Ghost Town of Heroes

It's a subject I think is too complex for me to easily work through. I also believe it's so complex that no one at NCsoft or Cryptic has a clear handle on it. The subject? What effect is City of Villains going to have on the CoH customer/player base and on the CoH/CoV base as a whole? City of Heroes seems to be going through a restructuring of sorts, and I'm not sure what it will look like when it's all settled down. I do know that right now, CoH is being described as a ghost town. I'd venture to guess that at least half its player base, and quite likely more than that, have jumped over to CoV. I know that my once very active and fully-membered supergroup has dwindled, in the blink of an eye, to a scattered few members, most of whom aren't online very often. I hold some hard feelings towards NCsoft and Cryptic for that. I was really enjoying teaming with my group and playing City of Heroes... And this, I think, leads to my concern. Has releasing CoV harmed the combined game as a whole? Are there enough players to go around? In trying to provide so many different aspects to the game, are they now no longer able to fully satisfy fans of any one?

When I first joined CoH over a year ago, it was to play a superhero game. No other online game had ever held enough attraction for me to join, but CoH had what I wanted. At first, I enjoyed just being the hero... exploring the powers, carrying out the missions. When that began to get tedious, I was lucky enough to find a mature, fun-loving, and unified supergroup to join. My enjoyment of the game then got to continue by regularly teaming with them. Now that group is all but gone, and I'm left soloing again, which has lost its novelty. I'm really not very interested in playing a villain (and hence, buying CoV) nor in going Player vs Player. So, I may eventually be coming to the end of the line with CoH... I don't know. And almost certainly there are other players out there exactly like me in these respects. Some will leave the game. I wonder if CoV will attract enough new players (and I mean new, ie, non-CoH players) to offset this loss. I simply don't know. And I'm fairly sure no one at the corporate level does either.