Future of CoX..

The problem is, the people who find PvP fun in this game number at significantly less than 5% of the population. I heard a guess that it was around 2%, which I'm inclined to believe.

When 98% of your playerbase doesn't do an activity, and actviely dislikes that activity, there is nothing you are going to do to change their minds. At this point PvP in this game isn't really worth the resources they'd have to spend on it, because no matter how much time you spend improving something, the people who don't like it are going to continue not liking it.

A lot of the hardcore PvPers left in i13 when tey drastically changed PvP. ALL of them predicted that the game was going to die because PvP was dead. They were all wrong, which indicates that the existence of PvP is irrelevant to the success of this particular game.

The devs saw that they lost very little when they altered PvP, and stand to gain just as little by fixing it, so it is WAY down on their list of projects to work on.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Yes, you'd never see Paragon Studios hiding or masking the number of players on a server, say by changing how the search tool reports totals for example, would you...

People should really stop pulling percentages out of their butts and pretending that they are facts.

You might be right and you might not, but I stopped reading anything else you had to say as soon as I saw this. I bet I'm not the only one.

Whether they do or not doesn't change the fact that CO was a failure. They had the option of going free to play or . . .

Yeah.

All the best games go free to play after a year - it's the one sure sign of success in the MMO industry

It could be taken as a financial model change in the Post WoW era of modern MMO production.

Exactly this. Mind if I borrow it for my signature?

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

Could be. It could also be taken as 'since our player base fizzled away shortly after release, we had to resort to releasing our game for free just so people would take interest again and hopefully spend money at the cash shop'. Which seems to be the case with Turbine and now Cryptic's move to F2P.

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

I disagree with pretty much all of that. There are only two things DCUO does right: first is the look and scope of the cities. They really feel like cities. Second are the two travel powers of Superspeed and Acrobatics. (Flight is terrible.) With a slight addendum of not taking falling damage as a positive.

Other than that, DCUO is simply a generic Fantasy MMO with "elf" crossed out and "superhero" written in. Since the development team is comprised of people from Everquest and the like, that's not really surprising. I mean, item decay? Really? I can kind of see that if you're using swords in Azeroth, but using ray guns in Metropolis? And notice that the gear your character has affects his powers. It was a good choice to allow you to show it or not, but my lightning-throwing mutant doesn't need a freaking magical anklet in order to have better defense. That's what is known in gaming circles as RETARRRRDED. The sound effects for DCUO might as well all go, "derp derp derp."

Other than the look and feel of the game, DCUO gets almost everything wrong, and that's one of the reasons why it's failing.

The scuttlebutt I've heard says that said competitor is still doing well on the PS3 servers, its the PC servers that are turning into ghost towns. Which doesn't surprise me considering how the game was effectively designed for the console, with the PC being something of an afterthought. Now what happens when the PS3 gamers attention span flickers to the new shiny, that remains to be seen.

Honestly, I love the IP enough to want to see a good MMO for it, though my real dream would be for Warner Bros to drop SOE like its hot and dial-up NCSoft and Paragon...

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

I wish I could recall where I saw it, but the study I referenced earlier showed that about 95% of all MMO players didn't do PvP. 85% or so actively hate it and another 10% simply can't be bothered with it. That leaves 5% of the MMO audience. Developers are better off simply ignoring that tiny portion of the gaming audience in favor of better things. PvP in CoH is widely regarded as the single biggest waste of resources by players and critics alike. Imagine what we could have if they hadn't wasted all that time and money on those zones, which even on Freedom and Virtue stand empty 99% of the time.

They'd be better off converting the PvP zones to co-op zones and remove PvP entirely from this game.

They stand empty because of the changes brought in. Was it as popular as they might have liked? No. But it was more popular and I always saw at least RV with people in it.

The mistake may have been in putting in different level zones for PvP. Everyone I have played with online who PvPed either occaissionaly or all the time, all prefered one thing...to PvP at level 50, with access to every power they had.

[Edit] As for another thought, I can't imagine those numbers being correct, when another link showed Aion (a PvP game) had 1 million subscribers.

I found just the opposite. I can't even find it on any of the usual charts.

They were empty before I13. I did the rocket thing on a couple of my characters, which took me a few days and I never saw a single person in there. I hit a blank spot in one toon's late-20s leveling curve where I'd done all missions before (this was long before all the new content), so I just took a tour of all the PvP areas I could get into. Once I got tired of fighting street battles in one, I'd go to another, seeking the zone badges. I think I saw two other players that entire time, which was over the course of 7 or 8 levels when I got to 35.

As you says, only Recluse's Victory had any number of players in it, but I would often find it empty on Guardian. It's a myth PvP was fine before I13 -- it was just as anemic then. The best thing about the changes is that we no longer have the worst of the juvenile tools running around the forums now.

Both sides of it are taking a big hit

When you factor in that it cost $50 million to make, DCUO really needs to be charting somewhere. Either in sales or subs, and it's doing neither.

BrandX summed it up rather succinctly: DCUO doesn't appeal to either console kids or PC gamers because it suits neither platform nor playerbase well. It's a classic example of completely misreading your audience.

well, 2 factors that jump out at me. asian audiences(at least large portions of the korean and chinese userbase do) seem to enjoy pvp a great deal more, so since aion launched in korea as well, was absolutely bautiful and catered more to the tastes of the korean fanbase, id expect the division of the fanbase to skew heavily. also, note that you said had. recently several large pvp centric games launched, had huge launches and then instantly plummeted (conan and warhammer also seemed to suffer this fate) aion has, by the news i have read on kotaku, had several serer merges as the population contracted dramatically. So the question is if pvp can retain a userbase outside of the hardcore pvpers, particularly in a game that a portion of the playerbase anecdotally claims to have come here to avoid it.

