City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

The Best Time of My Life

Aggelakis

By Aggelakis,
Posted on: 2012-09-02 22:42 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

What tales can you tells us of your most successful marketing efforts? What made them successful? (I'd be more than happy with ones that were "successful" because they had outcomes you really enjoyed, rather than ones that earned the most income or whatever.)

Was there any describable philosophy behind how you guys came up with and then evolved the price of things on the Paragon Market? Any big successes there you can tell us about? Any regrets?

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Posted

Whats the best (i.e. most crazy) marketing idea you came up with that you weren't allowed to do?

Always remember, we were Heroes.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by UberGuy View Post
What tales can you tells us of your most successful marketing efforts? What made them successful? (I'd be more than happy with ones that were "successful" because they had outcomes you really enjoyed, rather than ones that earned the most income or whatever.)
.....
I'll break these down into one post per question.

So you want to know about specific marketing efforts. I'm assuming you're wanting projects that involved external communications. In that case, I would define success with hitting the following criteria, not all of which are easily quantifiable.

1) Did it increase awareness of the brand outside of the existing customer base? This can indirectly be measured by looking at things such as account creations, website traffic.
2) Did it generate a noticeable increase in press coverage?
3) Did we get more out of it than we put into it?


Probably the most recent activity that we did was the live press preview of the Magisterium Incarnate trial. This was when we invited several journalists to hop onto beta with us and run the Magisterium trial before anyone else got a chance to see it. We normally didn't do this, the last time we did something like this was back in Issue 19, but we thought we'd be a little more ambitious this time around.

It was a ton of fun. I think we had around 12 or so devs on and around 4-5 press. Matt was leading it, Jeff, Sean, Cord, a bunch of others were also on and providing some awesome conversations as well. I was on as well, playing a Rad/Rad Corrupter because well....I'm rad.

It got us front page coverage on MMORPG.COM, a bunch of new players who came in because they liked what they saw on the livecast, and helped to get the existing players excited about I23. It was also great because not all of the journalists were familiar with COH, so we got to walk them through the game and ended up meeting some really great people like Grakulen from MMORPG.COM.

And it was fun.

-Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee
Help me beat Dr. Aeon! Follow me on Twitter.
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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Pebble View Post
The main reason for it comes down to resources.


I am the marketing department. There are no legions of minions at my beck and call. It's a pretty lean operation.

Until 3 weeks ago, I spent 12+ hours each day at the studio. I could go into details, but there's a lot that needs to be done on a daily or weekly basis. Every screenshot I make means it's time spent away from doing this week's sales analysis, and truthfully, making screenshots and videos isn't really a great use of my time. It's fun, but they don't bring in a lot of revenue.

Why don't we hire someone to do that? Resources again. It's non-trivial to bring on additional marketing resources. We've all wanted additional internal resources for creative production and other projects, but that means that's one fewer designer, artist or engineer we can bring on. And Paragon is a studio that's led by the exceptional development team.

We have engaged in advertising throughout the years. We've done print ads, site takeovers, banner ads. We also regularly do less obvious things such as paid keyword searches. These all have varying degrees of effectiveness. At the end of the day though, it still comes down to a return on investment, because every expense needs to be justified.

If we spend $X producing a trailer, will it bring us $X+Y in new subscriptions and sales? If we spend $Z producing tv commercials, can we prove that those commercials bring us $Z+Y in revenues?

When you're launching a brand new game, you don't need to be as diligent about answering those questions. For an established game, however, there is far less flexibility.

Any perceived lack of advertising was never due to skepticism or a lack of desire on our part. If the resources were there, every Issue release would have been accompanied by full-age ads in every magazine and comic book. We'd have had multiple trailers and even TV buys. And there'd have been much more fanfare and hoopla.

Paragon Studio was a small studio, but we consistently produced incredible work that far larger studios couldn't even hope to match. I think an unintended consequence of that was that we gave the impression that we were much bigger than we actually were. We just managed to do a lot more with a lot less.

You did have a legion of minions at your beck and call, ready to do your bidding. You only needed to ask for volunteers. They are called "Players"

Wouldn't work huh? Tell that to Titan!


