f13.net

http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/freedom/freedom_overview.html (http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/freedom/freedom_overview.html)

Sound pretty much identical to what I remember of the Champions Online model (without the stupidity of removing access to one of the major selling points of the game). Free players, Premium players (previous subscribers) and VIPs (subscribers who get an amount of cash shop points included in their subscription each month).

FAQ

Wasn't sure if this should go here on in the City of Heroes section in the graveyard but since the AoC announcement got posted here I assume this is the right place. Apologies if I got it wrong.

I'll have to pay attention to this. If I can get back into my old account, and keep the characters, content, and perks that I had previously accumulated, then F2P with a cash shop might get me to sign back up.

Coolness.  Great timing since I've been on a CoX kick.

It's the right place for it, Tyrnan.  No one would see it buried in the CoX forum.

Yeah I just resubbed 3 days ago so I'm pretty  :grin: right now. And I've been hoping they'd makes some sort of time-based powerset for years so that should keep me happy for a while.

Hmm...

Merusk needed another sig line, eh?

Seconded. Maybe it's time to see how rusty I am with my rad defender... again.

I am kind of sad they aren't including the Mission Architect for f2p'rs (I assume they can unlock the ability to play MA arcs with $, but only VIPs will be able to create arcs). That feature (player-created story arcs) is the best/most unique aspect of COH, and I'm not just saying this because I have a dev's choice arc.  :awesome_for_real:

The real question. Will it be on steam?

So far do not like. I'll have to see what my buds on Virtue are going to do. If most of them are going to try to move to the VIP-only server that's going to be problematic for me.

It already is.

In the F2P area I mean. ( Using the wallet and all that ) There are a few MMO's that are on steam, but not in the F2P section, but are F2P ( Or will be ).

FINALLY!!! This game has cried out to be free to play for far longer than the current fad.

If Steam also supports reoccurring subscriptions then they could do it though I doubt NCsoft will want to give Valve a cut.

They might for the increased exposure.

It's been a while since I've given a good, sig-worthy quote.

Yeah I would guess thats issue.  However if it was as tightly integrated as Spiral knights ( Uses steam account for log in ETC.. ) I could see giving it a spin again.

As a subscriber I'll be getting some free cash shop points, wonder how far they'll go. Might finally get some of the costume pack outfits. I'd always thought that charging separately for a handful of new costume options was kinda shifty.

Hopefully they can pull in some more cash and finally do what they've needed to do since launch and create new tilesets. Nemesis so needs its own steampunk style lab/secret base. And maybe one day the CoT can afford to widen their damn tunnels.

Ok cool.


Since this my first day on planet Earth, what's diff between CoX and CO?  CO seemed faster to the fun with early travel powers and more variety of power overall.  How do they stack up?

CoX has actually wizened up to this issue and you can now get your travel power earlier.  The Fitness Pool power is also given to everyone before level 10 for freeeeeeeeeeee.  And many power sets that were kept for one archetype only has been given to a lot of archetypes.  Plus they added more power sets overall.

While sigworthy, if I tack on another from her it begins to look like stalking.

You mean it's not?

Uh, still 6 and 14 last I checked.  Last week.  Fitness is given at level 2 for free.

The production values are higher with CoX.  It runs better while looking better.  I prefer most of the costume options with CoX, but CO has some you can't get plus more colors per part.  It's an acceptable alternative but it should have been an evolutionary step up.  The world is larger in CoX, heroes and villains, and with Going Rogue you can bounce between the two sides.

The combat systems are different enough to each have their adherents.  Free-form power selection is cooler, but limited to paying customers.  CoX has a wide variety though, so it's not like they're hurting.  CO's travel powers are superior for the most part.

For me, CoX just edges out CO in so many areas that it makes it an easy choice.  It doesn't help that I seem completely unable to give a whit about CO's lore.  It's like the difference between Marvel and DC, except the DC characters are all generic and bland.  There's Witch Woman who does witchy things and Bullet Man who shoots himself out of a giant cannon at naughty people.  Oh, and a dude named Defender whose defining moment is failing to defend a major metropolitan city.  Thankfully, no one gives a shit about the real Detroit and razing it to build a modern city would only be an improvement.  Somehow the game even gets that wrong.

I believe you get a temp travel power now though that carries you until you get the real one. Maybe I only had that as a vet reward or something.

Nope.

From the looks of things I'd have to play to unlock most of my characters, even as a returning player. That's not so thrilling.

EDIT: However I find it extremely amusing that only pay customers can actually post on their forums.  :awesome_for_real:

Been like that for a long time...isn't that the standard 'norm' nowadays?

Well of course it was like that before, the only customers they had were pay customers. I don't know if it is the standard for F2P games.

Who has played CoX lately?   Last time I played it the mission architect had ruined it.   All the grouping had dried up for anything but power leveling in the MA missions.

The City Traveler veteran reward (5 years) lets you choose a travel power at level 6 without having to take the prerequisite. Obviously not much use to people who haven't been playing for that long, but they said that you could choose the vet rewards you wanted with the new system. Although I imagine there will still be some sort of tiered system and would be very surprised if you could choose that one straight away.

Early access to travel powers was definitely one of the things that CO did right. Giving every second mob the ability to turn it off on you however, wasn't such a bright idea.


Yeah, I was thinking that they really should add a section to their forums that the F2P people can post in. Although I could also see that turning into a bit of a headache.

That didn't seem to be true when I last played around when Going Rogue came out, at least on Virtue. I was constantly getting tells for groups from random people, mostly for non-MA stuff.

It's the same on Union. There's still some of that going on in MA (or people just use it to power up to SO/IO levels) but it's not nearly as prevalent as it was when it launched. They tightened up a lot of the loopholes people were using since then. Also I think that (some) people finally realised that rushing to the level cap in a game that doesn't really have an end-game was rather pointless.

Oh man. If all I have to do is buy Paragon Points to play all my old characters for free, I'm sold.

I'm really curious what exactly they are going to sell considering this.   They can't really do pay2win without and end game.   I really want to hope they are going to do something smart like new power sets at 15 bucks a pop or something.   Going on the past though CoX's code is not well suited to pumping out new power sets cheaply.

Costume sets, baby. The game is 95% playing dress up.


EDIT: Also yes, CoX's lore stomps the shit out of CO's. I give a fuck about CoX's villain groups (well, most of them). CO is just zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Also CoX's superjump >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CO's superjump.

I'm definitely going to have to look into this.  I always loved CoX.  I just ended up losing interest finally because the gameplay just got repetitive, even for me.

Yeah it is definitely in my top 3 or 4 MMOs, I go back to it from time to time, this will facilitate that for me nicely.

I found that it felt really slow and clunky in terms of combat after having played CO for a bit, but I'll still give it another whirl after F2P.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15528482 (http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15528482)

Dev stream from earlier today giving some more details. Looks like there's going to be one of these each day this week.

Champions Online model does not allow previous subscribers to play old characters. Far as I am aware previous subscribers get no benefit from the CO F2P model. City of Heroes model allows you to play your previous characters and that is why I will give it a go but ignored the CO conversion. Actually it is worse than ignored. Before going F2P I kept CO installed because I could log in to my characters whenever I wanted. While not subscribing the account was converted to unlimited trial mode. This meant all my characters were temporarily set at level 15 and could never change zone but otherwise were playable. I even subscribed for a month because some friends started playing and I logged in to talk to them and they got me to upgrade. The unlimited trial auto conversion went away with F2P so I uninstalled.

So if F2P give you 2 character slots, but you are an old-time player with tons of characters...what determines which characters you can get?

I'd love to be able to pop in and out of CoX from time to time. My DM/SR Scrapper was finally inching towards the cap...too bad I remember Super Speed being...somewhat difficult to use in urban areas, do to the inability to run up walls.  :oh_i_see:

I'll totally give this another whirl now that it's going F2P.

Is it two characters per 'game' or two characters Total? I don't know how the CoH/CoV split works these days.


Of course, my highest character was only level 16, so it's probably not a huge deal either way.

You pick. You get two "global character slot tokens" to use to unlock whichever two characters you want.

It's easier now if you respec to get inherent fitness so you always have hurdle or you get something like Ninja Run (part of the Martial Arts booster) which has a jump boost as well as a run speed boost.

Two characters per account -- i.e. total.

I agree with a lot of the comments about the lore and graphic style being way better.   The combat, free form, etc though are hard to give up.   I don't actually care that much about true freeform but the archetypes in CoX are just  :uhrr:.

Thanks, Trippy.

I didn't have any real trouble previously (I also had Fitness pool stuff), but free powers are nice.

This is my experience too. CoH/V just feels slow these days.

My issue with CoH was always the grind. Even back in the day, it broke me. I got 3 characters to level cap in DaoC, but I couldn't get to 20 in CoH.

As a F2P thing where I can just pop in whenever I feel like it and not feel obligated to play it because I have a sub going, yea I'll totally play that. If only to just make costumes all day.  :grin:

There is no split. City of Villains ceased to be a product a long time ago when all of its features and customers were folded into CoH.

They already have quite a variety of microtrans available. I'm curious how they'll do character slots since as a subscriber, those are my primary motivation for continuing to pay monthly (having to pay every time you want to roll an alt? In City of Heroes? Madness). Keeping it limited to just two would be a slick way to minimize loss of subscribers. Seems like Paragon has little to lose here and a lot to gain - and any restructuring of the vet rewards system that gives me hope of getting City Traveler and the use-anywhere auction interface makes me a happy customer. I also really like that they're making limited free server transfers a permanent thing. Way more elegant than repeated server closures, in my opinion.

