With Freedom an apparent financial success...

Is any of that money going to go into non-cosmetic improvements? Things like an improved search interface, Praetorian flashbacks or upgrade of existing flashback system maybe, maybe some base lovin'? I'm all for more shiny and more stories, don't get me wrong, but I don't hear anything about eventually bringing anything else up to date?

An open letter to NCsoft

Well, we just had a UI upgrade for the tailor/character creation together with Freedom, so that probably will have to last a while. The base builder got Shift-dragging and Ctrl-dragging not long ago. I22 has the LFG tool expanded to include all the TFs/SFs in the game. So there is some stuff happening.

As to the specific things you want, you should probably ask the Devs directly.

Question: Besides the game not keeling over, what makes you think Freedom was a financial success? What little data I have available from after Freedom's launch (and public data is pretty scant and released on only a quarterly basis) suggests that there was pretty much no change in revenue at all after Freedom's launch.

How would you upgrade the existing flashback system? The way it stands at the moment, it seems fine to me.

Praetorian arcs need added into Ouroborous. Even if you were a Praetorian you can't go back through Ouro to re-do them, bleh. I suppose they could just say that the Menders can't go back in time in an alternate dimension so they can't meddle in Praetorian history?

But the thing that they still have never added are the Mayhems and Safeguards. It's not as much of an issue blueside besides for badgers, but a redside accolade is tied into the exploration badge in those Mayhem missions--you can see people paying millions of infamy for certain mayhems they're missing, and even so sometimes it isn't quick due to extremely anemic redside population--and the lowbies were usually too busy getting PL'd in AE to bother with mayhems. It's a hassle to make a f2p account just to PL it and send it to go get the mayhems your main needs.

If Paragon Studios was smart they would take whatever extra money CoH:Freedom has generated for them and apply that directly towards the development of a brand new sequel superhero MMO.

The current game is still fun and probably has a few more years of life left to it. But its long term future will require, at least at some point, a huge overhaul to keep it modern and relevant. The easiest way to do that will eventually be a brand new game that builds on the firm foundation of the current game.

Hm. I'm new here. I haven't really explored the game in-depth and so the need for a sequel doesn't seem at all compelling to me. But thinking logically, I think the devs really do need to start seriously considering when and not if CoH 2 needs to start pre-production. And whenever that is, it should be soon.

The game is already a hodge-podge of kludges and quick fixes, because the infrastructure of the game can't support more elegant solutions. Ouroboros, Null the Gull, etc. etc. There are significant problems with the way villain content is implemented on a fundamental level, and while better writing could go a long way towards fixing this, a total reboot would give an opportunity to build a more proactive villain game from the ground up, or at least leave room for it at a later date. There are a lot of advantages to going into CoH 2. Maybe see if you can get some guys from ANet to help out one of their fellow vassals, those guys are awesome at what they do.

Regardless, definitely make VIP access shared between both games, as you don't want to be competing with yourself, and also try to make a lot of store items cross-game too. For example, I've got a few costume part unlocks on my CoX account right now, a hypothetical CoH 2 should have similar costume parts which are automatically unlocked if the linked CoX account has the equivalent store item already. If you have CoX trenchcoats, you have CoH 2 trenchcoats.

That being said, I actually think the rate and technical quality of the content being produced right now is fine for the immediate future. The only things that irk me right now are occasional writing gaffes and an emphasis on group content. I want MMOs to provide the option of grouping together so I can do multiplayer when my friends are online, not require grouping so that I can't really play at all when they're not.

Don't let Cryptic anywhere NEAR CoH2. Their game philosophy is apparently to release a buggy & incomplete product, try to trick people into paying a lot of money up-front on a Lifetime subscription scheme and abandon all support for that MMO in order to work on a new cheap, bad MMO. CoH succeeded in spite of Jack's attempts to kill it on a few occasions (taking a year or so off of releasing a content patch after CoV launched because he reassigned everybody to work on Champions Online?)

More likely scenario is Paragon Studios vets begin work on CoH2 and NCSoft uses CoH1 as a sort of training ground for their korean devs. I think that's already begun judging from how revamped Dark Astoria looks like it's the Plane of Fear or something and the how the revamped Circle of Thorns looks.

I would hope that, if they are doing well, that they would be putting some of their money into the hardware. You know, updating the actual technology behind the game.

I'm hoping they're improving the servers they use, the cables connecting things, faster processors, all of the things that even make the game possible. That way, the game will be running at its best no matter what content they bring out for us.