Forbin_Project
-
Posts
11059 -
Joined
-
Quote:/Storm has 4 attacks, 1 heal, 1 team stealth, 1 Disorient, 1 Repel/KB, and 1 -Spd/Fly.Originally Posted by White Hot Flash
I don't know about /storm, but /dark doesn't really have any team buffs at all. You throw down tar patches, hit the biggest target with a toggled debuff, shoot off some Fearsome Stare, maybe some Tentacles, and pull out your Dark Servant. All you can do to directly help anyone is heal, and that's only if they're within it's radius if it hits. -
Quote:Sorry can't say Freitag's watching.Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
That what would be an F2P model that would work for you?
-
Quote:No.Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
So, for you, an F2P business model that has subscription levels (albeit all ungated in terms of access/content), but also has "microtransactions" that give additional benefits/bonuses/items of things that weren't previously included/available in the game (prior to F2P) would be something you feel the existing playerbase could get behind?
-
Quote:No problem. We be cool.Originally Posted by MajorPrankster
I took the winky completely wrong it would seem...
I am now sad I was sad...
-
Quote:And industry standardsOriginally Posted by VoodooGirl
We have to speak in hypothetical terms of "other games."
-
Quote:That's the F2P business model the MMO I was talking about has followed with differences to fit it's super hero theme.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
They both have 3 types of accounts. Free, monthly subs, and lieftime subs, and they both offer microtransactions where players now pay for things they used to get included with their monthly sub befor egoing F2P. And both have gated content that free accounts have to buy to access. -
Quote:Originally Posted by MajorPrankster
You have read nothing of the sort posted by me.
How on earth is my posting I think blanket statements of one type are funny some lead-in to make you think blanket statements of an equally silly nature are not?
I think the doomsayers are perhaps the saddest of posters, if you really want to know.
Apparently you didn't see the winking emote I used in my post to let people reading it know it wasn't a serious statement. So sad that your first reaction is assume the worst and get defensive. -
Quote:Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
Again, it depends on the F2P structure.
If the players of an established MMO reaallly hate the F2P structure of another MMO - do you think that established MMO switching to a F2P business model would be smart to copy it - or - try something different?
I don't believe an MMO moving to a F2P business model would be wise to take the "gated approach" - i.e. have to pay to advance - but instead allow the entire game to be accessible on a free account level and the microtransactions involved would have to be something that enhances the gameplay experience instead of "completing" it.
An F2P game that doesn't have monthly sub fees has to make it's money solely off of microtransactions. That means that players will be getting nickeled and dimed for things that used to be included with their sub fee. It's that simple. -
Quote:Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
From what I understand of the graph that was posted - that's revenue of new sales (i.e. new accounts or booster pack purchases) and not of continuing subscriptions. OP, correct me if I'm wrong.
I've read some editorials online about the free to play business model - and honestly, thanks to free social gaming like Facebook - it might very well be the new business model for future MMO's/online games. I have friends who fork out money to play Facebook games - buying those little microtransactions. My mom does it.
F2P could be a good thing - even for an established MMO - because it opens up access to more people who might have wanted to play the game but couldn't afford the subscription or initial investment. Conversely, I understand the concerns where it opens up the gateway to griefers and farmers - but you can't always look at the bad side of things. You need to take into consideration the good as well as the bad, but always try to put your emphasis and efforts into concentrating on the good.
I don't think any established MMO would make the switch without considering where it has failed but also where it has succeed in the MMO genre. They would be wise to understand what factored into those failures and successes. I think they would need to understand their playerbase and their perceptions of the free to play business model and build an unique F2P model that satisfies the concerns of their existing playerbase while at the same time making the game accessible to new "free" players without restricting them severely.
Yes, ultimately what I think what would make or break the transition to free to play for an established MMO is the community reaction - but the community would have choice. They can choose to resist the inevitable change, or they could embrace it and embrace the "new" generation of players into their fold.
Personally, I don't see the free to play business model being an entirely bad thing for an established MMO, but as a chance to build an even more robust social community - if the community is willing to embrace it.*
/end ramble
* diehard soloers will disagree. Noted.
Oh, and to toss some Golden Girl goodness into my thread, here are the winks and smiles.
While all those other things you mentioned are considered negatives by many people the biggest thing I think players of sub based games look at is how much more they spend per month on microtransactions when compared to what they used to pay for a monthly sub. -
Quote:Spoilsport. You would have to ruin my having fun with the doomcrying F2P advocates.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's actually factually false in a number of ways. First of all the numbers say that Cryptic itself as a line of business generated a net 17.9 million Euro loss over the last two fiscal years (apparently many internet reporters have difficulty with the funny squiggly e-looking thing).
-
If you give a man a fish he eats for the day. If you teach a man to fish he spends the day drinking beer on a boat.
