Kruunch

Unfortunately not really and still maintain the same performance.

Besides the melee defense bonus (which is the key factor in using them) they are also high on recharge, which is important, especially for Burn which is your big mitigator.

*EDIT* - Do some AE farms and with the tickets roll Silver Class L35-39. They cost 555 tickets each and I've gotten a ton of Oblits from these as well as some really high end sellables (Miracle: Heal, LotG: Defense, Numinas: Heal, etc ...).

WP/SS seems to be king of the arenas right now.

Way to twist those words Kali.

I'd guesstimate about 20% actually but that's a total guess.

You can check out rough numbers at MMOGChart.com (these aren't entirely accurate but give gross estimates based on industry and company statements).

Virtually all of them include trial accounts except where MMOGChart.com guesstimates itself.

Their report (on page 16 of their PDF) specifically says "access" not "active subscribers". Access means trial accounts (non-paying), press accounts (non-paying), dev accounts (non-paying), friends of devs accounts (non-paying) and so on. As well as paying subs.

Out of all those that are not paying subscribers I would think trial accounts would make up the largest number by far. Unfortunately NCSoft doesn't list the difference.

However it does list their total income and their income doesn't match the numbers you're holding up as active subscribers (as explained above as well) unless you're going to say that in Q1 2009 they had not sold a single service (besides a sub), not a single box (or D2D), not a single royalty.

While I tend to agree with you that 40%+ difference seems a little high, by the same token, of that 124k access number I'd be willing to bet the number of paying subscribers is actually lower then 100k. How much lower .... shrug. Your guess is as good as mine (well apparently it isn't but ...).

Because Wikipedia is user maintained is *exactly* why it's not reliable. This may come as a shock to you, but you can't always believe everything you read on the internet. Wikipedia is fine for a beginning reference point but any intelligent person who is going to do their homework would tend to want to move a little deeper then what is posted there.

In any event this is all fairly trivial and getting way off topic. CoH isn't changing its overall playstyle in the near future and while I applaud the devs for taking the Fable-like approach to their next expansion and look forward to seeing how it fits in with the current game, historically speaking we're not going to be getting far away from what we have now.

Back on topic .... the agro cap is still a legacy system (as evidenced by today's game play). If not removed altogether it should at least be raised. 34 seems the number people are starting to settle around (for those that aren't cuddling in a corner with their 3 Hellions) ... is that a more acceptable cap limit?

Yep I can't really argue that. Invuln seems to be fine as far as I can tell too, and I agree that swapping the powers position seems a tad "nitpicky" (great word).

Ok that's even worse ... then according to you the current content relies on the players not even *getting* to max level.

But no ... despite Aett's exclamations of "CoH was made to be a different MMO" .... and Sorciere's persian bizarre ideas of what MMO game play (and CoH's for that matter) are and should be, CoH was developed as a classic MMO with a super hero skin. The only truly revolutionary idea they had (past the physics which are awesome) was a "lootless" system, and we've all seen how well that worked out.

The one thing they (the devs) have simply failed to provide in any meaningful way is something for your character to do once it hits max level (no matter how fast or slow you get there).

What apparently you are failing to understand here is that this is not about playstyles, but about revenue. And to your point, *your* apparent playstyle is in the minority based on popular MMOs and their mode of play in what makes for a lucrative MMO. Don't take my word for it ... the most popular (and financially successful MMOs) all follow similar game mechanics.

Also what you fail to realize is that the best MMOs cater to multiple playstyles, not one particular over another.

Not sure where you got this figure from, but let's play around with it. Based on their current stream of advertising (including some of the large name personalities used), the gigantic network and server farms that are used to run WoW, all of the support staff that do everything but program and design ... I'm fairly positive that a very tiny fraction of that $200 million was actually put into hard development time in terms of producing a raid instance.

Heck, Blizzard doesn't even license much of its tools that it used in development ... they were made in house. And their dev team follow a very strict agile development policy.

