The dissatisfaction is far from widespread. There is some outrage: from about 10 people here, and from some who *have never posted before now*.
Any game around 100k is a great, successful game - track records of mmo's say that. This game ain't goin' anywhere. Right now, listening to the fools who are chanting DOOOOOM as loudly as they can is just a mistake.
There is no doom. There's merely a small issue on the way, before a very, very big expansion.
Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
Repurposed
only in that a few posters who are really angry are making over a hundred posts in threads. If anything i have seen a lot of old names and posters mentioning reactivating, and a number of globals that i havent seen light up in months to years have been green again in the last few days, so while thats all just anecdotal evidence, its worth more than a small handfull of posters who abused a specific aspect of the game and their dire predictions of doom. i see a sound and fury, ultimatly signifying nothing.
i5 actually had something I was looking forward to.
i15 doesn't come close.
"the reason there are so many sarcastic pvpers is we already had a better version of pvp taken away from us to appease bad players. Back then we chuckled at how bad players came here and whined. If we knew that was the actual voice devs would listen to instead of informed, educated players we probably would have been bigger dicks back then." -ConFlict
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I imagine the widespread player dissatisfaction
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Yeah, the widespread player dissatisfaction is imagined.
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
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I imagine the widespread player dissatisfaction
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Yeah, the widespread player dissatisfaction is imagined.
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I haven't even seen any indication that the players who don't visit the forums are aware there's anything to be dissatisfied over. I've seen one or two people in-game grump a little about losing Meow, and that's about it.
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
To play devil's advocate for a moment:
My sub dies again on Thursday and as per my location, I don't plan on returning until I-16 hits test.
I'm well know for taking breaks from the game, so this is nothing new.
But the question is "Why a break now? Didn't you just come back?" Yup. I dropped back in for I-14's freebie week and bought another month.
Then I-15 hit test and I saw nothing there of note. Having that land on top of my raised eyebrow at the mass bannings for the MA clusterfark made me say "hmmmm, think I'll come back later when things have calmed down again."
The point to this post? Disappointment may not always be expressed as "arrghh, doom, i hate this game, the devs are evil and monstrous fools, ARAHRGAHRGAH."
Sometimes, disappointment is a very quiet, "meh."
Looking forward to I-16! Because I like the devs and love the game.
Be well, people of CoH.
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The dissatisfaction is far from widespread. There is some outrage: from about 10 people here, and from some who *have never posted before now*.
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That's how I see it too.
For the past five years, people have been pointing out on the forums how the subscription numbers are decreasing. Yet five years later, those numbers are still relatively the same. As a game gets older, I expect it to gradually lose subscribers. All of the long-term games have fewer subscribers as newer and shinier ones are released.
I'm sure nobody expects any game to go on forever, so I don't understand why anyone would worry over the fact that one would eventually close.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
Don't let the forums ruin the game for you. The forums are just a bunch of loud people who like to complain and/or stir up trouble (Me included).
Ignore the banter and play the game. Much more enjoyable when people don't point out what they think is wrong 
Awwwww! I'm sure people will miss you, BillZ!
Maybe I should add your SR one-liner to my sig if there's still room....
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Back Alley Brawler
Did you just use "casual gamer" and "purpled-out warshade" in the same sentence?
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We all know that every negative comment represents a billion people. So if it is 10 posters that means 10 billion people are pissed.
On the flip side, really all the discussions are occuring between about 10 debbie downers and 10 dev apologists. Neither side can claim superiority outside of their own minds.
It isn't ED2.0 coming it is diminished returns. Just look to the pve idea test bed known as pvp. Diminished returns tackles all the problems the devs have been rumbling about.
Oh wait you mentioned DR lol. Ya, you aren't alone in thinking that along with all the good of GR will come a lot of "necessary reductions".
Pve'ers are going to scream bloody murder when DR hits them, just like pvp'ers did. It won't hit pve quite as hard though as the environment is less min-max by nature, but people will be PO'd for sure.
