The CO pay-DLC stuff came out shortly after they went F2P, sometime after the big wave of people that came in via the F2P debut tapered off into a more or less steady plateau. They presented them as extra-high-quality adventures for those who liked more challenge (or words to that effect), and they were a bit harder than normal content, though not exactly the kind of hardcore 'bang your head against the content repeatedly until something cracks' hard that was fashionable in some gaming circles back then either.
They did still have an optional subscription, but other than that it was F2P for at least a little while before those DLCs came out.
I wasn't paying much attention to the concurrency at the time, but now that Jonsills mentioned it I think he is right because the population did seem to start dropping around then instead of going up like Cryptic apparently thought it would.
They were making some other adjustments too that were not that popular IIRC (I found the almost constant crafting system churn especially annoying), so that might have had some small bearing on it too, but there was a definite sense of disappointment and snark in the Rencen chat with the paid DLCs since the player interpretation was that it meant less new content that the majority could access (which turned out to be right).
Personally, I started playing DCUO more and CO less around then, plus I started up a store in Second Life around then and spent a lot of time designing things to stock it with, so I was not keeping track of CO as much since I was mostly playing it in jags with weeks, and later months, in between though I never completely left until I went back to college and all the games except for Defiance (which was a good blast-out-the-cobwebs-and-wake-up game that was effective for that in a ten minute session instead of longer mission-based) went on hold for several years.
There hasn't really been much of anything added for the Romulans since LoR...and I'm sure there wont be any Klingon content for years to come after the (joke of) Year of the Klingon. May get some content from SNW, but that really isn't TOS content since it will replace Discovery as the "we want to ignore canon and rewrite history" series
TOS era Romulans would be quite interesting seeing as how their society was in extreme flux at the time.
If you listen to Mark Lenard's Romulan commander and the old centurion, you find that they went from a republic structure with the senate leading the government to a corrupt authoritarian empire with the Praetor having all the power while the senate was essentially reduced to puppets and sycophants, and that change happened during the commander's time in service.
Balance of Terror was an adaptation of the WWII movie The Enemy Below and so the Romulans were mainly based on the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the more recognizable abbreviation of which is not possible to be written here due to the censoring filters) that took over Germany in the1930s and started WWII, and were mixed with the ancient Roman empire (during their fall from a free republic into an empire) at the suggestion of D.C. Fontana because of Roddenberry's fondness for stories featuring the ancient Romans.
While actually living in a society like that is unpleasant (to say the least), it is a great source of story plots, especially those dealing with underground intrigue, espionage, and power struggles.
Joanne Linville's character brings in more details, such as the fact that the Romulans are a "poor but proud" people, they are not averse to recruiting their long-estranged Vulcan siblings to their way of life, and some other details.
In TOS it is shown that the measure of wealth (in the area of the galaxy shown in the series at least) is dilithium, little else has much material value since most things can be manufactured artificially given enough energy, and matter/antimatter reactors provide the greatest source of that energy but rely on dilithium to work safely.
That implies that the Romulans had trouble getting enough dilithium crystals to support their technology (Remus must be really hard to mine and possibly produce mostly lower quality crystals not useful in ships, or something along those lines) which is a good reason for their developing an insanely dangerous singularity technology despite those risks and the sacrifices in other areas that the effort would take in order to tame the tech into something useful.
That kind of thing is also useful for a semi-Game of Thrones style power struggle, especially since the fascist system was not in place for that long before TOS and various factions (including the survivors of the ousted republic) would most likely still be maneuvering in the shadows to a large degree.
A random factoid is that the Romulan 23rd century uniforms may have been some kind of electronic smart fabric. In one scene Joanne Linville's commander character was supposed use a communicator while out of her office but someone forgot to give her the Klingon communicator prop, so instead of ruining the shot she spoke into her sleeve instead.
The Klingons in that era are a bit harder to read and correlate together into a cohesive picture considering the large differences in the ways they have been portrayed over the years.
For some reason (possibly the Trickster combat style the humans of the Federation have that the augments seem to be more suited to understand than the other Klingon races) the Empire seems to have put mostly augment-staffed units on the border they share with the Federation, but they do not completely trust the augments either, so they serve in a rather Orwellian surveillance-state setup (or at least do in the house Kor is part of).
While the House structure is never referred to by that name it is hinted at by the fact that everyone on a particular ship is the same distinct race but there are large differences in physical features (and smaller but distinct differences in uniform and insignia) and operational practices between different units.
Kang with his heavy hawk-wing eyebrows and relatively dark skin, Kor with his medium, slightly olive skin and bifurcated eyebrows, and Koloth with his very Terran-Caucasian looking skin tone and facial features are the three types shown in the series (the most commonly shown were the type like Koloth), and the three types seem to have slightly different societies and honor codes similar to the differences between houses in DSC.
