GadgetDon

That's your opinion. Others differ. Why when people are getting together for the end of the game they consider part, including much of that community you consider great, do you have to be trashing it?

It's one thing to trash the game and parts of the community in threads about a potential future of the game. But in this, where we're reminiscing about what we love about the game, what's the need to throw dirt?

Actually, explaining who you were killed it. There's a standard that you can't edit entries about yourself or you're connected with, to supposedly keep people from turning it into an advertising medium. While that usually makes a lot of sense, I've known others who, reading their entry, see an error but can't get it fixed.

Then maybe you should get the **** out of these forums and go to a game where you actually like what they do and stop trolling the forums of those who do like this game.

I'm going to hold onto my anger, because it's not part of the grieving process. Rather, it's anger at the way NCSoft treated some people I highly respect, then they posted a response that flat out lied to us. That is something worth being angry about.

Then go now. Leave. Get the bleep outta here. It's bad enough you're trolling the discussions that talk about the future, but spreading your crap to the wishlist thread was over the top.

BTW, if you care, you are the first person I've made that suggestion to (that I can recall).

If you mean all these powers, probably not.

You could do something cool in the spy genre, different gear and training letting you do different things.

Or a sf genre, different alien races or different psionic/tech powers could provide a wide choice.


There's a lot I like about the enhancement system, but I'd make one change first - no more origin based enhancements. DOs and SOs are like TOs and IOs - anyone can use one (if they have a need of that).

I'd also simplify things a bit. Maybe combine defense buff and debuff into one. Or maybe combine by area. One enhancement type for protection (defense + damage resistance). One for control (Hold, sleep, confuse, taunt). One for debuff (toHit Debuff, Defense Debuff, slow). And all travel enhancements become universal ones - run speed, fly speed, jump distance/speed, teleportation range.

The question, of course, depends on what the niche is and how big it is.

First, whenever you're looking at numbers, remove WOW from the calculation. WOW is a beast unto itself and while it's always possible someday an MMO could break out and reach those numbers, defining success as "achieving WOW numbers" and failure as "not achieving WOW numbers" is pretty much guaranteeing failure.

With WOW out of the picture, the question is, is the niche big enough that there will be players paying enough money to keep the game going. Just being a niche doesn't mean there aren't enough people to do that. To take one example of an MMO that people have been expecting for a long time, let's assume that next March, surprise launch, is Pokemon World, the Pokemon MMO. Pokemon players are a niche, but they are a niche that keeps going and keeps spending. If done well, this is a license to print money. And you don't have to expand the niche much, lot of people know about it.

Another niche game would be one I've wanted for years, an MMO version of Paranoia. Unfortunately, it's a really small niche, because nobody knows the game. There would be ways to expand the game beyond "Paranoia players" to "people who like SF comedy", might be able to make it.

(For those who don't know Paranoia, think Logans Run as a Marx Brothers film. Alpha Complex is the only surviving megaplex after a thermonuclear war (well, not really). It is buried underground, and is run by Friend Computer, going to the surface would be instant death (well, not really). We all love Friend Computer because not to love Friend Computer would be treason and traitors are executed. You love Friend Computer don't you? All births are handled by the clone banks managed by Friend Computer who of course manages it perfectly. If there are mutants, it would indicate that Friend Computer is not perfect and so the mutants are traitors (every player character is a mutant). Friend Computer provides all we would wish for and manages all, so any secret society would suggest that Friend Computer isn't providing all we would wish and thus any member of a secret society is a traitor (every player character is a member of a secret society). It is the job of any good citizen to report all traitors for immediate execution. If a Paranoia DM doesn't have the players ready to shoot each other on a regular basis, he's not trying.)

So you're calling the Titan's nazis... and complaining about the rabid hate happening over there.

Riiiiiiiight.

Well, I think NCSoft has sufficiently pissed enough people off that I think many of us would be happy of NCSoft were to die as a company and go out of business.

This is not saying that we wish violence on anyone working for NCSoft and I personally would wish, should NCSoft go bankrupt, that everyone working for NCSoft would soon find a new job. With the possible exception of whatever NCSoft employee who made the call to close the game, then I hope he or she is unemployed as long as it takes the last Paragon Studios employee to find a job after NCSoft fired them.

I have a great deal of hatred for what NCSoft has done. I'd made a lot of allowance for them until the followup message where they flat out lied to us. It has nothing to do with the country in which they are incorporated or the race of the management, it has to do with their behavior. And while I do not believe the response to their actions is the main reason for their stock problems, I am taking a small amount of pleasure in it. I'm not particularly proud of that pleasure (unless it puts pressure on NCSoft to say "and we have recently struck a deal for certain assets we were not using" then I'll take a whole lot of pleasure from it).

Actually, my speculation (granted, just that) about why the rush to close NCSoft rather than the normal "ramp up the pressure" ending is that after the lousy quarterly result and stock issues, the word came in to do something significant. And after the announcement, stock went up, maybe it was taken as "doing something serious about focusing on profits".

They've never terminated a game this strong (still profitable, still improving, still generally positively viewed) nor have they ever had this much pushback to a closing. I suspect you're right that no, there won't be a sale - but there are enough differences that it wouldn't be that shocking if there was.

We'll just reverse engineer FTL travel from a crashed UFO.

Unless that's against the EULA.

Again, it's from politics. There's long been a term of "grassroots movement". This isn't something coming from the top down, it's something that the citizens want (at least one large group of citizens). Traditionally, this was most often used when an issue was before congress and the offices of the elected officials started getting tons of letters, faxes, wire messages, and telephone calls pushing for action one way or another.

