Great Scott! We're Gonna need a bigger boat! Shirley, you can't be serious!

[Glacier Peak]

New widget when viewing the forums in desktop mode (see below)! Also, a weekend high player count of 4,000 players (screenshot at bottom was taken before getting to a reported high of 4,000).

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edit: @macskull can you post your cool graph with HC max players and a link!

Edited January 15 by Glacier Peak

[macskull]

Here you go! It’s also in my signature along with some explaining of how it works. Of note, we did pass the 4000 player mark multiple times over the weekend, especially since this is a long weekend for much of the US.

[Water]

49 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

New widget when viewing the forums in desktop mode (see below)! Also, a weekend high player count of 4,000 players (screenshot at bottom was taken before getting to a reported high of 4,000).

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Edit: @macskull can you post your cool graph with HC max players and a link!

 

4163 it the highest figure which I saw.. shortly after I screenshotted 4146 ! :s

 

[MoonSheep]

it’s really exciting - nice seeing people street sweeping in atlas park and other low level zones and playing the content, classic mission teams etc

 

the game was always busy before on excelsior, but now it’s heaving

[Scarlet Shocker]

 

[Tattooist]

I agree with you. There was so much more people now than usual. The servers are getting laggy for some users too! It's preventing some people from having a good experience because of the server lag.

 

(This picture was taken at January 14th)

Edited January 16 by Snowbunny
Spell check

[Nemu]

The pandas are migrating to Torch-BEAR-er

 

It should be the official panda server.

 

I'll see myself out.

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

Great GooglyMoogly!  That's a lot of players.

[Tattooist]

2 hours ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

Great GooglyMoogly!  That's a lot of players.

More players than some steam games I know about!

[Coyotedancer]

'Kinda fun seeing that many people bouncing around the City... 

[Glacier Peak]

[evetsleep]

As someone who makes almost all their inf from the market I'm excited for this massive infusion of people.  I do wonder what impacts it'll have on the going rates for something's though.

[Glacier Peak]

Well I thought I'd revisit this thread again after 6 months and see if the number of players that joined us after the license announcement continued or declined. 

 

Looks like it's pretty much pre-announcement levels again. Is that good or bad? What do you think? If folks are curious, take a look at the graph of player count in @macskull post second from the top. 

[Triumphant]

27 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

Well I thought I'd revisit this thread again after 6 months and see if the number of players that joined us after the license announcement continued or declined. 

 

Looks like it's pretty much pre-announcement levels again. Is that good or bad? What do you think? If folks are curious, take a look at the graph of player count in @macskull post second from the top. 

 

It tells me pretty much what I would expect from a 20 year old game:  The small core of devoted fans remain the same small core of devoted fans.  Everyone else is looking for more modern gameplay.

 

It's fine by me.  I like the game.  I like the player base that we have.  If a few trickle in and a few trickle out, every now and again, that's okay too.  🤷‍♂️

[Lunar Ronin]

14 minutes ago, Triumphant said:

 

It tells me pretty much what I would expect from a 20 year old game:  The small core of devoted fans remain the same small core of devoted fans.  Everyone else is looking for more modern gameplay.

 

It's fine by me.  I like the game.  I like the player base that we have.  If a few trickle in and a few trickle out, every now and again, that's okay too.  🤷‍♂️

 

Yep.  It tells me that those who didn't play CoH back on live mostly won't be interested and who Homecoming has is mostly what it will have.  Both the graphics and gameplay are too old for modern gamers.  The player base will slowly but steadily shrink as people move on and die off.  I know too many people from live who've already passed beyond the rim.  Just is what it is.

[Techwright]

We do have an ongoing infusion of new blood, and...  uh, sorry, just realized that was a Snarky joke.  I didn't mean to...  an infusion of new players.  I meet a few most any week.  Likewise we still have former players discovering that the game exists and/or is now authorized.  So there is at least some counter to the population losses.

 

Since I re-read the OP, please remind me: what's the maximum population each shard can handle, and is that max the same as the original game, or have there been improvements?

[Water]

What else should be expected when brand new players looking for the nostalgic experience are being coaxed into AE who then miss the whole point of this 20 year old RP game resurgence. I think one of the reasons CoH is a high point in gaming to me is that it took a fortnight to earn a travel power back in the day and to complete the zone, The Hollows (where's da hallows? the AE babies ask - as the old joke still goes). It was a real task of learning and time commitment to get somewhere. Every ability was hard earned. All the while subconsciously learning how to use my few abilities in the most effective and economical way possible. I wouldn't give up my HC conveniences today though, nor do I skip the lower game 20 years later.