TOS filled in a lot of the details with stuff from the Soviet Union when needed, a practice that even showed style-wise in the D7 in some of the shapes being similar to Soviet capital ship upper works, and which was amplified in the K't'inga class with its "ugly pragmatic" surface detailing.
Unless Strange New Worlds goes out of their way to trample TOS the way first season DSC tried to, the STO content creators should be able to come up with a lot of good material that either avoids or bridges the gap between the way the various shows portrayed those two empires. Of course, the downside is that they will almost undoubtedly wait for at least a season or two of SNW comes out in order to try and not get canon-shafted by it.
While actually living in a society like that is unpleasant (to say the least), it is a great source of story plots, especially those dealing with underground intrigue, espionage, and power struggles.
That's kind of the dirty secret of Germany in the late 30's and 40's and Rome as the Republic shifted to Empire. And one of the things that makes them interesting for story examination. They weren't actually unpleasant to live in. In fact were quite the opposite. At least not until the bombs started falling and the Barbarian's were at the gates. Germany actually had the largest and most comfortable Middle Class in Europe. With the least class based society. (Provided you weren't one of the inconvenient minorities.) That was the true horror. The Legendary Banality of Evil. The very comfortable, happy, well fed and prosperous majority would look the other way regarding the horrors being done in their names, so long as the prosperity continued. It was one of the things noted by the American Paratroopers when they finally arrived in Germany during the war. Unlike the more rigid class based structures of England, Belgium and France, Germany felt the most like home... until they started finding the camps.
Classic Trek and TNG were remarkably good at exploring this theme from time to time. Probably most blatantly in the episode rather directly titled "Bread and Circuses",
Thanks for the clarification on the timeframe for CO's adventure pack releases. My experiences with CO are so limited that it's all mostly been out of sight and out of mind for me. I just remember the uproar that came about.
So here's another question: How much new playable content has been added to CO since that debacle? What keeps its players engaged? What do they offer that keeps the money coming in for it?And with that last question in mind, what have they successfully done in branching out to other revenue-generating options? I never see any announcements about CO. But I see them all the time about STO and Neverwinter.
As I said before I have not been playing it on a regular basis for quite a while now (and missed a few years entirely) so it is hard to say, Jonsills could probably answer the question better. I know that people talk in the forum about having nothing at all content-wise for at least several years and at least some players refer to it as being in maintenance mode, though it is not quite there since they do the various holiday stuff and still make a bit of fluff, and (rarely) tinker with things (true maintenance mode would not even do any of that).
Trying to refresh my memory (it was a long time ago) found out that they actually did put one Adventure Pack out about a year before going F2P, but the majority of that paid-DLC stuff came later where they mostly took over the new content output and new FTP content slowed to a trickle.
I don't know why the company thought doing that was a good idea, especially with the move to paid DLCs being so obviously unpopular once its drain on new majority-accessible content became evident, the dissatisfaction and snark pretty much dominated the chat (about like how politics does around election time in ESD chat here) for a long while so if they went into their own game at all they must have seen it.
While on a theoretical level STO has a lot of missions available since it has been going for so long that it might buffer the impact of paid-DLCs a little longer than CO did, on a practical level it would be seen as Cryptic breaking the implied promise of all missions being available to F2P players (which is a big draw btw, especially with people tired of being treated as second-class citizens in a lot of other games (like SWTOR for instance), or hitting the endgame paywall some other games have (DCUO was like that, though I hear they cleaned up their act a bit since).
Comments
They did still have an optional subscription, but other than that it was F2P for at least a little while before those DLCs came out.
I wasn't paying much attention to the concurrency at the time, but now that Jonsills mentioned it I think he is right because the population did seem to start dropping around then instead of going up like Cryptic apparently thought it would.
They were making some other adjustments too that were not that popular IIRC (I found the almost constant crafting system churn especially annoying), so that might have had some small bearing on it too, but there was a definite sense of disappointment and snark in the Rencen chat with the paid DLCs since the player interpretation was that it meant less new content that the majority could access (which turned out to be right).
Personally, I started playing DCUO more and CO less around then, plus I started up a store in Second Life around then and spent a lot of time designing things to stock it with, so I was not keeping track of CO as much since I was mostly playing it in jags with weeks, and later months, in between though I never completely left until I went back to college and all the games except for Defiance (which was a good blast-out-the-cobwebs-and-wake-up game that was effective for that in a ten minute session instead of longer mission-based) went on hold for several years.
TOS era Romulans would be quite interesting seeing as how their society was in extreme flux at the time.
If you listen to Mark Lenard's Romulan commander and the old centurion, you find that they went from a republic structure with the senate leading the government to a corrupt authoritarian empire with the Praetor having all the power while the senate was essentially reduced to puppets and sycophants, and that change happened during the commander's time in service.
