EepEep

Hi Starmor,

Unfortunately, this is just not possible.

Reasons:
1) Legal : Since the Korean CoH Costume Creator was an offline tool, it did not provide Paragon/NCsoft any legal protection under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

2) Development : The developers who worked upon the Korean CoH Costume Creator are long gone. The engineers who worked on it did not come over to NCsoft from Cryptic Studios.
The costume creation process has also undergone a significant number of changes since 2005/2006 (when the application was originally developed).

Even if by some chance that a former developer or a current developer from another development group at NCsoft added all new costume pieces, auras, weapons, and color customization options..., Reason #1 cited above would prevent a standalone offline application from ever being released.

Note: My name is Jesse Caceres, and I used to be the Business Manager, and former Producer on City of Heroes at Paragon Studios. I'm just posting from my personal account since I no longer have access to my Ghost Falcon (Red Name) account.

It was most likely taken by David Lewis, our internal guy at Paragon Studios. For shots like this, he actually just used demorecord.

He would fly slowly with demorecord to take a group shot, and then parse through the demorecord file to:

1) remove any characters that may have had an infringing costume
2) remove characters that artistically weren't fitting (i.e. for a screenshot on a retail box or a screenshot for Marketing / PR).

I remember that we occasionally would have to remind players to stop using certain emotes, or stop using powers during these screen capture/demorecord sessions. One time, there were two instances of Atlas Park, and when the group in Atlas Park 1 was getting too uncooperative/rowdy, we just used the group of players in Atlas Park 2.

Best,

Jesse "Ghost Falcon" Caceres
(posting from my play account)

(Ghost Falcon here, on my personal account).

Ultimately, in-game advertising via billboards just didn't prove very successful. In a game where players can super speed, super jump, fly and teleport, players did not stay in front of an advertisement long enough to count as an advertisement "impression". (Note: "Impression" is defined as a player's character standing within a predefined area (and facing the ad) for a specified amount of time.)

Additionally, by providing players the option to turn off in-game advertising, those impressions were reduced even further.

Due to the metrics, the funnel of sponsored advertisers dried up, and the in-game advertising initiative/feature was quietly sun-setted. We had other options to implement in-game advertisements (i.e. loading screens), but it was believed that a loading screen with ads implementation would have had a very negative impact on our playerbase.

We did a light exploration in seeing if we could use in-game advertising for player use, but in the end, it just wasn't feasible (I won't bother to get into the details, but there were many, many reasons...so I'll just leave it at that.).

Best,

Jesse "Ghost Falcon" Caceres

I can see how some of that happened.

IIRC, the recurring Beta List started around Issue 11 or 11.5 (11.5 was done near the CoH acquisition, and in my opinion, should have been called Issue 12).

If your name was on a "Cryptic employee" referral sourced list, then those referrals were removed from the recurring Beta List. At the time, since Cryptic was working on a competing superhero MMO, it was deemed necessary to remove any person tied to a Cryptic employee. (i.e. If you were on Geko's list, and not on Castle's, your name got removed.) Truth be told, you may have been on pohsyb's list, and got removed that way. What many people don't know was that pohsyb came on board Paragon Studios *after* the acquisition, and pohsyb wasn't part of the CoH-15 dev team. When the CoH IP acquistion occurred, the Beta list was one of the many things that had to be scrubbed. I probably just selected the excel cells of Cryptic referrals and hit the delete button. For that, I apologize.

The beta email notifications were a headache for us as well.

..., and by the time Issue 18 hit, I stopped handling betas around Issue 17. I'm not going to throw my successor under the bus on that one since Issue 18 - Going Rogue Beta was one of the biggest betas managed since City of Villains.

I am also crushed that you don't recall how I created IO enhancements on the fly for you during one of the Betas.

I will be listening to : "These are the Special Times"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgAkCmgD9kA

I have had so much fun with City of Heroes, and I really want to focus on the good times that I've had.

IIRC, here is the list of Devs that played on Justice.

Alpha Wolf
Back Alley Brawler
Castle
Ghost Falcon
Positron (<--I believe this is where he played his Fire Dom).

I believe a couple of the Arbiters also played on Justice as well (Arbiter Oates).

How do I know all this?

I was Ghost Falcon at Paragon Studios.

During the Closed Issue Betas (beginning with Issue 9), I managed the Beta Lists, and all NCsoft, Paragon and Cryptic Studios employees would send me their friends and families' names. Sometimes, I would get an actual game account name, but more often than not, I would be given a character name on a server, so I had to look up a lot of game accounts to make sure that the right person got in.

In my opinion, Justice had the most influence on Betas in their earlier stage because of their association with devs. It was easier to digest small amounts of feedback, rather than thousands and thousands of feedback.
I fondly remember reading the Beta Tester Global Chat Channel(s) and seeing the realization from the early beta testers that there were a lot of Justice players there.

A bit of trivia about Tic-Toc / Back Alley Brawler, and I.

• I first met/played with Tic-Toc before either of us were hired on to work on City of Heroes.
• Tic-Toc and I were members of a Justice SG called Redemption (and it's sub SG, Dawn of Redemption)
• Tic-Toc went on to Tempest Legion, and I went on to the Golden Knights. (Note: The Golden Knights is now essentially defunct, and I've moved on elsewhere).

Side Notes:

• Pohsyb played on Pinnacle.
• Most of Cryptic Studios employees played on Freedom (like poz).
• I want to say that when City of Villains launched in 2005, that the Cryptic Studios employees Villain Group was on Freedom..., but that was sooo long ago, I might be mis-remembering.

My deepest condolences to Lucas' wife and family. I teamed up with Lucas a lot more in farms than played with or against him in PvP. I was in the Golden Knights SG on Justice, and we were coalitioned with Lucas' SG (the Dream Team - which Flea is the Leader).

He was a very skilled player, and I respected his opinion a lot.

Alpha Wolf called me last week to tell me the news, and I couldn't help thinking that while I was sad to hear of his passing, I was glad to have played with him.


One of my regrets was not telling him that I was Ghost Falcon.

I'm very tempted to put some of my Paragon Studios / Cryptic Studios / City of Heroes/Villains stuff on eBay, and donate some of the proceeds to his family. I'm considering that I should start off with something small, before getting to any real big stuff. Obviously, if some people think this is a bad idea, just let me know and I'll stop. I bounced the idea off of Alpha Wolf, and I've been debating over the last couple of days whether to post this proposal.

To put this in perspective, and this might be a little bit TMI, but last year in 2011, prior to CoH Freedom Beta, I found a small tumor. Due to the location of the tumor, I decided to have it removed during the biopsy. The diagnosis thankfully turned out benign, but the waiting period was absolutely hellish. If it had been malignant..., well, I hope that my wife and kids would have received support and help. I am saddened Lucas passed away, but I really want his family to know that the bonds and friendships that Lucas made meant something.

I really want to help.

Rest in Peace, Lucas.

Hey Arcanaville,

I swear I never did anything *that* bad on my play accounts. Most of my characters are on Justice, with my main characters : "Eep Eep" (notice the space) and "Captainblade". If there was another guy running around as "EepEep", that wasn't me.

Btw, I'm glad that I was able to finally meet you that one time before. Too bad that the Going Rogue Launch Team Dev Wall that I asked you to sign will probably end up in a landfill.

-Jesse

If you applied in Feb 2008, the Lead Programmer at the time was Aaron Brady. Aaron's currently working at Facebook.

Yeah, I remember that. Our marketing team was looking for some interesting stories. I'm not sure how or if that was ever used.