Feycat

This is probably going to be my last post on this forum, for what it's worth. The atmosphere has become completely poisonous. And the sad part is, the poison that's driving me away is coming from the direction I had the most hope in. So I hope the Titan folks are still reading.

This is what I'm talking about. The fact that the SaveCOH movement is now mostly focused on a boycot NCsoft movement. It's mostly about bashing NCSoft - and by extension, a lot of that focuses on GW2, since it is a very successful (yup, I said it) recent NCSoft product.

But the hypocrisy is frankly staggering.

You hear a lot about how "this is our fifth dead MMO, we've become exceedingly good at it." FIVE.

And yet, all of you felt fine playing COH - until it was YOUR game that got shut down.

And now that YOUR game is being shut down, now suddenly NO ONE should be playing any NCSoft game ever again, and you do your best to get another MMO shut down. I've seen folks literally posting - some of them prominent Titan/SaveCOH/PlanZ people - that the failure of GW2 and Wildstar will be a victory for them, that it will be justice for what happened to COH.

Are you listening to yourselves? You're all bursting with how much it hurt when YOUR game got shut down, and yet you are ACTIVELY working toward getting ANOTHER MMO shut down! You are working toward inflicting the pain you are now suffering on other people - and too bad, they're just collateral damage and should have known better than to trust NCSoft.

Oh, really? If that's the case? SO SHOULD YOU.

If the ArenaNet devs deserve no sympathy and no support - neither did the Paragon devs. And if the GW2 players deserve no sympathy and to be able to play their game in peace - neither did the COH players. Because this is the FIFTH MMO shutdown, right? Is 5 some mystical number? 4 MMOs ago, you were still playing COH and that was fine, but 5 MMOs means that no one else should be playing an NCSoft game without being labelled a traitor and a moron.

Think about it.

I hope Plan Z succeeds, I really do. But I went from being an enthusiastic supporter of all things Titan to making my way out the back door now. I've been playing this game for 8 years. Since i0. I remember when costume slots were added, the fight to get capes in the game, rubberbanding across entire zones. I've been here since the beginning. I'm not some new person who just waltzed in - I'm a veteran, I earned my stripes. And apparently, the fact that I choose to continue to do exactly what all of us were doing until August, I am now a pariah, and people I considered my community are actively working to make sure that what I lost in August, I lose again very soon.

GW2 has been around in beta for YEARS. Some of us have loved and been invested in it for a long time. And aren't going to simply drop it, anymore than any of US dropped COH when Auto Assault or Tabula Rasa or any of those games were shuttered.

You've taken something that was a positive movement and turned it into something negative and poisonous. Your vengeance won't fix what happened with COH. It'll just repeat the process.


Oh, and as for Terwyn's points:

The hacking wasn't internal. It was external. It was stupid people using their same password/username combo on internet websites that they did as game logins, or as game logins in other games like SWTOR and WoW. That wasn't GW2 or Anet's fault. That was user stupidity.

The game is not more riddled with bugs than any other MMO - and less than most. And I say that having played COH, LOTRO, SWTOR and WAR from launch. GW2's launch was extremely smooth, the gameplay continues to be smooth, and bugs are being fixed at a good clip.

It has as much endgame as COH ever did. Raids are not automatically endgame - the lack of raids doesn't equal a lack of endgame. Some of us hate raids and felt it seriously damaged COH when they were added.

It is very easy to go and find something you haven't done yet. I've got 8 characters, from top to bottom of the game, and I've been playing since beta - there are still zones I've never done. Still events I've never played. Dungeons I've never done. Jumping puzzles I haven't gotten to. Crafts I haven't touched. And I play multiple hours a day. Any attempt to claim there's nothing to do - or in any way LESS to do than COH - is just false.

One of the things I actually love about GW2 is that it feels a lot like pre-incarnate COH. I can jump on whatever character I feel like PLAYING, and play them. I don't have to worry about which one I NEED to grind something on. It's not that kind of game. It's much better.

