Let Tankers be Tankers: Remove the Agro Cap

Perhaps the content from levels 15 to 45 is actually working for most people? I am sorry you skip right by it, I still find it enjoyable after nearly 5 years, and am glad they keep adding content in level ranges besides 45+, because it lets me level up different characters with a variety of experiences.

Since I alternate what content I do with which character, I can go months without doing many of the story arcs. This allows me to enjoy them again when I do finally get back around to them. Its a bummer that playstyle isn't for you, because it really works well at keeping things fresh for me.

I am glad CoH is still extremely successful because they make the game the way I enjoy playing it. It seems like it still has tons of stuff you enjoy as well, so I am not sure why you are going into an overblown and uninformed rant, that is not where you started out.

Play a game for what it is, not what it 'should' be.

You know, Kruunch, Vox has got you there.

This. I play more than tanks.

Its clear that some of the sort of people who'd like these changes sit on farm maps and powerlevel theirs and other peoples toons as a form of easy mode. Such people should ALWAYS have their requests denied.

So according to you, reaching L50 is the end of the game?

And you see that as a working model for a subscription based service?

Kali: Server pops and Jack Emerret's posts after release disagree with your numbers. Jack posted at the height of release (approximately six weeks after release or so) when CoH exceeded 100k subscribers, specifically as a refutement that lack of content was going to drive away customers. Since then and including City of Villains, server pops have never exceeded those post-release populations. So whatever the true release figures were, CoX has never exceeded those. If you take away trial accounts, I'd be very willing to bet that my numbers are closer then yours, but short of seeing their bookeeping I can't point to a source to corroborate this.

In any event this is all academic, as no MMO with the exception of WoW and EQ have exceeded post release numbers past a year after their release to my knowledge. If CoX were to flip a light switch on tomorrow and magically have a revamped game that hit on all cylinders, the likelihood is that it would only be enjoyed by those die hard players who have stuck it out. Unfortunately those die hards are becoming less and less as well.

What's left are small resource non-intensive tweaks and development to try and retain what subscriber base CoX currently has; re: the subject of the original post.

And some people should understand that if the most interesting content available to an MMO are player made farm maps, then the MMO really failed in the content department.

Quid pro quo.

I'm willing to bet that in any MMO, if you created a system where people could create their own missions, you'd see an explosion of easy content that gives the most rewards.

Don't blame the Devs for human nature.

Can you back this up with actual numbers, Kruunch, or are you just pulling your numbers out of your ***?

And if you think that Power Customization was a "non-intensive tweak", then I'm betting that BABs would love to have a word with you.

I understand that it works for you and for some of the other pundits on these boards and generally speaking people who are enjoying themselves don't want their boats rocked.

However I daresay you are not the majority. Can I *prove* any of these numbers I'm bandying about? As I've stated before, no I cant. And neither can you to the contrary. Nor do I feel the need to. This is not a trial and you do not have to be a particularly bright rocket scientist to see where this game has been and where its going. But from simple server pop data mining you can draw your own conclusions (unless you're going to posit that the overwhelming vast majority of subscribers to this game never log in ... ever).

As a commercial entity CoH works ... it supports a small in-house staff and returns a profit to the parent company. Extolling how long its been around is fairly disingenuous however since the market is replete with lesser MMOs who have survived for years. In fact there are free MUDs still in existence today after 15 years of continual service. The only thing that CoH proves by being in existence after 5 years is that it wasn't an out and out bust. Conversely that's a far cry from being a roaring success.

Contradicting yourself in the same thread (unless you were able to get from 1-50 in 7 hours pre-ED)?

The fact that you even bring up things like "epic fail" because someone doesn't fly through the game as fast as you shows this. I don't play this game to fly through it, I play this game to enjoy the experience. I guess if you've just been powerleveling and farming (which seems to be the case from your recollections in this thread) for the entire time you've played this game that would be your experience and you would think it was just a huge dig on me to claim that I didn't go as "fast" as you. It isn't.



It's quite clear that you are looking for a different game Kruunch. This game has NEVER been about end game and has always been about the journey. You obviously don't like that paradigm that is vastly different from a typical MMO and so therefore you complain and want to make it "easier" to power level all your characters up and even boast about it as if it is some great feat.

Level 1-50 in 7 hours isn't something to be proud of, it just shows that you do everything you possibly can do to avoid actually playing this game and have now perfected that to power yourself up in the quickest manner possible, and I'm not quite sure why you would bother anymore. If you find that fun, by all means continue to do so, but those of us who actually play the game (see I can turn it back on you since you already questioned it towards me) don't want to ruin our game so you can avoid the game at a faster rate.

