I'd gladly take a major upgrading of even the existing Zones. You know... like something to give the majority of players a reason to go exploring in Zones rather than just grinding their way to level 40 in Smash Alerts?
When I first started playing this game I distinctly remember really enjoyed exploring the world that was NOT Millennium City.
Can you link to the information where you got that CO is getting 4200 new accounts every week. I think we would all love some official information like that, and would especially like to see what else is listed in there.
I'm guessing you can estimate the number of new accounts by keeping track of the "New Champions" supergroup numbers coming out of the tutorial. Since the supergroup capacity is 500, if the New Champions supergroup number goes up by 8 during a week, that means 4,000 new players created a character during that week.
Can you link to the information where you got that CO is getting 4200 new accounts every week. I think we would all love some official information like that, and would especially like to see what else is listed in there.
New Champions super groups started in January 2012.
There are 498 new accounts per super group.
There are currently 698 of these groups for 347,604 new accounts.
Divide by 81 weeks gives us 4291 new accounts per week.
New Champions super groups started in January 2012.
There are 498 new accounts per super group.
There are currently 698 of these groups for 347,604 new accounts.
Divide by 81 weeks gives us 4291 new accounts per week.
Oh, I was hoping for actual information. Darn, got my hopes up and everything.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
There is a ton of content to do in this game. I've only done maybe 10% in two years.
Players weren't doing the tons of content for a long time, that's why we have alerts.
That?s an interesting perspective. I would say it the opposite way in that there is a lack of mission content and that led the developers to create the On Alert system. Since it?s easier to create one small map and a toss in a villain than it is to create new open world story lines, zones and NPC?s.
So we?ve got a bit of circular logic happening here.:cool:
I?ll agree that there is a lot of content to work through initially. And there might be enough to take two characters through without too much duplication. But when you get to your third character (and you don?t run alerts) you are really left to repeat the stuff you have already done.
I?ll agree that there is a lot of content to work through initially. And there might be enough to take two characters through without too much duplication. But when you get to your third character (and you don?t run alerts) you are really left to repeat the stuff you have already done.
The greater masses of players don't get past their first character.
The greatest mass of players doesn't pay a dime for new content to be developed.
Let me give you an example.
New Champions super group 504 contains 496 players, every single one of them is new account.
They started playing in March and the last login was in June.
No player made it past level 22.
194 new super groups since March or 96,612 players that mostly never made it to level 40.*
Divide that into thirty days and the average number of new players per month drops
from my earlier estimate by a thousand or a quarter of all new accounts per month.
If just half those people stayed in the we should expect to see over two thousand players in the game during any given hour.
Instead we never see Millenium City get past six hundred players and the other zones are even more bleak.
Ya'll get any data that that shows any sign of improvement?
Your super groups filling themselves up faster than you can make them?
Those alerts popping all night long as soon as you click em?
Finding a team is as easy as traveling to quest giver and finding a body to team?
Yep there I was 8AM server time, and two people in zone spend five minutes begging for teams.
Things are going swell.
The greater masses of players don't get past their first character.
The greatest mass of players doesn't pay a dime for new content to be developed.
Let me give you an example.
New Champions super group 504 contains 496 players, every single one of them is new account.
They started playing in March and the last login was in June.
No player made it past level 22.
194 new super groups since March or 96,612 players that mostly never made it to level 40.
Divide that into thirty days and the average number of new players per month drops
from my earlier estimate by a thousand or a quarter of all new accounts per month.
How do you GET these figures? What tells you that every character created is from a NEW account? How do you know when their last login was, not to mention what level they made it to?
How do you GET these figures? What tells you that every character created is from a NEW account? How do you know when their last login was, not to mention what level they made it to?
He probably has a toon still in that SG, I imagine, thus has access to the roster. However, to say that no member got past lvl 22 is not quite accurate....what about those who left the SG and went on to increase in level?
Also, he has no idea how many folks just left their toons in there, went on to make new ones and are still playing CO.
I think that he mainly uses the greatest database ever.....thin air.
How do you GET these figures? What tells you that every character created is from a NEW account? How do you know when their last login was, not to mention what level they made it to?
Press the G key, look at the roster tab, look at the level and status columns.
Its not rocket science.
New Champions super groups are ONLY new accounts.
Go join the tutorial a hundred times and you will never get into one.
Make a new pwe account, login to Champions, observe the numbers yourself.
An expectation of an East MC zone was made last year. Looking at PNP maps, this can include Grosse Point, a wooded area, old-style houses, and if it resembles the real Michigan shoreline, a lighthouse and beach with some boardwalk and wharfs. It also may include Harmon's mansion and a small island where there is a museum, observatory, and aquarium.
Further questioning uncovered that it would likely target lower level players.
There was also discussion on SERENITY and the moon as a battle zone for endgame.