There is plenty to be positive about though DR makes pvp a LOT better.... <crickets>
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To play devil's advocate for a moment:
My sub dies again on Thursday and as per my location, I don't plan on returning until I-16 hits test.
I'm well know for taking breaks from the game, so this is nothing new.
But the question is "Why a break now? Didn't you just come back?" Yup. I dropped back in for I-14's freebie week and bought another month.
Then I-15 hit test and I saw nothing there of note. Having that land on top of my raised eyebrow at the mass bannings for the MA clusterfark made me say "hmmmm, think I'll come back later when things have calmed down again."
The point to this post? Disappointment may not always be expressed as "arrghh, doom, i hate this game, the devs are evil and monstrous fools, ARAHRGAHRGAH."
Sometimes, disappointment is a very quiet, "meh."
Looking forward to I-16! Because I like the devs and love the game.
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Now I don't feel so bad.
I did and am doing the same thing; came back for I14 after a month and a half off (although I only reactivated one account). I'm not impressed with I15, but that's because I was hoping for some more power proliferation.
After this run ends I'll be back for I16. I can use the summer off anyways...
Who do I have to *&^% around here to get more Targeted AoE recipes added?
Arc Name: Tsoo In Love
Arc ID: 413575
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The point to this post? Disappointment may not always be expressed as "arrghh, doom, i hate this game, the devs are evil and monstrous fools, ARAHRGAHRGAH."
Sometimes, disappointment is a very quiet, "meh."
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And because of the way you have chosen to express yourself, you will be missed if you don't return.
However I won't lose any sleep if I never see any of the "arrghh, doom, i hate this game, the devs are evil and monstrous fools, ARAHRGAHRGAH." crowd ever again.
Still feeling pretty down. As I like through the forums here, all the posts that actually discuss the game are commenting on things that are horribly wrong with it, how it will fail, and how much better Champions Online will be. Oh, and that i15 and the MA are failures and/or broken.
Don't even get me started on in-game, where when I try to form a team of people I don't know, I routinely get at least one, "Oh, this isn't an auto-sk to 50 farm? See ya." (Most of my SG friends have decamped to an new server for no apparent reason, where they tell me they spend all their time powerleveling.)
As I've said before, I suspect that i17 will see this game's last sunrise.
"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"
Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers
A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"
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Still feeling pretty down. As I like through the forums here, all the posts that actually discuss the game are commenting on things that are horribly wrong with it, how it will fail, and how much better Champions Online will be. Oh, and that i15 and the MA are failures and/or broken.
Don't even get me started on in-game, where when I try to form a team of people I don't know, I routinely get at least one, "Oh, this isn't an auto-sk to 50 farm? See ya." (Most of my SG friends have decamped to an new server for no apparent reason, where they tell me they spend all their time powerleveling.)
As I've said before, I suspect that i17 will see this game's last sunrise.
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I'd agree with anyone who says i15 is a small and stinky fish that should be thrown back. But this does not spell DOOM.
I think the Paragon Studio devs fall short of the mark about 9 out of 10 times, it is just amazing how they fail to choose the correct strategy over and over. But if we have our eyes open we see that this is a widespread phenomenon evident in all aspects of society: business, law, medicine, arts ... and so on. People just muddle through and enjoy the success of something going right about 1 in 10 times. In business, usually if a company survives past start-up it has developed a momentum and stability that requires some significant internal shake-up or extrinsic factor to bring it down. I doubt the other MMOs will provide this external factor, and ditto with the economic recession. It's more likely that the newbie MMOs will be weighed down by their own internal failures and not make it out of the start-up phase.
So ... did I out-pessimist you and yet provide you with some hope? lol
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Massive anger on the forum over game changes
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What did I miss? What changes are coming? I've been ignoring the Issue 15 Beta threads, is it involved?
Teams are the number one killer of soloists.
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Still feeling pretty down. As I like through the forums here, all the posts that actually discuss the game are commenting on things that are horribly wrong with it, how it will fail, and how much better Champions Online will be. Oh, and that i15 and the MA are failures and/or broken.
