New efforts!

[Mistress Urd]

The ability for the industry to support multiple games in one genre doesn't really have a bearing on another genre's saturation point. CoH's inability to really grow its subscriber base in spite of technical excellence and initial lack of direct competition illustrates this. Among tabletop rpgs as well there doesn't seem to be the same level of interest as a whole in super hero based games. Personally, I don't think the market will support more then 1 or 2 independent super MMOs that don't have a big license dragging in fans purely via name recognition.

VO I think has a reasonable chance to stand on its own since it has some future-tech novelty thrown in, but I believe that only one of CoT, H&V, or CoH2 can succeed long term and if all do manage to be completed and present in roughly the same time-frame the split population could very well irreparably damage the profits (and chances for long term survival) of all three. I imagine a scenario where CO continues to limp along indefinitely simply because all reasonably developed competition ended up bankrupt when people couldn't figure out which one to combine their support behind.

I think I agree that only 1 game will do well.

Hard to say the reason(s) for CoH failing to grow its playerbase. Without pointing fingers at decisions made about game design, I can think of a few external things that might have helped.

1. Not getting the message out: This is probably the #1 reason why the game was spinning its wheels so long. No budget for Black Pebble to do anything. Hard to get your message out with no money.
2. This might be 1A but not sneaking in more product placement. (We all know about Big Bang Theory) but how much more could have been done. (it would most likely require $ so hard to do with none)
3. More encouragement for the players to get the word out. Grass roots efforts to get folks brings in more people.
4. CoH probably had more female and older gamers who played, more promotions targeting these folks!
5. More field demos of the game.  A weekend trip to a site to introduce people to the game. Local volunteer efforts and free swag go a long way to getting new folks into the game.

[SpectaPhantom]

Am I wrong thinking the way CoV was, distributed or developed, being a sort of standalone game didn't help. I know a lot of people on Triumph started leaving when it came out. Or felt like they were leaving. Everything felt dead.

I could be wrong on CoV. That was when I was a young teen. I consider those the Dark Years cause I don't remember much and what I do it's all misinterpreted.

[Scendera]

4. CoH probably had more female and older gamers who played, more promotions targeting these folks!

I have to disagree. Pandering SUCKS, because it screams that you don't think someone can recognize the merits of something "because...". That's pretty insulting to me.

I'm female. The only marketing CoH needed to do to get my attention was to take the element of risking my scarce money off the table. Soon as I could try it for free, I was there.

it was literally:

Sister: "Did you know City of Heroes is going free?"
me: "First I've heard...been curious about it. So how big is it and where do I dl it?".

[Mistress Urd]

I have to disagree. Pandering SUCKS, because it screams that you don't think someone can recognize the merits of something "because...". That's pretty insulting to me.

I'm female. The only marketing CoH needed to do to get my attention was to take the element of risking my scarce money off the table. Soon as I could try it for free, I was there.

it was literally:

Sister: "Did you know City of Heroes is going free?"
me: "First I've heard...been curious about it. So how big is it and where do I dl it?".

Would you rather they pander to free to play crowd who weren't going to pay ever?

[gypsyav]

Would you rather they pander to free to play crowd who weren't going to pay ever?

Why pander to anyone? I'd rather have a generic ad than one supposedly targeted at me. I'm female and I find most of the ads targeted at females play to stereotypes.

Just give me an ad that shows the product and gives information on it. Don't try to decide for me whether I'm going to be interested or not because I'm female.

[Zerohour]

if all do manage to be completed and present in roughly the same time-frame the split population could very well irreparably damage the profits (and chances for long term survival) of all three. I imagine a scenario where CO continues to limp along indefinitely simply because all reasonably developed competition ended up bankrupt when people couldn't figure out which one to combine their support behind.

This. I have been thinking about this very scenario. City of Heroes did moderately well even at its peak, and without any real competition for its particular genre. What will happen now that there will be multiple superhero MMOs out at roughly the same time?  Granted, with the popularity of the Marvel and now DC movies, we have seen a pretty substantial increase in the general populations interest in all things heroic. Will that help?

[Scendera]

Why pander to anyone? I'd rather have a generic ad than one supposedly targeted at me. I'm female and I find most of the ads targeted at females play to stereotypes.

Just give me an ad that shows the product and gives information on it. Don't try to decide for me whether I'm going to be interested or not because I'm female.

Exactly.