TL;DR - stop trying to kill someone else's puppy, just because someone killed yours. It won't bring yours back. And you should know better than to wish that on other people.

Maybe. And maybe no one will give a damn. Enforce stuff on the internet from a different country? Should be interesting.

That's pretty much how I feel.

I'm just hanging onto my saved characters and waiting for a certain guy to figure out his emu. I bought the damn game - I feel no guilt whatsoever in playing an emu after they've CANCELLED the damn thing.

I think Rangle was trying to point out you're using the wrong pronoun.

Believe me, that cash shop is doing just fine.

There are people in my guild and posting prominently on the forums and reddit who dropped $100 or so on gems for the Halloween event. LOTS of people did this. I was kinda boggled by it (nothing temporary interests me as a purchase - I want concrete things like bank/character slots, so for me the temp stuff gets a big "meh," as it did in COH.)

GW2 is releasing a major content update including a zone and a dungeon on November 16. Undoubtedly, there will be a bump in the cash shop for that.

Then we head into the winter holiday and whatever gambling/temp items they put in the cash shop for that.

I'm pretty sure GW2 is going to be able to float for quite a long time on their cash shop. Same way Paragon was doing just fine selling people powersets and costume sets without box sales or a sub.

I think that's a very good idea. If any more MMO-for-purchase-not-rental games like Minecraft come along, if their gameplay is worthwhile, you can bet I at least (and millions of people, if Mojang's sale numbers are any indication) will buy it.

You'd have to ask Mojang. They make their sales mostly by word of mouth. My husband played the trial on the advice of a pair of our friends, loved it, and harassed me into playing it. I emailed the trial download to all of our friends who play computer games at all. Our little group accounted for about 25 sales, friends and relatives to play at their own pace and time, many of whom choose not to play it on servers, or contrarily want a much bigger, more active server than our sleepy little 10-man group.

But you could take GW2 as an example. It's a one-time purchase game with no need to buy anything else. People DO buy things in the gem shop, but it's not required nor is it pushed in any way (anyone who tells you the current holiday event "forced" people to buy keys or anything out of the store is exaggerating to a ridiculous degree, I didn't buy a single thing for the holiday and experienced every part of it.) So far, it put out a MAJOR content event for the Halloween holiday, and is planning to release a new zone plus an opening event, with a dungeon and a storyline, on November 16.

Sadly, GW2 isn't a purchase-and-own MMO, it's a rental-MMO like every other one out there, but it's still a good example of a game that isn't charging a rental "fee" and is still putting out content, fixing bugs, etc.

As far as I know, Minecraft is the only one of its kind, but I do think and hope it will not be the last.

I feel like I'm derailing this even more (man, this thread moves FAST!) but no, Minecraft doesn't charge for updates, as I detailed. Neither is customer service - once you buy the game, if something breaks down or bugs or the login servers go down (so they're still paying CS people and for the login server) then they take care of that.

It's completely possible to make a game like this AND make money. It wouldn't hurt game developers to be told that once they sell a product, the product belongs to the player and they CANNOT take it away. Taking away THEIR servers is all well and good, but they should not have the right to remove our ability to host our own servers if we so choose.

It's a sale, not a rental.

I think it's kinda funny that you say "where did I say that?" and the respond to things I never said.

I never said anything about companies being forced by law to make their games Minecrafty. Nor did I say that current MMO companies are "doing it wrong."

What I said was to disagree with you saying that IF gamemakers were forced by such a law, that they would take their business elsewhere, stop making games, and stop innovating. Minecraft proves easily that gamemakers can make innovative, creative, evolving games, within the model where you buy a game once and then don't pay for anything else (Minecraft doesn't even have a cash shop!) and still make plenty of profits. Heck, GW1 and GW2 do as well, though they have a cash shop, should one choose to use it.

