Does Massively hate City of Heroes?
By
Beber,
Posted on: 2009-10-27 09:22 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Since there has been no press release, and no official word for anyone who was not at HeroCon, it's kind of hard to make a good article.
Plus, it's not especially Massively, no one in the MMO-news business had anything to say about HeroCon (MMORPG.com, TenTonHammer, etc...).
They'll wait for official press release to write some things, but since CoH is a 5 year-old MMO with less than 200k suscribers, I don't think they care really much about being the first website to have the news...
Thats the unfortunate side of things when it comes to product marketing. And you see it in various other industries too. Successful company's will consistently promote their product even during lean times but smaller companies are more susceptible to budget cuts or simply devoting resources to more current projects rather than continue to promote something 'older'.
Anyways, moving away from economics and business practices, I don't think Massively hate's CoX, but rather in general, are checking out the latest such as CO which means higher exposure currently about their bugs/patches/etc.
I can think of a couple of the editors there who did play CoX are taking CO out for spins which mean they leverage their time invested into perpective pieces for Massively. Worry not, the chrome will wear off and something new will come along. Thats just business.
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http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=212083
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Cryptic seems to do a lot more marketing than NCsoft/Paragon Studios. When I was bothering to track CO they had their devs talking to every no-name MMO website on the planet three times a week.|
Originally Posted by Zortel
I'm just curious and all, between the pages and page of news on such amazing updates like Champions devs talk about Blood Moon, Blood Moon Trailer, Screenshots of Champions, Champions gives out free respec...
Yet where's the HeroCon news? F2P games get more coverage than CoH/V lately, it seems. It took them 3-4 days to even announce that Issue 16 was live after the event. Did the company and website have some falling out? Is this part of an insideous plot by some other games developer to shunt out the news, or do they simply not care? |
Cryptic really seems to be shoveling their hype out of the back of a truck to anyone who'll listen. NCsoft is more restrained and less hyperbolic.
The other part of the equation is Star Trek Online. I'm guessing that the MMO websites are anticipating that STO will be a big deal, and they're paying close attention to Cryptic in general. And they may just be greasing the wheels at Cryptic so they get similar treatment for STO.
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MMORPG.com had an article about HeroCon.|
Originally Posted by Beber
Since there has been no press release, and no official word for anyone who was not at HeroCon, it's kind of hard to make a good article.
Plus, it's not especially Massively, no one in the MMO-news business had anything to say about HeroCon (MMORPG.com, TenTonHammer, etc...). They'll wait for official press release to write some things, but since CoH is a 5 year-old MMO with less than 200k suscribers, I don't think they care really much about being the first website to have the news... |
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/257230
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I get a somewhat elitist anti-CoH vibe from their community... dunno about the staff.
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Originally Posted by Photonstorm
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Thanks for the link
They didnt seem very . . . enthusiastic about the whole thing though did they.For a review it was . . . . . very basic
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Considering just how many MMOs are out there, I suspect one could count on one hand just how many actually have more than 200K subscribers. CoH/V is probably in the average as far as subscribers go (once you toss out the extremes on either end...if you didn't, then everyone except one particular game would be below average).
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Originally Posted by Beber
They'll wait for official press release to write some things, but since CoH is a 5 year-old MMO with less than 200k suscribers, I don't think they care really much about being the first website to have the news...
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Massively gives CoH regular coverage and have hit all the highlights in the last month (viz. the recent double XP weekend, Going Rogue beta keys at Hero Con, guest author AE missions, the new Halloween event, Hero Con's contests, and schedule). They even ran an item in which another MMO site did a compare & contrast piece on CoH vs. CO and concluded the former was the better game. Massively being a few days behind the weekend wrap-up doesn't sound like a snub, especially if NC Soft's marketing department is still working on the post-con press kit.
(If you want to see a site where CoH deserves more coverage, check out InsideMacGames.)