I didn't play much CO (just Canada and some of Desert, basically) but it's more akin to EQ2/WoW than to CoX in my opinion, at least as far as quest-grindiness goes. CoX's missions are all instanced and scalable, mission contacts don't require breadcrumb prerequisites, you can level to 50 entirely in the Mission Architect and not really miss anything except some badges (i.e. achievements) and quest text (which is way better than the industry standard, though that's not saying a lot). It's way, way less railroady than your typical MMO. Experience comes chiefly from killing mobs, and it gets pretty glacial if you try to solo but grouping is easy and fun.

They've now added what is essentially a gear treadmill to the endgame, but ignoring that, character customization is actually pretty ridiculously complex if you want it to be. Combat is a little bit clunky but steamrolling huge packs of mobs at the highest difficulty in a big group is chaotic fun that is hard to find anywhere else.

I hardly log in any more but I still go full-fanboy at the drop of a hat.

I dig the invention system.

You can do the old way of slotting SOs and be viable.  You can slot simple IOs around 30 and never really have to worry about slotting again, or you can get into tinkering with sets for all the small boosts.  Limited access for free players kind of worries me about that.  If we can unlock that without going VIP I might just do so.

I'm pretty psyched for this; it'll make it easy to just hop back on for a weekend or whatever when I'm bored of WoW. Hope you're not too gimped without paying, however.

Hasn't been grindy, as in slow leveling, in a long time. They even put in a "turn off xp gain" option because some people were leveling up too fast and missing some of the story arcs. (Could always do them via flashback though.)

For me the grindiness comes at higher levels where I'm trying to IO-out my char (soft capped defenses are so very nice). Have to repeat a lot of content (alignment dailies, task forces) to get the various merits to buy the rare recipes that I can't afford on the auction house. Also a lot of repetition unlocking incarnate abilities.

That would be excellent. Group content in CoH was always fun but the game was more an "occasional" thing rather than something regular enough a sub made sense.

Bonus extra points if they link it up to steam <3

I just watched a video of a CoX scrapper earlier and lost all my interest in playing this again instantly.   The slowness of it was unbearable.   It made WoW look so quick and snappy.

What's the link to the video?

I don't remember.  It was just some random video showing off the martial arts booster I looked up to see the ninja run.  It quickly reminded me how CoX's combat worked is all.   The slow executing moves and the dreadful wham/pow/etc sound effects.  Not to mention the poor bastard was occasionally using single target attacks because of course as a scrapper he didn't have a full set of decent aoe's.

It's fine with me. COX combat where you are probably in a group and can apply your abilities tactically wins over CO's "mash button" gameplay. But then I've never owned a console. COX definitely wins in the attacks having a much wider variety of tactical effects with real CC, buff and debuff possibilities.

Hopefully they updated the character models a bit in going rogue though, or they'll be looking really archaic about now.

I want to get back in just to have fun with my villain mastermind again. It was unbelievably awesome running around with my own pocket party. I had the undead kind. Loved watching my zombies run up and barf on stuff.

Now hopefully NCSoft can dig up my old account info. I have no idea what it is anymore.

I've never gotten around to playing this game, but for free the price is right. Color me intrigued.

This is awesome.  I used to sub and play with the costume builder for about 4 hours and play the game for 30 minutes.

What I like about COX combat is it's the only one other than old timey AC that lets you fight hordes of enemies. There's very little pulling one. You grab a group of a dozen or maybe you grab two groups. I find it far "faster" in feel than the "pull one guy, kill it, pull next" that's part of most games.

The scaling instances are perfect too. Can duo with the misses. And if you've got a bunch of people then it can get quite fun plowing into hordes of enemies. And the mission builder, while obviously somewhat limited, can add at least a little variety and story to the slaughter.

So, I played for 6 months after launch.  Will that character be there and available? I liked Happy Fun Ball.

Characters should be.  If he was too low a level, I think 31 was the cut-off but not sure as it's been so long ago, it's possible someone grabbed the name.

Man, now I am psyched to maybe see my scrapper again, who I finally got to the point of being almost invulnerable - good defense, great lifetap and endurance tap, near-infinite haste...in large groups I would commonly be the only guy left with any endurance to keep going during large fights.

They nerfed you.

Eh, I played a year or two ago, after I was supposedly nerfed, and it felt alright.

Invulnerable is not the right word, but properly super.

Espeicialy around the level 20-30 sweet spot there is so much stuff this game got right which others haven't bothered with. Sidekicking, everything about the defender archetype, more genuine class/playstyle variety than just about anything, hordes of enemies, costumes, travel powers....


Suspect new people will find it slow to start, unfortunately it has that 'earn your way to fun by about level 10/15' bullshit but ymmv etc. And the power curve up to around level 20 does at least mean you feel more powerful by the end of almost every session. After 30 starts to get a bit grindy, but hey, that is what alts are for.

When does this go F2P?

Well, the points start accruing July 1.  It's possible they'll release then as well, but I don't think they've given a specific date otherwise.

"Later this year".

Lots of details to yet sort out.

Is this the first NCsoft title to go F2P in the West?

F2P goes live with issue 21.  Since issue 20.5 is just hitting test, I'd guess 2-3 months, so...  September?

Most likely, they've literally just begun closed beta for it with a small group of testers to gauge initial feedback. There's the new Time Manipulation powerset plus another one to be announced in the next couple of weeks (plus more hinted at but I don't know if they'll be part of Issue 21 or further on down the road) that will likely need extensive testing plus all the other content on top of the F2P system itself.

Sorta-necro... I21 just went live yesterday, with current subscribers getting access to a F2P 'headstart' as well. I'm not sure how long the 'headstart' lasts, but they definitely still have a few bugs to iron out.

Here there be patch notes (http://eu.cityofheroes.com/uk/news/patch_notes/issue_21_convergence_-_september_13_2011_live.php). Highlights:
- new veteran rewards program (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Paragon_Rewards_Program) that allows non-sub accounts to unlock 'pay features' for free permanently and get the 'old' veteran rewards as well*
- cash shop (duh)
- VIP-only server for the cool kids
- revamped tutorials and newb zones (e.g. Galaxy City is out, most old contacts are out, new-style story arcs are in)
- '!'-style quest indicators for contacts
- phasing in outdoor maps depending on story arc status (if you're grouped, everyone is in the phase of the group leader)
- new interface, login/char creation screens
- various QOL improvements (e.g. travel powers at level 4)
- some new trials and powersets (Beam Rifle, Time Manipulation; Street Justice is being delayed for a few weeks)
- standard patch balance changes
- streaming downloader like Guild Wars and newWOW, so you don't have to download a 3-gig client to start playing
- some strange and convoluted anti-powerleveling code (some early reports indicate this may in fact hurt large groups that are killing stuff efficiently even in dev-made missions)

* As a 45-month vet with a box purchase + promo code, I got 20 tokens, enough to max out tier 6. This got me full access to the Mission Architect (creating and playing story arcs), access to controllers/MMs, ability to use the AH, earn merits, and some other random vet reward stuff, all without having to pay anything.

Personally I think I'll be playing COH for a while, especially since I don't actually need a sub for my main activities (creating Mission Architect storyarcs, messing around with various powersets on alts). Now it'll be possible to buy even more arc slots, there is no limit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFd5Cci_pE4)!

My biggest gripe is that the Invention System is locked out until you're at the 60+ month mark. Considering how much of the game has been released and retooled with the Invention System in mind, locking away such a massive part of the game (especially the later game) behind such a steep wall is kind of off-putting. Pretty much every character I have above level 20 is stuffed to the gills with inventions.

I'd much rather just resub for a month or two anyway, but since I don't have Going Rogue my 50s would have precious little to do.

Edit: And it's a shame that the devs are still on this anti-"powerleveling" bent even after all these years. Nothing they do has ever truly curbed it because the last 10 levels have always, always, always been an annoying slog. Now that there's actually stuff to do at 50, making it harder and harder for people to get to that level just strikes me as backwards.

Very much looking forward to this. Loved the CoH world, mechanics and powers but it works much better as a play occasionally game rather than subscription game since it ultimately got repetitive. Another game for the wife and I to duo!

The F2P scheme is interesting. Get a number of points from previous investment, get points when you buy in game cash and use those both to eventually buy permanent access to some things you really do want (Architect missions, inventions). Not a bad way of rewarding those who have been loyal to the game or those who buy into the game now if they balance out the points in a reasonable fashion.

When are free players supposed to be able to log in?  My account says 'playable', but trying to log in gives me a message that it's expired.

"Later in the year" seems to be the summary. They're basically testing it out before opening the floodgates.

And if they list it on the f2p section of steam, with some sort of promo, it really will be a floodgate (though retention will be terrible of course).

Those patch notes sure are pretty...maybe I'll come back and get my I1 Tanker to 50  :awesome_for_real:

I went back to COH for a couple of months last summer and had a good time. I've switched over to STO for now but when I get sick of it I'll definitely go back to COH. I figure I'll probably just subscribe rather than try to game the free to play system.

I'm just tapping my fingers here waiting. I just hope its set up so I can grab a couple of group instances a month and not have to dedicate a lot of money to it. World of Tanks is working great for me on that. When I'm in the mood I get premium, when I'm not I play my KV that I know I can make money on without premium.

Just got an email telling me to go ahead and log in for a special VIP early head start on free to play. But of course I can't log in without subscribing. And there's no indication of that anywhere. Not really a good marketing push.

It reminded me that I had bought "Going Rogue" when it showed up on the steam christmas sale and might as well apply it to the account. Free month of gametime added to my existing account? Well thank you very much.

Looks quite nice. The new going rogue zone has a stronger tutorial and story arc, basic fitness powers are now innate (jumping, stamina, healing) which makes sense because pretty much everyone bought them, and a little lady with dual uzi's is fun to watch. The initial XP gain is pretty fast too. Combat is still measured / slow which I quite like, having had enough of WoW twitch play.

