Wolfgang

@smartstep Yes, this model is just killing WoW.

THANK YOU. You made the same point that I have been wondering for months now. When it was announced that Cryptic was going Sub + MT store people brought out the pitch forks and promised to ban the games.

Then Blizzard (who as you point out has been doing it for a while), comes out with obvious stuff like pets and now a $25 mount and sure some have brought out the pitch forks, but they made near $3 million in 24 hours off a virtual pet.

Please stop with the double standards people and unlike Blizzard Cryptic is a very small company that needs the money, Blizzard on the other didn't spend $3 million developing a horse.

This is the second free weekend they have done. Both free weekends have come at the sametime as a major content patch.

They have lost subscribers just like all new MMOs and probably wish they had more. But it is much smarter to start getting more people to play the game now than a year from now when people have already given up on the game. DDO is one of the few games that has been able to reach back from the grave -- WAR waited to long to shake things up.

I guess Cryptic is damned for trying to have a new approach to marketing.

Or they might just be trying to keep CO in the news and buyers interested. It is smart to market the game this way and let more and more people touch it and get interested in it.

Or I guess they could wait until a year later like Warhammer when people have already given up on the game.

My only concern with sub numbers is that the Devs have enough subscribers to turn a profit and therefore continue to support their game.

Having 50,000 players or 900,000 doesn't make a difference to me.

I like Champions Online so much I purchased a lifetime sub.

They are shooting for 100,000 subscribers. They aren't trying to be the next WoW or even Warhammer. I am pretty confident they should get near 100,000 pretty quickly provided they keep new updates coming along like they did with CoH.

source on 100,000 comment: http://championsonlinedailynews.com/nemesis-online-on-the-table/

They are being very realistic -- which is also why they need some MTs. As has been stated with Free Realms -- if just 1% takes part in the MTs they can get a lot more money. So they will charge the sub with the hopes of 100,000 users (not a lot compared to others) and then if 1% of the base buys a MT here and there -- they will make enough cash to keep the game up and running and provide updates.

as peon47, they thought the game would be out by now. They are in massive crunch mode. They basically have a month left. I fully expect a fairly decent size patch after installing the game. The disc will go to press and they (like all MMOs) will continue to work.

They probably couldn't spare Bill or Jack for a week to be at Comic-Con. It would have been nice, but it is crunch time for them.

With all of the Nerd Rage these days -- I wouldn't want to show off something that might have bugs or feature incomplete and read the Nerd Rage for the next 4 weeks.

I went with Gamestop, but I sorta wanted the Vanity pet from Best Buy.

There is no evidence of this.

If there are 1000 items in the game.

Boss A Drops Items 1,2, 3 -- you can either farm Boss A until you get all 3 drops or go buy the items. How does that change the game design?

Want an special costume item, mount, color, etc... Figure out the questline or go buy it.

The only thing I could see is that they make something very hard to accomplish. But this hasn't stopped people from playing MMOs.

Microtransactions haven't ruined UO (you can/could buy leveled characters), haven't ruined Sony games -- this is just whining.

Cryptic has done nothing to make us "assume the worst". When they worked on City of Heroes they provided excellent updates and even a decent expansion. They haven't proven to be a company focused only on getting money.