The most disturbing part of this article for me is the fact that as I suspected Cryptic used a feature that obviously the community wanted in the worse way and tried to charge an unusually high price for it. I hope in the end the game doesn't fail of course but as long as they have both sub fees and an item shop I won't be subbing to this game, I'll try STO when they release it but again if they try to follow the same model and have both sub fees and an item shop I'll not go past the first month. From a business standpoint the model is gold but like alot of things SOE does you just have to wonder if it is worth alienating those who know better.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
At no time did you mention not counting extra servers, you just mentioned character slots. CO is definitely lacking those compared to other games. I, for one, had characters on multiple servers in CoX. I started out on one server. went to another with a friend, and finally settled on Freedom, but I went back and played my other toons. I had a massive amount of toonage on CoX (afterall its meant for altaholics).
I know of several people that play on different servers on LotRO. My kin has a sister kin on Landroval where many from Brandywine make alts to play.
If you are going to count character slots, then I think you need to count all character slots that are available to the player. This is another issue in where CO is lacking.
Particularly when character creation is such an experiment, as it is in CO.
The article does seem biased to me. The editor points out that no game out there offers full respec and that such a thing was never promised. Its almost as if the she is saying "what a retarted community to whine about something which no other mmo's offer" Clearly she has never played or understood the point of super hero games.
In CO there are no 'classes' as such, your completly free to customise and build yourself. In games where you have this complete customisation its kinda expected that you get the chance to fully respec because 'gimping' is almost inevitable.
No game offers full respec? What do you mean by that? I'm pretty sure that the latest incarnation of SWG offers full ingame respec. Also games based on a skill model do not need respec, since you can choose and surrender skills at will. Further, CoH/CoV allow you mutiple ingame options to reconfigure all of your primary and secondary powers. You can't change the sets you have selected, but you have multiple character slots per server for different types of characters (e.g. healer, melee, ranged, tank) etc.. They've recently added RMT respecs also, which I dislike. They have respecs available via fun missions, loot drops, via the ingame economy (auction house) and as veteran rewards. I guess they wanted to give customers a chance to throw away some extra cash by adding the RMT (shrug).
I also don't agree, in general, with the message you got from the article. I certainly never got anything so negative about the playing community when I read it. Nobody was referred to as a retarded whiner. I'm not sure we're reading the same thing.
I think the overall issues with people "whining" on the forums is quickly being solved by the simple fact they are quiting the game and dropping their subs. I myself have dropped my sub and it will expire Dec. 1st. They wont have to worry about a bitchy or whiny community pretty soon because they will have no community left to deal with. The downside to the one server/instanced zones type of game is anyone can log in at various times and check to see exactly how many people are logged in if the # of instances is small enough. Right before bloodmoon at the times between 11pm cst and 2am cst there were perhaps between 5 and 10 thousand people logged in. I dont have an exact number because I didnt bother to count everything. What was more telling is throughout the month of October the number of people in the 30+ zones remained below 1 thousand people, usually closer to about 500 people. This did not include those in the pvp instances and doing other such things, however, that is still pretty sad as a complete picture of the high end portion of the game. The first week the game came out there were up to 100 instances in the 3 lower level major zones with between 40 and 100 people in each instance. In addition to a small number of people in the various newbie instances. Late October it was 10 or fewer instances with most of them hovering around 40 to 50 people and one or two with 100 people. The decline was steady with a big dropoff after the first free month was up.
I just dont think there are enough players now to support a development team in general so the likelyhood that the game will continue as a p2p model in my opinion is very slim...more likely it will do a full transition to a f2p model with a cash shop. They will probably give those who purchased lifetime subs some form of cash shop money to compensate them, who knows.
I really think they should have done some good market research about the likely reception they would get from things like performance enhancing RMT (in a subscription based game) and adding full retcon via RMT. I think they would have found that a large number of people looking for a new MMO don't like those things.
