Massively

it is starting to get there. i put it down for a month, but some quest improvements, additions, revisions and other new content (e.g. Blood Moon) are giving me some faith back. plus the new zombie invasion pvp map is just a lot of fun.

give it 3 or 4 more content updates and i think you'll find it much more entertaining than immediately post-launch.

that said, i've done the same with my toons. i've probably created and saved 30+ designs and deleted 10+ toons. although, while some hard subscriptions numbers would be cool to see, the way the server sharding works admittedly does a super job of making that somewhat a moot point... every zone shard, whether it spawns 10 or 100, is usually teeming with players. of course, it also did a super job of making lasting online relationships (and rivalries) a little less certain, but i guess you can't win them all.

I'm not sure that it bodes well for any of them long term. How many people could be interested in playing a super hero MMO? Now divide them among three games in not necessarily equal portions. I think that we're headed for Super Hero MMO market glut in 2010. As a fan of the genre, it's going to be a great year. I'm not sure that the same can be said for the folks that are running those games though. It's going to be dog eat dog.

As an aside, CoH's recent efforts to move the game forward are really impressive considering how old it is. If Going Rogue delivers on the features they're promising, then NCSoft certainly isn't being shy about competing with CO and DCUO

250k isn't bad these days. Used to be 500k or gtfo but the market is spread so thin....

Yeah, I think that a lot of companies would be happy with 250K players. If you take WOW out of the equation, a couple hundred thousand players would be a very populous MMO. I'm pretty sure that CoH doesn't have that many players (had it ever?) but it's still chugging along and making tidy money by all accounts. You have to define successful I guess. If you have ~150K players, they're loyal, they enjoy the game, you can keep adding features and still turn a decent profit I think that would be a very successful MMO.

Broken Bottle, CoH actually hit 300,000 a couple months after launch, and were thrilled. (This was before WoW came out, and the 300K mark was considered "hit" status.) The game continued to grow over the following year, eventually topping out at over 700,000 subscribers before WoW came out.

In other words, the game started strong and grew for quite some time.

By comparison, CO peaked early and has been losing subs ever since. It's closer to a Vanguard or an WAR than another CoX. Of course, Vanguard has steadily gotten better since its rocky start, but it never recovered due to the combination of bad aftertaste in people's mouths and stiff competition in the marketplace. WAR is in a similar situation. In fact, if anything its parallels with CO are quite strong. WAR has been considered by many to be a WoW rip-off, while CO has been considered by many to be a CoX rip-off. WAR and CO both had very successful launches, followed by attrition due to lack of endgame content and other issues. WAR and CO both offer some new things, but none of it was spectacular enough to engage the majority of players long-term.

One other factor to consider is Cryptic's upcoming release of STO. Yes, it's a totally different genre. However, both CO and STO are similar in that they appeal to a demographic that's had enough with elves and orcs. :) What's more, Cryptic has to a certain extent set CO up for hard times by how they're piggy-backing STO onto CO with programs like the 6-month and lifetime sub beta guarantees. Put another way, they have deliberately cannibalized CO's player base to promote STO. That will reasonably be expected to have an impact on CO in the long run.

Please understand that this is not saying CO is a flop. WAR continues to do well with subscriber numbers that are similar to what we're guessing CO is at. But it also shows that CO has a long phase of slow growth ahead of it. However, with the upcoming launches of two other super hero games as well as the rejuvenation of the genre's grandpappy, the question is whether these modest numbers are going to be enough for CO to remain genuinely viable. Or will it end up following the course of Matrix Online? Or even Vanguard, for that matter?

Its ok but Aion had those kind of numbers from Korea alone when it came out in its first month. Now that its semi international (and in all fairness a year later) it has over 6million active subscribers and growing. I think Aion is ok but not my thing. With that said I dont think Champions will ever be hitting those kinds of numbers.

aurickle, CoH never hit 300,000. It was around 200,000. If you can still find the NCSoft IR Reports, you would actually see a peak of just above 190k.

Before launch they said they were shooting to get 100,000 players. So no matter how you cut it they have to be happy with these numbers.

...The only games in recent memory that've been anywhere close to 500,000 (and they all quickly lost it) have all been either had a big-budget company behind them (Warhammer), or were based on a fairly well-known IP (AoC, LoTRO).