Razoras

That would only be the argument if you didn't understand how MMORPGS like CoH were supposed to work with respect to subscription numbers. Which you apparently don't.

If it were healthy, typical MMORPG, the sub numbers should be down. I don't have a line of best fit on my graphs but you can guess a line of best fit pretty easily yourself since the numbers have remained pretty stable. I'd wager that we're below the low point we were at when the game was experiencing huge subscription trouble in 2004 (it should never have dropped that low, as evidenced by the recovery after changes were implemented).

I'd even go as far as saying the decline is probably much worse than it should be since Issue 14 introduced Architect. Any actual increase it introduced has probably been destroyed by the number of players driven away by AE-related behaviors and impacts on the larger game in general.

In the very near-term, however, we are seeing impacts from mostly external sources. School has started up again. Bubba has pointed out many times in many threads that our first competing product just had a massive open beta period and will be released soon. Our numbers are also down because Issue 16's PC is highly anticipated so a lot of people are on test instead.

There are other games that have a positive trend line other than WoW, too . Those operate on a different business model, than CoH and WoW and other major players (very front-loaded costs and income goals, punctuated by expansions to regulate the gradual erosion of player base). You start out with small development costs, you start with a small player base, you keep your operations scalable, and you build your player base gradually rather than focus on trying to achieve maximum saturation in the first quarter.

That ain't how MMORPG subscriptions work, generally. The business model isn't about ever-increasing numbers. It's like I'm talking to Aceman all over again. Do I need to make more graphs or something?

The rest of your post is more emotional drivel (you "cite" a nerf to TFs and then don't even bother explaining what the nerf was, you don't even know how much the Khan TF rewards but details like facts aren't important to your point, and you seem to think little problems that can be fixed or adjustments aren't worth doing just because), but the last bit of it resembles some coherence so it is worth token response.

They always will be leaving. Always. It's only important if there's a large amount of them, and that they share a collective reason for leaving. Anyone that claims to know one way or another if the AE nerfs or Freak nerfs will have any impact at all is simply being dishonest.

Unless they're me. I'm generally correct about just about everything.

Who says no one ever leaves because of nerfs?

Or, it's simply a part of natural churn. Churn, if you are unfamiliar with it, can be described as a (generally unavoidable) percentage of a subscriber base leaving the service. The goal in any service-oriented biz is to keep churn low and new subs high.

If it wasn't a nerf it would be something else breaking the camel's back. People misattribute their reasons for becoming dissatisfied with just about anything. That isn't to mean that there aren't some who genuinely find the game ruined by a particular nerf, either.

You deny building strawmen in one paragraph and then pretty much base your entire post on doing it.

Did it ever occur to you that the developers, when making a nerf, might occasionally weigh the good versus bad to a nerf before actually instituting it? They might know better than you what kind of impact (as an example) AE farms have had on the playerbase. What if they were able to see that the population that effectively lived in AE was doing fine (at least stable, if now growing slightly) but that the population that didn't enjoy AE was falling through the floor? I guess they better not try to fix the situation, because that would be a nerf! Even if they didn't touch AE rewards and just jacked up regular content rewards it would be called an AE nerf.

So why is it that a pretty innocuous nerf like this freakshow nerf, probably only a few pegs higher on the "really big nerf list" than if they decreased the damage of the craftable baseball bat attack power, is relevant to all this? Sure, they might have nerfed freakshow a little bit much, especially the minions... but... really? This is worth diatribes about how the devs are unintentionally ruining the game?

Not only that, you insist on trotting out an anecdote and then endeavor to make larger predictions based of it. Well, your anecdotes of people leaving over any nerfs are invalidated by all of my anecdotes (and they are many) of people leaving for other reasons: shallow game play, repetitive game play, bad graphics, lack of story advancement, lack of new recipes, lack of new powersets, etc. The game is doomed! The reasons for quitting are legion! Woozy woozy woo woo!

If that's the best you can come up with, I win again!

No one is really taking that position at all. In fact, I have pointed out in several posts that the reason we had so many subs in December 05 was because of the expansion. Not because of Ace's suggestion that up until that point there had been no "campaign" to control player behavior.

No one is arguing that nerfs don't drive players away. It's absolutely arguable about the degree to which players leave because of some nerfs.

Which year? The biggest drop in subscribers happened during 2004, which didn't suffer some of the most widespread nerfage at all. Very specific things happened during that year, most of which was fixing incredibly overpowered sets like Regen, the Fire tank sets (Burn, especially), and Devices (smoke grenade, especially).

The biggest drop on the graph most certainly wasn't following the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification, the nerfs I can remember triggering the greatest amount of heat and vitriol.

Great detective work!

It seems far more likely that that big drop after that nice peak of initial sales is just your typical post-release subscription drop offs combined with a game that really had some incredible balance issues and problems with mechanics that needed fixing. The numbers show that, after getting fixed, an upward trend in subs began.