... they really need a character model overhaul though. I'm really surprised they haven't especially when the new costume pieces look so nice and high rez. Some of the aura's (which are now on the character designer up-front) are really very good.

Created a new hero, since oddly limited character slots might be just what I need to ever see the CoH end-game, and ran into the new tutorial.

I must say it's somewhat impressive (the wrecked cityscape looks excellent) but it's pretty terrible as a tutorial. Short, way too noisy and pushes you to move forward quickly when you probably just want some punching bags and a bit of explanation. Also does the classic error of having you fight end-game monsters and a huge boss event at level 1 after which you enter the real game and are suddenly getting beaten up by muggers. I actually preferred the previous one which had none of these problems.

The shop is interesting. Having paid costume gear show up on the character designer to tempt you is excellent and the prices are reasonable enough to encourage impulse purchases. What remains unknown is how much it costs to buy access to subscription services. The locked AT's (controller and mastermind for example), Architect missions, Crafting and story arcs aren't currently in the shop. Probably because it's going to be quite a delicate balancing act to keep current subscribers from dropping down to premium and there's no point in playing their hand to early. More player activity will make CoH more fun though, it is at its best with a large group and enemy hordes being obliterated.

Yeah the new tutorial has caught a fair bit of flack. Quite a few people have complained that it doesn't really teach you very much about the game compared to the old tutorial, which is true I guess. The old one taught you about mob conning, combining enhancements, etc.

But, there's also the ongoing training to take into account with the new system. At level 6 you get a new contact, Twinshot for heroes (not sure who villains get) who takes you under her wing and starts teaching you more about the game and it's system. You get a 2nd story arc when you reach level 10 and a third at level 15. I ran a new hero through 1-20 over the weekend and I absolutely loved these arcs from a story perspective. For me, they're some of the most well written content added to the game in a while.

From an instructional perspective, I'd say they do a decent job too. I was having so much fun with them that I wasn't paying that much attention to what I was being taught but they seem to cover all the bases: leveling, tram system, sent me to Wentworths, Icon, DO store, Hero Corp Field Analyst, University, etc. The timing of those things was a bit off in some cases though. For instance, telling me about leveling at level 6 when I've already done it 5 times, or sending me to the enhancement store at 15 (although that may have been to make sure I knew there were more than just training enhancements in the game since it was a DO store). I'm not sure if this has something to do with the way that CoH's content seems to be split into blocks of 5 levels and you only get new stuff at 5, 10, 15 etc (6 being the only exception I can think of). So maybe they decided to wait until 15 to tell you about DOs so that you could use them?

I think the new system does a better job of easing a new player into the game over the course of the first 20 levels rather than making you read a load of popup dialogs at level 1 and just dumping you in the game. I'll have to pay more attention on my next noob to see if it actually teaches you everything you need to know, but it seems to cover most of it.

I resubbed too. Been about two years since I last played, but the gameplay is still fun and having waited this long there is a lot of new content waiting for me.

Dr Graves is the villain equivalent. And it's.... the weirdest and most fun tutorial I've ever done. I'm not even sure what I'm learning from it but the CoH guys have worked out that good dialog and stock maps can still tell a story that keeps you interested. The fellow villain who thinks I have lovely eyes, and would very much like to take them for his collection, is actually bordering on creepy.

free to play really is just so perfect for this game. There's lots they can add to tempt me (Night-Widow AT being an immediate one) and the game suits occasional play much better than the sort of frequency that would justify a sub. Meanwhile if they can get some extra development $ there's lots that could be added or updated. Also the character moves are heavily discounted as part of the head start so bought a pack of those.

I also saw one power I fell in love with. A long-cast almost perfect permanent stealth as long as you don't move. I was confused as to what they point was but it seems to effectively be a "need to go AFK for a sec while in a mission" super-power which is a great addition. 

Whatever happened to Geko?

Al 'Geko' Rivera (http://www.startrekonline.com/articles/meet_al_lead_designer_for_star_trek_online) went with Cryptic to be the Lead Designer of Star Trek Online. His LinkedIn says he's still at Cryptic.

Oh so that's why I hate STO and it's convoluted skill/power structure.   It all makes sense now.  :why_so_serious:

Pretty much the whole reason Cryptic splitting off from NCSoft and leaving NCNorCal/Paragon behind was the best thing to ever happen to CoH: it got rid of Jack "It's Not Fun Unless You Lose 95% of the Time!" Emmert and Geko.

So if I resub now to check it out does this "head start" thing mean we basically get Going Rogue for free?  I never bought that so not sure how that works.

Which is why after Cryptic left and Paragon Studios remained CoH/V attracted more players than ever before.  :oh_i_see:

Yes. I didn't buy it either, but I have access to the whole thing now.

The bad of CoH: "This map again?"

The good of CoH: "Doing sewer task-force, can run with what we have but the more the merrier".

It has to be one of the few MMO's where the mechanics actually encourage PUG grouping.

Doing the hero side "group" tutorial quests and they're quite fun. Trying to give a feel for the fun of being in a group using NPC super-heroes isn't entirely successful but it is a noble attempt.

Sort of confused.  Has the "free to play" thing gone live for the unwashed masses yet?

I havent played for probably 4+ years, but my account still exists.  Downloaded the game, fired it up, tried to log in, only to get this error:
 "Payment for this account has expired, would you like to check your account status on the web page?"

Going to the Account Status Page gets me:
"During head start you will gain Early Game Access before the game's official release. Access to City of Heroes Freedom™ is currently limited to VIP accounts. If you are already a subscriber, just maintain your active subscription to be automatically upgraded to VIP!

If you would like to upgrade to VIP, click here."

According to my Game Account Details, My Account Type is Free, My Account Status is Playable, and My Subscription Type is None.

Do i have to re-subscribe? purchase a VIP upgrade? Or is the actual Free To Play thing not live yet?

Would it be worth it to purchase a 1 month sub for 15 bucks or whatever it is, to get an automatic upgrade to VIP?

The VIP headstart is effectively the beta for the f2p mechanics with some sugar (events and freebies). They haven't announced it going f2p but it will probably be relatively soon.

VIP is effectively going to become "active subscriber". Premium is if you've spent any money on CoH either before or after (bought a product, had a sub, bought points) but are not a subscriber. And free is basically never spend a dime.

If you want to play free you can just wait, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to subscribe specifically for the head-start unless you want to explore while things are still quiet.

(Edit)

Looks like they've actually started reactivating some expired accounts:


Also looks like if your account goes inactive from now you'll be able to continue playing as a premium player.

So no real incentive to spend 14 bucks to re-activate my old account for VIP status, since i payed an active sub fee a few years back and should get defaulted to "premium" status when everything officially kicks off then.

Depends on how many veteran months you have... the 'paragon rewards program' can allow you to unlock certain parts of the game (such as the ability to earn merits, get medium inspiration drops or create Architect missions) permanently, and every subbed month is worth one point.

If you're near the threshold for one of the tiers, getting 1-2 months of sub may be a cheap way to get the unlock and check out whether the VIP benefits are worth it for you in that time.

You also gain paragon reward points (plus VIP status) if you buy points for use in the cash-shop. Some of the things that would be nice for a premium player, like permanent access to the invention system, have pretty high requirements though.

What exactly does access to invention mean though?  You can't even use invented enhancements without it?  Or you just can't make them?

Can't use or make. It's why it's completely and utterly pointless to log in any of my previously-made characters who are over about level 25 with the new system because they all have so many IOs that they're essentially unplayable unless I throw away roughly 2 billion inf worth of IOs, pay a $5 ransom to get their use back for a month, or resub.

But from what I'm seeing, you can actually get by on 30-day temporary licenses for a lot of stuff with just $5 worth a points a month (400, which is the minimum amount), which lets you use inventions (150 points), access the AH (another 150), and have 100 more to play with.

One good suggestion I heard for when you don't want to buy the license is to use your second build as a pure Premium build. Fill that up with SOs and you can just switch to that when you are not subscribed.

That does not sound playable.

They have multiple builds now?

Been in for a while now. From level 20 you can talk to a trainer to switch between your builds, with a 15 minute cooldown iirc.

Level 10 now (as I just got one). They've been in for a couple of years and are really useful for classes that have the capacity for a group and solo spec. They've also moved the heroic archetypes down to Level 30 to unlock so I'm enjoying messing around with a night-widow.

... I really had forgotten how much fun the character creator was. Though being able to save a costume and re-use it is such an obvious and massive advance. Already all my old characters have been shunted aside for new creations. Though that's partly because Dual Pistols looks hella sexy in action. The relatively controlled pace of CoH combat really lets them have have some complex animation sequences.

What else do they have to charge for though?

One time fees rather than ongoing fees. If you are going to take very very basic game features like the ability to wear enhancements and charge by the month, you're not doing a cash shop, you're just doing a subscription under a different name.

You can level a character to 50 just fine without using any invention enhancements, since the sub-50 content was created with normal enhancements in mind. I don't think the missions have been made harder since invention was introduced, so you are basically getting "CoH from a few updates back" for free.

This is exactly what Puzzle Pirates does, didn't you argue in another thread that's what other MMOs should model themselves after? Maybe that was someone else.

Everything I've ever done on Ypp is based on login days or use. 30 login days is very different for a f2p game than 30 days calendar. I think the labor badges are the only ones that go on a calendar basis because they work whether you login or not.

It does seem pretty aggressive, locking off a part of the game that is so inter-twined with regular levelling. Then again for the subscribers making perfect enhancement sets is basically their end-game. It would seem more logical to have a finer grained lock so maybe cover end-game crafting, but perhaps that's a lot of work.

