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1.7 million accounts 3.5 million toons O_O"
nepht
Posts: 6,898 Arc User
LOL seriously I read this at Lore Hound and thought WTF o.o" http://lorehound.com/news/champions-online-tops-3-5-million-characters-celebrates-third-year-of-operation-with-new-event/
I double dare the doomsayers to try to find DOOOOOOOOM here
I double dare the doomsayers to try to find DOOOOOOOOM here
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
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=^ _ ^= Kitty Lives!
Hush you >_>
But yes very valid point BUT as we all know GW also likes to bang on about how many accounts it has but never tells us how many are active if it works for them
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
RIP Caine
I bring you DOOOOOM!
Just when are we seeing these pictures in CO site?
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
=*0*= <oooohhhhh!)
=^ _ ^= Kitty Lives!
:eek: 7 Million zen traded for Q! Great googely moogely!
You're a lunatic with a mad man's dream of a milk proof robot!
___________________________________________________
CO has to be a money maker now with those numbers seems PW knows its FTP stuff as long as they butt out of the game design and let Cryptic get on with stuff the next 3 years should be awesome.
But if CO is doing that whut is STO doing that games numbers must be utter madness O__O"
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
RIP Caine
RIP Caine
You would think that C-store spending would be quite a bit higher, but much of that may be stipend spending rather than real money transactions, and more problematic to quote as strongly.
RIP Caine
Thats a big wad of cash
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Right, but that's just in zen trading. Seems like a nice tidy little sum brought in due to the Q/Zen exchange. Money that ends up in the game inspired solely by the Q exchange.
I would definitely be curious as to the sales from the Z store. Not that that we'll ever see that of course.
You're a lunatic with a mad man's dream of a milk proof robot!
___________________________________________________
That's a lot of money either way, even if a lot of Zen comes from ad revenue. Not all of it can come from stipend, after all, so that means a lot of it has be either gathered from ad or being bought in the store, which means Champs sounds like its producing a profit and with talk for future endeavors sounds like they might be getting a larger production budget as well. :biggrin:
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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PWE and Cryptic don't care how it's used, all's they care about is the fact you paid for it.
That has been traded for 1.2 billion Questionite. Which should pretty effectively answer the question of whether anyone has been playing - given that (IIRC) Q entered the game when On Alert went live, and until recently everyone was restricted to refining no more than 8k per character per day, that's 15,000 character-days of Q grinding (assuming grinding the full amount - I for one never have gotten to that 8k cap) since what, last March?
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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The other numbers in the panel are encouraging , if they can be believed. As someone else already pointed out, are they even active accounts? And of those, how many are paying a sub or contributing anything at all to the bottom line through the C-store? This is a F2P, after all. At least when WoW announces sub numbers you know roughly what that means money-wise.
Trust me, I want to be encouraged. But this panel shows me nothing solid.
Some very inaccurate or questionable points as well.
1) The launch was not, "a smooth release technologywise." I am not saying it was terrible, but it had its share of issues, just as many (most ?) games do.
2) "The big shift to the F2P model under new owner Perfect World Entertainment," did not occur. The game went FTP under Atari.
3) The game's release was delayed under Atari, any claim that the publisher rushed the release despite a lack of content is speculation.
4) Number of accounts is irrelevant as is number of characters. Income and population would be much more interesting to read. Cryptic announced that more than a million characters had been created shortly after launch (couple of months or so ?). Such was meaningless as an indication of success then, and remains so now.
I am not doomsaying here. I believe that the influx of players from COH, combined with more noticeable development than we have seen in a while likely point to some very good things for CO in the nearish future....
But...
The author of the article is engaging in obfuscation and/or outright lying, as well as spin-doctoring the limited facts present to create misleading impressions. Shame on him.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
The shift occurred under Atari, but they did very little with it in turn. PWE gave us the Questionite exchange.
The games release was delayed and they pretty much changed everything in beta. The original release date was in Spring or early Summer (think May or June) but was pushed back to September 1st. This wasn't much of a delay, honestly. Reasons are speculated as to why
Players made it known that a million characters were already made, I don't think Cryptic ever publicized it. They acknowledged the milestone in a post but that's all I remember form that though I think someone from a news site picked up on the post.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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That's Chronomancer AKA Bill Roper.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
It cost me 95 trillion dollars to train them.
Aforementioned monkeys have 6 handlers apiece.
I will provide solid proof of all this when the numbers mentioned in that preposterous article are verified by Cryptic and or PWE.
Seriously:
Faulty information and false hope gets us nowhere. The game is not doing well, it just isn't. I'm getting seriously depressed over this. I shouldn't, it's a game, nothing lasts forever, but still.
1. Skeleton Crew
2. Low in game population.
3. Bugs. So many terrible bugs.
4. Until reports that result in a ton of raised expectations only to end with bitter disappointment. STO discontinued their version (engineering reports) because "they created false expectations and misunderstands between cryptic and it's playerbase".
Pray PW invests in the game and hires more staff dedicated to CO. If they don't it's going the join the ranks of CoH, Mxo, etc etc etc.
