Gotterdamurung

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On the money issue:

They probably NEED the money. Think about it. They just bought out the game and brought talent back into the fold. I had wondered how they could afford to do that and keep the game afloat on simply continuing sale of GvE and our $13-15/mo fees. I was actually waiting for the next expansion pack. I just didn't expect it to be this (it does seem sparse) or to be this soon.

Bottomline: I think they need an influx of cash to keep the game afloat. I don't see this as a continuing trend.

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Given NCSoft's latest financial numbers, (coincidentally, just released today...) I don't think that's the case; for the 4th quarter of '07, their net profits were up 18% over the previous year. They're not exactly floundering.

But if they can find new revenue streams for the game, and that encourages them to put more money into the game, then I'm all for that.

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7) an apology for not being as awesome and cool as I am. I know it's technically not your fault, so I'll also require an apology from your parents too.

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I am so very sorry for not attaining the awesomeness that you have attained. I also apologize for my lack of coolness, as I know it doesn't approach yours.

My parents are not very computer savvy, so they are snail mailing their apologies to you. Expect it in 3 to 5 days.

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Dear Positron,

Please note that I have ammended said demands for an apology to also include sufficient funds to purchase a new keyboard, as mine is now covered with coke. (The drinking kind.)

I shall expect this posthaste, along with some of your mothers delicious gingersnap cookies and freshly baked dutch apple pie.

Sincerely,
Liquid Horatio X

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My dear, esteemed Mr. Liquid Horatio X,

Due to the unfortunate "soda on my keyboard" incident which immediately followed the reading of your above-quoted post, I will require you to forfeit any Positron-funded keyboard to myself. Surely such an awesome and cool individual such as yourself can see that this is only fair and equitable given the precedent that you have already established.

I await your contact to facilitate the transfer of ownership of said keyboard with baited breath.


Sincerely,


Father Hallowed Sr.

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Dear Reverend Father Hallowed Sr., esquire,

I am writing to notify you of a further unfortunate incident. Upon reading your post, your use of the phrase "baited breath" instead of the correct "bated breath" caused an acute attack of improper grammar rage, causing me to bang my fist on my desk, breaking my keyboard.

Given your impassioned and well reasoned plea to LiquidX, I am sure you understand that the only right thing for you to do is to pass along to me any keyboard passed to you by LiquidX passed to him by Positron. I will absorb the cost of having the embedded shards of plastic removed from my hand as a sign of good faith.

Anxiously awaiting your reply,

Dr. Francis Oglethorpe Gotterdamurung, DDS

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It's the cost of the pack that we are upset with. If it had relatively the same options that the GvE pack had it we'd have not problem with it.

Drop the price to $4.99 that seems more appropriate. Positron said he wouldn't add a badge to it because he felt there would be outcry from those who are badge addicts. So instead he went after the clothes addicts. He agreed to the word extortion, go back and read his response to the person that brought it up.

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Technically, I think he was more agreeing with the idea that some players would call it extortion, not with the idea that it actually was extortion. It's a fine distinction, but I believe an important one.

Now, I'll agree with you on the price. I'm merely arguing semantics. Extortion? No. Highway robbery? Sure. (Metaphorically, of course. I'm not suggesting that NCSoft is stealing from us. Although, the image of BaB in a long black cape and lone ranger mask, on horseback, holding up two old fasioned pistols, yelling "Stand and deliver!" is rather amusing.)

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However, yall know that some [censored] is gonna go down at this thing right, Recluse or Nemisis or someone is gonna show up and kidnap one of them and ruin the whole thing...I'm sure of it.
When have you ever seen a wedding in Comic culture (and my point of reference leads only to the X-Men universe, the avengers, the FF and occasionally spiderman) something inevitably goes wrong.

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You know, I've been wondering about that. I mean, they're making a big deal of this, they're talking about re-running it and recording it so that everyone can see it, and I'm wondering if there's going to be some major story element to the whole thing. (Especially given the picture on the flyer. Manticore appears to be proposing to Sister Psyche in Orobouros, mere yards from our anagramatical f(r)iend Silos.)

That might also explain why they originally announced a closed beta for this, and why they never had a public test of it; they don't want to spoil the surprise.

After all, it's got to be a mightly tempting target, what with all those high-ranking heroes in one place like that.

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Because they offered 2 powers (pocket d pass and jet pak) with the justice armor and sinister costume pieces. And if you didn't own or play the game before this you only had to buy one game and not two. Most of us had already paid for 2 games. But had no problem paying the $9.99 for the extra goodies.

This is giving just a few extra costume pieces. No powers or anything added in game. Sorry until they add something all they are doing is EXTORTING money from the clothes addicts out there. Had their been a badge attached to this then it would have been EXTORTING money from the badge addicts out there.