You can get permanent access to the invention system, but it's pretty steep. Something like 3 years of being subscribed or the equivalent dollar value in buying points. More really since you won't get discounts for being subscribed multiple months.

They are apparently unlocking old players on an account by account basis. I'm in.

Unless I subscribe, as reported, none of my existing enhancements are valid. Very annoying. I don't lose my Lowe if I don't get premium. It's really a huge turnoff and an example of how not to do a cash shop.

I'm still not in.  :sad_panda:

Things I have discovered about the F2P thing as a Premium person with more than a year of accrued game time, but whose characters all have about 380-500+ days since last being played:

The game itself runs a lot better than it used to. When I last ducked into the game for a month or so a bit over a year ago as I'm wont to do every now and again, the thing still ran like ass on a modern PC, necessitating lowered settings. Now? Runs like butter. I dunno what they did, but I'm glad they did it.

There have been surprisingly few costume pieces added since I last played. Less surprisingly, they're all for-pay Booster Pack pieces. Lots of new content though, which I suppose is better than the Champions alternative.

If you unlocked certain things with vet rewards in the past, like the Nemesis Staff or the Sands of Mu/Ghost Slaying Axe, you still get those (in fact, they take them away from you if you had them active on that character, and you have to re-acquire them via the vet stuff in the mail), and you don't have to choose them from the vet reward tree thing.

While most content is still playable with SOs for those who don't have the insane amount of accrued play time to perma-unlock inventions, some builds are... not. My Dual Blades/Dark Armor Scrapper is essentially unplayable with SOs, as she relied on a ton of set bonuses and +recovery IOs to not crash her Endurance after about fifteen seconds of fighting.

The store has some inexcusable shortcomings. None of the packs of stuff (namely costumes, but other things as well) have breakdowns of what's contained in them, no option to open a window and see more info, and any preview pics are limited to the small 80x80 image to the left of the description, which not all things have. It also does a poor job of telling you what you already own (as in, it doesn't at all), so it seems entirely possible to either re-buy a pack you already own or spend a small amount of points on a single piece from a pack you own but didn't realize was in the pack.

From what I can tell, people are leaving the normal servers in droves to head to the VIP server, and those still left (on Virtue at least) are snotty as fuck about it. It doesn't help that free players seem to have different-colored names from everyone else, which makes for easy targeting of vitriol and blame.

You can use the character creator to get some idea of costume pieces. There's a pre-defined costume selector (eg. "Witch") which shows the pieces in the set. Likewise for any area you can see all the pay pieces you can unlock. And I've pretty much just been buying the 1 or 2 individual pieces I wanted for my specific character. It would indeed be much nicer if it allowed you to specify a set and see all the pieces in that set plus have the pieces mention a set they are a part of.

The CoH team is clearly keen on retaining their subscribers. And the CoH players seem to largely consist of people working on numerical optimization of their level 50 characters. As such them fleeing to a server full of other people doing the same makes sense. Not sure I'll really miss them. Apparently super-groups as a whole are out of style. Read a comment that the veterans now tend to have a personal super-group for the storage.

Game seriously needs some new blood.

I'm pretty unsurprised by this. Supergroups in general were little more than glorified personal chat rooms up until they instituted the global chat system back in 2005 or so, and they've only become increasingly irrelevant since then, due to the ability for global channels to be used by both heroes and villains, while SG chat is not similarly linked and further exacerbated by the utter failure of SG bases as a gameplay mechanic.

Looks like they're ready to go.

Seems I'm in.  Maybe they're going through by time subscribed?  Was up to 30 months or so.

The one character I've unlocked has at least some of the 'locked' stuff.  Mastermind with Nemesis staff power, her Blood Widow Helm, Clockwork outfit in other costume slot, capes, costume change emotes, juggling, etc.

Maybe new characters would only have access to things I haven't unlocked in the shop?  Seeing as I only have 8 global unlocks and 12 characters, doesn't really matter.  Otherwise it'd be nice if they were either removed as purchasable items in the shop, or given credit on my reward token board.  It'd be silly if I have to re-buy Villain pre-order hats since I pre-ordered just to get them.

I want to log in just to check out all the toons my daughter made years ago.  She came up with some pretty wild outfits.

I'm surprised that nobody has made a better character creator by now, given the age of this game.  Likewise surprised that this hasn't become industry standard.

That's because everyone else is riding the gear as visuals wagon, for good or for ill.

I believe the idea is anything you have specifically unlocked stays available. So bonus items and in theory going rogue content should still be available.

Looking closer there's a bunch of content rent that will be the main differentiator. Auction house, Architect missions, Invention and Incarnate powers being the main ones. The first two are relatively achievable for a veteran character (8 months) while invention is not and incarnate content is VIP only. I'm pretty much thinking I'll just rent access to the invention system and treat it as a 2$ subscription that I can activate whenever I want to play some. Of course the game really needs a surge of new people to make it fun, it's pretty quiet and CoH is not so much fun as a solo game.

I'm of the belief that having anything be VIP-only seriously undermines the whole point of the freemium conversion, especially with the Incarnate stuff being the current end-game material. I can imagine people coming into CoH, bearing with its dated mechanics if they find it fun, only to get to 50 and realize that the money they've probably been spending off and on for certain things doesn't give you diddly squat if it's not for a permanent unlock like costumes or character slots when you've gotta start plunking down monthly for the level cap stuff anyway.

Sure, CoH has always been about the journey - a journey that it does very very well - but now that they have a destination to reach, pulling the rug out from the freebies when they reach it is probably not a good thing.

I don't think they're really approaching it as a free2play conversion. They want to retain their existing subscriber base while re-invigorating the lower level game. Or they might just be taking it carefully, always easier to open content once things have settled than take it away. Plus they can always make current end-game content free once they have some other level of content to keep the subscribers happy.

I don't think it's a terrible model.  I've been playing off and on since beta, and my highest level character is 45.  Since I've bought CoH, CoV, and Going Rogue, I seem to have access to almost everything content and systems wise.  But I can say this as someone with (now verified) 33 months of veteran boosts and a ton of things unlocked.  For free it still strikes me as pretty much CoH at launch, so not bad, really.

The only thing which really sucks is the lack of access to IOs.  Fiddling with IO builds was a ton of fun for me.  Maybe I should just go the "It's only $2" route, but I'd really just like to have it permanently unlocked.  Especially since under the new model I may choose to just play for a week then set it down for several months.  It just feels like a waste if I don't use most of those 30 days.

I just checked and my account is unlocked as well. Like Lantyssa I already have access to pretty much everything I need except the invention system.  But the invention system is important so there's no question about not getting it. I don't know whether I'll just resubscribe or only pay the 2 dollars a month for it.

For me, I need 12 reward tokens to permanently unlock IOs.

VIP is $15, which gets me one token, plus 400 points to spend on whatever.  That'll get me one month of VIP plus two months of IOs.
If I purchase points, for every 1200 I get a point, which also comes out to $15.  But IO unlocks only cost 160, so $15 will cover me for 7 months.  $20 gets me 10 months exactly.

For those of us with almost everything, the latter option really seems like the best.  VIP would really only give us Incarnate stuff, so until we're there, we might as well go with the long-term option.

I can't get past the IO thing. I was really looking forward to this, but I haven't played at all. Logging into an old character and figuring out you're going to need to completely re-equip or pay an ongoing fee just feels like a slap in the face. It's the boil the frog slowly thing. Instead of being eased into paying slowly, I immediately hit a pay wall.

I think in general, having items that are expensive in in-game currency and can't be unequipped or swapped out but require a premium status to play is not a very customer friendly model.

So I played tanks this weekend and spent enough to pay for six months of IO licenses. It's an emotional reaction to the model, not an economic one.

It is an emotional reaction I share.  I decided to think of it as a $2 sub as Kageru did.  If it holds my interest long enough, then it'll eventually become free.

If you have most of the important stuff unlocked already maybe you should just play low levels for a while and see if you still like the game.  You don't want to use IOs anyway when you're outleveling your enhancements every day.

I played CoH/CoV for like 3 years and I don't think I understood a single word of this post.  

I'll reread the patch notes again and see if it makes sense.  To be honest, I know nothing about the endgame.  I usually just got to 50 and rerolled a new toon.  That may have something to do with it.

I didn't get into IOs until around level 40 or so on my main (Ninja/Poison MM), but I have to admit they are like crack.  And with the amount of time I spent grinding missions and playing the AH to afford them, not getting to use them without paying a fee to do so is a bit annoying - let alone the cost to reslot with SOs like previous posters mentioned.

Guess they need to get their money one way or the other, right?   :uhrr:

If you played that long you just might have Invention unlocked for yourself already anyway. You should log in and see.

By IO do you mean the invention enhancements?  That makes more sense.  My scrapper and MM have a bunch of them.  They make life much easier.

I think IO is used just because of DO and SO (dual and single origin) enhancements.

(tries to remember credentials to log into CoX and check on Invention status)

edit : 7 tokens to get invention unlocked.  :uhrr:

I really think the free-to-play setup was designed to be unappealing to current players. The IO thing and only 2 free character slots guarantees that virtually no subscribers will decide to drop their sub to play for free, while being pretty innocuous to new players. Seems like they really didn't consider returning vets, though.

When I signed on this morning I had tokens to unlock up to 6 character slots as a returning vet.  That's nothing to people with alts I know but I only ever had one character so I didn't mind. It's sure nothing compared to the number of slots I had last time I subscribed though. I must have had at least 10 or 15 most of which were bonus slots of some kind.

Edit: Weird. I just tried to log in and it's prompting me to resubscribe again.  I guess my premium status comes and goes until they go free to play officially.