They talked about needing these revenue sources for things like ongoing development. However, I think these "sources" killed the number of subscriptions they would have got if they would have gone with a straight subscription model like some of the more successful games that have been running for years.
Who seems to be championing this whole new RMT revenue thing anyways? People like John Smedley (based on an interview I read). How well is he doing compared to the guys at Blizzard? Why do people still even listen to that guy?
Comments
AC2 allowed a full repsec about once a month. It is one of the reasons I think the game went down the tubes, so I am not a respec fan.
What bothers me most is these are the same people making Star Trek Online.....Ive said this long ago....COH was bad and now this is worse.
/sigh
The most disturbing part of this article for me is the fact that as I suspected Cryptic used a feature that obviously the community wanted in the worse way and tried to charge an unusually high price for it. I hope in the end the game doesn't fail of course but as long as they have both sub fees and an item shop I won't be subbing to this game, I'll try STO when they release it but again if they try to follow the same model and have both sub fees and an item shop I'll not go past the first month. From a business standpoint the model is gold but like alot of things SOE does you just have to wonder if it is worth alienating those who know better.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Particularly when character creation is such an experiment, as it is in CO.
No game offers full respec? What do you mean by that? I'm pretty sure that the latest incarnation of SWG offers full ingame respec. Also games based on a skill model do not need respec, since you can choose and surrender skills at will. Further, CoH/CoV allow you mutiple ingame options to reconfigure all of your primary and secondary powers. You can't change the sets you have selected, but you have multiple character slots per server for different types of characters (e.g. healer, melee, ranged, tank) etc.. They've recently added RMT respecs also, which I dislike. They have respecs available via fun missions, loot drops, via the ingame economy (auction house) and as veteran rewards. I guess they wanted to give customers a chance to throw away some extra cash by adding the RMT (shrug).
I also don't agree, in general, with the message you got from the article. I certainly never got anything so negative about the playing community when I read it. Nobody was referred to as a retarded whiner. I'm not sure we're reading the same thing.
I think the overall issues with people "whining" on the forums is quickly being solved by the simple fact they are quiting the game and dropping their subs. I myself have dropped my sub and it will expire Dec. 1st. They wont have to worry about a bitchy or whiny community pretty soon because they will have no community left to deal with. The downside to the one server/instanced zones type of game is anyone can log in at various times and check to see exactly how many people are logged in if the # of instances is small enough. Right before bloodmoon at the times between 11pm cst and 2am cst there were perhaps between 5 and 10 thousand people logged in. I dont have an exact number because I didnt bother to count everything. What was more telling is throughout the month of October the number of people in the 30+ zones remained below 1 thousand people, usually closer to about 500 people. This did not include those in the pvp instances and doing other such things, however, that is still pretty sad as a complete picture of the high end portion of the game. The first week the game came out there were up to 100 instances in the 3 lower level major zones with between 40 and 100 people in each instance. In addition to a small number of people in the various newbie instances. Late October it was 10 or fewer instances with most of them hovering around 40 to 50 people and one or two with 100 people. The decline was steady with a big dropoff after the first free month was up.
I just dont think there are enough players now to support a development team in general so the likelyhood that the game will continue as a p2p model in my opinion is very slim...more likely it will do a full transition to a f2p model with a cash shop. They will probably give those who purchased lifetime subs some form of cash shop money to compensate them, who knows.
I really think they should have done some good market research about the likely reception they would get from things like performance enhancing RMT (in a subscription based game) and adding full retcon via RMT. I think they would have found that a large number of people looking for a new MMO don't like those things.
They talked about needing these revenue sources for things like ongoing development. However, I think these "sources" killed the number of subscriptions they would have got if they would have gone with a straight subscription model like some of the more successful games that have been running for years.
Who seems to be championing this whole new RMT revenue thing anyways? People like John Smedley (based on an interview I read). How well is he doing compared to the guys at Blizzard? Why do people still even listen to that guy?