TonyV

I just have to say, guys, that extending Freebie Friday over the weekend was pure genius!

Seriously, I hope that you see a rate of participation that is significantly higher enough to justify making this change permanent. It was really, really nice not thinking at work on Friday, "Crap, I forgot to log in last night!" I actually claimed my princess hat this morning (Sunday), and I have to say, I look mighty pretty in it.

If the goal is to get more people (especially so-called "casual players") active in the store, this was the best way to do it. Before, practically speaking, most players had a very small window on a weeknight when, frankly, most people are busy and have a lot of real-life stuff going on. Now, they can hit the store at their leisure when most people will be playing more anyway.

In short: VERY high approval rating on this one!

They did give some strategy tips on the new trial. Nothing too earthshattering in the news department, but it was really nice having actual face-to-face interaction with the crew. It's the kind of thing that, if you're there, it's really neat but if you're not, it's kind of meh. It's like the difference between being a fan talking to George Takei (WOOT!) and just watching a bunch of fans talking to George Takei (um... okay...).

I've seen this complaint about almost everything that's not trivially easy in the game. Hamidon trial, every iTrial, STF and LRTF, etc.

And within a couple of weeks, people eventually figure it out and they pretty much never fail.

So yeah, color me not worried.

Heh, that's Smack Daddy, my Street Fighter on Triumph. When I was making him, I decided to literally make him a fighter, using the boxing costume. (Toast is right, Street Justice/Willpower.)

He doesn't really have a fleshed out story. In my head when I made him, I had the idea of a boxer or MMA fighter that was disqualified for fighting for some reason (probably use of illegal substances) and banned from the ring. Not really having a fall-back plan for his life, he turned to crime, still profiting from his fists and general toughness. He still thinks he's the best of the best though, and has gone to the Rogue Isles to prove it on the streets against the super-powered villains there. Make no mistake, though: He's anything but a hero. In the Isles, he's gone from petty street crime to all out mercenary, taking on jobs for pay not really caring who he hurts or what the implications are. Earlier today, he put the beat down on Synapse and Mynx, for example. He didn't care why, all he cared about was proving his mettle against the so-called super-powered heroes (and the cash being deposited into his account by Abyss, of course).

I like him, he's my only Street Justice character, and the powerset is really powerful. He can stand toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone, even without being fully decked out in top-of-the-line IO sets or anything. He's just a couple of levels shy of 50 right now. Hopefully I'll have him there within a couple of weeks or so (I tend to level really slowly...) and start kitting him out as an Incarnate, something I rarely do on any characters. I don't even have him in a villain group right now; I haven't teamed him up much and haven't really had a chance to interact with anyone who wants him in. Maybe after he starts wading through some trials I'll hook him up with a good group.

So today I was running missions and I ended up in one of the Crey lab maps. Four pieces of equipment, should I destroy them? Normally I don't, but I was almost done with the mission, so I figured what they hey, let's go for it.

One down, two down, three down, and four down. JACKPOT!

Needless to say, I just sat there for a while letting debuffs wear off.



Funny thing, just a few days ago, I hit my Inner Inspiration power and got slammed with three of the exact same inspirations--three Take a Breathers (medium blues). I remember thinking at the time, "Wow, that was weird luck. Probably won't ever happen again."

UPDATE

Sites are back up! Sorry for any inconvenience!

ORIGINAL POST

Hey all, just a quick note to say that Linode is doing scheduled maintenance on our server. It's currently offline. They told me it would be around 30 minutes, but also said it could last as long as three hours (until 1:00am EDT/10:00pm PDT/5:00am UTC).

They actually told me about it a week or so ago. I was going to wait until this weekend to post an announcement because if I posted it a week ahead of time, everyone would have forgotten about it.

...And then I forgot about it. So the lack of warning is my bad, not Linode's. (I'm sorry, really!) But just so everyone knows, it is scheduled, though unannounced, maintenance by our hosting provider and the server was gracefully shut down beforehand. Don't panic, we'll be back up before you know it. In the meantime, hey, you get to see what those CloudFlare error pages look like, woot!

From the Freedom Friday thread on Google+:

If they want to have an actor from BBT on TableTop, that's their prerogative, but that's not the point of this effort. If they have an actor from BBT, I fail to see how that would be helpful to City of Heroes. After all, if that guy were on TableTop, I seriously doubt he would actually wear that shirt. It's not like Colin Ferguson wore his sheriff's costume from Eureka on TableTop. I doubt the actor would mention City of Heroes at all. Even if by some really wild coincidence he did, it wouldn't necessarily reflect positively on the game.

The point of this post is to help City of Heroes get some good (cheap!) marketing. Having someone like Matt Miller or Melissa Bianco or David Nakayama or someone else like that on the show would accomplish that goal. Some random actor from BBT could never represent City of Heroes to TableTop's audience as well as someone who actually makes the game can.

And I think that it has a realistic chance of happening. TableTop is a show about gaming, these people work in the gaming industry, therefore they would very likely be interesting and entertaining guests that would appeal to viewers who are by definition interested in watching a show about gaming. (Next show's guests will include Steve Jackson, the designer of Munchkin.)

It would be win/win/win/win. TableTop gets an interesting guest (and probably draws in a lot of City of Heroes players as viewers), Paragon Studios gets the game mentioned in front of an audience interested in gaming, we get a neat show and probably some new players, and Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada gets... Well, okay, maybe it's only win/win/win. Sorry, Stephen.

Well, I still think of myself as just some random Internet schmo who has no connections other than being a fan of both the game and the show. I'll certainly try to do my part, though!

