Silver Gale

I'm not saying merging servers means the game is dying. I'm saying people who are into the MMO scene believe that merging servers means a game is dying. (There is a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it, since every Dev team knows how badly such a move is seen by the MMO community, so they save it for an absolute last resort... such as when the game is already dying.)

News of server merges in an MMO is almost immediately picked up by all the MMO dedicated news sites, that easily have several hundred thousand regular readers between them. Any of them who are not already CoH players walk away with the idea that CoH = dying game, not worth trying. This is not just a "few hundred people", and it's not the however many dozen newbies get the non-Praetorian starting experience.

I'm glad you're taking a while to rest and drink some coffee. You must be really tired from running around carrying the goalposts from place to place. You're ostensibly defending the position of "server merges are necessary" but you keep retreating to much more easily defended positions like "there aren't a lot of people logging in these days" or "non-Praetorian characters will not get the best starting experience possible". Then, once you establish that you are 100% correct, you act like everything from there to "server merge!" is so obvious it's not even worth talking about.

Here's something you can bank on: server merges are always interpreted as a sign of a game "dying". It doesn't matter how much better the game becomes on the new, more populated servers, if you put out a new game box and merge some servers at the same time, you are sending out a signal that your game is not worth buying because it won't be around for long anyway.

Some people "maybe" being turned off the game after they buy it because they start a non-Praetorian on a lesser-populated server is nothing compared to many, many people who have never played the game being definitely turned off of ever trying it when they hear of server merges.

Wow, the assumed intelligence of hypothetical new GR players plummets with each page in this thread.

What if those new players don't realise that you need a PC to run the game? What if they try to put the CD in their XBox or their microwave and then complain to all their friends that it doesn't work? That would be terrible press for the game!

Well, it will give you accurate info from the moment you start using it, which in some cases may not be what you're interested in.

I'm just saying, if you approach a large crowd of RPers of many different types with the mindset that "none of these people have anything to offer me", you're going to get that feeling of not being included.

Perhaps you could look into ways you can improve the situation, starting with yourself?

It makes an "***" out of "u" and the, uh, "Ming" dynasty.

I know, right? They should make a box that has the game and expansion in it, making it easy for prospective new players to see the cool new stuff.

Then they could do some sort of promotion together with a major games retailer where people who preorder the game/expansion box through that retailer get something cool, maybe even small ingame bonuses.

They should at least make a video series that talks about all the cool stuff they have coming up, and post it on some highly-frequented social network website.

Sounds great. Do you want to carry around empty holsters/scabbards and have your pistols/weapon appear out of nowhere, or do you want to carry around a second weapon/set of weapons in a scabbard/holster that stays in the holster when you draw the useable ones? Both of those are very simple to make.

That depends. If we consider Venture realistically he is only one player and thus doesn't make much of a difference on his own.

If we consider Venture according to his own sense of self-importance, then the merged market will have lost something like 60-70% participation.

I just noticed I typoed "due" as "duet". D'oh.

The market merge is due at the same time as GR comes out.

Interesting self-imposed challenge! Will you combine it with a MAN build or perma-death for Double Jeopardy?

Okay, so you consider sources outside the game canon unless they conflict with your view of how the ingame world should be (the partial list of cities attacked by the Rikti is, btw, found in the same posts of "former dev" Manticore as the Countess Crey stuff). Also, great big buildings in the gameworld that are required to interact with a system cannot be safely ignored, unless they're the only way of interacting with said system, in which case it's totally okay.

Glad we got that sorted out.

With 12 basic character slots per server and up to 21 market slots on each character, a single player can contribute to a great many "markets" at any time, so I don't see what the trouble is, or what the "obvious solution" might be.

You know, saying "I didn't *mean* to insult you, so stop being offended" is kind of like saying "I didn't *mean* to elbow you in the solar plexus, so stop being in pain".

IIRC, it was judged to be worth the time/work investment because Brawl is a power every character has, so the number of characters/players positively affected by the change is huge.

If by "we weren't even given a new tail initially" you mean "the preview of the Mutant pack on Test to look for bugs to fix had a bug that made the tails not show up, which was quickly fixed", then yes.

Porn != amount of nudity.