So no, it didn't cost them millions to produce Blackwing Lair, or Uludar (maybe millions to produce the full expansion ... that I'd agree).

BTW Blizzard's entire company has about 250 employees. Not sure what number of that translates into the programming and design dev teams for WoW but guestimating (and what I know about the business) I'd say around 30-40.

Yes and it's a very big secret. In fact it's been around for over 30 years now and most everyone who has ever played an RPG has discovered it. Shhhhh.

Or more probably ... it's nothing more then a solidly built game on time honored game mechanics and a little creative fun by people who have experience doing it. And they just keep doing what works.

Sigh ... talk about not even putting a thought into what you post.

P.S. - Way to erase that Online Chess example real quick .... lawl.

Ok first, as you've pointed out, there was no WoW when CoH was launched. At the time CoH's primary competition (or aspiration if you will) was EverQuest at around 500k active subs, and yes ... NCSoft and Cryptic both had their eye on achieving those kinds of numbers and probably would have been ecstatic for achieving half those (which they never did, no matter whose numbers you want to believe). As it turns out, CoH has been profitable (as far as I can tell) but not a smashing success (and this ultimately depends on how you determine "smashing" success). Again, stating how long it's been around for is not indicative of its success, but rather it illustrated that it wasn't an outright failure. DAoC has been around for 8 years or so .... do you consider that game more successful then CoH? Gross income wise they're not even close currently.

WoW didn't start out with a lot of advertising. In fact they were so behind the eight ball with due to constantly delaying their release, their bankrupt parent company at the time (Vivendi) practically kicked them out the door. And whle yes, they had a bigger IP then CoH, consider that it was virtually the smallest IP of many other MMOs that were published before and after that have never come close to achieving the success of WoW. Most notably EQ2, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons and Conan. Also, Blizzard's management was quoted as saying they were wishing for half of EQ's success (although I'm pretty sure they hoped to match it) ... as it turns out, they blew that out of the water by a landslide.

Is it some weird trade secret as to how they managed this? Heck no. They very simply copied EQ, smoothed over the most common complaints and rough edges and produced a very playable game based on a time tested mode of persistant play (the Dungeons and Dragons PnP model). The absolute most single area that they excelled in over other MMOs in development was this ... they built their own graphics engine rather than liscensing one, so that performance and development speed would meet their needs (and this was ultimately the cause of their delays). Hey strangely enough, one of the only other MMOs to do this was CoH (gasp) .... except while the graphics engine was done beautifully (from a performance and visual standpoint) the development speed was made a ton worse which ultimately has led to the extremely slow development of CoH (and in fairness, I remember Jack E. back in the day saying that they were hamstrung by NCSoft's QC release processes which I assume are still in effect today).

So yeah Aett ... I think CoH could have competed with WoW's numbers ... at least much more so then what they ended up with. All it took was a basic understanding of persistant world game design ... something they didn't have. Everything else they needed was (and is) in place.

And that lack of agile development is still in action today. Anytime someone brings up just how much of a wasted chance CoH is, someone else always brings up the next update. Well the next update is different colored powers and the next "expansion" (CoH has yet to have a real expansion) is a co-op zone. You really think that's fulfilling meaningful content? If so, you are more easily amused then I am.

Actually there was one challenge thrown out (by Coldmed) and one challenge accepted (by me).

Coldmed has since taken his toys and gone home.

Shrug.

I would say good business practices tend to support my position over yours, but I don't really want to continue the equivocation wars (largely because this is more a state of mind then a literal). I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

However I would refrain from having this discussion with a customer ... might not have em for long

P.S. - The White Castle reference wasn't pointed at you ... just an observation.

Forgetting game titles for a moment (and since none of the titles or scenarios you've mentioned were unique to MMOs but were brought up from past game systems) the essence of a subscription based service is recurring incoming based upon retaining and (hopefully) expanding the customer base. As far as I know this holds true for virtually every subscription based service, whether it be MMOs or your phone service. Can we agree on this?

