Thing is, they're not simply doing it "because everyone is" or "because it's hard to compete with "Free"".
At least in CoH and CO's case, they're running a Hybrid model. They have a F2P and a Subscription tier. In CoH's case they also have an intermediate tier for people who were previously subscribers.
So they have a regular income channel from their subscribers. And they will periodically get infusions from the F2P/store. Their subscriber level may go down a bit. But it'll eventually normalize (subs in CoH are head-and-shoulders above F2P in terms of non-power perks).
Hell, with the switch-over right now in CoH, a whole TON of stuff people have been asking for, for the better part of 7 years, has been put into the store (extra costume slots, additional storage, costume unlocks, enhancement unslotters, etc). There are people dropping hundreds of dollars right now and $5 bills are falling from the sky at Paragon Studios right now.
AND THE F2P component doesn't go online until NEXT TUESDAY!
Their setup sells NOTHING you HAVE to have. Granted, some of it's very NICE TO HAVE, but required for play? NOPE!
You can run from 1-50, EASILY without ever touching the store.
Access to the stuff in the store or the stuff enabled by subscription merely takes you from "damn powerful" in comparison to upper levels in other games to OMGWTFBBQ where classes and power combinations previously described as "gimpy" or "needs a team" can SOLO ARCHVILLAINS (Minion, Lieutenant, Boss, Elite Boss, Monster, Giant Monster, Arch-Villain). AV's are basically meant to give stiff fights to WHOLE TEAMS (or in some cases SETS OF TEAMS). Yet some specially built characters can solo them easily.
Case in point, my main tank could basically fight everything in the game to a standstill. But couldn't kill them (Tanks = High durability, crap damage) because his damage output, while impressive, couldn't overcome an AV's regeneration. With the new Incarnate stuff (that's only available to VIPs), he can finally kill AVs and GMs.
Thing is, this stuff only works at the top-most levels of play in the Incarnate system itself. At lower levels it adds nothing.
Yeah. This makes it a lot easier for houses with kids (or multiple kids).
It allows the kids to have a couple characters of THEIR OWN without filling up mom or dad's account. The ability to purchase more character slots (up to 48 per server now), gives you something to hold over them as "reward" too.
What I might suggest doing though.
Instead of sticking with the "standard" account. Buy a 1 month subscription up front. It allows them to play initially as a VIP player. Then, when they go back to F2P, they're a premium player (with elevated rights).
Premium players, while they can't START supergroups (guilds) themselves, can join (and even lead) one.
Also, they're allowed to send whispers (private tells to people) rather than being limited to local and team channels only.
They'll also be able to use the in-game mail system (once their toon gets to level 10 IIRC). This allows you to send them stuff (enhancements, salvage, recipes, in-game currency), offline, in the game.
It'll also give them limited access to the invention and auction house systems without having to pay for it the way base F2P players do.
Also, the month of subscription gets them their first Paragon Reward (vet) token and 400 points ($5) they can spend in the store on whatever the heck they want.
Also, if the expense is a problem for staying subbed, take a look here as well.
CoH's engine may not be as pretty as CO's is (kinda stands to reason since the CO engine is essentially a second generation of the same one in CoH).