Positron himself said that this was the reason he didn't add a badge to the pack.

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From wiktionary:
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Extort: To wrest from an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity; to wrench away (from); to tear away; to wring (from); to exact; as, to extort contributions from the vanquished; to extort confessions of guilt; to extort a promise; to extort payment of a debt.

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Extortion implies force or threat. No one is forced to pay for this; there are no consequences for not buying it. All they're doing is offering a product, (admittedly an overpriced one,) for those willing to pay for it.

If you don't consider the GvE pack extortion, then this isn't extortion either. It's just a much worse deal.

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And as it happens, I do think this "pack" is awful... from a value for money standpoint. It's all well and good, but for ten bucks?

Yah, no thanks, especially when GvE gave me a more stuff with more use than this wedding pack ever will for the exact same price.

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And I agree with you on that as well. If it had been $5, I'd have jumped on it, but at $10, well, I'll wait until I have a character that I feel absolutely needs one of the pieces for their theme, or perhaps someone that I'd like to propose to. (Although, one would think the worship emote would do equally well...)

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AND YES I BOUGHT HORSE ARMOUR, get off my case already.

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As did I, sadly. Maybe that's why I'm not jumping at this: once bitten, and all that...

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You completely missed the point. Maybe I used too many words?

Here it is in one line;

People without Credit Cards should be able to get this as well, so sort it out NCSoft.

There, better?

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Actually, you're right. I did miss your point, and I apologize; I thought you were joining in the chorus of complaints about this not being free content.

I actually agree with you on that point; there should be more payment options available for this. As others have said, there are the pre-paid Visa gift cards, so that does provide one alternative, but obviously, it's in NCSoft's interest to offer as many ways as possible for people to give them money.

Now, having said all that, I'd like to point out the extreme irony of complaining in one post about another poster's snark, and then posting something positively dripping with sarcasm and unwarranted bile yourself.

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There should be ways to get this content in to -every- players hands regardless of how they pay for it, all talk of pricing and value aside.

It's a poor business model to deny customers product due to shortsightedness such as this, albeit this is more to do with NCSoft in general than CoX.

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And how have they denied us? Are you honestly going to say you feel the costume options available without this are too limited? That they haven't consistently provided us with new costume options, free of charge?

If the quantity and quality of the basic content suffers because of this, then yes, I will be upset. But if this is legitimately an instance of them offering things above and beyond what we've gotten in the past, for an additional price, then I have no problem with that.

I'm not ready to give NCSoft a gold star, and say that I have no concerns here, but I'm also not ready to say that this is a terrible idea. Personally, I'm willing to wait and see how this plays out before I fall in one camp or the other.

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If people are willing to pay for it, and charging this price allows NCSoft to develop this kind of stuff without impacting things that are more important to more people, then what's the harm?

Do you honestly think they're going to take the cash they pull in from this and use it to hire another costume artist so they can develop for-pay and for-issue costumes simultaneously? Or that we'll get the same number of costume elements per year that we've always gotten, only (if this goes over well) an increasingly-large number of them will find their way into "packs"?

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Honestly? At this point, yes. What reason have they given us to suspect otherwise?

Now, if the next couple issues seem light on these kind of things, then yes, I, as a consumer, will be upset, and make my dissatisfaction known to NCSoft.

However, until we have some kind of evidence that they're planning to scale back or eliminate the free offerings, I don't think it's fair to automatically assume the worst. A drop of rain might mean a hurricane is coming, but I'm not going to board up my windows for every passing shower.

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The content of the wedding pack is completely non-essential to gameplay.

This makes no sense. The wedding pack is fluff, which is why it isn't worth money.


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To you. (And, to be honest, to me.) To others it is. That's how commerce works. If people are willing to pay for it, and charging this price allows NCSoft to develop this kind of stuff without impacting things that are more important to more people, then what's the harm?

Ask yourself this: wouldn't you be more upset if they did make this stuff part of the regular schedule? If it, say, bumped back some bug fix, or new content? If what they're saying is true, (and, at this point, I don't think we have any reason to doubt that it is,) then this strikes a good balance: people who care about this kind of thing can fund it without it affecting the rest of us.

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and recently switched my car insurance to Geico.

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Don't you mean "switched my car insurance to Geko"?

Or EvilGeko, since Geko's gone...

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I switched my car insurance to Arcanaville. The coverage is great, and I get regular reports with all of the numbers about just how likely other cars are to hit me, the formulae for calculating the numbers, and suggestions on how defensive driving could be optimized to even things out.

And LiquidX, thanks for this post; I was having a lousy morning, and I really needed something to make me smile.

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I am offended by the idea that I should pay for cosmetic frippery, the very same cosmetic frippery we were getting for free.

