Talionis
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Posts
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Joined
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I'm just astonished they won't sell the game and make a buck. Once they shut it down they severely damage the value of the IP.
Loss of Face may be a cultural thing I don't understand, but I don't understand the BUSINESS decision that shuts the IP down.
NONE OF US, at CoX customers are going to another NCSoft game if they really shut CoX down. And the thought we might go to a newer game of theirs seems to be the only logical reason not to auction off CoX and get what you can for the property. -
Quote:I don't want to play either CU or DCUO. Most people I've talked with also say both games are poor substitutes in the Super Hero MMO genre.Originally Posted by Cobra_Man
I share your pain about CoX, to be fair CO and DCUO are also real Super Hero MMO's.
The problem is that it's just that they aren't as good as CoX in many vital respects, although they may be superior in others.
DCUO is more action adventure than MMO.
CU is a very small MMO with a small world, mechanics are still not well balanced.
But at leas CU is an MMO and you can loosely say DCUO is also loosely a MMO. -
We have a great community and a great development team that have created a game that has many loyal fans.
I don't understand how NCSoft makes money by closing the game?
- Is it a tax right off? If so tell us so we can be mad at the politicians and not NCSoft. Even if so its hard to imagine you couldn't sell the game for an amount greater than the tax right off.
- Is it that you want to keep the IP so you can eventually put out an CoX2? The big problem I see with that is you are killing a naturally healthy player base and community and have drastically polluted your good will and faith that NCSoft will keep the game running.
- Whatever you could sell the game for seems like more than what you would get for simply closing the game down. CoX has a lot of potential revenue left in it. Customers will continue to pay simply to keep the game in maintenance mode. We have to be paying in a lot more than what it would take to keep the servers running.
Super Heroes are at an all time popularity high with the Avengers being the largest movie of the year, and several spin off and sequels. The genre is hot and potentially getting hotter.
I'll still suggest your business model is wrong. Make us pay for issue expansions, get away from the Free to Play model. Perhaps have a single archetype free to play, (Scrapper comes to mind) with only the costume packs available at CoH startup. New people could get an idea of the customizability of the game without giving away the majority of the game. The subscription with an annual large issue push where we got several significant upgrades and options bundled together so we had to buy the whole new issue just to get the one or two things we wanted is fine.
CoX players are mad because we don't have another home. Champions and DCU are no where close to the same product. Marvel's new game looks even less close.
NCSoft's deciscion to close CoX just isn't passing a smell test. The game seemed healthy, it had a new issue almost ready to come out. But CoX customers would have been content with something much smaller in terms of upgrades to the existing great game. CoX could have flourished at much the same level with a much smaller development team. Or in the much better alternative, the majority of the team could have been focused on creating a CoX2 that would have caused a market stir. Caused new people to play the game. CoX2 would have been a nice cash infusion for the game and would have allowed you to close CoX1 with complaints and grumbles, but modest loss of players or hard feelings because the players would have a new home to move their toons too. - Is it a tax right off? If so tell us so we can be mad at the politicians and not NCSoft. Even if so its hard to imagine you couldn't sell the game for an amount greater than the tax right off.
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I have friends on multiple servers. My Toons are spread out over multiple servers. Sometimes I want my good Tank from Champion on a group that I'm on at a different server. Its not worth it to me to pay to do this, but it would increase my enjoyment of the game.
Money money money, but Texting used to cost a lot of money when it first came out. Now most plans make you pay a small fee to text or include it in your data plan. Once server switching becomes or become automated, then the cost to NCSoft is negligible.
Now, the game is dying so this is probably moot. But I did like the idea of being able to play any toon on any server. Personally I don't mind not having my perfect name. -
Quote:I am hoping this is going on behind the scenes. If it were happening, it would still most likely have to get out of the NCSoft logins and there would have to be a stop of service so new billing could be set up. It is the cleanest way to separate the books.Originally Posted by Smurch
The option no one seems to have considered is that instead of selling the game, they could just spin off Paragon Studios and then license it to them.
