I hate what super boosters have done to the community

well said.

They'd save a bundle on server upkeep outside the two/three months a year when there was a new issue.

But it wouldn't happen, because people like me want to be able to play the game on our schedule, not the release schedule.

Or in other words the game would end.

They wouldn't save anything on upkeep cost. There would be no upkeep cost because there would be no game.

This isn't like many years ago when they released without any major competitors in the superhero mmo market, or the mmo market in general.

There are MANY MANY MANY more current and in development mmos flooding the market. Folks have plenty of places to go if they feel they are not getting their value from their mmo.

EDIT: Thankfully we still are getting our money's worth with COH/V/GR. Issue 19 shows that.

*facepalm*

You even quoted my caveat refuting this, and yet you still went ahead and said it.

Actually it seemed like you danced around it.

I wanted to SPELL it out.

We're not here still playing this game because we like to give to charity.

The day the game stops giving value for it's dollar folks will move on. Just like any other mmo community.

EDIT: That's what most folks who are against boosters are saying . . . they feel like they are getting less value for their dollar.

I ofcourse completely disagree, but I understand the argument.

Wut? Did you put your brain on today? City of Heroes is the game. What kind of game? A "massively multiplayer subscription-based comic book hero and villain role-playing game" kind of game.

For reals, I show you a legal document that says "X is X" and you come right back and tell me "It doesn't say what X is!" practically quoting for yourself the part of the document that does. Are you so bent on making me wrong even when I'm right?


It doesn't have to, because that's not how legal documents work. If something is left out of a document like this, it means (and will hold up in a court of law meaning) that it is excluded. So the document didn't say that they'll send a free puppy to every subscriber? Then they explicitly will not, because the document didn't say that they will.

Sometimes you see ludicrous warnings on things like "Do not attempt to stop the blades of the chainsaw with your testicles" (I wish I was joking), but these are ever put in place for people with a lot of money who can't admit to their own mistakes. Instead, in most cases, the instruction manual will quite blatantly say something to the effect of "Use only as directed" or in some cases "Do not use at all" because of all the boneheaded losers out there who say "But you didn't say I couldn't use it like THIS!"

Despite what the Darwin Awards might indicate, more often than not it's actually the winning case in court that "you weren't following the instructions" is what decides who wins and who loses. In our game (City of Heroes, which is a subscription-based massively-multilayer online comic-book super hero game), if you sue NCsoft for not getting your free puppy, they're going to point out that it was not explicitly in the User Agreement and call you an entitled twit.


The argument being made is that since this revenue generally comes from us, the customers, we are by some monetary extension granted the right to dictate how our money is used by NCsoft. That if I pay for access to the game, it's perfectly reasonable for me to expect new development in return.

That's not the case. I can expect all I want, but if something doesn't happen the way I expect and I feel like they misused my money, I can't sue them over it because I'm only paying for access.

We are not investors: our $15 each month is not for supporting a company or its development efforts; it is for purchasing a service. This is an important distinction, because it defines what we should be expecting in return for our payments. What we should expect is access to the game. What we should not expect is absolutely anything else, including continued development and customer support.

If NCsoft one day decides that City of Heroes isn't worth the cost of upkeep, they can turn it off then and there without telling us, the customers, or even their own developers. How unexpected would that be! Should that happen, we can't do anything about it: our payments weren't made to keep the game running.

Yes and they should also not expect to keep getting our $15 dollars a month if they stop providing increased value with their product. If I was only paying to access the servers, and that was all I was getting I wouldn't be here. I assume many others would tell you the same.

Really? So then the game can easily go Free to Play then right?

I hope you don't mean what I think you mean: But are you seriously saying this game can keep running if they stopped charging $15.00 per month for it?

Thankfully PS and NCSoft aren't the soulless husks (read: SONY) that you assume they are all throughout this thread.

No, the argument being made is that consumers have every reasonable expectation that certain standards (both of the industry and as demonstrated by the particular company in question) will be met. If those standards are not met, then the company's only reasonable expectation is that those customers will leave.

Everything else is sophistry. Yes, NCSoft can do what it wants with our money. We have no standing to sue them for misusing our $15 once we've paid it. So what? NCSoft would have to be irrational not to use the money to improve their product and meet reasonable customer expectations. Thus, you are describing a distinction without a difference. The money is used to provide customer service and to develop new content.

The day that those things end is the day that the game dies.

