GadgetDon

I might, because I love the game, but it would definitely be month by month to see what happened.

Some things that would increase my chance of staying, in increasing levels of importance:

(1) Transparency. Why the shutdown, why no sale, why the reversal. And if they pretend to be transparent and it doesn't ring true, that's enough to get me to leave.

(2) Transparency as to "what would make us pull the plug again". And again, honesty is first. If they said "From the feedback we've gotten, we think the game may have a chance, we'll give it another year. We'll need to see about a 10% growth in profits and player level at the end of the period from where it stood before the announcement", that might be a steep goal to reach, but at least it's something to know. If it's just "hi we're back", there's no reason to believe it won't be "hi we're gone" in six months.

(3) Matt Miller and a significant portion of the other staff come back. That's both because I'd have confidence in their ability to move the game forward, and for them to come back to NCSoft would say they have enough confidence to give it another go.

It's not just that CoH was pulling its own weight - but it was actively in development and most people were very excited about the next update. Would it have changed things? Who knows, but this was the answer to a lot of people's unhappiness and could have brought people in or at a minimum stopped/slow the very slow spiral people saw.

And the active development was part of the main difference between this and the other games - the surprise. There may have been hope on the part of Tabula Rasa players and devs and Auto Assault players and devs that they would be able to turn things around, but the mood was pretty negative. These were widely perceived as failed games. (And yes, I will say they should have been sold if anyone was looking to continue them, both as a sign of loyalty to the customers who had bought into the game and as a way of getting something, no matter how little, out of it.)

As I've said elsewhere, I've been involved with failing projects before, both on the inside and the outside. There's a process things go through, moves taken, increasingly drastic moves. Layoffs, projects delayed, rapid shifts in priorities, some attempt to save it. Most people on the outside can see doom falling, and everyone on the inside knows they're teetering on the edge. This came out of the blue. Shocking. Surprising. They were profitable but not profitable enough. They had membership retention unheard of for a game this old, but not good enough.

And that's why CoH's closing should make one more reluctant to invest in an NCSoft game in the future. Because this came with no warning. And it wasn't enough to be profitable and have happy customers, you have to reach some unknown level of success. Everything I'm reading says that GW2's numbers are below expectations. They sold a lot, but did they sell enough to reach some secret NCSoft goal to keep the axe from falling?

So to me, the argument isn't "NCSoft is a serial game killer". It's "NCSoft is a stalker, in hiding preparing to lash out with an assassin's strike". (Stalker in AT sense, not criminal sense)

I know that as OP I have no control over the thread, but I'll still ask:

This thread was set up to discuss mistakes made in design and execution in the game. It really wasn't meant to be one more thread to endlessly discuss the shutdown and NCSoft and the Titan group and the SaveCoH movement and so on and so forth.

So, consider this a request, can that discussion be moved elsewhere?

Even if the license isn't transferable - given how fast Cryptic and PWE moved to quash the rumor that the shutdown was due to the license expiring, I don't think either company wants to be "the reason the deal fell through". So they'd presumably cut a licensing deal.

I had fun with Beast Mastery (and it didn't hurt that I've had the name Happy Fluffy Puppy since launch of CoV looking for a concept). Was it the most powerful set? Probably not. But I've never been one to run at +4/8, even on my incarnates, and was reasonably effective.

Here's my immediate list.

(1) The handling of ED was abysmal. After being told that the changes to the powers was over, suddenly ED made powers far less able to be enhanced. I think that in the game today, with IOs in place, ED may have made the game better. But it came as a surprise after we thought it was done and the delay between ED and IOs was too long.

(2) Old content not being updated. Over the years, the story-telling abilities have improved, both in techniques and the idea of what was fun. The old content is way too long, way too repetitive (why clear out one council base when you can clear out six?). The Positron TF was an incredibly unfun grindy TF that got broken into two fun shorter TFs. In the transition from Sister Psyche to Penny Yin, the TF got shorter and a better story. The other TFs needed at a minimum some trimming and ideally a redesign. And not just the TFs, the old arcs have some great stories locked in unfun gaming styles and could be improved greatly.

(3) AE was handled badly. First, the farming aspect - if the devs were surprised it would become a power leveling money printing tool, they were about the only ones. But they were doing something new, I can give them a pass. What they did wrong about it was try to stop it, almost hysterically so it seemed, even killing badges that people would farm for. A smarter solution would have been to say "this is a great power leveling tool that people can use if they want to, we'll make some tweaks to keep it from being completely out of control, and we'll separate in the search the 'farming' arcs from the 'story'"

Worst, it was almost abandoned over time, the new ways of telling stories never made it into AE and allowing the forbidden name filter to be broken for so long is terrible.

(4) I'm going to break my rule about being specific here, but talking about something general - there was way too much trying to force certain gameplay styles on the game. I'll say this got much better with the Freedom revamp, but still happened a bit. Examples: Bonuses so much better for teaming, fiddling with TFs so that everyone had to play the hold TF and kept minimum team sizes high, no solo incarnate path and then the solo incarnate path was held down.

We've been accused of thinking the game is perfect and hate people who say otherwise. So OK, this is the place for your gripes about what happened with the game.

Three rules. (OK, suggestions)

(1) Be specific. Not "they lied", not "they love eviscerating characters", but specific things you think was wrong.

(2) Focus on the act, not the people. No badmouthing the character of either CoH employees for implementing or other players who might support it.

(3) If you want to challenge someone on why you think this was good for the game, do it, but again, keep it specific and keep it on the acts and the impact on the game.

Note: It's up to you if you think your complaints are "where CoH went wrong and why it's being shut down" or "where CoH went wrong but I love so much more".

If any have a hami raid on their list, Virtue still has been doing one every Saturday at 6pm eastern. There will be one next Saturday if you want to cross it off your wishlist and have or can copy a high level character to Virtue.