 

It was nice that there was a recent greater awareness of how passionate people feel about their gaming experiences. What with NC licensing our game back to us. How they/we have a sense of ownership. A game is still a physical thing to me. It was a physical thing, programming in BASIC some half century ago, then magnetic tape, then floppy discs, then CDs. Those physical formats have caused a sense of ownership to be instilled in the established gamer. It was a guarantee that our game is available, back then, whenever we load it up. It was always on the shelf or in the stack or on the pile, depending on your storage methods. It was always there.

 

Fast forward to so called RMT game services where you can pay someone to play a game for you so that you don't have to bother with it (Eh!?) and online only where there is a vacuum of physical media and a creeping sense that you actually don't possess the game in any case which you paid hard earned money to purchase. Once the operator switches it off, it is off for all and forever. But why would that be a bother? You haven't learned the game, you've skipped the whole process of levelling up where you could have learned how to play the game, how to use your power sets, how to synergise with the complimentary powers of your 'teammates' and how to interact with your chosen esoteric community. You have barged your way to the highest level in order to play a gaming character which you have no idea to how to play. You are a liability in a team and you still get your rectum handed to you solo. Because you neglected to learn how to play.

 

The reality is that fewer people will take up the experience. The community will shrink. There is one outstanding long term value which Homecoming has freely given to gamers the world over whether CoH is around or not. We still own our games. 'Online only' is tainted by the closure of servers which service only a minority and they don't make profit. More precisely, they don't make massive profit. As far as I'm concerned if they make 'a profit' however small then they are a going concern. That always irked me about how Paragon Studios was closed, still being profitable. HC CoH doesn't need a profit because it is upheld by our community who support it financially too. With games like The Crew 1 being currently cracked by the fans, much like CoH has been, there does appear to be a future for games we feel we own because we paid for them. Equally dedicated fans of any franchise are now proven to bring back to life and usage perfectly adequate games enjoyed by thousands. CoH and all future rebirthed franchises will be used as bench marks for all fans to show companies what can be done with heart. I think companies will eventually build 'end of life offline' into all games, I think it will eventually be standard once companies learn that without it, it is affecting the bottom line as is evidenced by those currently burned. They are increasing in number and they are vocal about it.

 

Edited July 13 by Water

[Snarky]

welcome to the Hotel California.

 

you can check out anytime you like...

[Glacier Peak]

1 hour ago, Snarky said:

welcome to the Hotel California.

 

you can check out anytime you like...

Yeah, but check in times are totally unreasonable!

[Glacier Peak]

6 hours ago, Water said:

fortnight to earn a travel power back in the day and to complete the zone, The Hollows

I can empathize, but it's still possible to throw back this experience. Turn off sprint, athletic run, and don't use any movement increasing set IOs, then run across the Hollows. It's nostalgic for sure, but it's also going to take 30 minutes to reach the mission door any nobody is waiting that long on a player anymore. Heck, even back then Taxi bots were a godsend to players. Or if someone on your team had Teleport Friend.

 

Interesting points throughout the rest of your post on the video game industry also.

[Triumphant]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

I can empathize, but it's still possible to throw back this experience. Turn off sprint, athletic run, and don't use any movement increasing set IOs, then run across the Hollows. It's nostalgic for sure, but it's also going to take 30 minutes to reach the mission door any nobody is waiting that long on a player anymore. Heck, even back then Taxi bots were a godsend to players. Or if someone on your team had Teleport Friend.

 

Interesting points throughout the rest of your post on the video game industry also.

 

Yeah, that's the thing.  If the legions of old-timers on live are a vastly larger group than the rest of us, they could just band together and play in the classic style, by dialing the difficulty up or down and refusing to use the various new-fangled widgets.  A few folks have even posted old-school type groups on Discord and the forums.  These groups are not comprised of huge numbers of members, so far as I know (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.  But if I'm wrong, why is there still an issue from an old-school player's perspective?). I think if that was going to happen, you would already see it happening.  I don't see it happening.  Maybe players of a more old-school play style would get more traction if they advertised outside of the game discord/forums on Twitter/X, facebook, or whatever the current social media landscape is?  I dunno.  🤷‍♂️

 

But I think the reality is that most live players have moved onto other interests.  A few of them have returned via the call of powerful nostalgia, and these are the ones that remain.  Others (like myself) are folks that never played during live, stumbled on Homecoming entirely by accident, really like the game in its present form, and keep sticking around.

