Dr_MechanoEU

Oddly Valkyire's costume is actually spot on, she's a science based hero

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Valerie Kellum was an up-and-coming archeologist exploring Scandinavia when she discovered what she first took for an ancient spear. A more careful examination led to the realization that the spear had a technological component. She traveled around Europe looking for ideas about its origin and ended up in a local Crey facility. When a Crey security team tried to take the weapon from her it activated and injected Valerie with advanced nanites that transformed her into Valkyrie, an extraordinary warrior with a completely different personality. She broke free and traveled to Paragon City where Positron is helping her come to terms with her new identity.

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Hence why she uses the tech banded outfit, her whole outfit is created by nanites from the spear.

Fine, Wednesday the 18th of February, 2009

There ya happy Dave?

Right start placing bets on when we're going to hear any news.

I'm placing my bet on Wednesday the 18th of February.

A song for those who will leaving us either for the US or other jobs elsewhere and how most of us feel with GhostRaptor leaving us

Ah cheers Sinergy.

Hmm perhaps it is a subtle hint to the guys at the EU office that as the album/single title says 'the final countdown'

Still I think we've all got the panic out of our systems and gone through the 5 stages.

1) Confusion.
2) Anger.
3) Panic.
4) Theorising.
5) tired of being confused, angry and paniced (there is little to no acceptance ).

An interesting article Mumsy.

Sorry Scarlet but who is this Jeff Strain fellow?

By that he means that after Issue 13s introduction subscribers went up and continue to do so, there was a 400 concurrent user increase from September to December but probably not the big hit that you usually see when an Issue is released.

In response to Col.

Busiest server is Freedom but it's got the nickname of Freedumb, if the reptuation to go with that nickname is true or not, not sure.

Second busiest is Virtue the unofficial RP server.

Actually if anyone is to be blamed for spreading the doom and gloom to the US side Sugar Rush, then that would be myself, intially telling the Americans it's bigger than just a few people losing their jobs as they beleived and that it was a wider cutback.

Trust me I don't think those lashing hurt as much as this toothache right now (no emergency dentists in the area, NHS dentist didn't listen to me at all (told her it was an abcess and she was determined to tell me it was a root infection), didn't even give me antibotics for the infection as was going to operate today, went to see a private dentist recommended by my father today and got antibotics (and took one look at my face and said it was an abcess), and scheduled in for a root canal surgery, yes it's costing me £250 in total but the NHS dentis, after the way she treated me, can bugger off).

To be fair just a simple, "we understand you're all kind of nervous right now but rest assured you will have news within a week" wouldn't have put to bed any of the fears we've all got BUT it would have let more people do the 'lets just wait and see' approach rather than be incredibly worried with no news and silence.

a ban for saying best of luck...seems a little harsh...

very well then...we'll go with the Damz option of things then...

Awesome we have a volunteer in Damz...actually it could be twofold. First create your blatent ripoff character, name him something like W0v3r1n3 then petition yourself, thus we would see if we get GM sign.

Well in that case, someone send a petition ingame, just something simple like saying "we know you guys are going to be leaving for the US or otherwise, just like to say best of luck in your future endevours and come say hi if you're ingame.."

See if you get a response...or turn on superspeed in a council base map and run around, you're bound to get stuck behind a piece of scenery sooner or later and then ticket.

Out of curiosity (inspired by the lovely person above me) should we all create Marvel/DC inspired characters just to see if we can get away with it or would that just be a mean a spiteful act?

No it wasn't just you, the EU and US forums both went down for a couple of minutes... though I doubt we'll read anything in to that.

If they went down and this topic had been removed THEN we could see something going on...

The whole reason I'm keeping subscribed to 2 MMO's is because I've stopped going out drinking once a week and instead do it once a fortnight, even just going out for a quiet drink in the pub costs me the price of 2 MMO monthly subscriptions and a heavy night out would cost me several.

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It is not a last moment decision in my opinion and they choose to remain silent.

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It's been three days now and we've heard nothing on this front, the forums are currently unmoderated, I'm curious if even the GMs are actually ingame at the moment (I may send a ticket saying so long and thanks for the help to them when next ingame but I wouldn't want to take up their time when they could be dealing with real ingame issues someone is having).

Any news, anything, something, would be nice.

However that could be the standard pre-Issue news release silence, the Devs do tend to go very quiet prior to news being released about the latest upcoming Issue. Though the fact Issue 14 was slated for a feburary release (though I think it was just listed as Q1) and we've seen neither hide nor hair of the beast apart from the incharacter musings of Doctor Aeon seems worrying. If it is delayed till March, then that means they only have two months with which to deal (test and release) with Issue 15, slated to be released at the time of the 5th anniversery (May if I remember correctly).