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(emphasis mine)

I'm not sure we can take this as a sign that we're never getting any costumes for free again; just that very specialized ones are available for purchase by those that really feel like they're worth it.

After all, we did just get the Jester and Enforcer sets for free; why assume that they're going to start charging for every new piece?

As to being offended, I think that's a bit strong. I find it sad that there are people who are willing to pay for all those bizarre gadgets they advertise in infomercials, but I don't take it personally every time I see one. So some people are willing to pay for, what are to you, pointless baubles? If they've got the money, and NCSoft is willing to make the product available to them, who cares?

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I think it would have been more interesting as a new mission or something.

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Well, according to the announcement, there is something like that:

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Outside of the Pocket D, and in conjunction with the live Wedding event, players will find new Hero and Villain contacts in Atlas Park™ and Mercy Island. Sela Vermont, wedding coordinator of Manticore and Sister Psyche, sends Heroes on a special wedding gift reconnaissance mission while Zev Scalamore, under direction of Arachnos, enlists Villains to do his dirty work.

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So it's not just the event on test; there is some other new stuff.

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Yeah, I know. I'm talking about the wedding event. A mission with the wedding would have been better.

I'm sure the devs are all nice folks, but I am one of the few that are not impressed by the fact that they are the devs. Yeah, they made the game. Other people clean teeth for a living. Others dig ditches. It's a job, and nothing more.

Rather than have an event where the devs show up on the test server, I would have preferred a new mission that every single player could have done.

I'm looking forward to whatever the reconnaissance mission is.

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I don't think I'm understanding. The way I read the announcement, those missions (or arcs, or whatever) are separate from the wedding, and available to everyone for the two weeks the event is live. (But thematically, linked to the event. So wouldn't that be "a mission with the wedding?")

I'm fairly sure if you skip the part on the test server entirely, you'll still be able to do the related missions on your home server.

Maybe I'm just not getting what you mean...

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So for meaningful new content, all we got was IOs. The rest was either recycled or very minor.

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You know, I had three quarters of a snarky, step by step refutation of this post, but I decided better of it. That one statement there is so amazingly out of touch with reality that you're obviously either deliberately attempting to be provocative, or want changes that are so far out of the mainstream as to make them absurd.

The game is not going to fundamentally change at this point in it's lifecycle, and it seems like that is the only thing that will satisfy you. All new content is going to use similar gameplay to what's come before; you've got the same designers using the same engine and tools to create content for (largely) the same group of players. You can't just expect that they're going to give you something that's totally alien to what's come before.

Even the one thing you allow as new, IO's, aren't really. We had rewards for defeating mobs, we had enhancements, we had costume pieces; how do IO's change any of that? It's just a recombination of existing game elements, isn't it?

I'm really curious to hear what, exactly, you would consider "new."

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I think it would have been more interesting as a new mission or something.

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Well, according to the announcement, there is something like that:

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Outside of the Pocket D, and in conjunction with the live Wedding event, players will find new Hero and Villain contacts in Atlas Park™ and Mercy Island. Sela Vermont, wedding coordinator of Manticore and Sister Psyche, sends Heroes on a special wedding gift reconnaissance mission while Zev Scalamore, under direction of Arachnos, enlists Villains to do his dirty work.

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So it's not just the event on test; there is some other new stuff.

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What an absolutely enormous let down. With so little content released so rarely as is, I can't believe you would actually make stuff like this and then try to get EXTRA money on top of the subscription for it.


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Yeah, last year was such a disappointment. I mean, besides the Valentines day event, the Halloween event, the Winter event, crafting, IO's, loot, markets, STF, Hami for villains, Monster Island, RWZ, all the Vanguard arcs, merits, mothership raids, LGTF, invasions, flashback, dual blades, willpower, weapon customization, ultra-rare inventions, respec recipes, the Menders arcs, dozens of new costume options including several full sets, new emotes, and a couple hundred badges, what exactly did they do for us?

I feel so completely cheated.

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Plus this is a SUPERHERO game, arguably costumes are as an important aspect of the genre as the powers themselves. At least they are to some of us, granting those with the extra $10 to throw away sole access to something that's part of an integral aspect of the game is robbery. Especially at the price.


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And of course, the current costume options are shockingly limited without this.

Not to mention the fact that they just gave us two new full costume sets, both of which (IMO) look better than anything in the wedding pack.

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Charging real world money for costumes and emotes? Wow. You guys have really sunk to a new low. I mean for the love of Christ offer SOMETHING tangible. More CHARACTER SLOTS. Offer a new AT, powersets. ANYTHING. But your CHARGING for costumes and emotes? Are you trying to piss off your customers?

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If they were charging for any of those things, I, for one, would be seriously annoyed. To me, that's the kind of thing that my $15 a month is supposed to cover.