An expectation of an East MC zone was made last year. Looking at PNP maps, this can include Grosse Point, a wooded area, old-style houses, and if it resembles the real Michigan shoreline, a lighthouse and beach with some boardwalk and wharfs. It also may include Harmon's mansion and a small island where there is a museum, observatory, and aquarium.
Further questioning uncovered that it would likely target lower level players.
There was also discussion on SERENITY and the moon as a battle zone for endgame.
Well that sounds...well neat actually, too bad it will never see the light of day. Like several other things in this game.
An expectation of an East MC zone was made last year. Looking at PNP maps, this can include Grosse Point, a wooded area, old-style houses, and if it resembles the real Michigan shoreline, a lighthouse and beach with some boardwalk and wharfs. It also may include Harmon's mansion and a small island where there is a museum, observatory, and aquarium.
Further questioning uncovered that it would likely target lower level players.
There was also discussion on SERENITY and the moon as a battle zone for endgame.
And then Brou proceeded to show us some pictures of the levels which were all already in the game assets and practically ready to go but were just never implemented for whatever reason, and we were all sad about it together.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
And then Brou proceeded to show us some pictures of the levels which were all already in the game assets and practically ready to go but were just never implemented for whatever reason, and we were all sad about it together.
I use numbers only to get a larger picture of what I'm already observing.
Is it my imagination that there are less players to play with?
No, its factual, even a rough guestimate shows that.
There is no observational data to say "things are exploding" or even "mildly intensified" compared
to other dates in the observed history.
July 2011 there were over 2,000 players online simultaneously logging in just from Steam.
July 2012 there was something around 685 online, from steam, before the game fell off the Top 100 played games. The observational data by logging into the game matched what one would expect, five main social instances with roughly under a hundred players in each, with other instances and Alerts soaking up the remainder.
There are no observable extra bodies to sustain the assumption that 498 New Champions multiplied by X super groups
are among the current players because maybe they are playing alts to level 40 while keeping their first character at level 1.
The observable data at any given hour by checking the game yourself, will not turn up the extra numbers.
I've been keeping very rough track of it all since this game exploded on Steam.
I was deeply impressed by thousands of simultaneous users and then poof!
Thousands of less simultaneous users.
Then they banned whole countries from playing!
It was like watching WOPR simulate total global thermonuclear war on Planet Champions
with a final solution to the experiment being reading: "The only way to win, is not to play."
An expectation of an East MC zone was made last year. Looking at PNP maps, this can include Grosse Point, a wooded area, old-style houses, and if it resembles the real Michigan shoreline, a lighthouse and beach with some boardwalk and wharfs. It also may include Harmon's mansion and a small island where there is a museum, observatory, and aquarium.
Further questioning uncovered that it would likely target lower level players.
I'm guessing you can estimate the number of new accounts by keeping track of the "New Champions" supergroup numbers coming out of the tutorial. Since the supergroup capacity is 500, if the New Champions supergroup number goes up by 8 during a week, that means 4,000 new players created a character during that week.
Even that isn't really an accurate way to measure new accounts. Sometimes I'll create a new character and it'll somehow end up in that new player SG, and my account is pretty darn old.
Even that isn't really an accurate way to measure new accounts. Sometimes I'll create a new character and it'll somehow end up in that new player SG, and my account is pretty darn old.
And of course, if your account was created after this "New Champions" thing started, all your toons will start off in it - and not everybody leaves it as soon as they can...
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
Might be a case of "too little, too late", but the main cause of departures here is still lack of stuff to do/did everything now i'm bored. Not to mention the downward spiral of content size updates and dev team diminishing( "Revelation was too big, we're doing Adventure packs now. AP's are too big, we're doing Comic Series now. CS's are too big, we are doing Alerts now. Alerts are too big, we're doing lockboxes now...)
Just wish we got some friggin' attention...though FE is a small step in the right direction.
How is it none of my characters ever wound up in any of the New Champions groups? I'm new as of last year. And yes, I checked each and every one of my characters.
This is evidence that new players are not always automatically added to it, screwing up Nextname's asspulling guesswork even more.
How do you GET these figures? What tells you that every character created is from a NEW account? How do you know when their last login was, not to mention what level they made it to?
He's not makin it up, I have an alt silver account I checked out just to get a glimpse, and I swear to god, level 20 must have something wrong with it for silver players.
Because a majority of people run into a brick wall or stop playing at that point from 15 to 23, and as a part of added history back when I first started playing this game, I ran into the same brick wall and ended up quitting it for a long time. There's something heavily wrong with that phase of the game and I can't quite put my finger on it.
I do remember though one part of why I left the game that first go round was because of the stat system and gear and not having a general view of what does what, and should I be using X etc. A good thing though I do remember about that experience was the low level zones were actually populated, especially the sub zones where everyone pretty much has the same mission. So getting a question answered outside of millinium city was easily achievable. One problem I have seen though with current level progression from new players, is the fact that they get thrown into the alert system so quickly.
