Indomitable Needs Your Help

[Without_Pause]

2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

City of Heroes wasn't making enough money for NCSoft even with all the microtransactions.

Oddly enough Aion and Lineage 2 are both F2P so living off of transactions as are the vast majority of MMOS these days. I don't think that's what killed CoH. I do get it not being a good culture fit for Koreans and NC Soft waiting to keep tapping that aspect.

[UltraAlt]

17 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

I don't think that's what killed CoH

 

That's what killed it for me +the F2P community ("how do I get out of Atlas?" due to ....) +AE farming +incarnate system

[Ghost]

2 hours ago, Apparition said:

 

 

Excelsior has a... reputation among the people that play on other shards.  A not entirely undeserved one.  Mainly that PUGs will just up and quit in the middle of TFs, SFs, and trials for no apparent reason and without warning.  It's honestly one of the main reasons why I moved from Excelsior to Torchbearer thirteen months ago as it happened to me when I PUGed way too often.  I made a thread ranting about it a couple of years ago.  A few Torchbearer shard players that moved to Excelsior within the past several months have moved back to Torchbearer, saying the exact same thing.  Sure, you'll be able to fill TFs, SFs, and trials, and at a quicker pace, but by the end of it you may have only five players.

 

The reason being that people have reputations on the smaller shard and can't get away with doing stuff like that too often.  On Excelsior, it's like the big city where no one knows anyone else, so you can get away with doing stuff like that.  So some people are preferring to stay on the smaller shards and not deal with that.  YMMV.

That may be the reputation, but it’s far from the truth.

I am not a member of a SG, nor do I have friends that play.  The only way I get to play is via PUGs.  I join and start them frequently - will someone drop?  Occasionally, but it is rare.

 

 

[Without_Pause]

33 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

 

That's what killed it for me +the F2P community ("how do I get out of Atlas?" due to ....) +AE farming +incarnate system

Spoiler alert, CoH is still F2P and I've seen instances of "How do I get there?" on HC. You'll see less instances of it since odds are former players are more likely to be the ones playing, but I see new players frequently.

[Ukase]

3 hours ago, Apparition said:

Excelsior has a... reputation among the people that play on other shards. 

I find this interesting. And, I think if I were to PUG as often as you may have, I would probably see more of that. As it is, I read some crazy dialogue just yesterday before and during a speed underground. 

I can't quote verbatim, but the gist of it was: 
Player: I'm debating on whether or not to call off work and do this trial. 

Trial starts. 

Just after the first phase (explained below) is completed: 
Player: Sorry, I thought this was going to be fast. I gotta go. 
Player logs off. 

The first phase of Underground, as we all know is kind of slow, as there are two waves of two separate ambushes. And, no matter how quickly you clobber the first wave, you have to wait for the next, twice. It's like 3 minutes from entering the trial to finishing this part. 

The recruitment for this was for a "speed" ugt. I know UGT well enough to know there are parts you can speed, and parts you can't. Not everyone knows this, I get it. 
But at no time did the player in question ask "how long will this take?" And he quits after 3 minutes. 

Did we need him? No. Finished just fine without that silly person. 

If people had been turned away and he pulled that, I would have given him a proper verbal thrashing for being selfish and yes, stupid. He knew he had to work. And you've got to be some kind of stupid to think a UGT, even a speed one, is going to take less than 5 minutes. Even a speed lambda is going to be hard pressed to finish that quickly. 

So, yeah, I can see where this might happen more often than you'd appreciate. I've been social distancing in game as well as in real life, teaming only with players I know. If I don't know them, the moods gotta be right for me to take the risk. 

I do feel badly for the folks on Indom. While I farm there, I can see the questions in help and the lfg activity. Other than one player who moved from Excelsior to Indom because he burned too many bridges, I've never come across anyone that's a jerk. I've got a base there, more than a few characters leveling up. 

But man...as much as I'd like to be the character I want to see in game, I try to be patient, but sitting in a zone for 20 minutes with nothing to do just waiting for others just makes me angry and resentful. I'm just not a cheerful giver in this regard. I simply hate to wait. 

