GadgetDon

OK, here's what I want out of an MMO.

#1 The appearance of my character represents my character concept and my creativity, not my gear. The more flexibility the better, but if taking new gear means the appearance changes, this game is unacceeptable.

#2 There must be the ability to play at several levels - Solo, Small teams (2-8 in CoH), Large groups (Hami raid, iTrials)

#2a Most content should be instanced, so that when I'm soloing I'm not competing against other players. Also, it means the content scales to how many are participating - and when content requires teaming, it's clear from the start of the arc/mission/whatever they call it.

#2b Some mechanism for people of different levels to team together, similar to supersidekicking. Maybe not exactly that mechanism, but some way of "Oh, you're only level 20? I'm level 30, guess we can't team other than just you tagging along."

#3 I need to be able to be unquestionably the hero. Yes, in real life things are rarely black and white, lots of grey in most decision. I play games to avoid real life, I want to be the hero.

#3a From the start, in game terms, what I do must matter. I.E. a minimum of "hey, you know these things there are hundreds around, go slaughter five of them"

#4 I don't have to be a twitch gamer in combat. I'm old, my reflexes are bad, my ability to target manually isn't so good. If I wanted a FPS or a platformer I have a variety of choices open to me. I don't.

#5 I must be able to completely ignore PVP. No challenges to duel that I must dismiss before I continue on with my playing, none of "my" faction getting buffs or debuffs because of how the PVPers are playing, no good PVE content locked behind PVP experience. I get that some people enjoy PVP, more power to them, but I don't.

#6 Good community building tools are part of the game. Guilds, global channels, multiple chat channels. Moderation to deal with the worst of the jerks. And ideally the ability to use the game forums in community building which includes off-topic discussions.

I'm also not a big fan of swords and sorcery gaming, but if there was a game meeting those conditions, I might give it a try.

So, what MMO should I try? From my looking around, #1 is pretty rare. #3 and #4 are left behind in more modern MMOs (apparently MMO designers have decided that what players really want to play is villains or at least hopelessly morally confused heroes). If you've got a recommendation, Another_Fan, I'd seriously like to hear it. If your answer is "well, it's unrealistic to expect all those", no it isn't because I'm playing one now.

I've got an Ill/Rad but haven't played her in years. Mostly leveled her up for the old style hami-raids. The strategy at the time was for a team of flying illusion controllers to keep dropping phantom army to "tank" hami while everyone else cleared mitos. the Rad part was then handy to debuff Hami for the takedown.

I know that made it all a bit too easy - but I still resent the ability of Hami to take out phantom army.

Sure. Here's the steps.

(1) Prior notice, if not directly then things like major but not completely layoffs or leaks to let it be known that the results weren't sufficient. At worst it wouldn't have been a surprise, at best it would have spurred the same sort of action you see now but directed into "get more people playing the game".

It also would have meant that the game could have been pushed into a state for the future downtime - get the contact NPC in the game for SSA 2.5, for example.

(2) Wait until I24 ships and GW2 ships. I24 both can see if that changes anything and at least doesn't leave that tantilizing "what could be" in place. And have happy players who are interested in GW2 buy it instead of being pissed off about what happens in CoH. (The latter may not have meant less complaining but would have been smarter financially for NCSoft.)

(3) Followup the Paragon Studios announcement by Zwillinger with a complete honest NCSoft explanation. "We love it but we're focusing our interests" is bull and sounds like bull. If the reason is that they aren't seeing the growth and the costs are rising, say so. It won't have silenced everyone, but there'd have been a lot less "why" going on. And don't tell me why they did it because you don't know. You think you know. I think I know and it's different. Unless NCSoft says why, we wouldn't know.

(4) Include in that discussion an honest discussion of the issues of selling the game, what would be needed to make it practical. Not an actual number, but set forth the reasons that "well, if you sell for $1000, that's $1000 more than you had". And provide contact info for who to reach if you're interested in opening negotiations in buying the game (and do discuss things seriously).

(4a) If, after two months, they've been unable to strike a deal, another post and be honest about it. "We've been talking to a number of people. The highest offer we got was in the range of xxx which just isn't high enough."

The problem with a "moral conscience" is that there isn't unanimity on what "being good" is. And remember, when you want to demand that a company give resources because it's good, it's not their money.

