June Producer's Letter

This is exactly what I am hoping. :P

I plan on staying as subscriber and we get 400 points per month. I just want to feel like these 400 points is worth $14.95.

I don't want a new costume set costing 1200 points and my $14.95 will be worth 3x less. That won't be good! I'll feel cheated.

Like I said, I think as long as current subscribers (400 point monthly) are treated right, this F2P won't change much to me. The key point is what can you buy with those 400 points.

If the value of 400 points sucks, then I can see a lot of angry fans do rage-quit. The company just needs to be very careful about the conversions.

None and you knew that before you asked that lol

I just sent an impassioned email to one of the admins, that I was already in a conversation chain with, all but begging for them to show the sg's some love or let us know if they are pending mass extinction

Yeah, I'm sure that a producer's letter would of course need to mention stuff like that... >.< I hope you are kidding.

You mean like the April Producer's Letter:

Or the May Producer Letter:

Or the fifty bazillion posts Jay makes in the art threads, which can't *all* be about incarnates, like:

I think you misunderstand. I hope that my subscription buys at least as much game as it did before if not more, period. I expect my subscription to provide at least the same level of game as it has previously, and as a practical matter it should be at least minimally better.

Totally separate from that, the 400 points should buy me something nice, but it should be all gravy. If that gravy is a hearty wine reduction with garlic and shalots, fantastic. If its peppercorns and pan scrapings, its still all good.

The real purpose to the 400 points isn't a cash back reward. Its that actually, buying things ala carte can be fun, engaging, and empowering all its own. The 400 points is to ensure that VIP subscribers *also* have at least some access to that side of the house for no extra cost: that they can play with the house's chips as it were, to get them involved with the system. This is a form of empowerment that the premium players get automatically as part of satisfying their need to buy many parts of the game we VIPers get for free. But the devs want to get us involved as well - and to be honest hope we decide we *want* to buy some of the new shinies as well - so they comp us some chips to see what happens.

If you can exercise self-control, the 400 points will be free money. if not, it might be the loss-leader that gets players spending even more money. But either way, the choice is the players to decide what to do with it. But it is *not* supposed to buy what your subscription used to buy. Your subscription plus the 400 points should net to what you're getting now *combined* at the very least, and for this model to be truly successful your subscription alone, without even counting the 400 points, should continue to deliver $14.95 of content. The 400 points isn't supposed to be delivering $14.95 of content on top of the $14.95 you're supposed to be getting with your subscription, and it would be amazing bordering on ludicrous if it did.

David and Jay are different people, aren't they? Anyway, without knowing something this big was coming (which, note, you did know even if you didn't know specifically what) and the announcement shortly thereafter of the Incarnate Armour and other art-related things tied to the Incarnate system, I can't really see anyone making the connection that what he was excited about wasn't those, which are intimately tied to the Incarnate system.

In hindsight, I'll give you that one. I was in a very anti-Paragon point at that time, and read it more negatively than was warranted. Where's my crow?

Yes, it should, shouldn't it?
2004: Issues 1, 2
2005: Issues 3, 4, 5, 6
2006: Issues 7, 8
2007: Issues 9, 10, 11
2008: Issues 12, 13
2009: Issues 14, 15, 16
2010: Issues 17, 18, 19
2011: Issues 20, 21

Average per year: 2.625 issues

I won't bore us all with the details of each issue, but you state that our continued $14.95 + the incoming 400 points per month should continue to give us the same level of content than we've gotten in the past.

I agree with you. Unfortunately, I don't believe that this is going to be the case as I've stated before. I find it FAR more likely that to get similar levels of content we'll end up paying 50 to 100% more per month just to break even.

Really looking forward to the gravy, myself. If that gravy comes in athe form of a revamped base building system, all the better.

Like Arcana stated, it's all going to be about how patient you can be, and how you spend your points. Some of the stuff available for purchase VIPs will already have by virtue of being subbing customers. VIPs will get the same level of FREE that everyone else gets. If this system were not in place, the same situation would apply...everyone gets the same stuff at a base level, and those that pay more get the extras (boosters). I'm not sure how you're jumping to the conclusion that all of a sudden each Issue will be less, and we'll have to pay extra to make up for it. Issue 21 is larger than what we've seen since GR, and everyone that pays gets it, just like if it came out tomorrow.

