Father Xmas

I've always felt that Father Xmas was my in game turning of the tables to the Kinks song Father Christmas.

Unfortunately I don't have a broad knowledge/collection of music and the songs I do directly associate with the game, ones that don't have the word hero or Superman in it's lyrics, is due to their use in someone's CoH music video (Bring Me to Life for example from Desolate Joker's video).

There's not enough face palm gifs on the Internet for this thread.

NCSoft stock has dropped over 25% since the third quarter results came out last week with the volume of stock being traded over 10x normal the first day.

When Aion had it's first full quarter of sales revenue 1Q 2009, it earned more than either Lineage or Lineage II while those games maintained their previous quarters revenues. Year over year 1Q sales went up 50%. YoY 1Q profit went up over 300%. At the beginning of 2009, their stock was only at 55,000 a share. Due to all the positive buzz, by the time the 1Q 2009 report came out, the stock already tripled in price to 179,000 in only five months.

Blade & Soul's first quarter numbers painted a completely different picture. In it's first full quarter, the sum of sales revenue of Blade & Soul, Aion, Lineage and Lineage II was within 1/2 of a percent of Aion, Lineage and Lineage II's sales revenue from the previous quarter. It didn't add any new sales revenue but appear to swipe/shift it from the other three. Not good for a new "home market game".

Guild Wars 2 had higher sales revenue in it's first month than the whole quarter sales of any of the above four games. GW2 isn't necessarily a "home market game". The original Guild Wars did alright when it was pushing out paid expansions but once that stopped it's sales revenues fell dramatically. So I'm betting the analysts are looking at GW2 for only a few years of good sales instead of it being a long term source of revenue.

So institutions and other investors still holding onto NCSoft stock during the decline leading up to the release of the 3Q numbers, hoping they would be great with both new games adding revenue saw that didn't happen so they dumped it after riding it down from it's high in October of 2011 of 380,500. The stock closed Friday at 156,000.

As for the game's closure date, it was likely chosen solely to give a month to decommission/reassign the servers and for the accountants to dot the i's and cross the t's on CoH and Paragon Studio numbers don't run into fiscal year 2013.

Nearly 1500 auctions on eBay for twinkies now. Right now those with bids are around $1-2 per cake. But there are some crazy people who have BiN prices of $90 for a box of 10. Then you have the downright silly ones asking for (pinkie to lip) one MILLION dollars.

There are other Hostess products up for auction but Twinkies are the big one.

Bankruptcy judge sets up new contracts for all the unions. Only one union, without asking permission first from the Teamsters, go on strike because they didn't like what the judge set up. It's their "we are staying out on principle" now put them and over 18,000 out of work before the winter Holidays. I wouldn't want to be a member of the baker's union when the other unions show up to lynch them.

Joker clap.

And Paragon Studio was under the NC Interactive subsidiary. It's at that level where you laundry profits back to the parent corporation.

I gave up reading this thread after the first five pages so I'm jumping to the end to post.

NCSoft NEVER reported profits on a per game basis. They only report sales revenue on a per game basis and only if the game had significant sales. This was the case with CoH up until the most recent report where both CoH and GW are now lumped into the "Other" designation to make room for Blade & Soul and GW2.

Now they did report sales revenue as well as profit and loss of their subsidiaries. However it appears that most of the time the subsidiaries strove to be profit neutral to slight loss, probably using some means to legally laundry profits the way most large companies do to avoid countries with high business income taxes (Hi US).

Now NCSoft did list Paragon Studios as part of NC Interactive which handles there games in this hemisphere. NC Interactive had huge losses in 2010 and 2011, in the 10s of millions of dollars, representing the bulk of NCSoft's subsidiaries losses for those years. NC Interactive's sales went from 70.3 billion KrW in 2009 to 27.5 billion KrW in 2011 and losses from 3.6 billion KrW in 2009 to 24.8 billion KrW in 2011.

That's all the hard date we have. We don't know what the sources of sales revenues were from a per title basis for NC Interactive or what and where their expenses were on a per title basis either.

Now in 2011 NCSoft had a gross profit margin of 77% meaning the 23% is the cost of sales. Now for a company that builds things, it means the cost of manufacturing. For an MMO company I would guess that means the cost of servers, bandwidth, help desk, website, etc., the cost of keeping the game running day to day. It wouldn't include the cost of the developers/studio. That's why by using that definition I can understand why the game had been called very profitable, but only on a gross profit basis. But it's that kind of fine point that gets lost in casual conversation. We still have confused people reporting sales revenue as profit so it doesn't surprise me.

It looks a bit like my pile but I never had more than one account so I only have one ofs.

As for T-shirts the only one has a CoV shirt they handed out at E3 in 2005 or 2006 I think. It's pretty worn out now.

I also have that CGW and the bound Prima guide from 2004 (Includes Issue 1).

Now I'm getting all misty again damn you.

I mentioned this in the 3Q results thread, sorry to reiterate it here.

