DiDiGuns

Great work TA,
I can appreciate the tedium involved in putting that together, measuring & cross-checking toon placement, plotting & coordinating the Cam position & movements for those spins & character actions. Looks like a real labor of love, thanks for doing it & for your open inclusion of everyone in the product. well done.

I used to play CO a while back (542 days according to their login screen), and will probably play there again if this game finally cannot get a wakey. But the glass is not empty until it's empty.

CO graphics engine is slightly better, but they haven't done nearly as well as they could to take advantage of that. Still lots of the same little bugs, as someone has said. It bothers me too, that they just ripped off so much of CoX, but I guess it's hard leaving behind your work & having to re-invent so much.

Couple of things I like there are some of their travel powers, like swinging, and freeform power selection. However, these can never make up for leaving behind the absolute best teaming/sidekicking system ever, global communications, the AE, morality system, invention system, base-building, constant update issues, the incredible dev team and actual super-community. Gads, this sucks to even think about.

If this is true, and it sounds like something Sony might do, I'd have to say I'll try to get past my differences in order to continue in CoH after so long. Under SoE though, I'm sure there'd be lots to adapt to: Inevitably this would mean server consolidation, and almost certainly a more static game - Although they would probably rehire some of the Paragon team, they are extremely corporate-minded and so would use most of their own staff, and the Devs would lose a lot of the freedoms they have had to innovate. Not ideal for creativity and job outlook for the team as a whole, but at least the Game-world would continue. This has always been my biggest issue with Sony, that although they cater to a creativity-oriented clientele & employ Creative Excellence to achieve their corporate gains, their decisions are always corporate-driven & often resemble what just happened to us here.

Server consolidation, if this happens, has some unavoidable repercussions:
1- Considering the current SG Base coding issues, it would likely mean starting from scratch on SGs at the least - no bases porting over, so whatever's in yours will be lost, but otoh that might mean scrapping the old code & actually fixing it.
2- Character renaming galore - in their past consolidations, where there are naming conflicts, SoE has allowed the first login to keep a name in the event of duplicates, this means that people out-of-time-synch with the restart would lose out every time - but I guess someone has to bite the bullet.
3- Population/Demographic shift: Think about the degree of Altitis among the CoX community suddenly squeezed into 1-3 servers with much more restrictive numbers of character slots. Each player will be forced to choose which to save, which must go. If I have that choice, I will chose the higher level toons I've put the most work into almost always. There's a resulting demographic shift to overwhelming numbers of Level 50 capped toons working on end-game content and crying out for more. - This would be a distinct shift in the game community as a whole.

All these things will change the game community in ways that can't be measured right now, and SoE is not known for corporate patience in not seeing immediate profits. All this is speculative and at best, still a little idyllic that it might happen at all. But I have already been going through my long roster of toons to do my own cutbacks of the ones that never really panned out, or are duplicates of ones who did. I plan to respec the hard-to-get IOs off the toons that will likely be locked or lost BEFORE the 30 November deadline and try to cut my losses in Base storage by turning a lot of it into cash. If the sale/transfer never happens, the investment is lost anyway along with all the rest of the game. If it does happen, maybe some of it will make the jump.

I hate that in all my time here I've not cared much for forum posting, but today's news is really a shock in so many ways.

I have played since the doors opened, with only a short overseas break, not just myself, but my wife also played on her own account for 6 of those years, and my son as well or the last 6+ years. Heck, I even pay for 2 extra accounts for my sister's kids to join in for the past 3+ years. So for us, this has been a great family outlet, and a place to meet with friends whom I probably won't get to see again otherwise. It has been an enjoyable & safe environment, and never stale... I would like to say a personal thanks to the best Dev team of any game running, bar none.

Who else could have so reinvigorated an older game like this time & again with innovatve and well-executed ideas. I mean ED was a scary time for all of us, but it gave us a new direction and infusion of life through the IO system; Super-Sidekicking is still the BOSS in MMO teambuilding, matched by no other game on the market; Mission Architect! WOW what a great idea for player interaction - so what if a few pushed its boundaries, thats what new life is. The Incarnate system; To expand and grow the game beyond where it was designed to go & with it the constant introduction of new mechanics and plots. So much - and so great.

I was always in love with this game from the first moment of flight, and I say it was not the corporate shell, nor even the genre (surely that wasn't enough to tempt me to others), but I attribute that ongoing love affair to this great Dev team - I thank you, my family thanks you, and many of my friends as well. May you always have the last laugh!

I have often thought that there ought to be an actual content "Mastery" Badge at certain low levels which would be account-wide and would mark the completion of all content below that level. Earning the mastery badge could unlock the option at character creation of 'jumping' directly to 6th, 10th, or other predetermined level without having to re-run the content. To make it market-friendly, maybe have the badge unlock the option at the market.

I think it would encourage everyone to use the content at least once, make sure that each player is at least familiar with the lore, and with the lessons learned along the way, and would cut down on the promiscuous use of dfb to bypass content which, lets face it, many new folks have never even seen.

Just a thought - I'm sure there's downside as well, but players who enjoy badging and running all the content on all toons, or just want to always start at 1, would still be free to do so, and at least at low level, it would tend to reduce PL & PL spam (at least I think it would).