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A lapsed player's day back under CoH:Freedom
Amarsir
Member UncommonPosts: 703
A Hero is Born
I played City of Heroes for several years (with on-and-off periods). To date it's still the only MMORPG to ever get that level of commitment from me. I liked that the combat is fast, that tactics are flexible, and that solo or pickup group play are both available with little planning. I really liked that I could have dozens of different characters that all played pretty differently.
Unfortunately, tracking each of the tiered systems for alignments, Incarnates, and other rewards left me where I didn't feel I could get value on an impromptu login and I didn't feel like maintaining a subscription just to log in, go "oh yeah, I needed that" and log off. I couldn't schedule enough time to feel I got my money's worth. So I lapsed the account after something like 60 months of subscriber time.
So now comes City of Heroes: Freedom, allowing play without subscription. Intriguing. And to be fair, two months ago I couldn't log in there at all so now anything beyond that is strictly and improvement. I'm certainly not owed anything. So today I reinstalled and here's what I experienced:
Locked Away for Crimes they Didn't Commit (or Prevent)
As expected, I found my characters locked. I have 10 usable slots waiting for me to assign, though. That's not a whole lot to a guy who used 12 slots each across 4 servers. It's not even enough for all my 50s. But certainly it enables me to pull up a few old favorites. I could see paying a little to unlock more over time. So I pick my fire/rad controller and log in.
That was a nice surprise, actually. I'd heard Controllers were a restricted AT. It turns out though that my account has enough subscriber time accrued that I have lifetime access to them. Pretty sweet.
No Interest, but Intrigued
I get a message that I have sold items on the Auction House, cash waiting for me. Even more surprising. Didn't the rule used to be they get deleted after 60 days? Just junk salvage, but it's good to have access to auction stuff. Not sure what character I parked all my influence on, though. I used to pass it back and forth via mail but I don't recall if I ever pulled it out. I kind of hope I did, lest a billion inf mail got deleted. (I didn't check my mail actually, due to system spam in it.)
My base (and I did have my own bases, at least one each on 4 servers) is locked. Not surprising, no rent paid in ages. So I go over to city hall and attempt to pay. No option. Well, there's been an update lag before. Let me relog ... nope. Am I the ... yeah, I'm the SG leader. OK so apparently you have to be a subscriber to pay rent. You must pay for the privilege of paying.
I want to be understanding, but as a long-time player I have numerous valuable enhancements in my base storage. And apparently I have no way of getting to them without subscribing. (Or trusting / making use of someone who does.) That's a bit of a let-down. I could live without my teleporters but storage is important, and even if I could live without using it again I want the stuff that's there.
De-hanced
Speaking of enhancements, about this time my toggles drop. That's weird because I was just standing there, not fighting. It turns out Invention Enhancements don't work. Every build I have on every character is pretty much IO'd out one way or another, and they simply don't work. It turns out I don't strictly speaking have to subscribe, though. For $2 a month I can get an Invention License turning them all back on. Much cheaper than $15, I could see doing that. But actually I have a better option due to my experience. My subscription history makes me very very close to permanent Invention unlock. (If I spent $15 I'd get that feature as a bonus to whatever I actually spent the $15 on, like character slots.)
So that's nice for me, with 5 years back history. If I was, say, a 2-year vet who had maybe 5 IO'd characters, that option would be way way out of reach. Again the $2 monthly option really isn't bad, but playing your main character the way you remember them for free is going to be impossible for most people.
Unsurprisingly after that, I can see my Alpha Slot doesn't seem to be working. (Unlike the Invention enhancements though, I didn't get a nice red "warning" message pointing this out.) OK so how close am I to permanent Incarnate unlock? It doesn't exist. How much for the monthly Incarnate License? Oh that doesn't exist either.
Hmm.
So unfortunately, the only way I can make any "forward progress" (which for my experience I define as "Incarnate Levels") is to be a full-on subscriber. I could spend some money to unlock more slots, and in doing so hit the threshold where my inventions are enabled, but there's no fixed (or discounted) rate I can pay to have access to the part of the game I'd want to be playing.
Not in it for the Teacups
This, to be honest, makes subscription even less of a marginal value than it was before. Before, $15/mo made the difference between playing and not, a big difference. If I was newish, $15/mo would make the difference between 2-slot minimal play and full multi-slot characters, auctions, and IOs, a sizeable difference. But for me, $15/mo makes the difference 100% of the game and 95% of it, and I do want that 5% but ... if you couldn't sell me a big upgrade before, how do you expect to sell me a small one now?
It's like I get a letter from Six Flags saying "here, have a free ticket". And I accept the premise that the free ticket is really an incentive to go buy overpriced Churros and slushies, which I might do. But then I go and find out the free ticket doesn't include Roller Coasters, and I can buy a full-priced ticket that does. Which, yes I'm sure I can, but the free ticket isn't doing anything for me at that point, so why am I there?
