RogerWilco

I don't think so. I think at best we have some anonymous rumours.

Please keep to the facts. Provide a link or document if you think I'm wrong.

Also, latter is spelled letter last time I looked.

Myself, I see no point in going after Wildstar or GW2, this is not their fault, and I don't think it's helping if we behave like a bunch of cry babies.

Try to keep to the facts and act mature.

Thank you for keeping the lights on. The Beta server is the only place where I have access to my characters right now.

Yeah, I was unpleasantly surprised when they closed this loophole. It would have been much nicer had they left it.

CoH is rather pointless at the moment for me, as basically all my characters use something VIP and are locked even if I would unlock the slot. Rogues, Vigilantes, MasterMinds, Widows, VIP powersets, etc...

I haven't heard anything on my support request, except an acknowledgement that they received it.

I don't know the US numbers, but I know my previous employer needed 1 million euros to run a 22 person company in 2005. That makes it probably a little over 1.5 million dollar or about $70k per person, maybe $85k in 2012?

What the employees would see of that on their pay check is about half of that, somewhere in the $35-45k ballpark.

Those are Dutch numbers for a company in a rural area. I would not be surprised if the numbers in Silicon Valley are significantly higher.

I think that employing 80 people would run somewhere in the 8-12 million dollar range, if only half of those people were working on City of Heroes, then the game was making a profit, but Paragon Studios was only barely breaking even.

Given the roughly 2.5 million dollar revenue per quarter from the official NCsoft SEC filings, the number of $800k/month profit can just not be true, it is clear the revenue per month was around that number. This is the only number that is publicly out there as far as I know and the only thing verified by accountants. Any discussion about the profitability of CoH has to start from this number. Only if the entire PS staff was working for free could you get the number of $800k/month profit. The much more likely explanation is that someone mixed up revenue and income.

I actually liked what they did in Praetoria with this. It might still have to many mob-pastures (I like that word), but large parts are free of it. Instead there are these events you can trigger. Kill the two guards in front of the Mob building and they come out of the woodwork in swarms. Interact with the protest and all hell breaks loose.

I liked how Praetoria was designed, the multiple factions in one zone, the events, no tunnels/trams/ferries to go from one zone to the other. I think it would have made a much better starting zone design than Atlas Park or Mercy Island, especially Mercy Island. I also liked that you had interaction with the big names from the start, not just after level 40 or so.

Yeah. One of the things that made CoH great is that it allows the player to chose the origin and background of the character. DCUO could have done that as well, but seems to have lost track somewhere. I haven't played the game, but apparently you can't make a Kryptionian.

Definitely not. It was shrinkwrapped and the game card first needed to be scratched to reveal the code.

There was also a code for "invite a friend" in a separate envelope, I had to tear the paper as it was glued shut.

Neither code worked.

I'm afraid that the time it took from ordering at Amazon to having the box arrive on my doorstep was just too long and I got pre-empted on the 19th.

I have put in a support ticket.

Most of that money was what it took to get the box to me, the box itself was much less.

I knew I took a risk when ordering it. I still have a nice map now.

Yeah. I spent nearly $50 to get this box. It arrived in the mail today from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com doesn't deliver games outside USA/Canada.

I've played this game since December 17 last year. I went VIP on December 20. My VIP originally ran out on July 20. I got a friend to also subscribe, so my VIP was extended to August 20. I was on holidays last week of August and could not renew my VIP before hand (only paypal).

Next to this I've spent enough on the Paragon Market to have the full Fire and Ice costume set. 37 Reward tokens in 8 months, you do the math.

I have since spent the equivalent of nearly 50 dollars to get a boxed game shipped to my country. It arrived today in the mail but it seems the boxed codes no longer work.

I was late to this game. I wish I had found it sooner, but it was never really sold in The Netherlands nor advertised. I enjoyed it a lot while it lasted.

I would really have liked to get my level 47 toon to level 50, but she's a Rogue.

I don't want a "free pass", I just want to play a game I really like while I can. Given that now even boxed codes no longer seem to work, I'm really out of options.

:-(

I submitted a support ticket.

I have the same problem. I just got Good vs. Evil Combined Edition from Amazon.co.uk today, and it says that "This serial code has expired."

It was a new game nicely shrinkwrapped, with a fresh "Game activation card", I had to scratch the black paint to reveal the code.

I like this scenario.

This. I had never heard of the game until a year ago. And that was because I specifically started looking for a SuperHero MMO, partially because SmallVille ended.

I think only WoW and GW have managed any kind of presence on store shelves here, or even online shops. I tried finding a shop selling boxes to get VIP again (sub ran out 20/8) but none of them even seem to have carried it, only Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, no bol.com, free record shop, computer collective.

I stopped playing WoW and started playing CoH a year ago. Partially for the same reason: I got burned out on WoW and started looking around for another game I'd like.
I had played WoW for 5 years and three expansions. I even bought the collectors edition for Cataclysm, but my character only got 2 levels before I got bored.

I'm happy to have at least played CoH for almost a year, although I never got to level 50.

I was planning to send emails this evening, but I will now refrain from doing so and wait further news from you.

I ask everyone to try and have TonyV coordinate things, if we can show we speak with one voice and support and follow him, it gives him more power.

Very true. I might be European white male, but in this game I could be anyone. I had characters with all kinds of backgrounds and colours. I agree that it's a problem of a lot of MMOs that the humans/elves often can only look european.

Because of the way I grew up, I've been on the wrong end of discrimination a few times in a way that few white males would experience. Nothing like a real black person, woman or other minority might experience, but enough to know how it tastes. It's subtle things like this, not just the clearly visible, that make the difference.

Oh, and Storm is my personal favourite SuperHero, especially the time she lost her powers but still was tough as nails.

The only number I can compare the revenues with, is that I know that my previous employer needed 1 million euros in 2005 to run a 20-25 man software company. My guess would be that you can run 20 people for a year on 2 million US dollars in 2012, so extrapolating to the 80 people at Paragon Studios would mean about 8 million dollars a year.

So my guess is that with 10 million revenue, City of Heroes would have been in the break even to slightly profitable range. With revenues slowly decreasing you would need to downsize at some point or find new ways to make money.

How it looked in NCsofts internal bookkeeping I don't know. I think that as an indie studio PS could have been run with a small profit but would have run into problems if revenue dropped below 8 million/year without downsizing.

I would have preferred a scenario where either CoH 2 would have been developed, or PS would have gone into a maintenance mode and they would have milked the player base until it would no longer cover running the servers.

I think the bean counters made a decision, probably because of the declining trend in CoH, but the way it was executed doesn't seem like a good PR move to me.

Maybe it's indeed true that what they had hoped for with F2P didn't work out. Personally I think they could have done a better job selling Freedom. With that I mean advertising, and the first experience of new users trying it out. If you want to hook your players, you need a few wow moments in the first 5-10 levels. I found the starting missions and areas in Paragon City and certainly the Rogue Isles very bland. I found Praetoria a much better starting experience and also much better looking.