Father Xmas

I haven't seen a copy in a store since summer last year. It was also nearly impossible to find time cards outside of the holidays but I did still see the old game card at a smaller BestBuy.

Well you could go the the global corporate NCSoft website and read all the investor relations and earnings reports. Here's the page to the last couple of years of quarterly earnings reports.

They don't list profit, just revenue from each major game however they aren't broken down into revenue from region. For instance Aion had 12.7x the revenues of CoH last quarter. Lineage I, which is no longer available in the North America region but is going strong elsewhere had 20.5x the revenue of CoH.

In the 29 quarters that Guild Wars have been around, it's no subscription model has earned it $15 million more in revenue than the 33 quarters that CoH has been around. How? Easy they sold over 7 million copies of their game. Sure the only new content added to their game was when a pay for expansion came out, but it was play for free. It was closer to a Diablo II game model than a traditional MMO. If a player left, who cares, they paid their money up front. Then ArenaNet took all of that filthy lucre and used it to develop the sequel. A sequel that reportedly has a million pre-sales.

Hey, don't shoot the messenger. It was only a matter of time when his cries of impending doom proved true, you can't deny the numbers. $10-12 million a year in revenues wasn't the kind of numbers NCSoft was willing to live with their "realignment of company focus and publishing support".

They tried in game ads once when it was all the rage, it looked as if the sneaker and taco phone ads on various billboards didn't really work out even though it didn't break immersion. And while real energy drink and action/comic book movie ads wouldn't either, it's a matter of convincing those companies to advertise here, that it's money better spent here than a TV ad on SyFy, Cartoon Network or Nick. I think the conventional wisdom today is ads in games don't work.

The gold level subscription is an idea I would support. Something that grants access to ALL costumes and powersets without the need to buy them separately. As the original review in Eurogamer states, this game is all about "hitting people in the face, while looking really good".

Server merger. Well nowadays each server isn't a group of PCs you could point at and say "that is Virture and those are Infinity". They are racks and racks of blades that can be assigned dynamically base on load (limited by storage throughput, database access). They could have already scaled back the hardware without us being any the wiser. Assuming they did have a work around for duplicate character names, forced relocation could break up existing server communities causing some to leave. It also doesn't fix the problem that zones are empty since nearly every mission is an instanced and those that aren't, patrol/arrest X of Y, players really don't like. I don't think significant savings can be made there.

I was just thinking we needed Captain Dynamic and his awesome button.

Now I'm wondering what manga magazine is sitting in the teen section of my library above the teen DVD section (which contains such teen hits as Ghostbusters and Top Secret! At least the comic book movies are over in the adult section). They might be old Shonen Jumps but I thought I remember the covers changing recently. Now I have to go to the library tomorrow to check.

Just the one. Going to see if I can fix that.

Don't misunderstand me, I think voting with your money is reasonable. However if you permanently boycott every restaurant you had a bad experience in you will soon have nowhere to go out and have dinner in. Well maybe that analogy works for me because I live in a small town with less than a dozen restaurants and the next nearest town is 10 miles away.

As time goes on we see the emergence of mega game companies who buy up studios, suck them dry and discard them like a carnivorous plant with flies. All I'm saying is if you start saying you will never again buy a game from <insert name> because the did <something you object too> you will soon end up only buying indiegames off of Steam or <shudder> Impulse (just because I hate Gamestop).

You forgot Beta is now open to all, not just VIP.

But it's like boycotting Fox because they canceled Firefly or NBC because they canceled Journeyman or Warner Brother's Batman movies because of the Schumacher films. You can, it'll just be a time when you run out of places you aren't boycotting to get your gaming on.

Paragon Studio fell under the NC Interactive subsidiary. ArenaNet is it's own subsidiary and Carbine Studios is under the parent company. It's possible that NC Interactive was mandated to reduce costs by X% and they decided it was easiest to shutter Paragon. There actually may be other staff reductions going on at NC Interactive but those don't make the same news splash as a studio closure. As far as I know, NC Interactive is in charge of the NA versions of Lineage II and Aion as well as maintaining the NA forums, websites and servers.

Note: NC Interactive are likely working on a NA translation for Blade & Soul.

Going Rogue mission structure is interesting if you also look at the mission structure of City of Heroes and City of Villains. There is a definite evolutionary feel.

City of Heroes was designed back in early 2000s and it's mission structure was influenced by the popular MMOs before it (Evercrack). Missions had a large time sink component to them. Talk to contact, go to other zone, return to contact, go back to other zone. A number of these time sink missions fall into the "Kill 10 rats" trope and until you became familiar to where these "rats" lived, it was a lot of exploration on foot. I will also assume that the Level 14 minimum for our travel powers were an extension of the "mount" trope that only higher level players get to cut down on travel time. Contacts had miscellaneous missions and occasional story arcs. When you out leveled them they refer you to the next contact up the chain.

