Father Xmas

It was the suddenness of it all that really shocked us. If we had say server consolidation or a public downsizing of the staff just before or right after Issue 23 we would have been more prepared for the "realignment".

However for long time players, over the years we were able to rationalize the changes in the perceived population of the game. In the early days the skies and streets were full of heroes, then the debt discount and mission bonus improvement drove a lot of heroes into instanced missions. That's okay because we still saw them racing from mission to mission, crossing Steel or Skyway to catch the other tram.

Then CoV came out which did two things. First the population was split between two games. You were either playing Heroes or Villains. Second the introduction of bases and their zone teleporters meant you only needed to get to a base portal or after Vet Rewards were introduced in Issue 8, the base transporter power at 2 years. So now we accepted a smattering of characters running about in the open on their way to trainers and stores.

Issue 9 introduced crafting, the consignment house and RMT spammers. This drove a lot of people off into hiding since the RMTers were pulling character names off of the search list to drive their spam email. So we learned to rely on our Friends contact list to see if they were online, besides SG and global channels.

Issue 13 altered PvP forever. PvP didn't really hold any real interest for me but from what I understand is significantly changed PvP in a way where existing tuned PvP builds were no longer optimal. Sadly they did add multiple builds at the same time, a feature that if existed earlier, would allow someone like me who didn't want to gimp their PvE build due to PvP or vice versa to have a specialized build as well as their regular one.

Issue 14 introduced AE and player created content it also created a class of players who never realized that there is a world outside of AE with a play style that was usually significantly different from the farms found in AE. Many proved to be difficult to team with players due to their lack of basic gameplay knowledge such as zone geography and travel to tactical knowledge about various critter groups (target the sapper/death shaman/DE pets first). This may have discouraged players from openly welcoming any new players.

The introduction of Praetoria in Issue 18 once again emptied out the existing areas as players went to try out the pretty and challenging Praetoria. The upside it was the only way to start a character with any standard AT before choosing a side. But the rather significant change in difficulty between blue/red to gold made the experience annoying to older players while newer players only exposed to the difficulty playing the first 20 levels experienced the opposite when they went either blue or red, not to mention the change in visual quality.

It was easy for us old timers to assume that everything was status quo over the last few years. We were accustom to seemingly empty zones and search results. Everything seemed alright since of friends and global channel and SG companions were still around in sufficient numbers but for a new player it was a ghost town and unless they were taken into someone's fold, they probably didn't stick around. Few who mentioned the substantial downturn in sales revenue since 2009 were lumped in with the doom and gloomers.

So when NCSoft made their "realignment" decision we were all blindsided by it. But how much of that blindside was us simply not noticing the actual state of the game? How many forum posts were there telling new players that the servers weren't ghost towns and all they needed to do was find an active global channel or SG to join. That the game was very solo friendly or team size or makeup wasn't that important as it is in other MMOs. I think a lot of us fooled ourselves that everything was okay as long as issues kept arriving and there wasn't any hints of large staff downsizing or word of server consolidation.

As for NCSoft's decision, selling the property may not even been discussed when they were doing whatever analysis that led to them choosing to close Paragon Studio and CoH. By the time they made the closure announcement it was fait accompli. Part of a larger plan already decided upon and changing a part of it like selling off Paragon and CoH was disruptive to the decided course of action. Who knows, it's all speculation as to the real reasons behind it. The game simply may not have hit some internally decided sales revenue goal after a year of F2P or a white knight in NCSoft's management left leaving Paragon with no protector. Maybe they decided that only MMOs that do well enough in Korea and the rest of Asia are only worth keeping. CoH may have been the family "black sheep" being only viable in the west. Again, who knows.

Moby Games listed them as founded in 2005. However when a group of devs who worked on WoW splinter off of Blizzard and go looking for a sugar daddy, I can see NCSoft deciding to gobble them up.

With the core group being former WoW devs, I now understand where the art style comes from in WildStar.

