Reduced XP for Freakshow now

inorite! it took me for gawdamned ever!

While that's nice, they didn't back in the day.

Actually this spawned a whole big discussion between my wife and I. Our conclusion was:

1. The game started with hunter/gather (go after existing resources -- this is your "ranching". Hunt for mobs, gather for blinkies. Alas Kora Fruit, we don't miss you.)
2. The game moved to animal husbandry (ranching for reals!) with the Rikti portals and behemoths -- using critters you find to generate more of themselves.
3. Now we're in the farming era, where you go from nothing to something via AE.

Somehow an appropriate progression.

Well, when you say it like that...

Something steampunkish?

This.

=P

The point in my earlier post was simply that while "players haven't left the game in droves because of various nerfs". The nerfs from 05 on also haven't "added any subs since the first big push to reign in player behavior began."


2005 alone gave us, among other things, HO nerf, agro cap, global defense decrease, enhancement diversification, mission timers, increased difficulty of Shadowhunters wolves, burn nerf (justified imo), sewer trial/av/gm/glowie xp nerf (all justied, again imo), nerfs to invul/regen (perpetual regen nerfs ).
Enormous changes were also made to pve powers in 05 for pvp, a few of which were highly unpopular (more powers had their effects boosted then reduced).


"Has the player base increased since then..?"

CoX had a peak subscriber base of 197.000 plus in 2005, there were just under 125,000 in September, 2008, the last quarter before ncsoft ceased to disclose their quarterly sub numbers.
CoH market share through the years.

As Bill points out, server population ebbs and flows, usually increasing with each issue release. But to say server population hasn't decreased since it's peak in 2005, is baseless in fact. And just silly.


Like I said, It's an aging game, players haven't left in hordes solely over various nerfs. But nerfs historically haven't driven subscribers back since the "player behavior campaign" (my term) began in 2005, either.
Just as diminishing returns for PvP, haven't had the desirable effects on that population since i13.

Logical statement? Certainly not to some.
O-\-<]:

I thought that's what the apocalypse looked like?

What is your point, again? This question is meaningless.

Water evaporates at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level temperatures and with minimized impurities. I fill a pot with water, let it boil for about 30 minutes, and then begin to stir it every once in a while.

Has the amount of liquid in the pot increased since I started to stir it?

You see, no matter what the devs do to the game outside of a paid expansion (and related marketing efforts), we will NEVER EVER see the same numbers we saw in 2005. This would be true if no nerfs were even made, this would also likely be true if we released paid expansion after paid expansion after paid expansion. It's possible we might see a new peak with GR, but I'm not so sure. The 2005 peak was created by the release of CoV, by the way. Before the spike, subs were steadily declining... or would have if they hadn't nosedived because of huge delays between issues.

The peak didn't happen because the developers began to nerf... they began to nerf before, during, and after release. Your asserted causal relationship doesn't exist.

So if the game's population will never reach the old peak, why does it matter whether there are nerfs or not? Our peak subs are entirely irrelevant to whether the devs have been nerfing or not nerfing or, as you want to put it, "controlling player behavior."

Again, you need to spell out exactly what you're trying to suggest. Are you seriously suggesting that the developers should not attempt to fix game mechanics that create an undesired behavior in large sections of the playerbase?

Don't be so sure

I actually forgot all about that. *I* hide from searches.

It's POSSIBLE, sure, that GR will create another spike in subscriptions like we did with CoV. I think we'll see numbers near, but not above, the old peak. I think we're too old, but you never know.

In almost every expansion I've seen in a MMORPG, the numbers have gone up, sure, but you don't necessarily see a new peak each time.

So, let's humor you, Ace. Let's divide the timeline of this game into a period "before" the campaign you allege started in 2005 at the peak of sub levels.



Strangely enough, if this campaign really existed, it seems to be a stabilizing force. Pre-campaign, the sub numbers had some pretty major twists and turns, while after the campaign, the numbers have stabilized greatly. If you want to move the goalposts further towards the middle or beginning of 2005 rather than right at the end, your argument falls apart even more. Rather than a decline, there are either more subscribers now or at least were for greater amounts of time than there were pre-campaign.