Perhaps instead you should just move on to another game that has an end game that you can power yourself to and call it a day.

There's a reason why you don't see this feature in other MMOs ... and you just answered for yourself why.

And I don't blame the devs. I blame the direction of the management (Positron specifically here).

Why would you bring up such painful memories? Have we offended you in some way?

Apparently I shouldn't have brought it up since it is in fact an "epic fail".

I have to agree here. Repeatability is a major selling point for any MMO or any game for that matter. What's the attraction of end game content if you have to go through 49 levels of the same content over and over to get there? I think that is one of the reasons behind Super Sidekicking; to pull folks out of AE by making the regular content just as attractive as the AE farms without removing the option to power level yourself into a coma.


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A DA is capable of doing more, much more, depends on what AVs we are talking about but the real trick in teams is keeping them all and that makes dealing with so many pointless to me.

Well not quite.

Yeah, I never say this stuff if I haven't done my homework. There's a reason I produced specific numbers - it's because they're available.

Per NCSoft's Q3 2008 financial report, there were just under 125,000 subscribers in September, 2008. Per Positron, subscription numbers experienced a "significant uptick" after the addition of the mission architect.

In August 2004, NCSoft announced over 180,000 subscribers.

Also, every press release or other announcement from a publisher about subscription numbers explicitly excludes trial and inactive accounts.

It's not hard to find these numbers. Google is not an arcane technology hidden away for only the elite to use. Just look up "city of heroes" "subscriber numbers" or "population" and you'll find the number of subscribers at various points in the past five yearsdocumented.

Edited to point to the NCsoft quarterly reports, rather than wikipedia. Stupid clipboard.

From the Q3 2008 report, monthly access:

Sept 2006: 172,420
Sept 2007: 139,313
Sept 2008: 124,939

Going earlier, I can find December 2005 at 194,000 - notable as the first report after City of Villains was launched.

And with the blame game, no changes are likely to be made, and I would be grateful as its not "my needs" that I think off.

The Devs do have people who don't farm and who don't PL, who basically do not repeat content so that it is easy from being highly predictable and fast. They have not failed that. These are the people with the type of gaming spirit that all MMO creators compete for custom. No game would get far on doing the same thing over and over. It is by being without a wide variety of content to test characters differently that developers would show little sign of imagination, talent and or hardwork.

AE is meant to encourage peoples creativity but peoples abilities to challenge eachother and themselves. If you wade through each and every arc you should have a lifetimes worth of unpredictable content. People who cut their teeth on unpredictable content will always be the better gamers. If you choose to farm the same things all the time for an easy life then that is the character in you.

AE is a great idea but it just needs anything that can be exploited taken out and as much as people may not like it, asap, hopefully in a way that can auto adjusts peoples missions rather than break them.

I seen what looked like the Brute with 4 sonic and 4 bubble dispersion and G knows how much +Dam buffs on him running around followed by friendly NPCs who were obviously the buffers cleaning up lots totally and absolutely unchallenged, he probably had an SO build.

Wikipedia and Gamershell.com are your sources ... seriously?

Actually going over NCSoft's quarterlies (http://www.ncsoft.net/global/board/b...?BID=ir_public), it seems to neglect to mention any subscriber numbers for City of Heroes (anywhere I can find) and I've only ever heard CoH's subscribership numbers mentioned once by a dev (*the* dev in fact, Jack E.) and that was at 100k subscribers at release.

Also NCSoft has a bad habit of fudging their subscriber numbers. They routinely had claimed Lineage had held over a million subscribers when in actuality they had bundled a free trial of their game with the most popular ISP in Korea (think AOL of Korea) and counted anyone who signed up to the ISP as a game subscriber. In actuality (as best had been estimated at the time) Lineage never had more then 200k active subscribers at its height.

You were around for CoX ... do you remember server pops being at release populations much less past them? I sure don't.

*EDIT* - Just saw your other post ... my statement still stands (btw you're wong about MMOs not counting their trial subscribers ... even WoW was guilty of that).

You can't really blame him either simply because there's no blame to place. I doubt very seriously that AE was implemented with blinders on. Positron had to know that there would be a percentage of player base that would take advantage of the new system to power level their characters. He was probably also betting that there would be an equal or greater percentage that would use the Mission Architect to create new playable content, origin stories for their characters and any number of other narrative missions meant to be enjoyed solely on their merit rather than on their ticket or XP outlay.

