BackAlleyBrawler

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Thanks for the updated patch notes

One question - I just tested my Crab VEATs 'mace blast' power, and the mace being used is still invisible. Was only the Bane version fixed in regards to this: "Arachnos Soldier / Bane Spider - Fixed Bane spider characters getting an invisible default mace when using a powers respec. " Or were both the bane and crab versions of the mace fixed so they would be visible? just wondering - I did send in a petition to inform the devs also.

Other than that, great work on the patch!

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What Crab Spider Mace powers?

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Hey Folks,

For those of you who have been keeping up and for those of you who haven't I was just informed this afternoon that my flick, "This American Hero (Part 1)" -- which was shot in City of Heroes -- won first place in the HBO/Cinemax Your Virtual Life contest.

Anyway I'm beaming and I just wanted to share the news with all of you.

Here's the youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2n65UcAy2M

-- Fly

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Congratz!

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Oh but they imcreased the animation times on Stone Melee for no reason, what a great waste of time.


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Or so they can fit the Stone melee animations in with the upcoming Shield defensive set. But dont take BaBs word for it at all.

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So are you calling Back Alley Brawler a liar? He said in a post and he told me that SM was changed for shields in a PM. He said if they were going to change any Damage Per Animation powers they'd start with Energy Transfer first.

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Not true. I said those power animations got looked at because we are working on shields. That's what lead us to discover the minor bug.

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As far as I can tell, Claws and KAtana are the only weapon sets that haven't got thr redraw removed yet. Just wondering if we can get an estimate as to when these last two sets might get that change?

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I would have thought this obvious, but no...you can't have an estimate.

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Have to fix BAB's list for accuracy:

Cryptic:
1. Positron
2. BAB
3. Castle
4. Ghost Widow
5. War Witch
6. Constellation replaced by Hero 1 (story bible)
7. JLove
8. Ken Morse (Art Lead)
9. Nick replaced by Don Pham (environmental/3D artist)
10. Brett replaced by Graham
11. Blue Steel (design support)
12. Serdar replaced by Mynx (Producer)
13. Richard (AP/Build Engineer)
14. Aaron (Lead programmer)
15. Garth (who moved over to Core Tech before the acquistion)

I think that is everyone.

Office support, HR, and Senior Management were all handled by Cryptic proper.

Issue 9 got a lot of attention from Jack, Poz, and Mike Lewis simply because the Invention System and Auction House was SO huge, and unlike anything we had done before. It took a village to raise that child.

John Yoo left RIGHT before the 15 person pair-down.

As for the comment about the two teams not stealing resources from one another. It is true. Anyone who left the project (Serdar, Constellation, Nick, Brett) was replaced by a new hire.

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Ack...forgot about Brett.

Still, I was close.

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And Aaron, but, you know, he's only the Lead Programmer and all.

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I mentioned him in an earlier post, but he somehow fell of the list. Sorry Aaron, you rock!

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Have to fix BAB's list for accuracy:

Cryptic:
1. Positron
2. BAB
3. Castle
4. Ghost Widow
5. War Witch
6. Constellation replaced by Hero 1 (story bible)
7. JLove
8. Ken Morse (Art Lead)
9. Nick replaced by Don Pham (environmental/3D artist)
10. Brett replaced by Graham
11. Blue Steel (design support)
12. Serdar replaced by Mynx (Producer)
13. Richard (AP/Build Engineer)
14. Aaron (Lead programmer)
15. Garth (who moved over to Core Tech before the acquistion)

I think that is everyone.

Office support, HR, and Senior Management were all handled by Cryptic proper.

Issue 9 got a lot of attention from Jack, Poz, and Mike Lewis simply because the Invention System and Auction House was SO huge, and unlike anything we had done before. It took a village to raise that child.

John Yoo left RIGHT before the 15 person pair-down.

As for the comment about the two teams not stealing resources from one another. It is true. Anyone who left the project (Serdar, Constellation, Nick, Brett) was replaced by a new hire.

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Ack...forgot about Brett.

Still, I was close.

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I believe that's it. The rest of the team were production. Brian Clayton (now the head cheese), Mynx (producer), Ghost Falcon (producer) Lighthouse, Ex Libris, Blue Steel (design support), Richard (AP/Build Engineer), and Ross (marketing)

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Is this "Ross" the nefarious Dark Watcher from Marketing who was at the Meet and Greet to make sure nothing too revealing was revealed?

