TrueGentleman

Nor here. While expecting as much content as Blue or Red side for Grey side was probably a little too optimistic right off the bat, the Rogue and Vigilante access to NPCs with alternate dialogue shouldn't be too much to ask for. Here's hoping that upcoming issues will have real solo content for Rogues and Vigilantes in addition to just radio/paper/tip missions, street-sweeping, and badging.

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Originally Posted by Golden Girl Superman is the superhero - he's not a vigilante

He certainly started out as a vigilante, explicitly operating outside the law. In just one page of Action Comics #1, he racks up counts of kidnapping, breaking and entering, assault and battery, plus what looks to be threating a government official - all to save a wrongly accused person from the electric chair, of course.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jophiel Personally, I'd rather see rogues & vigilantes able to access (on their own) content on both sides of the wall instead of waiting for someone else to start an arc or task force. I'd happily give up the reward merits for completing R/V tips for that. Not sure how anyone else would feel about it.

That would probably blur the lines too much in terms of game play, to say nothing of immersion. Nonetheless, it would be nice to see some unique Rogue and Villain content in upcoming issues. At this point, to judge from the population figures, access to both CoH/CoV maps and teaming isn't enough incentive to go rogue or vigilante for most characters.

NC Soft has already made a major decision to change the game: They've invested a lot of money in Going Rogue to attract both new and returning players. A name purge, by comparison, is a side project that would distract from their main focus and impact potential revenue.

And that's precisely the way businesses operate. Unless someone making a proposal can assure the decision-makers that they won't incur significant risk, it ain't gonna happen.

Continuing to pull figures out of my top hat, if a given promotional campaign - let's say an e-mail one, since those costs are minimal and MMOs do them regularly - woos back inactive players for a month (7% response is a typical estimate for such cases), NC Soft stands to make almost $80,000. If, however, a similar percentage of them don't because their main got renamed to Captain Generica, then they would lose over $5,000 in revenue. Boom - that eats right into your overhead. That's quite sufficient to sink a project in the business world.

On the opposite side of the argument, the figures for quitting players over this naming issue, evidently only small percentage of regular attrition, would still have to be compared to the costs of implementing a name purge (from the coding to the customer service). Since even the strongest proponents of a name purge currently on the boards aren't prepared to quit over this - especially not with all the new content from Going Rogue, issue 19, and the upcoming issue 20 - NC Soft doesn't have a problem from their bottom-line perspective.

It's my own variation of my Bartle Test score.

The small sample size notwithstanding, until there's a similar one for the opposite side of the argument, i.e. players who are now quitting because there hasn't been a name purge, the facts in this debate are still too nebulous for a cut-and-dried decision. NC Soft still would have good reason not to alienate ~4% of potential returned business if they can't point to a loss of current subscribers over the issue. (As long as we're playing with numbers, that's a potential loss of as much as $45,000 for just one month, to go by your estimate on inactive accounts.) Did you ask how many players in the RP channel had decided to quit since "iconic names" aren't available on this particular server, the lottery-like odds aside that they'd be able to obtain the specific ones they wanted?

Even then, NC Soft would be advised to perform their own surveys before making a business decision - and businesses have to be both conservative and methodical at every step of the decision process.

Both turorials are adequate as far as teaching mechanics goes, but GR's is far superior in terms of immersion and level design (CoV's likewise is superior, but the starting missions are a bit lacking compared to GR's).

</digression>

Some people find brainstorming helpful (your mileage may vary, but I see a few names among those examples that I might tweak into alts for myself in time for the X2XP weekend). Inspiration can be catalyzed - flexibility is the key.

Who said anything about conspiracy theorizing? I'm merely proposing an entirely unsupported hypothesis.

/doffs tinfoil top hat

I was surprised at how comparatively unpopular Rogues and Vigilantes are:
Switching my main Stalker to a rogue was the first thing on my "to do" list for Going Rogue and Vigilante for my DP Blaster is next (now that I've taken my main MM ). Are Alignment Merits the deciding factor, or is it down to general player preference?