 

[Ironblade]

3 hours ago, Ukase said:

My best advice is to simply forgo your wonderful bases and transfer. (Beyond SG bases, I see no reason why that's not a feasible solution...other than maybe alt names)

 

3 hours ago, Apparition said:

The reason being that people have reputations on the smaller shard and can't get away with doing stuff like that too often.  On Excelsior, it's like the big city where no one knows anyone else, so you can get away with doing stuff like that.  So some people are preferring to stay on the smaller shards and not deal with that.  YMMV.

 

Unless I'm mistaken, the current server architecture is entirely virtual so it doesn't need X hardware per shard.  So there's no reason to merge shards.  People who like busy shards play on the busy ones and people who like quiet shards play on the quiet ones.  Please who like busy some of the time and quiet some of the time can play on both.  Personally, I have at least one character on every shard.  I do task forces on all shards and only do 'big content' (iTrials, Hami raids, MSR's, etc) on the busy shards.

 

[Glacier Peak]

3 hours ago, Ironblade said:

Unless I'm mistaken, the current server architecture is entirely virtual so it doesn't need X hardware per shard.  So there's no reason to merge shards.  People who like busy shards play on the busy ones and people who like quiet shards play on the quiet ones.  Please who like busy some of the time and quiet some of the time can play on both.  Personally, I have at least one character on every shard.  I do task forces on all shards and only do 'big content' (iTrials, Hami raids, MSR's, etc) on the busy shards.

 

Good solution! That one character can be the "curator" so to speak, that maintains the base access/membership for each shard. Building five or more bases is a bit of an investment, but would alleviate the server-hopping difficulties for players who do so frequently and desire consistent access to such amenities.

[UltraAlt]

8 hours ago, Without_Pause said:

Spoiler alert, CoH is still F2P and I've seen instances of "How do I get there?" on HC. You'll see less instances of it since odds are former players are more likely to be the ones playing, but I see new players frequently.

 

To a large extent the players behave on Homcoming like they did before F2P was released (subscribers) - exception of Excelsior (which is the new Freedom).

 

It is F2P now, but there is are no microtransactions.

 

I do run into new players. And I'm still running into new players that are just logging into Homecoming for the first time ... or at least they are saying it is their first time being back.

 

 

[Turric]

14 hours ago, Ukase said:

My best advice is to simply forgo your wonderful bases and transfer. (Beyond SG bases, I see no reason why that's not a feasible solution...other than maybe alt names) 
Alternatively - consider a routine team up over on Excelsior or Everlasting, and entice players to join your group on Indom for various activities. And, over time, seduce them into joining you routinely.

 

 

Indeed, I have done that to a lesser extent. I have moved about 10 toons off of Indomitable in the past few months and put them on either Excel or Everlasting. And I have run some content on the new servers. It reminded me of what Indomitable was a year or so ago.

 

My only problem with moving wholesale is names... There are a couple names of my characters that are not available on the bigger servers anymore. And yes I know I could change them to "Captain So and So" with a period or a dash or whatever but I really dislike that. As someone else stated (either this thread or another recent one), if names could go by global handles, making those unique, while character names might not actually be, I would be favorable inclined to this change, though with a few caveats.

 

Of course, the other possibility is unlocking names on toons that have not logged in more than a certain amount of time, like a year?

[macskull]

Amusing and topically relevant information I found just now while checking the server status page:

 

 

(So, Indom's population is 35% higher than Torchbearer's - bets on when the "Torchbearer needs your help" thread pops up?)

 

(P.S. This thread and others like it got me to tracking player numbers on a weekly basis, my signature has the current graph. It's currently way too few data points to actually provide any trend analysis but it'll be interesting to see what it looks like in a month or two.)

Edited April 20, 2022 by macskull

[Turric]

@Crysis As an aside, and completely off topic, I have your name on Indomitable (Crysis) on one of my characters.

[Clave Dark 5]

7 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

I do run into new players. And I'm still running into new players that are just logging into Homecoming for the first time ... or at least they are saying it is their first time being back.

I do keep seeing "obvious n00b questions" in chat, and the reddit for CoH has the occasional "which server?" query as well.

[Without_Pause]

As mentioned before, I started on Torch and need to stick at least one character on there. I would likely only do occasional playing there since the build never fully got T4ed, but I would like for that to happen.

