TonyV

This is mostly speculation, so take it for what it's worth.

As far as I know, Paragon Studios doesn't do marketing. NCsoft does. All of the marketing goobs are out of corporate, not affiliated or related with the developers or community reps in any way. If you want to send a letter to the people responsible for marketing City of Heroes, you'd be addressing it to Austin, Texas, not Mountain View, California.

Here's the kicker, though. Theory o' Tony is that those people who are responsible for marketing City of Heroes are the very same people responsible for marketing Guild Wars, Lineage, Lineage II, and Aion. The last in that list is the spoiler of the group. It's the big shiny new kid that the company is putting a lot of emphasis on getting out there into people's grubby little hands. City of Heroes? It's over five years old. It's not supposed to be raking in profits. Money spent marketing it is money that could be better spent marketing Aion, right? At least, I think that's what's going through marketing's head.

Of course, my personal problem with that is that you need both. Aion gets a lot of free marketing by virtue of the fact that it's new. Magazines are reviewing it, it's prominently displayed on store shelves, it's showing up in retail advertisements, etc. It really wouldn't hurt them to divert a few bucks here and there from the Aion budget towards the City of Heroes budget.

After all, Aion is also an unproven game. Look at what happened to Auto Assault. Or Tabula Rasa. I'm not suggesting that in a couple of years Aion will be gone, but what we do know for sure is that City of Heroes is a proven winner. Money spent on it is not wasted, as it's a pretty safe bet than in five more years, it will still be around. So go ahead, NCsoft, spend money on marketing Aion. I really do understand wanting to show really big numbers for its launch. But please, don't forget your old reliables. After the flash and new game smell wears off of Aion, you really want City of Heroes to still be there and going strong for you!

Keep in mind that 3D graphics are designed to mimic what we see in the real world, not how images are projected onto the backs of our eyes.

If you're really motivated enough to try an experiment, do this. Get a large, clear, hard surface that you can set up in front of you somewhere where there are lines parallel and perpindicular to a direction you're looking in. Get a dry-erase marker, close one eye (since most monitors aren't 3D yet), and look straight ahead. With the marker, use your peripheral vision to trace lines over the parallel and perpindicular lines you see past the window in front of you. When you're done, open both eyes, step back, and look to see how straight those lines are.

If the perpindicular lines are straight, then 3D graphics has it right, they should be straight on the screen because that's how you see things in reality.

I know it's heresy, but I still think that they should give out the badges but no extra rewards past five years or so. I'd hate to be a new player and think that I'll never even remotely be close to earning all the goodies that the veterans have.

Plus, it would have the added advantage of heading off the people posting that the new rewards suck.

Okay, I have created a new chart, this time adjusting for the USD/KRW exchange rates at the time. The sales are now displayed in U.S. dollars, which is where most of the sales were generated. I haven't added the timeline, and I also started the chart in 2006 to weed out the CoV outlier. Here are the results:



The chart looks different because I composed this one in Google Docs instead of Microsoft Excel. I published the data so that you can see it.

I think the economy probably significantly affected new game sales, but not so much subscription-based games. After all, 2009 was consistently above average for CoH, and it was right after the market tanked and the economy damn near collapsed at the end of 2008. Of course, there were the Super Booster pack releases, which may have helped, released one per quarter starting 2008 Q4, except 2009 Q1. It's hard to say, because the subscriber sales and SB sales are mixed together. If I had to guess, the subscribers stayed more-or-less equal through the recession, with SB sales supplementing sales.

Oh, one other thing I didn't note on the chart. The Mac Special Edition client was released January 7, 2009, and the Architect Edition on April 14, 2009. I'm a bit disppointed to say, but looking at sales, it looks like neither really boosted sales much. I was really hoping hard that Mac gamers would join in the fun in a sizeable number to encourage further development on the platform and maybe even a Linux release.

I keep seeing posts about how CoH is hemorrhaging subscribers. I keep seeing replies about how no, it's not. Posts about how the city is dead. Posts about how no, people are in instanced missions. So it got me to thinking about how we can tell how CoH is really doing, something objective to look at and judge.