Gamemakers would in no way be put out of business if the law was enforced to say that only the SERVICE they provide is removable, but not the PROGRAM which we paid for. Which, really, is a far more sensible interpretation of the law to begin with. I've heard people say they'd be happy to keep playing this game with no new content updates, so clearly a singleplayer version would do fine. I've also seen people say they wouldn't play without an enormous community to draw on, so server service and community policing would STILL be something people are willing to pay for.

Oh, and Minecraft and games of its type aren't limited to 10 players. I have a 10 player server because I have 9 friends who are interested in the game and who I trust to play with. There are servers out there with hundreds of players, who have sub fees even, in order to pay for server infrastructure and community policing. This setup really IS the best of all worlds, because you can intimately choose the setup that works most for you. The gamemaker gets your money, and can charge for the original game, large server communities, and/or content updates as they please. Those of us who only wanted to solo/duo the game anyway can have our nice empty worlds to fill as we choose. Everyone wins.

Also, have you actually played Minecraft? Because it is FAR more similar to WoW than to Warcraft 3 or 2. By FAR. It's not even a reasonable comparison. Minecraft has NO goals, no structure, no "build X before Y event happens in order to win the scenario," no pre-fabbed structures that take X time for NPCs to build for you, etc. There's literally not a single thing about a strat game that has anything in common with Minecraft.

Your post is fairly incoherent, but I wish you'd stop trying to tarr the GW2 player with the anti-Titan-SaveCOH brush. They may have a Venn diagram overlap, but they are disparate populations. Lots of us that do play GW2 have been very fervent in our support of SaveCOH and Titan. And most of the people doing the grief-trolling are not GW2 players, or at least, have not posted that they are.

You are dumb.

See: Minecraft.

I bought Minecraft for $35 about a year and a half ago. I own Minecraft. Minecraft does not host servers. I host my own server (we pay about $60/year for a rented server host, however, we could run a (laggy) server from my home computer. Or play it single player.

When the Minecraft.net login server is down? I don't lose access to my single player games. I can even set my server to ignore login IDs and allow me to continue playing online when I can't log in, but that's a proposition that opens me up to hackers and griefers stopping by the server, so I don't.

In the year and a half I've owned Minecraft, it has put out 5 or 6 content updates that have significantly altered and improved gameplay, added new things, fixed bugs, and generally made the game more pleasant to play. We have never paid Mojang a single cent, over and above the initial purchase price, yet the programmers continue to work on it and add things to it.

Is it less complicated than a "real" MMO? In many ways yes, and in some ways no - I'd love to see any MMO allow free-form building and the server load that creates (let me tell you, the server map that my 9 friends and I have been playing on for the past year? It is ENORMOUS and takes forever to render in a mapping program!!!) It also allows the creation of lots of mods, skins, and server tools. You want to fly around? There's a mod for that. You want the game graphics to look prettier? You can do that. You want a system of banks like other MMOs (all banks access the same inventory) or PvP or character classes or factions? There are mods for all those things. The players have an almost inifinite ability to shape the game to their own style.

So yeah. It can be done. And Mojang has sold millions of copies and made a ton of money. And no one would ever call Minecraft a "WoW clone."

Arcanaville, I hate to ask, but is there any chance of finding out whether this still exists, and whether it's at all possible to distribute it? Whatever version it may be? Just finding out that existed makes me excited!!

I would honestly kill to have a version of COH that runs like Minecraft - you buy it, you own it, play it offline in singleplayer or on servers that you personally pay for to link up with friends.

I honestly believe that MMOs will end up there.

No, because it's not PvP. I'm really not sure why the OP used that word.

It unlocks shapeshifts that allow you to "attack" other people who are also shapeshifted, in a way that does no damage, only big "POW!" and "BAM!" visual/sound effects and sometimes does knockback.

But y'know. D'bags everywhere. 'specially here, these days.

I <3 you, Bill.

We don't actually know if it's a permanent alteration - I'm willing to bet the statue will be rebuilt after Oct 31.

And the explorable won't be available after Oct 31.

That being said, I enjoyed the HECK out of that fight!!

You're wrong on many, many levels. I will point a few out.

