What happened to COH?

I admit to being vaguely surprised any of them are still open now.

It's "Star Wars". That label generates a certain amount of business no matter how lame the product is especially when there isn't an alternative Star Wars title to draw a player.

The only thing that can really kill it is the Lucas' license fees get larger than the profits.

This.

I don't know how many times it needs to be repeated that shouting "xxx, lft!!!" in b-cast is the WORST way to try to find a team. Seeing as how most ongoing PUGs are in INSTANCES (even more so, since teams don't have to wait around anymore for an 8th member--difficulty settings made the necessity to get 8 to get higher numbers of mobs something that no longer is necessary), you'll rarely see many in b-cast anymore.

The same thing will probably happen with Cryptic's STO.

As a person who plays exclusively on Victory, I can echo this. I dare any doomsayers to roll a toon on Victory and get set up with all the global channels and then say that servers need merging. Even during off-peak hours on Victory (i.e., late night and weekdays) it's relatively easy to catch on with a TF/SF/team (just my anecdotal experience, but one that I've had over 4.5 years of playing on this server).

Freedom? No people?

If I were making and subsequently running an MMO I don't think my goal would be for any low population servers. I'm very confident paragon would love it if every server was full up every day. I think it is kind of strange the sense of entitlement that is displayed when people say they have a "right" to play on low population servers.

I fully understand why you guys might enjoy the peace and quiet, but what will you do if GR reinvents the wheel and this game booms (not gonna happen, but...) Would you demand that Paragon keep your servers underpopulated?

And for the record I haven't said once that it needs to happen, but for those "unsolvable naming issues" I don't think anything better would need to be done than adding a new tag. If something is then great, but the simplest solution is usually the best. KISS (keep it simple stupid ).

You are absolutely right you can't market a server merger, but EVERY image and commercial I see for this game always has a heap of players and action going on. Other than the occassional solo shot to highlight a power they don't really show off the lone-wolf nature of the MMO.

Just to clarify again, my whole position this entire time is that it doesn't need to happen, but probably will at some point down the road. My second point is that said list of "canned responses" is a joke. It has some substance, but is primarily propaganda.

I know I keep waiting for the corporate side of Paragon to come on and ask our opinions. I'm baffled that it hasn't happened

I'm really curious what has generated the sense of entitlement that you get to play on what effectively equates to a private server in an MMO. The first two letters really lean the other way. I'm not trying to be hostile, I'm actually quite curious because each time I see it posted that is exactly what is being stated. It is strangely similar to the posts that indicate people were paying their $15 and could use AE however they want and similar.

Click for Hot Sun Splitter Action

Even the more sparse servers are far from "private servers." Maybe that's why you don't get it.

Is it just me, or are you starting to get rather belligerent about this? You talk about the cut-and-paste response being "propaganda", then you put words in peoples mouths. You quote posts where people talk about what they "enjoy", then you start commenting about a "sense of entitlement". People have preferences different from yours. That's no reason to get in their faces.

This is tried and true advice. I know I'm a member of pretty much every major channel on freedom.

Of course all these private/hidden communications do absolutely nothing for people not "in the know". And I'm actually still looking for some better ones redside as everything negative I've been experiencing is redside.

If after I completed the tutorial, or reached level 5 a list of 10 major global channels popped up I'd agree with everything you have said. But I don't think it is ideal that the workload falls on the player to facilitate teaming beyond throwing up their lf team tag and using the default zone-wide communication channel. It seems exclusive by design.

I'm not intending it to be that way. I apologize if it came across as overly aggressive. I withdraw the question.

It is not very inviting for new players at all. If the in-game system for finding/creating teams needs to be supplemented by "global chat channels" then that system is lacking and needs to be fixed.

I do not have a particular opinion of whether or not servers should be merged; especially the whys or why nots. But a couple of issues being used as for reasons not to are really non-issues.

Names: CO has shown that you can create an environment in which any player can have any name. The uniqueness is based off the account name. The same can be done in COH.

Server Merging Means Death: If server merging occurred at the same time as a significant release then "the industry" or "people" would not be likely to think that the game is dying. For example, if NCSOFT choose to merge servers as part of the "Going Rogue" release. No one would think that the game was folding because of a server merge when a major new release was being delivered.

There are several "out of the box" concepts for increasing player density besides helping individuals find teams ( which I still believe a better Team interface would do more for resolving those complaints than server merging ). For example, lets say that starting with Going Rogue the devs begin playing with the concept of more "open world" missions similar to WAR and begin to lessen the amount of instancing in the game.

Perhaps, the devs have found out from data-mining and exit interviews that congregations of people lead to more people wanting to be around. What if the real benefit of the AE crowds were that it LET other people get to see each other instead of being spread out in instances. If the world "looks" empty to a newcomer than it IS empty in their minds and game experience.

1. Just because YOU like living in New York City doesn't mean I can't like Kansas.
2. Kansas, part 2.
3. "I only saw one other person. World of Conancraft has eleventy billion!" So What?
8. I will play where I damn well want to. And you can too. And that should be blunt enough. If I want a crowded server...