So some comparisons. Let's say you give money to disaster relief (pick your organization about which) every month. At some point you look at your budget and say "I can't keep doing this". Would you want the government or the relief organization to say "No. You've been making those donations. You must continue them indefinitely. You can't stop."

Or you've got a car, you've been giving rides to work with coworkers. Things change and you're now working from home. What would your reaction be to the idea you're obligated to continue giving rides to those people, or sell your car to someone who will?

I've been pretty hard on NCSoft in this thread, and I think they've earned it. They're doing some stupid things that are upsetting people. But I think they have the right to do these stupid things (at least until their shareholders say "stop doing stupid things or we're going to vote in new management). They followed the legal requirements for their employees - the "actual" firing day wasn't the day of the announcement because there's a law on notice for layoffs so they continued to actually be employees until very recently, and are presumably giving severance packages as required by law and contract. They've refunded the unused account payments to the players. You can argue that they could/should've done a bit more for the points, but I think its reasonable. These are what the law should and does demand. To demand some higher level of but they must be nice is unrealistic, vague, and unwise.

I understand the theory for when some people are being laid off. I think it's rather insulting to the people you've hired, and should be done on a case by case basis.

But when the entire office is being laid off, what are they going to do? Write bad code into the game being shut down?

I love this game. But the lore - OK, it's intricate and well fleshed out but it's good solid genre stuff. Get a couple writers familiar with the genre, give them a couple weeks, and you can get lore that's just as good for a new superhero game.

There's two parts of that.

First, if Burnt Toast or someone came up with a realistic reason it wouldn't or couldn't be sold, to the point of not even talking to those interested to discuss prices, I'd find that interesting, but not particularly comforting because it's only one of the stupid things NCSoft has done. (Honestly, if they're going to piss off a bunch of players, who with an IQ above room temperature would do it BEFORE the launch of a new game that there was cross-game appeal.) Any third party rationale is going to include supposition "so if their tax situation is this and if...", there's no reason to believe that the circumstances are that or that was why NCSoft did it.

If at this late date, NCSoft decided to end the mushroom treatment and lay it out why they're doing this - why they closed the game without the normal signals ahead of time, why it had to be done so quickly, and why they won't sell - I'll be honest I'd view it with suspicion and at best it would convince me that this wasn't all set in motion by a well-worn Ouija board. There might be some comfort to know there is intelligent life in NCSoft HQ, but they've still done so many things so poorly that it's not going to change anything.

Here's when it would have made a difference. Let Zwillinger make the first announcement, as the community manager. But follow it up with a full explanation, both the closing and why they feel they can't/won't sell it. I wouldn't have been happy to see the game closing, but I would've understood it. If they'd been public about not selling and why, it would have saved a lot of false hope and saved time of people I respect trying to make a deal it's now obvious they simply wouldn't do.

You don't leave a team of people around who could sabotage the product you're shelving. Riiight.

And as for saving the IP for yourself - they've "saved the IP" of Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault, Dragon Runners, and Exteel and it's done nothing but gather dust.

So let's assume in 10 years someone gets the smart idea of saying "hey, let's try that superhero thing again that we totally failed to sell in our main market" and aren't shouted down. CoH was already an old code base now, 10 years from now it'll be ancient, like playing Adventure on an Atari 2600 - and that's assuming we'll still be gaming on desktops and laptops running a version of Windows. The hero and villain groups? Will they still have relevance in 2022?

And when it comes to the value of a brand game, anyone who remembers it will remember it as "oh yeah that game that NCSoft killed".

So NCSoft is trading real money today against a vanishingly small chance it'll be worth money in the future. And that's a smart business decision. It's still probably moot - it's too late for a deal that keeps the servers up without interruption, the devs who know the code are moving on to other jobs, so NCSoft has probably destroyed any value in the IP so there may not be much difference between sell now or shelve it. But selling it as an active division with experience development team and well-thought-of update coming down the line, that's where real money was possible.

I've never bought into the "risk losing face someone else will make big money with it" idea. It would be easy to use the "not in our area of focus" argument - Superhero MMOs are different from fantasy ones, different market, more western market. NCSoft wants to focus on products that do well in Asian market as well as Western (and if they have to pick one, pick Asian). So NCSoft would be the wise company that knew what it does well and set free the one that's outside its focus.

And if the deal includes a percentage of profits for the first year or two - they become the REALLY wise company that knew how to make money from it.

