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How much life is left in this game?
abaddon653
Posts: 1,067 Arc User
So I have been considering grabbing a Freeform slot but I don't want to drop the cash if the game is going to die in the next year or so. Are there any indications on how much longer this game is going to last?
I really hope its got a few years left, I recently got back into it. I was a hardcore CoH/CoV player and I miss it, but CO never really snagged my heart the same way. But I do enjoy it now and I am hoping it will last a little while longer.
I really hope its got a few years left, I recently got back into it. I was a hardcore CoH/CoV player and I miss it, but CO never really snagged my heart the same way. But I do enjoy it now and I am hoping it will last a little while longer.
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No.
Guess away.
But then, even if you already know you're going to pull the plug on a game six months in advance, that's something you keep under wraps, as letting your employees know they're going to be fired through no fault of their own impacts performance and invites disloyalty. So ,you better keep them going about business as usual even if that means you're technically paying them not to sabotage you in the six months they'll still be around.
If the OP asks me, I do recommend buying the freeform slot if they just want to see what the game is really like, or subscribing if they plan to commit (freeform, extra costume sets, and a free character slot every time you hit 40 is worth it). What I wouldn't do in their place is buying LTS, not because this game is closing anytime soon (which it may), but because it's not a good idea investing such money on a game that has been on maintenance mode for years already.
This is true.
I was actually subbed for a couple of months at one point and I do enjoy the game but not enough to stay subbed.
Thx foxyperson, I'll take your post under advisement.
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!
Then I guess CO has most MMOs beat, since it seems to have died a couple of years ago. Or at least, put on Life Support.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Who is dru, jon?
Are you stalking my postings? You posted in another thread (one which I created, after having been on forum-hibernation for some time), and that thread got closed shortly after your post.
Guess (the game with the magical minotaurs) is sort of the outlier since it's been around since '04. And even though it is in decline, no one seems to expect it to disappear in the next two or four years.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how+is+wow+doing+2014
I only ever played the three solo-play versions of ********. Loved those crazy, kamikaze dwarves. :biggrin:
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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You would be making a video game purchase yes? A Free form slot?
Buy. You'll get your dollars worth. After that, when you've run every mission, every ap, every cs, every rampage, you can come back and scream bloody murder for more. Win/win as i see it.
However, this is the computer game industry. All it takes is one disastrous quarter for PWE to "trim the fat" or one new executive to come in and "shake up the company" by dumping an "obsolete old titles", and we're done.
That said, I think you're safe. CO has survived a lot of "certain death" challengers. It's the cockroach of MMOs.
You could post the same thing in any MMO that has transactions since all of us could wake up tomorrow and the server(s) has been shutdown with or without notice and any or no reason at all.
@OP: Given the duration of CO so far and the fact that PWE has seen enough merit to get what occasional content (the discussion regarding depth of said content / personal definitions of / etc not withstanding) we do get is at least a good sign CO still has a pulse. Giving CO some money shows players actually want to support the game and unfortunately money seems to be the only thing PWE pays attention to. Show monetary support and CO's future gets a little bit brighter. :biggrin:
Rune..scape has been around a year longer than that and is running F2p, basic, and third edition worlds.
to he OP,
who cares how long it has, I will enjoy it while it is available. All worrying about how long it's going to be going does, is;
a) stress you out
b) stop your enjoyment.
and since it is unlikely that we would get told anything till the day before, it's a waste of time asking.
After all, Paragon studios got put into Liquidation in August, this usually takes about 3 months to do, yet everyone seemed to be surprised when the game was closed 3 months later.
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Denial is a powerful thing.
Denial is really powerful. Especially when they think they know better.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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15 years as of this year, I believe.
PW hired a team of devs to work on CO, a game that has a difficult, proprietary code base. That's a lot of training and salary wasted if the plan was to shut it down in the near future.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
But yeah, like the others have said, you never really know.
"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." -- W. Edwards Deming
So CO's lifespan in months is about....42!!!!! 42!!!!! 42!!!!!!
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
I dunno, for an mmo, having ceased almost all active development outside of low hanging fruit and lockboxes for over a year is pretty much dead. things have shown glimmers of hope recently, but for an mmo, the last 2ish years were pretty close to dead.
RIP Caine
In fact, they have a history of leaving games up for ******n ever as long as they're at least breaking even.
RIP Caine
"Well he's in a wheelchair, but he seems to be enjoying life. There are a lot of people around who still like hanging out with him, and he's showing signs of recovery. Buuuuut, eh, not really up to my standards. He's dead, I'm calling it."
^Dr. Rianfrost
Undead is more like it.
Dry. Occasionally vomiting some strange mixture of rotted flesh and something good it might have swallowed along the way that managed to find its way through the animated corpses bloated and decrepit pipes, still kinda tattered and.. less than shiny due to the bile its been swimming through.
Talk about an exaggeration.
At worst: dead and we don't even know it.
Ultima Online's still up too.