If so, does "Ross" know that he's been dubbed "Dark Watcher"? And is he proud that his "Dark Watcher's Lament" IO set with its ToHit debuff is perfect for his role at the M&G?

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I think the programmer who adopted that moniker might take offense.

Ross was at the M&G, but he doesn't have a redname, log into the game as a sig, or post here on the forums as far as I know.

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We need Shane back behind the helm of Synapse, he played that character like a mufa during CoV Beta's closing event.

I notice your lists include Moderator11 as a new hire. I am wondering if you mean to imply Moderator11 is a person, or have revealed that you did in fact hire a terrifying robot texthunter from the future?

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We have hired two moderators (couldn't tell you their numbers) who are physically here in the NCNC offices.

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Thanks, BAB, you've been so gracious with your time. But please indulge me with just one more confirmation:

SuperMartin (Martin Simpson)... with ye or nay?

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Nay. He had moved off of CoX before I go here. Couldn't tell you when exactly. I believe he was part of Cryptic's Core team.

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Nice list.

Now if someone would refresh my memory, please. There was a large developer interview that (I think) used to be on the Cryptic website. In it, there was a picture of one of the dev staff sleeping on the job, except that he wasn't sleeping--he was in full-on recline mode while working at his station. Who was that guy?

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Has to be Richard. The poor guy has fallen asleep during team meetings.

He does a lot of overnight build-sitting

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With CoH at the point of its the glorious rebirth:

Cryptic:
1. Positron
2. BAB
3. Castle
4. Ghost Widow
5. War Witch
6. Hero 1 (story bible)
7. JLove
8. Ken Morse (Art Lead)
9. Don Pham (environmental/3D artist)
10. Graham
11. Blue Steel (design support)
12. Mynx (Producer)
13. Richard (AP/Build Engineer)

NCSoft:
1. Brian Clayton (Production, General Manager)
2. Ghost Falcon (Producer)
3. Lighthouse (Community Rep)
4. Ex Libris (Community Relations)
5. Ross (Marketing)

Temporarily Abducted, Later Rescued by NCNorCal:
1. pohsyb
2. Garth
3. Manticore (part time story consultant at NC Austin)
4. Ryan Roth (Environment artist) - left Cryptic to come work with us

Familiars Who Left for Other Projects:
1. Ian
2. Ravenstorm - No longer with Cryptic
3. Nick Duguid
4. Mike Apolis (Mapolis, environment artist)
5. Captain Mako (Shane Hensley)
6. Old_Lord_Recluse (Zeb Cook) - No longer with Cryptic
7. Lord_Recluse (Serdar Corpur) - No longer with Cryptic
8. Constellation (Brian Gilmore)
9. Geko (Al Rivera)
10. Archon Voss (Thomas Foss)
11. Statesman (Jack Emmert)
11-41. Unfamilar programmers and artists listed in the CoV credits whom we never interacted with on the boards.

Also, on the NCSoft Community Rep side, we've lost a few familar names: CuppaJo, Alexa, Aura, Arctic_Sun, Awry (who is married to Manticore and played Sister Psyche at the Live Valentine Event!), Cricket, etc....

New Hires at NorCal (so far):
1. Jimmy the IT Guy
2. Teressa (HR/Office mom)
3. BAB's animation minion
4-5. Castle's powers minions
7-8. Moderators 11 and 419?
9-10. Kick [censored] concept artists
11. Graphics programmer


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Fixed for you.

Should also point out that while the official CoH/CoV team was 100% devoted to working on CoH/CoV, Cryptic did occasionally send help down from people who had moved off of the project. Jack and Micheal Lewis were involved quite a lot in Issue 9, particularly the design of the auction houses/market. Shannon (Poz) also pitched in during Issue 9. I'm pretty sure there were other instances where this happened as well.

What didn't happen was anyone on the core team for CoH doing work on Cryptic's other projects. So it wasn't really a two way street.

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You let out the box and two others

1. Positron
2. BAB
3. Castle
4. Ghost Widow
5. War Witch
6. SexyJay
7. (Silent) Ian
8. Ravenstorm(?)
9.pohsyb
10. Blue Shield
11. Mynx
12. Hero 1
13.
14.
15.