As most of you know, NCsoft stopped publishing subscriber numbers a while back. But they do still publish their sales in their quarterly earnings statements. Really, these numbers are a lot more important than subscriber numbers. After all, a game can be wildly successful with a low subscriber base, or wildly unprofitable with a high one. Ultimately, "Is this making us money?" is probably the best judge of whether a company will continue to invest in a game.

SO... With no further ado, here is your chart. Yes, it's small and hard to read. Click on it to see the full-sized version.



Note that I've put labels across the top indicating when each issue release has it, as well as a few of the competitors (WoW: Burning Crusade, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, and Champions Online).

Here's my assessment, for your consideration.

Are there fewer people playing City of Heroes?

Yes, there are indeed. Not a huge number, though. If you roughly equate sales with subscribers, the game is off average by around 10% right now.

Is the game hemorrhaging subscribers?

No, not by a long shot. There was a lull around the end of 2007 during which sales were actually lower than they are today. Then over the course of the next year, the game consistently posted sales numbers well above average.

Did Champions Online make a dent in City of Heroes?

Um... Maybe. It's hard to tell, because there hasn't really been enough time to say for sure. It had only been out for a month when NCsoft's most recent numbers were posted.

Like I said, the game's numbers are off by around 10%, which I'd consider statistically significant. However, it's impossible to say yet how many of those people are just trying out something novel and will return. After all, look at the HUGE spike in Q4 2005, which City of Villains are released, followed by the more-or-less return to normalcy.

At any rate, even if it did make a dent, I really wouldn't consider 10% much of one, at least not yet. Had CO been a raving success, it could have potentially split the market in two and CoH could have taken around a 50% hit, or even worse. As it is, appearances are that people did indeed go over to check it out. What will be interesting is how many end up staying.

What about Going Rogue?

Let me get out my crystal ball... Yes, it's getting clearer now... Oh wait, it's gone again.

Seriously, as you can see from the chart, CoV give the game a HUGE spike in sales. That one is an outlier, because as I'm sure someone will point out, sales != subscribers, and as I recall, CoH didn't quite double in subscribers when CoV was released (although it did get a bump that lasted over a year).

If the same holds true for Going Rogue, the suits at NCsoft are going to be very happy when Going Rogue hits the streets. That quarter's numbers will go through the roof. Within an issue after the hoopla settles down, things will return to status quo.

Okay fanboi, so what's disappointing about the game?

If I were a suit at NCsoft, I'd be a bit irritated that the Super Booster packs aren't bringing in any significant sales. I mean, they did okaaaay, but after the first one, total sales actually dropped quarter-by-quarter, even with one per quarter being pushed out the door.

Now, one could read this as, "But maybe the Super Booster packs were what kept sales a bit above average. Without those, the game would have tanked!" Enh, maybe. I just don't think so, but it's a valid (if cynical) take on the data. Ditto character slots, server transfers, and all the other mini-transactions in the game now.

"That's bogus, I totally disagree!"

Hey, that's your prerogative. You can look at the data just as I can and draw your own conclusions.

So in conclusion as Tony sees it...

City of Heroes is indeed having an off quarter, probably two once we see the numbers for Q4 2009. Champions Online probably made a dent, but CoH withstood it pretty well. Other competitors (e.g. the 800-pound MMO gorilla) have virtually no affect on CoH.

The game is NOT dying, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Sorry, "DOOOOM!" sayers.) There's good precedent for the numbers coming from even lower than they are now back to having strong sales. The fact that we have a major expansion and client update in the works is very encouraging.

Or as my Magic 8-Ball says: "Ask again later..." *shake* "Outlook good."

You don't get debt for defeat until level 10.

As for answers to everything else, check out the Paragon Wiki article on debt.

Don't sweat it. Over the years, they've made debt almost meaningless. It's trivial to work it off in a few minutes, and depending on where you log off (patrol XP), it's entirely possible that you don't have to work it off at all.

It was defeated a couple of times, but it went to the hospital, slotted a few damage resistances, and is fine now.