Hmm... I wonder where they film the show? I've been assuming somewhere around LA, but I'm not sure, really.

Hey all (especially Zwillinger, who will hopefully see this and pass it along!),

So if you're a geek goddess fan like I am and like Felicia Day's new YouTube Geek and Sundry channel, you've probably watched the show TableTop, with Wil Wheaton. Every two weeks, they put out a 30-minute show in which Wil and three other players sit down and play a traditional (but not too mainstream) board game, such as Settlers of Catan, Tsuro, Ticket to Ride, etc. The guests each week range in fame from totally unknown (last week they had Amy Dallen, who owns a comic book store) to relatively well known in geek circles, but not mega-famous actors and personalities (Grant Imahara, Colin Ferguson, Ando from Heroes, etc.).

The show reminded me a lot of the kind of games and the fun we had on the Friday game night at the Player Summit. From there, I made the leap of, "Hey! You know who would probably make a good guest on TableTop? One of the designers or maybe a lead artist at Paragon Studios!" While most viewers of TableTop probably don't know specifically who Matt Miller, for example, of Paragon Studios is, I'm sure that most of them have at least heard of City of Heroes. I think that the producers of TableTop would be game (no pun intended) to having someone in that kind of position on the show, especially since the folks at Paragon Studios seem to be pretty big fans of tabletop games and are generally affable people. I mean, it is a show about gaming, and wouldn't it make sense that having a game designer of a moderately popular and well-known computer game on the show would be a cool idea?

To be honest, I have no idea how that would happen. I suspect that Wil and crew probably really would like cool ideas for guests, but short of just posting comments on their YouTube videos or something, I have no idea how to get in touch with them. Even if I did, I'm just some random Internet schmo--I don't want to come off as some annoying fanboy trying to mercilessly promote this target of affection. I'm not saying whoever is on the show should try to turn it into a commercial or anything, I really think they'd be an interesting and entertaining guest, and that it would probably get some viewers to check into the game just by having "So-en-so, who does such-and-such on the superhero MMORPG City of Heroes" in the show intro. Maybe the crowd here or the marketing folks at Paragon Studio would have a good idea of how to let it be known that they'd like to do a show.

So, what do you think? Good idea? If so, how could we, as fans of the game, help to make this happen?

The easy answer is that marketing feels that television advertisements draw in a disproportionately small amount of revenue and reaches a disproportionately small number of players versus other forms of advertising, such as going to conventions and working up cross-promotional deals with other companies, such as Dell, Apple, Antec, etc.

Keep in mind that the marketing budget is finite. If they were to advertise on television, that would necessarily mean that other avenues of advertising would be shut off. Would we rather have a television ad than, say, the Player Summit? Would we rather have a television ad than, say, a booth at Comic-Con? Those are the kinds of decisions that marketing has to make. Maybe you disagree with them, but if you really think about it, it makes sense. Personally, I see where they're coming from--it's likely that they do get more players and sustain their existing player base better through the activities they sponsor than buying a relatively expensive television ad.

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(For some reason, though, I find this thread oddly compelling.)

I see that a lot of you are still thinking that marketing = traditional advertising. These days, buying up television, radio, newspaper, and magazine spots doesn't get you a whole heck of a lot of bang for your buck.

Remember a few weeks ago when Massively did an Exclusive™ on the new mecha armor costume sets coming out? That was Black Pebble at work. Did you by any chance catch the Facebook posts from the OCR team asking us to vote on the Choose My Adventure series of articles to be about City of Heroes? Yup, that was marketing.

You can also probably thank marketing (with a healthy dose of praise on the OCR team also) in large part for the Player Summit, which was undoubtedly pitched as a means of getting existing players more excited about the game--and thus spreading word-of-mouth to their friends about it. Also, although the OCR team maintains the Facebook page, Twitter feed, and now Google+ hangouts, I'm sure Black Pebble et al have their hands in it too, since when I "like" or "+1" something, it's putting out there in front of my friends' faces.

Do you know how expensive it is to fly people from San Francisco to San Diego every year to attend Comic-Con? It ain't cheap, but that comes out of marketing's budget. How about Seattle for Pax? Are they still doing Pax East? I imagine flying people all the way across the country was a pretty heavy outlay of cash to get the product out there in front of a very targeted demographic.

Speaking of Pax, did you see the PC that Antec gave away last year? Check out the one on the right. I think you could buy those cases at one point, though I can't find any links to it now. Regardless, there are some City of Heroes customized cases out there. You can thank marketing for that.

Also, does anyone remember when City of Heroes was featured on Apple's games web site after the launch of Issue 14? Marketing. Or when it was an option to have pre-installed on a Dell computer, and Dell included City of Villains screenshots in their ad copy? Marketing.

Point is, just because you don't see City of Heroes ads on television doesn't mean that marketing is sitting around on their duffs. Those ads are expensive, most people just tune them out (or worse, skip them on their DVRs), and you're way more likely to be paying for anti-video game soccer moms to see them than a gamer who might want to give the game a try.

I'd rather it run on Thursdays my time than not at all. I just think that with a simple name change or other relatively minor accommodating tweak, it would be much less confusing.

The simple fact of the matter is that Freebie Friday ends before most people get home from work, which is arguably when most people play the game. When you tell someone that they're going to get something for free on Friday, they log on as soon as they get home, and find out that it's over already, they'll probably fell a bit sour even though they're technically not any worse off than they were before. That's just human nature.

The thing that I'm stressing here isn't that the world will end if it's not changed, or that as it exists now it's a slap in the face, or anything like that. I'm just saying that with a very tiny modicum of effort, the issue could be avoided altogether.