Back when I first started playing there was a sense of immersion from having to scrawl my way through the desert canada and millinium city zones, I felt more invested in the game because I spent so much time and thought doing basic navigation, and just studying what was easily understandable about the quests etc. I also felt rewarded high enough by getting the odd device every now and then that let me use more powers. A thing that any lowbie with a silver account will tell you, your power choice feels really thin until at least 25+.
But with the new alert system they got rid of alot of those old quest reward devices, as well as costume drops. Rewards that would normally keep a player invested and wanting to discover more and more, and be rewarded more and more.
As it stands now the XP alert system is streamlining and undercutting the value of the games current zone maps. Hurting new player time investment and immersion, and causing an overall mess of confusion on instances that require players to be more familiar with the game other than 2 minute XP alert.....
Now you run into situations where you're trying to go to vibora bay to do a boss or whatever and most of the people can't even go there because they never did the quest for entrance, they just spammed XP alerts until they reached 40.
This is a huge problem, and akin to being power leveled. It messes up the in game economy supply wise, and kills off a majority of the need for any silver player to put money into the game for an enhancement, a freeform slot, or just generally anything.
XP alerts are too much too fast. They should have just left XP alert rewards as a %buff to your XP gain not a huge ridiculous lump sum of XP that would have normally taken more time to earn.
Even that isn't really an accurate way to measure new accounts. Sometimes I'll create a new character and it'll somehow end up in that new player SG, and my account is pretty darn old.
And of course, if your account was created after this "New Champions" thing started, all your toons will start off in it - and not everybody leaves it as soon as they can...
No they won't. Only the first character goes to the SG.
How is it none of my characters ever wound up in any of the New Champions groups? I'm new as of last year. And yes, I checked each and every one of my characters.
This is evidence that new players are not always automatically added to it, screwing up Nextname's asspulling guesswork even more.
More lies.
New Accounts since January 2012 are all added to New Champions on entering the tutorial.
Its easy to forget leaving it, its just a button.
Its easy to forget being in it, mostly nobody else in it was online when you were and they
certainly didn't use the SG chat feature they didnt' even know about.
I've been farming data about the game for two years.
How long you been even curious about this data?
A day?
Well, Next, ol' buddy, my data come from the fact that I created an account after the New Champions thing started. I've made a few characters for it, to play with ideas - and every one of them has started off in a New Champions group.
So I don't know where your data are coming from, but I have data that disagree with yours. And I don't appreciate being called a "liar" just because my data sources differ from yours.
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
Well, Next, ol' buddy, my data come from the fact that I created an account after the New Champions thing started. I've made a few characters for it, to play with ideas - and every one of them has started off in a New Champions group.
So I don't know where your data are coming from, but I have data that disagree with yours. And I don't appreciate being called a "liar" just because my data sources differ from yours.
You are mistaken.
Screenshots please, of your account with two characters in a New Champions SG.
Its easy enough for me to leave an SG and say "see no default SG for toon number two".
It is impossible for you to get into a New Champions SG on the same account to prove your story.
More lies.
New Accounts since January 2012 are all added to New Champions on entering the tutorial.
Its easy to forget leaving it, its just a button.
Its easy to forget being in it, mostly nobody else in it was online when you were and they
certainly didn't use the SG chat feature they didnt' even know about.
Nope, not lying. None of my characters were ever added to New Champions. I didn't even know it was a thing until I saw it mentioned weeks later. Then I immediately checked each character so I could remove them from it and I found... that none of them were in it.
But feel free to hold onto whatever fragile logic you can to help you sleep better at night. :rolleyes:
I'm not going to say what others have experienced in this regard, but I just tested on my own silver account and new characters were not added to any SG automatically.
The first character on the account was in a New Champions SG.
And it's completely impossible that something glitched on either side of the argument, considering the mess this game is on a -normal- day?
I'm not ruling out a glitch at all (in fact it's very likely), but the existence of such a glitch would significantly throw off Nextname's numbers significantly, making him ultimately wrong anyway.
I'm not ruling out a glitch at all (in fact it's very likely), but the existence of such a glitch would significantly throw off Nextname's numbers significantly, making him ultimately wrong anyway.
Right because you can't just go into the game and use the functions built in to see
that the player numbers you expect to be there don't exist.
You 'just' went in to check if any of your characters were in in New Champions SG?
After you were 100% positive earlier, you're resolve was so shaken that you needed to
go out of your way to double check?
You don't remember which character was the first character on the account?
You can't read simple dates that are displayed by each character that would tell you
that, so you only have to check that one?
You are not very efficient.
According to JonSills every character goes into the super group.
According to you none of them go into the super group.
According to the programming the first character on the account goes into SG.
The programming is working, you're ability to tell fact from fiction is not.
Seems on December 4, 2012 you mention something about registering a CD.
If your account never created a Free To Play character you don't get into the SG.