The latter three just never posted much (in public or otherwise).

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Ah crap, forgot Joe (Hero 1). I think he might have been a bonafied addition to the team rather than being part of the Cryptic exchange program. He was brought in around Issue 9 or 10. Mynx was the producer on CoH a long time ago, left Cryptic to pursue other things, and then came back around Issue 9 to replace Serdar (who sometimes logged in as Lord Recluse). Manticore (Sean Fish) had left Cryptic to go work on another project for NCSoft back around Issue 8 I believe.

There was also Michael Henry and Joe Lyford, the two sound guys working for Cryptic. While they were never officially on the project they did handle off of our sound needs. Now our sounds are being handled through NCSoft in Austin

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BAB was leading probably only one or two people in looking after animations (he'd need someone else to hold the camera while he swung his sword around - bow wow chicka chicka bow wow! ;-), SexyJay probably had costume design all to himself or as part of a small art team (two or three people).

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I've actually been the sole animator and FX artist since Issue 8. So glad to say that's no longer the case XD

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If that was the case, then you, sir, rock even more.

To quote pohsyb, (^_^)b


So let's see:
1. Positron
2. BAB
3. Castle
4. Ghost Widow
5. War Witch
6. SexyJay
7. (Silent) Ian
8. Ravenstorm(?)
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

Who's who at Pre-NCNC CoX?

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Ian and Ravenstorm were moved to MUO. The last bit of work Ian did for CoH was the Justice armor pieces for the GvE edition. Ravenstorm's last major contribution were Safeguard missions, but he came back on every once in a while to help out. He was responsible for setting up Hamidon(s) and GM spawn placements in the Hive and Abyss, as well as pathing for the Rikti Invasion ships.

Added to that list would be Ken, our art lead. Nick, an environment artist replaced with Don shortly after Issue 9. Nick moved to one of Cryptic's other projects while Don is now with us at NCNC.

On the programming side, there's Aaron, the lead programmer and Garth, replaced at some point with Graham. Garth was shunted over to Cryptic's core team when Graham came on board, but eventually ended up joining us as well. Pohsyb had also been moved off of CoH/CoV but we managed to sneak him out and take him with us.

I believe that's it. The rest of the team were production. Brian Clayton (now the head cheese), Mynx (producer), Ghost Falcon (producer) Lighthouse, Ex Libris, Blue Steel (design support), Richard (AP/Build Engineer), and Ross (marketing)

That 15? I lost count...

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BAB was leading probably only one or two people in looking after animations (he'd need someone else to hold the camera while he swung his sword around - bow wow chicka chicka bow wow! ;-), SexyJay probably had costume design all to himself or as part of a small art team (two or three people).

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I've actually been the sole animator and FX artist since Issue 8. So glad to say that's no longer the case XD

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So who filmed you with the taped sticks? :P

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Tripod.

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BAB was leading probably only one or two people in looking after animations (he'd need someone else to hold the camera while he swung his sword around - bow wow chicka chicka bow wow! ;-), SexyJay probably had costume design all to himself or as part of a small art team (two or three people).

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I've actually been the sole animator and FX artist since Issue 8. So glad to say that's no longer the case XD

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I just want to thank you bigtime, Brawler, for the explanation. I'm web developer-lite myself, and so I was always interested in hearing some sort of technical explanation why. You guys throw in enough great stuff all the time to keep this game great. I'll still hope you all find a clever way to get it in without burying yourselves.

I would also love to hear a similarly detailed explanation about why we cant customize henchmen, when you get the time. If nothing else, it would be nice to have male/female versions (robots being a possible exception, since there's nothing inherently "male" about the existing bots).

Could you please also maybe throw in why we cant emote our veteran reward pets?

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Emotes on vet pets and controller pets is a design decision. There's nothing in the that would prevent them from doing them as far as I know, assuming their using skeletons that can/do share animations from player models.

As for the costumization of henchmen...the biggest thing right now is that the power system calls a critter into creation. That critter references an NPC, which references a costume definition. That's all soft coded right now, so there's not any way to allow for a selection between a set of pre-built henchmen. It's very similiar to the soft coding of power animations and FX, but a couple of more layers removed. So a lot of code work, power work, and database work to retcon that system into place.

