seebs

If it were a "pick any" option rather than hero/villain only, and only 400 points, I might get one or two.

Also, it sounds like you're a bit frustrated, which I can understand, but I urge you to consider a couple of things:
1. No one has ever referred to MMO forums as a reliable source for lucidity, let alone wisdom.
2. It may be that some consideration of presentation and framing could let you offer the same things in a way people liked.

I... I don't get it.

See. Prior to this change, if you wanted to play your characters in any way whatsoever you had to pay $15/month.

Now, you can play them without paying, but they aren't full-powered unless you're paying.

How is this worse?

FWIW, this doesn't work for me. I don't think I could articulate why at the moment, but using limited resources up makes me unhappy, and is a kind of antifun. I would be more likely to delete them, but even that makes me unhappy.

I would, quite seriously, much rather simply never acquire them. (Note that this correlates with my purchase thus far of roughly zero Super Packs.)

I actually don't exactly know, I just know that on some machines they don't glow for me and others they do. I don't know what the deal is; I assume it's a feature support issue or something. Ask in tech support, I bet someone will know.

Do other glowy costume parts (like the imperial defense gloves and boots) glow for you? If not, it's a rendering issue.

Could you clarify whether you think both CCGs and slot machines are predatory, or just one, or what?

I guess the reason I have a hard time buying this is simply that the entire MMO industry is built around patterns known to be addictive, such as random drops. Like, say, the way you get recipes occasionally and sometimes they're really valuable. That's addictive.

I think of "predatory" in the sense of predatory business practices, where the nature of the thing implies exploiting a weakness or vulnerability and misleading people. Predatory lending typically involves lying to people about the deals they're being offered, or at the very least misleading them.

I don't feel predated on here. They've got something on offer. I could get it but don't currently really want to.

Well, at the very least, that there's a significant pool of people to whom that's the only interesting part.

Everything else they produce is just inf to me. I don't need inf. The costume pieces are the only part of this I might spend real money on.

Except that it might be more complicated; for instance, it might be that the total dollar cost of buying the packs is higher, but that for many users, the EO pieces are not the sole thing of value, while other users care more about them. Different users have different values.

It might be, but...

There are clearly people who bought super packs only because they wanted the costume pieces. If those people are then offered a different way to get those pieces, they might well be upset because they were induced to buy a thing they didn't want as part of a thing they did want. Especially if some of them had to buy a lot of packs to get the items, which will have happened.

As long as there's no guarantee of success, some people will spend more on the super packs than it would have cost to get things separately, and if the separate option later becomes available, those people will be infuriated.

Having both options up front might well have worked, but it would have taken away one of the big draws super packs were offering. Part of the point of that draw is that a lot of people wouldn't buy super packs without some kind of exclusive, but once they've bought a couple they may decide it's fun and buy more. It's an inducement.

Exactly! When people evaluate outcomes, they don't value probability linearly; something 95% likely is not worth 95% as much as something 100% certain. (You can debate whether it's rational or not, but it doesn't matter; this is how humans are.)

If there existed an unambiguous N such that, for N super packs, I would be certain to have the whole costume set, then that would be a purchase I could evaluate and decide whether or not I liked the price. As is... Nope.

Two separate questions:

1. Effect of originally making the EO pieces available separately: Fewer angry players, but a lot of people not buying super packs who might have otherwise.
2. Effect of now, after the fact, making the EO pieces available separately: Tons of angry players who bought super packs only in order to get those pieces.

When you phrase it like that, and I think about the store implementation, it suddenly seems really plausible.

I have no idea whether the price on those is reasonable. I dislike gambles in general, so I'm not buying super packs, but all that means is that I haven't got a reasonable basis for an opinion as to what price would be reasonable.

Wow, that's an amazing coincidence. For some strange reason, I just bought the Gunslinger costume pack on both accounts. And that's gotten my points total starting to edge down such that I am thinking maybe of buying more points.

Seriously: Thanks. Thanks a kerjillion.

On the rare occasions when I'm up to teaming, I pretty much use the same kinds of rules.

My basic protocol:
1. Will invite anyone who asks if there's openings.
2. If someone asks a question, I say "fine by me". I don't always read the question.

Of course not.

There's just a limit to how much they can add without an incredibly huge amount of work.



Long story short, the problem of making significant overhauls to an existing, live, code base is not a new one. It can be done. It's usually impractical, but in the case of an MMO it may be justified simply because you have such huge motivation to avoid splitting things into a new game. And yet, the cost differences are huge.

If you set out to build, from scratch, a game that had all the features of CoH, plus some revisions to allow some cool new stuff, it might cost $N. Converting CoH to allow that new stuff might cost $N*5, or more. And the first $N*4 of it might happen with no user-visible improvements at all if you tried to do it as a single development effort. You might be able to break it down into smaller chunks with visible output... and that might knock you up to $N*10.

But that could be profitable if the game is doing decently and your community is large enough to keep, which IMHO this one is.

No one said it was difficult.

It's annoying.

Interruptions in a planned activity are annoying far out of proportion to how difficult they'd be otherwise. Okay, thought experiement time!

You are sitting doing nothing. The phone rings. You pick it up and answer it. No problem. Everything's fine.

Now, try this instead. You're reconciling bank statements trying to figure out a small discrepancy. You've got three pages of bank statements and your bookkeeping software open and you're doing a line-by-line trying to track something down. The phone rings. You pick it up and answer it. You are, assuming you're a reasonably normal human, irritated.

Why? Because the phone was an interruption.

On ordinary forums, which are run sanely by people who have a basic background in how security works, you log into the forum, you get your cookie, and you are now able to use the forum without interruption. If a friend gives me a link to a thread on a vB forum, I click on the link and end up in the thread.

Here, I get a login page instead. I have a clear task in mind, and that task is not logging in. The login is an interruption, and that makes it annoying.

It's not a question of easy/hard. It's a question of pleasant/unpleasant. Every time I come to these forums, my experience starts as an intrusive reminder that ncsoft has sworn blood vengeance on all forms of sanity and competence. I have to deal with that, and placate their cargo cult misunderstandings of security, before I can begin chatting with fun people about a fun game.

So if I just wanna kick around for a bit, read funny posts, post comments... I go to some other (usually non-MMO) forums, rather than the CoH forums. Back when the login stuff was less annoying, I liked to hang out here because I mostly like the community and the sense of humor.

Net result: I log in less, and it is less obvious to me why I'm paying for a sub. My impression of all-things-CoH is tainted by being (temporarily) thwarted every time someone sends me a link to an interesting post in the beta forums.