I'm very sure that "pay first and hope for the best" is the ultra rare player.
And even if it fudges my numbers upward by a thousand or two thousand, that only equates to churning through and losing even more players every month than we are.
It's guesswork at best. I was put in one on my first character, but I immediately dropped out. Since I doubt mine "filled up" the final slot, I equally doubt I was "counted" in this manner.
Right because you can't just go into the game and use the functions built in to see
that the player numbers you expect to be there don't exist.
You 'just' went in to check if any of your characters were in in New Champions SG?
After you were 100% positive earlier, you're resolve was so shaken that you needed to
go out of your way to double check?
I never said anything of the sort.
You don't remember which character was the first character on the account?
You can't read simple dates that are displayed by each character that would tell you
that, so you only have to check that one?
Sure I do; it was Lady Tsukira. And she has never been in it.
You are not very efficient.
According to JonSills every character goes into the super group.
According to you none of them go into the super group.
Hm... I never said that either. You're inventing a whole lot of facts today, aren't you?
According to the programming the first character on the account goes into SG.
The programming is working, you're ability to tell fact from fiction is not.
I don't think I'm the one here who has trouble telling fact from fiction. You might want to look in a mirror to discover who it actually is.
I do believe that i will be as well. the president of the us will soon be a red haired woman who talks like natasha Fatale, if we get to transfer our characters over. though technically the story is going to be pointing you at being a hero, more than a villain. I know i'm going to try and run as heroic as I can.
I do believe that i will be as well. the president of the us will soon be a red haired woman who talks like natasha Fatale, if we get to transfer our characters over. though technically the story is going to be pointing you at being a hero, more than a villain. I know i'm going to try and run as heroic as I can.
Wrong it will be President Nepht for it has been said the neko ears from SR2 are returning ! All shall bow down and kiss my butt \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!
Are you suggesting that you're somehow more of an expert on what happens or has taken place with characters on my account than I am? That my latest character didn't in fact get shoved into the New Champions SG when he first appeared in the MC Powerhouse a week and a half ago? If you're so absolutely sure that I'm making a false claim here then prove it. I'd LOVE to see this data you're using that shows I lied about this.
Take your time gathering up your evidence. I'll wait.
Excuse me?
Are you suggesting that you're somehow more of an expert on what happens or has taken place with characters on my account than I am? That my latest character didn't in fact get shoved into the New Champions SG when he first appeared in the MC Powerhouse a week and a half ago? If you're so absolutely sure that I'm making a false claim here then prove it. I'd LOVE to see this data you're using that shows I lied about this.
Take your time gathering up your evidence. I'll wait.
You need to provide evidence that more than one character in your account got into the SG. Or you can PM me your login details and I can make a new character and see it for myself. You won't though because you are lying.
I could make email accounts, PWE accounts, and login to Champions Online all day long and prove over and over again that New Champions is only for the first character on a free to play account. That's a lot of work to prove myself right.
And in doing so would probably get me banned.
But just to make you look like a total ****, even if two characters on one account got into an SG, even if it was on every of a hundred accounts, I could remove one from the SG and prove you wrong with false data. Duh.
You can't falsify your claim if its not a lie.
How about you provide just two screenshots? Can you get those?
Nobody making the claim you are has evidence to prove what they are saying. Don't take your time getting your evidence, print screen key is really easy.
Anyone can prove my claim true by making a new email, making a PWE account linked to the email, logging in, creating a character, enter tutorial, finish it or not, log out, log in, create a new character, skip tutorial or enter it, whatever, no New Champions SG. Repeat as needed.
Prove me wrong.
I want screenshots of two characters on one account in an New Champions SG that is
not New Champions 666 since that's a private SG.
Nobody else in this thread even claims to be tracking player numbers, but then instantly assume
they know for sure that the person tracking those numbers for two years can't even be close to correct.
If you have not been tracking these number every time you log in and while you are logged in for hours and you haven't been logging in everyday for two years, then you don't know squat and you will never know more than whats under a squat because you don't have the experience to compared the data to.
The population isn't increasing. Its as bad right now as it was before On Alert and
we can't Kill CoX a second time to increase the population this year.
You need to provide evidence that more than one character in your account got into the SG. Or you can PM me your login details and I can make a new character and see it for myself. You won't though because you are lying.
I could make email accounts, PWE accounts, and login to Champions Online all day long and prove over and over again that New Champions is only for the first character on a free to play account. That's a lot of work to prove myself right.
And in doing so would probably get me banned.
But just to make you look like a total ****, even if two characters on one account got into an SG, even if it was on every of a hundred accounts, I could remove one from the SG and prove you wrong with false data. Duh.
You can't falsify your claim if its not a lie.
How about you provide just two screenshots? Can you get those?
Nobody making the claim you are has evidence to prove what they are saying. Don't take your time getting your evidence, print screen key is really easy.
