Originally posted by Kaelano1

Originally posted by EricDanie

Originally posted by Ozmodan

NCSoft makes SOE look like a great studio.  They bail on anything.  

This pretty much nails it for me to avoid playing any of their games ever.  You never know when they will pull the plug.

This game had a great run, over 8 years and a F2P change in an attempt to keep profitability.

Now, I know about Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa, but this time it clearly wasn't the case of "bail on anything", even though Tabula Rasa was more of a problem with Richard Garriott, which makes Auto Assault the one true title which I will never understand the quick closure.

You forgot "Matrix Online"!

They closed MXO down after they merged all the servers, were down to one and the load on it was continuously light. Basically there wasn't enough people paying to play for the servers to run and still make a profit, THEN they closed it down. This CoX closure seems a little extreme imo.

As for TR, Richard Garriott was being a typical western artist and NCSoft didn't dig that so they tried to screw him over but he ultimately got it over on stupid NCSoft.

Same here, tawess.  And let me preface what I'm about to say with a "this is not a I told you so thread".  I recognize that 8+ years is a great run for an MMO.  But I want to point out all the posters(mainly in the official CoH forums, not here) that said in the recent year or two that the population was fine, you were wrong, wrong, wrong.  So much for my game lasting a few more years as they vehemently pointed out. 

They drop the news like that out of nowhere, and all they say is that NCSoft is "realigning focus".  CoX was my 1st MMO and it will always hold a special place im my heart. I only stopped playing a few years ago for a few months but have been pretty consistent ever since but it was a good 8 year run of the game with the best teaming system around.  The best part of this whole thing is I get to raise my hand in the air with fingers extended and gently fold only my index, ring and pinky fingers to you, Forum Cartel.  The only reason I'm happy about the game shutting down is that it disperses you all to the wind.

Unfortunately, I agree with other comments (though I don't agree with it emotionally). "No company shuts down something that is very profitable, plain and simple. It means the game was just barely breaking even so estimates were it would be in the red by the end of the year so they're shutting down based on that (a very very typical business move) or the game is already losing money so they're shutting it down. and fu mawds for editing this previously. Based on the abruptness of the announcement, I would guess it was already losing money."  The game just couldn't pull its weight no matter what differing opinions were tossed around in the official forums.  That will teach me to listen to people not employed directly by the studio or publisher.  They didn't know squat.

I disagree with NCSoft's decision and think it was a mistake but life moves on, though for the next few days it will be sadder. :(  Thank you for the 8 years of adventure, Paragon Studios!!!

The more I think about it, the more it looks like this is a result of two things. The first is that NC Soft disclosed a 6 million profit loss for the last quarter. And NC Soft has proven several times that it takes immediate steps when money is the topic. The second issue is that City of Heroes DOES have thousands of people playing it that do so for free as Premium players - and Guild Wars 2 is a one time investment that the vast percentage of them would switch to.

Originally posted by Aeolron
Sorry to see it go but when you have games like gw2 these sub based games are in trouble, my guess is that future mmorpgs will follow in gw2 footsteps

Oh FFS.

First of all, let me point out the obvious: City of Heroes/Villains has been F2P for some time now.

Is this the new trend we're going to see from the rabid GW2 fans? Every time a MMO is changed to F2P or is taken offline, you're going to heap all credit on "GW2 and its revenue model"?

When did the MMO community take a left turn into the intellectual weeds that is "Oblivious-ville"? I'm genuinely curious. I'm not talking about Aeolron here. I'm not even only talking about GW2 fans. I'm talking about this growing portion of the MMO community at large who are convinced that anytime a sub-based MMO goes offline it's automatically "because of its revenue model".

Every single sub-based MMO that has gone off-line has done so because the game failed to maintain enough subscribers to keep it going.

Allow me to also point out another easily verifiable fact: There are still subscription based games running to this day. Final Fantasy XI, FFXIV, DAoC, Rift, Eve Online, AC1 and some others are all still set up on subscriptions. They're doing just fine. Chugging right along. In a couple cases, they've been chugging right along for around a decade. They were doing fine then. They're doing fine now.