If so, then one could reasonably conclude that an ongoing service must be established that gives the person a reason to continue to pay, while at the same time offering a service that is attractive to potential new customers. Are we still in agreement?

In this regard I think CoH fails, in that the current content relies upon players being satisfied with achieving maximum level and repeating the process over and over again. While you could argue that every MMO offers this, many other MMOs also offer a substantial way of developing ones character once max level has been achieved. CoH's post max level development is extremely finite and in general not very rewarding (badges). The current MA system having made that even more trivial.

Your analysis of WoW vs CoH in the current market place I think is dead wrong (and where on earth did you get the idea it costs millions for them to produce a raid instance?!). 12 million subscribers wrong in fact (not to mention probably the highest retention rate ratio wise of any MMO to date). And this is what kills me most about CoH ... it could easily compete with WoW. If not exactly WoW's staggering numbers it could surely be garnering more then .0.9% or less of of and sadly with nothing more technologically speaking then they have vested in the game currently.

That is to say, the difference between WoW and CoH isn't production value ... its game direction. One is obviously much more popular then the other.

NCSoft's sales figures don't support these numbers. The descrepency I would think is that Page 16 only refers to access, which would mean trial memberships as well.

You may also want to check out this as a resource for garnering MMO numbers:

http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/...e-game-or-mmo/

Finally here is my post (2 up) that is what lead to my conclusions.

If this were the case then he is tacitly approving the trivialization of the levelling curve that the AE system provides. However I don't think this is the case. The MA system (according to Arcanaville) was a watered down version of a new in-house tool designed to create mission content faster. My guess would be that the rolling out of the MA system was an experiment based on a tool that had already been developed which lead to a fairly easy development release for what they were releasing, while at the same time creating a buzz about a game that has in the MMO community, virtually fallen off the map.

Releasing the MA system rests squarely on his shoulder as should any of the blame for his short sightedness (or purposeful negligence) that are the short comings of the MA system.

That's regardless (and I don't doubt there are many more "quality" player missions then there are farms). While the system is interesting, the drawbacks of it are inherently obvious (trivialization of the level curve). There are easy fixes to this ... cap XP gains per map as they had to cap ticket gains per map (how this wasn't in at first I have no idea). Both actually would need to be capped at much lower then they currently are to bring them back in line with "normal" mission content.

While I agree that not every scenario can be predicted, its gross negligence not to see how the MA system could be abused. I mean without a shred of MMO experience you could see how the abuse might occur. Given a modicum of MMO experience, the current form of the MA is inexcusable.

Finally the whole power levelling, versus farming, versus "normal" game play is an absolutely idiotic distinction. These are labels we (the player base) have put on styles of game play, but they are *all* valid forms of game play within a given MMO. However when balancing the various aspects of an MMO, the developer must always balance to the highest common denominator. Failure to do so (as in the case of CoH) sees portions of the game trivialized which other players will soon come to spite (as evidenced by this thread).

The end result .... the MA system was a horrible implementation and only a lazy stop gap of an idea in terms of adding quality content to an established MMO. I *do* think player created content will be the next step for the next generation of MMOs ... I just don't think this particular version of it was implemented well for the current game of CoH.

The fact that MA farms are so popular shows how poor the rest of the content in the game is. You (the generic population on this thread) may not feel that way, but I have yet to run a waiting list for doing paper missions or Brickstown story arcs. I have a waiting list every night I run an MA farm ... *every* time.

Ok because I'm fairly interested now ... here is NCSoft's second quarter reports (PDF):

http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/prfi...B-ACCD3AC78E6A

On page 5 of the report it lists gross sales revenue broken down per game per quarter of 2009 in million (I believe?) of Korean Won.

According to that, the "spike" in sales occured in Q1 2009 (I12?) and not in Q2 2009 (which would have been when I14 with the MA released).