Still, CoH has 7 years of content built. And it's fairly evenly spaced all along the leveling path. They even have stuff to do once you hit max level (Incarnates). They have over 50 zones. 4 PVP, 5-co-op. They have alignment shifting, so you can play as hero, villain, or two intermediary alignments. CoH has made attempts to balance their ATs. So nothing is "clearly superior" to play. With the enhancement and invention systems, just about ANY toon can eventually become ridiculously powerful if you have a mind to make them so. Also, the devs and art team keep pushing further and further with how much detail and such that they can wring from the current engine. The development team is fairly involved with the community as well. Not as much as they were in the early days, but it's still REALLY common to see devs and artists replying in threads other than "official announcement" type things. Their current Community Manager is also quite active. Every Wednesday there's a live video stream put on as well as he drags various and sundry members of the development staff from their caves and into the light. Roughly 2 weeks ago, they just upgraded their servers for better performance. Last week they launched Issue 21, which has the F2P component in and we're in the VIP (subscriber) head start right now. The new store is a bit...crude. But it mostly functions. And I expect it to eventually get a lot better. Usually their initial implementations on new UI stuff are somewhere between horrific and "WTF!?!?". But after a couple revs they tend to get a lot more usable as they get more and better feedback. It really IS a micro-transaction system. You buy points in blocks of 400 (which is roughly $5). And most individual items are between 20 and 120 points. Sets of items, like complete costume sets are 3-800 points. Also, VIPs (subscribers) get a dole of 400-550 (based on veteran status) points a month for free. Since monthly price for a sub is about $11 (can be $9.50 if you buy NCSoft 60-day time cards online), you're getting nearly half your sub back in points every month. There's also the updated rewards program. Previously it was the veteran program. But they've put so much cool stuff into it in the last 7 years, it wasn't fair to expect new players to come in and wait ANOTHER 7 years before they saw it. Now vets start out just about where they were in terms of rewards BEFORE the switch-over, but usually are slightly higher. The rewards are now in 10 (#10 is only open to VIP players though) tiers. You have to fill up an entire tier before you move to the next, but while in that tier, you can prioritize which rewards in that tier you select first. Also, buying blocks of market points rewards you with extra reward tokens, moving you up faster. If you don't spend ANY money, you can move into Tier 9 (what would be 6-7 years of rewards) in about 3-4 years. If you want to get there SOONER, you can buy points. And none of the rewards or stuff on the market are game-breaking "sell power" type of things. But lots of them are DAMN nice to have (team teleporters, remote access to the auction house, remote access to personal vault (off-character) storage, etc). Tier 9 and VIP Tier 9 are a rotating rewards setup. Certain rewards will occupy these slots for a while then rotate out. And new rewards will replace them. The toons who claimed them don't LOSE them. They just get the opportunity to get NEW stuff so they don't hit cap and have nothing to do with their reward tokens.
Seriously. The majority of users outgrew the WebTV-looking interface they're pushing well before WebTV became irrelevant.
So long as I can have my damn desktop environment Microsoft can implement whatever crappy additional interfaces (and control those interfaces) however the fuck they want.
If I wanted a smartphone interface on my computer, I'd buy a beefy smartphone.
I want a desktop environment. And having a stupid, blocky, sliding interface does nothing except waste time and processing cycles doing something I don't have a need for and could not give two shits less about.
Yes. But if you look at the article again. Part of the treatment is an intensive round of chemo to kill off most of the existing T-cells in the body. This way they don't attack the modified ones.
The problem is, after that, your immune system is more or less permanently compromised. You have enough to basically continue to try and fight off the cancer. But you're more susceptible to infections and the like. This is why the patients require regular infusions of immune globulin. To help bolster their immune systems.
If you try treatment earlier, before the cancer has progressed as much, yes, you run less risk of overloading the body's waste elimination mechanisms and there's a possibility that the negative side effects experienced would be less. But you're still going to have the compromised immune system.
But hell, if it was a choice between regular immune globulin infusions for the rest of my life and a bout of feeling sick enough to want to die or ACTUAL death by cancer? Give me the damn treatment and just keep me from flopping over dead while my body's killing the cancer!
The way the treatment works is by killing off most of your healthy T-cells. Then replacing them with the altered ones.
This leaves you open to infection pretty much forevermore.
Right now the treatment is kind of a russian roulette game. Things like kidney failure (due to being clogged with the byproducts of killed cancer) is no joke.
What they've got to do after they verify the results with further trials is find a way to control the reaction a bit more. Maybe lower dosages of altered T-Cell so the effect is more gradual.
A cure, or at least a VERY efficacious treatment for cancer doesn't do you much good if it kills you while trying to cure you.
Still, damned impressive. If this can be duplicated and controlled a bit better, these researchers should go up for a Nobel. And a few tens or hundreds of million in additional funding.
So he talks about real differences (band, power, and source consistency) and you pooh-pooh it because some guy is willing to share an "I got a friend" story?