Anyone can prove my claim true by making a new email, making a PWE account linked to the email, logging in, creating a character, enter tutorial, finish it or not, log out, log in, create a new character, skip tutorial or enter it, whatever, no New Champions SG. Repeat as needed.
Prove me wrong.
I want screenshots of two characters on one account in an New Champions SG that is
not New Champions 666 since that's a private SG.
Nobody else in this thread even claims to be tracking player numbers, but then instantly assume
they know for sure that the person tracking those numbers for two years can't even be close to correct.
If you have not been tracking these number every time you log in and while you are logged in for hours and you haven't been logging in everyday for two years, then you don't know squat and you will never know more than whats under a squat because you don't have the experience to compared the data to.
The population isn't increasing. Its as bad right now as it was before On Alert and
we can't Kill CoX a second time to increase the population this year.
I've got no screenshots to give because I didn't have the foresight to take any before I removed my characters from the SGs. It wasn't big enough of a deal to warrant capturing the moment and I especially wasn't thinking of taking one on the off chance I could rub them in your face later on and prove how wrong you were going to be. I doubt anyone had the foresight to take a screenshot when one of their new characters was randomly placed in one of those SGs. The proof you're asking for doesn't exist and you're hinging part of your argument on the fact that because these screenshots don't exist that your point is somehow more of an absolute truth.
You're the one that called me a liar and you're the one that needs to prove that I am in fact making this up. If your data is so infallible then, when you present it, it should speak for itself and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm lying.
I couldn't read the whole thing . It is in English ( I'm a Dutch speaker ) . Did he ask for your log in? You have to admit you gotta give him kudos for asking .
LOL
Will have to add wasnt there a bug that caused some vets to go into New Champs. Yes I think there was. Lotta people going NO U to each other without all the facts. Business as normal 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!
Next, you seem awfully emotionally invested in the idea that CO is dying. Why is that, do you think?
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
Anyone can prove my claim true by making a new email, making a PWE account linked to the email, logging in, creating a character, enter tutorial, finish it or not, log out, log in, create a new character, skip tutorial or enter it, whatever, no New Champions SG. Repeat as needed.
If its an intermittent bug or one triggered by a set of circumstances, your testcase won't catch it.
Just sayin' since you seem so sure of yourself. :rolleyes:
Next, you seem awfully emotionally invested in the idea that CO is dying. Why is that, do you think?
Its not that, its you aren't getting new zones because you dont' use the ones you have and there are not enough new paying players to justify the time and expense. The data spells this out. The data i watch every day.
That is the point.
It takes 20 screenshots to get a snapshot of a New Champions SG.
Takes 2 minutes to make an account and verify my findings.
In a month go back count how many New Champions SGs between yours and the latest. Divide by weeks. Easy Numbers.
If Veterans are being put in NCSG, and 'every character on an account' was
put into an the SG, then there are even less players than I'm coming up with.
The false claims being made by others like yourself are only making the situation look worse.
Anyway I just need a bit to make 20 screenshots and blur out everyone's account names then post it online for you to all glimpse at just one of 699 dead SGs.
This data is extremely typical, It was the same type of results I had back in 2011 when
I was teaming noobs in my own SG's in the tutorial, Westside and Canada.
I stopped super grouping players in December 2011 after clearing three groups of almost 1,500 month long idle accounts. I complained about this and the churn rate and the lack of zone chat ability and suggested there should be a default SG
and in January 2012, New Champions #1 appeared. Lucky everyone.
I've been tracking the groups ever since.
Today is July 24.
We are at New Champions 699 and should hit 700 by tomorrow afternoon.
113 new super groups in 123 days. 56,274 new accounts.
At 11AM server time this was a snapshot of the population.
Millennium City Ren Cen 99
Millennium City Westside 72
Club Caprice 56
Millennum City Powerhouse 49
Millennium City Alert (Foxbat and Mindslayer) 47
Fatal error 41
Millennium City Tutorial 27
Monster Island 21
Powerhouse Theatre 19
Vibora bay and Queen City 18
Millenium City City Center 17
All zones of Canada 17
The Desert and the disaster 17
Whiteout 15
HI Pan Alert 10
Gravitar 8
Multifaria 6
Millennium City Downtown 6
Lemuria 2
What part of that data looks like it justifies six months or more of developer time on a new zone?
Does it even start to look like it will reach 1000 current online players when you add everything up?
Then consider 90% of the players don't pay a dime.
Where's the money coming from, how do they make back their investment?
Any of you done the math to prove that the game really could benefit from a new zone?
I've done the math to say its a waste of resources and time.
Comments
When I first started playing this game I distinctly remember really enjoyed exploring the world that was NOT Millennium City.
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!)
Yes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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!
Does it involve a certain Purple-clad gang, slick-talking aliens, and a blood knight that sometimes plays a Hawaiian cop?
Why good Sir indeed it does
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!
Aww, I wanna know...