Others like EQ1 and 2, Vanguard, LoTRO, DDO and to a lesser degree, Runescape all offer a subscription payment option - and many people do actually prefer it over the F2P/Freemium setup. Crazy thought, I know.

Subscriptions are just as valid an option as they've ever been and are, in fact, far more road-tested and proven than F2P or B2P. F2P and B2P are alternative revenue setups. Not replacements.

While I am not playing CoH since before the mission architect. I had great times there. I hope those who like superhero mmos will migrate to one of the other 2(1 more in the future). 

My respect to CoH team, best luck in their future endeavors

Well sad to see it go as I had some fun there a few years ago. Sadly though this was a game that badly needed an updated sequel quite some time ago and never got one. Instead it just got put on the questionable life support of free to play with cosmetic cash shop and left to languish.

In this new era where there is just less and less of the MMO Customer Pie to go around as the MMO market is oversaturated, its seems FTP is no longer guaranteed survival for bad or outdated games. As more of the old games go, and yes there will be more, hopefully game developers will figure out that reinvigorating a game by making it funner to play is a far better survival tactic than just trying to keep its customer base entertained by selling them pointless shinny crap.

Originally posted by Tardcore

Well sad to see it go as I had some fun there a few years ago. Sadly though this was a game that badly needed an updated sequel quite some time ago and never got one. Instead it just got put on the questionable life support of free to play with cosmetic cash shop and left to languish.

In this new era where there is just less and less of the MMO Customer Pie to go around as the MMO market is oversaturated, its seems FTP is no longer guaranteed survival for bad or outdated games. As more of the old games go, and yes there will be more, hopefully game developers will figure out that reinvigorating a game by making it funner to play is a far better survival tactic than just trying to keep its customer base entertained by selling them pointless shinny crap.

To be fair, the live development was pretty robust and going in a good direction. 'Languish', to me, means Vanguard. CoH honestly was still getting better.

But yes, a sequel should have happened but it's niche market was so split by other same genre games by the time that would have happened I am not sure how that really would have worked either :/ 

Much more mmorpg's will meet this end in next 1-2 years.

Western mmorpg market is tremeduesly oversaturated and playerbase is actually decreasing.

Some of first f2p conversion were astounding success because they were fist western mmorgg or / and AAA ones that did that.

Additionally playerbase of p2p titles were in big part not shared with playerbase of f2p asian imported titles.

With dwindling playerbase and way too many titles (not to mention economy crisis and rising uneployment in many countries) titles have to fall. 

Mmorpg is niche and will be niche in west.

Originally posted by Teala
If this proves anything, it proves that even decent free to play games can meet with the chopping block, and no game is immune.

I think it shows that bean counters are villains and can't be trusted.  

They could've put it on life support and probably made a decent return on it that way, but that is apparantly not the NCSoft way.

I have a fondness for City of Heroes I spent a few months in it back in 2006 . Its sad to see it go .It is to my mind the only really decent superhero mmo even now . Still 8 years is a good run .  

The problem for free to play is that theres so many games on the market that now using the buisness model . Not all can survive . I actually started up a thread this afternoon arguing that The Elder Scrolls Online should be buy to play because developers seem to be of the mentality that make a subscription based game , get a few box sales and if it underperforms make it free to play and that the market could only support a finite number of free to play games .

Buy to play is the future and developers like Betheda will ignore it at their peril  . This is the first of many that will close down I think . I would even warn the likes of Bioware to think again about a free to play converstion in favour of trying to sell the game even now as a buy to play title with micro payments for downloadable content and expansions .

We mmo fans are waking up to the fact that single player games have always been buy to play so why should nt mmos be the same .

The subscription based model was never set in stone . Even though the more dogmatic amongst us thought it was .

Wait.....a so-called "free to play" game is closing. HOW CAN THIS BE??? I thought all so-called f2p games were just the way to go. You don't suppose that being "FREE" meant that too many people weren't spending any money do you? Couldn't be. We all know that companies have those money trees that just let the devs go pull off $100 bills for whatever they need.

Serioulsy though, I think that more and more so-called f2p games willl follow suit because you just can't make money if everyone plays for free. Imagine that!