Iron_Emerald

This has been the most fun that I've had with the game since I was a kid in the 80's. Thanks to everyone who made it possible and I just wish I'd gotten to play longer than a couple of years!

I couldn't make it since I was still at work, but this looks like such a fun event. Thanks Arcana, this was a really nice thing to do for the community!

And thanks to Hit Streak for giving us lots of monsters to clear out of AP on Freedom just now.

I've only been playing the game for a couple of years and my first exposure to your videos was when a friend of mine was super excited about being in a samuraiko video. I had no idea what they were talking about, but was directed to a bunch of them and watched through lots that night. They were great for getting me excited about this game, both seeing things that I already recognised and seeing the many things which I was yet to discover.

Thanks so much for all the great work that you've done in the game and all the best to you wherever you end up.

Thanks for all of your informative posts over the years and hope that your event goes well, it's sounding really interesting and I'll try to take part!

I too have really grown to love the numbers side of the game. I don't have many level 50's, but for those that I have I've had a lot of fun tinkering around to try and get the numbers where I want them in their builds. Even after the game started I decided to finally get around to finishing off the blapper build for my Energy/Energy blaster and I've been having a great deal of fun with her.

I don't think it's at all mysterious that people have a different reaction to something they have first hand knowledge of versus something they don't. Of course I'm going to complain more about City of Heroes shutting down than I am about those other games. For myself the only one of the other games I'd even heard of before was Tabula Rasa, and I'd never heard anything about it shutting down. City of Heroes on the other hand has been my favourite game since I started playing it a couple of years ago.

If I had heard of the games shutting down at the time then I'd have felt sorry for the players and maybe even signed a petition if somebody asked. But I really wouldn't have much knowledge of which side was in the right. Here though I know enough about people like Arcanaville and the devs that I choose to believe them when they say the game was doing well. I also know that I object to the timing of it coming so close to Issue 24 coming out. Whether you agree with those reasons or not, it's information I just wouldn't have on games I haven't played and occasionally read the forums of.

And as for the "why is 4 games in 4 years closing acceptable, but 5 games in 5 years isn't?" line. Everybody will have a different kind of threshold for when this kind of thing would start to count as a red flag. For some people they won't deal with a company after they've shut a single game the 'wrong way' others are going to be just fine with 5 games in 5 years. But I'll bet they wouldn't be happy to keep giving money to an MMO company that made traditional MMOs and shut them all down after a month. The last example is silly extreme, but the point is that everybody has a level where they decide there's too much of a pattern to keep doing business with a company. Some people feel they've reached that level with NCSoft, both due to their personal feelings over City of Heroes and the number of other games they've closed.

Save CoH not surprisingly drew in a whole bunch of people who want to Save City of Heroes, as the name implies. It's pretty unrealistic to believe that everybody who shares that goal is going to want to do things in the same manner as each other. There are some people with good realistic ideas (as I see them), others with less realistic but well meaning and positive ideas, some who just want to harass NCSoft until they give in and others at various points. This isn't some corporation where everybody who believes in the goal of saving the game can be fired if they don't follow the company line.

I haven't fully agreed with everything that SaveCoH as a whole, or the Titan 'leadership' as a whole have done, but I never expected to. If you're going to go through (as some other threads seem to ne) every post by every person who's been associated with Save CoH then of course you're going to find some odd opinions and ideas expressed from time to time. But for me at least the overall aim as much as I've followed it has remained sound.

Count me in too thanks.

Of course it does. Niche products succeed all the time in most every industry, that's why we see so many casual and independent game operators doing well these days (and a lot doing less well too of course). Niche doesn't mean unprofitable in any sense. It just means that not everything is going to have the mass market appeal to be the next WoW or Call of Duty or Diablo.

Niche doesn't even mean that something has to stop growing either (although on a tangent I think the Global Financial Crisis is ultimately going to cause many to question the 'grow, grow, grow' approach). If you concentrate on making niche games you don't have to just concentrate on one niche and you can still get the word out and grow over time with older games too.

Personally I think that it's a tough world for big MMORPG publishers out there these days. Too many investors seem to want the 'big new MMORPG' to be a WoW killer, but I think it's becoming more and more apparent that just won't happen in the current climate. There's just too much competition in the marketplace for a newcomer to get that big, competition both from other MMORPGs and the ever-increasing online components of what would have been offline games in the past.

To my mind the future of the MMORPG is more along the lines of relatively niche product stuff along with concepts such as what Arcanaville posted a while back as a CoH what-if suggestion, an MMORPG that allows shifting between degrees of online and offline play.

I'll go with 90!

Remaining Numbers:
62, 85, 91, 94, 96

84! Double the meaning of life!

Taken: 2, 7, 9, 13, 14, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 33, 42, 43, 47, 49, 53, 57, 63, 66, 68, 73, 75, 78, 82, 83, 84, 87, 95

28!

I'll admit that I haven't spent much time on the Titan boards, though it didn't seem too crazy last time I looked. But I'm talking about the reactions I'm seeing in this thread here. If people over there are the ones who need more of a reality check then it should be given over there, rather than long-winded 'hope is crazy!' posts appearing in this thread seemingly in response to a position that has never been stated.