The more interesting story here is that the US is doing exercises near North Korean airspace. Here is a militaristic country with nuclear weapons and with China on one side and South Korea on the other, as well as Japan close by. They have medium range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Everyone wants them to stop antagonising their neighbours, launching missile tests over them, doing nuclear testing... And the US and Japan have perfectly good spy satellites.
Operation Team Spirit has been going on in Korea for DECADES.
There were a bunch of years in the late 80's and early 90's where NK would offer to come to talks if OTS was called off. So they'd opt out of OTS for a year and then NK would send us a "Fuck you capitalist pigs!" message.
Finally, back in 1992 they basically chose to ignore NK and carried on with OTS again.
They'd buy old memory from people disassemble it and reassemble it into larger DIMMs through stacking. Actually bought some of it from them back in the day.
"What about this." "We're RIM. You want this." "No. Seriously. What about this? "We're RIM. You want this."
Newsflash RIM. You've been resting on the fact that you were a big dog in the early professional mobile market. That's not going to save you. It's the only reason you haven't bailed from the market already. It's not going to slow your plummet anymore.
So get back to work and FOR FUCK'S SAKE...INNOVATE. Otherwise, take your place along other relics such as Microsoft Bob. The Lisa. The Osborne 2. Get the picture?
Bettor Cop: There were a rash of crimes around Broadway and Seabright! I'm placing my bet on Broadway and Seabright! Crime Dealer: Oh sorry! The next crime happened over on Center and Church! YOU LOSE! Bettor Cop: Damn! That sucks! Victim: You're telling ME asshole!
I'm pretty sure I'm GOING to get marked as a troll, but I found it ODD that you used caps a lot to emphasize your sentences. Do you realize how MUCH you actually do this?
Quite aware. HOWEVER, I do it in lieu of using HTML formatting, which can vary dramatically in appearance from browser to browser and by user preference.
Seriously. While I admit that discovering things for yourself can sometimes be really cool. In a lot of cases, you'll see that people discovering things tend to be in LOTS of trouble (Shackleton anyone?). Like breaking down in a one-horse town after the horse has been stabled for the night.
On the flip side, I think the fact that you CAN find your way out of an area with GPS makes people more WILLING to go places they don't know.
Paper maps KINDA filled this niche, but static route plans tend to not survive interruptions. If you come across a construction area on a highway somewhere and want to detour around, paper route plans leave you screwed. With GPS, it updates as your route changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Having a few thousand angry defendants show up on his doorstep and lynching him would PROBABLY put a crimp in his plans.
Now with double the helping of pretentious snootiness!
Woo!
Neither fish nor foul nor good red herring!
You know, it's just possible some people might want to conserve electricity.
Look at the power said system uses to complete any given task.
If you complete a job in 10 minutes and burn 1KW doing it how is that in any way superior to doing the same job in 5 minutes and burning the same 1KW?
I understand where you're coming from.
Honestly, I don't think the same way. If I take a couple weeks off playing, so be it. $10-11 a month comes out to around $0.35 a day.
I pay more than that just driving to work.
F2P works for me because now friends that can't afford to pay can come back (albeit on a more limited basis) and play as regularly as they want.
And, in between my yearly sub renewals, if I have a budget crunch, I'm not missing anything.
Thing is, they're not simply doing it "because everyone is" or "because it's hard to compete with "Free"".
At least in CoH and CO's case, they're running a Hybrid model. They have a F2P and a Subscription tier. In CoH's case they also have an intermediate tier for people who were previously subscribers.
So they have a regular income channel from their subscribers. And they will periodically get infusions from the F2P/store. Their subscriber level may go down a bit. But it'll eventually normalize (subs in CoH are head-and-shoulders above F2P in terms of non-power perks).
Hell, with the switch-over right now in CoH, a whole TON of stuff people have been asking for, for the better part of 7 years, has been put into the store (extra costume slots, additional storage, costume unlocks, enhancement unslotters, etc). There are people dropping hundreds of dollars right now and $5 bills are falling from the sky at Paragon Studios right now.