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I don't get an "anti-CoH" vibe from Massively so much as I get a "that-game-is-so-5-years-ago" vibe, which I guess is admittedly elitist. However, I get that vibe more from the commenters there than the writers. It's a vibe I don't share, but can at least understand. But if you think the commenters are hostile toward CoH, you should check out the CO threads there; those people are brutal.|
Originally Posted by Zikar
I get a somewhat elitist anti-CoH vibe from their community... dunno about the staff.
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It was funny when I16 went live, because the Massively article about it was SOOOO obviously written based on info from the front page of the website at the time of the update. Unfortuantely, the CoH front page at that time linked to the early pre-release press info, which didn't describe big parts of the update such as the Super Sidekicking. So Massively's article about the update having gone live ending up with:
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Issue 16 also includes "Other features to be announced." We're not quite sure what that means, but we'll be watching for whatever they are. As usual, however, you'll get a free respec token with this issue. |
d
Massively wrote up something before Hero-Con started too.
So here's what I did - I sent them a tip and a link to the main Hero-Con thread that contains all the info. The reality is that Massively doesn't have a bias against CoH/V - they constantly want content to put up - but no-one from that site is paying attention to it at this point. Paragon Studios should have had something ready to go as soon as the Con finished.
Only thing I can think of is that the main contact Paragon Studios might use at Massively might be off sick or something. So they might have sent the info through, but no-one was there to put it up.
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my take as well, i find them to be fairly good to paragon, maybe i missed some bashing, or some 4chan rejects in the comments section, but they generally seem happy to put up any reasonable content sent to them.
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Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
Massively gives CoH regular coverage and have hit all the highlights in the last month (viz. the recent double XP weekend, Going Rogue beta keys at Hero Con, guest author AE missions, the new Halloween event, Hero Con's contests, and schedule). They even ran an item in which another MMO site did a compare & contrast piece on CoH vs. CO and concluded the former was the better game. Massively being a few days behind the weekend wrap-up doesn't sound like a snub, especially if NC Soft's marketing department is still working on the post-con press kit.
(If you want to see a site where CoH deserves more coverage, check out InsideMacGames.) |
I sometimes get the impression that Massively hates everything that isn't EVE or CO, and I'm absolutely certain that their CO coverage is all about keeping in with Cryptic for STO.
Amusingly, in the run up to release, there was a very noticeable contrast between the enthusiasm of their CO articles and a lot of the responses to said articles in the comments.
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That's how this business work, but to be fair with Massively they're pretty good at what they do. The attitude you describe is more common in big, big website. |
Originally Posted by NightshadeLegree
I sometimes get the impression that Massively hates everything that isn't EVE or CO, and I'm absolutely certain that their CO coverage is all about keeping in with Cryptic for STO.
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I don't know how it works at Massively, but it seems that they have contributing editors that try to cover all the available information, but also talk more specifically of their favorite MMO. They also have columnists that just focus on one game.
And among all those people, it seems that there aren't many CoX fans. Actually, the only one is the webcartoonist. In contrast, they have many EvE players, that explains the great coverage this game got from Massively.
So they publish what NC send them about CoX, but no one on their staff browses this forum, nor did attend HeroCon.
We can't blame them for that, they do the best they can, and they do it pretty well IMO. IIRC, Paragon Studios manages to get someone at MMORPG.com to covers all CoX news, but it's hard for a 5-year-old game to get media attention. The best way to get more is to try and join Massively's team
CO is brand new and actively campaing for customers.
CoH is 5 years old, and hasn't released any offical word on it's newest expainson.
It's not supprising. Once some GR stuff is offically released, and NCsoft starts it's campaining for GR, you'll see more stuff.
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I'm just curious and all, between the pages and page of news on such amazing updates like Champions devs talk about Blood Moon, Blood Moon Trailer, Screenshots of Champions, Champions gives out free respec...
Yet where's the HeroCon news? F2P games get more coverage than CoH/V lately, it seems. It took them 3-4 days to even announce that Issue 16 was live after the event.
Did the company and website have some falling out? Is this part of an insideous plot by some other games developer to shunt out the news, or do they simply not care?
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