This would factor in whatever decision NCSoft makes, however, when it comes time to devote their resources to improving the game for beginning players. The name purge, whether bad idea or good in the abstract, seems like a minor request in a practical context, especially when there are bigger challenges to address. (And GR's truly superb new tutorial and starting missions make the old Outbreak and Atlas Park/Galaxy City missions look that much creakier.) NCSoft has to make a business decision, one that balances their interests with their customers', both current and past, when deciding whether to implement a name purge or assign their staff to projects elsewhere.

Incidentally, as long as there's speculation about stealth name purges going on behind the scenes (a debatable proposition, but one thing at a time), could it be perchance that CoH allows "good names" to be held indefinitely in order to surreptitiously promote more even server population distributions? If someone has really, really set their heart on being "Night Man", surely they will first consider heading to another, less populated server to secure it rather than pick up a thesaurus (or use an online superhero name generator) and try something different?

We all remember what happened the last time Batman was crossed with Scooby Doo, and nobody wants to see a repeat of that.

Muppet Babies successfully ran for seven years, so by the logic of eyeballs in front of TV screens, Batman Babies should be at least as successful.

Pitch: Last night eight-year-old Bruce Wayne watched his parents gunned down in front of him, but tonight he's dressing up in his Halloween custume and fighting crime, with the help of his bumbling comic-relief sidekick, the wacky Bat-Mite! "Grown-ups are an uncool, boring lot, so my duds must, like, be able to pwn them. I must be a creature of the night, sick, wicked..."

There's a reason why the Superman mythos could encompass the adventures of a Superboy, but Batman has always been Batman.

The BSD-based OS X and Linux are both "UNIX-like" operating systems, so the WINE-based/forked wrapper Cider will have to pull similar contortions to get .NET working since that framework is supported only for Windows (which basically puts the lie to the claim it's a portable interface).

That said, while I'd obviously prefer a native OSX launcher, a JAVA-based one is preferable to one coded in the buggy, kludgy .NET framework. Enough people have had bad reactions to the current version of the NCSoft Launcher that I hope the company is considering alternatives.

If NC Soft were to fund a CoH focus group of new players, I'd wager that it would discover the 7-year-old tutorial and starting zones present more of a stumbling block than choosing the right name among a dozen servers. (It's worth noting that although several servers have name exchange threads on their subforums, not all seem to need them.) That said, we can't discuss the assorted ways competitors approach the issue of character names because of the ill-advised new forum rules, which leaves that debate even more abstract than the name purge one underway.

So since you're not going to quit over this, that leaves the "for" side of the name-purge discussion as a hypothetical, just like the "against". Without real action or real figures, the conservative strategy for a business in such cases, i.e. not cutting off potential return business while avoiding unnecessary costs, is the one to follow whenever the economy is less than booming.

Have you cancelled your account/terminated renewal because you were unable to name your character along the lines you'd hoped for? That's the only kind of example of this game arguably putting the interests of a former subscriber over a current one. And affecting NC Soft's bottom line is the only surefire way to get their attention (admittedly, this will have to be from more than a handful of individuals).

Contacting inactive players is a good marketing strategy in general, but this approach could be taken as holding a ray gun to the character names. A carrot-and-stick approach is defintely better, but the emphasis would be better on a free reactivation pass - especially coinciding with an anniversary, or a new issue, or an in-game event - with the warning that names will expire in X-months without a log-in. (And avoiding a "Great Name Rush" would make for fewer C/S headaches.)

The alternative conclusion is that renewed availability of what the OP calls "good names"* will retain current customers and earn good will/word of mouth for the game - but that's no less hypothetical (certainly less from my own perspective). Current customers, however, are already being "catered" to with a new expansion, new issues, new booster packs, etc., all of which tie up CoH's resources and leave little room for what, by comparison, counts as only a side project.

Until NC Soft shells out for a proper focus group study that tells them they can expect a significant number of players leaving because of name issues, prudent business sense dictates that they shouldn't risk alienating potential returning customers - which, to reiterate, MMOs love - when they already have invested in the previously mentioned new features. It's a bottom line issue, nothing more or less.

* I am unconvinced by the implicit quantity theory of superhero naming.

Unsubscribed trial accounts don't count in terms of return business, only ones that have had money down already and therefore have established a psychological precedent to spending more. Only one free sample per customer.