City of Villains had a different mission structure. While it still retained the "Kill 10 rats" trope, at least the 10 rats were in the same zone as your contact. Also going to one zone per level range rather than two concentrated the population, which they needed to do after they made instanced missions the preferred way to get XP. Also once you got out of the beginner's zone, the way contacts and missions worked was very different. The Newspaper/Heist mechanism would unlock a contact that only had story arc missions. These contacts may introduce you to other contacts when you outleveled them or you may have to use the Newspaper/Heist method again.

Going Rogue decided to emphasize the story arcs. Had one of four paths you could follow, based on decision points in key stories. Besides altering which missions were available to you it also altered what you saw in the world around you. It was a way to engage the player in the story, however for the kill all/earn XP/level crowd who never cared about story per se, it forced them to pay attention if they wanted to do certain content. We saw elements of this mission/contact structure moved over into CoH and CoV when Freedom came out.

Now the problems I saw with the Going Rogue edition. First, your first character had to be made in Praetoria. I can understand why the devs made that decision. You had access to all of the powersets, all the zones were designed with the new spiffier graphics upgrade and the previously mentioned mission structure. Each of those had a downside once you left Praetoria for Paragon or the Rogue Isles.

The obvious being the graphical quality of the zones dropped off noticeably. It's like buying an attractive old house with a renovated modern first floor only to discover the upper floors haven't been.

Then there's the flip side about upgraded graphics, you needed some reasonably modern hardware to enjoy those enhanced visual settings. Not a problem for a dedicated FPSer or massive solo RPG player but the casual gamer with a $500 laptop with Intel graphics or a desktop with a Dx9 class card couldn't enjoy them. By 2010 it was tougher and tougher to convince someone to pay $15 a month to access a game, the notion that they needed to upgrade their hardware to properly enjoy the new look was out of reach for some people and could discourage them from staying around. No one wants to be left behind.

Of course the other major problem with being kicked out of Praetoria at Level 20 was the very different mission/contact mechanisms. Someone who started out with CoH or CoV, by Level 20 they grok want they needed to do, where to go, what zone was next but a newly minted players fresh from Praetoria, it, like the graphics, was a major change. At least the devs got the bewildering feel of being dropped into a familiar but different parallel world right.

The very different mission mechanism and look between Going Rogue and Paragon/Rogue Isles caused players who have been conditioned how the game works to relearn. Everyone became newbs again. Nobody likes being a newb.

And I still haven't talked about the critter groups between the parallel worlds. Learning how to fight in Praetoria made groups in CoH/CoV seem easy and players use to fighting at increased difficulty in CoH/CoV got their head handed to them repeatedly if they weren't careful in GR.

So for new players, GR had a bit of a bait and switch feel while experienced CoH/CoV players had to adjust to more difficult enemy groups and different mission mechanism. While the technology was a step forward and the missions became more interesting for those who like story content, it felt like a different game that was trying to mimic the original.

What Bain Capital and companies like them do is to take a public company private, do the necessary changes that would make a much healthier company without being quadrupled guessed by Wall Street analysts that results in the stock price of a public company being jerked about. When they are done they bring the company public again and make their money owning a chunk of stock in the revamped company which if they did their job right, goes up over time.

What NCSoft did was more akin to The Gap, Inc deciding to close their Piperlime chain because it didn't contribute in a significant way to their revenues unlike their Gap, Banana Republic or Old Navy chains.

The game wasn't bringing in $10-12 million in net profits, just $10 -12 million in revenue, big difference.

The last time NCSoft reported unique users in a quarter number was third quarter 2008 at a touch under 125,000 and the game's revenue was $5.84 million. The quarter before Freedom, Q2 2011, when the game was still subscription based, $2.58 million, implying 55-60,000 active accounts. Q2 2012 earnings was $2.49 million so the change over to Freedom didn't seem to help. (The dollar figures are based on NCSoft's revenue numbers converted from Korean Won to US dollars using the average exchange rate for that quarter, since the assumption is the bulk of CoH players are US.)

If you read the Reddit thread most of the bans were either due to account hijacking due to aggressive gold farmers whose actions got the account banned or players who thought they were on an Xbox headset where spewing racial slurs and general profanity is the norm. It's a hilarious read.

Those who got banned due to account hacking are getting their accounts unbanned, they just need to use unique passwords.

Congrats you two. Sorry that your special day got tainted with the news.

But NCSoft is still mum about shutting down Paragon Studios. It probably jumped due to the sales of GW2.