Father Xmas

Ah, no.

The stores for those levels are actually contacts in Founders and Bricks.

It's a little too wild west for me there. I prefer someplace where people don't toss around profanity and slurs like an XBox tween with a headset and too much Red Bull.

You are forgetting hosting costs, server maintenance in case of drive or blade failure, bandwidth costs for game and forum and help desk costs (my character is stuck, help!). While common questions and technical issues could be handled by players, we don't have server access to help in game. We need someone with ban hammer privileges for the hooligans that are likely to show up if it becomes known that the "town" don't have a "sheriff" anymore.

And without a way to collect money to pay for those minimal costs, it costs money to process subscriptions and the like, as well as some amount of front office overhead that'll add to the costs of keeping the servers up. The Paragon Market is run by a third party who I assume gets a cut, and possibly a minimum amount per month and without new content, I would expect that the Market may end up more of a cost than a source of income.

NCSoft has never been good at coordinating things at a corporate level.

It was a Friday at a end of a month. It was the "perfect" time to shut down the studio. However NCSoft itself didn't put out a press release, at least not one on their global web site, which latest news on the English version is from 2009 or the US one where the last announcement was GW2 going live. Paragon had to say something because the word would get out over the weekend and at least they tried to be the ones we heard it from first.

I expect to hear details this week or next, assuming the rumors of a Nov 30 shutdown is accurate.

It was a reasonable episode. For some reason I now expect a Pond Life between each episode since the Doctor dropped them off.

Didn't mind the instant fix since it was a misunderstanding by a very stubborn Scottish girl, that she was doing Rory a favor tossing him out because she believed that having children was his heart's desire when it was always her. Honestly, ever heard of adoption or surrogacy? Maybe the Doctor knows of a time when artificial wombs were all the rage and any two cell samples could make a baby.

Interesting twist. A Dalek classified insane because it retained it's human soul. Interesting way to sample the actress who is going to be the next companion.

Only problem with that list of numbers, at least in one sense, is the US Dollar <-> Korean Won fluctuated quite a lot over that time period, even between quarters.

Here's that list converted into dollars based on average exchange rate for that quarter.

CoH/V Revenues (Millions of US $)

2007
Q4 5.874 - NCSoft buys off Cryptic and forms Paragon Studio, Issue 11 (end of Nov)

2008 - 22.243
Q1 5.684
Q2 5.655 - Issue 12 (mid May)
Q3 5.841
Q4 5.063 - Issue 13 (beginning of Dec), the "death" of PvP (by some)

2009 - 17.684
Q1 4.850
Q2 5.201 - Architect Edition Box came out, Issue 14 (early Apr) and Issue 15 (late June)
Q3 4.425 - Issue 16 (mid Sep)
Q4 3.373

2010 - 14.030
Q1 2.935
Q2 3.395 - Issue 17 (end of Apr)
Q3 4.834 - Going Rogue Box came out, Issue 18 (mid Aug)
Q4 2.866 - Issue 19 (end of Nov)

2011 - 10.933
Q1 2.734 - Issue 19.5 (beg of Feb)
Q2 2.576 - Issue 20 (beg of Apr) and 20.5 (end of Jun)
Q3 2.605 - Freedom, Issue 21 (mid Sep)
Q4 3.018 - Issue 21.5 (beg of Dec)

2012
Q1 2.559 - Issue 22 (beg of Mar)
Q2 2.485 - Issue 23 (end of May)

Note the upswing in revenues when an actual physical box set shows up in a store.

Yes the first two quarters of 2012 is down from 2011 by about 5%. Q2 was down only 3.5% from the previous Q2 in US dollars. Now if you look at all the games they call out in their quarterly presentation;

Aion down 33.0% year over year
Lineage II down 29.1%
Lineage I down 11.8%
GW down 43.3%
CoH up 2.4% (when comparing revenue in KRW)

So of all the games they called out individually, only CoH was up in KRW when comparing same quarters. Still down in US $ a tad but there is a worldwide economic downturn going on, just look at the revenues from every listed region;

Korea down 12.3%
Japan down only 1.2%
Taiwan down 45.3%
Europe down an incredible 86.1%
North America down 16.2%
Overall down 14.9%

So every region's revenues were down. Revenues from every game they listed individually were down, except for CoH which is only down 5% if you take the exchange rate into consideration.