I say stuff and I say things, sometimes together but only when I'm feeling adventurous.
I'm @blu8 in game!
New Champions super groups started in January 2012.
There are 498 new accounts per super group.
There are currently 698 of these groups for 347,604 new accounts.
Divide by 81 weeks gives us 4291 new accounts per week.
Currently we have only two confirmed devs working on the game: Gentleman_Crush and LordGar.
I'm not expecting that we'll be getting any new zones period.
Oh, I was hoping for actual information. Darn, got my hopes up and everything.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
That?s an interesting perspective. I would say it the opposite way in that there is a lack of mission content and that led the developers to create the On Alert system. Since it?s easier to create one small map and a toss in a villain than it is to create new open world story lines, zones and NPC?s.
So we?ve got a bit of circular logic happening here.:cool:
I?ll agree that there is a lot of content to work through initially. And there might be enough to take two characters through without too much duplication. But when you get to your third character (and you don?t run alerts) you are really left to repeat the stuff you have already done.
The greater masses of players don't get past their first character.
The greatest mass of players doesn't pay a dime for new content to be developed.
Let me give you an example.
New Champions super group 504 contains 496 players, every single one of them is new account.
They started playing in March and the last login was in June.
No player made it past level 22.
194 new super groups since March or 96,612 players that mostly never made it to level 40.*
Divide that into thirty days and the average number of new players per month drops
from my earlier estimate by a thousand or a quarter of all new accounts per month.
If just half those people stayed in the we should expect to see over two thousand players in the game during any given hour.
Instead we never see Millenium City get past six hundred players and the other zones are even more bleak.
Ya'll get any data that that shows any sign of improvement?
Your super groups filling themselves up faster than you can make them?
Those alerts popping all night long as soon as you click em?
Finding a team is as easy as traveling to quest giver and finding a body to team?
Yep there I was 8AM server time, and two people in zone spend five minutes begging for teams.
Things are going swell.
How do you GET these figures? What tells you that every character created is from a NEW account? How do you know when their last login was, not to mention what level they made it to?
Occam's Razor makes the cutting clean.
He probably has a toon still in that SG, I imagine, thus has access to the roster. However, to say that no member got past lvl 22 is not quite accurate....what about those who left the SG and went on to increase in level?
Also, he has no idea how many folks just left their toons in there, went on to make new ones and are still playing CO.
I think that he mainly uses the greatest database ever.....thin air.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
Press the G key, look at the roster tab, look at the level and status columns.
Its not rocket science.
New Champions super groups are ONLY new accounts.
Go join the tutorial a hundred times and you will never get into one.
Make a new pwe account, login to Champions, observe the numbers yourself.
That still doesnt take into account those who make alts and play them instead.
No one here will be able to give out the correct data other than Cryptic themselves, everthything else is guess work.
Further questioning uncovered that it would likely target lower level players.
There was also discussion on SERENITY and the moon as a battle zone for endgame.
Well that sounds...well neat actually, too bad it will never see the light of day. Like several other things in this game.
And then Brou proceeded to show us some pictures of the levels which were all already in the game assets and practically ready to go but were just never implemented for whatever reason, and we were all sad about it together.
Champions Online: Be the hero you wish you could be in a better game.
You should see the SkyTram.
Is it my imagination that there are less players to play with?
No, its factual, even a rough guestimate shows that.
There is no observational data to say "things are exploding" or even "mildly intensified" compared
to other dates in the observed history.
July 2011 there were over 2,000 players online simultaneously logging in just from Steam.
July 2012 there was something around 685 online, from steam, before the game fell off the Top 100 played games. The observational data by logging into the game matched what one would expect, five main social instances with roughly under a hundred players in each, with other instances and Alerts soaking up the remainder.
There are no observable extra bodies to sustain the assumption that 498 New Champions multiplied by X super groups
are among the current players because maybe they are playing alts to level 40 while keeping their first character at level 1.
The observable data at any given hour by checking the game yourself, will not turn up the extra numbers.
I've been keeping very rough track of it all since this game exploded on Steam.
I was deeply impressed by thousands of simultaneous users and then poof!
Thousands of less simultaneous users.
Then they banned whole countries from playing!
It was like watching WOPR simulate total global thermonuclear war on Planet Champions
with a final solution to the experiment being reading: "The only way to win, is not to play."
What is this Secret World you speak of?
Even that isn't really an accurate way to measure new accounts. Sometimes I'll create a new character and it'll somehow end up in that new player SG, and my account is pretty darn old.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Just wish we got some friggin' attention...though FE is a small step in the right direction.
This is evidence that new players are not always automatically added to it, screwing up Nextname's asspulling guesswork even more.
He's not makin it up, I have an alt silver account I checked out just to get a glimpse, and I swear to god, level 20 must have something wrong with it for silver players.