Yeah, a tiny percentage of people called the game City of Nerfs. Go write home to grandma about it, while you're at it. You and the few other "leet doodz" can lean back and continue patting yourself on the back about coming up with that unique gem of wordplay.

The rest of your post is pretty typical vitriol from someone who sets up mythical strawmen to beat down, blaming them for the game's ills and suggesting that "if they were in charge" this game would be even worse than it is right now (which isn't bad at all).

You even take a swipe at "role players" like they're somehow related to nerfs at all. I'm really not clear when "role players" became the guys people got to pin nerfs on, or how there's any logical connection between someone that likes to write stories or whatever and someone that likes nerf and doesn't like fun. Maybe that's PvP crowd thing (where "Carebears" has been replaced by "role players", or maybe it's just you and you're the anonymous coward who I responded to).

You pretty obviously haven't gotten over Issues 5 or 6, which is pretty funny considering that all went down a little under four years ago. How long do you plan to carry that torch and get so upset about it?

Well, she's still stacked up top.

Oh, sure we do (Rper, lol). Nerfs upset people when their playstyle is impacted by them. The pattern of gameplay they got used to has been changed, sometimes significantly.

Just because someone gets upset by a nerf doesn't mean they've got a valid complaint, though. Understanding doesn't mean agreeing. It also doesn't mean it's okay to make up timelines about when and how nerfs have taken place, or alleging a new pattern "now" with regards to nerfs compared to "then."

Indeed. Well, previous posts by Ace suggested he felt the campaign began after or at the peak of sub numbers, so I went with his artificial selection.

Here's another image with Issue and the two huge "nerfs" I could remember indicated which I made the same time I made the previous image. Both are sort of messy, though, because of the width of the forums required shrinking the original graph a great deal.

It's POSSIBLE, sure, that GR will create another spike in subscriptions like we did with CoV. I think we'll see numbers near, but not above, the old peak. I think we're too old, but you never know.

In almost every expansion I've seen in a MMORPG, the numbers have gone up, sure, but you don't necessarily see a new peak each time.

So, let's humor you, Ace. Let's divide the timeline of this game into a period "before" the campaign you allege started in 2005 at the peak of sub levels.



Strangely enough, if this campaign really existed, it seems to be a stabilizing force. Pre-campaign, the sub numbers had some pretty major twists and turns, while after the campaign, the numbers have stabilized greatly. If you want to move the goalposts further towards the middle or beginning of 2005 rather than right at the end, your argument falls apart even more. Rather than a decline, there are either more subscribers now or at least were for greater amounts of time than there were pre-campaign.

What is your point, again? This question is meaningless.

Water evaporates at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level temperatures and with minimized impurities. I fill a pot with water, let it boil for about 30 minutes, and then begin to stir it every once in a while.

Has the amount of liquid in the pot increased since I started to stir it?

You see, no matter what the devs do to the game outside of a paid expansion (and related marketing efforts), we will NEVER EVER see the same numbers we saw in 2005. This would be true if no nerfs were even made, this would also likely be true if we released paid expansion after paid expansion after paid expansion. It's possible we might see a new peak with GR, but I'm not so sure. The 2005 peak was created by the release of CoV, by the way. Before the spike, subs were steadily declining... or would have if they hadn't nosedived because of huge delays between issues.

The peak didn't happen because the developers began to nerf... they began to nerf before, during, and after release. Your asserted causal relationship doesn't exist.

So if the game's population will never reach the old peak, why does it matter whether there are nerfs or not? Our peak subs are entirely irrelevant to whether the devs have been nerfing or not nerfing or, as you want to put it, "controlling player behavior."

Again, you need to spell out exactly what you're trying to suggest. Are you seriously suggesting that the developers should not attempt to fix game mechanics that create an undesired behavior in large sections of the playerbase?

At least once, for sure, and possibly more than once. It is so much faster to level now with the XP curve changes, content changes, and things like rested XP, that it is pretty amazing that someone returning to this game from any hiatus could feel the game levels more slowly than is did before.

How long was your hiatus, OP?

Well, when I know what I'm talking about and you don't, that would be the natural outcome.

What exactly are you trying to argue? You admit that nerfs don't really drive droves of players away while at the same time pointing out that subscribers are bound to leave anyway.

Trying to "reign in player behavior" has been happening since release. Since before release. Are you suggesting that it would be healthy to not plug holes or fix exploits? Do not you understand what happens to games, especially online games, with that sort of inattention?

Your post doesn't have a lot of logical consistency. Games that don't nerf are games that spiral the drain far faster than games that don't.

I would also disagree with you strongly that somehow nerfs remain at the forefront of collective memory. I'd feel pretty confident that if you wanted to survey the playerbase with an appropriate sample size you'd find a smaller percentage of people who knew what the Global Defense Nerf was, what ED means in the context of this game (or at least would know it was a nerf). How can you possibly claim that a population with an average subscription age that is below a year has some long-lasting collective memory at all?

This... can't... be... serious...