What will be the effect of Champions Online on the CoX market?

I think all the marketing for Champions online could lead to more people playing City of Heroes. Broadening a niche exposes all elements within that niche afterall.

I think we'll see a spike in subscribers in the first three months of CO play.

As for the affect on the market? Virtually none. The majority of them will all be newbies.

I was going to give CO a spin and see if I didn't find something I liked about it enough to make the switch from CoX, but then along came the announcements of Issue 16 and Going Rogue and that was enough to make me cancel my preorder of CO. I think this game has the base of a successful game and some exciting additions coming in the near future to retain the majority of it's base.

Sure, there will be some who leave, but I think that there is also a good influx of new players and more to come to keep things from going too crazy.

I predict that the lifetime subscriptions will be the downfall of CO.

Early Lifers will take the game for granted quickly. When the Devs over there run out of the initial cash inflow, then they will focus all of their programming on microtransaction content and box content.

This will leave the early Lifers feeling substantialy jilted, because they will have lost the feeling of the game being 'free'. (This may or may not be justified, but that's another thread.) They will stay connected, because it's 'free', but they won't embrace the game with loyalty. Thus, they will lose the early adopters, who are vital to a game's success.

All of the above is rampant baseless speculation, and I am most certainly wrong in most of it, but I don't care. Now when I get home, I will get me more purple enhancements and be a happy camper. WEEEEE!

I checked out the CO beta last night and I don't see it pulling players from our game who like to use our markets so I don't think CO will have any impact on the markets and since you cannot make villains there it should not have any impact on the Black Market.

I think' there'll be a temporary drop, but no Game Killer. (And thus no Market Killer.)

I've been putzing around with the CO beta. It's got some good points, but my impression is City of WoW. Not sure if that's good or bad. I can see myself hopping on and off now and again, a month here, a month there for variety, but not ditching my Barely Ebil Lvl 50's.

CoX's big strength has been in constant improvement, new material, new concepts. An example being when I left CoX a couple years ago because of the Grind Factor, and because non-decaying debt from a bad PuG night pretty much ruint my main for me. (Every time I'd re-subscribe, log in and see that gawdawful pile of debt it would really just P.O. me. I'd play an alt for a while, then dig up X-Com again or some other thing.) Then to my surprise and delight, they not only began decaying debt but installed rested xp, which is a great motivater to play a character through one of those level slumps. And what followed? Even more improvements, more new material.

The Devs clearly weren't insisting till blue in the face that a 45 minute corpse run was "what really makes the game fun, you love it, you just don't know you love it", they were taking player criticisms and suggetions seriously.

That's what kept bringing me back, and that's what will keep me around unless somebody decides to start phoning it in, it'll keep me around.

Now, Star Trek Online might take a sizeable bite. I can feed my Hero Jones here just fine, but it's freakin' Star Trek, and I was raised on Tribble milk and dreams of sexy green girls. I can afford to have 2 subscriptions running just fine, but a lot of people aren't in my financial shoes, so I can see some people wandering over to STO to get their Tribble Fix. But if CoX keeps up with the good material and innovations, I think it, and the Market will be around for quite a while.

I'm still a fairly new player, to this game and MMOs in general (wandering upwards towards ten months now.) So I wasn't present when all the drama apparently occured - Who are Emmert and Gecko, and what did they do to become so hated? I'm just curious.

As far as the actual topic, I'd guess that the effect on the market would be pretty minimal as well. The worst that could happen is some portion of the playerbase (who both like CO's gameplay and have shiny enough computers to actually run it) might leave permanently. More will look but not stay, and some might play both. Transaction volume might dip slightly, but I don't see how CO can have any drastic effects on the market here.

Spoke to someone with a line into CO last night.

Apparently they need to scrape up between 25 and 30 million in the next two years to be considered at break-even. That's 1.1-1.25 million a month, or a steady paying player base of 80-84,000 players (lifetimers would count as roughly half a player).