Actually, from what we've heard, it wasn't a downward spiral, it was pretty much steady state (which I'll grant isn't good). More, it is rumored (but with enough details that I believe it) that PS wanted to do a CoH 2 but was turned down by NCSoft.

And for the idea of communication on the executive level - you really think the execs at PS would have been told "things have to get a lot better soon or we're going to close the thing down" and would have sat on it? What would be the purpose?

In any case, looking at what Brian Clayton did post announcement tells me he got little if any advance notice. He'd have started negotiations as soon as it looked like it wasn't going to happen, and either would have been much further in working on details or, by announcement time, started polishing his resume because he knew NCSoft wouldn't sell.

I'll agree with you on one thing - clearly the secret project didn't impress the powers that be at NCSoft. But even if the deciding factor was the secret project, again it wouldn't have been a surprise in any rational business process.

But here's the thing. I've dealt with divisions that aren't meeting the mothership's expectations, both as a customer and once as an employee. There's no secret about the situation, it's made very clear that the situation is bad and things need happening. You do this in part with the hope that they'll turn the situation around, or they'll so self-destruct that it's obvious why its being shut down when the time comes.

And what happens then is that you do have people leaving the company while they can (always better on your resume for "got offered a better job" than "got laid off"), things get delayed, marketing tends to take on a hysterical tone. In our case, it would've meant stuff being shoveled into the store to try to get people to part with money. And the rumor mill starts running rampant - they're being shut down, they're being bought out, they're going to change everything.

And while all this is going on, the division starts getting shopped around. There are no accounting tricks that make a sale worth less than shelving something - even if you sell it for less than your book value, you get the deduction of the difference, same as the deduction as it depreciates away. And remember, the value of a deduction is the deduction times the tax rate. The value of income from a sale is every penny of the sale up to the book value and then (1-taxrate)*(saleprice-bookprice) for money above the book value. Plus you don't have to pay severance pay or the other closing costs if the deal is handled right.

We got none of that, and from everything the people who worked for Paragon Studios said, this was a total shock.

This was not a normal business decision "oh well, they just aren't measuring up, time to close the book on it." This was a snap decision and those are rarely well thought out.

And while you're right, NCSoft could have been more of a jerk - what they did was pretty jerkish. "You're all fired, pack your bags and you're gone". No chance to finish up what they were working. And an active hostility to selling it.

Yes, it's their business to screw up. But you could present this as a case study to a first year business class for "spot all the stupid things done and how to do them better".

*edit* Oh, and if it's not obvious, here's my first top 3 of stupid things.

(1) The snap mass layoff. They had some good people working there, who might have been convinced to move to another project if approached quietly before the fact and the close had been handled better. Instead, all those people, the star performers and any who might be just regular workers, are looking for work at their competition. And should NCSoft want to do something in the future in this genre, they'll find it difficult to convince them to listen again.

(1a) The impact of the news on both other employees and potential future employees could come back to bite them. Any other skilled employee at ArenaNet or other divisions has to be eyeing this and thinking "what if..." and some are probably updating their resumes.

(2) Customer reaction. One of the greatest assets CoH had was a fanatically loyal customer base. Frankly, one of the ongoing mistakes was not making better use of it, offering "opportunities" to get into the other games, even incentives for being brand ambassadors for NCSoft. But now, that fanatically loyal customer base is unhappy with NCSoft. No, not all of them are going to be utterly boycotting NCSoft forever and talking them down every chance they get, but many will and most regular players are unhappy. If nothing else, do it AFTER GuildWars II ships so as not to kill sales to that base.

(3) Maintaining IP value. As said above, selling IP improves the bottom line over shelving it. Yes, that's not 100% true, there are some costs in doing the sale, but the costs of a sale aren't that high. NCSoft screwed up twice here, once by simply refusing to sell, once by not shopping it around before the shutdown (the value of a game plummets when a shutdown is announced to say nothing of the developer team being laid off). That could have been reduced by an announcement on the day "we are actively looking for a partner to purchase this IP and keep it going. If you have a serious offer, please contact xxxx@ncsoft.com"

Penny may have tried. It would have gone poorly. Perhaps that's why Manticore was so snippy towards her in SSA2 (bringing things full circle).

Actually, it's a Tony Stark quote. "Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damn well sure we'll avenge it."

