Samuel_Tow

I think the more pertinent question here, though, is how much that subscription will pay for as compared to what it pays for now. Because right now, my subscription pays for EVERYTHING, short of the occasional Booster, which is at most $10 every three months or so.

To put it another way, I know that my subscription for VIP status will remain the same as my subscription to the game now, but can you honestly give me a guarantee that my VIP status will not get a smaller cut of new content than my subscriber status does now? Can you go out and say that we won't be asked to pay more to get "everything" when Freedom goes Live than we are to get everything now?

*note* I exclude consumable repeatable services like character renames, server slot purchases, server transfers and such.

I personally don't count "services" as content, myself, for the simple fact that these are repeatable actions with a cost on each use. I would no more expect to be entitled to many enhancement unlotters than I would expect to be entitled to unlimted server transfers or character renames. Any "consumable" features and services don't and shouldn't count towards a subscription, aside from maybe having an allotment of free uses, which may not be a bad idea.

That said, I also hugely dislike taking things which SHOULD be content and turning them into consumable services. For instance, I could earn the right to travel to the new zone, which is content. Or I may have to pay Paragon Points each time I want to travel to it, which one could call a service, but is in fact a ripoff. Anything which can be considered a permanent in-game right, especially when it has low or no operating cost, should be done as such - as an in-game right. If I buy a costume piece, I want to buy the right to use that piece in the creator, not A costume piece to use on a single character and then lose access to it. I don't, however, expect to earn the right to move characters across servers at will.

Banking on presenting us with content they've prepared earlier strikes me as a pyramid scheme, in the sense that this won't last. Yes, you can launch an enormous amount of content once, or break it up into several smaller chunks, but sooner or later that will run out. And then what? What happens when the initial content package runs out? Do we go back to arguing among ourselves what's worth the development resources and why power customization is on the backburner?

Here's my concern - it's been almost a year, and they haven't managed to even get done with Going Rogue, a process which for previous expansions took an Issue at most. Now I'm being asked to believe that not only will they be able to finish that, but they'll also be able to launch full Issues as opposed to the "frugal" ones we've been getting, but also lots of other cool stuff on top of that, and a lot of it included in my VIP subscription... And I'm not supposed to be suspicious of that?

Let me just say that I've seen this studio make some pretty bold promises and use terms like "there's never been a better time" and "we're all really excited" in the past, and I've been sorely disappointed plenty of times. Every time they finish something big, we players pat each other on the back and say "Well, they're done with that! Maybe now they'll be able to give us more stuff and maybe even what I want!" And it never happens.

I hope you're right. I hope they do magic up another half a game development studio and make up for lost time, crank out lots of cool content and give a lot of it to me for the price of my subscription. I want to think that, but I just know we won't see much new stuff beyond the initial release, and a lot of it I'll end up having to spend a lot more for than I used to.

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The original post makes a good point. He paid a subscription and bought a LOT of stuff. If even that extraordinary spending can't keep us in the green, then something's seriously wrong with the model. Keep in mind the experiment isn't about what your subscription buys you. It's about what your subscription + GR + a couple of boosters buy you. 50 British Pounds is a LOT of money.

Then prepared to be surprised. Where, precisely, do you think the extra development muscle is going to come from? The studio wasn't doing a mass hiring drive and they haven't talked about expanding their staff. Sure, you'll see a large influx of "stuff" at Freedom launch, which consists of things they already have ready but are holding back so they can sell them, but once that's done, how exactly do you expect the team to make more stuff?

I honestly don't get how people expect the studio to suddenly turn lead into gold and produce more things faster. Are we assuming they're going to get a lot more money? Even ignoring the dubious nature of that fact, between spite cancellations and subscribers going Premium, just throwing money at people doesn't get them to work faster. Are we assuming half the development team was getting paid half salary to play Pong during work hours but now they'll be paid more to do actual work? Where is this new content going to come from?

I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that the game will cost us - the VIP customers - more than it does now, and I wager that won't be by a small margin. There are already people in suggestions telling me how allowing someone to drop $1000 into the game all at once to buy a whole bunch of purples is a good business model, so there's a chance that the game will both cost more AND make VIPs feel like second-rate citizens if they don't pay a lot more.