Balance of Terror was an adaptation of the WWII movie The Enemy Below and so the Romulans were mainly based on the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the more recognizable abbreviation of which is not possible to be written here due to the censoring filters) that took over Germany in the1930s and started WWII, and were mixed with the ancient Roman empire (during their fall from a free republic into an empire) at the suggestion of D.C. Fontana because of Roddenberry's fondness for stories featuring the ancient Romans.
While actually living in a society like that is unpleasant (to say the least), it is a great source of story plots, especially those dealing with underground intrigue, espionage, and power struggles.
Joanne Linville's character brings in more details, such as the fact that the Romulans are a "poor but proud" people, they are not averse to recruiting their long-estranged Vulcan siblings to their way of life, and some other details.
In TOS it is shown that the measure of wealth (in the area of the galaxy shown in the series at least) is dilithium, little else has much material value since most things can be manufactured artificially given enough energy, and matter/antimatter reactors provide the greatest source of that energy but rely on dilithium to work safely.
That implies that the Romulans had trouble getting enough dilithium crystals to support their technology (Remus must be really hard to mine and possibly produce mostly lower quality crystals not useful in ships, or something along those lines) which is a good reason for their developing an insanely dangerous singularity technology despite those risks and the sacrifices in other areas that the effort would take in order to tame the tech into something useful.
That kind of thing is also useful for a semi-Game of Thrones style power struggle, especially since the fascist system was not in place for that long before TOS and various factions (including the survivors of the ousted republic) would most likely still be maneuvering in the shadows to a large degree.
A random factoid is that the Romulan 23rd century uniforms may have been some kind of electronic smart fabric. In one scene Joanne Linville's commander character was supposed use a communicator while out of her office but someone forgot to give her the Klingon communicator prop, so instead of ruining the shot she spoke into her sleeve instead.
The Klingons in that era are a bit harder to read and correlate together into a cohesive picture considering the large differences in the ways they have been portrayed over the years.
For some reason (possibly the Trickster combat style the humans of the Federation have that the augments seem to be more suited to understand than the other Klingon races) the Empire seems to have put mostly augment-staffed units on the border they share with the Federation, but they do not completely trust the augments either, so they serve in a rather Orwellian surveillance-state setup (or at least do in the house Kor is part of).
While the House structure is never referred to by that name it is hinted at by the fact that everyone on a particular ship is the same distinct race but there are large differences in physical features (and smaller but distinct differences in uniform and insignia) and operational practices between different units.
Kang with his heavy hawk-wing eyebrows and relatively dark skin, Kor with his medium, slightly olive skin and bifurcated eyebrows, and Koloth with his very Terran-Caucasian looking skin tone and facial features are the three types shown in the series (the most commonly shown were the type like Koloth), and the three types seem to have slightly different societies and honor codes similar to the differences between houses in DSC.
TOS filled in a lot of the details with stuff from the Soviet Union when needed, a practice that even showed style-wise in the D7 in some of the shapes being similar to Soviet capital ship upper works, and which was amplified in the K't'inga class with its "ugly pragmatic" surface detailing.
Unless Strange New Worlds goes out of their way to trample TOS the way first season DSC tried to, the STO content creators should be able to come up with a lot of good material that either avoids or bridges the gap between the way the various shows portrayed those two empires. Of course, the downside is that they will almost undoubtedly wait for at least a season or two of SNW comes out in order to try and not get canon-shafted by it.
Classic Trek and TNG were remarkably good at exploring this theme from time to time. Probably most blatantly in the episode rather directly titled "Bread and Circuses",
As I said before I have not been playing it on a regular basis for quite a while now (and missed a few years entirely) so it is hard to say, Jonsills could probably answer the question better. I know that people talk in the forum about having nothing at all content-wise for at least several years and at least some players refer to it as being in maintenance mode, though it is not quite there since they do the various holiday stuff and still make a bit of fluff, and (rarely) tinker with things (true maintenance mode would not even do any of that).
Trying to refresh my memory (it was a long time ago) found out that they actually did put one Adventure Pack out about a year before going F2P, but the majority of that paid-DLC stuff came later where they mostly took over the new content output and new FTP content slowed to a trickle.
I don't know why the company thought doing that was a good idea, especially with the move to paid DLCs being so obviously unpopular once its drain on new majority-accessible content became evident, the dissatisfaction and snark pretty much dominated the chat (about like how politics does around election time in ESD chat here) for a long while so if they went into their own game at all they must have seen it.
While on a theoretical level STO has a lot of missions available since it has been going for so long that it might buffer the impact of paid-DLCs a little longer than CO did, on a practical level it would be seen as Cryptic breaking the implied promise of all missions being available to F2P players (which is a big draw btw, especially with people tired of being treated as second-class citizens in a lot of other games (like SWTOR for instance), or hitting the endgame paywall some other games have (DCUO was like that, though I hear they cleaned up their act a bit since).