AND THE F2P component doesn't go online until NEXT TUESDAY!
Take a look-see at CoH.
Their setup sells NOTHING you HAVE to have. Granted, some of it's very NICE TO HAVE, but required for play? NOPE!
You can run from 1-50, EASILY without ever touching the store.
Access to the stuff in the store or the stuff enabled by subscription merely takes you from "damn powerful" in comparison to upper levels in other games to OMGWTFBBQ where classes and power combinations previously described as "gimpy" or "needs a team" can SOLO ARCHVILLAINS (Minion, Lieutenant, Boss, Elite Boss, Monster, Giant Monster, Arch-Villain). AV's are basically meant to give stiff fights to WHOLE TEAMS (or in some cases SETS OF TEAMS). Yet some specially built characters can solo them easily.
Case in point, my main tank could basically fight everything in the game to a standstill. But couldn't kill them (Tanks = High durability, crap damage) because his damage output, while impressive, couldn't overcome an AV's regeneration. With the new Incarnate stuff (that's only available to VIPs), he can finally kill AVs and GMs.
Thing is, this stuff only works at the top-most levels of play in the Incarnate system itself. At lower levels it adds nothing.
Yeah. This makes it a lot easier for houses with kids (or multiple kids).
It allows the kids to have a couple characters of THEIR OWN without filling up mom or dad's account. The ability to purchase more character slots (up to 48 per server now), gives you something to hold over them as "reward" too.
What I might suggest doing though.
Instead of sticking with the "standard" account. Buy a 1 month subscription up front. It allows them to play initially as a VIP player. Then, when they go back to F2P, they're a premium player (with elevated rights).
To see the differences, in tiers, go here:
http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/freedom/player_cho.php#tabs-4
Premium players, while they can't START supergroups (guilds) themselves, can join (and even lead) one.
Also, they're allowed to send whispers (private tells to people) rather than being limited to local and team channels only.
They'll also be able to use the in-game mail system (once their toon gets to level 10 IIRC). This allows you to send them stuff (enhancements, salvage, recipes, in-game currency), offline, in the game.
It'll also give them limited access to the invention and auction house systems without having to pay for it the way base F2P players do.
Also, the month of subscription gets them their first Paragon Reward (vet) token and 400 points ($5) they can spend in the store on whatever the heck they want.
Also, if the expense is a problem for staying subbed, take a look here as well.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/R_M's_Guide_to_Getting_Cheap_Months.
CoH's engine may not be as pretty as CO's is (kinda stands to reason since the CO engine is essentially a second generation of the same one in CoH).
Still, CoH has 7 years of content built. And it's fairly evenly spaced all along the leveling path. They even have stuff to do once you hit max level (Incarnates).
They have over 50 zones. 4 PVP, 5-co-op.
They have alignment shifting, so you can play as hero, villain, or two intermediary alignments.
CoH has made attempts to balance their ATs. So nothing is "clearly superior" to play. With the enhancement and invention systems, just about ANY toon can eventually become ridiculously powerful if you have a mind to make them so.
Also, the devs and art team keep pushing further and further with how much detail and such that they can wring from the current engine.
The development team is fairly involved with the community as well. Not as much as they were in the early days, but it's still REALLY common to see devs and artists replying in threads other than "official announcement" type things.
Their current Community Manager is also quite active. Every Wednesday there's a live video stream put on as well as he drags various and sundry members of the development staff from their caves and into the light.
Roughly 2 weeks ago, they just upgraded their servers for better performance.
Last week they launched Issue 21, which has the F2P component in and we're in the VIP (subscriber) head start right now. The new store is a bit...crude. But it mostly functions. And I expect it to eventually get a lot better. Usually their initial implementations on new UI stuff are somewhere between horrific and "WTF!?!?". But after a couple revs they tend to get a lot more usable as they get more and better feedback.
It really IS a micro-transaction system. You buy points in blocks of 400 (which is roughly $5). And most individual items are between 20 and 120 points. Sets of items, like complete costume sets are 3-800 points.
