PumBumbler

Reminds me of ITF herding.

Yah, ITF lag, Ship Raid lag have gotten markedly worse as the patches have rolled in. Granted I like pushing the envelope of the engine but if any Redname wishes to tag along for a ride one of these days I'd be more than happy to show them the big red marks all over the netgraph on ITF or a Ship Raid.

As far as the LGtf final room is concerned generally the TF doesn't last long enough for me to really be concerned about it. Reported the bug when it came out but I figured it was logged and nothing else.

What could possibly go wrong?





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*runs off to buy water, ammo, and feminine hygiene products*

I've noticed this as a general trend even outside of the game. People just don't want to think anymore. They want passive entertainment and to be led by the nose. The worst of it is that people start demanding to be spoon fed like it is their entitlement. Funny thing is that Justice seems to have more than its fair share of leaders/thinkers/creative types...most of them just tend to guard WW/BM nowadays though.

The internets are teh nuTV.

He's just trying to bump his post count to catch up to you. Now neither of you two reply so I can bump mine!

I would agree that the general economy can have an effect on the revenue stream, but without knowing the demographics and metrics of the customers it is hard to gauge the impact that outside influences have.

If everyone was subbed on an annual basis, secondary accounts included, then Access numbers may not change that drastically and revenue may remain flat for a while. Depending on the state of economy, revenue might even go up temporally as people swap from annual renewals to shorter renewal periods (which cost a little more).

However, since the general consensus is that the recession will be long with a flat recovery, at some point the general economy will drag on CoX as well, which is probably happening right now.

Given his reg date, most likely but who knows?

Obviously you haven't seen the Virchoo forums lately.

-100DKP

The real Manoa.

What happens in Justice stays in Justice. Jus' sayin.

Manoa, Queen of the planet Sol, has announced City of Heroes II: Extra non-PvP Edition

The axis labels showing revenue moves from 4M - 8M, while the access axis (heh) starts from zero, exaggerating the revenue differences. Not a big deal.

Again, it is difficult to posit the exact nature of subscription revenue when the total revenue is given only. Looking at 06 Q2-Q4 inclusive, it is difficult to say whether there was a drop in interest and thus revenue or that revenue was deferred deliberately by the company or by proxy.

I could not find a direct reason for the sharp increase in Q3 06, but neither could I see an increase in revenue for Q4 06, when the boxed set for GvE showed up in Walmart. Given that boxed set sales should have increased revenue for the quarter, I can only guess that the revenue was booked for the quarter previous when the title was available for the purchasers at Walmart to order.

However, expectations leading up the launch of GvE edition could have suppressed income (aka the Osborne effect.) While this is entirely speculative, I cannot find a direct reason for the drop in income, but the Access numbers may not be as tightly coupled to incoming revenue and therefore may be modulated over the preceding and following quarters.

Also, the manner in which the subscriptions are booked can have an effect on revenue. I'm not sure when exactly the various promotions were introduced, but the bonus 2 months for year long subscriptions were started before the loyalty program was introduced. This type of program itself can cause people to put off renewing or delaying payment in anticipation of the promotion, and a 2 month bonus can push stated income a Quarter forward.

It's hard to see exactly what caused the drop and spike in 06 without looking back at the microcosm in 2006 but over the 3 quarters the access numbers were still working together on average.

From a management perspective, monetizing your installed base is one of the low-hanging fruits to pursue. Between Oct 08 to June 09, not only was the Magic Pack released, but we also had the Mac Special Edition and the Architect Edition. Just remember that the AE Edition is a boxed edition, which may skew numbers more heavily than regular booster packs.

While there are no access numbers released for that time period, anecdotally from all the greybeards complaining about AE babies and the related chatter that had appeared throughout, it did seem like a significant amount of AE Edition boxes were sold.*

The Mac special edition may not have captured a significant amount of new players, I'm pretty sure every CoX player who wanted to support the Mac bought a copy just to 'represent.' The bonuses for buying it were just gravy.

*As to why AE boxed sets haven't led to a surge in subscriptions, I think one only needs to look to that huge giant spike when CoV was introduced to tell the story. While the boxed sales of CoV loom large in Q4 05, the subscription sales following that basically showed no gain. I believe that AE Edition is working the same way.

Normally you would think that selling a big number of boxes (to mostly new customers) would lead to a bump in subscriptions (and thus revenue going forward). However, CoV also coincided with the dreaded Enhancement Diversification. I believe the incoming set of new players was also coupled with the outgoing set of PO'd players due to nerfs. It would be very strange to presume that all of the people who bought CoV were existing CoH players...that would be the alternative explanation to why that spike happened without any increase in revenue following.

Anyhow, I think the AE Edition subs were more than offset by the AE 'nerfs' (some of which were entirely needed) enough to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Of course, none of this is backed up by hard evidence other than my gut feeling.

I neg-repped you for that.

There is a general correlative trend that you can see in the chart with Access and Overall Revenue. Without access to the amount of box sales, subscription renewal types and other minutiae this will always be an exercise in dart board prognostication.

Also, dramatic and catastrophic are not mutual. A critical threshold that is breached gradually can still be catastrophic. Not that I think CoX is anywhere close to a catastrophic threshold from the numbers I've seen.

Meh...the truth hurts. I've been pointing this out for a while now but no one really cared. Justice is too pro for pugs, so all the newbs got left out in the cold and went to Freedom.

Today's AE baby = Tomorrow's Hami Raid leader.

All the braintrust and experts on Justice need to come out to AP/Mercy more and grab some fresh recruits or else it'll just be me staring at Quat watching the tumbleweeds roll by.

Short of being the accounting firm that doesNCSoft's numbers, or the producers of CoX, we're going to be left to our own devices to figure out where the market position of CoX is and where it's going.

Obviously the people that really know don't feel that it's worthwhile for them to tell us.

Therefore, feel free to start crunching the numbers instead of waiting to be fed. Otherwise there's no point this discussion either, may as well wait for some redname to drop the numbers out of the sky for you.

Since 4Q 2008 NCSoft stopped giving an extra level of detail to CoX reporting, so everything we are talking about has to be extrapolated or interpolated when discussing the metrics of the playerbase.

You're more than welcome to analyze the numbers that have been supplied to figure out how many 0s we should put in d00000m.

D0000m!

Just kidding. Looks like CO did take a decent sized bite out of the player base.

Looks like the currency adjusted numbers are down. No idea what percentage European sales are like, and Euros have done well against the USD recently.

Wonder what 09 Q4 is going to look like?