And the original question - yeah, I've given up. I'm still playing daily, or nearly so. Should there be another rally or another petition I'll probably participate. But I no longer believe either that the servers won't be shut down or that the IP will be sold, I'm assuming that December 1st the game will be a wonderful magnificent shared memory but that's all it will be.

Do I still harbor some hope I'm wrong, that somewhere there's a deal being worked out right now? Yeah. But there's nothing I can do either to make it more or less likely.

The Freedom Phalanx was well aware of how much Manticore loved Sister Psyche, so there's no doubt that it was necessary. (And I suspect he gave Penny a headache for a while with all the guilt he was emitting.)

But I'm sure there was some concern about "so what's he going to do now".

The end goal is to convince NCSoft that the costs of burying the game instead of selling it outweigh any potential tax benefit or pride benefit from burying it.

There are a number of Harry Potter fan fiction sites going. The there was a big closing when they took action against sites they thought were abusing the thing. Some outright porn sites using the characters from the series, some trying to make money from it.

And in any case, should NCSoft notice what's going on and object, the first action would be to send in a cease and desist letter. If that gets the action they desire (either complete cease and desist or a really good job of rubbing the serial numbers off the IP), it's pretty much unheard of for further action to be taken, particularly when there's no money involved.

This has been my theory. Not specifically to kill CoH, but rather a call along the lines of:

"Hi, remember us? Your biggest shareholder, the ones who bought your stock based on how you said it was going. Saw the latest quarterly reports, and not happy, not happy at all. You're bleeding money, and that's not what your shareholders want.

You need to show you're serious about changing course. Do something significant. No, I'm not going to say what, for now you're still in charge. Give us and the other shareholders we've spoken to who are equally unhappy a reason to believe that you're going to focus your efforts on where the money is.

No, this is not a demand. This is a friendly discussion. If it was a demand, there would be talk about proxy fights, and possibly lawsuits about representations made by your company and you personally. It's just a friendly talk. I'm sure you'll do the right thing."

By the numbers, CoH was the small fish. Lowest income for the game (globally, not just US numbers), no significant growth over time. So a need to "show they're serious" turning into "shut something down", CoH was the reasonable choice if they felt they had to close a game.

That said, there is a pony in this pile of manure. NCSoft management may not be willing to talk to anyone, may either have tax ideas about the value of leaving it on the shelf or saving face by someone else make a success of it. But making the case to Nexon that NCSoft is leaving money on the table could provide leverage.

I don't think they were surprised the the players were unhappy the game was ending. Part may have been experience, players of other games they closed complained a little and then moved on.

I suspect the surprise more "Holy *bleep*, these people are angry, and they're ORGANIZED. They're getting the word out in ways that make us look bad."

Even though they continued to pay the developers and that was probably the largest outgo of cash, by sending almost everyone home there are savings. Plus, they can start dismantling the office, sell off equipment and furniture, etc.

It also may just be standard corporate policy being applied, that once someone is fired, they're out of the office unless there's a compelling need to keep them on. If they're still in the office, they've got access to servers, email systems, other things that a revenge minded person might choose to abuse. Less likely in the case with the whole office being shut down (to say nothing that from what I know of the people who worked at Paragon Studios, they wouldn't do it), but sometimes corporate policy gets set to handle some specific conditions and becomes the Word Of God to be applied in all conditions.

Maybe he was told them in confidence, and if he breaks the promises he made not to name names, he'll get no more news?

Maybe. But I wouldn't want to be in Nicky Fury's shoes when Tony learns that Coulson is alive. To say nothing of Thor.

For it to just be a lie - that's a huge break in trust. And that has consequences. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner both had kept SHIELD at arms length, not really trusting them. After learning that Agent Coulson is alive, when Fury says "We've got a new problem" how reluctant will they be to trust him.

Clint and Natasha are SHIELD agents, apparently pretty loyal to Fury. Maria Hill, Fury's number two, has apparently had some lack of confidence in Fury's decisions but by the end has bought into his plans. It's one thing to hide "we're making weapons" or even "well, the cards weren't really on Coulson" but putting them through his death as a ploy isn't going to sit well.

I'm really hoping it's not just a lie. After Phil's body was taken away, one of SHIELD's (mad) scientists tries something experimental and manages to resurrect him. Maybe just "we told you lightning would revive him, but you just laughed, we showed you now", maybe it's a partially/largely mechanical body