The ability of IO's to not be obsoleted by level and the limits on salvage storage mean you probably will be using IO's from level 10 onwards. And as such most people will hit their first pay-wall at that time. It still seems that having a paywall for higher level IO's or high rarity ones would life that headroom a bit without making it any less tempting for the veterans.

Oh that's right. I forgot that IOs don't go red when you outlevel them. I agree though that Cryptic should just put the higher level IOs onto the pay wall to give the low levels more of an opportunity to get addicted.

The CoH community seems to be dead / Terrible. The remaining players are mostly running AE farming missions or perfecting their raid enhancement set. Super-groups are a personal bank extension rather than community building. I hope most of the veterans do run off to their gated community and the maps are once again full of erratic noobs and flying rag-dolls.

The way it's worked for everyone else isn't by pulling vets back in right away.   Usually they get a bunch of noobs who pay $40 bucks on costume pieces, adventure packs,bag slots, etc.   Some of the newbs subscribe as well.  Then they sell Sparkle Ponies to current subscribers and suddenly their swimming in cash and can afford to do real updates.   That's when they are supposed to pull in returning vets really.

I tend to agree that CoH should of done it different though.   They have a lot more vets than other games and they are a bit dated in new players eyes.

Occasionally I'd browse the CoH/V forums to see what they were up to after quitting the game a year or so ago. Any time the "Should CoH/V go F2P?" it was RAGE ON.

The community has some great people in it, but also a lot of people who are institutionalised to that community. So as a group it has a lot of baggage to try to get through (particularly if you aren't in glowing agreement about specific features or the direction of the game).

If CoH/V is about the journey, some of these vets have made that journey 60+ times already. They know what they like.

So, appearantly i can now log in.  However, if i am reading this right, i am only entitled to two character slots. Not sure if that is 2 character slots PERIOD, or 2 per server.

I have a level 46 blaster from WAY back, who i am tempted to "re-activate" on the Victory server, but I thought i would ask: what are the current server communities like activity wise?  And where do most of the F13 oldtimers hang around?

I have no problem creating a fresh character on a different server, but I at least want to make sure I am not going to end up on a dead one.

Freedom is the most populous server. Virtue is the second, and unofficial RP server. Although going F2P, things might change.

Nice to know.  Any idea on the Character Slots thing? Says i have 2 Global Slots (with 0/0 currently used when i pick a server).

Does this mean i only get 2 character slots total, period, or do i get 2 per server?  Would be nice if they made it a bit clearer.

It's not going to be two per server. I believe it's 2 in total plus any you've unlocked or paid for.

I'm mostly on Justice because that used to be the unofficial oceanic server. Of course the "Australia" channel only has 30 people in it. It's pretty quiet all round actually.

I couldn't figure out the slot thing either. It told me I had five slots. I used one and it then told me I had used 0 slots and had five left. I'd suspect a bug except a lot of the stuff seems overly complicated and I suspect there's something more to it.

Well that certainly is the CoH style. Their invention system remains one of the more terrifying character advancement mechanisms I've ever seen. The paragon points system is clearly from the same minds.

Okay I worked out the slot thing.  You have two slots on a server.  You also have X number of 'global slots' that you can apply wherever.  So the first two slots you use on a server aren't coming out of that global slot pool.  Now I just need to find the best way to get four of those veteran points to reach the unlock for IOs.

You have a lot of veteran points if you are that close. As far as I can see the most cost effective is to subscribe for X months. More-so if you are doing gated content and less if there's lots of stuff you want to buy in the store (since you'll get a free 400 points a month). If there's lots of things you want in the shop then you can just buy the points (1200 points per veteran point) or do some combination of the two.

Bought myself a knockback IO using the market. 4-20 million influence in game (be quite a long time before I have that) versus 120 points in the market for the pleasure of not sitting on my ass half the time in a lot of encounters. Also splurged on ninja-run because I loved that power in CO and it fits the character (plus is available for all of them). Sprint + Ninja run + power-pool stealth is a pretty practical travel power I hope.

Didnt seem to work that way for me.  I went ahead an unlocked a slot on Freedom server.  It took one of my global slots and used it to unlock the server slot, so now i only have 1 global slot left, and one server slot on Freedom available.

Currently i appear to have 14 total vetran "tokens" or whatever they are, and I apperantly need 27 to permanently unlock the invention system.  Since as far as i can tell the only way to get more reward tokens is to subscribe as a vet (I couldnt find any entry for anything that might be a Reward Token in the point store), that means i would need to sub for a minimum of 1 year and 1 month to hit the "permanent access to invention" state.  Yikes.

You get a reward token for every 1200 points you buy ($15); you also get a reward token the first time you buy anything from the store. Other than that, yeah, you get one for every month subbed.

hmm, so the best bet, if i wanted to unlock the invention system would be to sub up for a year, for the 12 tokens + 400x12 credits.

I wonder, if you buy a 1 year subscription, do they give you all your credits / tokens in bulk, or do you have to wait for each month to roll by.

Since I've been scouring the forums I remembered a post on this,

Yeah, the only way to get the tokens nownowNOW is to shell out for cash shop points.  Though if you're VIP subscribed you don't really need the tokens for the duration of your subsciption, so I guess there isn't much of a hurry.  I'd rather just thunk down the fifty bucks for the 4600 points than thunk down forty five for three VIP months that will vanish and leave me with just 1200 points in 91 days.  But then I never dealt with that whole incarnate thing, so I'm not concerned about lacking access to it.

I have a vip account, so I can tell you first-hand that incarnate content is "meh". It's just like a diku badge/rep grind where you run the same 4 trials over and over in random LFG pugs to farm 'special xp' and drops that you farm to turn into bigger drops so you can upgrade your ability that 1-shots 16 minions into an ability that 1-shots 32 minions. The incarnate TFs might be better, but the BAF/Underground trials I've done were just like pug molten core raids (or not even that) with lots of aoe spam, "why did I die?" situations, gimmicky boss fights, and various situations where a bumbling noob can wipe the group. With all that, the boss fights still come down to staying out of fire, taking care of adds, occasionally avoiding a cone attack, breaking LOS, and running away from the group if you're the "bomb". WOW 5-man dungeons had more variety in '05... I am disappoint. Overall it just shows that COH really isn't designed for this kind of content.

To me, the best aspects of COH are the insane amount of player-created story arcs in Mission Architect, and playing random wacky alts in random wacky situations -- you can all do that without paying anything. Last week I was in a pug with 4 defenders, 2 controllers, a blaster, and a stalker "tank" (with a crazy spread of levels, all SK'd / exemplared to level 35); I'd like to see anyone doing the same in level-appropriate WOW content!

I thought Mission Architect missions were VIP only?

Nope - you can unlock the ability to play them sans rewards (kind of pointless) at tier 2, which is a trivial amount of reward points. You unlock the ability to get drops from MA at tier 4 (8 tokens total, not that bad), and the ability to make missions at tier 6 (20 tokens total, I just hit this one).

The character slots could have been done WAY better..  It's damned confusing the way it is.

Unless there's something VIP gives you that you can't get through other means that you really want, you're better off buying points.  You either get 1200 points or 400 points + 1 month VIP for $15.  Seeing as that will get you over half a year of IO access if you buy nothing else with the former, you get far more for your money.

Looks like it's gone live now, trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0DKoutHf9M&feature=youtu.be&hd=1).

how sad to throw the doors open to your magical kingdom... and find out that no one noticed or cared.

Or in other words not seeing the surge of new activity I would have expected. They need to list the game on steam.

That it's F2P has been very poorly advertised.  I saw LOTR ads everywhere when they opened up and I've seen nothing about CoH.  The only reason I know it's F2P now is this thread.   You can bet that's why the game hasn't had the influx of players you'd expect.

The word of mouth has not been particularly positive. I did a search on twitter and about half were people bitching about the IOs.

Not having IOs available without paying and needing VIP status to pay base rent were both mistakes, I think.

Allowing IOs but not giving their set bonus to premium players would have been accepted a lot better.

I unlocked several of my old heroettes on Freedom. Gonna be fun tooling around with them again. Had 8 unlocks total and I think I did 5 so far on my favorites.

Just did the new tutorial opening level and a few of the missions in Atlas and I have to say it's pretty obvious they are trying their hardest to get that old engine to do new things.  Many of the missions are attempts to do the more interesting things in WoW, like non-combat bits where you are disguised. 

It's a good try, but I wonder if their quest engine just can't do what they need it to.

Honestly the one thing they keep avoiding and yet would improve the missions the most is to overhaul the dialogs you get for mission text.  This is a COMIC BOOK game, they should make those dialog boxes look like they would in a comic.  And that translucent background for them that you cannot modify makes reading them very annoying...

Other than that, I'm really enjoying being back in the game..

One of the things that really bugs me about CoH (still did when i played it way back when) is the whole contact system and how easy it is to out level the bastards.  At least in WoW, it was easy to go back and do quests you out leveled, even if you got no real reward for doing so, or it was easy to go and find a dungeon you out leveled and steamroll it for the lore / story / completionist in you.

In CoH, for example, I KNOW I missed some special event contact in the Hollows by out leveling the contacts, but there is absolutely no ingame indicator of where I could go to experience it (I beleve there is somewhere you can go to "re live" old content you missed, but none of my contacts has mentioned anything about it yet.

And it is stupidly easy to out level early contacts, especially if you hop into a taskforce or mission grind group.

Also, they REALLY need something that directs you to level appropriate task force initiators when you hit the appropriate level.  I just hit level 20 on my blaster, and i am pretty sure there are at least 2 task forces i could have done by now, but i have absolutely no idea (without going to a CoH Wiki) where the people who start them would be.  As a complete newbie, i wouldnt even have a clue I could start a task force on my own.  Meanwhile, WoW practically shoves you towards dungeon content with quest hooks and the like.

