Intriguing Massively Article

Some interesting points but it failed to point out a couple of critical issues - not the least of which the announcement that GR broke way too early by mistake! Had that not happened, then GR would probably have been a lot later and launched the End Game at the same time. Instead it all got a bit staggered and delivered piecemeal.

I don't know that Freedom was a result of GR not making a bucketload of money. I think it has become something of a trend amongst MMOs because (especially with the Hybrid mode we see in CoH) it works - the revenue stream of subscription remains and the diehard fans buy more than just the subs. The Booster packs had been a proven success already let's remember. This wasn't completely new territory.

My own feeling is that had the news not broken about GR far too early the whole expansion would have been a lot more impressive and launched with a lot more fanfare - but then the trend of F2P also landed around the same time and made sense for other games... let's remember that another competitive superhero game saved itself by going F2P... and showed it could actually make money.

I wonder if the F2P model had been around in 08 when Tabula Rasa was about....

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

That article is wrong on so many levels. Aion in Korea is a big hit, so to argue it didn't gain traction is a Western centric point of view. Next, I agree with others the Freedom model is simply evolving on what other MMO's are doing to offer customers (existing and new) options.

GR's problem is the same problem CoV had, which they should have figured out at some point- people like playing heroes and they like the setting of Paragon City. Any big 'new' release should've incorporated that reality instead of trying to impose its own.

Conceptually, CoV was a great idea. Conceptually, GR's whole morality system was a great idea. Sure you can quibble about this or that element, and argue about what could have been done differently to lure in players, but IMHO the bottom line is players like being heroes & like the 'generic' hero environment of Paragon City.

CoV should've been a zone off Paragon, Praetoria should've been a zone off Paragon- the city is the foundation of the game and they stray from it at their own peril.

I dunno. 20 levels was not good in GR. I am still pissed about that. I really liked GR. A lot. I utterly despised how empty it was. I could maybe group with 1 person a day if I was lucky.

Redside sucks too. Why? Nobody plays. Blueside rewards are just THAT MUCH BETTER. Any blueside TF generates sometimes as much as 2-3 times as many merits as an equivalent redside TF. Who wants to play with nobody for worse rewards? Just because story is better? Sorry, that just isnt acceptable.

I really enjoy Praetoria. The only thing wrong with it, for me, is the lack of ability to travel freely from Praetoria to Primal Earth before level 20. If that were fixed, I would probably start all my characters there, even if the access were just on a Rogue/Vigilante basis, where I could join teams but not get contacts.

I've always assumed it's some kind of technical limitation of the alignment system that keeps Resistance and Loyalist aligned characters stranded in Praetoria. I guess that's always going to be a problem with trying to do cool new things in a creaky old game system.

I agree, the problem with Praetoria is how set apart it was. You only had 20 levels, and only with people there. It did feel like an extended tutorial for a while. After 20 levels you're "praetorian" character is suddenly not taking any further part in his / her world and goes to the primal earth.

I think that it might have been interesting if you chose a hero or villian, played the first 10-15 levels in your respective starting area, and then get introduced to a contact that brings you up to speed on the "praetorian problem". Where you, the player get to choose to go to praetoria or not.

Once there, you get into it's story, and as you play through it, can end up changing your alignment as you complete missions. Of which there should be any 1 of 4 Villian, Rogue, Hero, Vigilante. So your Villian character can go straight to Vigilante for example, or your Hero straight to Villian.

Leave the Tips missions in place and the current system for older characters to change alignment though.

Then, the expansion should've been more complete with a story that went from level 15-30, not 1-20.

First Ward and Night Ward should've been the 30-50 zones already in the works for the next issue.

And make sure you have your end game ready to go. I understand they held it back to make it better. But if part of your goal is to draw back old players, it's probably fair to assume there's quite a few who have high level - almost level 50, at least one favorite 50, or severl 50's. With some end game content readily available for them to jump into, they can continue to play those favorite characters instead of only having the ability to switch alignments just to get to experience a few contact's worth of missions.