That said the US community moderators have been on the very quiet side as well though they may just have nothing to say and been getting on with the tasks at hand.

Saying that, how long were the devs silent on the whole 'Reformed' badge sheenanigans, took them two weeks merely to prepare a statement and say it would be returned to normal in Issue 14...

ahh I see... aye it is still pretty bad though.

Hmm when will we see the month by month report of last year?

Yowza, 17k one month then 13k the next, normally doesn't an Issue release bring with it a massive increase in subscriber activity?

I can probably agree on that, it does seem that perhaps the order to fix PvP came down from on-high.

The matter of the fact is they tried to fix PvP to bring more people into it and, as predicted, it failed and failed miserably, they lost more people (I.E. a substantial amount of the PvP crowd) and nobody stepped up to fill their shoes simply because (and I don't think the guys at the top realise this, as said, mired in the mentalility of the Korean market) CoH/CoV just isn't PvP based subscribers, I don't think they understand that PvP just really isn't as popular in the west as they think it is, especially in CoH/CoV where it's even more minority based than every other MMO since it was a PvE game first and foremost.

So you lost 10% of your subscribers and the other 85% STILL want nothing to do with PvP while there's 5% that will dabble in PvP still (figures pulled from out of thin air) and that would make it a complete failure.

However as always the EU side of things was hit harder due to the smaller subscriber base, we lost, what, 20 hardcore PvPers from the English forums and who knows how many from the German/French forums (well obviously they do but I speak neither French nor German) as well as those ingame who don't read the forums. For a game that probably has...what...30K Accounts (not sure on official figures) in the EU, even a few thousand is a major hit to the figures.

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Short term: no change (albeit possible US Forum migration).
Long Term: Pack your suitcases, I can't see it lasting without an EU.team to cater for our support.

I think they'll just wait for all the hullaballoo to quiet down before shuffling us over there this year sometime.

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Second what Dante says, for the most part it will cover the gap that are many complaints about the forums (i.e. That we rarely, if ever, see Redname Devs over here on the forums besides Warwitch, EU forums being treated 2nd class etc.) and it will consilidate the game into a unified whole again with all the subscribers in one 'area' as it were.

I can understand why NCsoft Europe was set up but I've always felt splitting the game between America/Europe/Asia was always a foolish idea, instead have all the stuff in one area and not split between three different companies.

Mind you every MMO seems to do it that way, WAR has two different companies handling WAR US and WAR EU.

In my mind it should have been NCsoft East (Asia) and NCsoft West (America/Europe/Australia) from the get-go and all the European servers merely added onto the list of the US servers when CoH was released in Europe.

Still this is all my opinion and I have the business sense of a small rodent in a trilby hat... so whether it would have been actually viable... who knows.

To be honest DW, I don't think even GR knows whether the EU side of things is going to remain or not, he probably knows about as much as the rest of us.

Of course they're keeping Sales and Marketting...who is going to advertise Aion to the EU if they were gotten rid of?

What I can guess is that Aion and any more MMOs wont have european side of things delt with, it'll all be US servers/forums etc. only judging by the fact that as you said, it makes no sense to gut the office and then release two MMOs in Europe.

Marketing is probably being kept merely to do just that, market the new products in Europe (have booths at games conventions etc.), nothing actually related to CoH/CoV unless we can another boxed expansion.

Good luck and God Speed with whatever it is you wish to do GhostRaptor.

From what I can figure, it seems like a botch job, they've basically gutted the entire Brighton office staff for some quick cash relief and really not thought where to go from there...

"Oh don't they play that game that failed miserably over here(Korea)?"

"What that one about super heroes...oh yeah...sure nothing will come of it...now get to clearing out those office workers it'll save us money in the short term...who cares about the subscribers, it's not like they matter that much!"

Sorry just kind of peeved about the whole fiasco.

On that front, to be honest, were actually annoyed when Lighthouse (their Bridger/Kerensky/GhostRaptor equivilent) was fired for his statement about Issue 13 PvP not being for the current crop of PvPers.

Anyway, posted in the US side version of the topic explaining to them that it looks like almost the entire EU staff are going, hopefully that should raise some eyebrows.

Personal, on the speculation front (yes it's wrong to speculate but until we got official info saying otherwise speculation is what we shall do) looking over the fact that it's all being shoved US side would, at a guess (tis all it is) that we will be end up on the US side, whether it's transfering the server data as a whole or issuing renaming tokens and shifting the accounts across who knows.

If they do the same offer that was offered with Tabula Rasa (an NCsoft game of your choice and 2 months free), well I think Mumsy gave the right response to that earlier in the topic.