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Selective reader, I see. Only posts that agree with your gloom and doom are "actually" discussing the game. All the posts about people enjoying the MA don't count. After all, they're just "fanboys" right?
Judging from how much fun many of us are having in MA, the dev content, and so forth, the fact that a number of people are noticing an uptick in renewed accounts, and that superheroes seem to be flocking to Paragon City (based purely on anecdotal evidence, of course), there is little to really back up the gloom and doom.
Have the devs made some mistakes? You bet. So do devs in every game. I've seen gloom and doom posts with every change in the other MMO I play. I see tons of gloom and doom posts in another MMO's beta boards (made quite a few myself). It doesn't keep people from enjoying the games and the predictions haven't met with reality yet.
City of Heroes has a strong fan base that has weathered a lot, adapted, and still enjoy the game. The two "competitors" on the horizon focus on different areas of gameplay than CoH (and each other). I think this is a smart move on their part. It means they will each have their own niche and perhaps complement each other instead of killing each other.
Variety is good.
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Massive anger on the forum over game changes
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What did I miss? What changes are coming? I've been ignoring the Issue 15 Beta threads, is it involved?
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You should browse the i15 threads and decide for yourself.
I think it's safe to say, though, that however much outrage is expressed on the forums, for many players the coming changes are completely unimportant.
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I'd agree with anyone who says i15 is a small and stinky fish that should be thrown back. But this does not spell DOOM.
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This.
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Have the devs made some mistakes? You bet. So do devs in every game. I've seen gloom and doom posts with every change in the other MMO I play. I see tons of gloom and doom posts in another MMO's beta boards (made quite a few myself). It doesn't keep people from enjoying the games and the predictions haven't met with reality yet.
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For every doom and gloom there's always something out there that's a hell of a lot worse, sure Issue 15 is...well...as one person put it, a small stinky fish that needs to be thrown back (if only for a taskforce and strikeforce mission dialogue rewrite...) and the Issue does seem to lack the 'oomph' factor we (well I anyway) have come to expect from an issue.
Tell you who I feel sorry for...Star Wars: Galaxies...now THERE is a doomed MMO if ever I saw one...the NGE update didn't do themselves any favours and now Bioware (considered one of the best creators of RPGs with awesome stories) is going all out to develope a story focused Star Wars MMO and is essentially something that looks, smells, taste and probably feels better than anything SW:G could throw out any time soon to combat it.
Be thankful we're not in a SW:G situation with SW:TOR looming on the horizon...now that really would be a situation for doom and gloom for any long time players of SW:G...
Or we could be in an Age of Conan Situation, the game got an awful rep (to be fair, it was deserved) at launch and has bled subscribers ever since. While it may have more subscribers than we do...it's not holding onto them very well and it's very hard to shake first impressions even if they totally remade the game people would still stick to what they heard when it came out as a buggy awful mess...
Or worse yet...Hellgate:London (which really was truly bloody awful game...really shouldn't have spent money on it...) which has vanished completely (well apart from Korea, where a company has bought the IP lock, stock and barrel and said it'd never surface again in the west...).
So currently...no...unless somehow Issue 16 is the new NGE, I very much doubt we'll see a sudden and massive loss of subscribers....
Thank you all for posting (for the most part) positive comments. I recently saw someone arguing in another thread that "our community used to be good, but now it sucks." As long as you all are willing to post in threads like this one, I don't think that's true.
Thank you all.
"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"
Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers
A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"
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Awwwww! I'm sure people will miss you, BillZ!
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Don't worry, I'll pick up another rock in a moment.
You fool! Thats what he wants you to do.
Then when youre tired from missing him, he eats you!
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We all know that every negative comment represents a billion people. So if it is 10 posters that means 10 billion people are pissed.
On the flip side, really all the discussions are occuring between about 10 debbie downers and 10 dev apologists. Neither side can claim superiority outside of their own minds.
