City of Heroes is shutting downFollow

Hopefully they'll start their own group and release a similar game in the near future. Not nearly enough cape based games.

I always thought it was pretty bad, and I'm surprised it lasted this long.

Wow. We had some fun in that game for a little while. It was never one of my favorites, but it was a nice change of pace from fantasy MMOs every now and then. And Joph was the worst healer ever.

Sad to see it go. Some great web comics jokes came out of those games.

I seem to remember you were the healer. Your hubbie was the tank, and Joph was just another DPS like me.

The Polish Princess was my first real "main" and she was a Rad/Rad defender (debuffs/heals). She eventually became my first 50 and first Incarnate but Nadenu remembers her best when I'd say things like "Oh, yeah, I'm healing aren't I?", "Hold on, my rez hasn't recharged yet" and "Bet I can use my snipe to hit that purple con demon ghost thingie from here".

In the years I played, I was friends with a terrific art community and acquired these pieces along the way...

Polish Princess
Polish Princess
Rose Veldt
Pachamama - I don't think any MMORPG will ever give me the same sense of hilariously chaotic power as a fully developed Storm/Earth Controller
Pachamama
Tally-Ho
Tally-Ho
Scarlet Finch - Tally-Ho's alternate universe evil twin, natch

Other pieces as well but that's enough cutting and pasting. And, yeah, I had plenty of male characters too but they never got the same art love.

Edited, Sep 2nd 2012 12:18pm by Jophiel

That's kind of a bummer. While I haven't steadily played for years, I do periodically hop on just to run around and blast stuff. While I agree that the game could get monotonous at times, the bigger fun was the variation of characters and abilities. Sure, you were running more or less the same set of missions each time through, but those missions were dramatically different based on the power sets you were playing.

And I still think that my ice/storm controller was by far the most ridiculously fun and chaotic character ever. Didn't always survive, but he could basically make a whole room full of baddies fly around for a few minutes at a time. It was actually surprising just how often that did work out though, which is what made it fun. Doubly so when grouping, since it totally flew in the face (haha! Flew, get it? I slay me!) of traditional lock-down control strategies.

I'll definitely miss this game. I'm a bit surprised it's closing down really. Don't know anything specific about subscriptions and whatnot, but my understanding was that CoH was considered the better game of the three superhero based MMORPGs. I can only assume the whole FtP thing didn't work out so well for them.

45% Ranged Defense + Hurricane

Supposedly, poor sales with Aion have hurt NCSoft and, being at the low end of the revenue scale, CoH is getting cut to save money by eliminating Paragon Studios. It's not that CoH was actively losing money, it just wasn't making enough to survive the "make the investors happy" blood-letting.

So I've heard anyway. Could all be make-believe.

Edited, Sep 4th 2012 5:48pm by Jophiel

The basic marketing concept is sound, it's a matter of implementation. The thinking is that by offering F2P, more people will try the game out, and that they'll get some money out of people who might not otherwise have spent the money for a subscription. The downside is that it takes about the same amount of resources to host a F2P player as it does to host a subscriber. So unless you designed your game with that model in mind from the get go, it likely wont work. A game that started as subscription only will be cost calculated for that subscription rate. But if the number of players shrinks, then you're maintaining a lot of idle resources. That's when some bean counter will come up with adding the F2P model. May as well use those resources, right? But it doesn't seem like it ever does much more than slow the rate of decline in most games because in order to make the model work, they have to start cutting out goodies that used to be "free" for subscribers and make them things you pay for in some way. This pisses off the subscribers, so you lose more of them, eventually being left with a game that cost too much to sustain with mostly F2P players.

At least that's how it seems to be going.

Also, there's a "City of Gyros" in City of Heroes. So closing City of Heroes de facto closes City of Gyros which is what he was upset about but he was told City of Heroes, not City of Gyros is clos-- I need to lie down.

So I just bought this City of Heroes game. What servers are you guys on?