Excellent work, honorary citizen! You're finally coming around to seeing the Praetoria perspective.

How can the self-declared Statesman expect to inspire the super-masses without posters and slogans?

You mean skulking in an underground bunker, naively entreating lesser heroes to fight his battles for him?

While goatees are a classic look, eyepatches are in this year for all the cool parallel dimensions.

Or, however plentiful they may be, they're still likely to be incredibly vast, literally astronomical distances from each other. Whether or not Wells realized it, an intrastellar invasion makes much more scientific sense.

As for the evolution of complex/intelligent life, it comes down to where one thinks the Great Filter may fall.

But businesses simply don't respond to that "why NOT" argument. Asking a business to do anything requires them to commit time/staff/resources/costs, so there has to be a more persuasive reason than a negative one. When the business additionally risks losing clean profit by taking that action, it looks even less favorable to their balance sheet. The MBA mindset simply doesn't work that way.

In the case of NCSoft with CoH {since one is not allowed to use the other relevant examples from MMOs out there} they've just launched their first major expansion to the game, which they continue to promote and which their devs continue to work on polishing. Going Rogue is a significant investment in not only retention but also resubscription, even as the game faces current and upcoming competition in its niche. (MMOs have a strange business model, one that looks like magazine subscription from one angle, theme park attendance from another, and from a third, association membership.) The suggestion that the company should undertake any project that could potentially turn away returning customers - which are the best kind to get and which businesses always hope for - is contrary to their bottom-line interests.

Unless a convincing argument that NCSoft will lose more money by not executing a name purge, that their current paying playerbase will demonstrably drop off without one, the status will stay quo.

EDIT: Technically, the other argument would be that NCSoft will gain more money by executing a name purge, but the slogan "City of Heroes - Where We'll Recycle Your Character Names If You Leave" doesn't make for a strong selling point.

That was Davison? Good lord, he's unrecognizable under that makeup (and with that accent).

That's a hard "how I met your mother" story to top.

"Very low" is an arbitrary figure when the actual number (whatever it is) counts as clean profit for NCSoft, whereas devising and implementing a new name expiration policy involves both fixed staff costs, from coders for the script to customer support for the problems that will inevitably arise, and intangible ones, potentially, good will and word of mouth. Businesses are very reluctant to trade the former for the latter, even when a customer argues that there's a benefit (from their own point of view).

Bluntly, that makes it sound as there is a fixed supply of creativity among the playerbase, and that it now resides in previously imagined forms, like so much plastic in need of recycling. Perhaps that's not the right analogy - maybe the concept of retconning a comic book character whose copyright term may or may not be coming up for expiration is closer.

As far as this thread goes, there isn't even a consensus that a problem exists, much less what an acceptable term of expiration would be even if one were to petition NCSoft about the hypothetical problem.

The number of long-absent players returning to post on the forums, particularly those posting on individual servers' subforums, seems in reasonable proportion to the number of players posting complaints about the naming expiration policy. In December alone, there were quite a few who had been away for two years or more who came back and were looking to see who remembered them or remembered the names of their characters. MMOs in general are much stickier than other games when it comes to drawing players back, not just when there's an expansion, but also when there's a lull in their schedules ... but forum rules arbitrarily forbid mentioning particular examples that I've seen myself.

In the meantime, you can post to previously mentioned Virtue Name Watch thread if there's a particular name you're set on claiming for yourself (other servers have similar stickied threads if/when naming becomes an issue on them).

Good will - which is hard to earn and easy to lose - as well as the time and effort of changing the policy on character names in inactive accounts.

Current player have many options, as discussed in this thread, when it comes to naming new characters. Veteran players who return to find their mains generic'ed under some new policy will be annoyed, no matter how well that policy was circulated. Losing their good will, along with the valuable good word of mouth that they can provide, costs NCSoft, hypothetically, more than devising and then implementing an acceptable use-by date policy for names when only a fraction of the playerbase (or whatever value of "a lot" counts as in this particular thread) has raised the issue.

In order to persuade a business owner to fix what a given customer perceives to be a problem, one must first convince them that it's a problem for them, too.