EarthWyrm

This.

I can live without the game. I'm already (mainly) doing so. I went from logging in multiple characters multiple times each day to maybe logging in one character once or twice a week since the announcement was made.

But they sent 80 good, hard-working, men and women -- people with families -- to the unemployment line with no warning and no reason that I have yet to read that justifies such a decision.

Tell me I can't play a game any more?

Okay. I'm a grown-up. I'll do something productive with my time and money.

Mistreat friends I've never met?

We're done. And I'll be happy to tell the world why.

I have. Three times. Once the day I bought the game, and twice since. (Well, four times now. I just went back and did it again.) I've gone back and forth between the account page, setting up the forum account, and trying to log into the forums quite a bit.

I wasn't aware that you could pause missions, no. Thank you for the information. We tried Polaris a while back, but with only 4 of us (and I think me under-geared, and without enough build diversity) failed miserably. At least we got to fail it together.

We should have gone to do something else, I agree. Please see all my self-deprecating comments about needing to L2P. I'm stubborn past the point at which it is even remotely adaptive.

I like the flexibility of builds. It appeals to me a great deal.

And now, because I'm an idiot who forgot to cancel before I auto-rebilled, I have another month to see if I can become less incompetent. On the bright side, if I'd actually cancelled I might have never gotten a response from CS about why I still can't log into the forums, because I would've no longer been a paying customer.

Thank you for the assistance.

That's good to know. I don't know if I'll be sticking with it all the same, for a couple of reasons.

1. My one month that came with purchasing the game when it was on sale for 24.99 expires Sunday night. Since I registered the game and started playing, I have yet to be able to access the game's forums. I've read through this thread and tried the things that were suggested; nothing. I get the "one fail out of five... two fails out of five..." stuff, and that's it. Valid game account, paid for the month, can't get on the forums with the month almost over. In the spirit of TSW, I tried to "puzzle it out" on my own, but have finally given up and emailed customer support.

2. Thursday night, four of us who played (the past tense of that just kills me, but I'm the only one who still logs in...) City together logged in to play TSW together. Unfortunately, we all had the mission you have to run to get to Dragon rank 2 ("Into Darkness"), which is a solo instance. Figured that we'd knock it out and go do some team stuff. Epic wrong. Based on how degraded my gear was, I died twelve times trying to beat the agent at the end, and my wife only finished the mission shortly after I did. I recognize that I've not put in many hours, to be just moving up to rank 2 after almost a month, and that I'm a frackin' noob and all that stuff and that I probably need to l2p. But that ate up over an hour of our time, and I was mad enough a couple of times that I scared my dogs. So we moved back to the main storyline we'd been doing together, and the next mission in that? Another solo instance. After about 2 hours of being logged on, on skype, and even on the same team, we had not done a single mission as a group. The occasional mandatory solo story mission is okay, but this was a terrible session and had me saying very unkind things. And it's the last group session we're going to be able to schedule before my sub expires.

There is a lot that I like about TSW, visually and story-wise. I have a problem when a game makes me feel as incompetent as I felt after I finally beat that boss. It wasn't even a sense of accomplishment. More relief that I didn't have to run back up that parking structure any more.

On the bright side, I can't get warnings on their forums for complaining about how much I died, because I still can't post on their forums. So that's a silver lining.

This post cut to the heart of the matter so well that I exported it to word and saved it. It ought to make its way into textbooks on management science and workplace psychology.

In what sense? Sincere question. Part of the selling point of the multiplayer environment is the creation of communities relating to the game. MMOs provided social networking before the term possessed anywhere near its present level of dissemination in our culture.

It's totally reasonable to expect people to be upset by the loss of a community.

Some people will take it harder, because the community was more a part of their lives than it was for others. Again, that's understandable and totally reasonable.

If you've got a specific research agenda you'd like to put forward as relates to gaming, social networking, virtual communities, and the formation of attachments, I'm sure there are a ton of doctoral students out there looking for dissertation topics who would love your thoughts. A deeper understanding of the phenomenon is certainly warranted.

If you're just providing a one-liner version of, "Get over it," I guess that's another matter entirely.

I point you to the strings of characters above the pretty pictures to the left of the words you quoted. Go ahead. Scrolly-scroll up and look.

The person who put you on ignore had different character-strings above the same picture than the person who you just responded to.

If it helps, I'm putting you on ignore now, and I have a totally different pretty picture for you to look at. I'm not even going to make you read a 5-paragraph disclaimer about why I'm doing it.


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My wife and I bought TSW when we saw it on sale for 50% off. So far, we like it, but neither of us is very far in. It's a very loud game for two people in the same room who aren't teamed. Are there separate volume controls for combat and dialogue? I'll admit that so far, I've not explored the UI all that much...

As others have said, getting a refund for a service that we know the publisher no longer intends to supply is substantially less doom-y than much of what we've heard in the last 3 weeks.

NCSoft was never, ever, going to say, "Y'know what? Never mind. We'll keep supporting CoX and taking your money." It was not. Going. To. Happen.

So they were always going to have to deal with severing the customer-business ties. This is just part of that.

I will only give up when Brian Clayton comes on these forums and says, "There is no way we will be able to negotiate the release of the 'City of' franchise IP from NCSoft. In the end, no arrangement could be reached that satisfied both sides. I'm very sorry, but we're out of options and November 30 really is the end. Oh, and NCSoft has a team of ninjas that they will send out to assassinate anyone who starts a private server with cribbed-together code after the game is gone. Oh, and the UN has ruled that the only allowable superhero MMOs from now until 2020 are CO and DCUO. Oh, and if you want your dog back, put $300 in a paper bag and leave it behind the third bench in the park a block from your house."

Getting money back for a service I knew NCSoft had no intention of providing, because they had made the business decision not to continue the game?

Not. Doom.

I suspect that's why we didn't start getting Lore answers immediately. I have this mental image of the team at lunch last Tuesday asking the question, "How long do we wait to see if somebody wants to buy the IP and the studio before we start taking new jobs?" And a reasonable answer to that, to people who have families to feed and mortgages to pay, is about a week.

If we get the lore answers Weds., I expect to see announcements about job acceptances start Thursday. And God bless 'em, because our dev team (and QA/community/everybody else) deserves every success in the world, even if it's not in the City we all love.

That doesn't mean we stop fighting for the City to live on, though. It's just part of the reality of the landscape we occupy IRL.

Isn't Stan Lee going to be in Columbus (OH) for Mid-Ohio Comic Con the end of this month? If I'm remembering right, he also has some M&G events that he does at these cons - but they're pricey...

There is much truth in this sentiment.

Thank you, Rylas, for putting into words what I am confident many others have thought.

Schadenfreude does not become you.

IBTL, GTH, HANL.

I never officially had a forum "bucket list," but if I did, making sure to quote Samuel_Tow would have been on there somewhere.

Thanks for making it easy, Sam, by posting something I so thoroughly agree with.