Forbin_Project

Originally Posted by DSorrow

Salvage is dirt cheap compared to recipes so I don't know why anyone would go through the trouble to actually store any of it for longer periods of time.

Originally Posted by Cambios

Forbin, that was some impressive net stalking there.

Originally Posted by Ironblade

Actually, there is neither a population problem, nor too many servers.
I guess you are just too easily amazed.

Originally Posted by SwellGuy

I think this is true however it is possible that they may be willing to spend $10 per month and unwilling to spend $15 per month. It doesn't make sense to me but I can imagine it is possible.

It's not dissimilar from why I do an annual subscription to save myself about $50 a year in the subscription.

Originally Posted by Schismatrix

Ack! You're right! Mea culpa. Still, i somehow doubt people who were on the verge of quitting RIGHT NAO stuck it out for another six months waiting for the surprise announcement of free server transfers*.

Unless they're like several people in the forums who announce that they've canceled their subscriptions every time a new issue is about to come out because it didn't contain everything they wanted, and yet are still complaining on the forums the next month and every month after.


*Time travelers might do that, but then they're only messing with us because they already know that they're going to be staying anyway. Time travelers can be such jerks.

Originally Posted by JakHammer

TANSTAAFL.

I would like to see NCSOFT try a bit of programmed marketing, if I recall the phrase correctly. Various promos aimed at new players at various subscription levels to see if the player base would expand dramatically at some possibly lower monthly fee.

Example: If the player base would double at $10.00 per month the increased cash flow might be a very good thing. If such a thing happened the new fee structure could then be expanded to the all players, and everyone would be happy. Or not.

Jak

Originally Posted by Stormfront_NA

Mmm...

Folks leaving? I have not really noticed a mass exodus of players at Champions. There may a perception of emptiness, but its only an illusion and not a reality.

Originally Posted by Shred_Monkey

I think about 18 months ago a lot of people were close to quitting due to the sense that the game was dieing.

Originally Posted by Cambios

No, I'm not a doom and gloomer. I just resubscribed a week ago after 3 years away from the game. I'm not a hater. I'm giving CoX another shot after a long break.
I play on Triumph, and holy moly is it dead. I can go hours without seeing a single person. It is so much less than what I remember from a few years ago that it is shocking.
The point is, the game clearly doesn't have the population it once had. NCSoft kinda admitted that a few years ago when they stopped disclosing CoX's subscriber numbers in their quarterly statements. But so what - if the game is fun, that doesn't matter.
The part that DOES matter though, is when they keep the same number of servers, but don't give people a free way to do some transferring. Because there are a few servers that are super dead, and only 2 or 3 that are high activity most of the day/night.
My point is that a subscription is ultimately a lot better to have than a couple server transfers. Losing customers who get bored on low pop. servers can lose you a lot more money.
One final note: the red/yellow/green dots are all relative. They aren't raw numbers, so you really can't conclude anything from that.

Originally Posted by Cambios

They lose a heck of a lot more money when people just unsubscribe because their server is dead.

The fact that they haven't merged servers, or simply made server transfers something like 5 free per month, amazes me.

CoX has a severe population problem and too many servers. They don't want to merge because it looks bad and they know people will crap if they lose their character name.

The only logical and fair workaround is free server transfers on a somewhat regular basis.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I don't even know why I have to do it.


Actually, I kinda know, but am not currently employed by NCSoft.


Which is why, out of respect for them I make sure any rumor I invent about their departure is suitably epic.


For example, I heard the other day that this whole thing is Castle's fault. One day Castle decided to redesign Fireball so that every time someone used it, the game servers deposited a penny into his retirement account (ever wondered why fireball has such a short cast time? now you know). Castle figured in a few years he could have retired sitting pretty. But then datamining showed that blasters were dying too quickly and not using fireball enough. The ones that were not dying had such high defiance buffs that they were one-shotting everything and not using fireball enough. So he reduced the damage buff of defiance, and made blasters partially mez-immune. This helped greatly, but then blasters starting doing so well that blasters were using hundreds of thousands of fireballs. Pretty soon NCSoft didn't even have enough money to pay BaB and had to let him go, much to his surprise. At that point Castle knew the game was up and by year's end the auditors would catch up with him. Knowing that his finances were being monitored he transferred his ill-gotten gains to an offshore account under the name of an accomplice. Castle would then leave Paragon Studios and his accomplice, citing new opportunities out of state, would leave California and meet up with him in Aruba a few weeks later where they would split all that perk pack money.

