Don't spend City of Heroes money elsewhere NCsoft!

This is a quote from Avatea on the EU forums with regards the upcoming paid for additional MA slots.

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I know how strongly a lot of you feel about micro-transactions, and if I weren't part of the team I would probably feel the same way.

I want to say this though. This is our opportunity to make sure that we get enough funding for our ongoing and future development. Bear in mind that any money an NCsoft game makes serves to finance all NCsoft games, not just ours since we are not an independent game developer.


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Sorry NCsoft, this may be me being selfish but if I buy a Booster pack, respec recipe, rename token or now additional MA slots I don't want that money being spent elsewhere.

NCNC was renamed Paragon Studios to show it's new design focus on City of Heroes so why on earth is money that players of said game being lumped into a big pool and then dished out accordingly.

Is the money I spend buying booster packs going towards the marketting campaign for Aion, a game I have no interest in. I understand it's one big business but I didn't mind buying the booster packs because I thought it was all going back into helping City of Heroes develope and progress, to help fund the future of City of Heroes.

Of course perhaps what I'm not seeing is that it could go both ways, is the money Aion is currently earning in Korea being soley dedicated to Aion or are we seeing those rather large funds being shifted to Paragon Studios?

Hmm a difficult subject that we definitely need to know more about.

'Cause.... once you give them your money, it's now their money and they can do with it what they want?

Yes but I really would prefer to see money spent on City of Heroes going back into helping City of Heroes develope further and progress rather than being spent on say Guild wars or Aion, which is what I thought buying things like Booster packs would do.

As I said above, is the money from Guild Wars and Aion being partly funnelled into the development of City of Heroes, it's something we don't know but I do hope is the case.

Hopefully it's not being dished out on a subscriber numbers (or in Guild Wars case, expansion bought numbers) basis, City of Heroes isn't NCsofts big earner and Aion or Guild Wars 2 would probably be taking the lions share of funds if that was the case. While I don't think City of Heroes should take the lions share I hope it's being dished out more equally.

I really like steak. I hate tofu, though.

The grocery store I buy my food at sells both.

Do you honestly think it's reasonable for me to bang on the manager's door and demand that, because I hate tofu, that any money that I spend on steak should be used to further enhance the store's stock and inventory of steak, and that it specifically not be spent on maintaining the store's tofu stock?

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City of Heroes isn't NCsofts big earner

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O RLY?

can i say it? can i say it?

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

stop being paranoid. if they didn't have enough money they wouldn't have hired several people for developement. and with everything they are doing in the future i doubt that there is alot of money going else where.

i agree with this.

As i mentioned somewhere else, i think the infos about the game are hardly displayed to the gamers.

Either for ingame problems and/or definitions (the whole anti farm thing, is an exemple... amongst many others)

Or for such matters as the one you mentionned.

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I really like steak. I hate tofu, though.

The grocery store I buy my food at sells both.

Do you honestly think it's reasonable for me to bang on the manager's door and demand that, because I hate tofu, that any money that I spend on steak should be used to further enhance the store's stock and inventory of steak, and that it specifically not be spent on maintaining the store's tofu stock?

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Yes but said store hasn't renamed it's Steak section "Paragons of Steak" with it's own little kiosk and additional attendant to run it , made a big show and tell of it to all the customers and even mentioned that thanks to the upsales of steak, they've got new types of steak in (i.e. The number of takeups on the wedding booster pack allowed the VEATs to be moved forward an issue from 13 to 12) but then all of a sudden the store is spending that steak money on Tofu.

As people KEEP missing out in my posts, we don't know enough, if money that Guild Wars and Aion is currently earning is being partly funnelled towards helping their AAA western title City of heroes to develop and progress. If that is the case, I've got no beef (sorry) with it, if the funds are only going one way (from City of Heroes towards their Aion marketting department for when it comes to the West) then there is a problem.

While I doubt the devs or mods can answer this it would be nice to know that as a whole NCsoft is just as focused towards making City of Heroes a truly epic success as they seem to be focused on making Aion appeal to western audiences.

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I really like steak. I hate tofu, though.

The grocery store I buy my food at sells both.

Do you honestly think it's reasonable for me to bang on the manager's door and demand that, because I hate tofu, that any money that I spend on steak should be used to further enhance the store's stock and inventory of steak, and that it specifically not be spent on maintaining the store's tofu stock?

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If you were willing to pay enough, I am sure the store would find a way to accomodate you.

You are buying a booster pack not stocks in the company. You have no say so how the company spends the money. Just how big business works.

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Yes but said store hasn't renamed it's Steak section "Paragons of Steak" with it's own little kiosk and additional attendant to run it , made a big show and tell of it to all the customers and even mentioned that thanks to the upsales of steak, they've got new types of steak in (i.e. The number of takeups on the wedding booster pack allowed the VEATs to be moved forward an issue from 13 to 12) but then all of a sudden the store is spending that steak money on Tofo.

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Uhhh... just a second.

It's got a big sign over it that reads "butcher". The people who work in that section work nowhere else in the store, and wear special aprons with their name tag and position on it. They do advertise when they have specials both on price and on uncommon merchandize. When a new product hits the shelves they market it in both flyers and in-store.

