Nethergoat

true story!

channel surfing last night after the show the wife happened across the South Park episode about that one big fantasy MMO, which led to the following scene:


Cartman: (long stream of gamer gibberish)

wife, suspiciously: Do you know what that means?

me: Uh............yes?

wife: *throws pillow*

not seeing it.

the only ones I EVER use are Ninja Run (which does nothing you can't duplicate with a 'free' power choice) and the Mutant one. When I team I get the occasional Mystic Fortune cast on me. Oh wait, I've used Self Destruct a couple of times to get back to my contact fast in Mercy.

Given the general environment of MASSIVE OVERKILL the game allows in terms of player power levels the sorts of piddly little effects included in boosters barely register.

haw! excellent.

we need to get a bunch of our 'market theme' characters together at Wents for a family snapshot.


Missed my monday money dump- was out of town celebrating 11 years of wedded bliss. Will make up for lost time TONIGHT!

qft

I keep saying this in these kinds of threads and it keeps getting ignored, but over a six year lifespan not raising the sub fee IS "increased value".

I'm not interested enough to do a detailed survey, but I'll wager there aren't that many entertainment services that haven't hiked prices in the last six years.

$14.95 in 2004 dollars carried more purchasing power than $14.95 today.
The fact that we've ALSO been getting 'increased value' via big changes arriving with the 'free' issues is pretty amazing, and IMHO should earn the devs some credit with any reasonable gamer.

Boosters are a way for them to increase income without increasing sub fees. Players that want to 'opt in' can do so, everyone else can just ignore it. I really don't understand all the complaining.

I did sell a couple of holds, but the others got deleted.

can't say I didn't try!

they added quite a few capes at some point I seem to recall, although maybe that was just CoV. I don't remember having any of the ones with transparancies when they were first introduced.

I'm working on field crafter and you end up with A WHOLE LOT of IOs that you need to move fast or delete before they drown you.

The money doesn't matter to me, so I'm happy to dump the 'crummy' ones on anyone who'll take them off my hands as a public service. I'd rather have somebody use 'em than just chuck em on the fire.

Untrue.

I watch stuff for a good long while before I start flipping it.

You have to know the price ranges fairly well to maximize acquisition and turnover so you can redline your profits.

having spent far too much time in the bloody trenches of that particular conflict, let me say you are dramatically understating the mania and fervor of the anti-merger RP fanatics.

WoW operates by its own rules.
If this game had that playerbase and those resources, a total makover becomes feasible. There's no perception problem because they can afford big boy marketing, with ads on the teevee and whatnot telling people what it's all about. They're not limited to banner ads on gaming sites and trailers on Youtube.

For them, it's a brilliant idea- they're creating WoW II without putting out a competing product, and it works for them because of the scale they operate on.

Our little game with its double-handful of devs and 100k or so players?
The resources simply don't exist.

If they wanted to do it and had the resources to do it they wouldn't need an excuse- marketing is like RP, anyone can justify anything. =P


You know what gamers see on store shelves, and at the top of the NC Store page?

Going Rogue: Complete Collection.

So worries about 'rusty old' content are vastly overblown.
New players aren't checking out the CoH/V that's been around forever, they're checking out the New Shiny, which includes the 'old game', or at the very least presents the 'old game' as a $20 expansion.

They're level 20 when they bail on Praetoria, which is well past the worst of the blue side content.



I'm going to guess because it takes a lot more work and thus is more expensive.

I've already explained why a few times.

*shrug*

This is the key point, I think.

The OMG @#$*% BOOSTERS crowd is motivated by a few confused beliefs- that there was a golden age when free costume additions flowed like the mighty Columbia river (there wasn't) and that booster content would exist without the revenue stream it generates (it wouldn't).

So it boils down to a typical entitlement whine, no different from folk who want purples to be available from vendors for a handful of inf. "I want the shiny for free!"

yeah the Big Dump was great fun, as was watching the anarchy over the next few days. =D

ORLY?


I mean, you might be able to sneak that nonsense past someone who hasn't read your posts in this thread, but unfortunately for you I have.


well except that it's your stated reason for quitting.

You're doing worse than making no sense here, you're flatly contradicting your own posts in the thread.

Enjoy your (short?) stay on my ignore list, and good luck finding the magic game that gives you unlimited content (as defined by you) for free!

Nice to let us know the extent of your failure up front- TY!

So?

I'm not sure what the complaint is, other than "I want this stuff without having to pay for it!", which is, I realize, one of the founding pillars of the Internet. That doesn't make it any more valid as an argument, though.

As it is the reality of the game and the reality of the MMO genre generally, yeah, good for us embracing the universe as it is and not as we wish it to be.

