Father Xmas
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:Which makes me wonder if the writing was on the wall, at least for a massive staff downsizing, one that would significantly slow new issues.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The patch notes should help anyone see why I24 is jokingly referred to as the "fix everything" Issue by the devs. -
People who upgrade their phone before their previous contract is up have either too much money burning a hole in their pockets or have their priorities seriously messed up.
But it is true the mobile gaming, on phones, is on the upswing. Especially in areas where this is a lot of mass transit with long commute times. NCSoft own presentations show 17% growth in that market, however they also still show a 19% growth in online gaming. -
True Mercy but UO and Everquest were the original successful MMOs. They now have sort of an historical significance and closing either of those would truly cause a groundswell of bad press against their current owners.
We on the other hand are a small MMO that got obliterated from the gamer press hive mind by the release of WoW a few months later. Heck even Second Life got more press than we did for a longer period of time. -
Cool, I knew the reverse was true, sort of, being able to sell gems at the market to other players for gold.
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This has been posted last week as well but without the bulk copy/paste.
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Voice of the Lord: The one in the braces, he done it!
Klaus: It's a fair cop, but society's to blame.
Detective: Agreed. We'll be charging them too. -
Quote:I was merely restating the premise to cursedsorcerer, a premise I have a trouble believing.Originally Posted by afocks
Truth. I know the game started depopulating from about a week after the release of MA. Players were saying that they would not renew their sub in the chat channels. MA took players away from the content and depopulated the game as a whole. AE was now de rigueur and reaching lvl 50 in a matter of hours was a sham. Within a week of MA level 50 players were surfacing in the chat channels asking "Where is the Hollows?"Quote:Originally Posted by Father Xmas
... there was a lot of fallout from it.
On top of that - a few weeks later there was an announcement that a raft of badges were to be removed. That is the one that got me; I could handle PLers because their path would never cross mine but, when they decided to take away the badges I had earned I then decided enough was enough so I unsubbed for a few months.
I have been lampooned for my opinion in game channels, this is only my opinion and experience. No need to troll it, just read it, your experience WILL be different. -
Quote:The premise being presented, if you look at the revenue chart at the start of this thread, that the game's revenue went down from $5 million a quarter before Q3 of 2009 to $3 million a quarter after Q4 of 2009. AE came out at the start of Q2 of 2009 and there was a lot of fallout from it.Originally Posted by cursedsorcerer
The way I see it, MA came out in I14, right? And CoH didn't die until slightly less than TEN ISSUES LATER! If MA was responsible, CoH would've been dead much sooner if you ask me.
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Quote:This was more of a commentary on all the threads that were blaming other NCSoft titles or Nexon partial ownership.Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight
This is at least the second thread started to blame AE. Lack of a PvP focus/i13, though, handily beat it, with at least 5 threads I've personally seen (and many more random posts in threads).
I kind of lean that way myself, about CO. However, the argument could be made about a number of plausible causes that led to this, from worldwide economic downturn to a paradigm shift in MMOs revenue sources to our game's rather niche genre when compared to the mass of MMOs on the market. Any or all of the above.Quote:We can largely only speculate, but I'd hazard a guess that Champions Online took a serious hit out of CoH. Even if the people that went to CO didn't stay with CO, they might not have bothered to come back to CoH. Around that period there was (IIRC) a huge number of MMOs being released, so there was lots of territory to explore. It was probably a number of factors that lead to the drop, but I doubt AE was very high up there at all. -
Yes but there's a "new" Black Prophecy coming soon.
http://massively.joystiq.com/tag/Bla...exus-Conflict/
http://nexusconflict.gamigo.com/en/ -
Quote:True but by the time GW revenue dropped below ours, GW had cumulatively earned $30 million more than us, which they burned through half of from then till now so cumulatively they are still up $15 million but now have a new game that's sold 2 million copies so far.Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight
For comparison, the original Guild Wars (which isn't sub based, and hadn't seen a new campaign/expansion since 2007) was generating about 1/2 the revenue of CoH during that same period of time.