It isn't ED2.0 coming it is diminished returns. Just look to the pve idea test bed known as pvp. Diminished returns tackles all the problems the devs have been rumbling about.
Oh wait you mentioned DR lol. Ya, you aren't alone in thinking that along with all the good of GR will come a lot of "necessary reductions".
Pve'ers are going to scream bloody murder when DR hits them, just like pvp'ers did. It won't hit pve quite as hard though as the environment is less min-max by nature, but people will be PO'd for sure.
There is plenty to be positive about though DR makes pvp a LOT better.... <crickets>
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Which would all seem so relevant if everything you're moaning about in this post was new to i15. Or new at all. Hate to break it to you, but you're a couple issues off if you're trying to attribute any of your "points" to issue 15...
Isn't issue 15 adding the option to remove heal decay from arena matches or something? Effectively allowing you to repeal one of "new PVP's" least liked features? (Haven't checked this out myself, but a friend in game was talking about how this option was going to renew his interest in PVP...) 
i15 is not especially exciting to me, but i hardly consider it to be making the game worse.
tl;dr version: /jpowerranger
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
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I fully expect to see some form of the PvP diminishing returns added to all PvE encounters soon, as well as possible reductions in character attributes.
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Nope.
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As I've said before, I suspect that i17 will see this game's last sunrise.
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Not going to happen in any circumstance. Even if upcoming games do significantly impact our population, the game won't suddenly just keel over. It'll take some time, during which the devs will do absolutely anything in their power to keep things running.
We'll always have Paragon.
tl; dr version: Depressed poster looking to be cheered up.
Am I the only one who's strongly reminded of the Issue 5 era right now? Massive anger on the forum over game changes, frenetic developer work, and an expansion on the horizon?
I'm becoming more and more convinced that we'll see the same situation we saw in the i6-i7 period. I'm concerned that NCSoft expects big subscription increases based on the expansion. Frankly, I just can't see any expansion, update, patch, or change, no matter how fantastic, enabling the game to do more than hold the line in terms of subscriptions. We've been suffering a laudably slow bleed in subscribers for some time (or at least, we were up through the last quarter for which that information was released). While I hope all of the recent changes haven't turned that slow bleeding into a gushing artery, I still don't see how an expansion can bring in huge subscriber numbers.
I imagine the widespread player dissatisfaction doesn't help with the game's numbers, although the effect is probably less than what reading these fora would lead one to believe.
All of us who were around for the period after i6 remember what happened when the expected huge numbers didn't materialize: dev staff cuts and development reduced to a trickle. Frankly, I don't think the game can survive another blow like that, especially with its age and competition waiting in the wings.
Finally, I suspect that i16 will contain some game mechanic that creates even more anger among the players than the current MA fallout/i15-is-too-small/the-writing-is-horrible/what-have-you mess, just as the outrage over the Global Defense Reduction was nothing compared to the outcry over ED. Why do I think "ED 2.0" is coming? In an i15 beta discussion thread and several other places on the forums, we've heard rumblings from the devs about how groups, and buff stacking in particular, trivialize the content. I fully expect to see some form of the PvP diminishing returns added to all PvE encounters soon, as well as possible reductions in character attributes. If it eventually results in a more balanced, enjoyable game, this is good, right?
Personally, I'm not sure. I don't think a five-year-old game can survive the outrage and subsequent account cancellations this kind of change would create. It was okay to anger the playerbase when we had around 130,000 subscriptions and no competition in sight. I question its wisdom when subscriptions are closer to 100,000 or just below (THIS NUMBER IS PURELY GUESSWORK! NO JUSTIFICATION!), the game is older (meaning longtime subscribers are more bored and more ready to jump ship), and there are plenty of competing MMO's on the horizon (including one that sometimes seems as if its development team's main goal is to torpedo CoX, not produce its own work). I just don't think the game can take any more shocks.
So, please, I ask you, my fellow forumites, to tell me why I'm wrong to be this depressed about the game's future. Show me that there's still some positive feeling out there!
"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"
Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers
A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"