Beyond that, full customization of henchmen or pets is theoretically possible, but it would require a similiar amount of rewriting of the core systems similiar to power customization as well as the ability to actually create a customized henchman's 'costume'. That would all then need to be stored on invididual players...so that's a pretty significant additional amount of data to be pushing down the pipeline. Then there's the issue of how to handle upgrades for minions.

So again, all possible...but almost everything is possible given enough time and resources. I'd personally have to put henchmen customization as an even lower priority than power customization simply because it benefits a smaller portion of the playerbase. Arguably, not smaller than weapon costumization, but weapon costomizaiton was much simpler and quicker to do...relatively speaking.

Just a head's up for everyone, we're going to be buckling down to get Issue 12 done...so you may see a lull in redname activity on the forums for a bit. Might not get as many immediate responses to PMs...mailboxes will probably fill up...posts demanding immediate answers will undoubtedly go unanswered. We're not ignoring you guys, we just have a bajillion little issues to tie up and we really need to focus on that right now.

On the plus side, marketting on Issue 12 is ramping up..so you should see more official announcements, dev diaries, stuff of that nature very soon.

Just FYI, I built the fire axe specifically with you in mind.

"I think players would like a fire axe as a custom weapon...especially that Maltese Knight guy. I bet he'll giggle like a school girl when he sees this."

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BAB I think it's great that you try to explain things like this to the players. However, you have explained the problem a number of times now and I don't think you need to do so any more. If people don't get it by now then you are just going to have to except that the fact that they will never get it.

I can tell just from the amount of posts you have written on this subject that you really care and have tried to do all you can. Saddly, it just can't be done. You have gone well beyond the call of duty on this issue. I give you permission to let this issue die. Please ignore any futher post or PMs regarding this matter.

Get Ex or LightHouse to sticky this thread and I'll be happy to link to it whenever people what to know why we can't have power customizing.

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That's kind of the idea here...I want to collate everything in one spot so that it can be refered to more easily.

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Q: What is power customization?

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A: Good quesiton, depends on who you ask. Power Customization could mean:
<ul type="square"> [*]Being able to change the hue or color of your power's FX[*]Being able to change the way your FX look[*]Being able to change what your power actually does. Ie, more damage but less accuracy.[*]Being able to modify or add secondary effects to your power. Adding Fire damage to your broadswords[*]Being able to change the appearance of henchmen or pets[*]Being able to change your appearance while form shifted from powers such as Granite Armor.[*]Being able to change the animations related to your power[*]Being able to change the sound related to your power[*]Being able to change the name of your power[*]Any or all of the above.[/list]
When we talk about power customization, we're generally talking about the first couple of items...being able to change your power's FX in some way.

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Q: What's so damn hard about power customization?

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A: The pipeline from power to effects just wasn't designed to be flexible. The powers designer creates a power def. This def defines all of the things associated with a power. What it's called, how much endurance it costs, whether it's a click, toggle, or auto power, its range, radius, etc. Power defs also contain a series of attributes such as doing this much smashing damage and this much energy damage. Power defs are softcoded, but they can't be changed on the fly or vary between one player and another. Power defs also call continuing FX on specific attributes. Ie, play the FX script for stone cages on the Hold attribute. So if the target is actually held, it plays the effect...otherwise it doesn't play anything. This is also softcoded as part of the power def and can't be change dynamically. Nothing related to power defs are stored on individual characters.

Power defs also point to another file called a PFX. This file contains a series of things that happen on events. The first half deals with animations. Play these animation bits when the power is activated. Play these when the power hits someone. This animation takes X amount of time before the damage should actually happen and takes Y amount of time before another power can be used (ie activation time). The 2nd part deals with the effects in a similar way. Play this FX script when the power activates. Play that FX script on hit. PFX scripts are also softcoded and can't be changed on the fly, yadda yadda yadda. These are also not stored on individual characters.

The FX scripts are a series of events and particle emitters. The color of particles are part of the particle scripts set as RGB values. Particles CAN inherit RGB values from the player, but they have to be attached directly to a costume node to do so. Also can't be changed on the fly, also not stored on characters.