Emotes and costume options? I can deal with that. (But again, not at $10.) After all, it's not exactly like anyone can argue that we currently have a dearth of either....

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To be fair, none of us know what hours the Devs are putting in or how much work. They could have been working overtime to get the Valentine's event done, they may not have. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and trusting that the money earned from these costumes is either covering the cost spent developing them or will be used to create even better content in the future.

Glass half-full/glass half-empty.

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I have to agree. Right now, we really don't have any reason to suspect that they're not being honest with us on this. So, for now, I'm willing to take it at face value: they're charging for this, because it wouldn't have been in the budget otherwise, and it didn't impact anything else.

For me, the proof will be in the next few issues. (Probably starting with I13, since that will be the first one that's fully from the NC^2 era.) Now, once those come out, if it seems like they're taking some of the neater things out and making us pay for them, then I'll grab my broom and start yelling shenanigens with the rest.

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No, it would be more like "don't try to charge us for stuff you used to give away as issue content or vet rewards".


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If I had a nickel for every post I'd read in the suggestion forum that said something along the lines of: "I want this feature so much, I'd be willing to pay for it," I'd be able to buy wedding packs for everyone in the game. So is it really surprising that they're finally taking us up on that?

Besides, if they gave us this stuff free, there would be just as many complaint threads, upset that they added something so narrow instead of another bug fix, or some more popular feature, or whatever.

Personally, I kind of like the idea of adding more narrow concept stuff, and letting the players who want it pay for it. That way, more mainstream stuff doesn't get pushed aside to make things that only a few players will use.

All that being said, I'll be waiting to pick this up when the price comes down. At $10, I'm not seeing a lot of value here.

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Don't worry... I'm still around too.

Us ghosts are just quiet.

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That can't be right. Casper never shuts up.

The only thing I want to know is NCSoft's stand on in game ads. We've been told before that there were no current plans to put ads in CoH/CoV. Is this stilll true? One company or the other had to be considering it or it would never had been brought up in the first place.

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In the interview on woot radio, Posi said that if they ever bring ads to CoX (and he stressed that was a big if...) then they would do it in such a way as to not upset players, and would make sure there was a way to opt out.

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WAIT!



We can has cheeseburger?

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Only if you have pants, and are wearing them.

Sorry, it's Troy's fault about that rule.

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No fair! We Triumphites take great pride in our pantslessness!

I am calling for an end to this discrimination against we, the haberdasherly-challenged!

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Businesses don't put that kind of investment into things they don't think will be around for much longer.

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That depends on the company. I've worked for some real stinkers that thought throwing money and people at a poorly conceived project was the cure for all ills. Not that I think that's the case here. Just doing my part in the fight against sweeping generalizations.

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True enough; I should have said that good businesses don't do that. And I think NCsoft has proved themselves in that regard; with Auto Assault, they've shown they won't keep funding things they don't think can succeed, and with Lineage, they've shown willingness to stick with a workhorse of a product for as long as people are still enthusiastic about it.

I honestly don't think CoX could be in better hands; they've been more successful in the MMO market than any other company in history, with the exception of Blizzard. However, Blizzard's a one-trick pony, in the MMO world. (A 90 ft tall, fire-breathing, world devouring, pony, but still...) NCSoft, on the other hand, has had multiple successes, and the fact that they look at CoX and think that it has a future worth investing in, to me, is nothing but good news for us.

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I hope... for the sake of the development team, that most of them stuck with Cryptic - In 3 years CoH will be almost seven, which is a long time for any MMO, and while Cryptic would probably just move the people to a new project, I have a feeling NCSoft would just give them the axe.

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Well, since (according to Ex) only one stayed with Cryptic, I'm guessing they don't share your pessimism.

And for the record, Lineage will be 10 years old next year, and NCSoft certainly hasn't given up on that.

Think about it like this: as others have pointed out, CoX was Cryptic's only money maker. That means NCSoft must have made them quite a pretty offer for them to give it up. In addition to that, NCSoft is creating a new studio for them, and expanding their team. Businesses don't put that kind of investment into things they don't think will be around for much longer.

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This scenario reminds me of the EA/Origin disputes and Ultima Online. But in the name of all that is holy, I dread seeing CoH/CoV recieving an update that warps it like the AoS expansion to Ultima Online did. Here's to hoping we never have that scenario.

I hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Can't say I have a whole lot more to say on the subject.

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An interesting comparison, given the participants. However, to draw another parallel, the changes to UO that you mention came after the Garriott brothers were gone. NCsoft taking over would mean (I would think) a greater involvement from them. So in that respect, I'm very hopeful.

In all honesty, if the announcement was that EA had bought the rights to the whole game, then, I'd be scared. But I think NCSoft has a good track record for making quality games.

And as I said before: if anyone knows about the dangers of publisher destroying a game, it's the Garriott brothers.