NCsoft Q1 2010 financials out: ouch.

I admit, I love most everything CoH has come out with. AE is a great innovation even though there were folks that found exploits and when the exploits were plugged, people left and cried foul. I will solo AE material when I am feeling adventurous and not just to earn cheap xp.

A lot of the features of this game were in a little game called "Freedom Force" which wasn't an MMO, but you could network and fight with or against other characters in user created content which they referred to as 'mods'.

I am 72 mo.s and going strong. I hope for another 72.

That's exactly what I thought.

Well, if you're looking to do AE missions only for the XP, that may be the issue. In my opinion, the main purpose was to let players share their own ideas and content with other players. It's basically officially sanctioned fan fiction.

yes i'm serious ,i think sunstormers post in this thread was spot on.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...9&postcount=49

i did only cause after 6 years here do i really needed to get off the same arcs that we've been doing since the beginning of the game.

however now im back to it cause i still need a balance of xp .the rewards of the ae dont match the risk anymore. the devs took care of that.hence why its dead on most servers.heres hoping they find a way to fix it in closed gr beta.at least they admit the problem unlike the markets issues

I'm unclear on the point you're making here. Are you suggesting that CoH is unprofitable? I'm pretty sure you know its costs were recouped several years ago and that it is a profit generator now.

It's certainly not at all comparable to Auto Assault or Tabula Rasa. So again, unclear on your point.

Also, it would be interesting to see the revenue for other MMOs in the same time period. I suspect that while the video game business is relatively 'recession-proof' it may be that MMOs are not so much, despite the popular claim of providing good value for the dollar.

And there is no doubt that CoH has lost players, some permanently, to Champions. It's inevitable with direct competition. CoH is also a six year old game now and it's not WoW, so some decline is normal and to be expected.

Anyway, DOOM and all that. As you were.

Already prepared.

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

Woo I haz fanz

I think for the year to come the biggest problem by far CoH will have is DCO release. If its a flop like champions then I think CoH still stands a good chance of having many more years left in it.

Other than what I mentioned in earlier posts which can be sorted with a few decent changes, theres really not too much more the game needs to make it great.

People always complain about end game content, but it seems Incarnates will sort this out to a certain extent but if the PvP system is revisited with PvP IOs drop rates been looked at a little more and increased in zones (not arena because people will just farm them :P) then you have unlimited end game content there combined with the AE system and TFs.

TF releases are nice, I'm a fan of the newest one with dopplegangers in particular and ITF was nice apart from the lag which still needs fixing.

This game has always been centred around making new charecters and leveling them, we need some form of real rewards for sticking with the same charecters other than being able to play it better. For instance I played my tanker for over a year pre MA, then the exploitive farmers came and a new guy can make pretty much the same thing within a week.

That kind of undermines the idea of likely a charecter and sticking with it. If the player feels a connection to the charecter there more likely to stay. Again Incarnates could help this a great deal if done right but I can see them being easy to get because thats what keeps the players happy right now. A majority want everything and they want it now, which doesnt help longterm because it leaves them nothing to do except make new charecters to try out and once they raised a few they are stuck with limited stuff to do.

I think something similar to how SWG had there jedi unlock system would be good in CoH, the thing took several months to upgrade your charecter to a jedi, then you had to create your weapon and level etc, leveling also was a pain since you could delevel as well if you died and you got hunted by bounty hunters.

In CoH I think we could possibly have something similar, in that you had a massive arc that only allowed you to do parts every so often and took a fair amount of time to do, much like the village quests there. In return at the end of it you could unlock a custom gold title over your head or something, accompanied by an extra power choice between several powers.

This would be great to reward longterm players and still not make the game unbalanced. The reason I talk about SWG a lot is because it was one of the most successful MMOs for a long time, whilst WoW also covers this catagory, a lot of the people here play this because they dont like WoW, where as SWG simply destroyed itself.

Player housing was also a nice touch

I do realise this probably belongs on suggestions but ahh well

So does every late-night conspiracy-theorist alien-abduction talk-show host.

Edit: Oops, forgot winks and smilies.

--NT

Oh CRAP I forgot my TOWEL!

I really really hate this zone event trend. It doesn't sound like I'll be making use of the Incarnate system.

Hopefully I'll be able to do a lot of beta testing for Going Rogue, so I can find out if it's something I'll buy. Although City of Heroes is still by far my favorite game, a lot of the team oriented stuff is beyond my deficient teaming abilities, and I don't know yet whether I'll be able to make much use of Going Rogue at all. For my purposes, it might not be worth purchasing.

Old Republic Online has me awful interested, too.

But yeah, I hope Smedley over there at SOE noted CO launching months and months before it should've as a buggy unfinished MMO with blatant cash grab schemes (pay for 12 month sub for an STO beta invite? launching with microtransactions? lol, you have to get people addicted to playing your game before you can start milking it as a cash cow) will just generate another flopped game rather than making them at SOE or DC skittish and think 'oh the market for superhero MMOs is too niche; let's cancel DCUO's development and make a WoW clone instead'. Sometimes these guys don't exactly recognize mediocre games fail because they're mediocre instead of because there's no market for it. Man, I'd KILL for a good sci-fi MMO, but sci-fi MMOs generally flop due to mediocrity. EVE is the best out there but it's sleep inducing.

"Wait and see." Zone event does not necessarily mean something like the last halloween one, or even the Croatoa war. Troll raves, Scrapyard's followers and the Steel canyon fires are also zone events, and those aren't that difficult (generally.)

Now, we know it's been said the Incarnate system wll require you to be powerful - then again, you are 50. But that doesn't necessairly mean "You'll have to get multiple teams together" - after all, I'm sure the devs have seen how the halloween stuff fizzled after the first few days (and is generally ignored now.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

You're not supposed to say sensible things I can agree with. What's wrong with this world, first EvilGeko now you! Sheesh!

See my Guides and Tutorials

I'm kind of imagining the zone events to be like this, where you're fighting literally hundreds of characters at once. It's the power rush many have asked for, and it makes sense to me.

Just... tech issues.

Completely groundless theory, but I like it.

Heck, doesn't the Longbow Ballista running around St. Martial technically count as a 'Zone Event'?

"Deficient teaming abilities"? That's all in your mind - anyone can team

If a sinlge player attacks it thinking it's a normal Longbow NPC, it counts as a Pwn Event.

The only problem with that calculation is that it assumes that the entire Paragon Stuidos dev team is working only on the current version of CoH, rather than being split between the current version of CoH and one or more other projects, which would have their own budget and funding, calculated separately from the budget and funding of the current version of CoH.

How would you even KNOW that? I'm beginning to suspect that you secretly play villainside.

Not quite, you do face a Ballista Heroside during the RWZ arcs.

Becasue Villain players have told me about the GMs they fight?

Elite Boss, in this case. Yeah, in one of the higher level zones, the 'zone event' is an EB that runs around sometimes.

Nevermind that Ballistas are very... ahem... formidable EBs.