Arcanaville

Of all the possible reasons why a hypothetical server-side emulator would not work, some of which are genuine challenges, this has to be one of the strangest, if not ludicrous, ones I've heard. If people could figure out how to equip villains on the red side prior to the market merge, this is an effectively impossible problem to create even deliberately, much less accidentally.

And it can be made completely moot by simply switching focus from the market metagame to the content-driven merit systems. The market was always an optional system in City of Heroes moreso than a core system, and it was always well within the ability of the developers to make everything players could want accessible through the in-game rewards systems. To put it bluntly, ignoring the social elements of the game, City of Heroes could have functioned perfectly well with limited reward system modifications as a single player game. There is no system that requires participation by more than one player that is actually essential to the core gameplay beyond the obvious desire to allow for multiplayer teaming itself literally.

And that's his heroic character.

Technically speaking, everything from the powers information I've provided to the community over the years to Leandro's demo tools could be construed as either illegal under the DCMA or a violation of the EULA of the game. Just by encouraging people to save demorecords of game content, I'm encouraging people to preserve copies of the game client, which when the game shuts down they will no longer legally have a license to use in any manner whatsoever.

An emulator for a dead game is something that is technically illegal, but I would lose no sleep over if I discovered existed, particularly if it was being used in a non-commercial manner for people to preserve and continue their game-playing experiences.

I have often wondered, going back years, how difficult it would be to manipulate the memory locations that the game loaded the actual entities into during demorecord playback and whether that would be a safe operation.

I'm not sure if that's addressing what I said or not, so I'll repeat: the letter was a component of an attempt to defraud. A letter can't be "a fraud" legally because a fraud is an action, not a thing.

According to the court documents I read at the time, Garriott's lawyers argued that the open letter was used by NCSoft as evidence his departure was voluntary and the content was crafted in a way that would allow them to later imply that, in defiance of the fact that his departure was not voluntary. Garriott prevailed at trial in his overall assertion that his departure was not voluntary and that NCSoft attempted to defraud him, and the fact that NCSoft used the letter to suggest it was voluntary was not challenged. Its therefore a matter of law that the letter was used in an attempt to defraud Garriott.

If you have evidence to the contrary, I would be happy to read it.

As a rule, the easier it is to convert things freely, the easier it is for RMT to occur. Also, the less paths there are to perform RMT, the easier it becomes to detect and track. And being atomic, items can be tracked and even revoked in theory much easier than influence, which is fungible and not atomic: one sale can quickly spread through lots of transactions and end up in hundreds of different hands.

I have a feeling operating costs were not the critical issue. If it were, your point #2 would be a contradiction: shifting that cash from CoH to Wildstar and B&S would not reduce net operating costs.

If NCSoft wasn't sitting on a large pile of cash, ROI could be a factor but money is fungible: if CoH was operating at a net profit, NCSoft can't simultaneously have a cash flow problem and be sitting on a lot of cash.

If there even is a singular trigger, I suspect its more likely to be a "focusing" issue rather than a profitability issue. A lot of people think businesses operate purely on the basis of what will make them money. But in reality, I know of few businesses that actually operate that way. Business leaders, in particular, are like MMO designers in that they have a vision for the company. That vision includes certain things and excludes others. In the past I've used the example of my company. Its an IT company, but what if I could sell pizzas and make net profit from it. Would I do it? Nope. I'm not a pizza company, and I don't want to own or run a pizza company. That its a business opportunity to make money is really irrelevant to me.

I've seen businesses decide to branch out into new things or stop doing things solely on the basis that they simply don't want to do them anymore, or alternatively that they rather do something else instead. Its entirely possible that short of City of Heroes making hundreds of millions of dollars, NCSoft simply decided, perhaps under pressure due to its poor quarterly performance, to "refocus" and decide what it wanted to be doing and what it no longer wanted to be doing, and Paragon Studios and City of Heroes were no longer what NCSoft wanted to be doing.

Because of that, we may never find a smoking gun that points to the root cause of the shutdown. There may be no direct cause and effect line from the root cause to the decision you'll ever be able to prove without a direct admission from the decision makers.

There are other possibilities, but this is a reasonably possible one that isn't given much consideration.

