plaguelands.comCity of Heroes can fix that with data
Skimming my bulging rss feed, mmognation had this little tidbit:
During the first three years of the game, more than 24 million characters have been created in City of Heroes and City of Villains with more than 102,000 of those characters reaching level 50, the game’s top tier.
(Emphasis Mine)
Is that all? I would expect at least 500,000 characters to reach that point with those numbers. Coh is quite the grindy piece of business and the combat is so dull and repetitive it rots brains, it would certainly explain the lack of players reaching the cap. If you were a game designer and the numbers showed that out of 24 million characters only 100 thousand reached the max, wouldn’t you think that is seriously fucked up,? No wonder their subscription base has been stagnating and slowly dying for the last two years, no one is motivated to reach the cap and they’ve had telling numbers the whole time, only the masochists will reach the top.
Several days ago, I lied half-awake when the ass crack of dawn was vanquishing the dark, zoning out on some political diatribe I spotted Gamer Generation episode 2.0 on the Discovery Times channel, it was all about virtual worlds and featured stories about the people who play them and their relationships with the game and the people inside them. One showcased a married couple that played City of Heroes together and the wife fell behind in levels making her character inadequate in their weekly group with friends. While the husband is more or less a tool for out-leveling his wife, they both agreed on using a power leveling service in Romania to catch her up, which was said to take four weeks and cost several hundred dollars - the show traveled to Romania interviewing the farmers who leveled her character along with the man in charge, telling his thoughts about the work they do - actually seeing and listening to their side was well worth watching the episode alone. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on the web and I don’t see it listed in their viewing schedule for the month.
More numero specifics:
Additionally, NCsoft has determined that of the 24 million characters created:
* 27 percent of the hero characters created were blasters, making it the most popular hero archetype.
* 26 percent of the villain characters created were Masterminds, making it the most popular villain.
* 32 percent of the characters with travel powers chose flight, followed by super jump at 28 percent, super speed at 25 percent and teleport at 14 percent.Fueling the game’s economy is the more than 3 trillion influence (the game’s currency) in circulation, which will play an important part of the new crafting system and auction houses being added with the upcoming release of “Issue 9: Breakthrough,” the game’s next content expansion.
Crafting will save us from the madness! Sure, it will.
Nod to we can fix that with data, whenever I see cold hard numbers and the results from data mining that damn phrase always pops into my head.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “City of Heroes can fix that with data,” an entry on Plaguelands
- Published:
- 04.27.07 / 12pm
- Category:
- City of Heroes
Two things, I should point out.
On the cynical side, these numbers came right from an NCSoft press release, so only they know how accurate they are.
On the arty side, those numbers actually don’t surprise me. The beauty of CoH/CoV’s character creation system is in the making, not necessarily the playing. I’ve had a full roster of characters on my account since day one, but I’ve only played one or two of them higher than level 20.
Of course, saying that it’s more fun to make a character than play it seems … I guess a bit cynical too. : /
I never levelled a character to 50 for exactly that reason. If you have a good group of people, you can probably get to 50 whilst chatting to people and occasionally pressing attack buttons. I know people in my old Supergroup who have ten or more level 50s. I mean, Virgil on a bike, I play a lot of hours, but really…
Interesting statistics though. 24 million characters? Half of those are probably my alts.
With no end-game as such, it’s not really surprising people don’t really race to the cap. What’s interesting to me is that, according to MMOGChart, CoH peaked at 180,000 subscribers… randomly waving hands around, say 500,000 people have subscribed over the three years total, that’s 48 characters per person. Makes sense, when creating costumes is one of the most fun parts of it.
That’s a good point with the character creation being one of the best parts of the game the numbers shouldn’t be that surprising, I wonder the difference between 50, 40, and 30.
haha, nice one Melmoth. The oteher half are Zoso’s creations, no question.
I think all that 24 million number reflects is how entertaining it is to design costumes for new characters. I’d be shocked if more than a small portion of those characters were played past level 5 or so.
I only played CoH for a few months and only got to level 32, but I still had something like 7 or 8 characters because it was fun to mess around with costumes.
The game is definitely lame after the initial thrill of travel powers and missions wears off. It doesn’t help that they did something weird after a few months that stopped the game from running through a firewall. It was too much trouble trying to reconfigure my firewall (they provided zero help), so I never played again.
Yea, it got old for me quick too, the character creation was my favorite part, too bad about the shoddy support, seems like I’ve read that far too often whenever I hear someone citing a reason why they left the game, that and the grind.
…hang on.
Somebody fell behind… in levels… in City of Heroes… and this was cause for concern?
All this tells me is that hubby couldn’t spend two seconds RTFM to learn about sidekicking but was perfectly alright with outsourcing to Romania. Truly the human tapestry is rich, varied, and snarled.
–GF
Yea, he was a tool - I forgot and left out that influence was also a part of the deal.
Just to clear up a few misconceptions, since you guys are talking about us…
Yeah, we know all about sidekicking. Of course that worked fine…as long as the leveling within the supergroup worked out. Sure, I got sidekicked lots of times, being (usually) the lowest-level member of the team. We had several level 50 characters on the team and I played with them maybe six hours a week. It helped, but it still didn’t level me up fast enough, since I couldn’t just play sidekicked for 24 hours straight, which is what those guys in Romania do with the character. (There must be some other trick to it, too, since when I played sidekicked on a level 50 team it just didn’t seem like I was racking up the levels as fast as those guys can.) Also, there were some times when we had an odd number of players and not every lower-level character could be sidekicked. And then it sucked to lag so far behind the rest of the team. Especially since after a while, pretty much everyone but me got above level 40 and I was stuck down in the 20’s with my highest-level character. I guess we could have recruited more but that’s a hassle, and I like playing with the supergroup since we’re a regular team and we play well together. Recruiting random people is such a wildcard — we got this guy once who I swear was stoned out of his mind and kept getting us all killed. I’d rather play with people I know and trust.
Some details that got glossed over…first of all, the guy that runs the power-leveling team happens to be a personal friend. And he cut me a pretty good deal. Second, it didn’t take 4 weeks to level my character. It was overnight. As far as my husband goes, well, he was pretty competitive…had to play like a maniac to keep up with his buddies. I didn’t mind though, since the powerleveling thing gave me a quick way to catch up, and I wasn’t all hung up on having to get to a certain level all by myself. Plus, I was just plain impatient, since my favorite, highest-level character was an ice/ff controller and I wanted to have a bigger impact when playing with my teammates. I was bored just having 2 or three really good powers to use, and I really wanted to get Jack Frost so I could do a little more damage.
Well, say what you will. You’re entitled to your opinions. We had some fun together with the game, and that’s what counts for me.
-CB
Hi, Chilled Bubbly! I never expected a reply from you, since I didn’t mention names and I’m sure you’re busy being famous and what nots in the coh community…
Funny how that happens. Seriously, thank you for the thoughtful response, I believe the show did leave out some details unless my memory was fuzzy. I remembered the show claiming the transaction took weeks opposed to overnight, but I’m not sure if I was wrong or the show, I did look for it online for about an hour and couldn’t find it. In your segment, the show addresses a very valid concern among gaming couples with kids who having different responsibilities and struggle to play together, it was intriguing to watch and thanks for being so open about it. The COH statistics made me think of your particular situation since the show was still fresh in my mind.