How to Get More Players

Larger van.

I live in America, that makes me an American with freedom of speech and the right to have my own opinion. Every post in this tread was my opinion of CoX. You might not agree with how I feel but you don't have to attack me for it. I allowed everyone that posted the freedom of not being verbally assaulted. I simply posted my opinion, but honestly it's your game play the way you want to and I'll play the way I want to. If shutting down servers is a no then we won't have long to play CoX. The only bad thing I said was calling everyone narrow minded for not seeing the inevitable. I think how Pinnacle was a year ago when I left and how it is now. How will it be a year from now if things don't change? Maybe 10 - 20 players on-line, do the math. And again I only play on the Villain side of Pinnacle. All my searches are from the Search Button not the /whoall. The only time I use the /whoall is in PvP zones when I am looking for a hero to kill. Like I said Saturday night Eastern Time I'm going to go server hoping, that used to be the peek time for Pinnacle.

You know what's awesome? Facts are awesome. Let's have some facts.

First off, here is the (mostly) current Juggernaut's Club of MMORPGs, the ridiculously big dogs.

Note: All of these are absurd. WoW in particular has close to four times the subscriptions of any of its closest competitors. Aion is the new big huge thing. Runescape is massive. These games are all big deals to the entire industry, and in the case of WoW, to the entire world.

Here is the Big Boy's Club.

If you look at them, you will notice they fall into three categories.

1) Strong, healthy games that will not die for the foreseeable future. These include local heavyweights like LotRO and EVE, ancient and unkillable creatures like the EverQuests, and more recent products that are still currently healthy but may not stand the test of time, like Age of Conan.

2) Dying games. These ones all have one thing in common: Their peak was way higher than their current numbers and their descent has not been arrested. Warhammer Online started high but plummeted rapidly afterwards, and is now in its death throes. Whatever malady first afflicted Star Wars Galaxies in 2005 has finally killed it. Dark Ages of Camelot is suffering a similar slow demise.

3) Also, there's Rift. It's new.

The hallmark of games from the first category is that they have fairly stable server populations regardless of how big those populations are. Maintaining servers is actually super cheap (so much so that ArenaNet has made great profits off of Guild Wars using no subscription fees ever, which is why they aren't recorded on the charts), which means once the game has already been developed, there is no reason not to maintain the servers unless the subscription count drops to practically zero.

City of Heroes has that stable population of ~125,000 according to all available data. Now even if CoX profits are decreasing, so long as they level out at some point above about 25,000, Paragon will be fine. Overall, however, Paragon isn't acting like a studio facing decreasing profits. They're still churning out new content, they didn't jump on the F2P bandwagon until after bigger games with enough population padding to take risks had proved it was workable (most specifically, LotRO), and they're not making any sort of desperate money grabs like you usually see with companies about to go under. CoX remains the undisputed king of the super hero genre within the MMO industry (though dark horse challenger DCUO might unseat it eventually, and that actually could put CoX in hot water).

For the curious, there's also the charts for the Wannabes, most of which are already dead or half there, and the Never Stood A Chance category. Although Puzzle Pirates is on that last one and is actually doing fine, but you'll notice the data is five years out of date and that game's got graphics roughly on par with a flash game anyways.

Also, NCSoft is publicly traded which means we can actually download their earnings reports from their website. If you bother to download it, you'll note that CoX is pulling in about double the amount of money as Guild Wars in the past few quarters.* You may recall that Guild Wars is the game that's getting a sequel with awesome new bells and whistles which is hoping to unseat the other non-WoW industry leaders with its incredible new gaming paradigm. The one that's going toe-to-toe with Aion and The Old Republic. And Paragon is making twice the profits of those guys. This data came from November.

I think CoX is going to be fine.

*And also that holy crap NCSoft owns every platinum MMO except WoW, what shady MMO crime lord are they paying to get that kind of market dominance?