Where did the game go wrong?
It was sold - and it didn't sell well.
That meant that CoH was then flagged as Western-only MMO in NCSoft's eyes - which is fine if they're fosuing on the Western and the Asian markets - but not so fine if they decide to "refocus" everything on the Asian market, as they seem to be doing now. |
And yet they still bankrolled Freedom after that failure, so it's not a fair excuse.
Obviously Freedom wasn't launched in the east, so "Well it didn't appeal to the eastern market" isn't a fair reason for shutting down COH.
If that's why they wanted to shut it down, they should've done it back then.
The main issue was NCSoft going into the red last quarter. $6 million in the red put them into panic mode, which means cuts had to be made. Unfortunately, CoH was what got cut, being pretty much the smallest of the games.
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No, I mean, I understand all that. I just don't think, "It didn't do well in the East" is a fair reason to justify shutting COH down. They already knew it didn't do well in the east and they stopped selling it to that market BEFORE they started funding the future of COH. It's just not a reasonable justification to me.
And yet they still bankrolled Freedom after that failure, so it's not a fair excuse.
Obviously Freedom wasn't launched in the east, so "Well it didn't appeal to the eastern market" isn't a fair reason for shutting down COH. If that's why they wanted to shut it down, they should've done it back then. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
Did you never hear about City of Hero? The failed Korean port of the game?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-soNvI6-xnc . |
punching ghosts
Except for NCsoft being idiots I think the main problem was that the crossection of superhero fans globally and people who play MMOs just was not very big and keeping a game like this alive and prosperous maybe simply was too hard.
They should of given us warning and asked us to spend more money. I would have bought more stuff to keep the game going.
Can someone confirm this stupid rumor about a COH2? I had someone mention this to me on facebook and I almost laughed.
Honestly? I think CoV was the biggest mistake they made and one they've been paying for ever since. Split up player base too much as well as dev resources.
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The game didn't go wrong at all.
NCSoft went wrong.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
Did you never hear about City of Hero? The failed Korean port of the game?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-soNvI6-xnc . |
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The failing of this game wasn't Paragon's doing.
It was NC Soft's. If NC Soft actually put money behind the only successful MMO IP in the US it managed to stumble upon, instead of blowing hundreds of thousands on wasted ads and publicity stunts for shovelware like Auto Assault, we might have been in a different place. If NC Soft had even a semblance of a marketing department, we would have seen them try to capitalize on every major mainstream superhero breakthrough of the last decade. Ads during Heroes and Smallville. Demo discs and posters in comic shops. A push with more comic companies to feature their characters in the game for cross promotion. Instead, they did jack and squat. They sat there with their thumb up their *** even when given free shout outs by Big Bang Theory. |
Y'know, I get your ire, but Auto Assault was far from shovelware. Might wanna get your knickers out of a bunch and stop putting blame on the wrong games, my friend.
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Taser's point (which I agree with) is NCSoft had a long history of overhyping their NA games then killing them if they didn't live up, and ignoring the games that were doing well and could have done better with some clear indicators in the broad market that they were viable and popular.
There were more than a few years in there where WE were the only advertising the game got on a consistent basis, and that doesn't cut it.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
In retrospect, they tried a lot of stuff that just didn't work, despite being cool ideas.
Gladiators, the Shadow Shard for example.
Also they had a bit of redundancy and waste. Two starter zones. Many zones for limited level ranges that didn't have much content. Granted, nobody can predict the future. When they were designing a Hazard Zone for each level range, they didn't know that future changes would all but kill street sweeping as a popular activity
They also exceeded their reach sometimes, planning for things down the road that, ultimately they never got to. They've been setting up the Coming Storm for years with way too many detours and distractions. Up until the end, they were setting stuff up in i24 they probably wouldn't get back to until i26 or i27, if that early. The Incarnate system is another example. They set up Omega way too early. In hindsight, they should have aimed for 5 slots, got them finished before they indicated there would be 5 more.
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If I had known of this thread, I might not have set up this one.
My basic opinion is that this game would be a much bigger deal now than it actually is if it weren't for all the early nerfs. Though I can see they paved the way for something better, if you had played before it was pretty tough to keep playing after. I really only got interested again after IOs made it possible to build characters that were close enough to being as strong as they used to be.
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"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I know we're all looking for deeper meaning to what happened, but I honestly believe NCsoft is telling the truth when they say that "continued support of the franchise no longer fits within [NCsoft's] long term goals for the company." They have other projects they want to dedicate resources to, City of Heroes was not in that plan. Does City of Heroes make money? Yes. But it also consumed resources that NCsoft wanted allocated elsewhere, thus the sack of bricks came a-dropping on us all on Friday.
