Hello from Paragon Marketing

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

So if we advertise City of Heroes by doing good things, how do we advertise City of Villains? Will we be seeing Posi robbing a bank sometime soon?

It's a game set in the modern world (kind of) I find it rather jarring actually to never see any real world products about.

I went to that word site and promptly bookmarked it. I found lots and lots of words that could be used as Hero names.

I agree the first word is new...the second, eleven word word...hmmm

(1) New Antifogging-Dark Astoria, Rogue Isles maybe.

(2) New Beardedness-New Beard 0ptions ???

(3) New Belladonnas-Ghost Widow has sisters and wannabes???

(4) New Chimpanzees-New Critter!

(5) New Fattinesses-Players were wanting a fat slider

(6) New Farmworkers-The Devs have at last realized farming is here to stay and are giving us a new AT whose strength is farming.

(7) New Farmerettes-Female toons can farm too you know.

(8) New Flippancies-NPCs will have more to say

(9) New Hatemongers-Always.

(10) New Overpricing-Because the devs balanced the game around SOs,they want us to use SOs, so they are raising the cost of IOs.

(11) New Antismokers-We have smokers in City Of Heroes/Villains, so now we are going to have vocal antismokers...it was only a matter of time.

(12) New Foredooming-Always

(13) New Programmers-We need these to have.....

(14) New Programming

And one last thing...instead of new, the first word could be man.

Man Farmworkers-The new Farmworkers AT have to be male...which would upset the Farmerettes, but, oh well.

Where do you live? The in-game ads were (are) based on IP location; people in the US get different ads from people in Canada get different ads from people in the UK. Et cetera.

Rikti Monkey Plushies!!!

My postings to this forum are not to be used as data in any research study without my express written consent.

EU only ever got to see one add in total before they were pulled.

This was the only EU advert


Notice how much better it looked than the Jetter shoe advert that was first released which was freaking TERRIBLE, it looked like someone had just slapped over a Jpeg image of shoe onto the billboards. This one actually looks like a poster.

I am reminded of a scene in "Zulu" after the battle has raged for twelve hours or so in which Lt. Chard presses Lt. Bromhead for the answer to a question he asked him. Bromhead finally answers, and Chard begins to critique his answer.

Bromhead looks at Chard and says, "You asked me, and I told you."

Black Pebble asked. We told him.

Certainly we understand the situation as you have presented it, and certainly we will accede to your wishes. I am of the opinion, however, that word eventually gets back. If the question is being broached about how to get more people excited enough to play CoH, and an answer is given virtually by acclaimation, it is foolish to ignore it.

So my piece is said. You have asked for the topic to be dropped, so to quote another film, "As you wish."

I just returned to COH from a hiatus and was kind of looking forward to seeing familiar product adverts in the game world (as I heard of ingame advertising but never seen it), and was a little dissapointed not to see them.

I might be in the minority though, some people get their panties into such a bind over something so minute (I mean really, how many commercials do these people actually ingest on a daily basis on the teleor radio).

There IS IN GAME ADS?
Who do I contact if i want to put an add on CoX?

Your local tattoo parlor.

*looks at the spelling of "add"* Or, alternatively, your nearest plastic surgeon.

Eh, it'll get here when it gets here, but I look at that as being 'fitting' to the confusing, relative (convoluted) nature of time travel story arcs, myself.

Actually, I've had a crazy theory since we got the first bits of Going Rogue information that the next expansion will be based on "The Coming Storm," possibly with a tie into the much mentioned space station. I haven't figured out a scenario in my mind to tie the two together other than "Traveling to the future" though.

It makes a weird bit of sense in my mind. That'd give them a few issues to build up to it- they could even theoretically use the nature of 'alternate timeline formed' to tie into the creation of an alternate Paragon to use in City of Heroes 2, if such a thing ever comes to pass.

Time travel would obviously justify and open up room for any number of new locations, contacts, storylines and such. (And historically inspired custom weapons!) Throw in a time control style power and you might have an expansion worthy idea.