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Thelonious Monk

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker View Post
You did have a legion of minions at your beck and call, ready to do your bidding. You only needed to ask for volunteers. They are called "Players"
They did ask. They asked us to follow them on Twitter, to retweet their comments and drive up traffic, to increase their visibility on Twitch, to invite our friends to play. They asked very nicely and gave us stuff for doing this (although I never actually did get my month for referring a friend here).

If people weren't doing (enough of) this with incentives, why do you think that asking louder would have helped? A post like, "Guys, we're in dire straits" -- even if they'd known that to be true -- would have been firstly forbidden by NCSoft as a bad PR move and secondly a huge risk for almost certainly less effort than we're putting out now. I think it could have been pulled off if it had been paired with a public move like shutting down a couple servers, but on some level that would've been a dick thing to do (because shutting down two or four or even half the servers would've screwed with thousands of people but not really saved much cost-wise -- it would have simply been to convince people they were serious).

People are rising to the challenge because they see a dire situation. No dire situation -- no heroic effort. Folks just don't work that way. And frankly it's hard. I've been after my friends to play CoH for months, but other than the points I literally bought myself for one friend and a month's sub for another, I couldn't get them into the game. They were always after the newest thing. One of them finally caved and brought his Scrapper back now that it's shuttering.

I think that Dark_Respite deserves a freakin' medal for her work with CoH, though. I regret not joining every gaming community I could've to spam her videos... and all of the other great videos created by our players, for that matter.

Oh, and Black Pebble, if you have any way to manage this at all, Leandro deserves at least VIP status 'till shutdown for that crowd tech video and the Paragon "hero crowd" logo. (I'm assuming you can't get him a new car.) I tried to give him a game code (GR:CC) a week and a half ago, but he already had it.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind View Post
I think that Dark_Respite deserves a freakin' medal for her work with CoH, though. I regret not joining every gaming community I could've to spam her videos... and all of the other great videos created by our players, for that matter.

Oh, and Black Pebble, if you have any way to manage this at all, Leandro deserves at least VIP status 'till shutdown for that crowd tech video and the Paragon "hero crowd" logo. (I'm assuming you can't get him a new car.) I tried to give him a game code (GR:CC) a week and a half ago, but he already had it.
Well, I wouldn't want you to get in trouble for spamming, but why not promote City of Heroes Tube? While it doesn't have ALL the vids that are in our Fan Videos thread, it does have a lot of them, and showcases several different vid creators in our community. Admittedly, it's a little bit out of date, but hey, volunteer to help Leandro bring it up to speed! (Believe me, I would LOVE to see the rest of the Fan Videos links added there just so they're not lost when the forums go.)

And if by some miracle, PS survives in some incarnation or another and hangs onto the game, Gods I hope they sponsor a work visa for Leandro so he can REALLY go hog wild with the game.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Pebble View Post
Shifting topics a bit.

I can't quite indulge an AMA, and there's a lot I cannot answer (which you guys can probably guess what those are), but if y'all have any business or marketing related questions for COH that you want to get off your chest, feel free to toss the, in this thread. I'll do my best to answer what I can

https://twitter.com/hosunl
If I recall, part of your work involved monitoring the City of Heroes game world economy. Can you tell us a little about Paragon's role in measuring and trying to correct for inflation? Were there reports on who the richest players were? And was there any research into player behaviors vis a vis the market? Did you have anything like the Big Mac index for keeping an eye on salvage prices?

I'd love to know more about Paragon's understanding of Wentworth's.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark_Respite View Post
Well, I wouldn't want you to get in trouble for spamming, but why not promote City of Heroes Tube? While it doesn't have ALL the vids that are in our Fan Videos thread, it does have a lot of them, and showcases several different vid creators in our community. Admittedly, it's a little bit out of date, but hey, volunteer to help Leandro bring it up to speed! (Believe me, I would LOVE to see the rest of the Fan Videos links added there just so they're not lost when the forums go.)
Thor's Assassin has been helping me to update it lately, so it's getting better. It's just a Blogger site, so it's easy to bring other people in to update it; it's just that nobody was interested.

www.SaveCOH.com: Calls to Action and Events Calendar
This is what 3700 heroes in a single zone looks like.
Thanks to @EnsonsDeath for the GVE code that made me VIP again!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by UberGuy View Post
.....
Was there any describable philosophy behind how you guys came up with and then evolved the price of things on the Paragon Market? Any big successes there you can tell us about? Any regrets?
I first read this as you asking about "despicable philosophies..."