Market share by itself is not an accurate tool to measure the satisfaction of players, or subscription retention, and your link restricts data to only which MMOs exist and how many subscriptions they have relative to each other. Without also including total active subscriptions and/or concurrent logins, the data is irrelevant. The cute little pie charts only show that some MMOs have grown, some have died, some have remained relatively stable and the market as a whole has expanded, but they give no information about how many players each actually has, whether or not the total number of players is growing in conjunction with the growth of the MMO market or how each MMO's subscription rates have changed over the years.

Find a better metric to support your assertions.

That image needs to be revised. At the very least, the demarcation between "pre" and "post" should be at Sep. 05 (one month after the release of I5, which implemented the GDN), and potentially even further, to June 05, one month after I4's release (which implemented various nerfs such as the 50% -ToHit added to SS and SJ (precursors to travel suppression, which was fully realized in a patch between I4 and I5) and the mechanic which stopped dead characters or characters beyond 300' outdoors from receiving rewards).

With the demarcation line in the correct place, the trend you point out is much more visible and correctly emphasized. Increases in subscriptions following the strongest balance changes (nerfs), then a very steady and gradual decline, but as of the last entry in the chart (Dec. 07), still higher than the point before the "campaign" began, indicating an overall satisfaction with the "post-campaign" game as evidenced by the relative stability of subscription numbers in comparison to the "pre-campaign" data.

Oh, sure we do (Rper, lol). Nerfs upset people when their playstyle is impacted by them. The pattern of gameplay they got used to has been changed, sometimes significantly.

Just because someone gets upset by a nerf doesn't mean they've got a valid complaint, though. Understanding doesn't mean agreeing. It also doesn't mean it's okay to make up timelines about when and how nerfs have taken place, or alleging a new pattern "now" with regards to nerfs compared to "then."

Indeed. Well, previous posts by Ace suggested he felt the campaign began after or at the peak of sub numbers, so I went with his artificial selection.

Here's another image with Issue and the two huge "nerfs" I could remember indicated which I made the same time I made the previous image. Both are sort of messy, though, because of the width of the forums required shrinking the original graph a great deal.

Hide from search is my default status about 75% of the time.

So the increase had nothing to do with the games first major expansion, it resulted from players deep affection for nerfs?
Brilliant detective work.

And the drop in subscribers after the games biggest year of major nerfs, was because there weren't enough nerfs in 2006?



Do any of you remember this games nickname at the end of 2005?
It was "City of Nerfs." Google it.



I remember losing my whole super group that year, most of them left because of all the nerfs and cov didn't offer anything new.


There are a small number of players who get a schadenfreude from watching the smug, overpowered, min/maxers (ie regular players, or non-role players) get nerfed. Unfortunately they all have big mouths, as you can see in this thread, and if they had any control over it, this game would be so f'ing slow and boring it'd be scraping the floor around -30K subs right now.

And all the loudmouthed nerflovers would experience a serene sense of peace on their single consolidated server.


Thank the heavens the devs only listen to most of the nerfherding whiners around here.


Yeah I don't like the MA nerfs, or the freaks, didn't like the pvp nerfs, didn't like the SS/EM/SM tanker nerfs


City of Heroes nerf creates massive outcry

No one is really taking that position at all. In fact, I have pointed out in several posts that the reason we had so many subs in December 05 was because of the expansion. Not because of Ace's suggestion that up until that point there had been no "campaign" to control player behavior.

No one is arguing that nerfs don't drive players away. It's absolutely arguable about the degree to which players leave because of some nerfs.

Which year? The biggest drop in subscribers happened during 2004, which didn't suffer some of the most widespread nerfage at all. Very specific things happened during that year, most of which was fixing incredibly overpowered sets like Regen, the Fire tank sets (Burn, especially), and Devices (smoke grenade, especially).

The biggest drop on the graph most certainly wasn't following the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification, the nerfs I can remember triggering the greatest amount of heat and vitriol.

Great detective work!

It seems far more likely that that big drop after that nice peak of initial sales is just your typical post-release subscription drop offs combined with a game that really had some incredible balance issues and problems with mechanics that needed fixing. The numbers show that, after getting fixed, an upward trend in subs began.

Yeah, a tiny percentage of people called the game City of Nerfs. Go write home to grandma about it, while you're at it. You and the few other "leet doodz" can lean back and continue patting yourself on the back about coming up with that unique gem of wordplay.

