Another_Fan

Originally Posted by UberGuy

I find your pedantic desire to even debate such a wildly obvius conclusion a refreshing reminder of why I had you on ignore for a very long time.

Originally Posted by DarkCurrent

That's cool. I find it surprising though that considering how much GW2 product they've moved that their stock isn't going up. What do you think explains the decline?

Originally Posted by DarkBlaster_NA

Threads like these do more harm than good, Stop posting them.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

TL;DR

Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU

Fair enough, and it does indeed all depend on how much stuff you are including. Continuing education is important, especially as new technologies/advancements in current tech arises. Need to stay on the ball here (hell going from OpenGL 2 to OpenGL 4 requires a bit re-education).

And chances are that there are also similar things for Nvidia and ATI to attend as well.

Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU

Well, to be fair, without knowing who you are referring to specifically, I am going to believe that you were referring to Another_Fan's wage estimates (which to be fair, in my mind I *do* believe that they are a high, which is why I ended up settling for a $7million/year wage/benefits package cost for 80 developers).

Originally Posted by UberGuy

Ooh, look out, he broke out "son".

Originally Posted by UberGuy

"You're wrong when I argue something that isn't what you said.""

I genuinely feel sorry for anyone that you teach.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

A fresh out of college CS major that scores a 100k+ job in the Bay area has effectively hit the lottery. Also, no fresh out of college CS major is worth $100k. I don't care if he graduated valedictorian from Stanford and flew to the job interview in his personally constructed jetpack.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I think that's generally a question of what kind of game you're trying to make, fundamentally. There's no reason for any sort of quantitative balancing at all if the game you want to make is "we're going to throw stuff into the game, and the players are entirely on their own as to what happens." But that is not this game. If it were, there would be no reason to think hard about, or at all about, things like debt management, XP curve balancing, or any of the other things that were done primarily to constrain the average player experience within a specified, if larger than normal for MMOs, range.

In City of Heroes' case specifically, it isn't a question of pitching to the median, its more a case that this game *defines* performance in terms of the median experience in the first place. Its not like a test that if everyone gets Ds you assume everyone is an idiot. In City of Heroes if everyone gets Ds you assume the game's too hard. That's not so much a debatable point as it is an axiom of the game design.

I think you should always *consider* outliers, but I don't think its a good idea in general to "accommodate" them in the literal sense. For me I think if the game design intends to do that, it should do so in a systematic way that makes them no longer actual outliers to the performance band the game targets, except coincidentally (meaning, it only happens to be true at this moment in time that the players cluster on one place, except for a few people; the game would function perfectly fine if tomorrow the players' performance ranged evenly across that entire range).

For example, I've always thought that CoH should have found a way to accommodate the playstyle of people who like to herd up tons of things and people who like to fight just one or two very strong things. But the reward system should have reflected that, so that allowing players to build for and execute the mass case wasn't the overwhelmingly higher reward choice. When it takes roughly the same build effort to kill a couple very strong things as it does to mow down hundreds of weak things but the latter generates far more rewards, that either implies the mechanical design is broken or the reward system is broken in some way. Either alone is not a problem: the combination together is.

In that respect, part of the problem is deciding which outliers to keep and which to bar, because certain combinations of outliers are (for the most part) objectively broken.

Originally Posted by Tater Todd

This thread...I should look away but...I c-can...

Originally Posted by UberGuy

My tactics have never changed, but they never had anything to do with what you seem to claim. I state things, and when they're challenged, I defend them.

Here's my statement that you latched onto with all the same pedantic asininity that you used to break out the forth and fifth dictionary definitions of "failure" above.



Readers should bear in mind that this discussion was posted during I18, so the only way to get purples was as drops or with Hero/Villain Merits.

Days later, after the main thread discussion had actually died down, you wandered into the thread and start arguing with the quote above because you were able to show that some Stealth IOs had been bought at prices that exceeded the price of some of the cheapest purples.