[Zombie Hustler]

/Necroing a post from halfway back in this thread to let everyone know that all the I-Trial dialogue and cutscenes have been added to the wiki. (Sorry, no screenshots.) So you can now read all the stuff you chose to ignore when you were running with the Leagues.

Awesome, and thanks for this. There was some stuff in cut-scenes that I never got a chance to really see/read because of the breakneck pace at which people ran Leagues through, and a couple I never even got a chance to see because there never/rarely seemed to be Leagues running for them (or we couldn't complete them due to ragequits, etc.)

Will be poring over this later!

[Serpine]

Granted, with the popularity of the Marvel and now DC movies, we have seen a pretty substantial increase in the general populations interest in all things heroic. Will that help?

In my personal opinion, no: They will at best drive people towards the licensed games based on the same setting / characters as the movies. More likely they will have little to no impact as the cinema goer will possibly just be drawn to further related passive media (tv / books) to see more elements of the universe they enjoyed expanded upon professionally rather then attempt to participate in that setting themselves.

The logic behind the movie genre success = game genre success theory is not actually one I particularly follow. I mean, did the success of "found footage" filmmaking produce a sudden influx of successful game franchises? Slasher films? Romantic comedies? Even science fiction films don't seem to provoke rushes towards sci-fi games (other then those about those movies).  More specifically, as best as I can tell, the success of WoW was not been linked to a crowd of successful sword & sorcery epics in theatres. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was already done prior to its launch with the Spiderman trilogy midway and Batman Begins about to happen. So you really you could make a better argument that super hero films are promoting medieval fantasy games. :)

[LaughingAlex]

Right on! City of Heroes was the first and best poster child of the Super-Hero MMO genre... it looks pitiful now with CO and DCUO alone. And frankly I think CO makes DCUO look bad, a game that is honestly trying it'd damnedest to be interesting. It's way more interesting than CO, even with the condition that you're modeled after established DC characters. That's cool in it's own way.

With City of Titans, Valiance Online, and Heroes & Villains as the young up and comers, they'd be in good company if the game whose demise spurred their creation made a huge comeback to restore some credibility to our little corner of the MMO genre.

I fully agree with you there.  The funny thing is that many CO players think absolute freedom is amazing, they always universally call you a stop having fun guy when you bring up the imbalances of the game and assume your a min maxer.  Truth is, sure I may be a min maxer but I believe there should be more balance as to encourage variety and that the game should make you feel good for doing well, it doesn't do that.  And CO players, the reason for the kind of bitterness 90% of it was the neglect.  Not to mention the nerf heads and holy trinity enforcers(both of whome just want to nerf everyone down to archtype levels, talking about CO archtypes here).

DCUO is not a bad game it just gets misrepresented by CO fanboys to easily.  It plays like a fighting game, somewhat.  I don't agree with it's trinity problem, as I feel they could have easily broke the trinity with the normal combat system in the game and top that off it's not fully a tank and spank.  But I do see it could have done the right thing and whatnot.  It's just different.  I still prefer CoX as that game had tons more depth, DCUO suffers from a severe depth loss as any trinity game does.  But it at least tries, unlike CO.  Though I think collections need to be redone in DCUO(I gave up on that for now, so tedious and unfun).

CoX coming back though and it doing well, would really help GW2 truely spark the end of the holy trinity.  CoX gave the proper image of a game on how to properly break the trinity, GW2 was just inspired by it.  But CoX coming back, it'd send a clearer message that GW2 wasn't alone and that it is very possible to break the holy trinity grindfest.  It'd help many game developers realize how it's done.

[AlienOne]

I fully agree with you there.  The funny thing is that many CO players think absolute freedom is amazing, they always universally call you a stop having fun guy when you bring up the imbalances of the game and assume your a min maxer.  Truth is, sure I may be a min maxer but I believe there should be more balance as to encourage variety and that the game should make you feel good for doing well, it doesn't do that.

Personally, I think we should celebrate diversity. If there is a crowd of people that like CO, then good for them. There's no reason we should be disparaging to them. That's not the CoH community I know. If those are the things they like, then they got the perfect game for them.

Us? We want our CoH back, and I hope they celebrate with us and congratulate us when we get it back, just as we should be patting them on the back that they're happy with what they have.

I was extremely happy to play my Warshade every day, and that was taken away from me. I don't wish the same for them.

[LaughingAlex]

Personally, I think we should celebrate diversity. If there is a crowd of people that like CO, then good for them. There's no reason we should be disparaging to them. That's not the CoH community I know. If those are the things they like, then they got the perfect game for them.