The rest of your post is pretty typical vitriol from someone who sets up mythical strawmen to beat down, blaming them for the game's ills and suggesting that "if they were in charge" this game would be even worse than it is right now (which isn't bad at all).

You even take a swipe at "role players" like they're somehow related to nerfs at all. I'm really not clear when "role players" became the guys people got to pin nerfs on, or how there's any logical connection between someone that likes to write stories or whatever and someone that likes nerf and doesn't like fun. Maybe that's PvP crowd thing (where "Carebears" has been replaced by "role players", or maybe it's just you and you're the anonymous coward who I responded to).

You pretty obviously haven't gotten over Issues 5 or 6, which is pretty funny considering that all went down a little under four years ago. How long do you plan to carry that torch and get so upset about it?

Edited, to get to the heart of the matter

Where are the words herd, or farm in my post?





Edited, as a friendly reminder to anyone who doesn't know.


As for Razoras' reply, you made one of my points for me, try figuring out which.

If that's the best you can come up with, I win again!

Let's break forum protocol and be at least a smidgen fair about this: the nerfherders populating these forums - and their name is Legion - are hardly "mythical strawmen."

This is rumor control, these are the facts: continual nerfs, at least to a portion of the playerbase, have a cumulative negative effect. One nerf perhaps can be gotten over. Nerf after nerf after nerf creates a straw-vs-camel's-back effect that ends up with people leaving. I can tell you that four friends of mine who had returned to CoV because of Mission Architect ended up leaving over the nerfs. I know a few more blueside.

I'm just one person. I wonder how many people know multiple people who have left over nerfs? We'll never know, but I'm guessing a sizeable number. And the numbers add up fast. And I can tell you that the nerfs are getting on my nerves. But that's just me.

I know some of you refuse to acknowledge that some people become upset over nerfs, and after a while we may lose those players... and so what? Good riddance to bad rubbish. I know that some of you view those people leaving the game as making the game somehow "better." Or [general] you may even think that the mere idea that people leave over nerfs is arrant nonsense.... after all, YOU KNOW BETTER, and your word is the Law...! I view this opinion in much the same light that I do ostriches hiding their heads in the sand, but to each their own.

I view people quitting over nerfs as lost money hurting a game that I love. Each lost player means less development $$$.

But that's ok. People who are not playing the way we want 'em to can just get the [edit] out and don't let the door hit 'em, right? We don't need their money, let this [edit-edit] burn... all the way down to a consolidated server. Sounds like a plan!

Who says no one ever leaves because of nerfs?

Or, it's simply a part of natural churn. Churn, if you are unfamiliar with it, can be described as a (generally unavoidable) percentage of a subscriber base leaving the service. The goal in any service-oriented biz is to keep churn low and new subs high.

If it wasn't a nerf it would be something else breaking the camel's back. People misattribute their reasons for becoming dissatisfied with just about anything. That isn't to mean that there aren't some who genuinely find the game ruined by a particular nerf, either.

You deny building strawmen in one paragraph and then pretty much base your entire post on doing it.

Did it ever occur to you that the developers, when making a nerf, might occasionally weigh the good versus bad to a nerf before actually instituting it? They might know better than you what kind of impact (as an example) AE farms have had on the playerbase. What if they were able to see that the population that effectively lived in AE was doing fine (at least stable, if now growing slightly) but that the population that didn't enjoy AE was falling through the floor? I guess they better not try to fix the situation, because that would be a nerf! Even if they didn't touch AE rewards and just jacked up regular content rewards it would be called an AE nerf.

So why is it that a pretty innocuous nerf like this freakshow nerf, probably only a few pegs higher on the "really big nerf list" than if they decreased the damage of the craftable baseball bat attack power, is relevant to all this? Sure, they might have nerfed freakshow a little bit much, especially the minions... but... really? This is worth diatribes about how the devs are unintentionally ruining the game?

Not only that, you insist on trotting out an anecdote and then endeavor to make larger predictions based of it. Well, your anecdotes of people leaving over any nerfs are invalidated by all of my anecdotes (and they are many) of people leaving for other reasons: shallow game play, repetitive game play, bad graphics, lack of story advancement, lack of new recipes, lack of new powersets, etc. The game is doomed! The reasons for quitting are legion! Woozy woozy woo woo!