Well, let’s put it this way… it’s possible Paragon was doing fine with COH, it just wasn’t fine enough for NCsoft corporate to decide it was worth expending resources to continue. I don’t know if this is true, but (and probably isn’t) but it’s entirely possible. Also understand that NCsoft North America has undergone a number of leadership changes over the last few years and is a bit chaotic to say the least.
— Alan
Funny for me it is the ‘WTF do you mean we have to be on the same quest to group’. CoH grouping is so stupid easy…going to other games that base grouping on content instead of level just infuriates me…this includes the games I work on. It is my single biggest MMO pet peeve.
Creating a group in CoH is also better than any other game. Find, select, sort,by level, power, location, click button. I always have an 8 man party within 5 minutes of logging in.
Sad, sad day. CoH was in some ways the only real MMO there’s ever been, if one means by MMO a game that can give you a social gameplay experience at the drop of a hat, in a persistent world, while roleplaying.
Every other MMO in existence has equated casual player with soloist, and social player with guildie. CoH never did that, and for 3 glorious years of my addiction to this game, I hardly ever soloed, I always formed my own team or joined others. All without being in a guild (although I did form one towards the end of my time there, just to see if I could).
It was PUG Heaven.
RIP.
Doubly annoying because I’d just fired it up again a few days ago and was really getting into my Peacebringer :(
It would be interesting to find out the pre and post FTP numbers and some ideas why it failed for this game when it has been very successful for others.
This is going to be frequent in the next few years.
Well, crap. CoH has been my ‘go-to’ MMO since it was released. I took some pretty long breaks at times, but I always came back for one reason or another. It was a very easy game to just pick up where I left off. Also, I never encountered a better community in any other MMO.
Someone on the CoH forums posted CoH’s revenue numbers from NCSoft’s annual report a while back. Revenue was down from the previous year, but not by a whole lot. Maybe they were spending too much creating new content? I have a hard time believing the game was unprofitable though.
BTW, I just read that the shutdown date is Nov 30. It occurs to me that I still have about 50 billion inf or so that I’ll never use now. Not sure how much of it I can access since my account is premium status atm, but if some active players want some dough to kit up a character or two just PM me with your in-game global handle. I can’t do much else with it at this point.
Bunch of people are doing petitions to stop the shutdown. Not that I think it’ll do any good, but you never know.
http://www.change.org/petitions/ncsoft-keep-ncsoft-from-shutting-down-city-of-heroes
And TonyV wants to buy the server code and run it himself.
CoH (and CoV when that first came out) were (and are) the only MMOs that have ever really grabbed me. Definitely a shame that they’re being canned - although, to be honest, it’s been 2 or 3 years since I last logged in.
No other MMO I’ve played has understood grouping as well as CoH.
There’s a sure fire way to stop the shutdown - SPEND MONEY in it. :)
Sure, if you could get a million folks to do it. But a few thousand one way or the other isn’t going to make a difference. I’ve never let my subscription lapse, bought expansions, the occasional other trifle…well over $900 and maybe closer to $1000 over the life of the game. I’m far from alone. The entire core community is similar. No one knows the NCSoft financials that prompted this decision, but I’d be willing to bet that the problem isn’t money-per-player, it’s the player count.
I wonder. It’s always seemed to me like many of the MMOs that have shut down were better populated and more successful than some of the MMOs that are still going, which suggests to me that either a) for some reason the ones that are still going cost much less to run than the ones being shut down, or b) they could have sustained themselves but management decided it wasn’t worth doing. CoH is really looking to me like the latter, but I suppose we may never know.
Is it possible (and this is an honest question) that they are hoping that the CoH players will migrate over to Champions, something that I gather hasn’t happened yet?
If Chapions has a better/more economical server structure or has easier-to-monetize FTP plumbing, maybe NCSoft wants to force the migration that they hoped would happen a year ago.
How would NCsoft benefit from people switching to Champions Online? It’s being run by Perfect World.
My wife actually woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me about this. Her main toon from CoH is probably he favorite character she’s had in any game. She’s pretty distraught over the whole thing. CoH is a game we’d go back and visit a couple times a year and spend a month or two knocking around any new stuff. Sad to see it go.
My bad. I assumed that since both games were made by the same team they would have the same publisher. I didn’t realize Cryptic had sold the CoX properties.
Holy crap what a shock. I’ve been playing since day one. Registered on the forums in April 2004. Eight years, longest that I’ve played anything, ever. And full subscription even when they went F2P.
RIP CoH. You will truly be missed.
Damn. Good-bye Doc Silver. Your tanking will be missed.
Heh, indeed! I only played at launch for a few months up to level 30 or so, but they really captured the super-hero feeling with that ability.
Super jump was the first travel power that I got. I spent several game sessions just jumping. Just jumping.