I've played CoX for about 3 years and I still love the game. I wil probably like CO but in the back of my mind I'm still rooting for the game I've grown to love.

Now to the point, I think CoX is trying to retaliate against the news of CO. They dev team has really been making some huge announcements lately and it's really intruiging the players.

Player generated conent. This is a large factor that might help CoX. Now when people complain about the lack of content/storylines, they will have an almost endless supply of unique storylines they can choose from. The missions will also most likely be unique adding more variety to the repetitiveness so many people complain about.

PlayNC are adding voice chat so all of their games can use it, another nice feature to the game.

Shields are currently being developed and are scheduled for i13.

The devs have stated that they have big plans for i13 and i14 and in my opinion, I believe it is an underwater zone. Mainly because of the little underwater section of one of the Cimerora maps recently discovered.

The wedding pack added a lot of extra revenue to the game, allowing villain epic archetypes to be moved forward.

More character slots were added and are purchasable.

Lastly, in game ads are being added. They will add a lot of revenue to the game, and are OPTIONAL, another great way to get the game going.

Okay, now that my rant is over I just want to say that I think the CoX team has realized their opponent and are really fighting back.

I'm really excited about what the new, much larger dev team has planned for CoH/V, but I don't particularly think anything we're seeing right now is a response to CO.

The devs work on issues way in advance. They're probably already busy with i13, fine tuning the design of i14, and already starting to conceptualize i15 right now. Now, it's very likely THOSE issues will be the response to CO, but what we're seeing now has been in the pipelines for a while.

The more I see of CO the less excited I get ::shrug::.

In a sense you're right. Consider the discussions that must have gone on between Cryptic and NCSoft.

Cryptic: We think City of Heroes is stable, but we'd like to focus our studio on making more new games.
NCSoft: As the publishers, we have a vested interest in keeping the game strong, we'd rather you devoted more effort into it.
Cryptic: Well that would be a little limiting to us. We have an interest too, but would rather focus elsewhere.
NCSoft: That's a bit of a problem then.
Cryptic: What if you buy us out? You could own the CoX property entirely, then we could develop other things without distracting you.
NCSoft: If we did that, it would only make sense if we also took in your design studio. We'd have to crank it up, too. it wouldn't make sense to spend more money on the purchase just to maintain the status quo.
Cryptic: Great. You own CoH and the dev team. We'll go make something new.
NCSoft: Sounds great. By the way, what are you going to make now?
Cryptic: Oh, another heroes game. It'll be Champions Online.
NCSoft: Son of a ...

OK I'm sure it's more complicated than that. The publisher and developers no doubt have had conversations since day 1 about just how much development the game gets. And then they knew for a while that Cryptic was working on another game for Marvel - which turned into Champions online.

So it's a convergence of factors. 1) They need to keep developing if they're going to get more value out of this established game. 2) The players have been pretty clear about what they want added. 3) The competition is close by and apparent.