So all of the things that determine what effects plays, when they play, where they play, and what color they are are all softcoded. They're in one location, shared by all players with the same power, and can't be changed dynamically or stored individually on each player.

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Q: So how come weapon customization works...what's the difference between it and power customization?

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A: Weapon models used to be called through the PFX scripts as an activation effects script. Every single PFX for every power in a weapon set calls the exact same activation effect. It's in fact one of the things the game uses to determine whether or not you already have your weapon out. What we did for weapons was we removed the weapon from the common activation effects in the PFX scripts and stuck it on the player as a costume piece. That gets us an always visible weapon that can be swapped out for other costume pieces (ie weapons), color tinted, etc. Unfortunately, we don't want the weapon always visible, so the next clever bit was we stuck it on the player as an animated entity. Weapons are essentially the same thing as wings, or the crab spider’s backpack, or Black Scorpions tail. They have their own sequencer that says, “Play this move when you get these animation bits”'. Animated entities attached to the player models inherit those animation bits from the player model it's attached to. So when you use a power like Slash, the PFX says 'set these mode bits on the player'. The animated entity custom weapon sword inherits those mode bits and starts playing the move where it's visible. While the player is in weapon combat mode, the sword is also in weapon combat mode and is visible. When the player gets out of weapon combat mode and goes into regular combat mode or back into the ready state...the weapon model goes into its default ready mode (it only has 2 modes...weapon combat, and ready)...where it's flagged to not draw. Perfect. Customizable weapons for everyone.

That concept can't really work for anything else...not completely anyway. For everything else that's not a weapon, ever power points to a different PFX which all use different attack effects, activation effects, hit effects, etc. Each PFX in a non weapon powerset generally doesn't have a lot in common with any of the other power's PFXs. So we can't just take one thing out that's shared by everything and stick it on the player as a costume. There are some exceptions to that. We could do it for some things, like the spines that come out of your hands for Spines or the red(pink) pom-poms of Energy Melee...but that's about it.

Now, that whole concept can be extended to do a bit more. It should theoretically be possible to move all of the attack effects and activation effects from the various PFX in a powerset into the sequencer for a null costume 'weapon' for the other powersets. So for example, fire blast would get an invisible 'weapon' model as a costume piece. That costume piece is an animated entity and it inherits all of the anim bits from the player. So when it gets the bits to play the Flares animation, the sequencer move for the 'weapon' would play the attack/activation FX for Flares. This gets over most of the hurdles for power customization. It's attaching effects to a costume node so the effects can inherit the costume node's color...similar to how auras are color tint-able. And it should capable of playing any effects that happen on or from the player. Glowy energy melee hands, fireballs that you hurl, lasers that come out of your eyes...all that stuff.

What it can't do, is play effects on anyone else. The powers system determines if a power hits or not. There's no way for something on your player model to know that you've actually hit anything...no bits for it to inherit and trigger the right animation (hit anim bits play on the target)...no way to know where to put the FX if it could be triggered. Same thing with continuing effects. The power system keeps track of when the attributes are true or not, whether or not to play the continuing effect, what effects script to play, and what to play it on...you, the enemy, a bunch of enemies, your team...whatever. That information doesn't go to the player. So attack effects and activation effects...we could do similar to custom weapons. But hit effects and continuing effects, we can't.

Weapon customization did open up some avenues of exploration and got us thinking more outside the box, but ultimately we found that specific pathway to be a dead end. There's just no way to intercept hit or continuing effects, so every powerset would have some sort of disjointed half customized, half standard look. That's just not acceptable for us, so the only solution is to pursue some other avenue that can handle full customization of every effect associated with a power.

All of that, is stage one of power customization. Figuring out how to retool the system so it can actually work. That's the part that involves writing the new code and making the necessary changes to all of the player power defs and/or PFX to support it.

Stage 2 is a massive overhaul of every single effects script used by player powers that we're going to customize. Right now, the colors for the various effects are softcoded into the particle emitter scripts. Most of our particle emitters use grayscale textures that are tinted to an RGB value through the particle script. In order for a particle to inherit the tint from an outside source (currently only from a costume node it's attached to), it has to be set to red. So 255,0,0 as an RGB value means that particle is going to inherit 100% of the costume node’s RGB color. The more white a particle's RGB value is the less color it inherits. Most basic example of this would be the effects for Energy Blast powers. Those are all tinted various colors, from blue to white. All of those particle scripts would have to have their RGB values shifted to red instead...So there would be a pretty big chunk of work required to 1) tracking down, collating, and duplicating all of the FX and particles scripts currently used by powers 2) change all of the RGB values used by all of the particle scripts so that they can inherit the color from an outside source.