This is the win-win-win
NCSoft keeps all the IP, doesn't contribute any funding, and just collects checks. Paragon Studios continues to develop the game and just has to keep it profitable. In case of a COH2, NCSoft could still do that. And the players get to keep their game.
The won't want to announce a sale until the sale is done, and I would bet that they want to sell to the highest bidder. People in the industry know that CoH is really up for sale right now. Whether its the whole IP or just a license to continue the existing versions.
Quite possibly, some of our Dev's may have been hired as consultants by other companies to get a feel for the state of the game, and what is really required to keep CoH going healthy.
But it might not be an easy negotiation. The only reason not to sell the game is the thought that CoH2 is worth something. Buyers will have to consider how much damage has been done to CoH and its player base.
And a simple licensing to another company would still leave the ultimate control of the IP in NCSofts hands. Could you imagine a company buying the license for two years and then having NCSoft decide not to renew the license then...
As PoS as NCSoft seems to be I'm not sure I'd be anxious to make a deal with NCSoft if NCSoft retains any power to screw up the deal down the road. -
But to also be fair NCSoft, hasn't said why they are closing the game down.
If it wasn't profitable, they never gave the players a chance to recruit. I love our Dev's, but if they need to half the Dev department, have issues come out even slower profitability could have been increased.
I think we would all hate it but we would understand the game closing. With no explanation, NCSoft seems really arbitrary. Their customers have been loyal to the game for over 8 years and there is no real substitute good that we can buy from someone else.
In addition one of the problem with MMO's is that we are really renting intellectual space. We build things in cyberspace and we don't want to lose them. Not to mention we all want to keep on paying what we have been paying for years, so I don't see what has changed.
Older games shouldn't have to die. If they don't want CoH on their books, but want to keep the IP, I would imagine someone would gladly take the revenue to host the game, even if it would only be in a maintenance mode.
But CoH players are not going to stop playing CoH and move to a new game NCSoft makes. We can't trust NCSoft anymore because our MMO investments might be wisked away at the blink of an eye. So if they think its some way to get us to play something newer and pay more than we were paying for CoH, then they are smoking something. -
The Don't Dwell on the How or Why just hurts me (See Below). It seems to me that the game is a reasonable IP. It is paying its bills. Going Rogue had a lot of extra's but for me I would have liked to see a lot more new powersets in a true expansion, but that had they built an actual expansion I would easily have paid my $40-$50 for the expansion pack. That was a missed opportunity for revenue jumps. WoW puts out expansions every so often and they see revenue jump in that model.
I think our community would've been happy with regular expansions. If the CoX franchise has any potential future revenues you would probably want to bank on some sort of expansion if not right away, in the foreseeable future.
In a lot of ways, I'd pay some moderate extra amount $20.00 to $40.00 for issue 24 and the ability to keep my accounts operating and my toons alive. In a lot of ways if they had setup that you pay $20.00 per Issue. I would've payed that.
"To our Community,
Thank you. Thank you for your years of support. You've been with us every step of the way, sharing in our challenges, encouraging us to make City of Heroes better, more than everyone else thought it could be. We couldn't have come this far without you. I implore you all, focus on the good things of CoH and Paragon Studios. Don't dwell on the "how" or the "why", but rather join us in celebrating the legacy of an amazing partnership between the players and the development team.
Thank you, and I'll see you in the skies, one last time.
Andy Belford
Community Manager" -
Well, all that sucks. -- Trust me I understand they can shut the game down. No one will stop them. They own it and its their ball so they can take it home and not let anyone play with it.
If they want to develop a CoH2, you'd like to think they would want to keep these existing customers happy. I'd be very scared to buy CoH2 now.
Its not fun to be on this end of it. We have NO POWER. Over the years we have put a lot of money in those hands. The illusion that I was building something has been burst for me. Because what I built will soon be gone.
I've also seen the death throws of other games be very different. This game seemed to still be robust. It all seems needless and a shame.
