UberGuy

I do all of this except for keeping consistent column order across characters. I have no idea why I'm OCD enough to maintain internal consistency in the tray on a character, but not column order. I suspect it has to do with a mix of not actually clicking on insps that often (I usually hit a keybind), meaning where they are on-screen is less critical, and just plain not using them that often.

Still, I bet this makes some people's OCD flare up just thinking about my doing it like that. I kind of does even for me.

Wow, you so do not get other people's perspective at all.

50 is not "the game". Forever and a day, CoH has provided an environment where the point is the journey. 50 has never been the end-all, be-all.

I play 50s most of the time. I happen to enjoy that most of all. So I get where you're coming from. But I enjoy seeing how my characters change when I add one new power, or three new slots. I enjoy seeing what they can do against something new that they've never fought before, even it its a very prosaic fight nothing like soloing a GM.

So I get that other people might prefer the latter progression experience more than the "haha, I am god here!" experience of being a tweaked out 50. And the game should allow both to be fun and balanced. We can't ignore the pre-50 game, because for some people, it's the part of the game that's most enjoyable.

That's only even possible or reasonable because the devs never assumed the degenerate case that 50 is where the game really starts. That concentrates too much of the player base there and screws the people who actually want to experience the progression through lower levels.

So while I can see your viewpoint, I also see that you're showing terrible, blinders-glued-shut ignorance of other viewpoints. You're allowed to like being a tricked out 50 more than any other state in the game, but you don't get to ignore that other people like other parts of the game. Fortunately for everyone, the devs never really saw things your way, and that's why the game was fun for both types of people, or those like me who enjoy both.

I find it curious that you assert that people refuse to accept it as one of the reasons. I don't think I've seen anyone assert it couldn't have contributed. The counter arguments have been that it was not the single "death knell" factor that your OP suggests. Several posters, myself included, have suggested that it may have gotten some people to leave when considered on top of other factors, such as burn-out, dissatisfaction with prior releases, the economy, etc.

When people refer to something as the straw that broke the camel's back, the implication is, in fact, that the straw had a role in the back breaking. It just wasn't the main factor. There may not have even been a main factor - just a really big pile of straw.

Not entirely, but that's certainly a big part of it. Green gets cleared noticeably faster when "team Jax" is present, for example. Stuff like that generally takes a few minutes off the whole raid, but when we're talking 20-30 minutes, a few minutes gets to be a bigger part of it. But when it takes us 30 minutes of grinding Monsters just to get Hami to show up, stuff like that matters less.

(Of course, how fast we grind out Monster defeats sometimes depends on who brings what to the raid, too.)

Nosir. They were going to let some other content, like the DA arcs, give it out, but nothing had happened yet.

So you had already made up your mind about the answer to a question you asked in the initial post. You asked that question, and when people responded in ways that didn't affirm the answer you hold true, you've debated with them. You apparently don't even accept the possibility that the truth is more nuanced than "it's the AE's fault". So why did you bother asking a question, again?

As others mentioned, you're looking at this through the lens of your personal experience. I know no players who left due to the AE. Hell, I actually think some of them probably started playing more thanks to the farming, though I certainly don't think that was typical. I like CoH's content, but was never terribly worried about the pace we got more stories - "content" in the form of new powersets and new TFs (and later, trials) was far more attractive to me. I had plenty of friends who messed with the wild exploits and then only dabbled in them - while "everyone" was supposedly off PLing, we were mostly running TFs together.

I get why you didn't like the AE, even if I didn't have the same reaction. I don't doubt some people left when it happened. I seriously doubt they were totally happy with the game - the AE was just another disappointment for them (not for me). You can't point at it and say "that's the reason!"

It's like saying someone died of the flu when they had an immunosuppressive disease. Yes, the flue might have pushed them over the edge, but that flu wouldn't have killed a healthy person.

No, because I shouldn't have been insulting anyone.

Read what I said.

Thank you for supporting the point you seem to have overlooked. You didn't quit because of the AE. You quit because the AE was the successor to something else you already were unhappy about.

Here's the thing, from my perspective. If you left the game over what other people were doing, and you had no access to players who weren't doing that, then I don't think the AE was why you left. It may have been the proverbial straw that broke your back, but I am incredulous that it solely was the reason a bunch of people left.