"just join some of the (often private) non-default channels to find people"

I apologize if I'm misinterpreting the sentiment behind this "anthem". But I'm not sorry that I personally believe that in a Massively Multiplayer Online game that populations should be high unless you deliberately look for remote areas (ie zones like boomtown or the shard).

Put another way, even on the busiest server it is very easy to find a quiet place because the zones are huge and there are way too many of them (blueside). I think it is important to be able to escape for some quiet time and I will even go into /hide a couple of times a week. The desire for quiet can be satisfied on any server at any time with minimal effort, but the desire for population can't be. That is my issue, take it as you will.

Fortunately for us the devs here don't make a habit of implementing Cryptics bad ideas.

... any more.

Which do you think was a bad idea?

Setting up an environment in which character names are not unique or using the account name as the unique tag?

I do not think that using the account name and displaying the account name was an option I would have chosen. Other options to accomplish the same thing exist though.

But, removing the restriction on unique names is a fantastic idea. I am very tired of not being able to use a name which fits a new character concept because "it is already taken" especially in a game which is 5 years old.

Fixed that for you.

Just because you would be quite happy being one of seventy 'Fire Smashers', doesn't mean other people would. Would you also enjoy reading a comic where all the X-Men were called Cyclops?

Both are awful ideas. Superman@thisnamelooksstupid.com looks retarded, and Kiken's response pretty much sums up why names should remain unique.

I guess it depends on how you look at it.

I'm sure that Paragon would love to have *more subscribers* coming in. But that isn't necessarily the same thing as full servers.

When I joined the game, I deliberately chose a lower population server, because that was the best match for what I personally wanted to get out of the game. Judging by this thread, many past threads about server merges, and the fact that there are plenty of people who presumably know that the high-population servers exist but choose not to use them, I'm far from alone in that preference. Whether it's because of play-style, because their machines can't handle busy zones, or whatever other reason, people are *choosing* low population servers. Right now, people who want to play on a high-pop server can join one, and people who want a low-pop one can join one. Make all the server populations uniform, and you make the game less appealing for a proportion of your existing and potential customers.

Now, financially, is it worthwhile to run the lower-pop servers to please that segments of your customer base? I have no idea. To give a useful answer, we'd need to know exactly how much less profitable the players are on the low-population servers, how making the server population experience uniform would affect subscriber numbers, etc. But NCSoft are still running the servers, so I would assume that at least they aren't losing buckets of money on the low population ones.

Also, I'm not sure how plausible it even is to make all server populations the same unless you run an active balancing programme to force people to spread out evenly. Would you constantly merge and split servers to keep each one at maximum population, with no spare capacity for new subs, reactivation weekends, server downtime etc? If not, then as soon as you leave room in the system, people's natural preferences for different play styles will tend to create population disparity between servers over time, just as they have done so far.

I wouldn't want dozens of Flymen flitting about the game. Would create lots of hilarious cases of mistaken identity.
Then again, finding a suitable name can be hard at times.

No need for server merge, really. And this has been discussed to death already.
What I'd like to see is merging of the server lists. So all European and US servers would be accessible to all.
Especially now when us EU'ians are shafted with awful maintenance times, and our servers seem to be packing up anyways.

One of the best things about CoH is the instanced missions. No kill-stealing or carebearing from "helpful" high lvl players. Non-instanced missions are especially annoying during events, when all NPC's disappear from maps.
Last Halloween I had to kill certain enemies. I hunted them thru three or so maps, all were full of zombies. Finally I just logged out, and did the mish days later after Halloween.
(Although this is more a problem with the event spawn system, which seem to trigger too often and in too many maps simultaneously.)

A few things:

1) If I have a lower-end computer, I shouldn't need to only be able to play in the sparser zones, many of which have very little to no actual content.

2) Right now, there exists the possibility to find a sparser or more populated zone based on your personal preference. Merging the servers eliminates that choice.

3) Right now, if you want to move to a more populated sever, you CAN. There is nothing holding anyone back from moving characters or creating new ones on a more populated server. Merging the servers would not allow for people to move to less populated ones, since there wouldn't be any.


Like an above poster said, Paragon Studios wants subscriptions, not just full servers. My personal story is that my old computer couldn't handle servers like Virtue or Freedom. It could handle most of Pinnacle just fine, except for things like Raids or Invasions, which I could usually avoid if I wanted to. But if every server was like Freedom, then I would have quit the game a long time ago, because my computer wouldn't have been able to handle it. I'm sure that there are others in my shoes. How many, I don't know. But having the OPTION for a lower-populated server, with less lag for people with lower-end machines is a good idea, because it means more subscriptions.

It's not a private server. As many, many people have posted people on low pop servers know how to be teamed. It's the Freedomites who don't know how to form teams and have a sense of entitlement of getting an immediate team upon logging in and never form one themselves.

Your assumptions about low pop servers are wrong and your conclusions are flawed by your assumptions.

[edited to add] I play on all the servers including Freedom and Virtue depending on which of my characters I want to play.

That would be pretty nice. So long as the conflict between globals could be resolved, I'm hard-pressed to think of many arguments against it. But, despite how smoothly the board-merge went, I think conflicting globals could cause more upset than conflicting board names, if for no other reason that the greater numbers of people involved.