Setting prices in the Paragon Market was a mix of art and science. As Freedom continued, we had more and more data that we could use to understand purchase behavior. That combined with feedback from the community itself helped us to set the prices.

There wasn't a one-size-fits-all philosophy though. The thought processes for setting up costume prices versus power prices versus consumable prices were all different. Different players had different opinions on what was valuable, so we had to take that into account as well. This meant determining the elasticity of demand for different categories. We also had to evaluate potential reach - how many players would see this item as valuable?

Probably the biggest success were Super Packs. They were pretty tricky to figure out internally, but what really helped us get the right target price was the feedback from the "Freedom Focus Group" we held last year. Because Super Packs were completely new, we weren't quite sure what the right price range was. We had ideas, but they weren't meaningful until we talked to the players.

As for regrets? I really don't have any. There are things I would have liked to have been able to spend more effort on, however. One of them being coming up with consumables that would benefit a wide range of players. Unlike most other MMO's, consumables have never been a critical staple in COH. We did have plans to grow that space more, though.

-Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee
Help me beat Dr. Aeon! Follow me on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/hosunl

 

Posted

Hosun,

It was an honor working alongside you, and really getting to see how much blood, sweat and tears you shed for this game and for the studio.

If you ever wanna get froyo, look me up, my treat.

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Brought to you by @Equation

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark_Respite View Post
I'm going to sound horribly selfish for saying this, but I am so glad you never really got around to it. To discover that you are anywhere near as talented a machinima artist as you are a math god would have crushed my self-confidence flat and I'd have probably stopped making videos on the spot.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite
Well let me put it this way. I spent hours yesterday writing a script that would create a demorecord that would show my main using power thrust to send a warhulk into orbit and quite a while afterward watching sequences of me knocking things miles into the sky while giggling to myself.

I don't think you had all that much to be worried about.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Well let me put it this way. I spent hours yesterday writing a script that would create a demorecord that would show my main using power thrust to send a warhulk into orbit and quite a while afterward watching sequences of me knocking things miles into the sky while giggling to myself.

I don't think you had all that much to be worried about.
*laughing*

And the first thing that reminds me of is the scene in my GOING ROGUE trailer where I had a hero energy-punch Nemesis right off the screen and then he cheers for himself like "GOOOOAAAALLLL!"

Your script would have probably come in handy when I was trying to document "Council Skeet Shooting" so I could explain it to people with a visual.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

 

Posted

I have a question: why the heck were so many things in the Paragon Market untradable?

Take Super Packs for example. You are the only supplier. If they are tradable and they sell in the game market for inf, people who wouldn't spend "real money" for them would still buy some for inf. That would lead to other people who have no problem spending real money, but are short of inf, to buy packs in order to place them on the market. You get more sales, and you punch the RMTers in the face while removing influence from the in-game economy (WW/BM sales have a 10% fee, remember).

And since "exclusive" things like costume pieces, powersets and temporary powers are always bound to the character, you don't risk people buying the wolf pet and giving up on super packs. People who want some specific things will still have to buy super pack salvage -- and you're the only one selling it. Every pack bought with influence is still a pack that was bought with real money.

Edit: EVE has an extreme example with PLEX. You can buy a subscription time token from the market, which then you can trade ingame for ingame currency. Translating that to COH, we could have a "VIP Token" which is just a piece of tradable salvage. When used, it adds 30 days VIP time to the account. This would mean people who otherwise wouldn't pay for VIP would buy a VIP token, and since, again, you're the only supplier, you effectively get a VIP payment you wouldn't have otherwise.

And that's just considering people who would sell them on the market. I know many people who would give Super Packs/VIP Tokens away as prizes for costume contests or to supergroup members.