Is it possible that a bunch of people were hanging on by a thread and what they saw in the AE pushed them over the edge? Yeah, based on other posts in this thread, that might be reasonable. That would make the AE's execution (and the timing thereof) unfortunate, but I think would be a lot less damning of the AE itself.

Quitting a game like CoH over the rash of AE farming if nothing else was bothering you seems extraordinarily shallow and childish, especially knowing that it wasn't as if the devs intended for it to be a PL tool - and they were abundantly clear about that in statement, if not in immediate action. No matter how poorly they executed their punishments and nerfs, I was never unclear about how they wanted the AE used (or not used), and I found ludicrous the people who tried to defend their farming, even though personally had zero problem with them doing it.

Since I choose not to conclude that a significant proportion of our players are shallow and childish (perhaps a poor decision, but one I stand by), I don't accept that this alone explains any exodus.

See comments regarding price cuts.

Movie attendance is not the same as movie profits.

What did they do to prices in that period? The 2nd article I linked above suggests that movie ticket prices dropped by 1/3, while your numbers suggest attendance increased by around 1/2.

I hardly compelling to firmly conclude that "people flock to movies in downturns" when there are significant price cuts involved.

Reference.

Schatz, Thomas. (1988). The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company.

They were. It was in flight when the studio was closed on 8/31.

You still require dollars to spend.

I just don't buy it. If I had a serious downturn in income, video games would be the very first thing to go.

And actually, that makes me think of something about our playerbase.

If I had to characterize CoH, it would be the MMO that people who don't play MMOs do play. That could factor in to the reaction of its playerbase to the Great Recession relative to those of other MMOs - if they aren't the sort of people who would have picked up a monthly sub before they found CoH (something I constantly read here on the forums), maybe they are more willing to drop it when times get tough, irrespective of how much "entertainment per dollar" it may offer.

You have to have money to spend on them.

The only way increased revenue during such intervals makes sense is if those pursuing the escapism are those in careers or income brackets that are free to increase discretionary spend.

This isn't speculation. Discussions of the downward spiral of this and prior recessions regularly cite how even just the concern of job loss causes people to cut expenditures on non-essential services, which causes further job losses. Video games are the epitome of "non-essential services".

It seems to me that a game's performance during a recession is a function of the economic demographics that plays it. A game with a more blue collar workers might perform poorly compared to one with white collar ones, for example (not that white collar jobs didn't suffer in the Great Recession). I see no reason to assume that, as a proportion of its players, CoH would have a larger concentration of players more prone to suffer in the recession than, say, WoW, but honestly, I'm more likely to draw that conclusion than to assume the AE killed it. Seriously, other than these inferences from that revenue chart, I saw no evidence of that.

The claims that the game started depopulating are not universal. No such thing happened on my home server.

Not a CMoA, but something pretty funny that this reminded me of - I was on a Keyes trial a while back where we were going for the badge where you get Anti-Matter close to defeat but don't actually kill him (since this fails the trial at that point). People weren't listening and got him far too close to zero, and the designated aggro tanker killed him with a Perfect Zinger proc in Taunt. (We totally did not blame him for the fail, btw. It was laid at the feet of the folks who scrapper-locked AM nearly to death.)

If you think anyone dedicated to PvP is going to be satisfied with that, I don't know what to tell you. Yes, he was cheating. I honestly don't know any competitive PvPer who wasn't grinding out or marketeering stuff to compete in PvP. Yes, you technically could play on SOs. You were a fool to try and compete with SOs.

That's what I mean about cutting to the chase.

He was accused of having no skill because he cheated in PvE to get 50s and probably IOs. It does not follow that he had no skill in PvP. I don't know the guy, maybe he didn't have any skill, but you can't logically conclude that from the fact that he cheated in PvE.

I'm sorry, I don't buy this for ... even a second is too long. This was a recession like no recession since video games came into existence. Nothing was "proof" against this.

The last time I checked, not failing counts as "resistant". Major games didn't shut down. They did suffer reduction in subscriptions or spend (for F2P ones).

Based on ... the notion that games are "recession resistant"? How do you quantify what revenue drop would make sense for that for the largest economic decline since the Great Depression?

I'm completely open to the idea given in other posts above that it was a combination of the economy and the arrival of other games, if the quarters line up. I think the idea that the scale of revenue loss due to AE would compare to either of those is fairly silly.