This is meta-game information, but still...

- You can take lossless screenshots by using the /screenshot_tga command. The file size is larger, but such screenshots won't have jpeg-compression "artifacts" that are particularly noisome if you're trying to capture clean images of UI elements.

As part of my base binds, I have the following:

/bind SYSRQ "screenshot 0$$screenshot"
/bind SHIFT+SYSRQ "screenshot 1$$screenshot"
/bind P "screenshot 0$$screenshot_tga"
/bind SHIFT+P "screenshot 1$$screenshot_tga"

SYSRQ is the Print Screen key. Using those binds, I can take screenshots with or without the UI, lossy (jpg) or lossless (tga), all with just a single key press. (Or two, if you count the shift key.)

- If you want to say $target in a channel (while, for example, describing what "$target" does to someone), just hit the escape key to deselect everything. With nothing selected, nothing will be substituted for $target.

- The semicolon (;) is synonymous with the /e command and will trigger the chat command line. You can save yourself a couple keystrokes when doing emotes by typing, for example, ;dance2 instead of /e dance2.

- Speaking of emotes, you can cancel any emote by typing ;none and hitting enter. This includes running emotes after, for example, someone hits you with a snowball, someone tells your fortune, etc.

- Another set of popular binds I use to quickly do something very common:
/bind Y "dialog_yes$$dialog_answer Accept"
/bind N "dialog_no$$dialog_answer Decline"

This will allow you to do things such as accept or decline teleports, accept or decline trade invites, dismiss mission intro text popups, etc. with a single keystroke and without having to hunt for the button with your mouse.

- Last bind hint to avoid making this a "useful binds" thread, I promise! But this one really does come in handy. You can bind keys to send messages to your global channels as follows. Just substitute the name of your global channel where it says Global Channel Name (and the key you want to bind it to, of course):

/bind PERIOD begin_chat "Global Channel Name"

Note that there's a space at the end of the line after the last quotation mark!

I remember saying when Going Rogue was first announced that my prediction for release was mid-June 2010, based on how long recent issues were taking, the year lead time between announcement and release of City of Villains, the opinion that they weren't really that far into its development, and the industry's tendency to barely meet or push back releases.

I got called some names and told that there was no way that they would wait that long before release. Some people were even predicting November 2009. Most people were predicting January - February 2010, and I knew that was shooting way too soon.

Am I still sticking with June 2010? Yeah, I really think that sounds about right to me. If it comes earlier, great; that's one thing I wouldn't mind being wrong about. If it comes later, I doubt that my level of discontent will compare to the yelling and screaming going on otherwise around here.

So pegging June 2010 for release, I suspect that the beta will either start very late in the first quarter (like the dwindling days of March) or be pushed back to first part or middle of Q2. Yes, I know that's long for a beta, but I also know that this is bigger than an issue release (ten to twelve weeks instead of four to six weeks), and the beta for City of Villains was quite long. As for news about it, that will start trickling out a la the letters and posts from Ghost Widow pre-CoV late next month or beginning of March.

To be honest, I wouldn't hold my breath for any news until next month. Like everything else, though, I guess we'll see when we see.

I'm not trolling. It's not that your ideas are bad ideas, it's just that basically you're saying, "I want to see new and different stuff." Well, welcome to the club, we all do. It's not particularly insightful, the devs already know it, and every issue, we do get new and exciting stuff. With Going Rogue around the corner, within six months or so, were about to get a lot of new and exciting stuff.

Plus, Ironblade makes a valid point. You assert that the stuff we've been getting is boring. That's your opinion. While you may firmly believe it and you have every right to, framing your suggestion in the context that it needs to be "fixed" will only turn people away from what might be valid suggestions because they don't hold that point of view.

Last, but not least, the devs have stated before that they're happy with the amount of "endgame" content. They would much rather add content across all levels. By framing your suggestions in the context of "we need more level 50 stuff," you're also turning people away who are 1) new, 2) play a lot of alts, and/or 3) don't want CoH to become more like WoW in that particular respect.