But don't confuse my sorrow with a lack of understanding that they CAN do this. But by doing this I think they really are murdering the value of a future use of the CoH universe, especially in the hands of NCSoft. -
Quote:This exactly... They have killed a revenue stream. Once off it won't come back. It will also negatively affect their other titles, MMO's depend on keeping the illusion that game is ours and the Toons we create are ours.Originally Posted by seebs
What I mostly don't get is: They also obviously immediately stop bringing in any money. Since they've repeatedly stated that the game was profitable, that strongly implies that the amount of money they've stopped bringing in is larger than the amount they've stopped spending...
There is Something Wacky Here. I doubt we'll ever know, and that is one of the reasons I am pretty much now highly distrustful of ncsoft.
A lack of confidence that our games will go on makes people less likely to invest money into pay to play or purchasing of games. CoH has had a long life, but its been still got a large player base and is generating profits.
Why don't they just sell the property to someone to run it? They get cash infusion. We can still play.
This maybe business, but its not good business and its making me reluctant to enter the MMO market again. -
Quote:I want to understand why someone took my toons away.Originally Posted by Lulipop
To OP
Why?
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http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...95621&page=136
It appears that the parent company of NCSoft had the head of the North America left August 27 and a new north American CEO was appointed a Dean Takeapooponus. Evidently, CoH only makes $800,000.00 a month in profit.
So $800,000/month is the magic number that is too small to even attempt a reorganization. -
Quote:Well that's it isn't it. It's if they have a good reason they haven't explained it.Originally Posted by Molehill
Because the devil is in the details. It sucks not having details. We can't get our heads around it, digest it, rationalize it. We can't acknowledge the rationality of it because we weren't given one. The best we can do is speculate, but we wake up the next morning knowing we got no closer to the truth. We probably have hundreds of posts trying to take a step forward, but so very, very few allow us to move forward. Paragon Studios employees are under a NDA (I read that somewhere in these forums) and NCSoft is playing their cards close to the vest. The only thing concrete that I've read so far was that there were "high level talks" with NCSoft.
It's a crappy frame of mind to be in.
We are like store owners who have been leasing property. We've improved it. We decorated it. We've fallen in love with the place. And we have been paying our rent. Worst part is no where we move will be anything like what we had. We can't just move our store and rebuild.
NCSoft has swooped in, told us we have to leave, but not why. We've been doing business with them for eight years and no details. They aren't selling the building to someone else we can rent from. They aren't using the business for something else, they have let the studio go as far as I know, and if they are retooling the servers to Guild Wars, that seems laughable because my understanding is the servers are not as expensive as they used to be.
We are just out of luck. I get they don't have to. It's business. But it's a real turn off and MMOs are investments of time and money. If I'm going to invest my time I want my collection of leased digital property to be available. This is terrible customer service, in a business that is only customer service.
How can I rely on NCSoft in the future? -
Quote:I did make that personal and i shouldnt have. I guess it's where we are putting our numbers because I can imagine a profit not being big enough, but killing a revenue stream is what I don't understand. The choices seem simple to me:Originally Posted by Molehill
Say 25% is what you need to keep investors happy. You make 15%, fire your division leaders, and change your business model (F2P lets say). Now you're making 20%. Investors are starting to get antsy ... What are you going to do? If enough of them pull their money out and your stock prices tanks, things can get pretty ugly, no? And you're still making a profit ...
I'll say it another way. Stock holders are partial owners in the company. When they buy shares in the company, they do so to make money, turn a profit on their investment. It has to be large enough for the investor, who considers the risk being taken and the amount of money being made over a given time horizon. If they decide that the company is not a good place to park their money, even through they're turning a profit (a small one), they'll sell their stock. Consider what happens when a large number of investors sell. You're making enough money to cover your operating costs (salaries, overhead, etc) with a little bit left over (small profit). But do you have enough to pay all the people who are selling their stock in the company?
Probably not... So what options does the company have left? Bankruptcy?
And the whole time ... the company was "profitable."