So that's where I stand. I still don't feel I ever got my money's worth for Going Rogue last year since I bought that for Incarnate slots which were limited availability then and not part of the package now, but that's water under the bridge. It's nice to give me the chance to be nostalgic, but they won't be getting my microtransactions when I'm no better off than I was 6 months ago - and I wasn't playing then.
Attn: NCSoft CEO
If there was an option where I could pay $3/month for Incarnates and $0.50/month for bases, I would immediately throw $30 at them to say "give me three months and unlock 5 characters." Nobody's retiring on that cash, but it's money they're not getting now and it puts me in place to buy more. (Plus I add player volume to the servers, which is something MMOs need.) Instead, they've locked it away under a $15 fee and I just can't justify that. Maybe there are enough $15 payers under the current system that they're fine, but for me it's an opportunity missed.
Currently playing:
DC Universe
Planetside 2
Magic Online
Simunomics, the Massive Multiplayer Economic Simulation Game. Play for free.
Comments
The problem is, with a high-tier-reward vet like yourself, all they have to get you to subscribe is bases, the Incarnate system, and signature story arcs. If they let you have the bases and Incarnates for $3.50 a month, literally no one would be subscribing anymore. People would stop paying $15 a month and pay the $3.50 intead. The game would be dead pretty quick with that kind of revenue loss.
I highly recommend you forget about your old characters and roll up a brand new one. Run through the new low level arcs. Maybe purchase Street Justice because it's such a great set you just might be convinced playing on a Premium account is worth it after all. Try the game like that and see if you don't find some value in it. You just might like it.
P.S. I agree they made a really dumb move with the locking of IOs on returning players' characters. I don't doubt they've lost more than a few returning players to that very bad decision.
Interesting post, you've made a lot of good points, as has OSF.
My question for you is, what could NCsoft/Paragon add to make subscribing more of a draw for you or other players that have access to, or are at the top tier already due to their long-standing veteran status? I mean, I've only been playing for 4 years so there are still good reasons for me to maintain my subscription. (Granted they'd have to shut the servers off and prey them from my cold, dead hands for me to un-sub.)
There are pretty substantial reasons for newbies and lower tier players to maintain a subscription including ATs, Powersets, bases, IOs, auctionhouse, Mission Architect, Signature Story Arcs, Incarnates... I'm sure I'm missing some things.
But for those that have been playing for 5 or 6 or 7 years, what do you think keeps those players subscribing? What do you think would be an incentive to keep them subscribing if they are already on the fence?
84 month vet. Aside from incarnates, story arcs and the monthly ~$6 point stipend (550 pointss), there's access to my 12+ whatever character slots per server basically. For the 5-6-7 year vets, I think it will ultimately come down to game fatigue more than simply being on the fence in regards to value.
I guess it boils down to how serious is the player about the game. To stay pretty competitive and on top of things subscribing is a must. For premium I would argue that it is different between IOs and no IOs; no IOs means you are going to play pretty casual and might be ostracized from IOs groups at high levels, but still they can have fun as long as they know their place. IOs players can play farming high lvl content(non-incarnate), so I might work more like for players looking for a break in their subscriptions.
I came back to the game as a free to player recently, didnt like the restrictions so re-subbed up. Played for a month and got some decent fun from the game but then got that same old fatigue as stated before by doing the same kind of things over and over again.
Some of the new archstories and monthly archs were the same types of missions with a different skin. I am not leaving the game in anger or discust, I just feel it needs something more and the F2P just doesnt get it done.
If I do come back again it will be for a month sub at a time (if they dont charge an arm and a leg for expansions).
Here is to hoping for an awsome CoH2.
Work hard Play Harder
Assuming you had a compelling interest to play the game (i.e. it wasn't about the cost and you don't feel the same way as when you stopped subbing), it might be worth a 1 month sub to unpark inf/stored ios and salvage. You might also strike an interesting arrangement with a subber - if they run the supergroup base and give you full access, then you throw some farming funds earned with the fir/kin their way every month. Honestly, if you said you'd throw some x million inf my way, I'd do that for you in a heartbeat -- I'm subbed through 2013 ( ' :
That 1 month of subbing to set up that arrangement then gives you permenant IO access since you're so close -- onward you're paying ~2/month to play with access to Wentworth's.
It looks like you'll have an alternative option for IO and AH access -- you can purchase it via reward merits. That's kind of a neat idea since it gets more folks playing TFs too.
Edit --- apparently not. This slipped through during the last patch unintentionally....ah well.
I think there's two ways to make a subscription valued. The first is to offer an exclusive high-end offering that you can't get any other way; a lure so tempting it's worth the full price on it's own. The other is to make it a bundle of lesser features, so that 3 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... >= 15.
And as you suggest they've got a pretty good case for the latter, at least for newer players. But the former isn't enough for me now, as it wasn't enough before.
For experienced players in general, anyone who was happy before the Freedom change should be no less happy now. But obviously they've lost people over time too. And although I certainly don't think everyone would drop the subscription for piecemeal Incarnates as OSF said, there certainly would be some cannibalization. So the question is whether they'd gain more from returning players than they lose from current people swapping down. I feel like they might, but if NCSoft feels differently it's certainly their call to make.