Or not. Like I said, it's just an odd theory I had a while ago.

J/ Wilde

Convenient - if you were cynical

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Heh Heh! Bet he's starting to regret mouthing off now!

Luckily, I'm not

The thread did become pretty bad

First let me thank you for being brave enough to talk to us. Nice to have a marketing guy in the room to speak with.

I have not read most of this forumn, however I did see this post. Here in is the problem with making a poster of Desdemona.

Who is she?

Yes those of us that have been following the forumns and the GR site know who she is. Sure I can imagine the sexy poster this would can be, yet I again state, who is she.

Now I know that somewhere on the poster there would be a CoH logo in the bottom corner. Yet when faced with the choice of Desdemona or say any number of sexy heroes from the main stream lines; and you were a 100% going to buy one poster, I'd say about 98% of all buyers would go with what is known versus what is not.

That hurdle aside, how to convience the comic book store owner to spend their money to purchase this poster? Having worked in a collector store for about 5 years and having also been in charge of what that store brought in to sell; even with my love of this game; I'm sorry, I'm not going to take the chance on trying to sell something only a handful of people know about.

Please don't take this as me saying that Coh community is just a handful of people. Yet look at it from the perspective of one locally owned store that only handles a certain radius of the population of comic book readers; how many of them play Coh?

At the place I worked at, we freely gave out the Diamond Books that contained all upcoming items for sell. This is how I would sell any poster related to CoH.

"Thank you customer for picking up your subscriptions, here is your monthly Diamond book, if you see anything you like, please return your order form with payment within the next two weeks and I'll place the order for it for you."

If no one wants it; it does not get ordered.

There-in lies the problem, as I fully believe that CoH needs to focus on the comic book collector community more. I miss the comic books I received monthly back in the beginning. Awesome idea, awesome tie-in. Probably not very cost affective for the business, based on time/vs cost.

I would again look at selling the comic books under a good label. On top of that I would do the following:

1st) Hire a team of writers just for the comic book.

2nd) The comic book would be a seperate subscription cost. 12 issuse for $x.xx, get 1 month of CoH free with 12 issuse subscription from website. (Notice I said 12 issues, not 1 year; more details coming).

3rd) Any and all people that purchase the comic from the shelf in a store get 15 day trial of the game. (There would have to be a tear out slip in the comic with serial code, also give a temp travel power to last the 15 days as well.)

4th) What happens in the comic book, affects the game; what happens in the game affects what happens in the comic book. (This would be by far the hardest aspect to accomplish and would require both the comic writers and the developers work together, and why I stated 12 issues sub, not 1 year)

This is accomplished by the following:

The writers create awesome story: Villian X does Y and story ends with cliff hanger.

Story introduces new contact(s), placed in perspective good, bad, and rogue areas. As heroes we have to save the city from whatever this new villian as started, as villian we get to help out with whatever the scheme is. As Rogue (ie vigilante or rogue), we choose whatever we wish to do. Also the contact will give us choices much like the police, newspaper missions of what we would like to do.

Now this new story arc is only available in game for limited amount of time. Comic book comes out, story continues in-game until completion. The outcome of the story will be determined by whichever side completes it the most server wide.

Once story has finished in-game, the comic book writers create the next issue. As players, we do not get to know the outcome of how the in-game plays out until the issue is released.

Factors to determine the side that "wins" would which side completed the most, which side "died" the most. How many missions were, "skipped". Or by what players choose to do the most.

As added bonus, the subscribers of the book alter egos get a power boost of some kind, if heroes "win" then they get a bonus, rogues "win" they get a bonus, and if villians then they get the bonus.

So new issue, continues story from where we the players pushed the game towards. So now after issue released new in-game content with continued story. And the process repeates until the 12 issues are finished.


As added bonus, we as subscribers get entered into competition to become the next in-game contact.

At the end of the overall story, we can then choose to purchase the in comic book form of the entire store, with issues for the "what if" arcs as well.

Jeri.