 

Realistically, I think reverting the game to something more like it's live state would just drive off most of the current player base, making it a fully (or mostly) dead game, once again.

 

The above is all just my opinion, of course.  I haven't got any hard data to back up my hypothesis, fwiw.

[Scarlet Shocker]

19 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

Well I thought I'd revisit this thread again after 6 months and see if the number of players that joined us after the license announcement continued or declined. 

 

Looks like it's pretty much pre-announcement levels again. Is that good or bad? What do you think? If folks are curious, take a look at the graph of player count in @macskull post second from the top. 

 

 

I don't think you can say it's "good" or "bad"

 

I think we can be very positive that we have our game after all this time and trauma which we don't need to revisit here.

 

Like any game ever, people go to "the new" so we got a huge resurgence of numbers on the official announcement and then that's tailed off. Hopefully over time the fact that many more people know the game lives means that the mean number of "hard core" / devoted players will increase a bit but I doubt it will be massive.

 

But now the game has "official" blessing we're likely to see many more people return for new content and shinies.

 

Personally I'm pretty glad to see where the game is now. It seems to be reasonably healthy and importantly, meeting its costs.

 

Even more importantly, we are blessed with a dedicated team of developers who love the game, respect its legacy and history and serve it very well in terms of the content and additions they deliver. They clearly think long and hard about what makes the final cut and personally I'm pretty impressed overall with what they have delivered. They love this game and that shows.

 

Given the above, I think we're set for another decade or so. People will come and go but that's natural.

 

Long live City of Heroes!

[Ukase]

On 7/13/2024 at 8:41 AM, Triumphant said:

I don't see it happening. 

Well, one reason why you may not see it happening is, for me, when I do crazy stuff like this, I do it solo. Why should others suffer with me? And explaining it over and over again to each new team...it gets old. So, it's just easier not to bother anyone. 

Not that I play like that all the time, but when I do, it's solo. 

[Intrinsic]

On 7/13/2024 at 1:09 AM, Water said:

What else should be expected when brand new players looking for the nostalgic experience are being coaxed into AE who then miss the whole point of this 20 year old RP game resurgence. I think one of the reasons CoH is a high point in gaming to me is that it took a fortnight to earn a travel power back in the day and to complete the zone, The Hollows (where's da hallows? the AE babies ask - as the old joke still goes). It was a real task of learning and time commitment to get somewhere. Every ability was hard earned. All the while subconsciously learning how to use my few abilities in the most effective and economical way possible. I wouldn't give up my HC conveniences today though, nor do I skip the lower game 20 years later.

 

I remember when CoH was first released.  Some of the folks I knew who frequented MMO forums at the time bought the game, powerleveled their characters up to 40 or 50 in the fastest and most boring ways possible, realized there was essentially nothing to do at max level (exemplaring had not been implemented yet), and immediately quit while proclaiming that the game sucked. 

 

Their previous experiences with other MMOs had conditioned them to play in a certain way, race to max level ASAP and start grinding through the endgame.  I was in a raid guid in Everquest, and we used to say that the real game began at level 50 (or 60, or whatever max level was depending on the current expansion).  Twenty years later, I believe this mindset is still present in most MMOs.  CoH is an exception to the rule in this respect, and it confounds veterans from other MMOs.

 

[Triumphant]

7 hours ago, Ukase said:

Well, one reason why you may not see it happening is, for me, when I do crazy stuff like this, I do it solo. Why should others suffer with me? And explaining it over and over again to each new team...it gets old. So, it's just easier not to bother anyone. 

Not that I play like that all the time, but when I do, it's solo. 

I totally get that.  And there are certain powers in the game (assassins strike, ranged snipes, teleport target... and plenty of others I can't think of off the top of my head right now) that are really only enjoyable if you're approaching the game in a careful, measured, tactical way, as these powers require thought and finesse to fully derive the most enjoyment from.  PUGs are usually frenzied, random things with players of widely varying skill levels, which is not conducive to enjoying those kinds of powers or just playing the game at a more thoughtful, relaxed pace as you prefer to do (and as I myself prefer doing, from time to time).

 

I also play solo for this reason, sometimes- though these days I play solo mostly because I have garbage internet and I don't want to torture other players on my team with my frequent rubberbanding, mapserves, and other lag-related woes.