-
Seriously why hasn't PS hired you and Arcanaville yet?
-
Quote:I think they more resemble the chihuahua's of annoyance than noobs of war.Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
Cry Doom! And let slip the noobs of war!
-
Quote:Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
Or at least it can be. One can trot out the counter-example of a struggling but well-received MMORPG that successfully went F2P shortly before the one you didn't mention by name after its parent company had a good experience with another of its MMORPGs switching subscription methods, but that's not the point since we don't have anywhere near the necessary financial information in those cases or, for that matter, CoH's. (Just as we're forbidden to discuss other games on these forums, we are not able to cite the truly germane statistics in this case either.)
On a tangential note, whatever the longterm feasibility of F2P as a model for MMOs, nobody can say yet how it affects player community, surely a more important factor for us. Anecdotally, I've seen opinions about this from players in newly F2P games that range from negative to indifferent, but never especially positive. If some posters on these forums are advocating F2P as a way of increasing the size of the community (and not because they're secretly misers), it's worth reflecting that more does not necessarily mean better - and sometimes it means worse.
In any case, as long as NCSoft is posting a profit, the devs are adding content and fixing bugs, and CoH's community is one of the best among MMORPGs, I'm content.
To be honest I'm enjoying this bit of news about the other game doing so poorly because we've seen several recent threads since that game announced it was going F2P from people holding it up as a shining example, and we should blindly follow their lead if this game wants to survive. -
Quote:I think it's a bad way to go for a sub based game unless it's a last resort. The reaction from the existing playerbase will make or break the switchover. If a game is designed from scratch to be F2P that's a different story because there won't be a pre-existing playerbase.Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
Out of curiosity, though, you seem to think F2P is a bad way to go (trust me, I have my reservations about it too.) But to play a sort of Devil's Advocate here, don't you think any other MMO looking to go F2P would like at the other game that tried it and would learn from their mistakes and player reactions and handle going F2P differently?
Is F2P inherently bad or just a business model that needs time to be understood/developed? -
Quote:Oh really? That's funny you say that because I haven't gotten a single petitionable anonymous comment since rep was disabled nor gotten an insulting post or PM from a frustrated loser who was angry at me because like Bill and many others I had my rep turned off so they couldn't see what my rep was or if their attempts to alter it had any effect on it.Originally Posted by seebs
If hiding the post count would make us behave better, then the theory that this is something we are "better than" has been empirically disproven.
-
Quote:You call a $25 million dollar loss a lack of enough profit? By their own admission the only way they could show any profit this fiscal year was by dumping said game and development company.Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
I seem to remember another Supers themed game that was boasting a 1,000% increase in sales, only to recently read that the company is in the process of being sold off due to lack of... well, enough profit.
Selling it off the parent company goes from a net loss of $5.8 million to a profit of $708,000. -
Quote:So it's okay for the doomies to make blanket statements but not anyone else. Gotcha.Originally Posted by MajorPrankster
These types of blanket statements on the Interwebs always make me chuckle.
-
Quote:Originally Posted by Daemodand
So 67,000 accounts? Of course, you'd have to adjust for pay services and boosters, but that sounds about right. Apparently we see servers in the yellow and red due to the downscaling of hardware (with another round of downscaling having just been tested).
It's sad to see such a solid game find an all-new low in earnings with every quarter. But the answer is before us as had been mentioned: F2P. Problem is, NCSoft simply does not understand or like F2P.
Going Rogue and the end game have both failed to prop the game up. GR's problem was obvious: 20 levels wasn't enough content. People did the 20 levels and left. It didn't help that those are some of the most annoying 20 levels to get through (both mechanically and thematically) in the game. The end game is one of the most-cited reasons on various MMO fora for people leaving the game. Those people feel the Incarnate system has turned the game into one they no longer recognize. I can see their point, even if I don't necessarily agree.
AE was another misstep for the game as well. Mass interest turned into mass exodus. I don't see future MMOs including player-content features as the concept has been pretty well shown to not work.
PvP 2.0 certainly didn't help, either.
But as I said, the answer is before us: F2P. But will NCSoft's corporate culture allow it?
We already have an example that F2P is NOT the way to go. Several people have been pointing to another MMO that recently went F2P this year and have been claiming that said game is doing better than ever and we should follow it's example. However the parent company of said MMO is divesting themselves of said game and the company that created it because said game has lost $17.9 million during the last fiscal year and has already lost another $7.5 million since it went F2P this year.
Those numbers don't lie. Going F2P is disasterous. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Thought I'd said it
- that quite often (or so it seems) when we see name complaints, we see the "they're on my friends list and I never see them so it's obviously inactive" thrown in shortly after.
Only reason for putting that there.