Because a majority of people run into a brick wall or stop playing at that point from 15 to 23, and as a part of added history back when I first started playing this game, I ran into the same brick wall and ended up quitting it for a long time. There's something heavily wrong with that phase of the game and I can't quite put my finger on it.
I do remember though one part of why I left the game that first go round was because of the stat system and gear and not having a general view of what does what, and should I be using X etc. A good thing though I do remember about that experience was the low level zones were actually populated, especially the sub zones where everyone pretty much has the same mission. So getting a question answered outside of millinium city was easily achievable. One problem I have seen though with current level progression from new players, is the fact that they get thrown into the alert system so quickly.
Back when I first started playing there was a sense of immersion from having to scrawl my way through the desert canada and millinium city zones, I felt more invested in the game because I spent so much time and thought doing basic navigation, and just studying what was easily understandable about the quests etc. I also felt rewarded high enough by getting the odd device every now and then that let me use more powers. A thing that any lowbie with a silver account will tell you, your power choice feels really thin until at least 25+.
But with the new alert system they got rid of alot of those old quest reward devices, as well as costume drops. Rewards that would normally keep a player invested and wanting to discover more and more, and be rewarded more and more.
As it stands now the XP alert system is streamlining and undercutting the value of the games current zone maps. Hurting new player time investment and immersion, and causing an overall mess of confusion on instances that require players to be more familiar with the game other than 2 minute XP alert.....
Now you run into situations where you're trying to go to vibora bay to do a boss or whatever and most of the people can't even go there because they never did the quest for entrance, they just spammed XP alerts until they reached 40.
This is a huge problem, and akin to being power leveled. It messes up the in game economy supply wise, and kills off a majority of the need for any silver player to put money into the game for an enhancement, a freeform slot, or just generally anything.
XP alerts are too much too fast. They should have just left XP alert rewards as a %buff to your XP gain not a huge ridiculous lump sum of XP that would have normally taken more time to earn.
Lies.
No they won't. Only the first character goes to the SG.
More lies.
New Accounts since January 2012 are all added to New Champions on entering the tutorial.
Its easy to forget leaving it, its just a button.
Its easy to forget being in it, mostly nobody else in it was online when you were and they
certainly didn't use the SG chat feature they didnt' even know about.
I've been farming data about the game for two years.
How long you been even curious about this data?
A day?
So I don't know where your data are coming from, but I have data that disagree with yours. And I don't appreciate being called a "liar" just because my data sources differ from yours.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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You are mistaken.
Screenshots please, of your account with two characters in a New Champions SG.
Its easy enough for me to leave an SG and say "see no default SG for toon number two".
It is impossible for you to get into a New Champions SG on the same account to prove your story.
Nope, not lying. None of my characters were ever added to New Champions. I didn't even know it was a thing until I saw it mentioned weeks later. Then I immediately checked each character so I could remove them from it and I found... that none of them were in it.
But feel free to hold onto whatever fragile logic you can to help you sleep better at night. :rolleyes:
The first character on the account was in a New Champions SG.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Occam's Razor makes the cutting clean.
I'm not ruling out a glitch at all (in fact it's very likely), but the existence of such a glitch would significantly throw off Nextname's numbers significantly, making him ultimately wrong anyway.
Right because you can't just go into the game and use the functions built in to see
that the player numbers you expect to be there don't exist.
You 'just' went in to check if any of your characters were in in New Champions SG?
After you were 100% positive earlier, you're resolve was so shaken that you needed to
go out of your way to double check?
You don't remember which character was the first character on the account?
You can't read simple dates that are displayed by each character that would tell you
that, so you only have to check that one?
You are not very efficient.
According to JonSills every character goes into the super group.
According to you none of them go into the super group.
According to the programming the first character on the account goes into SG.
The programming is working, you're ability to tell fact from fiction is not.
Seems on December 4, 2012 you mention something about registering a CD.
If your account never created a Free To Play character you don't get into the SG.
I'm very sure that "pay first and hope for the best" is the ultra rare player.
And even if it fudges my numbers upward by a thousand or two thousand, that only equates to churning through and losing even more players every month than we are.
No new zone for you.
I never said anything of the sort.
Sure I do; it was Lady Tsukira. And she has never been in it.
Hm... I never said that either. You're inventing a whole lot of facts today, aren't you?
I don't think I'm the one here who has trouble telling fact from fiction. You might want to look in a mirror to discover who it actually is.
Wrong it will be President Nepht
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!
Excuse me?
Are you suggesting that you're somehow more of an expert on what happens or has taken place with characters on my account than I am? That my latest character didn't in fact get shoved into the New Champions SG when he first appeared in the MC Powerhouse a week and a half ago? If you're so absolutely sure that I'm making a false claim here then prove it. I'd LOVE to see this data you're using that shows I lied about this.
Take your time gathering up your evidence. I'll wait.
You need to provide evidence that more than one character in your account got into the SG. Or you can PM me your login details and I can make a new character and see it for myself. You won't though because you are lying.
