunt" while standing still, and then hit "s" to backpedal AFTER the animation finished and before the target could return fire. I KNOW players in the past have commented on the mob's AI "improvement" on returning fire so much more quickly, but since it impacts the usefulness of Taunt/Confront/etc. I'd like to see it fixed or at least some sort of official "we're working on it" rather than have the issue vanish into the Black Hole of Quality Control -- I don't think we should HAVE to jump through hoops.

And on a related note, I wonder if this might have ANYTHING to do with the improvements to Snipe powers? "Well, we can't fix the aggro issue, so how about we eliminate the animation time? If they're hitting Aim and/or Build Up anyhow...yeah, that's a cheap workaround!"