And that, people, is why blasters were buffed.

Originally Posted by Shadow State

And I recall one of the devs saying that doing the swing motion would be non-trivial but relatively simple. The hard part would be overhauling every map in the game to include anchor points, and the stupid looking would have been doing it with out anchor points. But then I may be remembering a different time that the devs talked about Grappling travel powers.

Originally Posted by Shadow State

It would take a lot of work or look stupid, not and. And I don't recall them ruling it out as a non starter, just stating that it would be very hard to prioritize due to the above logic.

Originally Posted by Angelxman81

I know is hard to apply a serial code by mistake but, both got the same name and I want to keep just the account I really use.
If I have the option.

Originally Posted by Angelxman81

I got my normal account and a trial account, that already expired.
But both accounts got the same name, so I want to delete the trial because I dont want the chance to apply a code (boosters) by mistake.
Is that possible?

Originally Posted by Nodnal

It's simple supply and demand. Before the auction merge, the player economy was limited to the individual server.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I was sort of giving you the benefit of the doubt that you believed the assumption was both cynical and reasonable. Because if not:

Then you've just said that there is no possible way for something to happen, and anyone that thinks otherwise is being ludicrous, based on an assumption you admit is not explicitly reasonable.

Originally Posted by Shatterjack

Then you were making baseless accusations. At best.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Why is that a reasonable assumption? If the objection is that Vulcan is relatively insular and isolationist, then no percentage is necessarily reasonable. To take it to an extreme, if I were to say that millions of Vulcans were cannibals, based on the assumption that only one tenth of one percent of them eat other Vulcans, its clear the percentage is meaningless. There's no basis for assuming that percentage without evidence. Similarly, without evidence, there's no reason to assume some percentage of Vulcans must be off-world.

Originally Posted by Shatterjack

...doesn't exist. Period. Skepticism is justified, insinuating that I am a liar is not.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

We don't actually know that. Its plausible to suspect that the proto-Romulans that left Vulcan took basically most or all of the exploratory types with them, leaving behind a much more insular society. And we know Vulcans are not as diverse or as evoutionarily progressive as humans are: in Enterprise its revealed that Vulcans are actually afraid of humans, primarily because they are amazed that humanity was able to recover from a global nuclear war that destroyed their civilization in less than a century, something that took Vulcans over a millenium to accomplish. Vulcans are smart, but they were only a few decades ahead of humanity at the time of Enterprise after having more than a thousand year head start. They are not progressive people.

In many ways, Vulcans are analogs for historical Chinese. At one time China had huge exploration fleets and the best science and technology in the world. But it was Europeans who colonized much of the world, and when they did they didn't find very much in the way of Chinese outposts in their way. China withdrew, much as Vulcan could have.

10,000 does seem low given that Starships would still be out there, but if all Vulcan ships were primarily science vessels, its possible that such ships only contained crews of a hundred or so each, not a thousand like a ship comparable to Enterprise.

Originally Posted by BafflingBeerMan

What evidence do we have that the Vulcan population was spread out in any significant way though?

Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake

go easy on him, Mrs Swanson was really tough for a 16 year old to deal with.

Originally Posted by BafflingBeerMan

They are the closest people to the distress signal that could feasibly help. Doesn't mean that the Vulsmiths on Alpha Centauri XII hears the distress signal from home and don't rush back home. The Vulcans rely on Starfleet, their resources diverted elsewhere, but that doesn't mean those resources aren't near, just that they probably can't help in a significant way in a crisis.

Since the Vulcans aren't as warlike as the Romulans, for example, it is feasible that many of their ships are exploratory in nature or scientific and, while they wouldn't be useful in an attack scenario, would still rush to Vulcan to help and be caught in crossfire. They could have come first (don't you think Vulcans would first lean on their own people to help?), been ineffective and then called Starfleet. Even if that all happened in a span of a few minutes.

Also, remember what Alt-Spock said at the end of the movie: he had already found another planet to help relocate the survivors. This means there aren't many, if any, Vulcan outposts out there. They had to start completely from scratch. So it seems to stand for reason that if any significant number of Vulcans were living off-planet, they were in starships that could easily have reached Vulcan (not to necessarily to help, but to simply return home in a crisis) and been destroyed.