I didn't say anything is ACCEPTABLE. I said that's how CORPORATIONS work. They are not people. They are profit-making machines. They don't exist for warm fuzzies and hugs. They exist to make moola. I don't like it, but that's the world we've built and live in. It sucks, but the only way to change it would be an enormous, systematic reworking of how the entire world works, at this point.

Also - I gave NCsoft NO money since COH has been axed. I received the game as a gift, pre-ordered long before COH was shuttered. I have bought gems with in-game gold. They have not received a dime from me, nor will they unless Anet buys itself free of NCsoft.

I have never proudly suppoted NCsoft, nor called anyone else a dirty, bleeding heart hippy. As a dirty, bleeding heart hippy, it wouldn't make much sense.

The name-callers are on your side of the fence, bro.

Uh, GW2 PvE is reminiscent of COH PvP... what are you smoking? I've got an 80, 60, 3 40s, 2 30s and a new 20 and I'm enjoying the heck out of the PvE. And leveling is super easy - and also doesn't matter, since I spend a good portion of my time playing with lower-level friends in downleveled zones

On to your question - yeah, I played the mini-game PvP, reminded me a bit of League of Legends. Nope, didn't like it, but I've never been a fan of "scenario" PvP.

GW2 is as much a successor to COH as SWTOR was to SWG - which is to say, not at all. SWTOR had little to nothing in common with SWG, except for the basics of the IP. GW2 has some good mechanics lifted and tweaked from COH, but other than that, is not a successor.

So? If you felt that LucasArts screwed you over, with the NGE, with shutting down SWG, or even with those awful freaking prequel movies (that's where *I* stopped spending any money at all on anything Star Wars - a friend had to buy SWTOR for me to get me to try it because I refuse to give Lucas one more thin dime for taking such a giant, hairy dump on my childhood) then it would be reasonable to NOT buy SWTOR because you don't trust/like LucasArts anymore.

It's a perfect parallel to NCsoft and the COH/GW2 thing, actually. If you feel the parent company screwed you over in some way, you're much less likely to purchase another product from them - this whole argument is a perfect example.

Uh, NO corporation gives a crap about anything but the next quarter's profits. They don't have feelings, or morals, or beating hearts. They're all about money. That's why they're a business.

Not true, and has been discussed earlier in the thread, with regards to buying gems with in-game money. Which, btw, is not hard to make. 100%ing one zone - ONE zone, even a low-level zone - and selling my drops nets me at least 1 gold. If I were to go to a high level zone and farm some events, I can make about a gold an hour. *shrug*

But what isn't mentioned is that black lion keys DROP as loot (very rarely - I've gotten I think three, but it does happen) and are rewards for several stages of the Personal Storyline.

This.

You know what? Some of the REST of us have been playing this game for 8 fun years, too. On Virtue, no less. We are no less entitled here to post than you are. So please stop telling us we're not entitled to talk about where we are now and what fun we're having.

On to the topic: I actually don't enjoy this event as much as COH's ToT event (which is really the only part of COH's event that I liked - banners and zombies can blow me.)

The only fun parts of it (to me) are extremely reminiscent of COH. There's mystic doors that appear that you can "knock" on to get either a treat (ToT bag full of prizes or candy) or a trick (monsters!) There's a labyrinth that's extremely reminiscent to me (and several of my COH-playing guildies) of the haunted mansion.

And the "costume brawl" which some have (stupidly, IMO) labeled as "PvP" is great and makes me super sad for PvP, because instead of taking any damage, you smack the other people are are rewarded with "POW!" "BANG!" "POP!" type comic-book popup effects. It just... argh! We should have gotten that in COH, dammit!

Yup, you could!

People have been using a big LFG guild to seek out groups since there's no global channels. Works pretty well!

I'm on Tarnished Coast, which is the unofficial RP server.

Haunt and I found out last night that a good chunk of our RP guild (that we met in GW2, not one we moved with) play/played COH and we all had a good "raise your glass and talk about the good old days" convo, with a side of "which call to action we've done to help save it."