Draconian character creation power set availability due to balance issues?

Unfortunately every game has folks like this...those that get very aggressive because they do not wish to work for what they have.

I've only had Inf problems on a few initial characters I rolled...since returning (and thanks to the open email to yourself) I have found it much easier to outfit my characters early on with a suitable amount of Inf.

That's why I mentioned what I call drive by gifting. To avoid the inf beggars some of us quietly drop stuff on people without saying anything. If we see a nice costume, read a bio we like, or if we see new players helping others out we'll silently drop an expensive recipe, enhancement, inspiration, salvage on them and move off before they can figure out where it came from.

I hear other players do it more often during the holiday events.

Personally I use my second account when I'm in the mood to do gifting (and I can afford to activate it). I throw the alt on /hide and give away things I've emailed to that account. That way I'm never pestered by jerks demanding more free stuff, and I can still enjoy making someones day by complimenting the effort they put into their character.

I'm hoping the other good samaritans will also use secondary accounts to do more gifting once Freedom goes live and they realize like I did that it stops the jerks from abusing our generosity.

Just a question, but what do other games allow? Full class respecs? Or full skill tree respecs?

I haven't played anything other than SWG and WOW so have no idea what the standard is.

"Did not meet expectations?"

Really?

This game is owned by a parent company that has proven itself (repeatedly) to not be the slightest bit shy about pulling the plug on underperforming games. (Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault, Lineage)

The fact that NCSoft not only kept the game alive, but hired more people to run it and gave it it's own development studio does not say to me that the game failed to meet expectations. Given how NCSoft treats games that don't make them money, it's a very safe bet to say that CoH exceeded their expectations by quite a bit.

Game development companies do not devote more resources to games that don't meet expectations. Especially companies with NCSoft's attitude toward underperforming games.

Just looking at the facts logically will debunk any notion that the game failed to meet expectations.

Same argument is posed for almost every game in existence by it's fans, including SWG.

It's not a stretch to expect folks were looking for a game launched online to break 200k subs, and certainly not be sub 100k.

But that's neither here nor there. There are reasons folks walked from this game. There is no way that I know of to be sure of what those reasons are.

The only thing I do know is that when I left last time I didn't say a word, seems like quite a few people have done the same. This time I chose to speak up.

I'll give people 20M for SOs if they ask nicely. Past that...

I was on a TF with someone who was asking for advice on spending merit rewards. I advised A-merits, and she said she couldn't afford the conversion, so I sent her 40M to get her started.

Also, let's take a look at the MMO subscription numbers post a few pages back. How many of the non-Big Name or non-Big Developer titles have lasted (and how many of those act like WoW and inflate their numbers by counting temporary accounts as full subscriptions)?

I see games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online get upwards of 800K subscribers, and then are almost dead within a year. Rift might be doing the same thing. Star Wars Galaxies had numbers until SOE decided that it didn't like that. Dark Age of Camelot: petering out. With Going Rogue, I'm betting that we're beating out Everquest, Everquest II, and Ultima Online as they are declining.

I mean, according to the 50K-150K chart, only a few games seem to be on the upswing, including a game I've never heard of: Dofus (and by the looks of it, I'd say it's an Asian game). The others are Second Life, LotRO (although we'll have to see if that trend continues with it being FTP or not), and Eve Online (although didn't they just lose a huge number of subscribers en masse?).

However, through all of that, CoH's numbers have held relatively steady. I don't think that we've done as bad as you think we have. Consider a few facts:

1) Superheroes are very much a western phenomenon, for the most part, at least in terms of how this game portrays them

2) Cryptic Studios was a no-name studio when it was working on this game

3) The game lost the known-title backing of Champions in the development process, which made it a very risky venture

4) There was no Asian release until after the game was live (look at the big hitters on that list, and you'll find that most of them are huge in Asia), which probably hurt it's release numbers.


Considering all of that, CoH has outlasted some games, been a bigger hit than others, and is still running. I'd say it's a success, and I don't know how you'd prove otherwise from an objective standpoint.

There are so many reasons why I don't believe someone would quit because they can't re-choose their archetype and powersets. The main one being; how did they get so far playing sets they don't like that it makes re-rolling look like too much work?