Father Xmas

Nice.

Kudos for them to get James Hong to do a cameo and the young lady they got to do the Kim Cattrall part is spot on. The parody lyrics were also quite good. Very clever, very good.

As I pointed out in one thread, somewhere, GW2 is only what, $60, once. I had spent at least $150 a year in this game for nearly 8 years. So even buying that game is still reducing the amount you give to NCSoft.

Well RAID 0 isn't actually RAID (the R is suppose to be for redundant, 0 isn't). All that 0 buys you is performance at the cost of 1/2 of your mean time between failures. Sorry you learned about that the hard way.

One of the two major reasons I hated boutique computer companies during the mid 00s. RAID 0 and SLi/CrossfireX using low end graphic cards and expecting the average buyer to not be aware of the consequences of those choices versus alternatives. Banking on buzzwords as features. It's one of the reasons I started my guide.

Edit: Oh and I now see that your video along the the Paragon-Style video is now linked up at Massively.

I really like the faction idea.

An add on to that would be having the in game bosses of the factions you most oppose act as your character's nemeses at least as a flavor element in missions that are set ups for an ambush. It doesn't matter if you ticked off the Tsoo or the Family or the CoT, they will be your character's opponent in that mission (or maybe an evil team-up, very comic book like).

I guess that was a monicker that was hung on her by others here I guess as the one character from Smallville whose appearance was blamed for Clark never evolving into Superman, at least before Lois came into the series.

I gave up watching Smallville during or after the third season because it really didn't hold my interest any longer, with the exception of a few episodes such as the JLA ones or the larger team up episodes. So I don't quite understand the underlying reasons for the "she who shall not be named" since I didn't see a bulk of the series when she was still on but since people have used it here before and it's her return to TV as a lead, I thought it would be appropriate.

Yep, had to figure that out myself, I couldn't place the face until I looked the movie up on IMDB.

Basically between quarterly reports, all stocks trade on rumor, industry news, general economic news and phases of the moon.

Since it's a Korean exchange and GW2 isn't released there yet, it's success has as much impact to them as an American car company's stock when they are getting great reviews and sale numbers for a model that's only available in Europe.

It could also be that the belief of PC gaming as being a thing of the past and NCSoft's penetration into the mobile gaming marketplace isn't happening fast enough in the eyes of investment managers.

Or it could still be part of the sell off related to the Q2 numbers including Aion's large decline that quarter because it was Aion's success that ran the stock price up from 50000 at the start of 2009 to it's peak of 380000 roughly a year ago. Which is about the same time when NCSoft's revenues peaked and profits started to decline until it went red this last quarter.

The stock is near it's recent bottom again, I suspect it'll start going back up in anticipation of NCSoft's Q3 report now that B&S and GW2 have been released.

I understand. People want someone to blame, someone to point a finger at. But the suggestion that Nexon had it out for Paragon or City of Heroes specifically or western regions makes no sense. What did we do to them?

Not sure if I like it, just reporting on it since Person of Interest wasn't on last week. I'm sure it will end up overly sappy with the two characters stuck in a star crossed lovers angle.

Arrow on the other hand so far rocked. The very slow reveal of his experience on the island and how it changed him adds a nice twist to the presentation of the origin story.

Majority - a subset of a set consisting of more than half of the set's elements.

Nexon is a major share holder, the largest share holder but in terms of corporate ownership, not a majority, period. Also interesting is where Nexon got the stock. They didn't buy it off the market or directly from the company but it was from the CEO's personal holdings of which he sold roughly 60% of to Nexon. NCSoft didn't see a penny from this it was the CEO's personal payday.

The quarterly loss wasn't large. Yes it was the first in a very long time, longer than 8 years at least and it was a continuation of decreasing profits over the last several quarters.

Now factor in that the NA and EU regions revenues have decreased by 60% from 2009 to 2011 compared with an 8% growth in Asia. In the first half of 2012 NA and EU revenues dropped 30% from the first half of 2011 where Asia dropped only 10%. So where would you cut? What markets would you concentrate on? This isn't rocket surgery here.

Blade and Soul was already done and was released at the end of Q2. Localizing it to NA and EU is a lot less expensive than developing a new game. Guild Wars 2 was in the final stages of Beta and from all accounts was getting very positive revues. So those two games are off the table because they are done or nearly done and I imagine they would like to see revenues from both of them to offset any development costs.

WildStar is a still a few years away but is under the main offices watchful eye, there may also be politics involved depending who in the main office is backing it. That leaves Paragon Studio and CoH. It's an old title and paid back it's development costs years ago. It didn't even get out of beta in Korea so revenue growth by spreading the game into Asia is already a no go. It's revenues in NA and EU have been decreasing over the years and F2P didn't reinvigorate them.

As for selling it off. First NCSoft had to get their people to come up with a fair market value, for their shareholder's sake, it's sort of required. They may have felt it wasn't worth the cost to compute a fair price. Also besides the game assets we are also talking about the player database, which are customers. One of the most valuable assets a company has is a list of their customers. No business wants to sell off their customer list to a direct competitor. They would likely charge per head for that information and we're talking everyone who ever played or signed up for a demo. They would have to untangle that information from the master accounts and still maintain the links to the player database of characters and purchased items from the store.

But likely none of the offers reached a point that NCSoft would go ahead with the assessment of what the property was worth and it would likely not be finished before the game was shut down. And if a price was reached, the sale made and the game saved, the game would be without any of the existing developers, the new owners would have to rebuild a staff from scratch to maintain the game.

Three months is just to short of a period a time to build a relationship with NCSoft so they would even consider an offer for the game. You can't just show up in their lobby with a $25 million dollar bank check and have them take you seriously.

Nexon ISN'T the majority shareholder of NCSoft. They are the largest single entity owning stock (a bit under 15%) but they aren't the majority.

And Nexon as well as NCSoft denied there were even talks with Valve, it was purely a rumor spread by a Korean newspaper.

Ah great, I'm a wreck again.

That was a beautiful send off. Thank you for it and all your other videos over the years.

No, in the original story a prince was cursed to be as ugly outside as inside while here a young doctor's thirst for vengeance became externalized when he volunteered for an experimental program while in Afghanistan. The 80s TV series the Beast was simply born that way.

Well it's both an MMO and a space sim. Think Wing Commander/Privateer as an MMO.

Interesting. It's not a card that requires activation at the register like so many proxy currency cards for MMOs out there but looks to be like the old time card coming in full size DVD box.

Well the holidays are coming up and I can see why ArenaNet would want this out there since the game would be out for nearly four months and at the likely price of $25 would be a reasonable stocking stuffer. Now if they are still being restocked 3 months after the holidays then I'll get angry, otherwise it's just like what happened with NCSoft time cards just being around for the holidays in stores.

No, China White.