I could make email accounts, PWE accounts, and login to Champions Online all day long and prove over and over again that New Champions is only for the first character on a free to play account. That's a lot of work to prove myself right.
And in doing so would probably get me banned.
But just to make you look like a total ****, even if two characters on one account got into an SG, even if it was on every of a hundred accounts, I could remove one from the SG and prove you wrong with false data. Duh.
You can't falsify your claim if its not a lie.
How about you provide just two screenshots? Can you get those?
Nobody making the claim you are has evidence to prove what they are saying.
Don't take your time getting your evidence, print screen key is really easy.
Anyone can prove my claim true by making a new email, making a PWE account linked to the email, logging in, creating a character, enter tutorial, finish it or not, log out, log in, create a new character, skip tutorial or enter it, whatever, no New Champions SG. Repeat as needed.
Prove me wrong.
I want screenshots of two characters on one account in an New Champions SG that is
not New Champions 666 since that's a private SG.
Nobody else in this thread even claims to be tracking player numbers, but then instantly assume
they know for sure that the person tracking those numbers for two years can't even be close to correct.
If you have not been tracking these number every time you log in and while you are logged in for hours and you haven't been logging in everyday for two years, then you don't know squat and you will never know more than whats under a squat because you don't have the experience to compared the data to.
The population isn't increasing. Its as bad right now as it was before On Alert and
we can't Kill CoX a second time to increase the population this year.
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!
"We" didn't kill CoX the first time.
I killed mine.
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!
I've got no screenshots to give because I didn't have the foresight to take any before I removed my characters from the SGs. It wasn't big enough of a deal to warrant capturing the moment and I especially wasn't thinking of taking one on the off chance I could rub them in your face later on and prove how wrong you were going to be. I doubt anyone had the foresight to take a screenshot when one of their new characters was randomly placed in one of those SGs. The proof you're asking for doesn't exist and you're hinging part of your argument on the fact that because these screenshots don't exist that your point is somehow more of an absolute truth.
You're the one that called me a liar and you're the one that needs to prove that I am in fact making this up. If your data is so infallible then, when you present it, it should speak for itself and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm lying.
I couldn't read the whole thing . It is in English ( I'm a Dutch speaker ) . Did he ask for your log in? You have to admit you gotta give him kudos for asking .
LOL
Will have to add wasnt there a bug that caused some vets to go into New Champs. Yes I think there was. Lotta people going NO U to each other without all the facts. Business as normal 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!
Good thing the forums work so much better now.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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If its an intermittent bug or one triggered by a set of circumstances, your testcase won't catch it.
Just sayin' since you seem so sure of yourself. :rolleyes:
People are broken. - Lum the Mad
Its not that, its you aren't getting new zones because you dont' use the ones you have and there are not enough new paying players to justify the time and expense. The data spells this out. The data i watch every day.
That is the point.
It takes 20 screenshots to get a snapshot of a New Champions SG.
Takes 2 minutes to make an account and verify my findings.
In a month go back count how many New Champions SGs between yours and the latest. Divide by weeks. Easy Numbers.
If Veterans are being put in NCSG, and 'every character on an account' was
put into an the SG, then there are even less players than I'm coming up with.
The false claims being made by others like yourself are only making the situation look worse.
Anyway I just need a bit to make 20 screenshots and blur out everyone's account names then post it online for you to all glimpse at just one of 699 dead SGs.
This data is extremely typical, It was the same type of results I had back in 2011 when
I was teaming noobs in my own SG's in the tutorial, Westside and Canada.
I stopped super grouping players in December 2011 after clearing three groups of almost 1,500 month long idle accounts. I complained about this and the churn rate and the lack of zone chat ability and suggested there should be a default SG
and in January 2012, New Champions #1 appeared. Lucky everyone.
I've been tracking the groups ever since.
Today is July 24.
We are at New Champions 699 and should hit 700 by tomorrow afternoon.
113 new super groups in 123 days. 56,274 new accounts.
At 11AM server time this was a snapshot of the population.
Millennium City Ren Cen 99
Millennium City Westside 72
Club Caprice 56
Millennum City Powerhouse 49
Millennium City Alert (Foxbat and Mindslayer) 47
Fatal error 41
Millennium City Tutorial 27
Monster Island 21
Powerhouse Theatre 19
Vibora bay and Queen City 18
Millenium City City Center 17
All zones of Canada 17
The Desert and the disaster 17
Whiteout 15
HI Pan Alert 10
Gravitar 8
Multifaria 6
Millennium City Downtown 6
Lemuria 2
What part of that data looks like it justifies six months or more of developer time on a new zone?
Does it even start to look like it will reach 1000 current online players when you add everything up?
Then consider 90% of the players don't pay a dime.
Where's the money coming from, how do they make back their investment?
Any of you done the math to prove that the game really could benefit from a new zone?
I've done the math to say its a waste of resources and time.