The European Community

Nice post Tyrrano

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Originally Posted by Tyrrano Hmm, don't think I was offering to transfer. ;D

Thank you for illustrating my point

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It's just the entitlement whine I can't stand.

Me neither, it's not really a productive method of getting the point across in my opinion, however I understand it and as I said, we love this game, that's why the posts can be passionate.



Oh and...

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Actually it's quite applicable. My access and experience is diminished because I'm halfway around the globe. Same with CoX for y'all - the distance and perceived lack of customer base causes problems that we NA folks don't have to deal with. I don't like it - neither should you. But neither situation is likely to change. :/

I get what you're saying, but I still don't think that this is a good comparison, maybe I just like to be a pain

I've been keeping my eye on this thread and even started to put together a list of what stores offer to the EU and how easy it is to actually find the game. For example did you know that quite a few of the popular UK websites [for example play.com and game] only have up to the good v evil edition? Thats a LOT of content they'ld have to download before they even get to play!

Also lets say you type "buy city of heroes" in to google, the official website is halfway down the results. All of the results above it only offer the good v evil download/boxset too [again far too much to download]. However if you do click on the official website, it takes you to this page http://www.cityofheroes.com/buy_now/products/buy_city_of_heroes.html , now imo it does not clearly state which one is the way out of date option between the two available downloads. Anyway as i was saying, below is a post that i made on another thread about 4 months ago when we found out we werent getting the GR boxset in europe. Think it still applies now even without recent updates to it

The first two years was great over in the EU. I personally wasnt here for the first few months when the EU side launched but have been here ever since. As with most games, the general population would obviously decline as time goes on and everybody accepts it.

However . . . . . . when a major new expansion comes out and its been hailed as the potential saviour of our EU servers within a lot of the playerbase [just log in to any of the EU servers and ask around, most people would say it], and then we get told its not being placed within our stores then i feel we personally have a right to feel generally worried and concerned for our "homes".

Not one person so far has said that having it as a download is a bad idea [more options always welcome], the problem being stated is that there is now a fear that our servers will continue to decline due to no new players. The US ones should flourish and rightly so from the new expansion, old players and new ones will be coming back to check it out.

Let me give a very good example too. Which of the following servers would you pick if your a new player?

EU: 4 servers, 2 of which are english, 1 german and 1 french.
US: 12 servers [iirc? Cant really remember off heart without looking]

EU: Union tends to peak at just over 200 players mark. Defiant just over half that. Vigilance just under half it and the german server [sorry cant really remember how to spell it] everytime i've logged on to it hasnt been over 50.
US: Majority of your servers have a lot more players than our busiest one. If worried about players being on at different times, then freedom/virtue would be fine since even your "lowest numbers" beat our peaks.

EU: Population slowly declining with no real advertising/merchandising to give the belief that it'll grow
US: Both GR and AE boxsets will have been available within stores in just over a year difference to give customers the impression that its a constantly growing business/game and would get new players.

We all have a lot of group of friends ingame who we like to talk/play too, but if theres no new players coming in then whats the motivation to keep us here? I dont want to play on a "private server" as such. I've even logged onto the french and german servers from time to time to team with people who i dont know [still love teaming with the french players!]. The EU population is currently a very loyal bunch of people who have for the last 3 years seen our community reps/communication dwindle constantly. Merger of the forums helped greatly with the communication part and we are only now starting to see dev/mod created events on our servers too.

Seemed like it was starting to pick up and that the future seemed bright with GR, now . . . . all the bad memories are coming back

I’ve been away so have only been able to browse this thread from my mobile so apologies for my lateness contributing (and yes, I did read every single post ). I think that someone in NCSoft needs to make some hard decisions when it comes to the future of the EU. Alas, I do not think that decision will be made by any of the Devs who read and participate on these boards. More likely, it’ll be a decision made by some suit in an office somewhere staring at a spreadsheet full of subscription numbers and dollar signs rather than this thread.

I think that for us in the EU, we heard the death knell the moment that the Brighton offices were gutted. I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of how things used to be, but when we had an EU office, we saw things such as EU competitions, events, meet & greets, good gods even this bizarre creature known as ‘publicity’ at a few of the sci-fi and comic fairs. Once the Brighton office was closed, we knew it was the beginning of the end. It took a week from the announcement of the closure for anyone from NCSoft to have the decency to turn up on our EU boards and offer us any reassurances as to what was going on. Even then, it was the same, non-specific retort we have come to expect in the two years following.

Last summer, we saw the merging of our boards and although this is an excellent thing that has allowed us wider participation with our US brethren, we still have yet to see anything that reflects that with regards to our servers.

I regard the EU part of these boards to be something I wander into vaguely if there’s something worth discussing. Unfortunately, all too often it is for threads full of people who used to be passionate, zealous advocates of this game who I have sadly watched become more and more jaded as time has gone on. I know, I can smell my own.

As I said, someone needs to make a hard decision about the EU. Either NCSoft has to give us the right publicity, support and drive to promote the game outside of the US or they should pull out of Europe altogether and offer the EU subscribers free transfers (badges, vet rewards etc included) to the NA servers. (Or heaven forbid, the much wanted server list merger!) Rather that than the lacklustre, ‘wait for EU subscribers to start new accounts in the US’ lip service that we receive at the moment. I could list the differences in service we receive but I hate the ‘entitlement whine’ as much as the next person. I just want to see parity between the two regions either by increasing support for the EU or doing the decent thing and making us one community. But as time goes on, I see the likelihood of this becoming less and less. I love participating with our US cousins on these boards, all I want to is to be able to do the same in game.