There have been disguise missions since the beginning. I still have screencaps of my character dressed up in her Freskshow outfit.

Yeah, I remember them too, but these seem different somehow, as though they're more interested in telling a story and less interested in just giving you another room full of punching bags.

They did put a "find a contact" button which gives you a level appropriate contact in the zone I assume. I do agree that if you did some grouping you always felt like you'd jumped the tracks of the story flow and it was quite hard to re-attach.

I tried using the LFG tool they have but apparently it's fairly useless. While it gives positive stats like "average wait, 2 minutes" that's because it counts pre-formed groups entering without using the system. Then again there's only so much a match-making system can do when you are at reservoir population levels.

If you were a player who spent the time and cash building up your IO'ed character, coming back to an un-IO'd one is returning to a nerfed character.

My hopes of seeing a second Paragon Studios game keep diminishing.

The way this is done is actually pretty cool: there's no in-game indicator or NPC or anything that tells you where to go for this.  As soon as you do something that involves time travel, though, you automatically get the power to create an Ouroboros portal and a little message about it.  At least that's how it worked last time I played.  From a character and story perspective it's pretty neat, cause it's just something you get dragged into by getting involved with time travel.  And there's several story arcs throughout the game involving time travel, so while it's possible to miss, odds are you'll get it just by playing.  Of course, if you already know about it and just want to get the power, accessing it is as easy as having a friend drop an Ouro portal for you.  Touching that portal 'counts' and you get the power yourself.

A lot of the other comments are (or were, last I played) true though - it's really easy to miss contacts and task forces are out of the way and not explained at all by the system.  Outleveling contacts is pretty common.  I seem to recall it being possible to lock your exp bar though, which you pretty much have to do if you want to do a lot of the low level story arcs.  And there are some missions that cannot actually be done as part of Ouroboros flashbacks either.

I think the LFG tool is only for stuff you can't do unless you're a VIP?

The new low-level trial is started from it too. I assume any new trial content added to the game from now on will use it and maybe they'll add all the old trials/TFs/SFs to it at some stage

But it's not for regular gameplay. Like just doing random dungeons.

Sadly no. If it was it would make things a lot easier on the free/premium players with regards to teaming. But you don't need to be a VIP to do the DfB trial so there's hope that they'll add more non-VIP things to it in the future.

They've been listing job openings for work on a "next-gen MMO" for at least a year now, so here's hoping they get on that before City of Heroes fades too far into obscurity for NCSoft to keep them around. I feel like if the CoH team weren't yoked to the terribly dated CoH engine and seven years of wonky design decisions, they could make a better MMO than just about anybody currently out there except maybe Arena.net. Also with incredibly high potential for disappointment, of course.

Yeah, it would seem that Paragon Studios has been working on another title since at least the start of 2010, and probably earlier.

However, that was before Going Rogue launched and didn't do anything to arrest the slide in player exits and before a group of Paragon devs were retrenched. And now a launch into F2P that might be a fizzer.

Of course, the interesting thing about NCsoft games is that they release revenue figures quarterly, so in a few months we should be able to see what happened at the launch of F2P.

From the viewpoint of somebody that actually did try CoH out through their new F2P system?  They waited way too long.  The quality of competing F2P games out there now is far far better than CoH now.  Yes, CoH may have a much better endgame and a deeper veteran player experience, but I couldn't get past the initial shock of how poorly the game has aged.  I had the same reaction and speed to uninstall as when I tried Shadowbane again during their brief F2P attempt.

I kind of have to agree.  Compared to some other games, it really hasnt aged very well.   I mean, If you compare WoW to CoH, WoW's basic world has had some fairly signifigant graphical upgrades.  Vanilla WoW and Current WoW may still have the same polygon count on most shit, but the visual engine (lighting, water, textures etc) got afairly decent overhaul, and it is still pretty nice to look at.   

Comparatively, CoH just looks fairly bland for 90% of the world at large.  Sure, your superhero looks awesome, and I am pretty sure that they updated a lot of the NPC models (I dont remember the Circle of Thorns mages looking quite as awesome as they do now), but the textures on the buildings / grass / rocks etc for everything in the world just look like ass by modern standards.

You can turn on some kind of super-mega-bloom effect that makes it all look slightly better. If you don't hate bloom, that is.

I poked my head in, the lack of IOs for Freeplay is sort of a pisser.

CoH/V has had graphical upgrades, with the most recent one being with Going Rogue last year.

However, this does nothing to put polish on the early starting zones of CoH, which still look very basic, especially compared to the more recently designed areas.

Paragon Studios have been clear that they won't be revamping older zones because it isn't worth the investment in their minds, but this has been a short-sighted strategy because players get access to the new tutorial / Going Rogue zones, only to be dumped into a zone that was built in 2003.

Some of the original zones like Atlas Park have been redone for the new Issue.

I dont know, most of the environment textures still look like ass to me.

I think it's not a bad call. A full re-design of all their zones would be a massive investment probably better invested in new gameplay. The only difference being less ass character models, but I'm beginning to wonder if that interacts with all the costume pieces they have and is a lot more work than it seems.

I don't personally find the zone design too bad though. It's fairly clean and not having too much random decoration probably helps make it a bit more tolerant of older machines. Big city zones are pretty infamously laggy.

A lot of those costume pieces look like ass due to the shader support.   It would be a fair amount of coding work to add but it would allow them to make a lot of improvements with limited artist time.   Applying materials to already made objects is not a huge amount of work.

I logged in early last week while the free2play was appearantly still in beta and it's fucked up my characters majorly. First time I logged in I unlocked a server and 2 character slots but now when I log in the server is unlocked but all the characters are locked again and there are no unlock points left. Grr. From my brief play session earlier I'm not sure I want to even put out the effort to put in a support ticket. As others have said this game has not aged particularly well. I can ignore graphics but I find the game play mechanics so ancient as to be completely annoying.

For anyone who is actually playing: Are you having problems with the game just randomly locking up?

Seems that (at least for me) the game is not super stable.  I can be playing along perfectly fine and then boom, game hardlocks, and i have to CTRL ALT DEL to shut it down.  At least firing it up and logging back in is sufficiently fast that i dont miss anything, and it does not kick me out of groups or whatnot.

Cant really find a cause for it either.  Vid drivers up to date, not running it on any settings that would make it unstable, and my PC is FAR above min spec to run it.  Seems to happen most frequently when i am zoning out of a mission i just finished, but has also happened while just randomly running down the street too.

Do you have an ATI card? (if not, disregard this post)

I had this problem with the 11.8 catalyst drivers. I upgraded to 11.9 and haven't had any problems since. If it comes to that, you can try downgrading to 11.3 or 11.4 (that's what I did before 11.9 came out), but that's obviously not a long-term solution.

I play Champions free-to-play, and I like it. It's fast-paced, twitchy, and I can take on twenty bad guys at once. I've made two cash shop purchases so far, for the Specialist (dual pistols and dual swords sounded fun) and a Penthouse apartment (being able to super-leap out of my apartment into the city below sounded fun).

The game is completely imbalanced, and that's okay.  I can teleport through any situations I don't want to fight through.  I have a super-powerful PBAOE that absorbs nearly all incoming damage, and a super-powerful AOE ranged attack that hits everything in a large cone around me. Both look really cool. At some point they'll add the mecha powerset (power armor) for free-to-play players, and I'll spend money on that too.

Is there any reason for me to start up City of Heroes and give it a go?

I have a wonderful job and other fun hobbies, I'll never participate in content that requires me to stick with it for over an hour at a time or start over from the beginning. I have zero interest in repetitive grinding.  Does free-to-play COH offer me something that Champions doesn't?

CoH does have some good points that ChampO lacks.   The combat is really slow in comparison though and the graphics are pretty old.   If you like ChampO already I doubt you'd find CoH to be better.

With how heavily locked down the complete beginner F2P version of CoH is, probably not, unless you just want to mess around and try out the combat system.  If it wasnt for the fact that the 6 months worth of payed time i had banked from 5 years ago bumped me up to tier 5 unlocks for my now F2P account, I probably wouldnt enjoy it enough to go back to.

Pretty sure I subbed for 6-9 months back when the game first launched. Made it up to level 25 or so on a character I probably wouldn't want anymore. Would that help me?

Yep, it would help quite a bit.

I'd say COH is far better than CO. Like night and day. But the F2P version is a joke and I wouldn't bother.

If you can remember your old account details, then that account should get grandfathered into the new Rewards system for your "payed time".  You will pro end up with enough reward tokens to hit Tier 5, which ulnocks a bunch of goodies.

The F2P version of COH?  Really?  I didn't notice all that much difference between F2P and Subscription with that game.

If you start out with a brand new, never before played, F2P account on CoH, you are highly limited to what you have access to. 
You are locked out of the following:
Can not send Mail
Can not send Whispers / Tells
Can not Join Super Groups (guilds)
Can not Trade with other players.
No access to the Broadcast or Global chat channels (meaning the Help channel has become the go to channel for F2P player communication)
No access to ANY of the Mission Archetect functionality (cant build missions, cant play missions by other people)
Limited access to the Auction system (i think you can buy stuff, but cant post anything)
And possibly a few others i am missing.

All in all, unless you pay enough through the store or by subbing to VIP status for a few months, a very basic level account is fairly crippled in what it can and can not do. 

Some of that is a continuation of restrictions on trial accounts put in place to stop gold spam, specifically the tells, mails and broadcasts. Though I did see someone on the forums point out being able to respond to tells would be good, but that's new code. As soon as you put a couple of dollars into the game quite a few of those vanish.