Total game revenue for Q1 (during the spike) was 6,837 million kwon.

Conversion for KRW (Korean Won) to USD (US Dollars) is by today's exchange rate roughly 1250 KWR to 1 USD.

That gives us a total sales for Q1 2009 of roughly $5.5 million dollars for the quarter or roughly $1.83 gross per month in that quarter. This would roughly translate into 122k subscribers *if* no other forms of income were to be taken into account. In other words, if they had not sold one game box, not one server transfer, not one character respec, not one booster pack, not garnered one royalty they could have possibly around 122k subscribers (as of Q1 which was their spike ... as of Q2 2009 they were down about 4%.

Now I don't know the break down of their game sales, so I couldn't intelligently comment but I'd be willing to bet that it lands under 100k subscribers (and this is at their "spike" I might add). Maybe not quite at the 50k I first thought, I'd be more willing to say around 80k during their spike ... close to maybe 65k I'd say now (yeah total guess but with a little more information to back it up).

Wikipedia and Gamershell.com are your sources ... seriously?

Actually going over NCSoft's quarterlies (http://www.ncsoft.net/global/board/b...?BID=ir_public), it seems to neglect to mention any subscriber numbers for City of Heroes (anywhere I can find) and I've only ever heard CoH's subscribership numbers mentioned once by a dev (*the* dev in fact, Jack E.) and that was at 100k subscribers at release.

Also NCSoft has a bad habit of fudging their subscriber numbers. They routinely had claimed Lineage had held over a million subscribers when in actuality they had bundled a free trial of their game with the most popular ISP in Korea (think AOL of Korea) and counted anyone who signed up to the ISP as a game subscriber. In actuality (as best had been estimated at the time) Lineage never had more then 200k active subscribers at its height.

You were around for CoX ... do you remember server pops being at release populations much less past them? I sure don't.

*EDIT* - Just saw your other post ... my statement still stands (btw you're wong about MMOs not counting their trial subscribers ... even WoW was guilty of that).

There's a reason why you don't see this feature in other MMOs ... and you just answered for yourself why.

And I don't blame the devs. I blame the direction of the management (Positron specifically here).

I understand that it works for you and for some of the other pundits on these boards and generally speaking people who are enjoying themselves don't want their boats rocked.

However I daresay you are not the majority. Can I *prove* any of these numbers I'm bandying about? As I've stated before, no I cant. And neither can you to the contrary. Nor do I feel the need to. This is not a trial and you do not have to be a particularly bright rocket scientist to see where this game has been and where its going. But from simple server pop data mining you can draw your own conclusions (unless you're going to posit that the overwhelming vast majority of subscribers to this game never log in ... ever).

As a commercial entity CoH works ... it supports a small in-house staff and returns a profit to the parent company. Extolling how long its been around is fairly disingenuous however since the market is replete with lesser MMOs who have survived for years. In fact there are free MUDs still in existence today after 15 years of continual service. The only thing that CoH proves by being in existence after 5 years is that it wasn't an out and out bust. Conversely that's a far cry from being a roaring success.

And some people should understand that if the most interesting content available to an MMO are player made farm maps, then the MMO really failed in the content department.

Quid pro quo.

So according to you, reaching L50 is the end of the game?

And you see that as a working model for a subscription based service?

Kali: Server pops and Jack Emerret's posts after release disagree with your numbers. Jack posted at the height of release (approximately six weeks after release or so) when CoH exceeded 100k subscribers, specifically as a refutement that lack of content was going to drive away customers. Since then and including City of Villains, server pops have never exceeded those post-release populations. So whatever the true release figures were, CoX has never exceeded those. If you take away trial accounts, I'd be very willing to bet that my numbers are closer then yours, but short of seeing their bookeeping I can't point to a source to corroborate this.