Its an mmo, they justify their continued cost to players by adding new things. i bought legend of zelda for a one tie price and got a closed product, i paid no more and got no more, the expectation with mmos is people play them for years on end becaue they grow and evolve. if you expect less, good for you, i would like to see champs live up to its potential, because it could be a very good game and has some unique features, rather than seeing it float limply in the water occasionally putting out lockboxes. things are a little better but when people describe the upswing of the last year..you really do have to temper that with reality, last year was a start, but this year needs to be better.
besides, a persistent vegetative state that just started moving its eyes toward light sources is a more apt comparison.
(cookie clicker mmo is a totally different kettle of grannies and would likely destroy its competitors with lasers)
To work out if Champions is going to last its current lifetime all over again is really a matter of five considerations, and this is not because I like making numbered lists:
1. What competitors does it have, and is Champions doing anything unique to them?
I would say that Champions has two main competitors, the DC game and the Marvel game. The former is closer to Champions in what the gameplay is, but limitations in what the writers can do to the source material, a few gameplay elements that seem flawed, and the higher requirements a person's computer needs to run it smoothly means that the DC one may fall down compared to Champions, which has simple gameplay, lowish computer requirements (it runs faster than a NES emulation sometimes on my awful laptop), and more freedom to play about with the source material.
The marvel game, I admit, I haven't played, although lack of character customisation, free movement, and it being basically a reskinned Diablo from what I have heard on the grapevine means I have no interest in playing it.
That's my opinions on it anyhow. Champions should thrive as it has USPs that other competitors don't have.
2. Is it financially viable to keep it going?
This, I can't answer without asking Cryptic to see their books. But, with the regularity of new lockboxes, we can logically conclude that someone out there buys keys with real money.
Also, Champions has the benefit of being under the umbrella of a company with many titles: a purchase in Star Trek may ultimately actually fund our caped crusaders' investigations and new stately manors! That's right: buy tribbles: it keeps our heroes in the air!
3. Do people play it?
This is... hard. To be honest, I think Alerts took the population's visibility out a little. It means that for levelling to get access to most of the missions more quickly, you won't see people while questing, just when as a team.
It feels emptier. I'll say that's a definite. Can't say for sure. I know PvP was popular pre-Alert.
Is it that hard to make PvP have Questionite or etc modern rewards? I think the PvP would bring back the hardcore min-maxxer gamers, who, while PvE fulfils that itch a little, know deep down in their monkey brains that they want to crush the skull of a rival tribe and suck out the brain matter to gain their power, like all RPG players.
4. Do your servers have space you want to use for new titles?
New stuff gets more money, sooner, in the short term. While a dedicated fanbase may be more reliable, could PWE and Cryptic gain more profit through new titles upon killing old ones?
Probably. It's hard to say. We'd feel sad, even irritated and enraged, but I don't know if we'd boycott the company if Champions died. And the new customers, especially the 'must play the most recent thing, not some old stinky thing from 2009' crowd might be a boon. I don't know, you need a statistician, a business analyst, and a marketing expert in this thread.
5. Is there much you could add to the game that would be better implemented if you scratched the current game, and rebuilt it from scratch on the more recent engines that have more features?
This is the main reason we don't have a Foundry: the engine wasn't made for it, and it can't handle the truth, more or less.
Champs could do with a graphical polish, stylism aside. Personally, I think with current tech it might be possible to have an optional cel shaded effect that actually makes them look 2D, as an advancement of our comic outlines aesthetic.
It also can be optimised. While Champs runs well, Star Trek Online runs a lot better, maybe because there's less capes and wings with their constant animations, and STO has much smoother lines and movement for the most part.
Gameplay, while it's active and fun, needs more reason to move about: unless you build for it, most superheroes in Champions will stay in their spot and blast powers: usually there's not much need to be as active as an actual comic book character.
Maybe a newer engine could handle that. And that's the best reason to scrap the current iteration of Champions, if we must do it.
But. the game as is has a lot going for it, and with Cryptic North's big potential updates coming. I'd say it's a bit too hasty pulling the plug just yet.
DCUO is a console game more than it is a PC game, hence why it's player base is stronger on the PS3 than it is on the PC. It was designed with standard MMO logic in mind first a generic looking character that gets gear to build up on and that can alter the appearance of the costume of the character but is extremely limited. The combat itself is spastic at best, in a vane attempt to be like arkham cities combat, but just stumbling as it runs. The open world movement, it's ok, however how they designed it and if you are a speedster or acrobat and getting wrapped around a light pole you just happened to rush by because the engine thinks you want to wall climb, gets annoying. Baddies tend to be sacks of HP more than real strategic fights which is a problem all modern MMOs suffer, that developers focus too intently on making these games soloable without providing a real challenge.
Marvel Heroes is not an MMO. No ands ifs or buts about it. It's a Diablo game at the core, with several of the Diablo developers on it. Ironically, Marvel Heroes is a better Diablo than Diablo 3 was. It's mindless, there is little reason to team other than to do it, and outside of the metaplot, the story is practically non-existent. It was designed from core to be a bad guy beat down game, relying on style over substance and those that just love loot. It's not a bad little time killer but not something I would ever say is competitive with CO since they aren't even remotely the same game.