I can also see why, considering Blizzard's reputation in Korea as well as WoW's success in Asia, NCSoft is keeping them around. They are probably expecting WildStar to do very well in Asia.

When did Halo, a FPS, get XP? Been seeing the Mtn Dew commercials. Is there a skill tree you level up with or what? Only Halo I played was the original.

And of course what would a superhero movie poster be without a bum shot of one of the female leads.

This might help.

The game could have been very profitable as long as you only included operating costs like the server hosting, bandwidth, customer support, the forums and the website. But as soon as you include Paragon Studio into the mix and can't see how it could be considered very profitable on sales of only $10-11 million a year. Unless of course people are suggesting that the numbers NCSoft reported as sales revenue are a fabrication.

Assuming the sales numbers are accurate, the game's revenues have been on a steady downward slope for several years now. Freedom hadn't reversed this trend but may have leveled it out for the time being. There was no hope for growth into NCSoft's most profitable region, Korea, as the game died in Beta there years ago.

It's been reported that Paragon Studio had spent time and manpower toward development of two new MMOs which NCSoft rejected in their early development stages. So all Paragon Studio had going for it was maintaining a game with near zero revenue growth with revenues that were now only 40% of what they were in 2009.

The NC Interactive subsidiary that Paragon Studio is organized under is hemorrhaging money big time, with a Q2 loss as large as what all of NCSoft reported for the quarter.

Yes it sucks our game is gone and the devs are now in the wind, landing at other studios but on the surface I can understand why NCSoft did what they did. Who else were they going to "take it out on"? NC Europe was already gutted a few years ago. Arenanet was on the verge of releasing their new game which rocked the early reviews, creating a lot of positive buzz. Carbine Studio is listed as being under the NCSoft parent company which was profitable last quarter. Blade and Soul got good reviews when it came out in Korea at the very end of the second quarter. Their bread and butter MMORPGs Aion, Lineage I and II are still raking in the big bucks in the Asian region.

So NCSoft killed off a studio in a foreign country that was behind a game which was rejected in NCSoft's home market, a game whose sales revenues have been declining over the years, a studio haven't shown you a new game idea that you liked and are part of the wholly own subsidiary that has been majorly in the red for the last several years. Sorry but from their point of view, it's the logical play to make if they want to show their investors that they are trying to reduce costs.

Saying this doesn't make me an NCSoft supporter or an apologist but a realist. They messed up, we payed the price. Is it fair to the employees of Paragon Studio or the players of CoH? Hell no. Is it the right move for NCSoft? Probably.

I'm not complaining about your Youtube channel, it's great you informed your regular viewers about the deal but posting a link here to a video where you tell people about the link to the site where the offer actually is, as well as describing the steps involved which they could just read at the site seems a little round about to me, that's all.

There's an XKCD cartoon in here somewhere.

Did any of you sit down and watch Cars 2? It wasn't awful like many like to suggest. It was a pretty good adaptation of the whole mistaken for spy trope not to mention all the regular spy tropes people love to watch littered throughout it.

I think a lot of people here are just POed over the fact there still isn't an Incredibles sequel.

Well in that case stupid is what stupid does.

I don't think anyone claimed the game was losing "billions of dollars", just that it wasn't as profitable as some people kept claiming, at least when he take into account the cost of Paragon Studios.

The game couldn't have been making tens of millions in profit when it only had $10-11 million in sales revenue over the last 12 months. Also that $10-11 million in sales revenue couldn't translate into over 100,000 paid subscribers for several years now. I'm all for enthusiasm but lets ground it in facts first and then go from there.

You really didn't have to make a video about it, just point people to
http://www.stopzombiemouth.com/

The idea here is to print out coupons you can hand out on Halloween instead of candy (this is cosponsored by the American Dental Association) and the PDF file they provide (8 coupons per page) includes the instructions and the code.

It looks to be a newer version than the one I own (which means it no longer as the Thriller zombie).