How to make CoH more profitable to NCSoft

I know at this point we all feel like NCSoft just shot our dog, heck even I do, but I would like to keep this thread flame free and constructive. The truth is, there were 2 ways this could have gone down: either NCSoft turned off CoH, or NCSoft itself shut down. Either the case we would loose CoH.

With all the information that has been put out there, either on these forums, facebook or other website interviews, it seems the possible reason CoH is getting shut down is because CoH was not as profitable as NCSoft needed it to be. I'm creating this thread as a brainstorming for possible options to increase the profitability of CoH.

I know, you might be thinking what power do we have over that? More than you think actually! You have to realise that WE are the source of their cash flow. However, NCSoft might not have been willing to try certain options out of fear of scaring off clients. I'm hoping they will read this thread, and see what we, as their customer, are willing to do.

NEW ACCOUNT CONFIGURATION

Alot of people on Facebook and on these forums are suggesting that they increase the cost of subscriptions. Heck, even I would pay an extra 5-10$ a month if it meant it would save this game!

However, this option could also alienate other players, who can't afford to pay more per month. So by doing this they could end up loosing subs, and scaring off potential new customers.

Here's what I suggest: add a new account type.

Currently we have (to my knowledge, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) Free, Premium and VIP. What I'm suggesting would be something like Free, Premium, VIP and Gold. All current account types would be there, so players would not loose the options they already have. The new account type would cost more to allow NCSoft to charge more money and allow the players who do have the extra cash to choose this option. As for what the different benefits this new gold account would have, I'll leave that up to others to speculate. But the ideas are out there, like maybe a freeform character perserver for that account, Or personal nemesis.

IN GAME ADDS

Adding in game advertisement is something that was mentioned in the past. I don't know why it was not implemented, or if it was and it just flopped, but maybe this needs to be revisited. Maybe reduce the cost for in game adds? a little money is better than no money, right? Or NCSoft can use it for free advertising of their other games.

I remember the community being up in arms and saying it would break game immersion, that they didnt want to pay for this game if reall world advertisements were going to be included, etc,etc,etc. At this point, I'm sure people would rather have in game adds breaking immersion than not having immersion period!

REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF SERVERS

The monetary impact of this would be minimal, but 2 fold.

First, having/maintaining a server costs money. It consumes electricity, it needs hardware, it needs room, etc. Currently we have 16 servers. If we reduce the number of servers to 8, we would ideally be reducing the cost of running these by half.

Second, community would be modified. In the past, merging servers was a great debate; some people wanted it, others didnt. Again, at this point, I believe we would agree to merge servers, over not having servers to log on to, period. Tho an increase in numbers/players on every server would defenetly look more appealing to new players, so this might help attract new customers.

PAY FOR CONTENT

CoH is known for adding new and free content. Over the years they added 23 free issues, which were awesome and we love you guys for doing so. But now I believe that it's time to have us pay for it, because paid for content is better than no content at all.

What I would suggest is a model similar to DCUO, when they have download packs of content, and that must be paid for. This would allow people to keep playing the game, even if they pay for the content or not. It would work like CoV did; you buy it, you have access to it, you don't, you can't acces it but can still play CoH.

This is all that I had off the top of my head. Feel free to add more ideas.

New Account Configuration

~ That sounds an alright addition, depending what the extras were.

In Game Ads

~ If they did this I'd drop the game immediately, unless it was limited to f2p players. The whole point of paying subscription fees is to not be exposed to in game annoyances such as advertising.

Reduce the Amount of Servers

~ How are you going to deal with name conflicts?

Pay For Content

~ They already had that. I paid for new content with my subscription fee. I paid for extra things with my monthly stipend of points. Non-subscribed players paid for things with Paragon Points purchased with cash.

DCUO content packs are free to subscribers. DCUO also gives a monthly stipend of points to spend in their market to subscribers, like CoX did. F2P paid for points to exchange for content like they do in CoX. Essentially, the economic models of the two were virtually identical.

I was just thinking about a server merge to hold down costs last night. It's not an easy thing nor liked by everyone, but if it'd help... I'd happily give up some names just to help out anyone who's name conflicted with mine.

Not possible. It was always a niche game and it will never be as successful as the rest of their games because the rest of their games are super-popular in Asia in a way that City of Heroes could never be (see: City of Hero). The game didn't get ditched just because it wasn't profitable enough, it was because NCSoft made some dumb business decisions and decided to recoup the costs by cutting their least profitable (but actually still profitable) game.

NEW ACCOUNT CONFIGURATION

A decent idea if there were to be value added for the new account type.

IN GAME ADDS

This flopped horribly. Advertisers don't/can't see the benefit. Not to mention it is a "captive" audience who has a way to shut it off if they don't want to see it.

REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF SERVERS

Probably won't have much impact. I seriously doubt that the individual "servers" or shards are truly physically separate. They might be, but in this day and age it is doubtful. Most stuff of this sort is virtualized so that one physical server is doing multiple duty.

PAY FOR CONTENT

Something that should have been done with the big hitters, the invention system in particular. Small fee's $5-$10 would have helped offset operating costs significantly. You can't do it for every little thing, but for more major content like incarnates it would have worked.