As I seem to recall, you are some sort of teacher of literature, and yet you cannot understand how indescribably, pointlessly pedantic this was. For someone with such a background (if I remember correctly) you suck at communication. Everyone in that thread, even the person with whom I was debating when I posted it, understood exactly what I meant and did not object to it. You came in after the debate was over and started a new one strictly based on semantics. In the resulting debate, you threw up Venn diagrams that proved nothing and you quoted market facts that ultimately blew up in your face. You were wrong, everyone there knew you were wrong, and you still couldn't let it go.

No, you couldn't possibly be wrong. The other people in that thread disagreed with you because they were my "fan club". Yeah, because I've always had such a big following.

Anyone who wants can read the thread from the link in the quote above. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether or not you live in your own little world of logic and meaning. I will say that this post summarizes the whole thing rather nicely, though.

And I must say I did very much enjoy making this post.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Unless that's average salary and benefits of $90k and sixty thousand dollar parking spaces for each employee, I have no idea how Paragon Studios could possibly have been averaging a net total cost per employee of $150k.

For reference, last I checked the industry average for game designers was something between $50k and $90k depending on experience and other factors, and senior designers (usually, that title means manager) between $80k-$120k.

I've always used a figure of merit of about $75k average salary and about $90k total benefit cost per employee averaged across all employees, about $7M in incremental annual employee cost for about 75 employees. If Paragon Studios had a higher total operating cost than $9M to $10M I would be highly surprised.

Remember that out of all those Paragon employees, for every senior producer/designer/programmer making maybe around a hundred grand, there was a QA person making far less: probably closer to $40k-$50k.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

I seem to recall that most of what they were doing was generally enjoying the beatdown of your royal insufferableness.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

The game isn't doen yet.

Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU

Side note 2: And how did City of Heroes manage to have 100,000 subscribers and *only* have a revenue of 800K/month? I have seen people posting up on comment threads that CoX has a subscriber base of 100K players. I can see it being 100K of *regular* unique account logins... but that is something completely different.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

LOL, not even close. I saved that thread, dude. We really shouldn't pollute this thread further with our crap, but I'd love an excuse to quote it here.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

In context, given the position implied by the post in question, I believe there is no reasonable debate that the definition number one is the one intended.

I find your pedantic desire to even debate such a wildly obvius conclusion a refreshing reminder of why I had you on ignore for a very long time.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

The devs chose to balance the game, under the pretense they were game developers. They did not decide to follow your game philosophy, under the pretense they are not sociopaths.

Originally Posted by Tannim222

I don't dispute the game has been in decline for years. That's true.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the game was failing.

What is true is the game was turning clear profit as I've posted upthread.

A profitable game with a full-time studio of staff with active work on an old game, and staff with active work on a new game is not a failing studio.

In my own opinion, a profitable studio with a profitable game is one that is still healthy.

Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba

"Healthy" is subjective. Most agree, however, that the facts show that the game has been in steady decline for years.

Originally Posted by PPCGunner

Here's a mind blower for you,

A. NCsoft shut down a profitable game because they needed a reason to twirl their mustaches this quarter and making gamers cry seemed to fill the bill.

B. NCsoft shut down a game that wasn't profitable or very marginally profitable because they needed to concentrate on things that made them money.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

Because the game's failure is not something you or anyone else can clearly lay at the feet of the implementation. We cannot point to how the game worked, or its lore, and say "that's why it 'failed'." We can point out things we consider flaws, but that's not the same thing as a list of reasons why the game "failed". And among the things that might be considered mistakes, is your assumption that they would immediately repeat all of them?

Whatever mistakes they may have made, these same devs have been responsible for either early creation or later work on a game that many of us here loved to play even today. At this time of closure I think we were on the verge of some of the best things ever added to the game. We want these same people to work on the game because we trust them to create something we would love to play - they proved they can do that.

Remember, when consider mistakes and paths not taken, we also have to include what we know about corporate support from NCSoft. That includes includes, among other things, shooting down an actual sequel. What "mistakes" might have been corrected there?

In any case, I think it's a bit ludicrous that you frame that question around an assumption of failure. An eight year run is hardly a failure in this context. The game being shut down at this point does not mean it "failed".

Originally Posted by Ad Astra

Funerals are for the comfort of those still living - the widow, the children, the best friends, etc.