Silver Gale

Savin' up mine for Rares and an Ultra Rare on my main.

Does anyone still run this? Does everyone who could possibly want the badge have the badge already? Does everyone who needs the Penumbra just choose to buy it with Shards? Should I have gotten it while the getting was good (and the nukes weren't disallowed)?

Discuss.

So apparently one of the Judgement abilities is "Ionic Judgement".

I'm going to have a bind for that: "It's it ionic? Don't you think?"

I hope nobody starts pointing out that my Ionic Judgement is not actually ionic at all, and that in itself is ionic.

Perhaps we can finally put the old "if you make a character in CoH you are signing all your rights to them over to NCSoft and can never make anything with them in other media for profit" myth to sleep.

Here's the problem with doubling the length: sure, going from 1024 to 2048 doesn't seem like a big jump... and it's not like everyone is going to use the full thing, so you don't need to add an extra kilobyte of storage space on every character, right?

Wrong. You can't just add 1024 characters to *some* bios. You have to change the size of the "bio" field in the character database, which means the database immediately grows by a minimum of one kilobyte for every character that exists, even the ones on long-inactive accounts.

Let's take one of the historical high marks of "active subscribers" in CoH, 180k users, and assume that is everyone who has ever played the game. Next let's assume each player has created about 4 characters on average, across all servers. With these fairly lowball estimates, doubling the size of the bio field makes the existing character database jump up in size by 700MB.

180k players * 4 characters * 1kB additional bio = 720 000 kB = 703.125 MB

Or to look at it from another angle: how much space do you need on your servers to make sure that your current players will always be able to buy more character slots? Assuming there are about 90k people who are likely to be interested in the game, adding another 1024 chars to the bio field requires reserving another 34GB (on top of whatever is currently set aside for future character creation).

90k players * 11 servers * 36 characters * 1kB additional bio = 35 640 000 kB = 34804.68 MB = 33.98 GB

Even not accounting for the potential problems with messing around with a database (the CoH character database is an in-house format, there's no telling how easy or hard it would be to expand one of the fields), that's a lot of disk space to set aside just so a few people can express how awesome their character is a little better.

In the discussion threads for the last two boosters, (Dance and Origins), several people noted that they feel the packs would sell better (and presumably make more money) if they were one or two dollars cheaper. We can't tell if it's true for the Super Boosters, because we have no access to any sales data, but maybe if we looked at a similar market, we could at least get a basic idea of how price relates to gains.

This article on Gamasutra shwos the top selling (most sales) and top *grossing* (most money earned) games on the iPhone and iPad. The top-selling games are all in the $1-$3 range (no big surprise there), but half of the the top *grossing* games are $3-$4. The discrepancy is even bigger on the iPad, where only *one* of the top-grossing games is $1, and *five* are $10.

Despite this, you'll note that the top-grossing iPhone games are still $1, and they are the same two games as the top-selling ones (again, no big surprise there).

What does this tell us? Well, on the iPhone and iPad, at least, you're more likely to get a lot of money if you price your game up. The income lost from people who look at your game and go "I'd buy that for a dollar, but not for three" is less than the income gained from, well, people paying $3 for your game. You still have a chance of grossing more on a cheaper game, but it needs to be a vast, runaway success.

Extrapolating this to boosters... sure, *you* might have bought the Party Pack at $4 instead of $8. But do you really think it would have attracted *twice as many buyers* at the very *least*? Do you think pricing it at $2 would have made it a "must buy" to the entire playerbase?

Maybe the NCSoft marketing guys aren't as dumb as they look.

NOTE: Please do *not* discuss the relative merits of the actual games, as that is against forum rules. This thread is meant to discuss the idea that "lower prices mean more money earned" and the iPhone game sales are only a point of data in the discussion.