This one has never stopped releasing new content and you're still dropping your sub. So, yeah. I'm not sure any dev team would want to use your fickleness as their guiding light in the storm of the current market.

Hey look, another proof of Campers Dictum!


Alas, you saved it until 3/4ths of the way through the post and now I'm committed. =(

As there probably isn't a single player here that would stay subscribed "no matter what the dev team did" your use of the term is less apt than most other applications- gratz on finding a new bottom!

You keep rambling on about a non-existant "decrease in content".
By this do you mean some premium costume bits ending up in boosters?
Because other than that free issues over the past year or so have been bursting with content.


when you act like an idiot people stop wanting to hang around you.

good luck finding your dream game out there, I have a feeling it's going to be a long haul.

They're an MM so they can't really suck.

=P

I guess it boils down to whether you prefer creating (being given a blank sheet to fill in) or editing (revising an existing work). The devs seem to lean toward 'creating'.

Hey, I spend a lot of time in DA. =P

But on topic, hazard zones are a design dead end and they could all certainly use a revamp. Even their utility for farmers has vanished with the advent of MA and user variable team sizing. Would I like to see them 'brought into the fold' so to speak with content additions? Sure! Faultline was a grand success.

I'm all for adding a mission structure to empty spaces like hazard zones.

It doesn't seem to be as simple as we think or they'd have done it already.

Now this is just silly.
Revising a 6 year old game to meet the standards of an expansion released in 2010 would be a MASSIVE undertaking, and largely wasted in terms of curb appeal for new players. A new expansion is something gamers intrinsically understand. "Hey, we re-did all these old zones!" isn't as appealing, plus it carries the stink of implied failure ("yeah sure we made people pay for all that old junk, but it's pretty crummy and this new version is really great, this time we promise!")

Taco Bell is always repackaging their 3 crummy ingredients in different ways (gordita! mexican pizza! chalupa! nacho taco!). Why don't they spend that energy on improving their older offerings?

For the same reason MMOs prioritize releasing new material over revising old- its simpler and more promotable.


Again, you're concretizing something that is essentially fluid.
There is no "core" of the game, there is a constantly shifting locus of population that defines the "core" as whatever we're all choosing to do right now.

There is no inherently superior value in 'old zone' content compared to 'new zone' content. And 'new zone' content has several advantages over 'old zone' content from a developer (and new player) perspective. Players ignore what they ignore for good reason, and they play what they play for good reason- as long as they're playing and enjoying SOMEthing in the game, it is a success.

35-39 is by far the 'best' pool for rolling MA tickets, having a greater proportion of 'good' to 'junk' than any of the others.

I would assume the same was true for merits, although my only roll so far netted me a handful of recipes that make yours look lucrative. =P

hawr!

Well, I did say I wasn't in agreement.
I'm just pointing out that from a certain perspective it makes sense.

And from a creative standpoint, I would *always* prefer to come up with something new as opposed to revising something that already exists. As a player I may not like the emphasis on 'teh new shiny' but if I were a dev I would absolutely prefer it.

So this is why Atlas Park is a garbage-strewn wasteland?

Sorry, not buying that one.

Players congregate where the action is, so yes to some extent they'll follow The New. Eventually that wears off, or some other New comes along and supplants it. I've been here long enough to remember each successive wave of OMG Everyone is doing _______, ________ is dead! panics.
None of them last.

The thing is the game isn't a fixed point, it is evolving.
If the game were a character we could think of each new issue as a power choice. When it's new and shiny you use the heck out of it to figure out how best to use it, see if it's 'good' or 'bad', mess around with slotting, and generally sort of obsess over it. Then it finds a place in your overall build (or not) and becomes part of the landscape.

New areas to inhabit aren't an eternally expanding diaspora, thinning the population of the game out to a few atoms per cubic mile. "The Playerbase" (as far as it is useful to refer to it as a monolithic block) tends to travel en masse. So OMG EVERYONE is doing MA!, or OMG EVERYONE is running the ITF! or OMG EVERYONE is a Winterbaby! etc etc etc.

There is no damaging dispersal of players because the majority tend to be doing whatever everyone else is doing.


O
GR has brought in more new players than anything since CoV and they opened up Praetoria for the reactivation weekend for people to check out.

They could have burned up all the resources used on GR to re-make three or four zones in Paragon City and it wouldn't have drawn much of a response beyond the ecstatic transport of a bunch of longtime players. There is marketing value in NEW. It may not seem fair or right, but reality is what it is.

If they can't differentiate between the expansion and the game proper they aren't amazing prospects going forward.

And you're heroically wrong, but that's your right.


It gives you something to sell, for one.

There are arguments to make for revamps over all new, but I don't find any of yours compelling.