I Burnt The Toast

Originally Posted by Rakeeb

Dug, upon what information are you basing this assertation that NCSoft is about to go bankrupt?

You'll excuse my disbelief.

Originally Posted by Vel_Overload

I can feel for the OP and for a different reason: I'm a VIP player.. yes I don't get full access to the game. I have to pay stupid 'points' to unlock powersets that any other game would give me since I was VIP. I've already cancelled my sub. I already give this company the standard fee of $15 dollars which is no more than any other subscirption based game..

..yet they are still trying to sucker me into buying 'points' to unlock stuff that I should have immediate access to the moment it goes live. WoW doesn't even do this! And those guys are evil! EEEEVVVVAAAALLL. I dunno. I understand this game is technically 'dead' since it no longer rakes in enough cash from subscriptions and no, don't argue the technicalities and meanings of the word 'dead'. Because this game is certainly not vibrate anymore if that makes you feel better. The moment a game goes F2P or in this case P2Win, the game might as well be labelled dead. I hope City of Heroes 2 isn't going this route whenever they announce it's in the works.

Originally Posted by Prof_Radburn

Never been able to snag one of these so no longer bother

Originally Posted by Matthew_Orlock

I tried, but someone was much faster at typing these out then myself, even using the copy and paste method..and how someone was able to type out those codes so fast form the image? Crazyness!

Originally Posted by TwilightPhoenix

In other words, you're either trolling me or being dense. I never said my decision to return hinges on IO access, though IOs are important to my enjoyment of the game and just the one thing that is brought up the most in this topic. If anything, performance is a far bigger concern as, historically, the Mac client has performed like crap and got a lot worse when Going Rogue hit, regardless of whatever I set my graphics settings to. I've literally had 7 FPS with minimum graphic settings, even though my computer meets or exceeds recommended specs. You can give me a ten year subscription and everything the store ever releases to me for free and I won't touch this game if it continues to run like crap for no good reason.

Since it runs native rather than being emulated, I'm hoping the Windows client performs far better and I'm installing it right now to give this another go. Thank you install disks for saving me from having to download 3 gigabytes plus patches.





So, in other words, you didn't read my post and assumed I wanted the VIP experience without paying for it?

Originally Posted by TwilightPhoenix

*facepalms* Not only second what Texas posted, but I also repeatedly said being to downgrade to SOs and having to spend a hour or more per character to make new builds for SOs is totally unfun. Unplayable may have been too strong a word choice, I'll be honest, but the process of downgrading and playing downgraded is horribly unfun and doesn't encourage me to want to play more, free or not. Additionally, I've yet to say anywhere that I want everything a subscriber has without paying. I'm trying to decide if I want to pay for this game again, either as a Premium or a VIP, and am getting annoyed that the game seems to be doing everything it can to sour my experience and discourage me. Not get everything for free.

I doubt it'll help, but I think I'll go edit that in to my original post in big, bold letters. Why do people assume that someone wants everything handed to them for free when they have any sort of issue related to the current payment model?

Originally Posted by TwilightPhoenix

Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting everything to be free. Not even close, they have to make money somehow after all. What I do miss is the awesome generosity they had back in the day. Been away from the game for awhile? Have a friend invite you and get some free time as a welcome back gift. Not sure about the game? Here, have a trial for a few days that lets you experience the whole game for it's short duration (said trial got nerfed like crazy, which was annoying, but I was a subscriber by then so it didn't directly affect me, just made introducing the game to friends a PITA). AFAIK, that kind of thing is gone. There's no VIP trials, no extra welcome back time, none of that. It feels like if they're already getting your money, they love you. If they're not, they don't care about you even if you've been a paying customer in the past. Or if you prefer, gone from "Hey, we made your game more awesome, please come back and join us!" to "Hey, we made your game more awesome, but if you don't give us money we're going to make it suck for you." Or if you prefer, they've switched from the carrot to the stick. It doesn't really encourage me to sink $15 or even $5 just to see if I still like the game when there's so many sticks smacking me when I log in.

Lots of ways they could easily alleviate that. The invite-back thing they used to have, letting existing characters from previous subscribers keep what they have if no longer eligible, just can't get more (maybe disabling Incarnate powers, no real opinion since I'm only losing a couple of alpha slots so I really don't know what I'm missing), allow accounts that have existed/been unsubbed for so long be allowed to activate a (maybe one-time) "free VIP trial" that lets them check out VIP benefits for a few days, stuff like that. I work retail, that kind of stuff works. You'd be surprised how much extra someone will spend for a single carrot and how much more likely they are to just dump their cart and walk out of the store when there's too many sticks. For example, a brand of flavored water wasn't selling at all. We gave free samples and now we have trouble keeping stocked, months later.

But yeah, I'm not expecting to get everything free, despite how awesome it is with Aion (though the only thing I haven't spent anything in their cash shop is because they haven't put anything for sale that interests me).

Anyway, I did read some of that diary topic and his experience is... a lot different than mine. But that's probably because he's Tier 9 and has almost no restrictions. I'm Tier 4 with 9 tokens, so I'm a long way off from having permanent access to Controllers, Masterminds, and IOs, along with other things. But I do have AH access. What I'm supposed to do with it when I'm not eligible for salvage or recipe drops, I don't know. At least my influence isn't capped so my wealthier toons aren't stuck having more inf than they can carry. And also, I have EAT access too. No clue why since I didn't buy it and I haven't VIP subbed, but my Peacebringer is perfectly log-inable.