Yeah, a $5 one-time investment eliminates about 3/4 of that list, and a further $30-ish investment eliminates most of the rest (and at that point we're at "game box price" territory). IMO coh's freemium implementation is better than most other ex-sub MMOs, including LOTRO (which seems to be praised around here).

The biggest issue according to most of my guildies (and this thread) is that the only ways to get access to IOs and the enhancement invention system are:
- paying a sub (VIP)
- buying an invention license each month for 160 points ($2); this is a really minimal fee, but the fact that you have to pay a monthly fee for a 'free' game is probably a red flag for a lot of players
- having tier 7 veteran rewards to unlock the system permanently, which requires you to have 27 reward tokens total; you get one token to start, another if you have a retail code, one for each 3 vet months, one for each vet year, one token for each month of VIP and one for each ~$12-15 (depending on discounts) you buy at the store. That means (25-x/3-x/12) months of sub where x is the total number of veteran months you had on your account before... that's over five years of veteran status or 2 years of sub for a new player! For example, there are only two people in my guild who had enough veteran months for this option to be realistically accessible in the near future. You can also get more reward tokens by buying stuff in the store, but if you look at it that way you'll see "Oh I have to pay (100+)$ to unlock inventions? Screw that!"

Even though you don't *need* IOs to do anything in the game and can use a secondary build to set up a SO-only build, for most 'old' players it's become an integral part of the character building process -- suddenly losing access to them* is a pretty big deal.


* rationally, a premium player is not "losing access" to anything, since they weren't able to play the game at all without paying a sub before... but this is the player perception

Maybe they'll tweak it.  Overall the system is pretty well designed, though extremely complicated so it's tough to grasp.  If they start allowing IOs but no set bonus, I bet people feel perceive it as a great change.  Once slotted with them, IOs feel like a requirement.  The bonus is just that, though.

I'd been maintaining a sub, so I had pretty much everything except the last tier unlocked when they switched. If I had lost access to IOs, ... probably would've quit. The min/maxing is fun and is really the only thing to do with your max level char besides incarnate trials. IOs really should've been an earlier unlock.

The calls for trial accounts to be able to respond to tells has been going on since the trials launched with these ridiculous restrictions. I've no doubt it helped turn people away from CoH/V by making it hard for two (or more) players trialling the game to link up.

Yes, the restrictions are similar to what WoW uses, but CoH/V isn't WoW in terms of the player base size. And it did little to restrict gold spam anyway.

I doubt if there will be any changes. The whole F2P system seemed to me to show a real lack of faith in the F2P model. The mini-subscriptions for auction house and IO use. It just seemed like they weren't willing to fully commit.

I hear a fair number of people saying this. But could you elaborate a bit?  Combat in both games seems really simplistic, but CO's feels faster paced and more fun, and more suited to taking on large piles of baddies all at once.  I'm comparing CO vs CoH at launch here since that's what I played, so if things have changed let me know, but CO has more comic-booky graphics and fun cut-scenes with gleefully cheesy writing. CO has interesting powersets like power armor or telekinetic blades that I don't remember CoH having. The 'Crisis' areas you work through as you level up in CO that introduce you to each zone before you 'stop the crisis' and enter the real zone are a really fun touch. I like how you can control the speed of your leveling too, just beating missions 5 levels above you if you're sick of your current area and you want to move on.  The weekly comic book episodic content releases are really fun, too.  What does CoH have that trumps all of this in your eyes?

CoH/V has years worth of content, the Archetypes fit together much better than the freeform power systems generally allows and I think CoH/V has better lore.

But I do find CoH/V too slow to play anymore. I got 5 years out of it, and that's enough.

Just off the top of my head, COH has
- Very varied player archetypes: there are typical melee/range pew pew ATs and the holy trinity is there if you look really hard. OTOH there is also an 'RTS-lite' pet class (mastermind, controlling 6+ pets with different powers at one time), and you can basically compose any kind of group you want for the content and make it work; no need for a dedicated tank or healer (defenders are NOT healers). You also have multiple builds per character, making you even more versatile (my warshade can basically do everything except support).
- COH also has an insane amount of powersets by now (primary (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Primary_Power_Sets), secondary (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Secondary_Power_Sets)) that are also customizable; you can set their colors and (in case of weapon-based powersets) weapon looks.
- Completely dynamic grouping with super-sidekicking, ie. you can group with your level 50 friends at level 4 without problems and vice versa.
- Scaling difficulty from 'I want to fight small amounts of wimpy mobs 1 level below me' to 'I want to fight tons of mobs 4 levels above me' (I'm not sure how CO works here).
- Massive bucketloads of content, you'd need at least 7-8 characters going from 1-50 (each of them playing different content) to experience it all. This also really helps if you're rolling alts and don't have to run the same missions in canada or the desert again (and in COH, you're rolling a LOT of alts).
- Hundreds of thousands (!) of player-created story arcs adding to the massive bucketloads of content... a lot of them are quite good / better than 'normal' content, and I'm not just saying this because I happen to have a Dev's Choice story arc myself. :P
- An involved power invention system where you can make your character crazy powerful to enable the aforementioned 'fighting tons of mobs 4 levels above me' feeling.
- No loot, no fighting over loot; power enhancements and invention components drop for everyone and you always get stuff you can use (even if you're sidekicking / examplaring).
- Still the best character customization 'tech' on the market.
- Incarnate system -- it's ok if you really want to play WOW-lite at 50. Personally I don't like it, but a lot of people do.
- Player versus play-- actually forget about this one, pvp in COH is terrible.

CO was... completely meh for me. The block mechanic annoyed me to no end, and I didn't find the quests/lore/enemies inspiring at all.

See, I get excited about CoH power sets when I see them on a list. For example, the new "Street Justice" gritty brawler powerset sounds fun, on paper.  But then I look at a YouTube video of the powers in action, and CoH combat just puts me to sleep.  So slow, so bland. The mission architect stuff does sound fun, though I imagine CO will be getting that soon, too.

I'm curious what you didn't like about the Block mechanic?  It's one of my favorite parts of the combat system, and makes me feel much more in control of the flow of things, especially when combined with the comic-speech-bubbles attacks.

I tried playing it again but god it's so slow.  Even if you have ridiculously pimped out recharge via IO's/hasten/etc it's so slow.   The animations just feel like molasses.   I could read a book in-between key presses.   There's a lot of great stuff in the game still but it's all kind of pointless without interesting combat.

Differences of opinion.  I find CoH combat the perfect speed.  CO felt... clunky.

Have to agree, I dig the pace of combat in CoH as well.  Makes things like MMs and Blappers both feasible and enjoyable.

I'm keeping CoX on the laptop in case I get bored somewhere away from home, but I can't see myself playing it regularly - especially with the restrictions on F2P.

C&P from the champions thread because I'm lazy :p

The actual combat gameplay felt extremely buttonmashy without playing like an action game / FPS. Kinda like combining the blah parts of a fighter game with a diku? The block mechanic itself was really annoying; when we were doing a mission with elite mobs, I pretty much did nothing but block 80% of the time and try to squeeze in some one-shot taunt blasts the rest of the time... it was either that or dying.

(f'ref, I played a power armor character and I was the 'tank' of our team)

Yeah blocking felt anti-fun to me. It had a kind of QTE feel to it. Now, if it had enabled special reactions, etc., that sort of thing, I think it would have felt more interactive, and maybe it does for some power sets. As it was it felt like something I was doing instead of using my powers, when what I wanted to be doing was zapping my electrical bullshit or whatever.

I'm sure it feels much more organic to a more tank-ish character than the one I was playing.

Block is terrible because it's a all or nothing action that destroys game balance. Anything that seriously threatens a blocking character with support will one-shot an active character. It's more a side effect of CO's group dynamic being woeful. And while it has arcade style button spam most of the buttons do the same thing.

CoH is slow and boring from an action perspective but fun at a tactical level. So while the AoE attack is playing out you can decide what to do next. And with lots of AoE buffs and debuffs you need to think about your positioning or the flow of the battle. Of course that shows up a lot less solo with some of the more "pure" classes such as tanks or blasters, though even the blasters need to juggle their boosts a little bit.

I find my character (DP/Kinetics Corruptor) has to make quite a few decisions. Do I have enough targets in my AoE cone? Can I afford to be locked into the relatively long animation? Would getting a buff up be better? Even redraw, switching between weapons and non weapon powers, has a tactical element. In CO it was mostly waiting on cooldowns because there was very rarely any reason not to hit the most powerful attack.

That said my own revisit to CoH petered out fairly quickly. I don't think the novelty of being in a virtual world is making up for the often quite ordinary game-play. And I don't have the time or energy to invest to the point where I'd form social connections or see the end-game. Pretty much the same on messing around with Rift.

I fired my old robot/force field mastermind yesterday and  molten tears of joy streamed down my face when I noticed that casting a force field bubble automatically buffed everyone on my team instead of forcing me to keep track of everyone's shields.  That was a change that took too long to arrive.

I finally found some time to give it a go and had forgotten how much I really love this game. I pulled my old rad/energy defender (Sylver Starr) out of mothballs and almost immediately got invited to a group. Took me a while to get my bearings again. I now know why I stopped playing the character as much though. She's not a great healer or damage dealer. I could have sworn I had a direct 1:1 heal but turns out my heal is just AoE. Which sucks when I have to shadow the tank and other members of the team decide to fight something else outside my range. Maybe it was just this one group but I seemed to remember players sticking fairly close together before instead of running willy nilly all over the place.

Next one out of the box will either be my blaster (Retro Rockette) or my controller (Star Kross).

Also noticed leveling was much faster and overall movement speed seemed faster as well. Feels good to be back in Paragon again.