If you want my personal opinion, based on what I know and what I've been told, I think this situation is a lot more complicated and messy than we're ever likely to know. There's just more moving pieces on the board than I can really account for, is all I can say about that.

To address your specific question, I don't believe NCSoft was forced to shut down the game in that sense.

Technically, the case was made that the letter was used to perpetrate a fraud. Successfully.

That's true: the community in general would not likely have reacted well to the knowledge the game was being shut down regardless of circumstances. But that isn't the question here. The question is whether the publisher had any responsibility whatsoever to the community to gracefully shut the game down. Even NCSoft believes that responsibility isn't zero, or they could have simply shut the game down on September 1. It is their game, and they are making no more money on it, so from a purely quantitative business perspective its illogical to allow the game to run until November 30. Clearly, they either believe that outside observers would judge them harshly if they shut the game down abruptly, or they themselves believe that act would be wrong. Either one acknowledges either that they are aware of a social responsibility to the game, or they recognize everyone else believes they have one whether they agree or not.

But beyond that, there's lots NCSoft could have allowed to happen that would have cost them nothing but would have allowed the community more consideration. They could have allowed the developers to craft a better ending to the game. They wouldn't have had to pay any more for one, as we know the devs are still (unless they've resigned to take other jobs) actually on the payroll until October 31 in accordance with California law. They could have allowed players to rejoin the game to say goodbye which would have cost them trivially, but they froze account creation. They also froze out the ability to grant VIP status and offered no direct means of unlocking premium character slots (separate from using existing slot tokens), again interfering with players' ability to say goodbye to the game in a way that required essentially no material cost.

They did not even have prepared messaging for precisely how the game would end, how refunds would be handled, what parts of the game and support systems would and would not be functioning. They announced the *decision* to terminate the game before even thinking through *how* they were going to terminate the game.

These acts exist outside the realm of "business decisions." There's little or no material consideration here (meaning: they aren't about costs, revenue, or money in general). Even presuming the material requirement to shut the game down, there's no evidence NCSoft particularly cared about the community it was shutting down even to the extent of offering courtesies that would have cost them essentially nothing to provide.

Offering them probably would not have made people care less about the game shutting down, but it might have caused people to be more willing to accept NCSoft's assertion that the shutdown was the result of careful consideration. Instead many have the justified sense that it was a callous act, and calls for boycotting all NCSoft games are only the most extreme instances of what is almost certainly a more widespread sense that games such as this should be kept at a distance.

It may be in a manner impossible to measure, but it does seem to me to be an act of poisoning the well.

I made no specific assessment of your actions whatsoever, so that's impossible.

When you address the first point, I'll hand you another.

I didn't call you a name. I implied you were illiterate because you claimed that words you typed minutes previously meant something other than what they actually say, and failed to recognize them even when quoted directly. If I was name calling I would call you Ms Illiterate, which is a name. Questioning your comprehension skills is something I offered objective evidence for.

I also believe my characterization of the general content of your responses is accurate enough to be objectively sustained. I would be more than happy to demonstrate that it can be upon request.

But no, this is not a debate. That requires debate skills on both sides, and as I previously mentioned, you lack those.

The people that think its time to move on, should move on. The people that are repeatedly saying its time to move on are disengenous: they don't believe its time to move on, they believe its time to stay and tell other people to move on.

If you're going to do that on a public forum, you can't hide behind a false shield of reasonableness. As is always true on any public forum, if you challenge someone, you should be prepared to be challenged in kind. And you have no right to set the rules of that discussion to explicitly favor your own expression.

Its equally ludicrous for people to keep saying nothing others say changes anything, as if they were exempted. Trying to preempt the last word by saying anything I say changes nothing is something that if you actually believed it, and believed the proper course of action is to be silent, you'd have been silent.

You should consider adding something else besides "I know you are but what am I", "drop dead", and "look at me, I don't care what other people think, see, see?" to your debate repertoire, because there's no mercy rule on the internet.

I think MMOs have a legitimate point of departure from those other things in that MMO publishers almost literally sell access to communities as a fundamental part of the value proposition of the game. They want and encourage people to become emotionally involved with social structures tied to the game, knowing that for most people such attachments can't be trivially dissolved.