So, yah, actually... it does. And I think you'll find that most decent sized grocery stores are the same.

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As people KEEP missing out in my posts, we don't know enough, if money that Guild Wars and Aion is currently earning is being partly funnelled towards helping their AAA western title City of heroes to develop and progress. If that is the case, I've got no beef (sorry) with it.

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They have a product, you have money. They want your money and you want their product. Once they have your money and you have their product it's not longer your money and no longer their product, it's THEIR money and YOUR property.

If you don't want the product, don't give them your money. If you feel that you have a moral obligation to make sure that any money that you give any vendor for any given product is used in an ethical or moral way, then act on that.

You don't, however, have the right to tell them how to spend money that now belongs to them.

Which I will be, I wont be purchasing any more MA slots, Respecs, Renames and despite how much I want the SUPERSCIENCE booster pack, I'm now not going to be buying that either.

And technically Booster packs are still THEIR product even after they've been bought, it's not like Steak where I can do whatever the hell I want with it when I get it home, it's applied to my account, I quit the game, that money is gone for good. With Steak atleast I'd have had an enjoyable meal out of it.

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The amount of money that CoH earns through microtransactions, subs, etc. is tracked. I'm certain that investment NCSoft makes in CoH takes into account the amount we pay. It makes little sense from a business perspective to wall off funds in the way you suggest.

The staffing up that NCSoft did for Going Rogue probably couldn't have happened if CoH had to rely solely on its own earnings stream. This is all speculation, of course, but I do feel confident in saying that I feel that NCSoft has treated us well as CoH players.

Thank you Gecko, that was the kind of answer I was hoping for not some snarky response about steak and such.

I will be the first to admit that we are treated well, even if Issue 15 is a bit of lame duck, we do get vastly more dev contact than almost any other MMO I've ever been with, they (for the most part anyway) listen to what the players have to say and I do suspect that NCsoft is gearing up to really make a massive push for putting City of Heroes back in the limelight with Going Rogue.

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Just how big business works.

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Or small business, or a barter, or any kind of mutually voluntary transaction, really.

Look at it this way - you like to drive pick-up trucks, and that's all you buy. You want Hypothetical Motors to put all the profits from your purchase of Hyprolet pick-up trucks, and the profits from you taking your Hypo-10 to the dealer for servicing, and the profits from the Hypo Motors floor mats and mud-flaps you bought into making newer and fancier pick-up trucks.

Then the price of gas goes up and people stop buying as many pick-up trucks. The public wants economy cars and hybrids instead. Unfortunately, Hypothetical Motors listened to you and didn't invest any money in developing economy cars or hybrids, so their business drops off precipitously. So now, despite your undying loyalty to Hypothetical Motor Corp., they are filing for bankruptcy and are likely to be out of business by the next time you need a new pick-up.

The moral of the story is, diversification is good, and a single basket containing all of ones eggs is bad.

Also, if NCSoft launches the next WoW mega-game, wouldn't you like to think some of the profits it generates will be invested in CoX?

While openly admitting that NCsoft has the right to do with their money whatever they want, I hope that NCsoft has -- frankly -- smartened up enough to have noticed that they had been siphoning money out of City of Heroes to fund the development of other games, ever since they laid off everybody but the Freem 15. And that doing so has been, frankly, disastrous.

A capsule history of NCsoft and MMOs: as people were getting tired of Everquest, three replacement MMOs came out, EQII, WoW, and Lineage. And frankly, WoW won. Won so big that even in Lineage's target market, Asia, people are quitting Lineage to play WoW "because that's where everybody is." It doesn't even have that much to do with how good the three games are, it's just how the market shook out.

So NCsoft invested all of the revenue from Lineage into Lineage II, in the frankly arrogant belief that they could out-Blizzard Blizzard on Blizzard's home territory, and in the deranged belief that they could sell millions of copies of a game that could only run on a couple of thousand PCs in the whole world because of its hardware requirements. (What? It worked for Doom. Once.)

Fortunately, they hedged their bet with a small investment in this game ... which has turned out to be the only profitable game they've had since Lineage I. They concluded, somewhat rightly, that part of this game's success was because it was moving out of the D&D knockoff arena and into an underserved niche. But instead of continuing to invest in this game in the hope of growing the superhero MMO player base to the size of the D&D knockoff MMO market, they decided instead to take the profits from this game, and the declining profits from Lineage and Lineage II, and funnel them all into a long, long series of new MMOs in underserved niches: a parody MMO, a Car Wars MMO, a Starship Troopers MMO, and a battlemech MMO.

I don't entirely blame them for this, but it's time to face facts:

1) Blizzard owns the D&D knock-off market for as long as they want.

2) This is a really, really bad time to be developing new MMOs. Art budgets are so through-the-roof that it is impossible to develop a new MMO to today's art demands and actually make money with it.