On top of that, we also have some particle scripts that use pre-colored particle textures. Dark Miasma is a good example of that. We also use geometry in some of our FX scripts, and most of them use some sort of pre-colored texture So things like the bubble for Force Fields, that teal blue-green is the color of the texture that's on that sphere. Those particles and FX geometry would have to have new grayscale textures made for them and then they would need to duped and set up to use color tinting.

Stage 2 isn't difficult work, it's just a ton of it. There are tens of thousands of FX and particle scripts that would need to be tracked down, duplicated, and modified.

Stage 3 is hooking all this up into some sort of system or UI to allow you guys as players to change your fireballs from red-orange to green. Most logical place for that is the costume editor, probably something similar to how you currently deal with auras or custom weapons. Other ideas involve special color enhancements that you can slot into powers, console commands that you could type in, options set in the graphics menu, etc. Those are all implementation ideas...probably the easiest step of the whole process.

Can it be done? Sure. Given enough time almost anything can be done. But is it more important to do than all of the various other things that can also be done in the same amount of time? That's the step where power customization as a feature has repeatedly fallen off the list and pushed back to the next issue. We still continue to discuss it, trying to figure out some way to do it in a way that won't require as much new code, or won't require so much time from an FX artist to make it happen.

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Q: Why not make a version for each power that you can chose, and then assign a pre-colored FX script to those. Red Flares, Blue Flares, Green Flares, etc?

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A: Duplicating powers and PFX in that way makes it very difficult to maintain those powers. We did this for the prestige sprints and it certainly can work, but if we were to do that for every player power then that's a huge amount of duplicate data just to have the visuals changed. The likelihood of bugs related to powers would increase exponentially. Every time Castle would go in to fix a bug with Flares, he'd have to fix that bug for every 'color' version of Flares.

It’s also a ton more work than being able to just take the current FX/particle scripts, dupe them one time, and set them to a common tint-able ready color. If we had to manually tint variants for every FX script then it’s a ridiculous amount of work.

It's also limiting the options for players. What if the shade of yellow we pick isn't the exact shade of yellow-orange, or yellow-green that you were really hoping for. Even sticking to Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Violet, White, and Black would be duplicating the power defs for every player power 8 times. And would you guys really be happy with such a limited set of options?

So, it’s a ton more work for us, exponentially more upkeep problems for Castle, and less options for you guys. Not going to do this …even if it does work.

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Q: Why not make enhancements that add color or change the color of your powers?

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A: Enhancements won't just magically make color tinting happen. Something like this is more of an implementation suggestion, or how a player might actually go about changing the color of their power effects after power effects can actually be changed.

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Q: We get that it would take a long time to rebuild all of the powersets to be customizeable...but could new powersets be built so that they are customizeable from the start?

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A: New powersets could be easily be built specifically for color tinting, but we still currently lack the system to take advantage of that.

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Q: What about the hammer from Stone Melee, or the swords for Ice Melee and Fire Melee? Could those be made into custom weapons too?

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A: Technically, yes...they could. Still, I think we'd prefer to hold off on these particular powers until we can deal with being able to customize the whole powerset. Otherwise we could paint ourselves into a corner by making the elemental weapons customizeable and then not being able to make the rest of the power FX customizeable because of that.

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Okay, so out of 8 pets, why are there only 2 different buffs?

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Originally, there were 2 pets: The Faeries. Then someone (may even have been me, I don't remember) brought up the fact that Faeries won't match everyones concepts and so, the Wisps were born. Then, someone suggested the Drones for Tech types and at the last minute the Oscillators were tossed in. All told, a more classic example of Feature Creep you will never find!

So, since there were only two pets originally, there were only 2 powers made. I didn't have time to make 6 more powers to match the new entities.

As for why they are so fragile, let's just say if they were at all "tough" I could exploit them horrendously. So, they are fragile. They CAN be kept alive if you are a ranged AT, but melee types will have a hard time of it.