I do agree that aiming for Consoles was probably not very smart, console gamers are a different breed from PC gamers and despite everyone clamouring to try to make a console based MMO, I think only 1 was marginally successful and even then it's PC counterpart did vastly more business (its sequel many years later however bombed horrendously).

MMOs are still very much a PC orientated genre, much like the RTS genre. This isn't a slam against consoles it's just that is the way things have gone.

The other thing we're seeing is MMOs that have failed to move with the times, the above mentioned sequel felt like it was designed by a group still trying to follow the EQ model even more strictly than its biggest competitor who had made strides to move away from the 'unrelenting grind' model.

The Korean Grindfest model is definitely losing its popularity in the west, if it was ever that popular, people can put up with grinding IF it's puncuated by awesome things (like a particularly cool questline that has you jumping from dragon to dragon to ascend a mountain). If there is nothing but solid grinding, as most of the free2play (free2play are notoriously grindy) or Korean based MMOs have, you're not going to be popular anywhere but in countries that like that sort of thing.

Aion is an example of an MMO that was 'westernized' but not enough to actually save it from being hideously boring for western audiences (Korean ones however still make a large number of subscribers).

CoH, similarly, is so different from the Korean model (WoW has enough hints of it that you CAN grind if you really want to but questing is more fun but less efficent) that it bombed spectacularly over there.

Different regions value different things.

Indie game publishers - with games people generally haven't heard of (yes, I have, and know about such things as World of Goo, Braid and the like) are a totally different matter. They're a couple of people sitting around saying "We want to do this on Linux!" which is why you have a few million Solitaire and Othello/Reversi clones. Pointing at those and trying to make them seem like an argument for a *major* developer sinking more money on one title than the indie devs will see in their whole run isn't really rational.

Or are you going to tell me Minecraft is *really* on par, in every respect, with even COH, not to mention the aforementioned bigger games? I've played it. Yes, it's cute. It's also very much "low budget." The goal of the game: "Do stuff." I'm not misdefining it. It's *exactly* that vague.

And arguing about WebOS? Seriously? You're kidding. Tell me you're kidding. WebOS is as much a gaming platform as my house is a skyscraper. It's there to get on and check email, etc. quickly, not to be in 24/7 and actually do work (or "serious" gaming.) Sure, play Farmville on it. But if you're going to tell me Farmville is actually equivalent to a major gaming title - like any of those listed - the discussion's over, as you're in a world of your own.

Having Linux "in my phone and in my car" is also not an argument, unless you're *seriously* going to say that COH, DCUO, Starcraft, etc. need to be playable IN FULL on said devices. In which case, to put it bluntly, you're delusional. Like it or not, yes, they ARE going to have to consider just Desktop Linux - not the linux that lets me change songs in my fancy car stereo, or the by-necessity minimal (and not by necessity non-standard-between-devices) Android interface.

Don't forget, as well, the hardware requirements for the games. You can play World of Goo on an iPad. No 3d acceleration, shading, etc. All 2d. Now, try Arkham Asylum... wait, it's nowhere near capable enough to even show the loading screen, even if it existed on iOS.

I like the little twist on MS history though. That's amusing. Big orange letters, though, don't change the way MS-DOS GOT TO BE THE DOMINANT PLATFORM. Why did people program games for DOS? Because everyone was using it. You may have noticed little titles like Doom, X-Wing, a fair Lucasarts stable in general, Origin, Apogee...

Larger developers HAVE developed for Linux. What happened? They fell flat on their faces. Each platform they develop for needs people who know their way around it, people who can support it and the like. Why incur the cost for something that's going to give them little to no return? (And, frankly, WINE and the like provide even LESS incentive to do so.)

"Those commercial developers and publishers are getting their collective ***** handed to them by independant developers?" Really? What kind of money did they sink (using a cross-platform game here) into World of Goo? How much did they get back? How does that compare to the *launch* of any of the games I mentioned? Unless you have a very *creative* definition of "getting their ***** handed to them," of course.

Edit: Before I forget:
Strangely, for something like that, they have no word about it whatsoever on their website (steampowered.com.) I'd expect there to be loud cheering in the "OSX, but what about Linux?" thread. Instead, silence. Or at least a note on "Steam under Linux" on their own developer wiki. Now, they do have info there on setting up Linux binaries for *servers,* but that's hardly the same as the game itself (and due mostly to people wanting to rent game servers *others* are running... which for various reasons may be running Linux.)
Plus:
"Valve puts an end to Steam on Linux rumors" - answer being "No."
"No steam for Linux" - Linux magazine online.
"Steam not coming to Linux" - slashdot
"No need to get excited about Steam on Linux - again." - Linux Today.

All of these (and more) are from Aug-Sept 2010, and all are there to shoot down the rumors that came up with the Mac release at the time of YOUR article some months before.

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I was playing on Virtue and in Arena, so higher population could of made a difference.

Well, I say had, as...

1) I read the other post first, so was refering to it in the past tense.

2) It could of also been a past amount of subscirbers (there was mention in the thread that the list could be old).

And last I knew, the server merging on there had less to do with less players, and more to do with PvP oriented game, didnt need that server no one but a few played on.

Nope.

They made money. That's what they're in the business to do. And if they hadn't, would CoH be as it is today? Not likely.

Not saying we all wouldnt be here loving whatever they would have done, hell, they might have done something other posters have been clamouring about.