There wasn't any fundamental reason why Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, or even X-teel couldn't find customers. All three were very highly awaited by legions of eager customers, and if they had been able to impress those customers, any one of them could have been a million-customer or more game. Except that they all blew through their entire development budget, and then kept on spending money without slowing down, without even finishing the art assets, leaving the game play to be cobbled together on the cheap and never even minimally tested, and that is why none of those games were any fun to play.

And ironically, right now, NCsoft owns the superhero MMO genre as thoroughly as Blizzard owns the D&D knockoff MMO. There are three other companies out there that have figured out that somebody is going to make huge money in this niche. Which is why they're spending money like water to try (already completely unsuccessfully in Marvel Entertainment's case) to rush out a competitor to City of Heroes.

But they're 100% doomed to failure, if they can't solve the same budgeting problems that have killed just about every MMO that has come out since WoW. The only way that City of Heroes can fail to expand to the size of WoW (or even bigger, since superheroes are way, way bigger than generic fantasy right now), the only way it can continue to shrink like it has been ever since issue 6, the only way any of those other superhero MMOs can turn this game into Everquest and themselves into the WoW of superhero MMOs, is if NCsoft loots this game of money to pour into yet another guaranteed-fail MMO (*cough* Aion *cough*) and lets it die on the vine.

Paragon Studios knows what they need to do to make this game a mass-market success. They also know they just plain don't have the money to go back and clean up older parts of the game that suck, that new people keep falling into, concluding the game sucks, and walking away from. So they do something much, much cheaper by way of customer retention, like two five-mission story arcs or task forces every four months, when doing things like cleaning up the level 5-20 hero contacts would take much more manpower, manpower they don't have. Manpower they don't have because NCsoft doesn't have any faith in this game, they think (again) that they're going to have better luck with a grindy PvP game with such over-the-top hardware requirements that it can only run on a couple of thousand PCs in the whole world. And because that other game's hardware requirements are so high, so are its art development costs. And so ... City of Heroes continues to wither.

Maybe I'm wrong. Paragon Studios is up from 15 to 45 people. You'd think that 45 people ought to be able to produce, or clean up, content about twice as fast as 15 people could. Maybe what NCsoft has invested in Paragon Studios is enough to make this game the WoW of superheroes, and maybe they can afford to gamble the excess on other games. Maybe.

But given the track record, both of NCsoft and of the industry as a whole, I think it's a crazy thing to bet on.

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Don't panic. I suspect this is a lot more innocent than it sounded. I seriously doubt that CoH money is going directly to, for example, the Aion team, the Lineage team, and so on.

However, I am pretty sure that some percentage of CoH money goes back to NCsoft corporate into a general pot of money they maintain for handling various administrative functions, such as paying investors, maintaining the web sites, paying the CEO, marketing, fulfilling debt obligations, R&D on new games, etc.--stuff that benefits all of their games.

After all, you can't really develop any new games if you don't have any money, unless you go out and borrow it. And borrowing money (and paying interest on it) when you have an existing revenue stream to draw upon is generally a boneheaded business move.

If it makes you feel any better, rest assured that CoH does indeed benefit from the money that Lineage/Lineage II makes for the company. Without that money, the game would never have been developed, or at least if it were (since Cryptic was the company that developed it, not NCsoft), it would never have been marketed like it was or reached the audience it did. Also rest assured that City of Heroes does make money, and as a revenue-generating source of income, I don't think they'll let it be underfunded anytime soon.

The more money we spend on City of Heroes, the more money NCsoft will see fit to put back into it. It's as simple as that.

Stop bringing logic into paranoid conspiracy threads Backfire, what did I tell you about that???

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Stop bringing logic into paranoid conspiracy threads Backfire, what did I tell you about that???

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I can't really tell anymore.

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Also pointing out that, that if you go to NCSoft.com and follow the link to Investor Relations, you'll get a lot of the info regarding earnings, and I do think they break down what has been earning them what.

And agree with the general 'don't panic' sentiment. Any business that does not invest in their best products will not last long. It would be bordering on silliness to think that NCSoft will slow funding to Paragon Studios anytime soon, what with these packs and a new boxed expansion coming.

I dunno... I'd like to continue to support this game, and by extension the company that the development team is a part of, as incentive for them to continue spending development time and money on it. Like EG said... I'm sure they track this kind of stuff, and as long as it stays popular, I sincerely doubt they will have any reason not to sink at least a percentage (perhaps a majority percentage) of the money this games makes back into it.

And if they continue to produce quality products that I may enjoy just as much (potentially - Aion looks pretty nice, and I have no complaints at all about Guild Wars for the most part. Infact, the only NCSoft property I ever disliked was Lineage II), then I can see where that would be a worthy investment for my dollar.

P.S.: Dear NCSoft. Just tell me how many small children and/or animals I must kill to get Blade and Soul over here. Please, for the love of all that is holy, do not leave us out of that one.

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Aion looks pretty nice

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It does, but the GameGuard rootkit -- ahem, "Anti-cheating measure" -- is something of a deal-breaker for me.

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Aion looks pretty nice

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It does, but the GameGuard rootkit -- ahem, "Anti-cheating measure" -- is something of a deal-breaker for me.

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Any particular reason? For the sake of curiosity.