I love Praetoria as well. The biggest problem in my opinion is that if you make a Praetorian character, you are stuck there until level 20. You can go to Pocket D, but you cannot exit to Paragon City or the Rogue Isles.

Conjecture=assuming...and you know what they say about people who assume.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

I played in Praetoria when lots of people were playing in Praetoria. I never found it hard to level 1-20 if you teamed. In fact, I leveled so fast, I missed all the story because I out leveled contacts.

If they would set it up so a character can start in Primal and go to Praetoria as an infiltrator, I think we'd see a boost in Praetoria use, especially for the solo types.

My problem with Praetoria, was it made one a Praetorian.

Alignment missions, I'm sad to see havent been moved through the whole game. New story arcs that lead into choices like GR did would be great!

As for BABs, I always got the feeling he was let go because he seemed to be a "No, I won't make this set because I don't like it, want it or what have you"

BABS for instance seemed to be the type who would be against TW.

As I've said before, my own personal theory was that all the content in Going Rogue was designed to be level 50 content which got retrofitted to be 1-20 because at the time the 'meh' of low level legacy content was apparently losing them subscribers.

The other problem they had was that they set up Praetoria as a land of moral ambiguity and then once the iTrials came along, seemingly stuck for ideas, they went "nope, evil all along...lulz!" which basically undoes all the work put into the starting content and the mythos of Praetoria.

Praetoria was never a land of "moral ambiguity". If anything, it's probably the most black-and-white part of the game.

Yes Venture, of course it is...

I was fond of the "let's add one more starting point for characters" idea.

If any of you have ever played the PC version of The Temple of Elemental Evil, it has a very cool intro which is customized for your party's alignment. Basically they went through the trouble of creating 9 different intros to the game so that you could choose the one that would give your character proper motivation to get to the starting point of the game.

It's a concept that's so very rare.

In most MMO's, they might give you a customized starting area but it's based off your race, which may differ significantly from what you think your character would fit best as.

in GW2, you have the opportunity to go straight from there to the mists and then to whichever race's starting area you want, and you can do what you wish from there. Which is awesome and a great way to give players more freedom.

Going Rogue's morality missions were a blast. I loved that most of them put me in a position where there was an actual CHOICE to be made, it wasn't a blind "click here to be Jesus, Click there for Hitler" approach like you see in every single damn bioware game.

It was "You can't destroy this massive supply of drugs, you gotta decide who gets em." or "Do you destroy this, or risk it falling into the wrong hands?" There really wasn't a "you have to chose this or you're wrong and stupid" answer, and that was a refreshing change of pace from all the other games out there.

I've been saying a somewhat darker version of that all along. My version is even simpler: after the nuclear whale abortion that was Tabula Rasa, after becoming an industry laughing-stock, NCsoft tripled the development and maintenance budget for City of Heroes, in a Hail-Mary pass attempt to try to make up for what years of neglect had done to the game.

It was way, way too late for that to work.

Look, this part isn't speculation: if you triple your operating costs, you have to triple your revenues just to break even. The studio went from 15 developers to a hair under 50 overnight. Have revenues tripled since then? No. They've risen modestly, but they haven't tripled.

Or have they?

I keep running into people who admit to having spent insane gobs of money on the Paragon Market. New content turns out to be a money-loser for them, but new prizes for spins of the virtual slot machine (Super Packs) and new costume sets and new powersets are all selling like hotcakes. What was a $15/month game is now, for I wonder how many people, a $30 or $50 or more per month game, and if enough people compulsively buy every new powerset, every new costume pack, and buy $12 per power purple sets for the resulting alts? That could have ended up way more than tripling the revenues.

If you like getting new costume sets and new powersets and don't mind paying double or triple what you were paying before, and don't mind the fact that we're probably never again going to see an expansion the size of City of Villains or even a smaller one like Going Rogue, that's a good thing.