I’ll sit tight, keep playing and do my best to be patient. But I fear for a lot of us, that patience is running out.

One unavoidable factor is right under our noses: Cultural demographics. Since the 1930s and moreso since World War II, the United States in particular has had a fierce and long-standing love affair with super-heroes. Some of its oldest still fondly remember Captain-America punching you-know-who in the face. People have especially turned to them for entertainment (and comfort) during times of war and economic upheaval, when the U.S. has historically seen comic-book sales and related film-sales skyrocket. When Captain-America was assassinated several years back, the event made for bold, front-page headlines across the nation's newspapers. Serious business, know what I mean?

Really, with little to no European advertising coming down the pipe from NCSoft, the responsibility for community building necessarily falls on the community itself. Your paying customer base is dwindling, so what can you do? Well, always remember, like Spider-Man (didn't) say: With Great Problem comes Great Responsibility! Download the fan site kit and start building more interest in your game. Don't ask what NCSoft can do for you, because it's too late in the game for that strategy. Instead, do something for your publisher. Bring them numbers, and they will bring your funding.

Last but not least-- For those European players who are thinking of moving to the Freedom server, I'd also like to add that the Virtue server (NA's "Officially Unofficial Role-playing Server") often goes toe-to-toe with Freedom's concurrent population count, has more comic-book geeks, super-groups for role-players, and events for role-players than you could shake a, well, role-player at, and even has its own community-run website (Virtueverse.com).

The thing is, I believe that the Devs do care about the situation, at least that’s my impression from meetings in the training room etc.

But they are not the right people to give us any real answers, but these boards are of course the only real method of communication we have as players.

I was chatting to one of my oldest in-game friends last night who is thinking about surrendering all of his stuff the move to the US servers. His main reason was the lack of players to team with and with only 75 visible players on-line at the peak time (8.30pm) I understand how he felt. I tried to explain that giving up all of his vet rewards and boosters would be crazy but he loves to team and is completely fed up struggling to find players to team with.

This is typical of the slow erosion of our player-base that I have noticed increasingly over the past year and without any marketing or direction from NCSoft I’m sure it will continue until very few players remain.

As usual last night I ran a team, I’m pretty bullish about keeping the team full and search for players constantly to attempt to achieve this. Sadly a quote from a player joining my team may sum things up better than any point I could make here, he said “Woah big team” – there were 5 of us including the player joining.

Perhaps no-one that matters will even see this thread, but if they do, come on give us a realistic expectation before the EU servers really do cry out DOOOOOOOM!

Luckily I missed free transfer to the EU servers but I do feel for my european brothers and sisters.

Even some of the U.S servers are quite low population sometimes; I really think it is time they merge the U.S and EU servers so we can all play together. There are already a lot of euro players on the U.S servers, it feels like the EU community is being punished.

As for the CoH main website, I euro version of the site hasn't been updated for some time and looks old. Time they got rid of that really.

There really needs to be some serious housekeeping done around here, things feel untidy and messy. I also don't understand why the booster packs aren't advertised on the main website.

I guess boxes on shelves should be a priority, but I honestly haven't seen US MMOs on shelves here unless it's a local version. Or maybe that's just WoW, I don't know.

However, one BIG source for advertising that City of Heroes has never had is general banner ads, or even ads by google. I've so far gotten into at least two other MMOs (briefly) over banner ads on ICanHasCheezburger, those being Dragonica and Dungeon Fighter Online. Of course, Dragonica sucked and Dungeon Fighter Online crashed with their Tech Support giving me the middle finger, so both were a bust, but I went through the trouble of looking them up, finding videos for them on GameTrailers, reading GameFAQs reviews, tracking down Wikipedia articles and so forth.

If I were an MMO buying sort of man (both of those were "free" to play), that'd probably convince me to at least track down a free trial. I mean, I've done that for single player games. Find a good game from a banner (or a torrent site...) research it, fire up Steam to see if it's for sale, grab it and I'm instantly $20 short and one game up. I did this with Alien Breed: Impact on Saturday. I even got a gift copy for a friend of mine, who is NOT a game-buying sort of man.

And you know what originally caught my eye? Decent banners. None of that crap about listing features or boasting users. Dragonica caught me with a picture of a slightly unorthodox ganguro girl fighter... I actually think it was either this one or this one, and yeah, for obvious reasons. Dungeon Fighter Online caught me with a banner that looked like it was showing off an arcade fighter, and I hadn't played one of those in a while, so I was SO there... If only it'd run...

Basically, we need more online ads. As in, more than zero.

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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.

There are some good posts on this page of the thread.
Sadly there is still no red name reply let alone a ncsoft reply to our issue.


Today the US updater had an update to include the dev diary, the EU didn't.
This is another example of the difference in marketing and support between the 2 continents.

My account is due to be renewed in a few hours but right now I REALLY don't feel like paying ncsoft more money.
I will be following this thread so please keep alive, we need to get this issue out there.
Not just on this forum but on all other forums aswell.