The simple truth is, we know the numbers are a lie. Of those 3 million fully half are alts belonging to Bluhman and Slapperfish. So take that for what its worth :biggrin:
And your proof of this is?
There are considerably more people playing this right now then there was at release. The MC zone chat moves at a fairly rapid pace, and there's always a ton of people hanging out in the Ren Center.
Go to any MMO in existence and you will see this said about every single one of them. WoW, STO, CoH, Rifts, SWTOR, ect... Every single one will have posts complaining about the massive number of game crippling bugs.
Which either means that the reports are massively inflated, or else it's simply impossible to make a MMO without a massive number of bugs. But in either case CO is far from alone in this.
That's ridiculous.
No one needs more than 5000, tops.
3575665/1746351 is roughly 2 toons per account.
Considering Bluhman and Slapperfish, plus lazy posers like me (I only have 33 toons), and what it comes down to is a LOT of folks made only a single character, with what that implies...
In the game, I'm @Knickknacks.
RIP Caine
You must obviously be high on drugs, otherwise you'd recognize that this game is actually one of the titles that is doing well.
I'm a steam gamer, and I'll admit, while our group doesn't make up the population of a WoW burning crusades release, we still make up a large number of global gamers overall.
CO came to steam a while back ago, June 14 2011 to be exact, and was recently re-boosted by steam under perfect worlds titles. Right after the CO thing got re-boosted, war of the immortals and Rusty Hearts got boosted onto steam to see if they could follow.
Basically, then nexon copies their attempt at the same thing to see if the steam gamers would let it fly and generate new revenue. Now nexon has their maple story on steam so yeah it must have worked.
But the general rule of Steam is, even if you are free to play etc, you don't get on steam unless your game is doing well. All you have to do is check this games steam user achievements to see real activity. But most games wouldn't even know steam users existed because most steam F2P players are so blank in the head they forget that the games actually have official forums and websites. So they stay stuck in their steam hub thinking the game is a ghost town.
Yep, numbers can be deceiving. The account/character numbers means that each account has on average 2.04 characters. Since I have 10, in order to balance my numbers to the average, that would mean ~9 accounts with 1 character. Some folks have a lot more than 10.
I been a long time leaving but I'm going to be a long time gone.
Willie Nelson
T.U.F.K.A.S. (the user formerly known as Scarlyng)
Wrong on the CO forums since November, 2008
Um, where?
The author mentioned those numbers in a single sentance and didn't imply that they meant anything but that the game has "positive momentum", and I agree...
So I'm not sure where you get the "spin doctoring" or the "obfuscation" from...
Shame of him? How about shame on you for allowing your bias to read further into the article than was stated and responding based on that bias...
M-O-O-N, that spells @Rhyatt
Originally Posted by mijjestic: Ultimately, though, MMO players throwing stones at each other in this fashion is basically one nerd pointing and laughing at another nerd whose glasses are thicker.
Laws yes!
But I admit that this game is like the little train that could. I don't know how this Doc D invasion is going to play out (And I won't unless it's still going when I get back from my trip this weekend) but I count it as "new content".
Otherwise the game seems to be in hamster wheel mode. I hope this changes once Neverwinter gets off the ground and they can shift some talent to their existing games.
Wait? Whaaaa..?
That's still incredible for a game that's been out almost 8 years now especially considering the number of competitors that have come and gone in that time.
Until you consider that at least 2/3rds of that is the Asian player base that uses a totally different payment method over westerners.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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Could you post a source for that, because that's not my impression at all.
You mean from Blizzard themselves? It's no secret that the largest amount of their player base is from Asia.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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So it's not 2/3 but it's over half. Blizzard also signed new licenses with AsiaSoft last year to expand even further into 3 Asian markets: Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Here's a nice article talking about the Asian financial impact on WoW in 2009: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24657#.UFp0-7JlQrs
How many instances of MC exist today ?
There were many dozens at release.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
I read absolutely nothing into the article other than what was written.
For example:
"It?s hard to believe that Champions Online came out three years ago. Not only because it makes me feel old, but because of the tumultuous ride the title has gone through.
A too-early launch thanks to publisher Atari led to a lack of polished content, yet a smooth release technologywise.
Actually Atari delayed the release of CO by a matter of several months. Cryptic was offered significant financial incentives for making certain dealines, and chose (perfectly reasonably IMO) to do so. I dont fault them for this at all, but it happened. There were any number of problems with the launch, including the tech (being unable to leave the PowerHouse for weeks as an example).
There were tech issues at launch and Atari delayed CO's releasew initially while Cryptic then pushed it out as soon as possible in order to qualify for bonuses tied to release dates....The author of the article is either uninformed, or a liar.
The move left a sour taste in many a player?s mouth, mine included, which Cryptic Studios routinely replaced with sweetness. The company kept at it, adding in more and more enticing content
before the big shift to the F2P model under new owner Perfect World Entertainment.
The shift to F2P occurred before PWE purchased Cryptic. Again the author is either ignorant of the facts, or a liar.