They could possibly do this. But I'm still somewhat skeptical they can actually pull it off. Even with a flood of trekkies buying the lifetime deal for the entry into STO.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I can not seeing it being a significant CoX killer. Console kiddies will probably play it for a bit and rapidly get bored. MMO players will find it thin on content and lacking any compelling game play after a couple of hours. Plus it is just so completely ugly! Oy!

City of WoW, or City of WoW's UI are appropriate descriptions of CO.

I find it hard to believe that having made one super hero MMO, somehow they made a worst one. I'm still boggling over how that happened.

The best feature of Champions Online is how quickly the uninstaller works.

I actually *gasp* like CO. Might sub for a month or two just to see how it ends up being at higher levels (they seem to have blocked off the 30+ zones during the open beta, so once I hit 30 that was about it other than PvP). Still, don't think it'll kill the game.

It's already been said (by who, I can't remember and I don't have the inclination to go back through thread and check) that expansion of the genre increases the visibility of other games within it. In short, what's to say that the release of Champions couldn't be a bit of a draw to the Superhero genre and more players to CoX? I guess it's just a matter of if there are more people drawn to CoX than leave it.

It also seems like there is a good amount of publicity being put into the release of the power customization in I16 and little bits here and there about the Going Rogue expansion. It's just a matter of maneuvering and continuing to expand and improve the game to keep people in it and I think the folks at NCSoft are doing a pretty good job at that. I know I'm not going anywhere, and from what I hear in the SGs I am a part of, very few of them are either.

I've been having a laugh reading their forums.

Between the community chatter and the gameplay footage on youtube, I'm not seeing anything that improves my low opinion of the game or its devs.

I think we'll see some effects on the Markets. Since I'm relatively new (to the forums) maybe I'm missing something that's old hat for you guys, so please check my logic here.

Who's likley to leave CoX for COL? Those who are flighty to begin with. Those who are only here to rack up some 50s and move on. Those are also likley to be heavy users of AE for PLing. So we're looking at a disproportionate loss of AE PLers as compared to the general population, at least initially.

I couldn't help noticing that supply on the markets got a shot in the arm about 2-3 weeks ago. I think that coincides with high school and college-age players logging off in favor of school. I expect these players are also heavy users of the AE for power levelling, so we have a recent example of a drop in AE PLers = drop in market prices.

So as long as player losses are limited to people with a high tendency to jump around anyway, we should see another net drop in market prices. If COL somehow becomes a serious player magnet, all bets are off.

That make sense?

Discussing CO's impact on the in game market is a valid topic. Straying from that topic to discuss CO will get this thread moved to Comic Hero/Villain Culture. Comparing CO and CoH is not acceptable.

The rules are designed to contribute to a free and open exchange of ideas. Unfortunately threads which contain much direct comparison between the games devolve rather quickly into a free and open exchange of criticism and personal attack. Hence they are against the rules.

For the record, I'm not concerned with CO's release in regards to my market strategy. I'm going with a combination of buying recipes and crafting them (a.k.a. manual labor) and long term stocking for the next double xp weekend. My target goal is somewhere in the billion profit range, since I have a perma PA Ill/rad to finish and a soft capped nin stalker. These strategies are netting me a comfortable 100 million a week plus I am steadily filling up my reserves and setting up long term sales.

If I were concerned with CO causing any sort of market fluctuation or unpredictability, I would focus entirely on short term profit strategies and hold almost no inventory. Given what I'm seeing on the market this morning (I was away for the weekend, which seriously limited my profit) I'm guessing the majority of the ebil agree with my assessment because I'm seeing a lot of activity that indicates to me that others are doing some serious bulk purchasing or at least making significant market manuevers perhaps because of the increased price volatility since the last double xp.

Sorry if i let my earlier response drift into unseemly territory. I just had a very strong reaction to CO, and that bled over into my guess that the market wouldn't see any major effect from said game's launch.

I personally don't see it having a large effect on the market. As many others have said, even if we lose x people to CO, then that's x value lost from both supply and demand on average. I base this around my personal observation* that on the average people who supply the market also generate demand.

*These are simply my own observations and I realize that this is not always the case, however I feel that the amount people who only deal with one side or the other are statistically insignificant insofar as any actual changes resulting from a loss of people from that group.