In any event this is all academic, as no MMO with the exception of WoW and EQ have exceeded post release numbers past a year after their release to my knowledge. If CoX were to flip a light switch on tomorrow and magically have a revamped game that hit on all cylinders, the likelihood is that it would only be enjoyed by those die hard players who have stuck it out. Unfortunately those die hards are becoming less and less as well.

What's left are small resource non-intensive tweaks and development to try and retain what subscriber base CoX currently has; re: the subject of the original post.

I currently level toons 1-50 in 7 hours played.

Yeah that "fix" worked out real well.

Any person with a smidge of MMO experience knows that the main focus of additional content should always be the end game. In 5 years they've added what ... 6 end game TFs ... hero and villain side combined?

I've seen people fired for being more competent then that (in the MMO community no less).

EQ, EQ2, AC, WoW, AO, Vanguard ... all of these MMOs had content that stayed ahead of the main player body ... because they all had developed end games. I can name a dozen more that had equal to or better content then CoH (off the top of my head no less).

Are you seriously comparing CoH's hideously barren content with other MMOs? CoH is one of the biggest offenders of flat line game play. Have you never played another MMO?!

First of all CoH barely broke 100k players at its peak. Try more like 50k active subs now (I'd be willing to bet its less then that in fact).

And the MA is the worst offender of content trivialization to date. Player content? You look at the same ole missions with player made stories as new content?! It's a complete admission that the current team of CoH developers doesn't understand or is not willing to put the time and resources into their game to actually develop "real" quality content. Apparently even rehashing the same old crap is too tough a job for them, so now they can get the paying subscriber in on the act while they reinvent co-op zones ala their second (in FIVE YEARS) expansion.

Again, Ouroboros was installed because the devs couldn't figure out the proper levelling curve for a game that has never raised its level limits a single time in 5 years (and no I don't consider raising the limits from 40-50 after release actually raising them ... that was completion of the last tier of levelling they couldn't seem to fit in with two years of development).

You know what pisses me off the most about CoH ... it isn't a bad core ... in fact its an excellent core when you get right down to it. The graphics and animation and even the cludgy animation-lock style of fighting has driven this game for so long in a niche genre never challenged up until now (Champions Online) and they (NCSoft) are literally about to lose their market share to the first competitor to come along because of the lack of foresight, lack of agile development needed in the MMO world and utter lack of creativity past their initial launch.

And its sadly ironic that they are going to lose it to the original developers of this game who (from everything that I've seen in the CO beta) have finally learned that lesson. And *still* this game founders after all that.

And for all that ... I'm still pulling for this game because it has been, above any other MMO, the game that could. Unfortunately it will end up as the game that never did.

P.S. - This is not directed at you Aett ... just the general state of the game.

Seriously? Levelling was slow pre-ED? Debt??

Just wow ... epic fail.

Think about what you're saying Aett.

Since day one, the levelling curve of this game didn't match the content correct? So instead of fixing the levelling curve, or content, they superceded both by giving a generic pass to everyone.

In other words, at that moment in time (well before actually) that Ouroboros was instituted, the devs in essence, gave up trying to match the levelling curve of this game to its content.

That right there is tacit approval (or admitting defeat ... however you want to look at it) of the devs that short of hacking the game, level at whatever pace you like.

And at 5 years in, the devs shouldn't be worried about levelling paces (except to make them faster if it were applicable) but should be worrying about what to do with all those max level players.

Something they should have been doing at the 1 month mark of the game when skads of people were hitting max level for the first time .... sigh.

P.S. - Badges weren't in at day 1 (can't tell you how much I hated doing Posi over again) and they didn't have badges for Story Arcs until after I6. Kruunch was L40 when Badges came out (had to do the new Sewer Trial over again too grrrr) ... he also had done every TF and most every arc (which only served the purpose then of filling up your souvenirs tab) through to those levels including all the herding and portal farms and so forth. So you didn't quite miss all the content you were talking about ... unless ... gasp ... you were power levelling

*grin*