Us? We want our CoH back, and I hope they celebrate with us and congratulate us when we get it back, just as we should be patting them on the back that they're happy with what they have.

I was extremely happy to play my Warshade every day, and that was taken away from me. I don't wish the same for them.

Well see, what I'm refering to is the fact that, I felt largely limited in CO and actually punished for using some powers, as said powers were so far below par it's kind of sad.  See I wanted some things buffed and even wanted some enemies buffed and whatnot.  But then i'd get ganged up on for asking to buff weaker, underperforming abilities.  You'd be surprised at just how badly some abilities are superceded or underperform, so much so that its almost like "Why bother experimenting in this game, i'll get severely punished for it repeatedly and if it is good they'll nerf it to uselessness!".

CO is horribly, horribly imbalanced.  It has almost no freedom, I feel, because of it yet people ask for more nerfs or even say x or y is fine when it plain sucks and very clearly sucks in terms of BOTH the numbers AND in terms of function.  It's a joke to say CO has freedom because of that.  It's freeform system would have it if powers had a standard to go by but they do not.  Your either severely out-performed and even find enemies harder then they are supposed to be by design or you do ludicrously well with nothing in between, :/.

I wasn't saying having alot of freedom was a bad thing, I was saying CO in reality has no freedom.

Edit: No, I don't want CO getting shut down but I do fear that.  I already spoke about it a long while ago.

Another Edit: What i'm saying is that, the imbalances of the game are severely counter-productive to the whole point of the freeform system.

[Scendera]

I don't want CO to get shut down. I want to see it get shown some love by their devs. Til then, it's simply a game that I wish interested me more than it actually does right now.

[LaughingAlex]

I don't want CO to get shut down. I want to see it get shown some love by their devs. Til then, it's simply a game that I wish interested me more than it actually does right now.

Me to, exactly my thoughts on it.

[Ouul]

I don't want CO to get shut down. I want to see it get shown some love by their devs. Til then, it's simply a game that I wish interested me more than it actually does right now.

Me to, exactly my thoughts on it.

QFMFE

[ivanhedgehog]

when coh comes back if our accounts are lost, I would love to see them activate loyalty powers across the board. and some 2x xp for the kick off

I will be saving vacation time...

[LaughingAlex]

I think I agree that only 1 game will do well.

Hard to say the reason(s) for CoH failing to grow its playerbase. Without pointing fingers at decisions made about game design, I can think of a few external things that might have helped.

1. Not getting the message out: This is probably the #1 reason why the game was spinning its wheels so long. No budget for Black Pebble to do anything. Hard to get your message out with no money.
2. This might be 1A but not sneaking in more product placement. (We all know about Big Bang Theory) but how much more could have been done. (it would most likely require $ so hard to do with none)
3. More encouragement for the players to get the word out. Grass roots efforts to get folks brings in more people.
4. CoH probably had more female and older gamers who played, more promotions targeting these folks!
5. More field demos of the game.  A weekend trip to a site to introduce people to the game. Local volunteer efforts and free swag go a long way to getting new folks into the game.

I think getting the message out would be the most important part, and advertising the games virtues as well.  It should be advertised that the game actually had a lot of variety in how to actually play it, which was the true beauty of it.  It wasn't a game that severely punished you for not playing one of the three trinity builds and there was no best way to play it.  It should be mentioned that the game does make you feel like the hero and it does so in a good way.  It should be mentioned the game is for the most part a very very balanced game that doesn't punish you for not going a true fotm build all the time.  It's a game that became ahead of it's time.

[Remaugen]

We really need like and dislike buttons for individual replies. . .


Are we there yet? ;D

[Scendera]

I think getting the message out would be the most important part, and advertising the games virtues as well.  It should be advertised that the game actually had a lot of variety in how to actually play it, which was the true beauty of it.  It wasn't a game that severely punished you for not playing one of the three trinity builds and there was no best way to play it.  It should be mentioned that the game does make you feel like the hero and it does so in a good way.  It should be mentioned the game is for the most part a very very balanced game that doesn't punish you for not going a true fotm build all the time.  It's a game that became ahead of it's time.

Perfect! The game stood on its own merits quite nicely and the best way to promote it would be to discuss what it did *so* right.

[Tubbius]

Speaking of what City did right. . . .  Someone had a HUGE list on here at one point of stuff that City did that was unique and right to it.  Anyone know where that list is?