Maybe you're right. Maybe I don't understand business. I thought that in order to grow quickly enough to implement a business plan to take advantage of a relatively new business venture (say MMO's circa 2004), you took in public money and operated on public money. As the company profited, those profits were given back to the investing public (dividends, capital gains, etc) or reinvested into the company for it to grow (say R&D or to handle cash flow to quickly grow a larger workforce). I'm not familiar with the mechanism (if any) for a publicly traded company to hoard money (that it made by using investor funds) so that it can buy itself back. I'm guessing that NCSoft doesn't have that kind of cash on hand. Profit is only part of the end goal as it goes hand in hand with keeping investors happy.
1. Keep going with CoH as is. Profit is there and keep a player base happy till you decide to upgrade to CoH2.
2. Keep CoH going but change organization. This would be changing leadership and reducing staff. revenue will likely drop some, but profits could go up since expenses would go down.
3. Sell the intellectual Property to someone else, even potentially a not for profit of the current players. This generates some short term revenue and cash.
4. Close the division and do what? Create bad will. Make zero dollars off of it. They just seem to be making a bad situation worse. This doesn't seem to give the corporation anything.
Business is usually rational and I just see so many other options as being more rational. -
Quote:This whole thing is a PR nightmare. I didn't expect CoH to be around forever, but I expected it to last until CoH2 was developed. In a lot of ways, Going Rogue, was miss-managed because it was CoH2-lite. But people didn't buy it in droves because they should have marketed the graphics update with basically all the additional powers we have to date and called it CoH2. Sold it as such and tried to pull in new players all the while keeping its existing base players happy. Mthose players have shown they will continue to buy subscriptions and other micro transactions.Originally Posted by Molehill
I keep reading about how City of Heroes is profitable and from a basic money-in, money-out perspective, it makes sense to keep it going. City of Heroes may indeed be profitable. But it's most likely not profitable enough when it's considered against the backdrop of a publicly traded company, which NCSoft is.
That's the basic understanding I have of how profit is looked at in a publicly traded company. It could very well be that City of Heroes as a unit wasn't making enough profit for investors to keep money in Iit.
I think you don't understand business though. If I say I'll make 25 percent profit, but only make 15 percent, the division leaders may get fired, but it makes no sense to kill a division that is still making money. Instead you change your business model. There is still revenue coming into the division. If they hire less developers and have issues come out more slowly we were still going to keep paying subscriptions. Heck putting the game in maintenance mode with no development, consolidating servers so that with the reduced participation there would still be hi enough concentrations to form teams the game could've been a minor revenue stream.
I've heard they just didn't make a big enough profit so many times, but it makes no sense to me. Maybe some better analogy will make sense to me, but I thought companies liked to make as much money as possible. I can't understand murdering a division that is making money. If you think it should be making more change the division leadership and business model. But some money should be something the corporation wants.
The only way to make any more money off the title is to make a CoH2 and attract back the core players and gain new players, or to sell the software and intellectual product to someone else and let them worry with how to make a profit.
What has happened is the product we love which we had been leasing is being taken away. And now we can't lease it from NCSoft or anyone else. -
Why is it going away? My understanding is that it is making money. If I were making a hundred dollars a month profit (profit is money after all my expenses) for basically leaving my computer on, I don't turn the computer off. Some money is better than No Money.
Plus the current situation is causing immense Bad Will with every current and past City of Heroes customer. Not only is it an enormous surprise to a community looking forward to I24, but we cannot understand a business reason for the move.
I speculate that they think the intellectual property is worth something in the future. City of Heroes has an expansive Universe. It's also the only Super Hero game to really catch on. CoH is also a game with a fan base that includes a lot more female players than most MMORPGs. Most people that have played CoH would return for a CoH2, the title CoH2 has been reserved. CoH has become a respectable name. But if that's the case NCSoft has done terrible damage to the name CoH.
The right way to transition to CoH2 would be to keep the servers open at least in maintenance mode until the new game was up and running. Closing CoH1 with a new shiny CoH2 waiting for me is far less detestable.
The thought that if you turn off the CoH servers the current player base moves to Guild Wars or other NCSoft titles is laughable. They are not equalivalents and even if the CoH players might be interested in the other NCSoft titles the awful taste they have left in the CoH players mouth will keep them from trying NCSoft titles.
