Codewalker

Which is... exactly what I said. Tony is involved in one small piece of it (web development).

SithRose was made a moderator because they are wrangling Plan Z forum sections, not the other way around.

One of the reasons they're considering moving to independent forums is to avoid exactly that kind of confusion.

Pebblebrook: That's possible, and would certainly explain a few things. Company politics can be a *****.

Rangle: Let me put it this way. If Paragon Studios had been an independent company, it would have been doing well for a small business, able to support itself as well as invest in creating future products to grow the business. That's even with the estimated costs being absorbed by NCSoft (server maintenance, shared bandwidth, billing, support, etc) factored in.

Maybe not with the full 80 developers -- they would have had to have a few less developers and a few more customer service types -- but it would be viable. I don't believe that PS was operating at a net loss w.r.t. NCSoft even with new development. It may not have been operating at a net profit, but breaking even while investing in future growth is a very good place to be in for a small business.

I would have invested in that, even if it meant scaling back for a while in order to pay for an IP buyout at a reasonable price (20 might be reasonable. 80 is not).

However, for a large company that is used to selling to millions of borderline-addicts going into Internet Cafes and making make mega bucks with the flavor of the month, that's small potatoes. I don't hate NCSoft for not wanting to run the game, but I do think they are full of it for not wanting anyone else to, whether it's company pride or whatever cultural euphemism you want to put on it.

500k is slightly high, but not completely unreasonable for a common IO. I usually bought level 30-40s for around 250-300k. After getting /auctionhouse it became very simple to just leave standing bids for the ones I was going to need and then claim them in between missions.

If you add up the cost of replacing SOs every 5 levels, especially the higher level ones which get quite expensive, 500k isn't too bad, even more once you add the convenience factor.

I love you too, man.

IMO it had a lot less obvious plot holes and wall-banging moments than SSA1. Who Will Die had a lot of "forced to be stupid" moments that made me want to reach through the screen and shake the characters because they were being so dense.

I wish I had managed to find the time to blog about the quad-box super team I did for fun. Rerolled my namesake as a Bots/Time MM in the lead. The rest of the team consisted of an Ice/Kin Controller, a Cold/Ice Defender, and a Stone/Dark Brute.

The main thing that made it interesting is that I didn't just use a power set on auto; I used keyboard broadcasting software and actively played all 4 characters at once. I had a LOT of keybinds. The ground-targeted powers were a bit of a pain as the camera angle didn't always match up exactly, but most of the time it was close enough.

It was challenging, but great fun, and by the end was able to "solo" task forces on fairly high difficulty settings. I probably used Team Teleport more times while leveling than the rest of the server did in a year.

You can play it on beta. I highly recommend checking it out.

They couldn't release it on live even if they wanted to (which they probably do). The final contact was never added to the Steel Canyon map, and the only people with the knowledge of how to do it are locked out of touching the servers.

Don't forget to send the Collector's Edition HeroClix figures back when you return the box.

Those character likenesses were only licensed, you filthy thief.

4... billion... dollars.

4...... BILLION...... dollars.

Wow.