They tried in game ads once when it was all the rage, it looked as if the sneaker and taco phone ads on various billboards didn't really work out even though it didn't break immersion. And while real energy drink and action/comic book movie ads wouldn't either, it's a matter of convincing those companies to advertise here, that it's money better spent here than a TV ad on SyFy, Cartoon Network or Nick. I think the conventional wisdom today is ads in games don't work.

The gold level subscription is an idea I would support. Something that grants access to ALL costumes and powersets without the need to buy them separately. As the original review in Eurogamer states, this game is all about "hitting people in the face, while looking really good".

Server merger. Well nowadays each server isn't a group of PCs you could point at and say "that is Virture and those are Infinity". They are racks and racks of blades that can be assigned dynamically base on load (limited by storage throughput, database access). They could have already scaled back the hardware without us being any the wiser. Assuming they did have a work around for duplicate character names, forced relocation could break up existing server communities causing some to leave. It also doesn't fix the problem that zones are empty since nearly every mission is an instanced and those that aren't, patrol/arrest X of Y, players really don't like. I don't think significant savings can be made there.

Name conflicts are easy to take care of:

1. If a person has a conflicted name the person who had it first and is a paying VIP customer gets the name.

2. All the accounts that have not been paid for in the past three months names are up for grabs. No more names in constant limbo.

3. Hand out 200 rename tokens to all VIP accounts this will help assure a person to get a name that will work for them. I've made well over 500 characters in my years here and I've only had about 7 conflicted names.

Rich the Easy Guy

Well you could go the the global corporate NCSoft website and read all the investor relations and earnings reports. Here's the page to the last couple of years of quarterly earnings reports.

They don't list profit, just revenue from each major game however they aren't broken down into revenue from region. For instance Aion had 12.7x the revenues of CoH last quarter. Lineage I, which is no longer available in the North America region but is going strong elsewhere had 20.5x the revenue of CoH.

In the 29 quarters that Guild Wars have been around, it's no subscription model has earned it $15 million more in revenue than the 33 quarters that CoH has been around. How? Easy they sold over 7 million copies of their game. Sure the only new content added to their game was when a pay for expansion came out, but it was play for free. It was closer to a Diablo II game model than a traditional MMO. If a player left, who cares, they paid their money up front. Then ArenaNet took all of that filthy lucre and used it to develop the sequel. A sequel that reportedly has a million pre-sales.

If it keeps the game going I am up for giving up my Dearest names, paying a bit more, Freezing content where it is right now.

I haven't seen any other game with content, customizable characters, community like this one. We're willing to lose it because We can't keep our favorite name?

But without the Devs and the crew at Paragon what would the game become? I wouldn't grow, and NCsoft has already shown no interest in keeping it going is the change would have been different.

Maybe the question should be How do we make the game more enticing to another company who may want to bargian with NCsoft and keep it going?

My answer to that is show them a fantastic development team, a dedicated community and people willing to give it their all to keep their dream and game alive.

REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF SERVERS

You can't have my names.

You can't have my character slots. Merging any servers would put me over the limit of 48 per server.

You can't delete my characters. Where are my characters going to go when the number of available slots on an account is less than the number of characters I had before the merge.

You can't break up my server communities.

You can't disband my SG's.

You can't delete my bases.

I think the big mistake in the Free, Premium, and VIP is that the Premium level should never have been what it is. The idea behind Premium was to draw back players that left. Instead, it created people who signed up for a month, created a bunch of toons, and then stopped paying, but because they paid once now were Premium members. Bad move that. Restructure it so that it's a $5 sub?

The idea of adding a tier is a thought, say $20-25 and make it that all new/purchasable costume and power sets are free? Or increased Paragon Points per month?

On the server merge point: It doesn't matter how many servers there are. They're "virtualized" - meaning there isn't physical separation between the servers. They're all in one bank of a ton of hardware, and if a server needs more resources it takes it from the "pool" and releases it again when it doesn't need it anymore. Closing a virtualized server just means that you gutted that community for no reason.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Personally, I like the way Champions handles names, tying them to your account global name. That would "free up" a whole bunch of names and would help to ease any possible naming issues if servers are merged (unless you create the same character across several servers). I also think it would make it easier to recognize people that you know and enjoy playing with without constantly checking your global list.

As for the idea of a new payment tier, personally if all that was given was automatic free contest codes like the recent Kirby dots I'd be satisfied. I don't use twitter or check Facebook on a regular basis so I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll never get these freebies. If they were guaranteed by paying a few extra bucks a month, sign me up.

edit:

How about giving gold member a monthly prestige stipend so that several of them could get together and build a decent sized base on an alternate server in a decent amount of time, even if that isn't the sever that they spend the majority of their play sessions. That was one of the reasons the core group that I played with stayed on one server, we had a maxed out base and didn't want to start from scratch. If we were able to plop down a chunk of prestige that was saved up in order to have a small to medium base in a short amount of time we might of ventured out and met new people.

Add anime stuff, since apparently the Korean big wigs at NCSoft think the game is too American.