NCsoft Q1 2010 financials out: ouch.

It's always amazing to me how people always assume that, just because THEY used an exploit, then therefore EVERYONE must have used an exploit. This is provably wrong, because I know I never have. I value the satisfaction of punching things in the face far more than the level I do it at.

Of course, I'm a noob because I don't want mega xp, so what do I know?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Hehe, it's the same as back when the MA was launched. I've lost count how many times I've been called names because I declined an invite to a farm team because I wanted to play regular missions with my friends instead.

Damn you and your 66 (+3) vet badge for not wanting mega XP!

Yeah... I didn't do it either.
I really dislike those sorts that declare "everyone did it".

Crawl back into your shelter and hide your head in the sand and hope that real gamers pull this game out of its own *$s because otherwise it is going down fast!!

Haha... I think that is the customary reply to that, but my idiotese is a bit rusty.

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No everyone did not. You can't make blanket statements because I know that I did not. I hate farming it's boring and takes all the fun out of actually playing the game.

I like your whole discussion ChaosExMachina, but am only pointing to these comments. Assuming the role of village idiot (its only a role, people), I ask: Is this really what Paragon Studios is thinking? Because it sounds cyclical and self-defeating.

"No significant PVP", so...
PVP players tend to go elsewhere, so...
there'll be no significant fix to PVP because "there isn't enough of a userbase"
Potential PVP players won't stay because (wrap back to first line)

seems to me, if the above loop is acurate, then the answer is to break the loop and take Ray's path in Field of Dreams: if Paragon Studios builds it, they will come.

Except that this clearly is the paradigm they're operating under...not just for PvP but for everything. That logic is the exact same logic they used as to why they focus more on heroes vs. villains. Less players = less dev time.

Basically they're operating kind of like TV execs, where if a show isn't an instant hit, then it gets the axe. If something doesn't immediately attract a majority of the user base, then it just gets ignored.

Of course, in a fit of insanity, anything that is too popular (Like AE, for instance) gets nerfed until it's so broken that no one wants to bother with it...triggering the "just ignore it, no one uses it" philosophy.

random thought.

i recall not liking the name of that plan "loyalty plan" ...it sounded like being married or in a relationship ...like the game was saying to you.

"if you are truly loyal and faithful then you will give me money and i will stick around for an extra month"

is what i get from it .

I can't tell you if that is what they're thinking. It's simply a guess that is consistent with most of what has been said about similar subjects.

Lets not forget those who rage quit and forget the subscription auto renews...

It goes doubly for the dollar amount. The pop spike from CoV wasn't really that large to begin with. The dollar spike was, but GR will be puny compared to it. If for no other reason than they are spreading the surge out with pre-purchasing many months in advance. But there are other reasons too.

Yes, the AE is broken NOW, no matter that you could go from 1-50 in 2 hours, that wasn't broken. Only everything they've done since then is broken ...

Srsly?

This is one of my pet theories, too. In this connection, it's important to keep the way the game has been marketed in mind. As the Black Pebble thread strongly implied, the target population is the group of current subscribers, not potential new players. Put another way, the game is in retention mode, not expansion mode. This means that the population to which the game is being presented is getting progressively more and more blase about the product and thus harder and harder to please.

I also agree with the posters who've suggested that DC Online and the new Star Wars MMO will deal serious wounds to CoH player numbers. I don't much care for Star Wars myself, but it has more geek-cred than any other existing fictional property out there, and it seems unrealistic to expect that large numbers won't jump ship to play a decent MMO based on it exclusively.

Similarly, and, to me, much more troublingly, people are likely to switch to a decent MMO based on a recognized superhero property. This is a greater threat to CoH player numbers because it is a direct competitor in the same genre. More troublingly*, though, despite all the praise creating an individual story receives on these fora, I argue that most fans of superhero stories don't really want to create their own story and characters. They want to be Batman or his allies, not MyOwnSuperheroMan and his. (Long, longtime players will remember how clones dominated the early years of CoH, and I don't mean the sort of clones found in the i17 story arcs.) I just don't see how CoH can compete with that. (Note that this was not such an issue with Champions Online. While it had a setting and characters from an outside source, that source was more than a little obscure.)

Finally, am I the only one here who thinks developing the current City of Heroes and a sequel at the same time is a really bad idea? Unless the sequel is essentially grafted right onto the existing game, then all it will do is further split the player base.