To say that we have no right to demand this-or-that is correct. To say that customers voicing their preferences have a false sense of entitlement is silly.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

*Ptoo* I'd rather put words in my own mouth, thank you very much.

To answer the question, I doubt NCsoft could make City of Heroes free and still keep everything floating. Unless I'm mistaken, it's their largest source of revenue and if nothing else, it's what keeps the other games running.

Apply your intuition anywhere you want; in the end it doesn't matter. Our bank statements show a purchased subscription, not paid bills and salaries.


See here and here. The User Agreement was subsequently brought up to clarify what customers should expect in exchange for their payments, and product quality, management decisions and keeping the game going at all are not part of the package.

Is NCsoft dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot and make all their customers leave? Certainly not. Are they allowed to be? Absolutely. Our money doesn't dictate that one way or the other.

Pretty sure it's AION that makes the most.

So the $15 a month DOES in fact matter.

Good to know you're not insane.

I would beg to differ on this point. But I'll leave the thread be and we an agree to disagree.

Bottom line: Unlike MANY other mmos out there this one keeps improving itself and delivering value (meaning constant updates). Issue 19 continues that trend.

The day it stops doing that is the day people stop subbing. It isn't rocket science.

I think it's worth noting that at least one game in the industry has gone free to play and increased its revenue. DDO did this, and it now sustains itself wholly on micro transactions for in-game perks (some of which affect character progress). I heard but have done no research to confirm that LotRO is switching to this same model.

I'm not saying that CoH should or even could make the switch to such a model, but it has been done successfully.

"It's just a flesh wound!"

Good point. But the question is does anyone think this game could do that right after releasing an expansion?

In the first linked post, Grey stated his expectations as a consumer, based on what he feels he has received in the past for his subscription fee, and based on what he feels the industry standard is. He has every right to voice his opinion as a consumer about what he thinks is worth his subscription money. Rightly or wrongly, he clearly thinks that he's getting less value for that money than he used to get.

Your second linked post is just a restatement of your position. You're caught up with a meaningless distinction, and apparently you're the only one who doesn't see that. You seem to be a strict literalist, which can be a good thing when discussing certain matters, but works to your detriment here.

Whether we have legal standing to dictate what NCSoft does with our money is irrelevant. All that matters is that it is in NCSoft's interest to keep its customers. Customer expectations go hand-in-hand with customer retention. Customer expectations almost always go above and beyond a given business' strict, legal obligations.

Customer expectations are largely subjective, but they're not entirely arbitrary. For every unreasonable customer there is someone (like you, seemingly) who thinks that every benefit a company provides should be met with meek, gushing gratitude. On the whole, things balance out, until an industry standard emerges -- a standard that any competitor would be crazy to ignore. In this case, customer service (that is, support for customers who for whatever reason can't use the product they're paying for, and thus may soon leave) and content updates fall under that industry-standard umbrella.

We can legitimately disagree about what constitutes a reasonable amount of new content, what constitutes a fair price for that content, what constitutes good or bad customer service -- but pounding the EULA and insisting that NCSoft has the right to commit financial suicide serves no useful purpose.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I agree completely, and for that reason, it is an error for someone to suggest that the money they pay carries any weight. The fact that we spend money and continue to spend money is the point of interest here, not the fact that our subscription involves a $15/mo payment.

My argument is against those who assert that their $15/mo gives them the right to decide what NCsoft does behind the scenes. Being a customer matters, and NCsoft will wisely listen to the feedback of its customers, but the moment someone says "this is not what I'm paying for," they've stepped over into the realm of entitlement.

You're not right about this. Repeating it over and over doesn't make that any more true.

Yes, City of Heroes is described as a 'massively multiplayer subscription-based comic book hero and villain role-playing game'. It seems that even you can manage to be right about something occasionally. But for the purposes of this discussion, it's a pretty meaningless definition.


You're (conveniently) not accounting for reasonable expectations (see, there are those words again!) end-users may have with regard to your product.

The reason you won't find a proviso in the EULA about a free puppy with every subscription is because the customer has no reasonable cause to expect one. Therefore, there's no need for them to indemnify themselves against a hypothetical failure to hand out puppies. That's an unreasonable expectation - puppies are not associated with this type of product. On the other hand, things like expecting a company to provide a certain level of support for the MMO they run at no additional charge are perfectly understandable, given both the precedents established by other companies' offerings and NCSoft's products themselves. If they foresaw a scenario where they did not intend to provide such support, in light of the reasonable expectations of their customers - as it is arguably a given for this class of product - they would have explicitly accounted for such in the EULA.