Furthermore, NCSoft is further eroding the illusion that MMORPGs are constant worlds that will never go away so that the digital property that we technically just lease even though we put the effort into creating the Toons and bases we love. With that illusion damaged customers are less likely to purchase future titles from NCSoft and other companies.
My understanding of the cost to putting games in maintenance mode is negligible. While a revenue stream for the game would be small, the effort and expense to keep the game open are also small.
Again isn't some profit better than NO Profit? No explanation I've seen makes sense. Can anyone explain it? Does anyone have a suggestion? -
Quote:I conceded already. I'd just rather anything than have my toons disappear.Originally Posted by Talionis
I had seen that happen in other games as a cost saving mechanism. Loosing my name or losing my all my toons... Seems like a no brain-ER. Now, if it doesn't make anything cheaper and the game doesn't stay then combining servers doesn't do anything productive.
I just can't believe they aren't taking in enough to keep the game going possibly with fewer or no additional updates. -
Quote:Funny when the biggest movie of the year was... Avengers?Originally Posted by cursedsorcerer
It's a conspiracy to rid the world of "horrible" Superhero games "that nobody plays and are universally hated because nobody thinks superheroes are interesting. Fantasy games are better."
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Quote:I had seen that happen in other games as a cost saving mechanism. Loosing my name or losing my all my toons... Seems like a no brain-ER. Now, if it doesn't make anything cheaper and the game doesn't stay then combining servers doesn't do anything productive.Originally Posted by SinisterDirge
What would consolidation have done besides drive some players away that lost their toon names?
I mean as a cost issue as far as I know all the different servers are actually just partitions run off the same machine, so no cost difference there...
Merging the servers wouldn't have done anything besides pissing off a bunch of people who lost their homes.
I just can't believe they aren't taking in enough to keep the game going possibly with fewer or no additional updates. -
It just seems like someone would have bought it and had us keep paying to keep the servers open. Killing a MMO should really hurt NCSofts reputation. If they had a new superhero game for us to transfer into, I'd understand. But this...
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Most games that die, so signs of weakening, they reduce staff, they reduce the number of servers. I was actually getting excited for the new sets that have been in production. I really get the feeling that this is news to most of the staff.
Any chance this is a precursor to COH2? -
This sounds more like a plea for a new Archetype similar to Veats.
It would basically be a smorgasbord of comparable powers, already in game only this Archetype let's you choose between them. Veats are actually really close to this idea. I think the difference is that you want to be able to mix and match some soldier with some crab. Also hopefully getting more than just a couple choices.
Also, I really have wanted a more complicated Melee Defender Archetype for a while. -
We can now purchase transfers from one server to another, but it would be nice to be able to do it quickly and easily, back and forth so I can play on a server that has enough people to easily find teams, but not so busy as to constantly get my team split between Atlas 1, 2, and 3.
A quick easy automated "free" way to transfer servers would make evening out servers easier and we could do it ourselves. -
I will definitely sign this. The example maybe overcome-able without a team, but there are a lot of mission arcs where I start them and then get to a point where I need to click two objects at the same time.
I think it would be nice if arcs were clearly marked solo and non-solo. -
Quote:I think Tankers do play more like controllers with the taunt effects. Playing a Tank, I don't think primarily about doing damage, (I do with Scrappers, Brutes, and Stalkers). The powersets are closer to the same for Tankers, Brutes, and Scrappers than Stalkers because Stalkers get the Assassination powers.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
If any of the melee archetypes is fundamentally different from the others, its stalkers. Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers have the largest overlap design-wise. If this was a beginning of time decision, there should have always been only one of those. But merging them today is impossible, because no matter how similar they are in an absolute sense, the playerbase has grown to focus on the differences between them, inflating the importance of those differences to the point where eliminating them would serve no good purpose.
Arcana, I actually agree with you that no change can be made now without a lot of anger from existing players and I see little to no reward for removing Scrappers from the game -
My trick arrow feels like I am just saying "PEW" "PEW" sometimes... ;0