Then they would be making twice the money for the same amount of content generation? If they can pull that off without a general revolt of the playerbase and without someone like me noticing they are a lot smarter than I am.

In any case, I can't make promises for the devs, and I can't honestly state I know with certainty what they will do in the future, or what they might be forced to do in the future. What I do know is that I looked Positron in the eyes and told him that's what I thought Freedom would need to do in order to be successful, and it needed to be done so obviously that everyone would be able to see it was true except for the extreme tin foil hat wing of the playerbase. The fact that he didn't burst into laughter I'm going to take as a sign that he didn't think what I was saying was absurd.

For me, the bottom line is that this is about value. Either I'm getting more value for my money or I'm getting less. If I believe subscribers are getting more value for their money in I21, I22, I23, and so on, I'll say so. If I believe they are not, I'll say so also and the devs know that my assessment of that will be a very informed one, since there's no quibbling with me over the amount of effort it takes to do different things. The Standard Code Rant doesn't apply to me, in other words.

The impression I got, from everyone I had a chance to talk to at Paragon about Freedom face to face, is that they believe this will open doors to expanding the game and delivering a better product to its subscribers as well as the premium players that the new model picks up. They could be wrong: it wouldn't be the first time. But I believe they are sincere, and I believe they are on the right track at the start. That's really all I can ask for from the development team.

And as I said previously, even if you are right it will take quite a while before we know that. The biggest problem with Issue 21 is that its going to set the bar pretty high for Issue 22. Only the most jaded and flippantly negative players are going to be able to say we aren't getting our money's worth and then some in I21. And my guess is that I22 has stuffed the pipeline with stuff as well. So if a drop off is coming, the earliest we're likely to be discussing it is sometimes around Spring 2012. And it would take at least until Summer 2012 to establish a trend. Long before then I think we'll know if City of Heroes Freedom ends up opening doors for the game to expand its footprint, resources, and development.

IBM used to have a line printer in their product line, they had a very similar model that was twice as fast, and they had an upgrade from the slow model to the fast model. The upgrade cost was exactly double the price, of the lower cost model and it consisted of wrapping a cable twice around the spindles driving it. The customers weren't happy about being gotten the better of, but seeing as the lease costs were enormous for any kind of electronic computing equipment at the time, they bit the bullet. The added productivity from the rest of the system made up for the cost.

The new incarnate system is horribly grindy in many people's eyes, they could simply sell table upgrade tokens. Yes you would be taken advantage of but it would save you lots of real time, and let you use empyrean merits for other shinies.

You wouldn't be aware of any games that use a model where everything is possible in the game but you have to pay to lower the grind to a reasonable level ?

The canonical story from the bad old days was the Honeywells which used to be field upgraded to faster speeds by removing a jumper that introduced waits. And unfortunately even in my long but not that ancient career, I've seen examples of this sort of thing.

But that's not really relevant to this situation.

The problem with this theory is that you'll never find consensus on what a reasonable speed is to earn anything, so if the devs do the reasonable thing which is to pick a reasonable target in the middle and then offer optional ways to accelerate that speed for a price they feel is fair, there's no way to distinguish that from the more sinister motive of deliberately making the game slower than necessary for the sole purpose of selling accelerators. It is an unfalsifiable conjecture regarding motive.

However, it is theoretically possible to determine, by direct calculation of man-hours, how much resources go into subscription content and how much go into ala carte content not automatically accessible to VIP players. It is therefore both falsifiable in theory, and provable in theory, to state with no ambiguity that the players are getting more game in terms of actual development effort, and not tricks for their subscription dollars with the new model. In the absence of the raw data to perform that calculation, I'm going to estimate. I have several very strong bases upon which to extrapolate those estimates. Not everyone will accept those estimates, but that's not really particularly significant. The point is I will know if we're getting more or less game, within some margin for error, and everyone else will have to either accept that estimation or come up with their own. And then act accordingly.