We don't have much information, granted, but if this comes down to faith in the development team, then they ran out of credit for that with me. I'll believe the market spin when I see it with my own eyes. And when I end up paying more money for stuff I should have been getting for free, I'll wish I had been wrong.

That's $15 that the company won't get once people stop collecting badges if those become purchasable. You talk about this like there's nothing to lose, and there is. By offering services like buying influence, buying powers and buying your way to success, you do make money off those willing to do it, but you LOSE money off those who not only don't buy them, but stop paying you anything at all and leave for another game.

It IS unfortunate, actually. Because I can tell you right now - I'm not going to play a game where the most important thing is how much money you pay. City of Heroes should never, ever allow people the option of "cheating" for money, and if it does, then it will be rather more than unfortunate.

A game is not real life, and I play it for precisely that reason. If Paragon Studios are incapable of running a business without turning their game into an environment where even VIP customers are still second class to those with lots of disposable income, then I guarantee you that they'll lose more revenue off cancellation than they will gain off people wanting to pay to win.

True, we don't know all THAT much about Praetoria, especially about the lesser targets that don't need three football teams' worth of people to assault, but I'd still prefer for that information to come from a Praetorian informant than from a character who insists he's more awesome than I am.

I actually think Praetorian Vanessa DeVore may be a good pick, counter-intuitively. Yes, she's a powerful psychic, but she's been defeated before, both on Primal Earth and on Praetorian Earth so her "awesome level" is about mid-range and good for us to compete with. She's also WITH the Resistance, but not coo coo for cocoa puffs level of "with the Resistance" like Hatchet or War Dog or Calvin Scott. Plus she's likely to know a lot of inside information, perhaps even pulled out of the Seers directly, being a psychic and all.

Or how about Penny Yin? She's reputedly the world's most powerful psychic, and her Praetorian version is picking Mother Mayhem's brain. She'd make a pretty good contact for snagging soloable Incarnate missions in Praetoria. Penny would know where to strike and what to take out, and she'd be able to hide the identity of the people doing it from Mother directly.

Basically what I'm saying is I don't want our progression into godlike powers to proceed in the shadow of even greater, more unreachable gods, as if to remind us that NPCs will always be greater than us. I thought the point of giving us Incarnate powers was to remove us from under the shadow of the Statesman and Lord Recluse, but was it worth it if they just invented even more absurd characters to tower over us?

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All of that said, if we DID get solo Incarnate content through Prometheus, I wouldn't really complain about it all THAT much

YES!!!



*edit*
I really have no complaints about the suggestion and give my full support of it. So long as the set has a sword that's bigger for women than the damn Legacy Broadsword and actually looks something like a sword, I'm happy with it.

See, here's the thing - I've tried other games that marketed themselves as "super hero" and made a MUCH more concerted effort to stick to the genre and exclude everything else. I HATED those games, and with a passion, especially after playing City of Heroes. Oh, sure, they allowed me to play weirder things (like Samuel Tow, who gets more bizarre every time I touch him) and the games didn't tell me I shouldn't, but these characters felt so... Out of place it was unpleasant. It's like I tried to insert the Corporate Commander into JR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings novel. It just doesn't belong.

I like City of Heroes because it is much more inclusive than any specific reading of what has historically been done in comic books. The game may borrow some of its mannerisms and storylines from general comic book history, but I remember a player once put it very well: We don't need to wait for Marvel or DC to write a story before City of Heroes can use it. Our environment is entirely inclusive. It is a modern-day urban environment where super-human powers exist, and that's really the extent of the limitation of the setting. It doesn't have any one theme or genre or even any one setting. Anything you care to put in there, the game will accept as long as it makes sense how it got here in the first place.

I like to think that the original vision for comic books isn't as restrictive as people like to present it. I like to think that the spirit behind comic book is "Oh my god! Who is that man? How can he do these things?" and an examination of the life and times of such people. Or to quote a rather famous line: "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Superman!" Comic books, to me, are an examination of the absurd and unrealistic taken seriously and placed in a dramatic storyline.

Yes, I realise that some people would like more of a specific sub-genre of that broader range of possibilities, the things they grew up with, perhaps. And I fully respect this, even if it's not my cup of tea. But I don't feel it's justified to give one particular style of comic book disproportionate weight, be it golden age, silver age, dork age or what have you. Especially not at the cost of possibly harming the breadth and depth of conceptual freedom.

