What are the keys to COX's devoted fan base, what can Cryptic learn from this?

sigmaseven0

The title says it all. Champions would be lucky to last as long as COH did and enjoy fan-base willing to make such long term commitments.

Its unlikely that much, if any of the Paragon team would be brought over and its even less likely that the COX IP would revert back to Cryptic, but what CAN happen is Cryptic looks to learn about what it takes to cultivate a player-base that's invested for the long term. The more committed the fans are, the longer a MMO is likely to live (and the jobs of its Devs).

CO has seen various Executive Producers over the years and each of them had their own vision of what CO. Stokeman, our newest EP has a unique opportunity take advantage of this situation and have a preview of what the future could hold, what worked and what didn't work (like looking at your girlfriends older sister to see how she mite age).



As an ex COX player and some one that has been looking over the forums this past weekend i will start the thread off by speculating on what i think contributed to COX (relatively) long life cycle and devoted community.

1. The RP Community: The RP community had a strong presence in COX and reading over the posts of new COX refugees, RP continues to be important. I suspect that engaging (to varying degrees) in RP has nurtured friendships in the game that anchor people to the game. Your less likely to leave a game if all your friends are playing it (see wow). CO devs should look to COX to see how catering to the RP community now and then can contribute to players making long term commitments.
NOTE: Like RPrs the hard core PVP community tends to stick around and be more devoted to casual players. Overall the smaller niche community like pvp and rp tend to stick around the longest and contribute to maintaining a certain atmosphere for all the players in the game By forming the more developed SGs and holding events in game.

2. A robust teaming experience: This is another thing that I noticed that COX players are looking for. CO used to be mostly solo friendly but Alerts and to a lesser extent, Adventure packs have helped with that. The thing about Alerts is that they they encourage you to have a different team every time, thus reducing a teams opportunity to jell and offering less time for relationships to form.

3. Lore: CO is known to be heavy on campyness, pop culture references e.c.t. Many CO players didn't like this style and it also seems to be a turn off for some COX players. I will give Cryptic Credit as the new thematic release approach they have been taking is an improvement.
One of the major Lore related shortcomings that i see in CO is the lack of descriptions for NPCs. There are many NPCs in the game that don't have a back story when you click on them. It may seem like a small detail but but in COX, NPC descriptions went a long way toward keeping me up to date on who it was that i was fighting and what their motivations were.

COX players feel free to share your thoughts.

agentnx5

Aren't you forgetting PvE (the foundation), PvP (combat, everlasting), and full-depth customization (i.e.: freeform)?!?

I'll leave this to the CoH players, but I just wanted to point out that I feel you're missing some major categories there. I'm also not nearly as pessimistic sounding about the future.

sigmaseven0

agentnx5 wrote: »

Aren't you forgetting PvE (the foundation), PvP (combat, everlasting), and full-depth customization (i.e.: freeform)?!?

I'll leave this to the CoH players, but I just wanted to point out that I feel you're missing some major categories there. I'm also not nearly as pessimistic sounding about the future.

I agree, the OP wasn't meant to cover every thing, just to set the tone.
It was already starting to be a wall-o-text.

originsource

I am a long time CoX player. It was the first MMO I ever played, and while I've gone through most of the bigger MMOs to have come out since, it is the one I always came back to. In fact, I just started playing again a few weeks ago, just in time for this heartbreaking news.

The things about the game that made me stick around for long stretches and always come back was the sense of community. The Devs spent time with the players in game, which was special. Other than that, the character customization was great, but to me it was the story that made me always want to come back. The world was so fleshed out, with so many factions/games and interesting stories, big baddies and heroes you could interact with, that you felt like you existed in a real comic book universe. And, when I'm playing superhero based games, that's what I want.

The invasions, the fires, all those open world events were just so much fun...I'm going to miss it fiercely. I don't have much faith that I'll feel anything close to the same for CO as I did CoX, but I'm going to try and make the best of it and hope that CO steps up and capitalizes on this opportunity by realizing similar levels of story driven content and lore in the near future.

chalupaoffury

Better support and way less bugs. Period.

Most of the people I know who left CO did so because of the trivial challenge level, massive number of unfixed bugs, and the fact that asking support might as well be trying to phone the president and ask him for a loan.

You can directly measure the success of an mmo by how well they maintain the game, and how well they handle customer service issues.

championshewolf

chalupaoffury wrote: »

Better support and way less bugs. Period.

Most of the people I know who left CO did so because of the trivial challenge level, massive number of unfixed bugs, and the fact that asking support might as well be trying to phone the president and ask him for a loan.

You can directly measure the success of an mmo by how well they maintain the game, and how well they handle customer service issues.

This is far from true because there have been games that have bent over backwards for their players and they crashed and burned, while there are other companies that did jack crap for their players (Blizzard and even CoH had its stint) but survived quite well.

chalupaoffury

Well, assuming the game itself isn't boring and terrible. But bliz treated me and my friends very well. Me during my like 3 month stint there (bored me to tears) and my friends over the course of the entire game.

