Active membership in the outfit is pretty low. As in, “hey look, two of us are on simultaneously” low.
How many Qt3ers are playing on Emerald Vanu right now and aren’t in the outfit? Because if we don’t have enough people to make it worth while, my inclination is to shut the outfit down.
–Dave
Dave, you should join McMaster’s outfit. It seems pretty well attended. The price tag is just too much for me, although I think PS is a great game.
I liked the game a lot, but the crap that required buying an expansion to use the new weapons was enough to make me quit. It’s a shame too. I might come back if they drop the monthly price to under $5, but I still doubt I’d pay for the expansion.
s’funny… I have a comp account and I still have no interest in playing. :roll:
The number of planetside players in outfits that log on continues to fall.
November 2: 30186
November 9: 28051
November 16: 26151
This is from a peak of 41780 in early August.
My theory: the “shit, I’m not going to pay for an expansion pack, and if I can’t use the new stuff, I’m not going to even play the game anymore” factor is driving more people away.
Its sad though! The game is a good game that is a lot of fun to play – its just not worth $12.95 a month, its no fun without full servers to play on, and the developers didn’t react fast enough to fix the glaring bugs.
I cancelled my membership because hardly anyone at work plays anymore and it was getting harder and harder to get into squads ironically. You’d think with less people you’d get more invites, but it seemed to be getting more clique-y.
My sentiments 100% exactly. I was/am really bummed to see SOE piss away what is potentially such a great game. The two big problems for me were price (way too high for what you get) and dwindling population, which made it so hard to find good battles.
I firmly believe that Sony just fucked this one up. They had a game that was technologically sound and balanced well enough for it to be fun, and with enough variety to keep it interesting for a while. But they drove people away with the high price and lack of updates, and that started the downward spiral of hard to find battles -> even worse value -> more people leave -> even HARDER to find battles -> etc. If this game had a sub fee of $5, people would probably be playing in droves and it’d be great fun. It’s hard to believe a big, experienced company like SOE would make a move that is so financially stupid, but there you go.
It’s doubly lame because this will probably make it a lot harder for anyone else to get a MMOFPS greenlit.
I was arguing for the $5/month approach long ago too, but I suspect that SOE put way too much dev money into this puppy to go that route–or at least that’s their logic. It’s pretty clear to me that the game cost a bundle to develop and they grossly overestimated the revenue it would generate. It pleased the critics, who of course aren’t paying to play, and appealed to gamers on a “yeah that’s pretty fun but not for $13/month” level, but to no one on a “this is worth $13/month plus the cost of an expansion” level.
I doubt the Core Combat bit has much to do with the falling population. The new weapons are not that great and not that fun and the caverns are only cool when people are there, which is never, so…all it did was further fragment the small server pops.
Seems to support the thesis that MMOFPS aren’t as economically viable as MMORPGs. Or is there some other reason that the Planetside players are more price-sensitive?
I think they’re price-sensitive for two reasons:
Multiplayer shooters are available for free. Of course, multiplayer RPGs are increasingly available for free, too, so it’ll be interesting to see how that works out–if you could play NWN with five friends for free, would you still pony up $15 a month for EQ2?
It just didn’t seem like we were getting nearly as much content as you got in a MMORPG. Maybe there are all sorts of hidden costs to a MMOFPS that I don’t know about. All I know is that I used to pay $10 or so a month for games like EverQuest and DAOC and they released new stuff on a fairly regular basis. Maybe not huge amounts of new things, but you felt like the game was really developing and you didn’t have to pay extra for it. With PS, there pace of new additions was incredibly, incredibly slow IMO, and many of them (eg Skyguard) were fairly useless. When they finally decided to put a bunch of cool new stuff in the game, they wanted you to pay $30 for it. (The only exception was the LLU stuff, which was pretty cool and free.)
The bottom line is that I’m not super-sensitive to price. I played EQ for over a year, DAOC for 6 months, and made brief (1-2 months) forays into Shadowbane, AO, and WW2OL. I was happy to pay the sub fees for all those games (well, okay, not WW2OL). But I left PS because of price and low server population (which is a result of the price, IMO).