White the 3Q results were good, with improved game revenue (from 129.7 to 167.3 million KrW) and one of the best quarterly profits in years (from 7.8 loss to 47.2 million KrW profit), Blade & Soul didn't add any "new" revenue the way Aion did in it's first full quarter, but appeared to "steal" revenue from Lineage, Lineage II and Aion. It's never a good thing when your shinny new product cannibalizes the sales of your older products rather than add to it. The additional revenue came from GW2 being out for only a month (earning more than either B&S, Aion, Lineage or Lineage II for the quarter). As for GW2, I think investors see that game as a short term significant revenue source unlike the big three, now four NCSoft MMOs.

So the stock is now down around 25% since the 3Q numbers came out on significantly higher trading volume. Again it's still 3x higher than it was at the start of 2009, it's just not 7+x higher which it was at it's peak a tad more than a year ago.

And since the cameo was the very first thing in the episode and it went by quickly, I didn't recognize that it was Riker who was Castle's "number one fan".

"How far they fall."

I got around to watch both the SDCC panel and the SCI channel's special last night. It certainly seemed that the cast/crew actually did click at a level rarely seen. Both are worth watching. The panel video can be found up on YouTube and the summerglauwiki.

Just saw this over at IO9. It's an auto-tuned, built from sampled dialog, music video for Firefly, done as a promo for the special that was on over the weekend.

Very creative.

http://io9.com/5958573/and-now-a-joy...me?tag=firefly

Yea, like that. Just saw that episode recently as the first few seasons are now in syndication.

From my understanding it's being released now in parts but in a couple of months it'll be a movie (maybe multi-part movie like Alice or Tin Man) on SyFy.

I guess he's staring in the movie adaptation of a YA SciFi J-novel "All You Need is Kill".

Photo and article.

Well I think it was last year when I notice the double meaning in the jingle "Every Kiss begins with Kay". Whoosh. I always have taken it at face value "give her our jewelry, get nookie".

Getting back on the original topic, somewhat, the stock went down again on Friday but not as much and volume traded was only half of what it was on Thursday but that's still around 5-6x the volume in the weeks leading up to the announcement.

It closed just above where the stock price last was 31 months ago.

Reminds me of Starship Troopers but they selected zombies instead of bugs for the final render.

It strikes me that someone couldn't rap their head around how slow zombies can be a menace against I high tech fighting force. I think they forget THEY'RE ZOMBIES! Shooting them in general don't do much, bombing them simply knocks the one not dismembered down for a bit and hitting them with flame throwers simply make them into shambling fire starters.

But no, 28 Days/Months Later, Zombieland, etc. allows film writers and directors to go action movie vs slow building menace or virtually unstoppable army ants angle. Let's drop in a car chase or foot chase sequence to liven things up (no pun intended). Can't do that with massive shambling hoard of zombies but if they swarm like Black Friday shoppers at Walmart going for that $300 60" flat screen oh boy, that's some slick piece of storytelling.

Well they do have pistols in B&S.

And the day/night cycle is a wee to fast to do proper vampires in CoH.

And it's one thing sharing a full costume in our game versus sharing just the "body" in B&S. It's like some virtual sex trade. It's "look at my stable of lovely young things, see anything you like?". And since what you do trade are special jpg files it turns into a collectible card game. Also it wasn't clear if you could "capture" other player's characters with the special character screen grab which is available in game, which then turns it into sexy Pokemon since when you load the file up in the editor they will be without the clothing they were wearing and back in the lingerie.

Maybe it's just the guy's video presentation that's creeping me out.

Hey it was 3am.

Very good.

I will be the first to admit that the character designer in Blade & Soul for female characters could double as the customizer for a RealDoll.

Yes the narrator in the videos I linked to a few pages back was a little too exited that the patch allowed you full camera movement control and zoom in the creator. The new feature to allow you to mail JPGs of your character to friends who can then import them into the editor for their own enjoyment (I assume they embed all the character creator info into the JPG metadata section) seems a little creepy. Creepy like finding out your friend has 500 nearly naked, anime stylized, PVC plastic figures occupying an entire wall in his living room.

It doesn't help that the default sample clothing during creation is essentially skimpy lingerie. Sure you can switch to other sample outfits during creation, I think the default male outfit looks as if they have a towel around their waist.

While we can do some of the same things in our creator, ours seems very clinical as if editing a plastic Barbie where the character in the B&S editor seems more alive. It blinks. It talks. The hair, clothing and breasts moves as you rotate the model. There are a few poses you can put them in. Then the shear amount of detail you can tweak. Iris size (so you don't have to have anime eyes), color and type, pupil size, eyebrow shape and position. Eye and lip makeup. A couple dozen attributes in the body from basic height, hip width, leg length to finger length, thigh and calf length. I wouldn't be surprised if it had foot size and allowed you to adjust the collar bone and shoulder blades.

And all of this loving rendered using the Unreal 3 engine. And the really disturbing thing as I think about it, you will not be able to appreciate most of these customization while playing. Only if your character is standing around so you can pan and zoom in with the camera.

Again, this is just the body and face shape and detail. Clothing is entirely another thing, handled by the standard buy/equip/inventory system. In our game, clothes make the character. It's the nature of iconic heroes/villains. In B&S, it's the body wearing the clothes and the level of detail is scary.

I agree, it's going to be M. There was a rumor that the game was going to be censored for the NA market and NCSoft released a PR saying no way as it would upset the artistic vision of it's character concept designer. Let's see where did I see that ... here.

And if you don't want to soil your browser history, this was posted Sept 20th.