Father Xmas

They didn't negotiate in good faith. They, the bakers union, ignored the negotiations all summer according to the Teamsters and then after the package was presented, a package that the rest of the unions were involved with, understood where management was coming from and approved, a package that gave the unions seats on the board and 25% ownership, chose to strike and force the company to close.

Some people would rather watch the world burn.

But every so often somebody comes up with a new twist that ignites the masses. Both WoW and CoH were developed in the shadow of Evercrack and UO, through their existing universe, company reputation as well as refinement of the EQ model took off. Same could be said with the Harry Potter novels, upscale fast food businesses like Five Guys or Chipotle Grill, smartphones and tablets. Something existed that was similar beforehand but then someone tweaks it just right and BAM, it blows up huge. And then everyone tries to copy it.

Welcome to the world and how it works.

It's a problem in every creative business where there is a large upfront cost with hope that you will make money on it once it's out. TV, movies, music and video games.

So what most everyone does is use as a template whatever currently successful property in hope that'll improve your odds at making money. Harry Potter - Percy Jackson, City of Ember, Golden Compass, Narnia; Twilight saga - Hunger Games, I am Number 4, Vampire Diaries; Lost - Alcatraz, Revolution, Terra Nova, Journeyman, Flash Forward; Avatar - every movie that was forced into 3D since it. Police dramas, hospital dramas, lawyer dramas, dysfunctional family sitcoms, group of friends sitcoms, reality talent shows ... the examples are simply too numerous.

It's simple, the people who are willing to invest money into a new creative venture are a superstitious cowardly lot who feel better if what's being made is nearly a carbon copy of what is already successful so that's what they invest in. That's also why you are seeing development teams going to crowd funding for game genre's that aren't currently in fashion or sequels to well received but niche games.

Well both Marvel and DC had MMOs in development back then, why would they let a competitor who already have a head start on them advertise to their future customers? Sure they could have had more of a presence in comic book stores with their 99 cent "bootleg" demo disks or the occasional major comic con (not SDCC, that's so not about comics anymore and really expensive).

Based on what I've read about setting an advertising budget, in the games good years the marketing budget wouldn't larger than $2 million dollars, worldwide. While $2 million is great for a local business or politician running for office, it's a joke for even just a NA wide campaign. And at $2 million dollars you would need to get around 20,000 new customers to buy the game and stay for three more months just to break even.

I think the call for more advertising and how it could have saved the game is just a need for self-validation about playing. See an add on TV and you (plural, not directed at anyone in particular) can point to it and tell friends that you play that and not WoW. You can derive some measure of pride if more people are at least aware of it. It's like supporting a college team that aren't in the top 10/25.

No, I choose who I'm going after with the tab key and let the game animate me turning around to strike the target that's behind me. I can alternate between targets faster with tab while spamming attacks than I would ever be able to accurately with a mouse. And no, I'm worse with game controllers so that's not an option.

But you overlook the fact it suppose to be the skill of the character and his equipment. I already know that I have the eye-hand coordination of a drunken one eye monkey in a centrifuge. I'm escaping here in an RPG, my character is suppose to be better than me. My skill is in how I enhance my abilities, what skills I choose, what enemy to attack and in what order, to know when to regroup or simply run away.

Stop trying to turn RPGs into FPSs that only Red Bull infused teen twitch monkeys enjoy playing. Go fire up your XBox and chainsaw some bugs on rails or go join Master Chef one shotting enemy with a pistol if you want to show off your "skill". My character's "skills" are drowning them in water, setting them on fire, encasing them in ice, tricking them to attack their friends, set imaginary minions on them, stabbing them with swords, knocking them off rooftops with beanbag rounds, pummeling them with my fists and occasionally kneeing them in their junk. None of which are skills I have in real life. So why should my real life skills or lack of affect them?

For the Architect I would have to designer set classifications, farm or story with farm being the default. This way if someone who was actually using it for a story, they would likely spend the moment it takes to set the designation as Story. It would have also allowed those only interested in farming or those only interested in doing other player's stories to find those missions that interest them.

Other than the old mantra "Risk Vs Reward". That was the logic behind the old Fly penalty. No queueing up an attack and fly by your target while spending most of your time out of range. Arena showed the unfairness of that with Super Speeders and after an attempt to add the accuracy penalty to all primary travel powers they shifted it to suppression.

I mostly agree with you here.

I hardily agree here. They would introduce some new technology aspect to the game engine and then ignore propagating it throughout the game for a long time. Improved buildings/textures in Praetoria, power customization, higher resolution costume parts, branching story arcs, power dynamics (dual blade - I11, Street Justice and Titan Weapons - I21, Staff Fighting - I22), no war walls (Praetoria), engine animated cut scenes (I6 but I could live without them, still rarely used since I6). Those are just a few. Now as a software developer myself I can understand why they couldn't either propagate them all at once or over the next year, improved features aren't as sexy as new features and it all boils down to resources/manpower.

I always say that the push from street sweeping to instanced missions quickly altered the perceived population of the game. Then over the years of factoring in new ways to quickly travel from mission to mission without use of Trams, eliminating the need to go to Icon, Wentworths, University made seeing groups of players in one place a rarity. If you were a new player, it made even the more populated servers seem like a ghost town. Of course all of those changes helped the individual player cut down the downtime between missions which to them was a good thing however the overall impact in my opinion was it left what was once zones alive with players now empty and deserted. Sum all the deserted zones together and I can see why players blame the number of zones as the reason.

I got nothing, since I don't understand the point.

Now I wasn't much of a PvPer. That said I didn't mind the Rock/Paper/Scissors aspect of it. What I minded was the 5 to 1 ganking or the preventing of me from leaving the zone. But that's players not the underlying mechanics. Also the choice to either build your character for PvP or PvE but not both was a problem. I13 introduced alternative builds but if that was done a few issues previously I think it would have helped the PvP population. Instead they tried to "ballance" the unballanceable.

They were doing so well moving away from required team content only to introduce a path to grow our level 50 characters that required teaming. And not just teaming, grinding. But grinding "is bad" so the devs put a timer on the rewards. So even if you didn't mind grinding it would still take you days or weeks to earn enough whatevers to craft your first whatchamacallit but that's only a 1st level whatchamacallit so you have to grind for weeks more to improve upon it. I get a headache thinking about it.