Also, VIPs (subscribers) get a dole of 400-550 (based on veteran status) points a month for free. Since monthly price for a sub is about $11 (can be $9.50 if you buy NCSoft 60-day time cards online), you're getting nearly half your sub back in points every month.
There's also the updated rewards program. Previously it was the veteran program. But they've put so much cool stuff into it in the last 7 years, it wasn't fair to expect new players to come in and wait ANOTHER 7 years before they saw it. Now vets start out just about where they were in terms of rewards BEFORE the switch-over, but usually are slightly higher. The rewards are now in 10 (#10 is only open to VIP players though) tiers. You have to fill up an entire tier before you move to the next, but while in that tier, you can prioritize which rewards in that tier you select first. Also, buying blocks of market points rewards you with extra reward tokens, moving you up faster. If you don't spend ANY money, you can move into Tier 9 (what would be 6-7 years of rewards) in about 3-4 years. If you want to get there SOONER, you can buy points. And none of the rewards or stuff on the market are game-breaking "sell power" type of things. But lots of them are DAMN nice to have (team teleporters, remote access to the auction house, remote access to personal vault (off-character) storage, etc). Tier 9 and VIP Tier 9 are a rotating rewards setup. Certain rewards will occupy these slots for a while then rotate out. And new rewards will replace them. The toons who claimed them don't LOSE them. They just get the opportunity to get NEW stuff so they don't hit cap and have nothing to do with their reward tokens.
You can hit the City of Heroes site to learn more about it.
http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/freedom/freedom_overview.php
Or you can hit the Paragon Wiki.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/City_of_Heroes_Freedo
Seriously. The majority of users outgrew the WebTV-looking interface they're pushing well before WebTV became irrelevant.
So long as I can have my damn desktop environment Microsoft can implement whatever crappy additional interfaces (and control those interfaces) however the fuck they want.
If I wanted a smartphone interface on my computer, I'd buy a beefy smartphone.
I want a desktop environment. And having a stupid, blocky, sliding interface does nothing except waste time and processing cycles doing something I don't have a need for and could not give two shits less about.
Yes. But if you look at the article again. Part of the treatment is an intensive round of chemo to kill off most of the existing T-cells in the body. This way they don't attack the modified ones.
The problem is, after that, your immune system is more or less permanently compromised. You have enough to basically continue to try and fight off the cancer. But you're more susceptible to infections and the like. This is why the patients require regular infusions of immune globulin. To help bolster their immune systems.
If you try treatment earlier, before the cancer has progressed as much, yes, you run less risk of overloading the body's waste elimination mechanisms and there's a possibility that the negative side effects experienced would be less. But you're still going to have the compromised immune system.
But hell, if it was a choice between regular immune globulin infusions for the rest of my life and a bout of feeling sick enough to want to die or ACTUAL death by cancer? Give me the damn treatment and just keep me from flopping over dead while my body's killing the cancer!
That probably wouldn't be a good idea.
The way the treatment works is by killing off most of your healthy T-cells. Then replacing them with the altered ones.
This leaves you open to infection pretty much forevermore.
Right now the treatment is kind of a russian roulette game. Things like kidney failure (due to being clogged with the byproducts of killed cancer) is no joke.
What they've got to do after they verify the results with further trials is find a way to control the reaction a bit more. Maybe lower dosages of altered T-Cell so the effect is more gradual.
A cure, or at least a VERY efficacious treatment for cancer doesn't do you much good if it kills you while trying to cure you.
Still, damned impressive. If this can be duplicated and controlled a bit better, these researchers should go up for a Nobel. And a few tens or hundreds of million in additional funding.
When the choice is "gigabit" that's *only* 420MB of 10/100 that's maybe 70...
YEAH! I'll go for the 420MB connection saying it is gigabit.
When I'm pushing gigs of files over my network I want it to happen as quickly as possible so the network resource isn't choked for hours at a time.
But NOOO!
WE DON'T NEED NO STEENKIN' GIGABIT!
*Cue everything in the omniverse with both a face and a palm facepalming at the same exact instant.*
So he talks about real differences (band, power, and source consistency) and you pooh-pooh it because some guy is willing to share an "I got a friend" story?