On my rad/sonic defender, the heal aura isn't really my focus. I hit it a few times if the group's taking aoe damage or someone's in danger of dying, sure -- but the other rad abilities are WAY better at keeping people alive. Radiation Infection massively nerfs an enemy group's tohit%, Enervating Field lowers their damage to acceptable levels, and Lingering Radiation slows their movement+attack speed. I actually use EMP Pulse a fair bit combined with a blue inspiration or two to quickly neutralize the offensive capabilities of an entire enemy group. Accelerate Metabolism is one of the best buffs in the game, and it works on your entire group! I also have the three Leadership toggles (assault/maneuvers/tactics) rolling all the time for more group supportage.

Of course finding good anchors (hardy mobs that'll outlast the first few AOEs from your group) for the first 2 abilities can be a challenge...

And sometimes, finding groupmates that don't view the glow of your anchors as a giant "Kill me first!" sign can be equally challenging  :angryfist:

If your teammates are killing so fast that your anchors don't stay up long enough to have an effect you didn't need to drop them in the first place -- i.e. if your team is steamrolling everything this is your chance to pewpewpew or whatever.

That situation I don't actually mind and will happily join in the carnage. I was talking about situations where you'll get a few people on the team who will focus-fire your anchor down first for some strange reason, maybe because it glows a bit brighter? Although in fairness, it's been a long time since I played my Rad so maybe it's not as common now.

Some players like to take down the biggest targets first. Scrappers, especially, do that a lot anchor or no anchor, since they higher crit chances against the bigger types. If you are on a team like that try anchoring on LTs or even Minions instead of Bosses.

Yep, I typically anchor two mobs in a spawn, and target mobs near the back of the spawn (bosses if available, otherwise LTs). Scrapperlock / tunnel vision is real, but thankfully tends to go 'closest mob dies first'. Think of it as managing pet AI. :awesome_for_real:

I know every character got the powers from the Fitness pool for free, but what I'm not sure about is what happened to the characters that took those powers as power picks?  Are they just missing some powers they would have normally been able to get but took the fitness powers at those levels?  Do you need to respec them to get those slots back?

You used to need to respec to get the slots back. Not sure if that's still true in Issue 21.

All existing characters were granted a freespec when the changes went through, so assuming you haven't played the character since then you should still have it and can use it to pick alternate powers.

Change your anchor color to something dark and dull.

How do the two compare to DCUO?

I'm pretty sure CO and DCUO are both console friendly, action RPG's. CoH is the odd one out in being old and old-school.

(Though I've not played DCUO because, well, it's a SOE game).

I think DCUO was faster paced and played more like a console game.  I enjoyed playing it for a month even with the wonky controls.  COH is much more MMO-like in terms of missions (quests) and character development.  COH plays at a slower pace.  I lasted a lot longer in COH before boredom set in, but it didn't have quite as much of the sheer 'fun' factor.

How much more of the game is there now? I've had to 'upgrade' my old CoH Launcher to this lousy new NCSoft Hub thing and now after dicking about for 10 minutes it's foisting a 3gb download on me. 3gb on top of Going Rogue? WTF?

Most of the new content is raid-ish stuff for the incarnates at max level.  Lower level people probably won't see any difference.

The going rogue expansion added an entirely new 1-20 leveling path which isn't bad. Making the fitness pool (speed, endurance and health recovery) an innate power also makes things a lot nice and faster at low levels. For old content I think they reworked the story progression a bit and make some changes to the hero noobie zone I didn't really notice.

Is anyone playing this completely fresh as F2P, as in no veteran hours built up before?

I'm curious what the new F2P experience is like, particularly when you are limited to only the local and team chat channels (and help, I'm assuming, but I haven't seen that stated). However, I'm not "DL 3GB+" curious.

Oh come on, it'll be good practice for downloading SWTOR.  :grin:

My download cap is less than 1.21 TORabytes, so I won't be downloading SWOR either.  :grin:

No, but I have played with people who came into the game with the old free trial restrictions on communication, which are the same as what people who go into the game now completely fresh have to deal with. Unless you love to do absolutely nothing but solo (and CoH is only really fun in as close to a full group as possible), it's just shy of unplayable unless you have friends who aren't under those restrictions ready to play with you. Even then, it's a major hassle. You can send them tells, but they can't respond; the only way to do any kind of remote communication is to either get them invited to a group or add them to your friends list and then use the /friend chat channel, which sends that message to every friend who's online. You can't trade them anything to help them out. You can't get them into your supergroup to get them any advice or help. You can't get them into any global channels.

There used to be buddy invite chains people would organize on the Penny-Arcade forums that would get people some 14-day trials where, if a person subscribed, the code issuer would get a free month of game time. This went on for quite a while, and some people even managed to accrue nearly a year of free time due to this, and it got a lot of people playing the game. When the baby-with-the-bathwater trial restrictions went in, people sticking around even for the 14 days ground to a complete halt.

It's probably been mentioned before in this thread, but those draconian trial restrictions (which address a problem that's since been fixed with better, more aggressive chat and in-game mail auto-filtering) are likely a lot of the reason CoH's subscriber numbers have been sinking further and further, and why the F2P switchover's gotten few people playing when these things tend to get a huge rush of people for at least a few months.

Edit: I remember one story of a couple who tried out the 14-day trial fresh not long after the original restrictions went in (back then you couldn't even access the Help channel). Naturally they wanted to play together, but they couldn't send each other tells and couldn't invite the other to a group. Since Friend-wide chat didn't exist yet, the only way they could communicate was via /local, and the only way they could group up to do anything was to go around populated areas and beg people to invite them to a group and make one of them the leader. It was a disgrace.

Koro, I agree completely. The trial restrictions were ridiculous. I had friends I convinced to try the game, they'd log in to find themselves unable to get any help from other, or able to team up together (I wasn't in game at the time) and basically run around for 5 minutes, then quit.

And I agree - the trial turned players off from paying for the full game. However, existing players were happy with it, so the forums were very supportive of restrictive conditions around trials.

If the restrictions are being driven by an anti-RMT objective at this point for a F2P game, it's insane.

... looks like I'll have to sign up and give it a shot.

Not surprising. The CoH forums have always been a bastion of "fuck you, I got mine". Besides, it's not like those players who were on the free trials could post there and air their frustrations with the limitations anyway.


Nowadays it's probably less "anti-RMT spam" and more "something we can charge you to unlock". Though I imagine the players on the forums will still defend the restrictions to the death with the anti-RMT argument.

Okay, so I created an entirely new account and started CoH/V as F2P.

The character creation system has been nicely revamped, even if Sister Psyche's boobs are very distracting. However, I tried to put a cape on my character without realising that capes are locked content - I couldn't continue, but thought that was because the game hadn't streamed enough info to let me through.

The new tutorial is kinda fun, if a bit short and the boss fight an odd addition to my CoH/V experiences. Giant Monsters certainly aren't meant to be taken in small groups after that point in the game.

In the game proper, the Help channel is being used as the default broadcast channel by the F2Pers since everyone gets it.

The new Atlas Park missions are short and have customised maps, so that's a nice change, even if it is still warehouses and caverns.

I plan to get my character out of the noob areas and then think about how the game presents itself to new players.

This was 100% inevitable.

Having chat channels, tells and trades locked down for F2Ps is peak of idiocy. These are core components, having them locked out is just all around bad idea.

Allowing gold farmers to use disposable accounts to spam users in chat channels/tells/trades is also an all around bad idea.

Here's the thing though: CoH/V is now F2P. If a spammer wants to make an account, it's free (and was pretty cheap before hand, if your gold farmer was willing to commit credit card fraud to get an account and I'm sure that most did).

Instead, you are left with an early game that's crippled communication-wise for new players / trialists. CoH/V isn't (at least before Freedom launched) getting that many new players to pay up, which is an issue given Paragon Studios' claims that they have a 95% retention rate each month. If they were getting new players to pay up, they wouldn't have a revenue issue.

Plus Paragon Studios could just sell inf for $ now and compete head-to-head with the RMTers. Not saying they should, but they could.

I agree that that's a valid concern. But the COH F2P launch went really overboard with locking down stuff that no one would even be able to abuse for spamming. Take the inability for free players to reply to tells or to send tells between people mutually friended. Those are blocked but only annoy legitimate new players without giving a benefit vs. spammers.

Given that they actually invested effort in renovating parts of the new player experience, giving this little thought to communication just seems strange.

I think there is no difference from the games point of view between a tell and a reply tell. But I agree those changes would be good.

Was playing this with some friends as part of a game day. Story arcs still have a wonderful potential to get people "out of sync" in completion which is annoying, but the game is still quite fun in groups and the server was nice and busy. If they do a "slow burn" version of f2p, where it's more a sideline than a main goal, it should work okay.

So, I just discovered that you can purchase a 30 day Invention Licence directly from the Merit Vendors in game for 150 merits.   Run a few task forces, you are good to go for the month.  Now to decide if it is worth it to craft low / mid level IO's for achieves or just wait till i hit 50 and grind away.

Huh.  I've been banking merits like mad.  That's very nice to know.

Wow, that's... probably enough to get me to play again, yeah.

Just got an email, to show their dedication to the F2P model, the next issue has been announced and will only be for subscribers.

They'd made it pretty clear from the start it was a hybrid model, with subscribers getting new and end-game content either first or only. It launched f2p with subscriber exclusive content.

And that was probably the right call. They're not flashy and fast to get into enough that they would have done better on pure f2p. They need to protect the existing subscriber base.

The existing subscriber base has been dropping steadily for years though.

Sure, it's an ancient game, and for much of its life was starved of resources. But that's the same reason that going f2p isn't going to set the world on fire and they couldn't rely on it. So they tried for a system where people who have bought into the game subscribe but there can still be casual play or people exploring the game. Pretty similar to what EQ2 did I think, and for the same reasons.