* Why "troublingly?" While it has nothing to do with City of Heroes as such (which is why it's in this footnote), I see the focus on established characters as one of the major stumbling blocks in the development of the superhero genre. Sure, the established characters from the major publishers are fine, but I'd like to see more people developing their own superhero stories. (CoH sort of allows us to do this, in that its setting isn't beholden to an outside source, though it still isn't the same as the creator of a character building a setting from scratch.)

*sigh* @mister -rep:

Of course it's more complicated than that. I just get sick and tired of every nincompoop claiming that the devs ruined the AE by 'nerfing it into the ground'.

The AE was horribly broken upon its release. The state it is in now is a whole lot better than it was and as soon as they fix their ally spawn fix the biggest beef most people have with it at the moment will be gone too.
Does that mean it is perfect? Hardly, but it's getting there, slowly but surely. And claiming that it is 'nerfed into the ground' and you 'should be able to farm and pl in it if you want' is just ... dumb.

Eh, personally, I'm in the opposite camp. I'd much rather play Kel's Hero Guy than Batman or Kel's Jedi Dude instead of Luke Skywalker (or even Darth Vader.) But then, I never understood why people rolled Wolverine clones, so what do I know.

What, you don't have three other people with you to raid the Mothership? It's easy and scares the hell out of people in the zone when your raid ends.

I'm getting increasingly skeptical about GR because its titular feature is coming pre-nerfed into near meaninglessness.

Using the sub to cross locations requires you to drop any quests.

You still can't make a factionless SG, which is an utterly terrible decision. SGs are an important tool to build social connections that keep people around, and using the titular feature will require you to switch SGs or at least join a sister group that has a different chat domain.

There will be no advantages of the system for balancing PVP zone populations, that is being a rogue or vigilante is irrelevant to PVP zones.

It's sounding like you will not be able to get, say, hero quests as a rogue.

Not being able to use markets will limit how effective your cross trips can be.

These things could combine to turn it into simply a novelty or a way to get teams.

It's also been so anticipated that users' expectations may be impossible to satisfy.

I'm firmly of the creativity camp myself, but it's hard to guess how much of a factor this will be.

The biggest draw to new player will be making story choices, but the rest of it is, again, kind of insular. They've no reason to be interested in an alternate universe of some unknown game, or whatever incarnates are.

What they should do is avoid the mistakes of Arachnos and go wholly into distinguishing themselves from the new competition by offering creative independence. That is again what the expansion is about and it would be wise to emphasize it as much as possible.

I think that the openness of the incarnate system (which should be nothing but a code name) will actually have greater importance than it may sound like it would. They have to be the open alternative to DCUO. If the licensed game actually provides more creative freedom, there will be nothing to market.

But having people on both sides of the law in the same group makes zero sense. As for the chat, serious SG/VGs don't use it. They have their own global channel, which works cross-faction and cross-server. Also across multiple SGs on the same server, which many groups have.


Not sure what you're saying here.


Probably, since rogues and close to villains while vigilantes are close to heroes. Makes sense to me.


Not sure what you mean here. You will ALWAYS have access to a market. And, since you can carry stuff with you, I don't see any problem anyway.


And that differs from every expansion of every game in existence in what way?

I was responding to this:

The conversion is a fiction of reporting, so the exchange rate has no effect on the profitability of this game. All of the expenses are in US dollars, all of the revenue is in US dollars, and both are blind to the exchange rate. The exchange rate itself is just a static multiplier in the consolidated report.

It *is* important to factor in the exchange rate when attempting to extrapolate reported revenue (in Won) to likely subscriber rates, because changes in the exchange rate will change the Won-denominated revenue of those subscribers. But because we don't have subsidiary expense reports, we can't really compare expenses to revenue in any denomination. And if we did have those numbers, we wouldn't really need to know the conversion rate, because expenses would be in Won and revenue would be in Won, and we could still subtract and get a clean profit or loss number (of course, it would be in Won). But without those numbers, there is no "good news" aspect to the exchange rate, because there's no expenses number to apply it to at the moment.

In other words, what I'm saying is the exchange rate is neither good news nor bad news to profitability. It only obscures the true revenue numbers.

My main took 908 hours to get to 50 (as reported by a civilian).


As a rule, I don't PL alts for the sake of PLing alts. I have been in PL situations before, always to observe or learn the technique, but since the alts I've done that with are also alts that I test other things with, often which debt-cap them continuously, it all evens out. Alts I roll specifically for the sake of playing the powerset combination or character I basically never PL. In fact, I still often go through the tutorial.


So on the PL front, I've probably *tested* every PL trick that exists, but I don't *use* PL to actually level alts. I'm pretty sure I'm not that rare of an anomaly in that regard.

the first step is admitting you have a problem.