Yeah. Okay. Whatever kid.
The more interesting story here is that the US is doing exercises near North Korean airspace. Here is a militaristic country with nuclear weapons and with China on one side and South Korea on the other, as well as Japan close by. They have medium range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Everyone wants them to stop antagonising their neighbours, launching missile tests over them, doing nuclear testing... And the US and Japan have perfectly good spy satellites.
Operation Team Spirit has been going on in Korea for DECADES.
There were a bunch of years in the late 80's and early 90's where NK would offer to come to talks if OTS was called off. So they'd opt out of OTS for a year and then NK would send us a "Fuck you capitalist pigs!" message.
Finally, back in 1992 they basically chose to ignore NK and carried on with OTS again.
When does OTS happen? About this time every year.
Sure! Let's bury a few billion tons of plant and animal matter today. Put it under high pressure. We'll call for it in a couple million years.
Or not..
This is how VisionTek started out.
They'd buy old memory from people disassemble it and reassemble it into larger DIMMs through stacking. Actually bought some of it from them back in the day.
Ensure your own bankruptcy
Leave the $70 monocle alone!
LEAVE IT ALONE!
*Emoweep*
As you're going to be spending more time with your kids, heed this simple advice.
Anyhoo. Thanks for all the effort you guys have put into the site over the last decade and a half.
So get back to work and FOR FUCK'S SAKE...INNOVATE.
Yeah, they've totally been sitting on their thumbs. It's not like they've spent the past two years buying up talent,
They should have bought better talent.
updating their OS
A pig in lipstick is still a pig.
and putting together a slick line of new products
*SNERK*
Oh. You were serious...
Uhm. No. I disagree with this. New products? Maybe. Slick? More like "more of same".
and revamping their development tools making it easier than ever to write software for BB smart phones and tablets.
But with the same host of dummies in the 3rd party market, we're still getting crap, crap and more crap.
Or we can just wait a couple more years for RIM to maybe think of it themselves.
Oh, wait, they totally did all of that.
And, hey, let's face it -- the Bold 9900 really makes it really hard to wait for QNX line up.
No. Offerings on Android and (may God forgive me) iOS make it really hard to wait.
"What about this."
"We're RIM. You want this."
"No. Seriously. What about this?
"We're RIM. You want this."
Newsflash RIM. You've been resting on the fact that you were a big dog in the early professional mobile market. That's not going to save you. It's the only reason you haven't bailed from the market already. It's not going to slow your plummet anymore.
So get back to work and FOR FUCK'S SAKE...INNOVATE. Otherwise, take your place along other relics such as Microsoft Bob. The Lisa. The Osborne 2. Get the picture?
Ooh! Ooh!
Bettor Cop: There were a rash of crimes around Broadway and Seabright! I'm placing my bet on Broadway and Seabright!
Crime Dealer: Oh sorry! The next crime happened over on Center and Church! YOU LOSE!
Bettor Cop: Damn! That sucks!
Victim: You're telling ME asshole!
Nope. That's the point. The Always On DRM is also gating the single-player experience as well.
I'm pretty sure I'm GOING to get marked as a troll, but I found it ODD that you used caps a lot to emphasize your sentences. Do you realize how MUCH you actually do this?
Quite aware. HOWEVER, I do it in lieu of using HTML formatting, which can vary dramatically in appearance from browser to browser and by user preference.
Using caps for emphasis, I side-step this issue.
Seriously. While I admit that discovering things for yourself can sometimes be really cool. In a lot of cases, you'll see that people discovering things tend to be in LOTS of trouble (Shackleton anyone?). Like breaking down in a one-horse town after the horse has been stabled for the night.
On the flip side, I think the fact that you CAN find your way out of an area with GPS makes people more WILLING to go places they don't know.
Paper maps KINDA filled this niche, but static route plans tend to not survive interruptions. If you come across a construction area on a highway somewhere and want to detour around, paper route plans leave you screwed. With GPS, it updates as your route changes.