The largely positive momentum has only continued
Really. Only continued ? Ignoring very real problems and concerns in order to make this claim is spin doctoring. I think CO has some of the greatest potential of any game Ive ever seen. I love it in full recognition of, and despite, its faults. Ignoring, discounting, or otherwise dismissing its faults in order to claim that only positive momentum continues is a horrible thing to do to the game.
and today that means 1.7 million players have created over 3.5 million Champions.
This point is made in reference to the PWE, post Atari, era of CO. And yet fully a third of those characters were created in the first month of CO's existence. The author specifically presents this information as the outcome of positive momentum, when the data included does not support such a conclusion.
Taking data that may very well be a demonstration of a neutral or negative situation and claiming that it demonstrates a positive conclusion is obfuscation.
Perhaps you are right and an author that engages in outright lying, and less blatant forms of dishonesty, in his reporting shouldnt be ashamed...
"
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
My comments in Red
I agree, and I do not fault Cryptic for CO's tech issues at release. I do fault the author of the article for claiming that they didnt exist.
I honestly dont think that the, "red headed stepchild," treatment increased to any great degree after the switch to F2P. That aside I also was not particularly surprised that there was a significant amount of stumbling inherent to the switch to F2P. Systems needed significant amount of testing that could really only happen once a large population had the opportunity to dive into them. I also am not surprised that PWE, a company specializing in F2P games, was more decisive in their handling of the matter.
Of course none of that is relevant to the point that the author made a false or inaccurate claim regarding on whose watch the F2P conversion occurred.
I ignored nothing of the sort. Then again this point was not at all made by the author nor questioned by me.
Let me ask you this..do you think that there is only positive momentum ?
Hmm, the things I pointed out in the articvle are false, but Bill Roper's state of the game from October of 2009 supports my own claim there.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/champions-online-has-1-million-heroes
http://co-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=1318027
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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But then I expect most of you have zero clue as to who Sir Bruce was and what he did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Woodcock_(computer_games_analyst)
Given some of the other points already made in this thread concerning accuracy and a cursory inspection of the content on that website... all I have to say about this topic is: Sis boom bah, rah rah rah! :rolleyes:
People are broken. - Lum the Mad
Read the brief article.
I have 16 level 40s. Another 5 or so more not 40. An SG mate has over 20 40s.
Considering most silver accounts will have at least 2 characters created, 1.7 to 3.5 ratio seems suspect, don't you think?
Agreed. It helps, as would the billboard suggestion in my signature below, but it's only a small part of what is needed for funding.
Exactly.
I know Battlefield Heroes for example likes to quote huge numbers of characters and registered players, but that's meaningless especially in that game where hackers are constantly creating new accounts to evade the banhammer when they cheat. And that game is infested with cheaters. So yeah, they may have millions of accounts, but very few of those actually fund the game.
This is why I'm quite angry still with changes that some of the programmers (including Gentleman_Crush, as he's seen as or is the leader in that area) touted that pushed many of my friends away from this game, namely what was done to crafting, removal of the calendar on the website, lack of responsiveness to bugs (including severe ones that affect PvP in the extreme, like the currently Imbue bug not canceling out on heal usage), and the straight up removal of crafting with no compensation for Blueprints (including extremely expensive ones) and a slap-in-the-face compensation (R1 mods) for those who had collected raw crafting materials as per explicit advice from a developer on his in-game chat channel (which most players probably didn't even know existed).
In short, recruit new players AND please stop driving your loyal customer away! (loyal = active with the game + spends money that funds game) It's like shooting yourself in the foot. You're going to drive your customers that have actually payed lots of money into the game, away from the game? Seriously? Does nobody other than me see incredibly illogical that is?! :eek:
Two of these friends that left due to the above reasons I mentioned spend each about $1000 on this game, no joke. That's not a huge amount of money to them individually, but I'm certain it's far more than most players have spent in this game by a long shot.
The key to the F2P model revolves around having a sizable population, lots of customization, mircotransactions combined with subscriptions (so you can have more options and it isn't pay to win), and customer retention. The addition of the Questionite Exchange seems to have been a very smart business move in the long-run, and I was suspicious of it at first. It also helps reduce/prevent the pay-to-win aspect that kills many F2P games. But loosing your big spenders seems kind of... bad... especially if you're not recruiting new players enough to make up the difference.
Seriously when was the last time this game was talked about or advertised in the mainstream media?
*ahem* http://www.g4tv.com/games/pc/40993/champions-online/
More specifically:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/41226/champions-online-review/
Do your research people!
Mean and median expenditures per account would be more useful. Even more useful would be a graph that shows what percentile of the population funds what portion of the game, including other sources such as AD revenues and such.
Speaking of which...
Don't they have to release this info somewhere being a publicly owned company? I'm not an expert on the stock exchange system and what the obligations are, but I thought this was kind of important info that is supposed to be shared with stockholders?
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
I'm just not going to read that **** from now on. Even if it's the cure for cancer.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
If you're not going to read it then stop complaining about it. Seriously, get over yourself.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
So I'm leaving my customary 15% right here!