In short, I thing we can all coexist together without having to argue who has more right to exist.

I don't think that's a very good example, though. If a person sat at your bar from early morning to late night, ordering drink after drink, would you keep accepting his money and feeding him more booze? I mean, you could, there's no law (that I'm aware of) requiring you to do anything else, but would you? Or would you tell him "I think you've had enough for one day?"

Yes, the point of a business is to make as much money as possible, but not at ANY cost. A business trying to suck as much money as it can from its customers by any means necessary comes off more as a scam than as a legitimate business, especially when some of what they're selling may well do more harm than good to the experience the business is trying to sell. Because that's all video games give us - an experience. Because how much fun is a game, really, when there's always that button in the corner of your screen saying "Cheat?" How much fun, moreover, when the game is actively trying to get you to press it?

Video games have more in common with movies than they do with bars or restaurants or night clubs, in that they offer a particular package of experiences, and they achieve this both by providing some things and by WITHOLDING others. Many times over, people have commented that City of Heroes is way too easy - to them. When told to just unslot their enhancements or not use these and those powers, they refuse to do so, and I can't blame them. Progress and a rise in power is an integral part of the game.

I've seen people ask to be GIVEN perfect builds without going through the process of obtaining them, the equivalent of running a character trainer in Diablo 2. However, this ignores the point that these items are balanced to be so powerful exactly BECAUSE they're intended to be rare and hard to get and a pain in the ***. Because they're not intended to be all over the place for everyone to use. Moreover, they're intended to be hard to get and difficult to find because the process of obtaining the unobtainable and extraordinarily powerful is in itself all the fun for some people. By providing a way to "buy" you way to these items, it corrupts the nature of this process, taking all the fun away from it.

Let's go with another example: Badges. I'm not a collector, myself, so I don't pretend to "get" the emotions around them, but I've seen enough people obsessed with them to know there's more to them than I see. People collect badges because they enjoy collecting, but how much fun do you think that collecting would be if every badge in the game were dumped in the Paragon Store for c25? It's not a matter of enjoying something because other people DON'T have it, it's a matter of enjoying something because you know it's rare and obscure. If it's not rare, then... Well, then it's not rare.

The value of certain items comes from the difficulty in obtaining them. If you "sell out" that difficulty, you corrupt the point of the items to begin with.

You're welcome I figure we're all equal people here in the game, and if want to be treated with respect and consideration, then it only makes sense for that practice to start with me. I like to help people when I can, and I like the fact that whenever I need help, all I have to do is ask and other helpers will usually have answers and solutions for me pretty much on the spot. It's what makes our community as positive as it is, occasional personality clashes aside - you can always get help and you can always contribute to helping others, and that's seen as the norm here.

I wouldn't go as far as to organise events for new players, though. I'm not a leader (too much work) and I figure the game ought to have better tools to handle that server-side anyway. I've spoken on behalf of an auto-team feature before, and I feel one is more necessary than ever before now that we're expecting a large influx of new players that may not always be aware of the kinks in our unspoken etiquette. Sure, auto-teams may sometimes end up underpowered or with all unprepared people, but I still consider that superior to not finding a team at all.

Generally speaking, I find that approaching other people with patience, understanding and the notion that there's a real person on the other end just as entitled to having a fun gaming experience as you are is the right attitude to take out into the field. I figure as long as most VIPs exhibit that, the Free players will sort the rest out for themselves.

Or they can be like me and come for the game, then stay for the game. Because it is a fun game still, and it still has the ability to let us make our own characters.

I'm not going anywhere. I'm not afraid of people, be they paying or free customers, be they nice newbies or idiot noobs. Those who ask for help will receive it, those who end up on teams I'm on will be treated fairly. I don't team because I need warm bodies. I team for the company, so it makes sense to treat every other player with respect. More than that I can't promise.

An enormous amount of the OLD content, yes. But look at how many factions your hero is a "member of" by the time you hit 50 - the Midnight Club for Cimerora, Ourobors for Flashback, Vanguard because you join them implicitly as soon as you set foot in their base and use their portals, and now Prometheus. I don't want to be "an agent of" anything.

