At present to the superhero mmos out there the CoH community is like a large potential customer base for who ever can appeal to us the best. CO is ok, but not great. It does have it's good points but what it really needs is a major expansion to breathe new life into it. And I think that the expansion it needs to boost its popularity and the overall enjoyment of the game is a playable villain faction. I think if they can get that in place it should bring a lot of players in and they can then build on it and add in long term gameplay content.
Indeed. Outside COH, and without pure copy, catering to that group, the COH community as a whole is a tall order for a sub 100,000 player game. Because unless it's direct copy with the exact same people working on it, there will be things different and depending on the person that is asked within the community, "why thye played COX or what attracted them to COX" there are hundreds if not thousands of different answers. Sure there are groups that relatively have the same answer that probably say one thing, but cater to that view then still lose a lot of the community.
Like even on COHtitan, it's only a small part of the community that is here and show themselves. Many ex COXers have never been on COHtitan, some have but no longer, some dip in every now and then, and others moved on to various other groups. Overall the community is scattered and if the community first can find some semblance of common ground instead of "COH means this and nothing else other people say" then there is no way in hell any game maker even if they wanted to can actually target the COX community. It wouldn't be worth the investment for a major game maker.
On a smaller scale that is targeted at various few pieces of what COX meant, it should work. Hence that is where the three upcoming projects come in. Three different views of what a successor of COX should be like and maybe most or at least a good portion of COXers can find something that fit their definition of what COX was to them.
Short version: as a community, meaning that includes the people that is not here on COHtitan, have to figure out a general idea of what it is that appeals to them overall instead of trying to place a flag based on one or two views of what appeals to the community. And the first step is to realize that COHtitan people are not even majority of the COX community as the community is nice sized but splintered to hell right now which each side thinking they are the community and speaks for the entire community.