Mission Architect - CoH killer?

CoH revenue has been slowly declining for years and in part that'll be due to people like me. I realise that probably sounds weird, why would anyone admit to that, but I guess I represent a silent percentage of the player base.

I bought the game at European release and played solidly until a few months after CoV arrived as part of a very active SG coalition. However once people had one or two 50s they tended to lose interest, with nothing compelling to do at max level they were left with alting for replayability. As people began to leave the game, and friends lists became silent, it just started feeling boring.

The weird thing is I kept my subscription for quite a while even though I wasn't playing at all. Eventually though economics caught up and I cancelled. Since then I've regularly come back, but rarely for more than a month at a time. Why? I'm not sure. Since Paragon took over the reigns the game has improved immensely, but something just doesn't grab me long term and my sub inevitably cancels again.

I've been doing this repeatedly for the past 4 years, you'll notice I'm not a VIP at the moment as my most recent subscription literally finished just prior to the announcement.

I'm a fan of the game, I'm definitely a fan of the Dev team - but I've not subscribed as much as I feel I should have - as much as the game has deserved. In effect I've contributed directly to it's downfall in some small way.

That makes me sad.

Well... I think the ones gorging themselves were content, but the ones getting vomited on did the complaining.

Regarding my experiences from other online games, power leveling alone can't kill a game. Diablo II have been around since 2000, and doing Baal runs* vs normal gameplay yields an astronomical XP gain factor, I guess it's in parity with the most advanced AE farms before the worst exploits where fixed (and there was no DFB).

What can bring down any game within weeks is dupe exploits. If the most desired items are suddenly available for everyone, you feel very little incentive to keep advancing your character. It was the reason I suddenly quit playing Rose Online (back in 2004), despite a very interesting crafting system.

I still think that Mission Architect is good for the game. Anything that allow you to build your own lore (regardless if canonical or not) is great for the long-term attachment.

*Baal runs is farming the final boss, usually with very mixed level teams.

"NC SOFT" killed the game period end of discussion.

I will admit that the Mission Architect gave me extra incentive to check out Champions Online. It was very difficult to find teams running regular content between Issues 14 and 15, when most people were farming AE. Now, I didn't say that everyone was PLing, and that no one was running regular content. But, let's be honest. Between Issues 14 and 15, most people were PLing in AE, and that's all they were doing. With Champions Online's launch around the corner at the time, it seemed like a haven from the non-stop farming.

But Champions Online's launch day patch killed it, and the launch of Issue 16 shortly after curbed the AE farming, so back I came.

So, yes, I could see how the Mission Architect played a significant role in the loss of CoH players, but it wasn't the only one.

Mission Architect or any other feature didn't kill CoH.

A big reason for decline in 2009? Fatigue. This was when myself and a lot of the older players finally hit that pont where we just weren't interested in playing anymore. We were 5 - 6 (counting beta) years in and ready for something else for a while.

The thing to remember when talking about any one feature is that none of them drove large numbers of players away. MMO's decline over time, there have been very few exceptions to that rule.

Anyone comparing WoW to CoH is fooling themselves. WoW is the exception to EVERY MMO rule. Its a fluke brought about by a well loved game company taking a very well loved franchise and moving into the MMO space with a game that did nothing new or unique, it just did everything basic and simple and it made all the millions of preexisting fanboys happy.

After that long break of a couple years I came back to the game and found my love renewed and I've been playing just like I did in the days of old. Lots of and lots of hours logged. During the 4 weeks before the Announcement of DOOOOOOOM I saw a lot of older players coming back to game.

Our fatigue was over but sadly NCSoft's wasn't.

I guess this kind of blame game crap should have been expected. This is still the forums...

I mean it could not be that someone with power in NC SOFT decided to shift focus away from an 8 year old superhero game that never made TONS of revenue for the company but was still profitable.

Nah it had too be the "other" players that decided to play the game in a way that was different from you.

This typical forum trash......will NOT be missed.

AE didn't kill CoH but it was handled extremely poorly.

You had people hitting 50 in an hour or two then sweeping bans, then a post by Positron explaining the exploit ban/issue then some were un-banned and others were not. On top of that some of the characters were deleted.

Adjacent to that you had the badge issue, which required aberrant behaviour to get some badges (1,000 times running a certain mission?) and then THOSE badges disappeared. Then the Dev's Choice mess, where some great arcs never got any recognition because either the Devs missed them, the Devs didn't like them or maybe even the Devs weren't fond of the player who wrote them.
Not even going to start on the ratings griefing, some of the Dev's Choice not having proper power warnings (hidden EBs in one of them with no reference to them in mission text) and so on.

MA was a nice idea, terribly implemented and never addressed for the following few years. I only use it to PL alts these days, running labelled arcs (LBMA for example) is really hit and miss and a handful of the Dev's Choice hit the right target of decent story AND good challenge.

Architect killed Architect due to variance in rewards, badge issues and so on. It didn't kill CoH, though I do anecdotally know some people that unsubbed as they did with I13.

A few decent points have been made in this thread, although I would have to say I didn't start this thread looking for 'blame' - or anything like it.

I just vividly remember thinking that MA could cause this game a great deal of damage - once I realized exactly what it was capable of.

I know of several long time players who were dismayed at the abuse MA allowed - who did stop playing. I myself took an extended break from the game entirely due to the introduction of MA.

It was nothing to do with recession and everything to do with being disillusioned by the influx of newbie level 50's who had no idea how to get to Peregrine Island - or even the Hollows for that matter.

It's academic now in light of what's happened, but it would be intriguing to see what would have happened to the revenue figures had MA not been dropped on us back then.

It may not have killed CoH directly, but I'm damn sure that it certainly did the game no favors whatsoever and reduced the games ability to survive.