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We've come to this now, turning on the game as the cause.
Yes in 2009 there was a sudden drop in revenue during the later half of that year. Yes MA came out in 2009. So did official Mac support rather than Bootcamp. So did the first round of power customization. So did Aion and Champions Online.
I really would like to believe that players weren't so petty that they left because they didn't like others PLing with reckless abandon or because of the devs repeated attempts to halt the PLing with reckless abandon. Or that the repeated attempts to fix things broke legitimate stories time and again because cleverer players kept finding ways to abuse what was believed to be safe.
Or is your premise that the influx of AE babies consumed new players so quickly they quickly grew tired with the game so they were gone within the first few months than hang around and let the game grow on them? Or that the barrage of AE spam drove existing players away? Or maybe all of the above.
I personally never got into AE at all. I wrote terrible dungeons in college, I'm a big believer in what's commonly known as Sturgeon's Law and I knew trying to find good stories to play would be nearly impossible. So I ignored it. Turned off broadcast, hid from general search and always started in Galaxy.
And when Posi went nuclear the forums erupted with the usual arguments about exploits (how should I have know?), PLing (they said you could level up with just AE missions) and the pros and cons about farming. But it was just a rehash by the usual suspects from either side of the issues.
But still it was a permanent 40% dip in revenue. That's a lot of POed players, way more than what I would expect from those ticked off over an optional system like AE. -
But how much of the fact The Secret War is "bombing" is due to the fact players don't want to try new things either.
Look at the threads discussing other MMOs. Look at the reasons people find to reject each and every one of them because they aren't enough like CoH? From my understanding it plays very differently from other MMOs. No fix classes, no obvious levels, one mission at a time instead of a choice, missions that aren't always "kill everything you see". It's a two way street.
Players want the familiar and game companies are only too willing to comply. -
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Actually there isn't a breakdown in costs on a per game basis. However employing 80 "professionals" full time, in the SF bay area, when you are only making $10-12 million a year, profits couldn't be much.
Edit: Damn, ninja'd. -
Quote:Tom's Hardware looked at the hardware requirements, testing various cards at a variety of game settings.Originally Posted by OmniNogard
Just great, had a whole post made up and the forums decide "NOPE" and i lost it all.
Basic Summery of post.
Game is good, liked the underwater fighting, only got to lv4 before i got hungry.
Need new PC (Thinking a Alienware X51), game atm runs form 1FPS to 9FPS(if I'm lucky). Current PC is a pile of junk that's not meant for gaming.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...mark,3268.html -
Well I picked the team where the Yankees are their arch nemesis.
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Quote:EVE has RMT re PLEX. Sony tried it in some of their games. It's when it becomes pay to win that it's dangerous to the social stability of the game.Originally Posted by Steele_Magnolia
So their dirty secret is out... they were RMTing themselves.
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I respectively disagree with his assertion that our closure would hurt NCSoft in either the short or long term. We are a very small segment of even the NA MMO gamer population. The vow to never buy another NCSoft title is hardly a monolithic stance among us. Most MMO gamers realize that MMOs close, although true not as many that have been around for as long as CoH. While our organized efforts have been well publicized by MMO news sites, the shear amount of daily news quickly scrolls us off the front page. Same is true with the majority of celebrity re-tweets and posts on their websites.
It's not like NCSoft is powering their games with the hearts of dead orphans. There isn't some big social concern that would rally non-players of our game to our cause and join an NCSoft boycott. And when Blade & Soul and WildStar finally comes to the US, several thousand gamers, most who wouldn't be interested in those games for one reason or other, vowing not to buy it won't even register. It's the inverse of the pirating argument where publishers believe that every pirated equals a lost sale. Vowing to never buy from someone when they don't have anything you wanted anyways isn't a threat. And not buying into a wildly popular new game from them such as GW3 impacts the revenue that game is generating insignificantly enough to not be noticed.