(If the answer is "so we can ban the account if they do a chargeback / used a stolen credit card", the question becomes, why not make them tradable after two weeks or so?)

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This is what 3700 heroes in a single zone looks like.
Thanks to @EnsonsDeath for the GVE code that made me VIP again!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr_Darkspeed View Post
Whats the best (i.e. most crazy) marketing idea you came up with that you weren't allowed to do?
I wouldn't say this was "the best," considering I engineered the Flowbee-haircut of Positron.

It may be "craziest" though.

Back when we were launching City of Heroes Going Rogue, I had an idea for a promotion. One of the challenges we had was that back in 2010, the phrase "Going Rogue" didn't necessarily apply to our game (thanks to a published autobiography at that time), and we were vying for attention through Google Searches.

So I had an idea to capitalize on the confusion.

Send in a copy of Going Rogue (the autobiography). Each copy would qualify as an entry. At the end of the month, we'd pick a name from the entries, and the winner would receive some amazingly awesome prize (I forget what the prize was, maybe it was signed copies of the game or something not as cool as a car). There were also plans for a grass-roots campaign to bump up our "Going Rogue" up higher in Google searches.

Legal approved it, believe it or not.

But other forces conspired to nix it.

-Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee
Help me beat Dr. Aeon! Follow me on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/hosunl

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by black pebble View Post
i wouldn't say this was "the best," considering i engineered the flowbee-haircut of positron.


So i had an idea to capitalize on the confusion.
Well, that's depressing. The forum won't let me do allcaps, ruining my already terrible, terrible joke.

On The Confusion?

[edit: EDITED. Alas. Note: That would have been a really amusing promo.]

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Posted

The daughter of a science teacher/track coach who was Killed in Action, Sarah Polstran found herself destined to live in the shadow of Russia. She entered politics at the earliest convenience and never had a problem accepting the orders of a superior officer. Her loyalty and devotion (as well as the connections her father had before he was killed) saw Sarah promoted into a super-secret black ops division of the GOP. Her loyalty never wavered and her devotion was only strengthened with every off-the-books mission she performed.

That is until the one day she was captured and disavowed by the very government that she swore to uphold.

After nearly being killed in her escape, Sarah was cybernetically enhanced and dubbed "Paelstrom", a new presidential campaign asset. One thing were clear to Sarah: don't retreat, reload. No matter how many upgrades they put into her, she knew that she couldn't depend on the government. She could only look out for one person now, herself. On a mission into the alternate dimension of Praetoria, Paelstrom made the fateful decision to sever her ties to the Alaskan government and become a free agent. Loyal only to herself, Paelstrom earned the respect of Tyrant and now stands at his side, plotting the attack and decimation of her former home state.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Pebble View Post

But other forces conspired to nix it.
so was it a Nemesis Plot™ or the more insidious Rangle Plot™

On Justice
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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind View Post
They did ask. They asked us to follow them on Twitter, to retweet their comments and drive up traffic, to increase their visibility on Twitch, to invite our friends to play. They asked very nicely and gave us stuff for doing this (although I never actually did get my month for referring a friend here).

If people weren't doing (enough of) this with incentives, why do you think that asking louder would have helped? A post like, "Guys, we're in dire straits" -- even if they'd known that to be true -- would have been firstly forbidden by NCSoft as a bad PR move and secondly a huge risk for almost certainly less effort than we're putting out now. I think it could have been pulled off if it had been paired with a public move like shutting down a couple servers, but on some level that would've been a dick thing to do (because shutting down two or four or even half the servers would've screwed with thousands of people but not really saved much cost-wise -- it would have simply been to convince people they were serious).

People are rising to the challenge because they see a dire situation. No dire situation -- no heroic effort. Folks just don't work that way. And frankly it's hard. I've been after my friends to play CoH for months, but other than the points I literally bought myself for one friend and a month's sub for another, I couldn't get them into the game. They were always after the newest thing. One of them finally caved and brought his Scrapper back now that it's shuttering.

I think that Dark_Respite deserves a freakin' medal for her work with CoH, though. I regret not joining every gaming community I could've to spam her videos... and all of the other great videos created by our players, for that matter.