Social communities spring up all the time surrounding things like television shows: Star Trek at one point existed almost solely *as* a fan community for almost a decade. But while CBS and Paramount could and did stop making Star Trek the show, and its obvious they couldn't be compelled to continue doing so just to serve a community, conversely they did not provide nor did they revoke the infrastructure of the fan community that sprung up around the show.

As with most things, its easy to portray the situation in binary terms: either MMO publishers have no ethical responsibility to their communities at all, or they are slaves to them. If one thing is certain, its that the truth is going to be between those two extremes.

Very recently, an example of a form of social contract overriding legal and fiduciary ones was the settling of the NFL officials lockout. Press releases aside, it seems obvious that the final arbiter was the public at large. The NFL has no legal responsibilities to football fans. But there exists a social contract between the NFL and fans that in part includes the fact that the NFL makes claims about protecting the sport and the brand, and asks for the consumer's trust in its actions in the furtherance of that protection. The official lockout was a blatant irrefutable breach of that social contract, and the vast majority of both fans and professional observers reacted accordingly.

You could trivialize this as just as case of catering to the masses, but there's a difference between giving the masses what you think they want, and the masses thinking they are being cheated out of something and demanding corrective action. The law was mostly silent on this issue, but society at large knew better. A social contract had been breached, and that contract affected enough people to cause their dissatisfaction to be sufficient to force change.

MMOs are still a relatively new thing, and they don't have even a tiny fraction of that kind of penetration into people's lives yet. But that's a matter of degree. When an MMO publisher asks players to join, get involved, live a segment of their lives in their environment, I believe they are entering into a form of social contract with their players, whatever the EULA says. The EULA of CoH said the devs could change anything they wanted whenever they wanted for any reason they wanted without warning or compensation. But the game had a cottage rule nonetheless. The cottage rule was an informal social contract between the developers and the players: they agreed that because players get attached to the way things are, they would only change certain fundamental things when they had a high enough justification for doing so. All game developers form roughly analogous social contracts with their players, and break them at their own peril.

Until the City of Heroes shutdown announcement, I always assumed publishers recognized their own social contract with players. You build communities here, we won't arbitrarily yank the ground out from under you. And most shutdowns I've seen have been much more graceful than this one, recognizing that sometimes games have to end, but the community deserves to unwind gracefully.

In truth, the shutdown of City of Heroes is a very small thing in the gaming community. But the tragedy of the commons instructs that its the accumulation of small things like this that can destroy much larger things. Each time an MMO is shutdown, especially like how NCSoft is shutting down City of Heroes, it contributes in a small way to people distrusting game operators, and being slightly less likely to expose themselves emotionally to becoming involved with other similar online communities. And that's not a good thing for MMOs.

No one cow destroys the field, and no one shutdown destroys MMOs. But if MMO publishers refuse to honor their social contract with their players, or even acknowledge there is one in the first place, they must all take collective responsibility for the consequences of that collective decision, whatever that turns out to be. And people are highly unpredictable when it comes to such things on long time scales.

The purpose of that statement was to express the thought encapsulated in the statement.

Separate from that, I may be convinced to clarify things for you when you answer my question first:

I asked for an example.

Do you have any other way of expressing yourself besides rhetorical questions?

It is an interesting question to consider what the ethical responsibilities are of an entity that sponsors, promotes, and explicitly profits from communities, to the communities it generates.

I read the linked article when it first came out. Essentially what it says is when you have more money than you can reasonably put to work, profit margin doesn't matter, absolute profit matters. I would tend to agree. What I don't understand is why this would be considered either interesting or controversial, and what it says about NCSoft specifically with regard to City of Heroes.

If NCSoft has more money than they can currently put to work, then the only reason for shutting down City of Heroes is that it was losing money. If it was returning even a small percent profit that would likely beat investment returns on that much liquid assets. The argument put forth by others that the problem was that there were better marginal returns elsewhere would be nullified by the argument proposed by author of the linked article.

Personally I think its much more complex than that, because of the issues of repatriating cash.

An intermittent inability to comprehend language combined with reactionary anxiety and wild swings between indifference and emotional engagement are potential signs of a progressive mental disorder.

Yes, it is.

An example of which would be?


That's not a reason why, that's a rhetorical restatement of the question.

That's a very roundabout way of saying you are in fact trying to convince people to dismiss their emotional investments.


Why.