I know from personal experience about IBM's. It wouldn't surprise me if honeywell had one as well, D.E.C. also had a near endless list of that sort of thing, going from making machines that had to buy proprietary format disks to making not quite standard memory.


You can measure the range of acceptable range of progression speeds for the game. Well in principle it can be measured I don't really have the motivation but NCSOFT has however many subscribers*#of sales/subscriberMOnth*Price per sale as their motivation. I would hardly call doing that, and setting prices to maximize profits sinister, its just good business.

But that is irrelevant for most people. They will be able to see it. For them it will be like getting the weather report by opening a window. We already have people upset about the grindy nature of the new trials.


Well if you can get their man hour numbers that's truly impressive, are you NCSOFT'S accountant or efficiency expert ? I can't imagine extrapolating the time it took to create a piece of software from the finished product. It is usually an incredibly variable process to define the project and make certain it actually completes in a timely fashion to begin with.

Once again though I don't think anyone is going to care about the amount of development effort that goes into the overall product. They are going to care that what they enjoy in the game gets addressed and gets addressed in a tolerable way.

Yes they did

Yes there were

On the one hand, all the previous co-op zones have been 35-50 - but on the other hand, Praetorian zones are also all technically co-op.
The epic feel of the zone, and the stuff in it, does sound more like a 35-50 place, and with it being the place where Primal Earth and Praetoria blend togther, that sounds like Vanguard will be invovled in getting us there to fight Tyrant and the DE, which was implied in Dark Watcher's arc in GR, and Vanguard tend to be a more high level group.

My husband and I have vastly different ideas of what is a "comfortable" temperature. What he considers about right I consider too cold, what I consider about right he considers too hot.

We are not going to agree on a "open the window" estimate of the weather - either I'll say it's too cold or he'll say it's too warm. However, if we look at an objective measurement like temperature, and see yesterday was 18 Celcius while today is 16 C, we will both agree that today is colder than yesterday (even if I would consider today "too cold" and he "chilly but bearable").

I can say I'm starting to look at this change in a much more positive light after having read this letter and finding out the lengths PS has delved in order to make the transition successful. Combined with my own reassessment of what exactly I expect and want. I still have faith in our Dev's and finding out how dedicated the are to us is very reassuring.

Let me say this, as my own persona add-on to what Arcanaville is saying..

The Dev's took time out of their day on a saturday to bring in a couple dozen players and get our feedback. And when I say took some time, I mean a whole saturday. Fed us, gave us breaks and most of us were there for most of the day.

It wasn't just a couple either. People from marketing, design , production, and the community relations team were there, getting feedback on a lot of the stuff coming in CoH:Freedom. They took notes, they listened to what we said, they responded to feedback they spent a day picking our brains. Not just old hands either, they had a nice cross section of players, older, newer etc. A few times when one of us said we had concerns about an option or a proposed idea, they immediately started throwing other options or variations of the idea at us to see if something else would be better.

They took it very seriously, and I wasn't thrilled about the idea of F2P to start, but I left thinking that they had a great handle on it, and that these people are dedicated to this game, they love it, they are passionate about it and they very much want to keep their fans. Conversations I had with a number of them told me that, not because they said it, but because everything they said pointed to it.

Yes, there will be some people that will always be unhappy. But honestly I think if people keep an open mind to what's coming they will see this could be a great thing for the game and a lot of cool stuff could be coming our way.

this

That is something that should definitely NOT be 'gravy'. A better working base editor should be part of the basic game imo.

Now, extra base items and stuff (statues of your characters anyone?) is something that has limited appeal to some if not most and a lot of appeal to others. Because of it's limited appeal I imagine that stuff like that isn't high on the priority list, so it doesn't fit into the regular issue budget. So it would make more sense as gravy.

I wasn't going to jump in and join the pile on but seriously?

I have personally on at least two accasions pointed out to you directly in discussion threads that there still was stuff other than incarnates being developed. There was in Issue 19 (arcs, missions), there was in Issue 20 (mid level TFs), there was plenty of info floating around that there would be in the future.

And this is exactly the point people here are making.

There was plenty of information, you just chose not to see it.

Do you feel better now?