Oh, and Black Pebble, if you have any way to manage this at all, Leandro deserves at least VIP status 'till shutdown for that crowd tech video and the Paragon "hero crowd" logo. (I'm assuming you can't get him a new car.) I tried to give him a game code (GR:CC) a week and a half ago, but he already had it.
I take your point, up to a point - but most of that stuff was a no-brainer. But often didn't work... as you say, the incentive was borked because getting new people to join often meant that the reward didn't get allocated anyhow. That happened to me more than it was successful.

Also remember I'm in the EU which meant that NCSoft's biggest effort in marketing was to sack the staff in 2008. The whole marketing fail in the EU still rankles with many of us - we've been treated worse than second class citizens - just ask the French and German players on Zukunft and Vilgilance.

But your response is slightly to miss the point. There was one instance where the CC team and Marketing put together a competition to design an ad for a game mag in the UK. Got a huge response and seemed to be pretty successful. It also generated some interest outside if I remember rightly.

But mostly marketing seemed to consist of "playing it safe" and "do it by rote" without any original thinking or real passion. Sure most players won't be bothered about the game (any game) because they will be here for a while then move on. But that's to miss the point and under value the impact the hard core die-hards can play in making something successful.

I'd also like to say I'm not simply picking on Black Pebble here. This isn't his fight in many ways. It's a far deeper rooted cultural problem where marketing isn't a core activity. It's almost like that film "if you build it, they will come." Sadly it doesn't work like that and NCSoft generally needed to do a lot more - had they done so things would have been very different.


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

 

Posted

Heroes Villians and all will miss you (although I am still hoping it can be saved)

PS Us players will miss you as well

PPS You do have a soul even if it is currently being rented

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by corinna View Post
If I recall, part of your work involved monitoring the City of Heroes game world economy. Can you tell us a little about Paragon's role in measuring and trying to correct for inflation? Were there reports on who the richest players were? And was there any research into player behaviors vis a vis the market? Did you have anything like the Big Mac index for keeping an eye on salvage prices?

I'd love to know more about Paragon's understanding of Wentworth's.
The in-game economy was a monster. That's more of a question for the dev team, but from my recollection, it was a pretty herculean task to try and fix the inflation. It couldn't be done in one shot. Several attempts were made, which is one of the reasons why there was a high INF cost to various Incarnate unlocks. But it would have required much more extensive analysis and work to implement permanent, meaningful changes.

We did know who the richest players were. There was some research done into market behavior, but the tools to allow for the really cool analysis were built into issue 24.

And no index that we kept track of on a regular basis.

-Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee
Help me beat Dr. Aeon! Follow me on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/hosunl

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Pebble View Post
The in-game economy was a monster. That's more of a question for the dev team, but from my recollection, it was a pretty herculean task to try and fix the inflation. It couldn't be done in one shot. ...

Obviously you didn't consult me....


Give all INF to EI...ta-da! My problems with the market are now solved!

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Posted

I <bleep>ing love the CoH economy.

No other game has such a level of control. And such a level of Ebil.

Release the top richest players list!

@Rien

I am Lord Omi. Now and forever. They can take our City, but they can't take me.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Pebble View Post
The in-game economy was a monster. That's more of a question for the dev team, but from my recollection, it was a pretty herculean task to try and fix the inflation. It couldn't be done in one shot. Several attempts were made, which is one of the reasons why there was a high INF cost to various Incarnate unlocks. But it would have required much more extensive analysis and work to implement permanent, meaningful changes.

We did know who the richest players were. There was some research done into market behavior, but the tools to allow for the really cool analysis were built into issue 24.

And no index that we kept track of on a regular basis.
I don't think the problem was how much inf was in circulation, the problem was its distribution. That's why influence sinks didn't have the effect you'd expect them to have. The only players they could work on, had more influence than the sinks could make any dent into.

It also required a systematic view of the economy and how every reward earning activity worked, something I don't believe ever really existed up to this point. It was not something that could be adjusted with averages. If anything tackling the economy with averages I think was doomed because of the way influence and drops were distributed by player and by activity.

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