What it comes down to in the final analysis is a numbers game. There are far too many people in the player base to effectively predict all of the ways that any new content or feature is going to be exploited so the developers do their best to plug obvious holes before release and then watch for new holes after the fact. Also realize that, despite individual opinions of it, power leveling is a valid play style within the MMO genre and as such the developers are not going to stamp out all the possible ways of doing so, only the most game breaking ones. This is not to say that I support power leveling, only that its continued existence is a form of validation and in some small way it is nurtured by game developers.



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Ok because I'm fairly interested now ... here is NCSoft's second quarter reports (PDF):

http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/prfi...B-ACCD3AC78E6A

On page 5 of the report it lists gross sales revenue broken down per game per quarter of 2009 in million (I believe?) of Korean Won.

According to that, the "spike" in sales occured in Q1 2009 (I12?) and not in Q2 2009 (which would have been when I14 with the MA released).

Total game revenue for Q1 (during the spike) was 6,837 million kwon.

Conversion for KRW (Korean Won) to USD (US Dollars) is by today's exchange rate roughly 1250 KWR to 1 USD.

That gives us a total sales for Q1 2009 of roughly $5.5 million dollars for the quarter or roughly $1.83 gross per month in that quarter. This would roughly translate into 122k subscribers *if* no other forms of income were to be taken into account. In other words, if they had not sold one game box, not one server transfer, not one character respec, not one booster pack, not garnered one royalty they could have possibly around 122k subscribers (as of Q1 which was their spike ... as of Q2 2009 they were down about 4%.

Now I don't know the break down of their game sales, so I couldn't intelligently comment but I'd be willing to bet that it lands under 100k subscribers (and this is at their "spike" I might add). Maybe not quite at the 50k I first thought, I'd be more willing to say around 80k during their spike ... close to maybe 65k I'd say now (yeah total guess but with a little more information to back it up).

If this were the case then he is tacitly approving the trivialization of the levelling curve that the AE system provides. However I don't think this is the case. The MA system (according to Arcanaville) was a watered down version of a new in-house tool designed to create mission content faster. My guess would be that the rolling out of the MA system was an experiment based on a tool that had already been developed which lead to a fairly easy development release for what they were releasing, while at the same time creating a buzz about a game that has in the MMO community, virtually fallen off the map.

Releasing the MA system rests squarely on his shoulder as should any of the blame for his short sightedness (or purposeful negligence) that are the short comings of the MA system.

That's regardless (and I don't doubt there are many more "quality" player missions then there are farms). While the system is interesting, the drawbacks of it are inherently obvious (trivialization of the level curve). There are easy fixes to this ... cap XP gains per map as they had to cap ticket gains per map (how this wasn't in at first I have no idea). Both actually would need to be capped at much lower then they currently are to bring them back in line with "normal" mission content.

While I agree that not every scenario can be predicted, its gross negligence not to see how the MA system could be abused. I mean without a shred of MMO experience you could see how the abuse might occur. Given a modicum of MMO experience, the current form of the MA is inexcusable.

Finally the whole power levelling, versus farming, versus "normal" game play is an absolutely idiotic distinction. These are labels we (the player base) have put on styles of game play, but they are *all* valid forms of game play within a given MMO. However when balancing the various aspects of an MMO, the developer must always balance to the highest common denominator. Failure to do so (as in the case of CoH) sees portions of the game trivialized which other players will soon come to spite (as evidenced by this thread).

The end result .... the MA system was a horrible implementation and only a lazy stop gap of an idea in terms of adding quality content to an established MMO. I *do* think player created content will be the next step for the next generation of MMOs ... I just don't think this particular version of it was implemented well for the current game of CoH.

The fact that MA farms are so popular shows how poor the rest of the content in the game is. You (the generic population on this thread) may not feel that way, but I have yet to run a waiting list for doing paper missions or Brickstown story arcs. I have a waiting list every night I run an MA farm ... *every* time.

They are better than your non-existent ones. Also, Learn2WWW. Wikipedia references NCSoft's IR site. Click the "IR Archive" link (left side menu), grab the report for the third quarter of 2008. Read it. For ease of use, here's the direct link to the ZIP file with the actual data. Page 16 of the PDF is what you want.

NCSoft's sales figures don't support these numbers. The descrepency I would think is that Page 16 only refers to access, which would mean trial memberships as well.

You may also want to check out this as a resource for garnering MMO numbers:

http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/...e-game-or-mmo/

Finally here is my post (2 up) that is what lead to my conclusions.