For the higher level characters with IO builds, I know, making SO builds was one of the first things I grudgingly did a year or so ago when I first tried Freedom. And spending a hour+ per toon making a new build and buying SOs isn't the best "Welcome back!" experience. And then having them perform as only a pale shadow of their former glory is not fun. At all. If you want to see what I mean and you have a spare build on an IOed alt, just log em in, make a second build, unslot your incarnate powers, and just feel how horribly weak it'll seem in comparison. It's not fun. That and I think I screwed something up on my Scrapper and Defender when doing the SO build because they perform like crap with them. And I'm out of respecs to fix it and my Scrapper already used up the trial respecs tweaking his too often since he was my first alt for me to experiment with IOs on. And I can't craft the respec recipe. Yay?

But anyway, I took a more serious shot in-game. Maybe it's just Tuesday, but my server, Protector, was weirdly silent. Either nobody was on or they all went to new global channels. Sure, it's not the biggest server, but the global channels were usually chatty during evenings. So, having no idea which contacts in the contact finder gave old, sucky missions and which ones gave the new content, I went and ran a Mayhem mission since those always amused me. Yeah, paper missions were blah, but I fully expected that going in and I'm not really judging the game on those. And they at least amused me by putting four of the missions back and forth across the street rather than opposite corners of the map. Blowing up everything was still amusing, though PPD Ghosts are still broken (-45% stackable tohit debuff on a minion-level mob at level 30... seriously?).

And I also realized I need to just suck it up and ditch the crappy Mac client and just install CoX on my Windows partition if I'm going to play again. The jittering frame-rate is a serious PITA (40 FPS! Now 7! Now 40! Now 7!) and, as always, adjusting my settings didn't help. Also, the memory leak is still there. Anyone know which files contain all the settings, or at least the ones I've set to default, such as key binds, window settings, and all that? I know where my costumes are stored, but not the other stuff.

Oh, and Tymer, Freemium is still F2P. It's just one of several variants of it.

Edit: Are options.txt and wdw.txt the settings files I'm looking for? Poking around trying to see if I can find it in the mean time. Not sure if there are others.

Originally Posted by Tymers_Realm

OP, You're not gonna like what I have to say, but here it is:

City of Heroes is not a F2P game. Yes, there is free access and limited functionality. The game is Subscription Focused. In other words, it is a Subscription-Hybrid. That has been the Dev's intention from the first announcements of CoH:Freedom.

You Sub, you get access to all Story Content and a good number of Costumes and Powersets. You don't Sub, you can pay, a la carte, for what you want to use and get more functionality unlocked as you progress through the Rewards System. This awards those who had subbed for extensive periods and those now who wish to throw gobbs of cash to Paragon/NCSoft.

That doesn't mean VIPs get everything either. There's still Costumes and Powers/Powersets VIPs also have to pay for. But that was true (at least Costume-wise...) in the pre-Freedom days.

Does it suck that premiums have to use the web site for assistance? Yes. Then again that is all apart of the design, gate enough services/content to get someone to pony up the $15/Month.

Right now, I'm a T9 VIP. If I had to drop to Premium, I'd lose the following (and then have to pay for):
First Ward & Night Ward Story Content
Leather & Chainmail Armors at least (I think there a couple more, not sure...)
Dark Control/Assault & Time Manipulation Powersets
EATs
Incarnate Content (not that I have any 50s anyway...)
550 Paragon Points/Month
SSA 1.1-1.7 & 2.1 (and that would get longer with each added installment)
SG Rent payment (Considering I have Red Star and/or Payment privileges on a half-dozen or more SGs, that's a big hindrance...)
New T9 VIP items when they become available
Access to about 2/3 of the overall characters I have (I'd have the 2 + 20-25 Global Tokens, I think)

That's a lot, to me, and I feel enough of an incentive to keep Subbed.

As I said above, This may not of been what you wanted to hear, but the Dev's approach, I think, is respectful enough to long-term players and incentive enough to new players to keep subbing.

Thank you for the time...

Originally Posted by Hendrake

My thought was basically:

Awesome! This is more or less my standard object selection! Except for all those stairs, and the books.. and those three tech pillars, and what about those big electron thingies and how many barrels?

Okay, maybe this isn't exactly my first choice of objects

Originally Posted by Madame Pistacio

All but one contestant have picked up their bases! I am so excited to see what you guys will do!

So without any spoilers... who was surprised at what was in their "Disaster" Base?

Originally Posted by Quinch

There's a difference between code and game assets.

Let me try to simplify - let's say that there's a bit of code that tells the game, "go fetch me that wheelbarrow from the third shack on the right", and the game will go do that. Now, let's say that we take the bright green wheelbarrow that is there, and replace it with a red one. The code won't care - it'll go "okay, here's a wheelbarrow, imma go fetch it". The exact properties of the wheelbarrow - color, size, wheel squeakiness and so on - don't matter, as long as the wheelbarrow itself is there. Of course, if you change the wheelbarrow into something silly, like a color or a temperature, the code will just go "what the heck, I can't pick this up!" and throw an error, but as long as the object itself is there, the code will blindly go and use it, regardless whether it's told to get something something as simple as a floor tile, or something as complex as a redesigned NPC.

Originally Posted by Ultimus

Yes I have to brag a little but I just lead a late night Keyes trial... and at the end "Badge Earned" appears... well I got the avoids the green stuff badge. We weren't even trying So happy!