I personally will be 'boycotting' NCSoft in the sense that I don't intend to play any of their games again, at least until I have reason to believe they would handle something like the CoH shutdown better in the future. That being said I'm against a more rabid kind of protest where bitter CoH players post lots of negative comments everywhere they can about NCSoft games. The occasional well written post about NCSoft practices is one thing, but if bitter diatribes started filling up every internet story about NCSoft then I think that would make CoH fans look worse that it would NCSoft.

That said I think that focusing on Plan Z may be unrealistic in a lot of ways, but it's a much more productive use of time for people who really don't want to see the game go. Even if the community lacks the ability to follow through and finish the game just showing there's that much desire for one can't hurt the possibility of a professional studio deciding to make a CoH tribute type of game.

Happy birthday!

Some of the nay-sayers here seem to have a strange binary view of hope and grief, as if being sad about something means somebody must be moping about it and upset all the time. Or holding out hope means they lose all sense of reality.

I'm sad about City of Heroes ending, but it's not like I'm weeping into my coffee each morning. It's sad and I wish it wasn't happening, but I can feel sad while still realising that it's very much a 'first world problem' and not a dominant thing in my life.

I also hope that the game will continue in some fashion and haven't given up on that, either with NCSoft having some kind of change of heart or with a spiritual successor turning up in the form of Plan Z or otherwise. Hoping that these things happen isn't the same as expecting them to happen. Indeed I think the chances for each are relatively slim and I'm realistic about that, but I still hope they happen.

By way of analogy when I buy a lottery ticket I buy it hoping that I might win. I realise that I almost certainly WON'T win of course, but the people who do win sometimes aren't figments of my imagination. I don't rearrange my life expecting that I'm going to win and booking in celebratory holidays, I just hope it'll happen since it would be nice.

Even if you never play the lottery it takes a remarkable string of luck and coincidences (along with work and good planning and all that good stuff) to get most any good thing in life. Think about the odds of being born at this particular time, of the chances of meeting your significant other, your friends, just being in the right place at the right time. The 'saving' of City of Heroes if it happened certainly wouldn't be the most incredible or unlikely event I've had direct experience of and it seems bizarre that holding out hope it might return in some fashion is considered ridiculous by some people.

Certainly it would be silly if people were completely overcome with grief over the game ending. Or if people were so overboard with hope that they were utterly convinced they could keep playing the game as it is in December. But as far as I can see nobody is saying that, it's just a convenient construct to pretend that others are being that silly so somebody can feel good about being the 'voice of reason'.

Oh, and more on topic I want to say congrats to the devs on the new jobs and I hope that you all end up doing something that you really enjoy. The fact that I have problems with the implementation of the incarnate system doesn't take away from the fact that I got into this game more than anything else since my teens. I'm going to miss it greatly and you all did excellent work here.

Some people are talking as if we either have to enjoy our last few months in the game and say goodbye to it or continue to support efforts to try and save the game despite this new announcement. This is a false equivalency though, doing one doesn't lead to the other. I'm quite capable of continuing to enjoy the game and prepare for it to end on November 30th, while at the same time hoping that efforts to save the game may yet succeed.

Granted, this statement can be seen as a blow. But all this really reiterates is what we knew at the end of August, NCSoft want to close the game down. Simply saying that they haven't found a way to save the game and are going to stop trying doesn't remove their ability to save the game if they're convinced to do so. However genuine they've been over 'exhausting all options' they still have the ability to sell this game to somebody else who does want it to continue. This message is another statement of their intent, but it doesn't change their ability to sell the game.

Who knows, but if we stay positive and keep getting our message across, keep getting positive coverage and keep up in-game events to show that CoX has life in it yet then we can't hurt the chances of the game surviving somehow vs not doing any of that. Maybe NCSoft can be convinced that doing a good deed by finding a way to pass the game on to somebody else will be good PR for them. I'd certainly feel very good about NCSoft if they did something like that and would go out and buy Guild Wars 2 the next day to thank them.

I think most people realise that the odds are against the game continuing. But that doesn't mean that it's totally pointless to hold out hope.

That was great, I've really enjoyed all of your videos so far.

Oh fine... I can't resist...

FPARN!!

Did I do that right?

Pretty cool that I got one after you though. I've only got two level 50's and the second is a dm/inv with a build somewhat inspired by your one. I made a number of changes to fit my own play style (I love my Soul Drain -> Spring Attack -> Dark Consumption 'scrapper nuke'), but the core idea is the same. So thanks!

Thanks so much for doing this. It's a little sad to find things out this way rather than in the game, but it made for a fun read. I'd especially have loved to see the Scirocco series, I've been really looking forward to seeing him redeemed.

Though annoyingly I only just managed to ask the question that I'd been forgetting about the possibility of if we'd ever see The Grimm Fairy! It would have been great if we found her when going through the Battalion storyline and working with the Rikti. I really can't picture what she'd look like and would like to see her in game...

My only revenge on NCSoft will be that I don't intend to give them any of my money again until I can get a better explanation of why they ended the game like this. I don't want them to collapse as a company, they still kept City going for years and a lot of other people enjoy their other games.

Otherwise I'll play other games when City ends, maybe give Champions a proper try and give support to any kind of City successor game that turns up. The best 'revenge' will be ending up with a great City style game that becomes a big success.