Even if those people actually have the names on their friends list they are failing to realize that this is a very casual player friendly game and the person with the name they want may simply be playing during times they aren't online. Maybe the guy with the name only plays during the morning/early afternoon, or he only plays 2-3 times a month because of his RL schedule. However the complainers would have us believe they constantly check the name 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at 5 second intervals or some other bs. -
Quote:I see. Someone's account hopping in an attempt to avoid moderation. Only shame is I don't know his ingame global so I can join others in putting him on ignore ingame. His magnetic personality here has won me over and I now desire to join that exclusive club.Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
This is also Cold_X. Go see what a charming individual they are.
Off topic: I do enjoy watching Bill when he gets into these battles of wits with unarmed people.
-
Quote:I disagree with this. The role of SG's has never changed or diminished. It was put in the game mainly for immersion/role-playing for players wanting that Superfriends/Avengers experience. The ability to find teams was never the main focus like it is with Global channels.Originally Posted by Wicked_Wendy
I don't think the SG is necessarily dead these days.. its role has just changed and it isn't nearly as important as it once was.
-
Quote:Thank you for explaining your point of view, it was one I hadn't considered possible. That being said I don't think the person who said there wouldn't be a problem put as much thought into this as you have.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The way I read the suggestion, if you had, say, 40 characters on the servers to be merged, the merged server would have 40 active character slots. You couldn't make any new characters on that server but you could access all 40. It didn't say characters above 36 would be inaccessible, so I should give the suggestion the full benefit of the doubt in that specific circumstance.
The concept of temporary overflow exists in other parts of the game: you can have more transaction slots than the maximum if the game requires them to, say, split up a group transaction, and we know from past testing that if the game is forced to send more recipes or salvage than you have space for for some reason, you're simply temporarily allowed to have more than the limit, but you cannot do anything else except remove items until you drop below the limit. I'm assuming the suggestion follows similar lines.
Agreed shardless or cross server teaming would be far better than merging servers.Quote:Its possible, but not nearly enough to avoid the huge number of problems a merge would cause, because most of the problems with a merge are inherent to the merge itself, and not its collateral damage effects. Some players fundamentally do not want to see their server community and its assets merged with another. That's an intractable problem with no real problem-free solution. Some people fundamentally do not want to change character names. That is an intractable problem with no real problem-free solution in a merge.
In any case, if I was of a mind to do a server merge, I would go all the way and go shard-less. Rather than have to deal with this problem multiple times, I would go all the way once and come up with a way to preserve server communities within a singular global structure. And I wouldn't claim it would be problem-free: I would only do this if the problems I know would occur were worth the benefits.
Is it possible? Well, hypothetically one way to do this would be to put everyone into a single global space but tag all players with a shard tag of their original server, and then use phasing to allow players to see essentially only things with the same server tag. In effect, Freedom, Virtue, Champion, Triumph, and all the other servers would be occupying the same space but invisible to each other. Voluntarily, however, people could unlock their phase locks and see everyone and everything on the global server, either permanently or temporarily for cross-server teaming. If you're on Infinity and you want to team with someone on Virtue, you could unlock your tag and see the Virtue people, join their team, and run with them. You could stay permanently globally visible and see everyone globally, or return to your own "Infinity dimension" once that was done. While teamed, your Superguy character would appear as Superguy: Infinity to avoid name clashes with Superguy: Virtue. It wouldn't appear like that: it would appear as Superguy with the server tag below, so it actually looked like a tag rather than a continuation of the name, so we don't mess with players' character names.
There are a ton of problems with executing such a thing, I won't deny. But I would explore ideas like that before contemplating a server merge. Because while a server merge might be more technically easy, it actually might be far more disruptive because in a normal server merge the problems of name space and community just get punted. In something ambitious like the above, those problems get addressed front and center. -
Quote:One only has to look at the outrage many EU players are expressing over the same thing happening to their Global names which is a minor inconvenience compared to character names.Originally Posted by Tyger42
So, because some guy on another server created his character before me and some people decided they wanted to ram a total change in server community down my throat because they were too cheap to buy a transfer and/or lazy to reroll on a server that more suited their needs, I should be forced to either lose my name or have a tacky roman numeral stuck on the end? And you don't see why that would be a problem for people?!
-
Quote:Right, and the only way for players to get access to the characters over the limit would be to delete existing characters that they never would have deleted before the extra characters were forced to transfer to the new server. So the players are put in a position where they are forced to delete charactersOriginally Posted by Arcanaville
Actually, he's saying if you have more than 36 characters total among the servers being merged, none of those characters get deleted: you simply cannot make new characters on the new server because you're over the limit.
agreed 110%Quote:Having said that, the notion that such a merge under those parameters wouldn't cause problems is an interesting blend of scary and funny. It would be the single largest disruption in the game in its entire history. For every issue listed in Memphis Bill's post, I can think of one more not listed. Its a huge can of worms.