On an unrelated note, I really think they should have switched to a Serverless model by now. The problem is what was first experienced when CoV came along, and then Rogue, then Incarnates, and now access tiers: it fractures the population into groups that can't play together. If you had 500 people on a server in 2005 (a decent turnout for non-peak hours) they'd all be heroes and at worst be fractured into 100 per 10-level range. Easy to form teams.
But now if there are 500 on a server, how many different ways does that get fractured? You might be looking not just for a tank, but a tank with vigilante access who has incarnates unlocked and the alpha slot first-tier filled . . . (Excuse me for not being up on the vocab & details, but you get the gist.) That can make the servers feel more empty than they actually are. Going serverless, despite the technical difficulties of an actual switch, would easily address this by giving everyone access to everyone else.
Currently playing:
DC Universe
Planetside 2
Magic Online
Simunomics, the Massive Multiplayer Economic Simulation Game. Play for free.
A bit of a late reply here and all, but the game only would get split 3 ways. Being vigilante or rogue doesn't come with any specific content. It only lets you do content from both the hero or villain sides. So you split things hero, villain and VIP (or incarnate basically). I'm not even really sure I'd consider VIPs along the same lines as I'd consider Heroes or Villains since their exclusive content is really just a very small part of the game.
It'd be difficult because like you, everyone will have their own reason for staying, or what would be seen as an incentive to stay subscribed.
I lucked out and joined the game right after GvE was released, so I had the best of both worlds. As hehenep mentions, I do not think that the fracturing is as bad as that, at the least you have Hero, Villain, and Praetorian, in the most extreme, you'd have hundreds or even thousands if you want to include everyone/team in an instanced mission or base. Not to mention, if you get enough people in a zone, then a duplicate zone will be created, then another, and another. I think that during the last Dev-held event I saw 14 Atlas Parks
As for the difficulty in going serverless, there is not only the mechanical difficulty, there is also the in-game difficulty with duplicate names, SG's, etc. Not to mention that each server is its own community. While I have character on every server, I primarily play on 2 of them, one being a low-pop server and while it may take some organizing to get a Hami Raid going, we also have a lower percentage of posterior-head adornments.
Another thought:
Another bonus to being a subscriber, I have 12 open character slots on every single server, with the merging of the EU servers to the selection screen and the addition of the VIP server, I can create 240 characters without buying a single character slot. Barring any slots I may have purchased, going Premium would lock 236 of those slots, (well technically it locks all of them, I get to chooses which 6 to unlock.) I get 2 global slots and one for each year of subscription.
Even including the character slots that I have purchased, going Premium would lock me out of some of characters on my two favourite servers. Not the only reason I remain subscribed, but definitely towards the top of the list.
Names and server slots are easily fixable "problems" if the desire was there. Increasing slot access only requires willpower, and names can easily be solved via globals. A player's full name would be Local@Global, and it would be a very trivial rule to say a player can be chatted with / invited / etc by
- global alone (would always work)
- combination (would always work)
- local alone (works unless a current conflict exists, in which case it's easily fixed via pop-up)
technologically it's a very simple problem to solve. There are also half-way measures possible. For example, I said from the day they mentioned "Arenas" that they should use a shared server, which would be possible even without globals. Just make it Server.Character in the rare event that two same-named people are in the same place. You certainly can't tell me that the Arenas wouldn't have benefitted from that.Socially I admit it might be more of an issue if people feel like they're comfortable RPing in a designated server or if they specifically avoid RPers in the same way. Or if someone can't bear the concept that they might cross paths with another "FireFreeze" yet have somehow remained oblivious to the "-=FireFreeze=-" and "Fire Freeze" and "FireFreeze03" and the fact that all those exist x12 on other servers.
But I think that's just an unfounded panic that would quickly be bypassed if they actually did it. For example, remember how much abject panic there was about merging the market between heroes and villains? Completely needless and I haven't seen that much misunderstanding of markets since the last time I read the New York Times. People were worried, and of course "doooooooom" was predicted, but in hindsight everything's fine.
The same would work for a serverless approach if so handled, they just don't want to. Which is fine if it's working, but I think they underestimate the importance of critical mass in multiplayer environments.
Currently playing:
DC Universe
Planetside 2
Magic Online
Simunomics, the Massive Multiplayer Economic Simulation Game. Play for free.
Yeah I shouldn't have said "vigilante", since that actually reduced the problem. (I could probably argue a corner-case but it'd be petty.) I was just on a roll throwing in terms. I think the general point stands though. Think of all the reasons you might have a bunch of people in one place but they can't participate in something together. (Level restriction, alignment restriction, incarnate restriction, architect access, etc.) Even things that aren't in place now but could be (like if they sell a new zone as an expansion). All other things being equal, that separation isn't good for a game, and good design would seek to minimize them rather than create more. (For example, CoH invented Sidekicking, a clever way of fixing level gaps that much of the industry has adopted.)
Currently playing:
DC Universe
Planetside 2
Magic Online
Simunomics, the Massive Multiplayer Economic Simulation Game. Play for free.