This one we were told a while ago Champions makes enough to stay open. The other games do not support this one, each game has to be able to support itself. However, we have what is classically called an orgy of evidence that Champions has indeed gathered enough of a budget that they are actually working on things. Of course everyone will just claim it's nothing at all, and the rub is that since we don't know we can't see. However, all signs point to this Fall that something will be coming.
People do indeed play Champions. Any player can actually do a personal census and get a rough idea of how many are actually playing at the moment. However, it's hard to get the exact number of players because of fluctuation, not everyone plays everyday, or even every week, and things of that nature. But considering things still happen in this game it's more than evident people play.
I think the servers are designed with expansion in mind and if they do plan to add more they plan to add more to that.
This statement is completely wrong on so many levels. We don't have the Foundry because, well quite frankly, we don't have the players for a substantial test. STO, a much larger player base, became the test bed for this instead, which promised better returns. They attempted, once, to test bed an idea in Champions for other games, the racing system, and I don't think their data returns on it were all that satisfactory. Now there is a racing game on Risa in STO. It works much better.
As far as the Foundry, we've been told that Foundry is ready for Champions, but Champions is not ready for the Foundry. The reason being; all the art assets in this game would have to be combed through and retagged to work in the Foundry. Not to mention they would also have to create new assets and art as well as interiors to actually give the Foundry more depth than ti would actually have using what is currently in Champions. That is no small undertaking in itself.
Now that the dust has settled on Neverwinter, the Foundry team might be turning their attention to Champions now. But considering the work load, the need to update this engine to support it and such, even if they started at the beginning of this year, I wouldn't expect the Foundry until next year sometime. Would the Foundry create a big pull to Champions? Hard to say but I lean towards yes. But it's one of those things that will take time to get it working, and reitterating and upgrading Champions engine to the current iteration will be no small feat either.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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More seriously, the only thing that greatly tempts me to spend money in STO is the TOS set - a Tier-1 Constitution-class cruiser, the classic Trek bridge and uniforms... But that's $25, which makes it more than an impulse buy for me. And our Gold bennies make STO look sick - the bad kind of "sick", not the modern slang meaning. That's a big part of why we're still self-sustaining here - more reasons to sub, or (better yet, if I can ever get $300 that isn't spent before I touch it) go Lifetime.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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(Though to be fair the Neverwinter Foundry set such a high bar that the version they could do with CO's engine as it is would probably be a bit of a disappointment if we expected an equivalent version.)
I've been playing CO since 08/12, and I will say that it's the MMO I enjoy the most of the ones I play now. I do suffer from altitis, and I like a game where you can log on for a few minutes at a time and still get something done if you're in the mood to do so.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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welcome to my world, where making up a character is "hmm wonder what this does?" followed a few levels later by "aww crap, thats bad." PH time, 1 alert later Ph time repeat several more times
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Remember when Bad meant Good and Cool meant Hot? And then when those meanings flipped? And then when those meanings flipped again? And then when those meaning flipped another again?
You have some control over this.
I'll play this game till it closes and when it closes I wont give two &%$£* . Ive played the Champs PnP long before this game was thing will be playing long after its gone .
My last words in CoH before it shut was "Screw you guys . I truly hate you all! and now if you dont mind I'm off down the pub! \o/"
I also said the same crap in SWG and I can guarantee Ill say the same stuff when this one shuts as well.
Play it and have fun while its up.
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!
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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*puts down coffee, begins to make this face*
RIP Caine
In this particular episode, they were arranging a multifamily yard sale to benefit - something or other, not really important. Anyway, while looking for more treasures to sell, Luke and Manny found an old case in the attic. They brought it down, and were about to look inside when Manny's mother, Gloria (played by the appropriately glorious Sofia Vergera) slammed the lid shut with her foot, refused to let the boys look inside, and ordered that it be returned to its resting place in the attic - unopened. She refused to speak of the contents, save that if had come with her from Colombia and they were to ask no further questions.
MANNY: I wonder what it is?
LUKE: Isn't it obvious? A closed box, from Colombia, that we're not allowed to open - it's gotta be a severed human head!
MANNY: That's your first guess for everything!
LUKE: One of these days, I'm going to be right!
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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If cryptic mentioned they had a plan to keep the game playable after they stopped officially supporting it, i would be a very happy man. ashteron's call apparently is doing this with their fans, much like meridia 59 did to let people host public servers, and even swg may be back, so long as people have physical copies of the discs. if coh had given us the ability to just play it offline, I would have been far less annoyed.
Incorrect, our sun does not have the sufficient mass to go supernova. In fact, it will merely swell to a red giant, swallowing the inner planets, and eventually cast off its gasses over time until it becomes a white dwarf.
You remind me of this guy (sfw&kids).
Eitherway, assuming all of us live long enough to see the events predicted happen, we're all still boned.
(On the third tentacle, given that that's about three and a half billion years from now, and three billion years ago our world still hosted primitive bacteria as its highest life form, I seriously doubt anything recognizably human will be around to bear witness.)
(Besides, we all know that at the heat death of the universe, the only surviving life will be Tyr Anasazi, the cockroaches, and Dylan Hunt trying to save the cockroaches.)
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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You forgot Keith Richards.
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