Originally posted by roo67

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 .

 

I thought it was Zenimax who was making Elder Scrolls Online?

Sad News ;(

I was reading that PW wouldnt renew the engine with NCsoft is what caused this.  They wanted to get rid of CoX as competition for CO.  I read this on the interwebz so take that with a grain of salt.

Still very sad ;(.

Originally posted by Reas43

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

Sorry to harsh your moment of GW2 fanboy gloat but, CoH was F2P.
 

You're a shining example for your peers.

I had a plant die in the back yard on the SAME day GW2 launched, so what are we to think? That the epicness of W2 was not somehow responsible for this? I could sight many other examples of the effect GW2 is having in gaming and in our everyday lifes but I think I have proved my point.

We are starting to see the collapse.. it has little to do with payment model.. The genre is flooded.. Many new comers from the WoW era have come, seen and conquered already and most are simply moving on..

To be quite honest, I don't see any new north american mmo sustaining itself for more than a year due to be released in the next few years while the genre cleans itself up..

Originally posted by Enigmatus

Originally posted by roo67

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 .

 

I thought it was Zenimax who was making Elder Scrolls Online?

 

looked it up on the TESO website

© 2011 Bethesda Softworks LLC, a ZeniMax Media company.

Seems like we are both correct .

I miss Auto Assault.

It was one of the most unique games I've ever played.

These constant shutdowns show proof that the economy is still screwed.  It's been over (around?) 4 years since the crash and things are still pretty bad.

Originally posted by Gruug

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!

 

Other free to play games have closed their doors in the past.    If the game is not popular and not making enough moneyto justify keeping it open, might as well close it and move on.

damn what a shame. I loved this game, it was truely the first game where character customisation came first. but age catches up to us all.

Thanks for the fantastic memories.

36 month Vet.

You will be remembered among the greats!

Wow! Never would have expected this to happen!  This is a title that will be missed!

Cheers!

I had so much fun with this game. It's the only MMO I've ever played that turned me from a soloer into a grouper. If I logged on and couldn't find a PUG, I logged off again. Fortunately, that almost never happened; PUGs in CoH were everywhere, and they were almost universally enjoyable. I cannot honestly say that about any other MMO I've played since 1999.

I worry that we'll never see anything like CoH again: incredible avatar customization, incredible character skill customization, incredible market system (placing buy and sell orders), incredible grouping, unbelievable number of badges/titles, outrageous amount of emotes and other roleplaying support...the list just goes on and on.

CoH, you'll be missed.

I think it's called lipservice, or something like that.  Don't think I saw a single post in this thread or one of the others about this from someone that was STILL PLAYING. 

Everyone thinks it's sad it's shutting down, yet none of you are actually playing it. 

One server, I think it was freedom, only ever managed to keep a relatively high population, one other seemed to stay around medium, the rest always seemd to be low; even after they switched to free to play.  Doesn't really matter how many people play a f2p game, if no one spends money on stuff then it doesn't ever make money.  As a several year subscriber I never had any reason myself to actually spend any money in the shop, pretty much everything was already unlocked for me.

PvP was pretty bad.  End game was pretty bad.  The grind to level was pretty bad, that is if you were one of the very few people that didn't actually use one of the half dozen methods to power level.  The balance was pretty bad.  The game was beyond repetetive.  Mind you, I really liked this game; was my first MMO and I played it steadily for 3+ years, and then a few month out of a year for the next few. 

I"m not sad at all.  CoH had an excellent run.  Over 8 years for an MMO that didn't have a crafting system when it released, no loot collection, no PvP, no endgame.  It was quests over and over, fighitng the same mobs over and over, in the same instanced maps over and over. 

Holy crap, CoH managed over 8 years, and it's best quality was it's character creator; yet it was still a pretty good game for people that liked comic book stuff. 

I'm not sad at all!  I give NCsoft, cryptic, and paragon studios huge kudos.  They developed, produced, and ran an MMO for over 8 years, that if released today, even with the content it has right now, would have lasted about as long as Tabula Rasa.  It kept a subscription model longer than LoTRO, I think longer even than EQ2, longer than Champions online and DC universe as well.  It lived while Tabula Rasa, The Matrix Online, and Auto Assault died.  It survived the launch of WoW, the leaving of its original creators, a world wide recession; it survived a genre that, when it released, wouldn't really be considered mainstream, and even today really only appeals to people that actually enjoy comic books. 

There is no reason to pitty or feel bad for Paragon studios or NCsoft, they should be congratualated.  In an industry that is dominated by the fantasy genre, and is pretty much split between people wanting either fantasy or sci-fi, they managed to keep an MMO with not much to do in it and based on comic book heroes going for almost a decade; in my book that's one hell of a success.

(I do feel bad for the real fans of the game.  The ones that paid subscriptions and then contiued to support their game with purchases after the F2P switch.)

I'm surprised that they didn't try it on the "truely free" model like they did Aion and L2.  I agree that the "F2P" system was not very inviting.  I didn't get any farther with the system when I went back and discovered that my main character ( a Mind/Empathy Controller) was locked because Controller was a "premium" class.  The more restrictive you make a "Free" system the less liekly people are to stick around and get "(re)hooked"

Still a real shame.  I thought CoX was doing well enough for a game that is 8 years old.

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"!

He didn't forget.  MXO was made by SOE, not NCsoft.

I and most of those I know in game are still in shock; this was so completely out of the blue.  Paragon Studios Dev's were participating normally on the forums and working on getting the new issue ready to go from Test to Live yesterday... then today all of the dev's were fired and we learn that NCSoft has pulled the plug.

I've been playing CoH ever since early 2005; it was my first MMO and the only one I stayed with.  In March I would have gotten my 8 year badge... it's been 7 good years.  The big thing that's kept me and tens of thousands of others playing, many of us since near launch, has been the community.  No game I've tried has had the quality of community that we took for granted with CoH, many of them like WoW have been toxic in the extreme.

I saw the gradual decline over the years, then with the F2P release I saw a marked improvement with many more players online, lots of things the Dev's had said were too much work to implement finally happening and new releases coming faster and faster.  As far as we could tell things had reversed and we were growing again.