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All my fault...sorry about that.

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Welcome back, Manticore!
I still remember you at a test server party, and how many of us waited patiently in line for you to give us funky yellow titles.
I still have the screen captures of mine- "Skyscraper Incarnate".

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If you're talking Halloween last year, then it wasn't Sean. That Manticore admitted he wasn't Sean, but one of the other devs. Then BackAlleyBrawler posted recently he spent last Halloween in a costume stuck at a computer in a cubicle handing out titles for hours while suffering a cold. So... my powers of deductive reasoning tell me that last year's Halloween Manticore was played by Christopher Bruce who is now the BAB.

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Guilty. I borrowed Sean's moniker for that Halloween event, the Cuppathon, and many other events...all the way up to the "Season's Greetings admin spam fiasco" of last year that got me grounded from playing around on the live servers.

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It's been so hard keeping quiet about this.

Like many of you, I am an avid fan and player of this game. I've played it since launch, have multiple level 50 characters on both sides of the fence. I truly love this game and it's been an honest to god, dream come true to have the opportunity to work on it during the day and then go home and play it at night.

The thing that has excited me most about this whole deal is that I can only see great things coming for all of you guys as the players of this game. And to me, that's what this is deal is all about. Making the game awesome for as many of you as we can. That was ultimately the biggest factor in my decision to leave Cryptic and join NCSoft. All of those things that we've had to push back or write off as taking too many resources to get done in the limited time frames and limited manpower. All of the bugs or QoL issues that have been lingering for what seems like forever because the programmers were too busy fixing the major bugs. All of those really big pie in the sky ideas that we've dreamed about for so long and couldn't do because there was no one who could implement them...that's all back on the table. The sky is literally the limit. It's been really tough having to make decisions on what would be the 'best bang for the buck' and I'm really looking forward to having the recourses so that won't be such a deciding factor moving forward.

Of course, just putting more resources into the game wouldn't cut it by itself. We have a fantastic team that's been working 100% (or more in some cases) on CoH/CoV and every single one of us has made the move to stay with on this project and with this team. So now we've got a lot more recourses, the same fantastic team, the same great game to pour all our energies into, and the best bunch of players to create that content for. Personally, I've never heard of a situation like this in the game industry. It just doesn't happen.

I am completely stoked. You guys should be too. We literally would not be here without you guys.

There's going to be a period of transition as we move into the new studio, staff up, and train those new people in using our systems...but we're going to do our damnedest to make sure you guys don't notice and very shortly after that you will notice the results of this. I really wish I could talk about the things we have planned, but it's not my job...so I don't get that privilege.

All of this is still bittersweet. I have nothing but good things to say about Cryptic, they're a fantastic studio who created a fantastic game and they're now moving on to create more fantastic games. I'm truly going to miss working with them. I'm sure this was a tough decision for them to give up the controlling share of the franchise, but one thing that probably helped make it easier is that they knew their creation was being passed into the absolute best of hands. There is no other group of people in the world who care about this game and it's players like we do.

Looking forward to a very bright future for this game and all of you guys. We love you all of you. You drive us nuts sometimes, but we still love you.

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My concern is that it'll turn into SWG all over again.

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I am an optimist on this score. The industry saw the player reaction to the shenanigans with SWG and I hope that something was learned.

Also, my personal opinion is that if anything, CoX will not get that kind of changes, but will be used as a cash cow to set up the rest of the franchise - whether this is MMO/single player games in different styles or even a sequel, where they go to town with crazy ideas good and bad.

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I agree 100% with spidermonster on this. Statesman left CoX over a year ago to help develop Marvell Online. Everyone else who has been working on CoX for the last (awesome) year is moving with the game to the new studio. Even grumpy, yet lovable BAB...

Any similarity between this news and SWG's "New Game Enhancement" debacle is, well, I just am not seeing it.

Cautiously optimistic...

-Buxley

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I'm grumpy but loveable?

Happy Villainiversery.

So glad that I didn't spend this anniversary dressed up like a pirate, sitting in my cubicle for 6 hours patiently handing out yellow titles in Pocket D before shooting each of you with a teleport arrow. All while sick as a dog.

Ah, good times.