Sometimes, this isn't really the people rising up and making their voices known. Instead, it's either companies generating huge numbers of letters and mailing them from different locations, or even small organizations telling the members "write lots of letters, many of them, put different names on them". This "fake grassroots movement" got dubbed astroturfing.

In practical politics, of course, any movement for a policy you support is a legitimate grassroots movement and a movement for a policy you oppose is just astroturfing.

If the deal is struck fairly soon, it would be suicidal to let it sit offline for an extended period for reworking. The best thing a CoH: Phoenix would have going for it is a lot of people who are excited about making it happen, really want to see the game live. That excitement is going to fade over time. If the game isn't up by, picking an arbitrary date, March 1st, it's going to be a lot harder to relaunch.

Now, if, say, six months separate between the servers going dark and a deal being made, another couple months to make some tweeks wouldn't hurt. Things like removing naming exclusivity could be done in that time (though I'm in the group that thinks it's a bad idea, but I would be more aggressive at returning names to the available pool if someone hasn't logged in for a period). One server might be doable in that time if you have people who know the system well working on it.

But if you're changing the game mechanics in ways like removing ATs, that's a huge redesign and not something you'll pull off in a month or two.

If the new team wants to do major changes, a better strategy would be, as part of the "we bought the game announcement", something like this:

(1) We plan to bring the servers back up with the current game very quickly. It will have the servers as the old one, but we may be contemplating some server merges depending on what we see in terms of traffic.

(2) We will finish and launch I24 as quickly as we can, and will look at the state of of I25 to see how much is involved in finishing it and bringing it to live. I24 or I25 is expected to be the last major content update to CoH.

(3) Our primary development focus will be CoH 2 which we hope to launch in six months to a year. We will be announcing design goals and planned features as soon as possible. It's our intention that there will be a way to bring existing characters from CoH 1 to CoH 2, possibly with the equivalent of a "respec" required for the change in the system. Bases will not be transferred, we'll have a new system we can support. CoH2 will be a continuation of the CoH universe, there will always be an Atlas Park (and an Atlas Park33).

(4) You, the community of CoH, is why this is happening. So we will be collecting feedback and acting upon it along the way. This is the time to be polishing off your wishlist of what you'd like to see.

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That keeps the enthusiasm up, the ability to play (and get money from players) nearly immediately, and set expectations for changes coming.

I've mostly heard Astroturfing in politics, as a play on the idea of a "grassroots campaign". There's a lot of social media promotion for a cause or a group or a candidate, is it truly a bunch of people enthusiastic about it (a grassroots campaign) or is it all fake with people paid to promote it and using fake accounts (astroturf).

The idea that anyone is being paid now to either badmouth or support NCSoft in this forum is laughable (and insulting). The only place where such a strategy would make any sense is "Hey I'm going to (fill in game)" "Yeah, me too, (game) has everything I liked from CoH".

And a big part of astroturfing is to look like there's a large amount of support behind it. One astroturfing account is a a contradiction in terms.

If it's the same game, I'll be very disappointed if the characters are wiped. Not saying I won't join again, but disappointed. And the loss of all my veteran rewards/paragon rewards would also reduce my enthusiasm.

And I thought some of my posts in this thread wandered into the technical

If I was on the CoH: Phoenix team, having bought the rights but not bought the character data, and paranoid about inflation (which would be a valid concern), I might set it up where we import the basic character data from an Extractor file including levels, incarnate unlocks, etc. but strip any influence over say 100Mil, any enhancements not slotted (if those are even in the recovery file), and limit them to one or two purple sets per character.

If I was really paranoid, maybe do it on a per account basis - your first character, you get as many purples as you've got slotted. Second, two sets. After that, no purples.

And as for Titan being involved - I'd be shocked if they weren't, at least in some sense. For better or worse (I think it better, you think it worse) Titan has gotten really good at promotion. So even if it is Brian Clayton and his people who make the deal, without anyone direct control involvement, they'd want to bring Titan and TonyV in to spread the word "yay! CoH is back! Here's the details."

The license may have been stated to be transferrable with the game.

Actually, if there's any truth to the "must shut down" story (which seems questionable to me), it could be the license. A cautious lawyer could have put in a clause of "If we've shut down the game and want to sell, the license is transferrable". If that's the cause, someone from NCSoft should find that lawyer and slap him around for no transferability until the game is shut down (thus lowering the market value of the game).

Actually, there could be some clauses about Cryptic in general or Jack Emmett in specific getting a payday of the game is transferred while still in operation. I suppose Cryptic could have had some irrational fear that NCSoft was just going to flip the game. (Conceivably not rational, IF the clause was there, we don't know how it's affected NCSoft's decisions in the years since the sale to NCSoft.)

It still doesn't explain everything. For example - why would NCSoft have been refusing to respond to people who wanted to make offers? It would've been easy to negotiate a deal, privately let them know about the clause and why the game had to shut down before they could close the deal. Take offers, see how much they can get. Even if they didn't want to publicize the reason for the being unable to sell (maybe a fear that Cryptic would claim the shutdown was just a sham to get around the clause and sue), they at least could've said "we're continuing to talk to potential purchasers. We can say nothing about any progress and at present no sale is expected and the shutdown will happen as expected, but things could change."

This is all speculation. Personally, I'm skeptical of the report that they must shut down before they can sell, I find it highly unlikely that NCSoft will strike a deal within the foreseeable future. I think they're being stupid not to strike a deal, but they wouldn't be the first big company to do something stupid.

But I'd love to be proven wrong. And should a deal be announced in the first week or two of December, I'll say Fansy, looks like you were right.

And here we are in complete agreement.