[Ukase]

I still have a dozen or so characters on torch. A farmer, and my first fire blaster.  I also have a character that was supposed to be a copy of one of my favorite characters on live - a spines/regen scrapper. Heh, I looked at it- and it didn't have ANY IOs in it. Level 26 and nothing but SOs. Small wonder the stats were really bad. I stopped playing it because it didn't seem nearly as robust as my scrapper was on live, post regen nerf. But my memories of that character are at 50, not 26. Still, I hate to PL it. As someone who gets the 4 passive accolades on each character, I already run Maria Jenkins at least twice a week, and that's really about 2x as much as I'd like to. 

Maybe Torch and Indom should join up. 

I had initially moved to torch because of some friends who reached out that had settled there, so I moved. I always felt like the folks at Torch were better speed runners, more of the min-max type. Excelsior slowly began to pick up some of these folks, or some of them simply "caught up". But there's no question with more players comes more casual players. And some of them are so casual, they genuinely have no idea what they are doing, and are quite blissfully ignorant and don't even know it. 

[MoonSheep]

for the sake of balance, i’d like to add a viewpoint that most iTrials are slightly dull once you’ve done each of them a few times over and MSR’s really are the most dull thing you could do in CoH

 

i expect the server population is experiencing a depreciation curve after an initial surge in activity and will level off over the next 6-12 months

 

i’m a supporter of the holy trinity and feel in the modern CoH era it has almost completely disappeared. the game has lost some of its cooperation charm from my view - every AT is the same and nothing matters. is that the reason for population decline? who knows, takes the shine off for me slightly 

[Crysis]

6 hours ago, Turric said:

@Crysis As an aside, and completely off topic, I have your name on Indomitable (Crysis) on one of my characters.

 

I know and it's why I refuse to play there.  😛

[Ironblade]

8 hours ago, macskull said:

(So, Indom's population is 35% higher than Torchbearer's - bets on when the "Torchbearer needs your help" thread pops up?)

The numbers fluctuate a lot.

 

[Apparition]

Yeah.  Torchbearer's population seems to be higher than Indomitable... up to twice as much... between around 11 A.M. ET and 11 P.M. ET, and then nose dives to lower than Indomitable's population.  Seriously, unfortunately, Torchbearer is completely dead late at night and in the morning Eastern Time the past couple of months.

[Crysis]

14 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

The numbers fluctuate a lot.

 

 

I still think, as others have pointed out already, a shard merge at some point would address some of these issues.  But I realize bases, names, etc....makes that unlikely.

[MoonSheep]

12 minutes ago, Crysis said:

 

I still think, as others have pointed out already, a shard merge at some point would address some of these issues.  But I realize bases, names, etc....makes that unlikely.

 

that's not a problem - if two people with the same name appear together in a zone, PvP mode is activated and the true victor of that name will prevail 

[Without_Pause]

On 4/19/2022 at 12:11 PM, Without_Pause said:

This has never happened to me on Excel. I think I had maybe one TF break up, but that feels like quite the maybe. There was one TF where it was stuck in a loop for giving us the same mission. We broke up, reformed, and completed it. Yes, some people left and didn't come back for round two, but round two finished with 8 people.

Well, same bug. TF simply broke up.

 

 

Edited April 20, 2022 by Without_Pause

[Troo]

1 hour ago, Apparition said:

Yeah.  Torchbearer's population seems to be higher than Indomitable... up to twice as much... between around 11 A.M. ET and 11 P.M. ET, and then nose dives to lower than Indomitable's population.  Seriously, unfortunately, Torchbearer is completely dead late at night and in the morning Eastern Time the past couple of months.

 

quadruple boxing will do that..

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 hour ago, Apparition said:

Yeah.  Torchbearer's population seems to be higher than Indomitable... up to twice as much... between around 11 A.M. ET and 11 P.M. ET, and then nose dives to lower than Indomitable's population.  Seriously, unfortunately, Torchbearer is completely dead late at night and in the morning Eastern Time the past couple of months.

It's almost like...   People have jobs!

 

I know. Weird, huh?   😁

[macskull]

11 hours ago, MoonSheep said:

i’m a supporter of the holy trinity and feel in the modern CoH era it has almost completely disappeared.

Not really on-topic, but the "holy trinity" was never really a thing in this game.

[UltraAlt]

17 hours ago, macskull said:

So, Indom's population is 35% higher than Torchbearer's - bets on when the "Torchbearer needs your help" thread pops up?)

 

This is an off-prime hours screen shot.

The increase of population on Indom has happened just lately, and it is still lower than Torchbearer in prime time.