Contacts like Maxwell Christopher, Crimson, Harvey Maylor... Even Willy Wheeler on the villain side, those contacts I enjoy. They're sources of information, I go to them, learn what I need and go act on it. Contacts like Levantera, Montague Castanella, the Menders and so forth... Not so much. I don't want to be part of a "super group." I don't want to be part of an organisation, agency or whatever else you want to call it. I don't want to be acting on anybody's orders. Not by the time I'm shooting for Incarnate powers. Not by the time I'm arm-wrestling giant robots. Not by the time I'm saving "a thousand worlds."

Let me put it into perspective: The Statesman, while leader of one or two hero organisations, doesn't really answer to anyone. That doesn't make him a villain because he still respects law and order, but his power makes him an agency in himself. While people don't go to pray to him like they would a god (like Hequat or Lughebu, say), he is still a free agent who cooperates with mankind for their benefit, but who isn't OBLIGATED to do so.

In essence, whenever I've seen the Statesman, or indeed any of the Srviving Eight get involved in old content, they're kind of like the old master, someone who you go to to ask for help, who is strong enough to handle himself, but who is in no way obligated to help you unless he actually chooses to do so. Even in Maria's new arc, I can't "requisition" help from the Freedom Phalanx. They're just doing a favour for Maria because they're old friends, and later on looking for the Statesman.

Simply put, a character with Incarnate power should be independent, and not "an agent of" anyone or anything.

I'm with Chyll on this one. I don't really care about "classic" super heroes, and I've never liked their concepts much to begin with. To me, a game which sought to ape existing super heroes and included systems to reward copycats would be shooting itself in the foot. Variety in both genre and theme are important, and what City of Heroes inspires more than anything else is creativity. Remember the old trailer? "City of Heroes, where YOU are the hero!" The point of the game is to make your own, not to ape an existing one.

As far as I'm concerned, City of Heroes is no "homage" to super hero comics or anything of the sort. It is not and should not be accountable to what comic books are like. An age old stance of the development team has always been that "it's like that in comic books" is never a convincing argument in and of itself. They're not making a comic book simulator. They're making a super hero game, for a VERY broad interpretation of what "super hero" constitutes.

Personally, I much prefer sci-fi and anime themes to the corny themes of Silver Age and Golden Age American comic books. I find far more inspiration for my characters in other games, in contemporary (non-super-hero) movies and other themes like this. That City of Heroes accepts these themes, allows them to work mechanically and has a fictional universe that makes sense for all of them is what's kept me here for seven years.

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Incidentally, I have a level 50 SS/Inv heroic Brute, and she's one of the strongest characters I have by a significant margin.

Because I don't like games where gameplay comes down to who invests the most money. I used to go to arcades when I was a kid, and how well I did at a game usually came down to how many credits I put in. But that's not as relevant as how I play arcade games now - on an emulator with infinite credits. I can blunder my way through every encounter, die a thousand times, and all I have to do is press the 2 key a few times and BANG! 9 more credits, meaning about 27 more lives. And that's only because the credit counter only has one digit.

Arguing that time and energy are another form of currency and should therefore be treated like money (an argument you didn't make, but which IS a strong reason for this suggestion) isn't applicable here. People play games to get what they can't get in real life, at least the ones I know do. In real life, I'm not super rich. I can't decide to buy a new shiny car and just go do it. But in a game, this doesn't matter, because it's not a question of how good I am AT LIFE, it's a question of how good I am AT THIS GAME. If I'm good at the game, then nothing else matters.

I'm sure you've heard stories from all sorts of people with disabilities. One was so crippled he could essentially only use something like two fingers on one hand, and yet to most people in-game, he was just a somewhat slower, but otherwise perfectly normal player. We've seen a lot of people who avoid social contact in real life, but who run SGs here, and form teams and and lead TFs and so forth. It's because in City of Heroes, it doesn't matter who and indeed what you are in real life, because all that matters is what you do with the game.

The less real life and, by extension, real money, is a factor of the game, the happier I'll be. I have enough trouble juggling bills and expenses in real life. I don't want that headache here. I don't want a second life with more peer pressure, money troubles and social classes. I can accept that I can't have something in a game just because it's not fun to get. It's much harder to swallow that I can't have something because I'm not paying enough money, however. That's one aspect of real life I want nowhere near my games, and it has nothing at all to do with what others have.

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I do not want the option to "pay to win" to even exist in a game, irrespective of who does what with it.

You should have thought about that before you made your head out of Hubba Bubba.