End Sinister

In mercykilling's defense, he doesn't have a 2,500+ post count next to his signature.

Actually, he's not. If you haven't been paying attention the past 30 years, corporations have made so much money that they have more money than all of the sovereign nation's combined. The biggest economies are not countries, but corporations: They have the most capital out of any nation, even the U.S. and China.

If you haven't been reading any of the news, there is an estimated 4 to 20 trillion, that's right, 20 trillion dollars held up in the Cayman Islands as a result of corporate greed.

There was once a time that corporations gave a damn about their image and would bow to the pressure of their consumers. Nowadays everyone is so damned apathetic they know that they can get away with price gouging and charging way too much money on certain items and that we won't stand up to it. It's people like you who think that everything's okay in the world when it's not. The charger for people's I-Phones for instance is actually worth 2 dollars yet Apple charges 20 some odd dollars for it. And it's okay to pay that and it's okay for apple to have 1 trillion dollars in its coffers, isn't it?

There is too much corporate greed and mercykilling's outrage is my outrage. I'm not just angry at NC Soft, what has incensed me is the greed on NC Soft's part, much like its corporate brothers and sisters, and their disloyalty to a studio that has consistently performed well. The game has made money, just not enough, which is what mercykilling's posts are all about. For corporations, there will never be enough money to be made and it's why capitalism has decimated our economy; and we're only in the beginning of it!

Brillig, I didn't intend to be presumptuous, but with such a sudden move made by NC Soft, it wouldn't surprise me if they only padded everyone's final paycheck a little bit. I didn't mean to speculate on that. I am simply angry for what they did. As for my other statement regarding NC Soft wanting to pull out of the American market, I do stand by what I said. It seems that they company has been motioning to do so for some time. They've paid no heed to even tweak the game play ever so slightly with their other Asian MMO's. That's fine to do on their part. It is disrespectful to the players and to the developers who have made them so much money thus far.

I'm with you on this. They couldn't even let the dev.'s ride out the next three months and give the game a decent send off and give Paragon Studios' employees even a small severance package.

I want NC Soft to burn. Good luck trying to push another fantasy genre MMO onto people that no longer want to be playing that kind of game. I have a feeling that, much with Aion, Guild Wars 2 will be in the red in six months to a year.

Fact is, NC Soft bought Paragon Studios in an attempt to really penetrate the American market with an American made MMO. Since it didn't do gangbusters in sales and because it didn't win over Korean gamers, they dropped City Of Heroes because (from what I can tell) they probably want to exit the American market. They keep making Asian style MMO's with game play that Asian's prefer, which mind you, is markedly different from what Western gamers want to play.

Nevertheless, NC Soft should have sent one of its oldest and most successful IP's off with somewhat of a bang. It's understandable that City Of Heroes is an old game and that it has been reaching its twilight years, but this is a game that could have been put into maintenance mode and given a half decade more at least. NC Soft's move has more to do with freeing up quick cash to float the losses incurred by its most recent MMO endeavors and its failing MMO, Aion, for which they refuse to assert as a failure because of Eastern company politics (someone's head would definitely roll if and when Aion goes under).

GG, the petition is 15 signatures away from 10,000 as we speak. If we use this as ammunition while notifying various gaming outlets and possibly N.P.R. (as a few posters have mentioned), we just might be able to get something going. We could be known as the little MMO that could. Even if we can't extend the life of our beloved City Of Heroes, at least we'll make NC Soft look really bad in the process.

Wow, **** them. Seriously (wondering if my swearing will even be modded at this point). That is some twisted crap. One would think that the entire game would be opened up at this point. NC Soft is full of number crunching ****** bags. Not a single cent more from me NC Soft. From what I understand they shuttered Paragon Studios today and we won't even get a proper farewell from the devs.

I'm going to have to back up Zero on this one. I've tried multiple time to resist the siren song of City Of Heroes, but the proverbial spike in the chest has had its first strike toward this once C.O.H. addict's heart. Why, one might ask? A big part of my lack of desire to play has been the seemingly hashed together and piecemeal nature of not just the zones, but the story arcs and the writing itself.

Maybe at the ripe old age of twenty eight I'm finally growing up and out of video games. I tried buying an X Box, lost interest in that, and I still came back to City Of Heroes. That says something about this wonderful game and a testament of what the dev.'s have gotten right all these years. I have said C.O.H. will be my last video game numerous times in numerous threads; and at this point it's true. The problem is that Paragon is simply making that transition out of playing video games much easier because they simply aren't putting in as much care as they used to. Well, they certainly reflected that attitude back onto me and I definitely care less about this game. Most of the new content is almost unplayable because of all the erroneously spelled words and horrible takes on accents (now) too. The stories themselves are becoming more and more trite as time goes on.

Night Ward's Fireball arc and the bulk of the other Night Ward content left a bitter taste in my mouth. The terrible plots I could see in a video game, but the grammar itself and the spelling errors made me unable to finish out Night Ward. I already hated the duplicate zone of First Ward and I found the whole zone and content update wholly unprofessional and lacking the polish that Paragon Studios was once dedicated to up until this past issue's point. The stories were disjointed and many were completely pointless endeavors.

The dev.'s are smart people and know how to deliver; Nature Affinity, I'm looking at you! I just don't understand the inconsistency in delivered content. Paragon needs to reprioritize certain things and bump quality assurance up a peg or two because I for one can't tolerate traipsing through poorly constructed sentence after poorly constructed sentence. For instance, I cannot believe that the whole "Shark Week" fan fiction made it past Q.A. and onto the main page. That was terrible writing and an unprofessional breach between customer and content provider. It totally dismantled any facade of professionalism that this game has for me. It was like reading some teenager's fan fiction on a web log or something. Not to mention that it is the very same writing that is seeping into the game lore itself. Furthermore, the dev.'s have made it clear they don't give a damn about inconsistencies: the time frame of zones and level progression is all a jumbled mess at this point because of certain story arcs ending before they begin (Praetoria and the Praetorians seeking sanctuary on earth).

I'm getting the feeling that Paragon Studios is getting ready to bid adieu to City Of Heroes because of its blatant attitude of "screw it" that we've been seeing lately. If this isn't the case, get your stuff together guys, the writing is making the game nearly unplayable at this point.

P.S. Nalrok_AthZim, I'm one of Zero's former S.G. mates in a pretty longstanding S.G. that is now more or less defunct. I am one of those people that rarely plays at this point because of the writing.

It's not going to. Bases are for the most part broken and there are other things out there that probably aren't getting looked at like fixing the numerous spelling errors in this game. I think that the dev.'s are trying to fix what problems they can and fix which problems may be most visible. I believe this issue is thinking of the future of this game more than anything.

Look, the economy's crap, M.M.O.'s all across the board are losing players simply because the main demographic for them has grown up, and the dev.'s know that a nearly ten year old game can only last for so long. They're probably putting through as many fixes they can this issue so it can last much longer on life support than it normally would. I applaud them for this issue and for doing what they can to polish off as many systems in the game as they can before they eventually have to downsize in the coming years.

They're giving us most of the fixes and customization options that we've been requesting for years in the coming issue. Good on them for pulling through. In my opinion, it's probably one of the best issues they'll be coming out with in some time.

By the way, wasn't the check name function broken for a time? I remember a while back that it didn't even properly search or something. Yes, it's nice that it's working now.

I am so surprised that Ray, Payback, Nightstick, and Chance we're not taken. Good job on those.

Scythus, I didn't mean to come down on anyone's names. I wasn't saying that they were bad, just that, to me, they didn't seem like they would have been that difficult to land.