From a cold calculating look at the numbers it appears on the surface that the graphic engine revamp in Issue 18 didn't spark a boost in users. Or Level 50 raids in Issue 19 and larger raids in Issue 20. Or the conversion to a hybrid F2P model. Or new content every quarter for the last nine quarters. We seem to be permanently stuck in the $2.5 to $3 million a quarter.

On face value it wasn't the game not doing well, relative to the rest of their line, I think the reason is more esoteric, it missed projected targets or NCSoft believes the money they spent on Paragon Studio could be better spent on something else with a better rate of return than what this game made. Or it could be a case of making an example for the investors, showing they are trimming away portions of their business that aren't helping significantly in revenues or profits to "refocus on their core markets", some silliness like that.

Avatars just links to where you had stored it. They never hosted the avatars. Most people used photobucket or similar service. You could check your User CP and see if the link is still there. It may give you an idea where to look at least.

I actually found what I think was my first post, an entry for a costume contest for a cameo in the CoH comic. The links are broken but if anyone care here are the three images.

Thanks all. There was a lot of anecdotal information about conflicting apps, configurations, cranky graphic driver versions etc. that official support doesn't have in their database/help script, that only someone who hangs here I read every post of every thread may remember. Tech gurus here never had their own wiki consolidating this stuff. To late now.

I would like to give a shout out to Zloth (Sloth) who wrote not only CoHHelper but the demo recording launcher that bears his name that enabled many a machinima video. He hasn't been around on the forum since the Jan 2011 and I hope he realize how much these utilities helped.

I thought he could be the perfect Gan in the Blake 7 reboot. Loved him in Finder, it was such a perfect role. His voice was one of the more memorable ones.

Well by a day in NA.

I remember taking Father Xmas, when not up to run a mission, and hang around the Hollows fighting Darwin by healing/rezing (Medicine Pool Aid Other and Resuscitate) low level characters who got over their head again and again doing the Arrest 10 X missions for Wincott. With the occasional escort of someone who fell in the hole (nobody messes with a high level tank).

Great news. Enjoy.

Sorry, the word "losing" by itself made it sound like you were stating an actual quarterly loss, a bottom line number, not a negative change of revenue when comparing quarters.

I believe their first misstep was to make instanced missions a lot more attractive than simple street sweeping. Reduced debt (back when debt hurt) and XP bonuses turned most zones into ghost towns with only the occasional hero spotted traveling to their next mission, contact or zone.

Even those sightings became rarer as they introduced more and faster ways to travel across zones and to missions. Certain gathering spots became more and more of a ghost town as bases got invention workbenches, Tier 8 direct access to the consignment house and vault, eliminating the need to go to Icon by making every zone trainer a tailor.

Sure all of those things streamlined our play but to what end? You log in as a new user and the first zone you go to has only a handful of players visible (and as a new F2P user you can't even talk to them without running up next to them). People judge popularity based on seeing other players and if you aren't seeing many, is it a game you want to invest time playing if you can't find anyone to play with.

Just following your lead.

Stardock apps normally doesn't play well with the game.

When I first heard I thought of this song.

Grapevine Fires by Death Cab for Cuties (youtube audio)

In no particular order.

1. Being able to pose on top of phone poles and run along the phone wires. So Hong Kong cinema.
2. Playing "lets not touch the ground" traveling from Point A to Point B with Super Jump. Someone once thought I was flying, since I only touched edges of rooftops, chimneys, fire escapes, etc and wondered how I was flying so fast.
3. Being able to get a close approximation with the costume creator of characters from anime, TV or western animation. Being able to be inspired by something you've saw earlier in the day and whip up a character with that concept (in my case, a group of bag pipers practicing in a empty parking lot).
4. Scrapper/Brute lock. Taking on crowds of enemy while in other games two would be almost always fatal.
5. Being able to lose myself, escape the petty annoyances of the day and immerse myself in a world where I'm the hero, fighting the long odds and winning the day.

I didn't mind the layer cake area once I turned up the gamma and could see those holes in the floor.

But honestly they really weren't designed for a max out huge character model. Especially one that got speed boosted after he asked not to be.