2010 2nd quarter earnings

I'll be here for as long as Paragon Studios keeps being super-heroically awesome. Now, I wouldn't dare suggest to anyone here what they should do with their time. But armchair MMORPG forecasters have been around since the first days (yes, mere days) of UO. And UO has actually outlived several of those naysayers, how about them apples?

Shine on and stay classy, armchair forecasters. I'd finish reading past page one--I usually make it a point to read through a thread before replying--but I believe there's a lady somewhere getting her purse snatched, so I'm needed elsewhere!

Edit: Abbreviated the name of a non-City of Heroes game.

Don't we normally get Graphs with this?

I want to see Worm battling out on the Graph like last time damn it!

As for me...well I've yet to find any other MMO that tops both customisation AND playability, so here I'll be until I do.

Edit:

Also good point Ultima Online, Everquest 2 (and I believe 1) are still kicking...Ultima Online has been going for what, 10+ years now?

as far as population goes, we're not near 200k like the old days

QR: I think what happened to AE went far beyond "exploits getting fixed." I don't think people should be able to PL to 50 in 20 minutes, true - except for me, because I can handle it.... JOKE! Its a joke, people - but they went far beyond merely fixing that.

They basically stripped 98% of the rewards out of AE, rendering mostly useless a system they had devoted an entire issues' worth of thought to.

The merits [pardon the pun] of this strategy are debatable. They did stop the exploits, true. But at what price?

All I know of exploiting is the one AE baby I kept. She's extremely rich due to having had to purchase few enhancements - she had tickets. We all had tickets. And they were fun.... She went in the door level 1, came out level 20 in about ten minutes flat. I skipped a great deal of the pain of a pre-stamina character on a very end-heavy character. Call it "exploit" if you must, but that was a lot of fun. She's one of my top five favorite characters now.

I also got to try out other characters without having to sink six months of work into them only to discover that I hated the powerset. Strangely enough I did all this "exploiting" and here I still am, with just shy of fourteen level 50s and counting. Still paying a subscription. I would say that anyone who quit over perceived fun being blasted out of the game with a nuclear warhead - which is what the AE nerfs amounted to, a nuke applied to the AE building - may not actually qualify as an Evil Exploiter.

Sometimes people just wanna have fun. If they are paying a subscription to do it.... I don't know. All I wish is that we had those ragequit people back. We could use 'em.

AE was created with creators in mind (and potential fans of those creators). It was made so that players could create their own stories, villain groups, worlds, universes.

It was designed to be a content creation tool, not a ticket/reward/loot creation tool. And I'd still explore those creations even if there weren't any "rewards" for doing so. As a creator and lover of stories, I know what the real rewards of the MA system are.

an alternative take for the doomsayers

Perhaps Chicken Licken was wrong after all

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

Let me expand on my previous question here: What are we hoping to achieve? I have a few guesses:

1. Strongarm the developers into making our changes under threat of game sink. "See, you did this, and now your game is sinking. You better do that, or you will go out of business!" This is, has always been and will always be futile. The developers cannot be strongarmed. They can be persuaded, and they can be persuaded by desire and enthusiasm, not threats of vague apocalypse. If the point was to persuade the developers, focusing on how a change could help the game is far superior to threatening how not making the change means doom.

2. pwn teh noobs. "People said the game wasn't dying, but now I have proof. Ha-ha!" This is pointless, useless and, above all, petty. While there is a certain degree of satisfaction in "I told you so!" what is it actually achieving? If we WANT the game to fail, then it makes sense to try and depress current players enough to leave by prophecy of doom, thereby doing little more than creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, thereby removing any satisfaction of being "right" anyway, since you didn't know, you just helped make it happen. But that's a bad motivation in any ethical context.

3. Sour grapes. "I hate this game because of all the bad changes made to it, but it's OK. It's the game's fault because it sucks and see? See? It's failing!" Having seen people do just that (and fall several levels down the ladder from "friend" into "*******"), I can definitely see it as a possibly intent, but again - what does this achieve? It's like the console wars all over again - I cannot simply prefer one game over the other based on personal taste. One game has to be provably superior to another in order to justify my opinion with hard fact and make my decision obviously correct. This is not a good motivation, because it could just as easily be replaced with a modicum of self-esteem.

And that's all the options which I could envision. And none of those options are productive. WE are not going to fix the game if that were our intent, because WE are not game designers who work for Paragon Studios. The most we can do is campaign for what we want, make our opinions and ideas heard and trust the developers to make a good game out of it. We can't keep second-guessing them and trying to yank their jobs from out of their hands like we know everything. All the gripes here are legitimate, but as complaints constrained to their own particular field, not extrapolated into doom and gloom.

And the rest is just mean-spirited alarmist hysteria. I've seen and seen claims that Going Rogue will bomb and sink the company. Even assuming that it will, so what? How will that change what YOU are doing right now? Do you need assurance that City of Heroes will last another decade in order for you to keep playing? Because such a guarantee will never exist. For any game. Even WoW. It's likely, obviously, but it's never guaranteed. Any game can bomb and fail. What does dwelling on that accomplish?

Even if we could prove that City of Heroes is going down the drain, what are we trying to achieve by it?

Quote:

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.