The problem is since we've lasted as long as we have, we believed that this game would be treated like Ultima Online or Everquest as one of the grand old, historically significant games that are limping along with a loyal player base. Yes we feel betrayed. Yes we are grieving at the loss of a world we routinely escape to but in the grand scheme of things we can barely make a ripple in the ocean of available revenue that all MMOs are fighting over. We can hope some benefactor will come forward and takeover from NCSoft and reconstitute at least part of the Paragon Studio team. But if you think our sudden closure or our vow to never spend money on another NCSoft game would actually harm them in someway, is wishful thinking at best, delusional at worst. -
Quote:fixedOriginally Posted by Xzero45
In your opinion, I'm a Red Sox fan.
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I assume they own
All costumes
All character models
All missions
All zones
All animations
All power sets
While the engine from Cryptic is merely the framework the game is built on, all content built with or on top of that framework is NCSoft's. -
Oh GOD! It's gratuitous fan service like that gives all anime a bad name.
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Quote:Not proven, only speculated. Pre-Freedom, based on revenue you could estimate 60-80 thousand subscriptions. After Freedom revenue numbers stayed relatively flat. Sure it's possible that we had 20-40 thousand new Premium players who paid next to nothing but that doesn't help the top or bottom line.Originally Posted by Comicsluvr
At the time of 'The Announcement' CoX had about 100,000 players.
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Well it's possible that since they didn't think it was worth keeping around, why would any right thinking company want to own it? You have to think something has value before you think someone else would be interested in buying it.
Of course then you have to factor in the player database. Companies tend to jealously guard their customer lists. Why would they want a competitor to have those names? -
Quote:Stores stock what they can sell. The vast majority of shopper aren't going to spend the money on a gaming PC so stores simply don't stock them. Also the technology moves to fast, new models of PCs from companies like HP come every 4-6 months, stores do not want to be stuck with "old" inventory. BestBuy does carry gaming PCs in their online store and I believe they will ship it to a BB near you but that's as close as you'll come to seeing one in a box store. Sadly it looks like the start of college has caused them to be nearly sold out of all their gaming PCs on line which are nothing more than prebuilt gaming PCs from iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC.Originally Posted by Larcen3
So, I've decided I want a new computer....and while I usually build my own I haven't done that for a few computers now.
My requirements are pretty straight forward
At least an intel i5.
At least an Nvidia 670
At least 8-10 GB of RAM
I've hit the big box retailer in the area (best buy) and a smaller shop (micro center) and it seems like no one is selling big pc's at the brick and mortar store. Most try to scrimp and put an nvidia 640 in the case, which is a good video card, but its not a 'true' gaming card.
Has buying a gaming pc always been this hard to find at retail?
Also, is the 640 comparable to the 670?
Is this a first world problem or what?
Even upgrading a store bought PC that may have the CPU and amount of memory you desired with better graphics can be daunting. First nearly all in store PCs are built in small microATX cases (I guess so they can pack more in each cargo container) and have low end, low wattage power supplies that can do the job with what's installed but don't have the power to spare for anything more that the most low end video card.
So first you need to upgrade the power supply to something beefier. This can be a problem because most beefy power supplies are a bit "longer" than the ATX standard and because of the size of the case used, can be a problem. And since off the shelf power supplies are designed to fit into taller cases as well, their cables are longer than they need to be and bundling the excess out of the way in such a small case can be annoying.
Then there is the graphics card itself. Again this goes back to space available inside the case. You really have to crack the box open and get an understanding of how much space you have available before looking for a card. The more powerful the video card, the longer it tends to be and the cramp conditions inside the HPs, Lenovo, Gateways you find in stores may not allow for the card you want.
So you either have to hit the yellowpages (like people use phonebooks anymore) to see if any of the mom and pop PC stores in your area do custom builds or buy a pre-built iBuyPower or CyberPowerPC from NewEgg or go to those sites directly and buy/design/tweak one.
And as for your 640/670 question, no they aren't comparable. The GTX 670 is over 4x faster than the GT 640. The GTX 670 card itself costs around 4x as much as the GT 640 and can use over 100 more watts of power.