But this is also what gives me hope. I really don't get the vibe that NCsoft's decision to ax Paragon Studios and City of Heroes was a personal one. They don't hate us. I also don't think it was a legal one. They could have kept everything going as it was if they didn't want to reallocate the resources that City of Heroes was consuming to other projects. Ultimately, I think that will save this game, because that means there's no business sense in NCsoft keeping the game sitting in a closet collecting dust when someone else is willing to pony up money for it. Just because continued support of the franchise no longer fits within NCsoft's long term goals for their company doesn't mean that it doesn't fit within the long term goals of some other company or organization. Therefore, I honestly believe that a few years from now, we'll all be hanging out in Atlas Park reminiscing about that time that NCsoft scared the hell out of us, and how much better the game is now in its Third Era of ownership.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
If it went wrong anywhere, it was the very beginning- a lot of half-formed ideas, vague power descriptions and poor balancing. The game spent eight years fixing these problems, getting better and better.
I believe their first misstep was to make instanced missions a lot more attractive than simple street sweeping. Reduced debt (back when debt hurt) and XP bonuses turned most zones into ghost towns with only the occasional hero spotted traveling to their next mission, contact or zone.
Even those sightings became rarer as they introduced more and faster ways to travel across zones and to missions. Certain gathering spots became more and more of a ghost town as bases got invention workbenches, Tier 8 direct access to the consignment house and vault, eliminating the need to go to Icon by making every zone trainer a tailor.
Sure all of those things streamlined our play but to what end? You log in as a new user and the first zone you go to has only a handful of players visible (and as a new F2P user you can't even talk to them without running up next to them). People judge popularity based on seeing other players and if you aren't seeing many, is it a game you want to invest time playing if you can't find anyone to play with.
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The problem wasn't Freedom being a failure. That's about all we actually know (Freedom certainly increased the life of the game).
The problem was most likely NCSoft needed to cut something due to Aion underperforming, and GW2 costing a crapton of money to market... and they were running a deficit of $6 million, so they needed to cut something. Unfortunately, CoH, being their smallest thing, simply made the most sense. |
So now, without the revenue provided by CoH, they'll be making around $1 million less a year than they were before.
Yeah, I'm sure that making less money will somehow cause them to make more money. Good job, NC Soft!
In other words, the game didn't go wrong. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but the game did more right than any other MMO I've ever played. Including WoW.
They corrected almost all of their "mistakes" imo. This game still has many of the traits that must be in future MMO's if future mmo developer monkeys want me to keep throwing them my hard earned bananas. For example: any of those mmos I consider must have a decent community or encourage teamplay like COX or I'm keeping my bananas. Those solo-only or 2 member team mmo's are just not fun for me.
I found COX exceptionally enjoyable, especially the extreme variety of primary and secondary powersets that could be used so many ways to benefit the team.
When the enemies melted like sticks of butter, the vets in the game knew why. You see the rads, sonics, darks, ice, etc doing their thing for the sake of the team. Even the stepkids, the TA's, they did their job, too.
Farewall all.
-BurnSucka.
"Melt 'em like butters!"
the game "went wrong" when Jack talked NC into publishing it when nobody else would touch it. Corporate skullduggery/malfeasance/incompetence (depending on which flavor of rumor you prefer) killed this game, it was nothing the devs did.
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My City Was Gone
The only real foreseeable problem was that the microtransactions had to be done through a third party company instead of NCsoft proper like in their other games.
As far as game design is considered, City of Heroes did have a couple of mistakes. The greatest being the lack of an "overworld" for people to really interact in. There were a couple of powerset problems and all that, and also there was a lack of focus on PVP, the base system was kind of messed up, and other things like that.
But did the "game" really go wrong? The biggest thing I noticed in the last few months of CoH is that the developers not only acknowledged these problems, but were making active attempts to fix them. ATs were being balanced and improved, empty zones were being removed, writers were paying attention to feedback.. all in all I was really looking forward to the next couple of issues.
I'd put the blame more on NCsoft for refusing to capitalize on the emergence of several very popular superhero movies. It's like NCsoft just didn't care that much about little oh CoH.
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The biggest problem CoH had was the first one, which was it's rigid old engine that made it hard to add new features.
The only thing they ever did wrong was changing the way we chose our colors in beta to separate skintones from costume colors.
I more and more get the feeling that it is dirty board member politics. From wanting to cut the non Grindy Foreign black sheep out of their business model to oh look we need to make the shareholders happy and show that we can make even more profit when we show them we cut the fat (read employees) of. Never mind that they made money of this game, keeping shareholders happy is more important.
For the mods, sorry if I overstepped the boundaries here.
What was the size of paragon studios on August 31st? When did the workforce peak and what was the number?
No **** it had no Eastern market. It wasn't even sold in the East.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.