Black Pebble

Where are the shots of the Dual Chainsaws!

Oh, one question I been meaning to answer.

Why Didn't We Do Name Purges?

We all really did want to do a name purge. But there were a few major issues.


Technical Reason
The biggest being we didn't have any way of doing it. There IS no name purge tool. The first (and last) time we did it was by using an incredibly unstable ad-hoc script, which caused a ton of issues when it was finally done. You guys may not have seen it, but it broke a lot of things in the account database. Even if we wanted to run it again, we couldn't as the databases had changed too much since then.

So then the question came to how do we create a brand-new tool? It may seem like it's "just data," but keep in mind it's incredibly disorganized data. And it was stored in systems that were designed by folks who were no longer at the studio.

What should have been a simple task ended up becoming an enormous challenge, one which would have required significant resources to pull off, which would have come at the expense of content. Having a small team meant that EVERYTHING was a trade-off.


Business Reason
We also had a hard time figuring out best time to do it. With both Going Rogue and Freedom, we knew a lot of former players would come back. If they came back and found that they lost their name though, they'd be a lot less likely to stick around. Their name was an important part of their character.

So the trick was finding the right time when we had development resources AND we weren't getting a constant flood of returning players.

We're still figuring out when that time would be.

I remember when I first joined Paragon Studios. I think we had around 9,000 fans on Facebook. That's pretty bad for a game as popular as COH. A lot of it was that as a Studio, we just weren't that experienced or comfortable with leading in social media. You'd think it'd come first hand considering how social we were.....

In the matter of a few short years, Andy, Jessie, the entire community team managed to create a real presence on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Twitch....all of those places had their own feel and identity.

What some studios won't share with you is that in order to make themselves look better, they'll "buy" Facebook Fans+Twitter followers. Some times you'll see that some game went from having 10,000 fans to 100,000 fans in a matter of weeks. Most of those are dummy accounts, bought from out of country.

Well we didn't pay a dime to go from 9,000 to over 56,000 in less than 3 years. Some may say it's because, well....we couldn't afford it . But the truth is our community team gave players a reason to want to follow us on social media.

You guys probably know by now how challenging it is to market an 8-year old game with a non-existent budget, but I'd say it's even MORE challenging trying to lead a community when you have less than $0 to spend. You have to keep not only your current players engaged, you have to constantly reach out to new players and find ways to get them to join this awesome family....and you have to do it with nothing but your passion and smarts.

As we can all see today, Andy, Jessie, Kevin, Tia, and the rest of our community were up to tackling these obstacles and quickly overcoming them. It didn't take long for the rest of NCsoft to notice just how active our social media sites were, and the incredibly innovative ideas the community team kept coming up with. That's why you may have noticed that once you saw the COH team do it, other games would slowly try to do the same.

We had (and still have) the BEST community and the BEST community team. And Jessie in particular deserves our praise and thanks for the heart-breaking and herculean work he's had to do the past couple months to keep the game going strong. He may not have been there from the start, but Jessie is the one who is making sure that the torch is being lit until the very last second, and then some.

Thank you Jessie.

Fudge. I missed it. I would have transferred my untouched since 2004 Fire/Rad over from Virtue, too.

I think I'd make a great villain.

I'd just go and knock off the Hero, and then use the $20B I DIDN'T spend manipulating the world for the past 10 years and spend it on a nice jacuzzi and some smoothies.

Yeah, overly complicating things is beautiful and it certainly helps with the Muwahahaha's. But it's so much work..... I'd rather solo grind Incarnate powers. (See what I did there?)

There's a concept character I always wanted to make, and I figure this is the week for it. I know the theme, but I don't have a name or costume. So could you guys help me out with that?

This was partly triggered by the discussion on Skyfall with Arcanaville.

You guys know this scenario?

Villain: "Surrender, Hero, or I'll kill this defenseless civillian I've captured!"
Hero: "Very well, I give up, but don't harm him/her!"

I always thought that scenario was bad. Because if I had super-powers, I'm pretty sure I'd do a LOT more good alive than dead, even at the expense of one hostage. I'd feel bad for the bad hostage, but hey, I just avenged them AND stopped the bad guy from hurting even more people! Superheroes just don't seem to think about the big picture enough. And that got me started thinking about the greatest hero of all.....


[INSERT NAME HERE], The Fiscally Responsible Hero!


Our hero has a massive spreadsheet at home that he uses to calculate just how economical each act of heroism is, so he can figure out the Return on Investment.

• Someone just stole a purse from grandma.....but it's 2 miles down the road. How much gas and time would it take to retrieve the purse, especially when there's a car crash a mile in the other direction?
• Villain wants you to give yourself up in exchange for hostages? Well let's do the math and figure out the potential future earnings of all of the hostages and compare that to the money that's saved by the Hero stopping disasters.
• Are the Skulls rioting in Steel Canyon? Well what if the Hero has a job interview with the Freedom Phalanx instead at the exact same time? He might be able to save more lives if he gets in.

In every situation, our Hero pops out his handy-dandy Smartphone and runs through the numbers so that he can be heroic AND fiscally responsible. This guy isn't about getting endorsement or self-promotion, he just wants to save the most number of people with finite resources. And he never leaves home without finishing at least one financial forecast.

But what would we call him?

And what would he look like?

Help me COH Players, you're my only hope....

I'm looking for:
Name:
Power Set/AT:
If any of you are up for it, I'd also love to see
Screenshot of the Costume:

You have until 5:00PM PST on Thursday, November 29th. Winner gets.....something. Probably a smile from me.




PS: I really did want to see him in the game one day. Though I imagine it would have involved going over many dead bodies.

IANAD (I Am Not A Dev)


HOWEVER, I do agree that while both COV and GR introduced incredible content and systems, which certainly injected new life into the game, they did have the unintended side-effect of also dividing the player base.

It was definitely a concern that we as a studio had. This was why with Freedom you saw the Unified Tutorial, so that you could at least choose your path versus having it thrust on you. There were other plans in the works, some more solid than other.

We were in a bit of a sticky pickle. If we homogenized content too much, there would be no uniqueness to being a Hero or Villain. But it was also nearly impossible to create enough unique content for six different factions. Players don't want generic content that works for both Heroes and Villains, they want great content that makes them feel truly heroic or villainous.

I think that's one of the reasons that for a lot of the content over the past few years, you started to see much more intense storylines, with greater weight placed on consequences.

So to wind this back up to the beginning, I'm not sure I'd say that COH went wrong with having multiple factions. They did have a tremendously positive impact on the game. But I think in hindsight, there were a lot of consequences down the line that no one could have seen coming.

I enjoyed the movie a lot, but it dawned on me well after the fact - the bad guy won.

I'm not sure if I like that or not.