That they didn't do so is telling.

You're conflating the two. I'm arguing the second.

There's a difference between 'dictating how our money is used' and having reasonable expectations with respect to the service you're paying for. Though it seems your frothing fury over common people daring to 'dictate' the actions of large corporations, or even thinking that they matter in the grand scheme of things, seems to have blinded you to the distinction.

However, it's perfectly fair for you to expect certain things from a service you're paying for access to, like customer support and continued updates over the life of the service. These are normal features for products of this type, and would only be noteworthy if they weren't provided.

Wrong.

The fact that we're paying for a service rather than a discrete product does not define what we should expect from said service. Why should it? Other MMO's provide periodic content updates at no additional charge in addition to any paid expansions they may sell. NCSoft's own games do this. CoX has a longstanding history of doing it. Yet you're going to sit there and argue that despite the weight of precedent, it is unreasonable of a person to expect this from the service at this point in time? That we ought to all be thankful that NCSoft doesn't just pocket our monthly fees and restrict all content updates to paid expansions, and praise them as such stand-up guys because they don't? Really? Come on.

What our payments were supposedly 'made to' do has no bearing on what the money's used for internally, and shouldn't be held up as the yardstick by which player expectations are judged.

The fact of the matter is this: we don't get new development in return for our payment (except when there's a price tag on it like Super Boosters or box expansions). However reasonable an expectation it may be that we do, our payment is explicitly defined in the User Agreement as nothing more than purchasing access to the game.

Do you feel your money has a longer reach than that? Then either stop paying or take it to court. Then you can try to convince a judge of the same things of which you're trying to convince me, and NCsoft's going to be using the same argument I am in their defense.

Deep down, I know my payment would help cover NCsoft's court fees, and while that's not a way I'd prefer my money to be used, the situation wouldn't be in my hands. I'm only paying for access.

I've found that if I don't use my browsers back button I'll stay logged in to the forums longer. I still get logged out but I can stay logged in longer.

I don't even use the back button.

I think I said "Hats! Bats, rats, and cats!" with so much hatred that the forum software censored it.

That's debatable, and we've gone around and around on the point.

It's also not relevant to the greater issue. Specifically: Are the people who expect content updates and customer support over the life of the MMO's they subscribe to being unreasonable? Are their expectations unfounded and indefensible? Are they exhibiting a sense of false entitlement by expecting these things?

You've been arguing that they are.

According to you, the fact that these things are widely acknowledged as a given for services of this type means nothing. As long as something's not expressly spelled out in the EULA, subscribers have no right to expect it. For them to do so is incredibly presumptuous in your eyes. Even something as fundamental as product support is only provided as a goodwill gesture, and we ought to be grateful that we're given those crumbs. How dare people expect companies to provide support for the services they're charging for! The nerve!

I can't agree with you on that.

Yes, I feel our money - the playerbase's collective money - has a longer reach than that.

Does the fact that we pay $15 a month to play give us the right to sit in on staff meetings and make decisions about who gets hired and who gets fired?

Of course not.

Does it entitle us to say, 'Hey, I expect this from a service I'm paying for, and if you don't provide it, then I'm going to take my money to someone who will?'

Absolutely.

The revenue generated by our subscription fees are what keeps companies like NCSoft in business. As long as they can offer a service we feel is worth the price, we'll keep on paying for it, month after month. If they can't do this, people will cancel their accounts. If enough people move on, the company won't be able to stay afloat. So they have a vested interest in fulfilling the needs and expectations of their subscribers.

Since we are paying to play this game, it's perfectly understandable that we have certain minimum expectations when it comes to support, features and updates. Those expectations are based on other similar products and what's historically been the norm for this particular game. They're not rooted in some false sense of entitlement.

I feel customers have an obligation to voice concerns they may have about the services they pay for. Their feedback should matter. Speaking up when their expectations aren't met doesn't make them 'entitled twits', as you put it.

If you can't concede these points, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. You taking umbrage over my use of 'our money is paying for x, y and z' synonymously with 'we're giving them our money, and as such, we have a reasonable right to expect x, y and z from this service' is nitpicky nonsense that sidesteps the actual issue.