Fact is, barring a few major glitches (the wow infectious disease comes to mind) those games have always at least been *playable*. For co to hang as well, it has to squash lots of bugs, and get better QA. Look at the last week, you couldn't play many nemesis, nemcon, all of the comic series, half of the adventure packs, one of the crisis, gravitar, vikorin, etc... Lag, disconnects, sg banks not working, sg invites being wonky... See where I'm going with this? And then there was the week the chat servers went down, right after the steam push. This game is self sabotaging, imo. During the steam push I recruited dozens of people to the game, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM left because of the bugs, saying "this game would be great... If I could play it. Is it in beta?"

Good support is just the icing on the cake. I mean, looking at other successful mmos... WoW does the campy stuff along with the lore, just like we do. WoW has no rp community, even on rp servers. What they do have is engaging gameplay, stable servers, and good QA. I feel like the OP touched on some X factors that can make a game like this survive, but in the end, it *is* a video game. Stable servers and solid gameplay are the keystone to longevity.

championshewolf

The only thing that boils down to why CoH survived so long, because despite what people will say about game play and such, it boiled down to its community. Plain and simple. The game play wasn't that deep in CoH and the stories weren't done very well until City of Villains.

It boils down to the fact that CoH had one of the best communities around and I would have probably stayed for them if it wasn't for the fact I already had gotten quite a bit of run around from NCsoft and their double dealing as apart of one of those soopur sekrit groups they talked with regularly.

agentnx5

chalupaoffury wrote: »

Better support and way less bugs. Period.

Most of the people I know who left CO did so because of the trivial challenge level, massive number of unfixed bugs, and the fact that asking support might as well be trying to phone the president and ask him for a loan.

You can directly measure the success of an mmo by how well they maintain the game, and how well they handle customer service issues.

championshewolf wrote: »

This is far from true because there have been games that have bent over backwards for their players and they crashed and burned, while there are other companies that did jack crap for their players (Blizzard and even CoH had its stint) but survived quite well.

You are both correct to some extent. But it's more important to ask what issues do they "bend over backwards" for and what issues do they take with a grain of salt?

Balance issue complaints on well-established powers should largely be ignored (there are exceptions, if enough proof can be given that because X changed, this also creates an effect that means Y must change to match). But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

On the other hand, issues that directly affects business or public image of the brand should be not be ignored! This is easily summarized up with talking about making the priorities be fixing bugs (and keeping them fixed) and content. The cross-over between these two priorities is in improving existing content.

Don't ignore customers too much. Stay involved and communicating and helping out your customers, turn-over rate will bleed the game dry and it dies. You want to keep customer loyalty and confidence up.

Don't bend over to every whim of the kids (especially kids, because they aren't the ones playing the bills) who whine about things being overpowered, when they don't have the experience to really know if it is or isn't truly overpowered. This will make your game suck.

This game was killed by the developers listening too much to the complaining: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Knights_of_the_Old_Republic (note: this isn't the new one). Fist-punching AT-AT walkers to death with ease is just stupid... Remember who pays your bills, and if a customer is paying $1000/yr. on RetCons, you might want to bloody listen when they keep sending you emails about them being concerned about constant "restructuring" or power & crafting stuff.

So...

It's a balance, and one that is not very forgiving in a competitive market. And one that affects all the players who enjoy the game if it's a MMO. IMHO, both of your two should strongly consider softening on your points of view and find that balance.

Silverspar, Chalupaoffury has a point as to why there were a lot of people that left with On Alert. A lot of long-time veterans that loved to play. Many of them prefered PvP first, PvE second, and didn't touch RP more than to just make a wicked looking outfit (or a ridiculous looking one for humor's sake). It's little wonder to me why PvP has been so empty, honestly. Granted, there are other factors, like not being able to get sufficient resources, gear, or Questionite from PvP events, but it's definitely a major reason. So... yeah... If you need to change something, that's ok but you need to make sure your loyal customers who are giving you reliable income aren't feeling cheated out of their money in the process.

mistformsquirrel

sigmaseven0 wrote: »

3. Lore: CO is known to be heavy on campyness, pop culture references e.c.t. Many CO players didn't like this style and it also seems to be a turn off for some COX players. I will give Cryptic Credit as the new thematic release approach they have been taking is an improvement.

One of the major Lore related shortcomings that i see in CO is the lack of descriptions for NPCs. There are many NPCs in the game that don't have a back story when you click on them. It may seem like a small detail but but in COX, NPC descriptions went a long way toward keeping me up to date on who it was that i was fighting and what their motivations were.

To me, this is the big thing.

The lore made the universe come alive; and I really feel that's something CO needs - and honestly could HAVE; we have how many years of pen and paper RPG sourcebooks to draw on? What we need is a couple good writers; and a willingness to put out content without worrying about voiceovers and brand new environments.

High quality writing + smart use of existing environments means you can create both quality and quantity at the same time. < . .> That's what we need here - quality and quantity. I have faith it can be done or I wouldn't be here.

canadascott

There are two things that Cryptic could do almost immediately to welcome CoX players.

First, there are a number of emotes that are present in game but which aren't accessible in the CO emote system, and which were present in CoX, things like hands on hips and crossed arms. Implementing these would be a small but significant contribution.

Second, Finn and a few others have, over the years, made note of costume pieces that they had in CoX that had no equivalent here. The devs should take a look at those old threads, identify patterns that could be quickly adapted (if not exactly copied, of course), and release a new costume set.