Kitsune Knight

The much-hated perma-death event. Careful not to die, because there ain't no medicom teleporters this time!

The Devs never could quite figure out why the player base didn't enjoy the event....



Unless Zwill pops in, we'll probably just have to wait until the sky turns a new color and the Event channels start lighting up

Those are called one-off expenses in the US. I've never ever seen someone refer to them as 'one-of', certainly not in a business/accounting setting! Try going to Google and type in 'accounting one of' (don't press enter or any buttons after typing that in) and, at least for me (I have all customization/tracking disabled), it suggests to complete to 'accounting one off expense', figuring that's most likely what I'm typing.

The use of loads of equals signs in text is also rather unusual

Zwill "announced" it in the last Coffee Talk, saying he was gonna try to get the server guys to turn on Double XP and as many events as they could.

There were three different 'secret projects'. The first was CoH2, but the higher ups in NC shot down the project (that may of happened before the Devs ever mentioned a secret project). The next I can't recall at all (it also folded, again can't recall why)... and the third was apparently a Unity-based game. There was an article posted on the boards recently about it, was fairly interesting... assuming any of it was actually true.

The Admin message explicitly said it was to turn off Double XP?

From what I understand, can't you actually convert the in-game currency into the cash-shop currency?

NCSoft never does that sort of thing. They're of the mindset of get it over with already, don't just drag it out for several years.

If you look at the graph, CoH was already trending downward even with very high development speeds, with a high rate of new items being released on the market. Some money spent on marketing would have probably done wonders to bring in fresh blood and might have reversed the downward trend... but NCSoft doesn't seem to do much of any marketing in the western world.

If they had cut down development, we'd have almost assuredly seen a steep drop for the following quarter and again the quarter after, as revenue from the Paragon Market starts heading towards zero (there won't be any new shines to buy, and everyone that's VIP would continue getting more than enough points to cover everything they wanted). VIPs would then be pretty much the only revenue stream. What percentage of players are VIP? I don't think there are any official numbers given by the devs, but it's obviously not 100%, which means a further drop.

If they had killed Paragon almost entirely, the expenses would drop massively. Likewise, I'd bet the revenue would drop fairly massively as well. Probably not as much or as quickly, but CoH would definitely be on the fast track to death at that point. And personally? I'd probably leave if they'd killed Paragon. I was here during the days of the Freem 15, I remember quite clearly what that was like. I like our Dev team quite a bit, and I doubt I'll find another community like this one... killing that would have been a major disincentive to staying.

I'm sorry that you find pointing out efforts that are 100% wasteful is a bad thing. I would much rather the community be focusing on saving the game (and if we're especially lucky, Paragon) rather than temporary feel-goodery that actively hurts many of the efforts to save the game. The "I stopped the first 9/11" guy and the boycott!!! crowd being prime examples.

If a group is trying to use some story of stopping a terrorist plot as an example of whatever-the-hell, and then it's provided obviously false (or even just completely incapable of providing any proof), it'll be an absurdly large PR blow to something that's 100% PR. But people didn't want to ask the important questions, they wanted to just belieeeeeeve so much so they attacked someone trying to ask.

Likewise, the boycott crowd (the ones screaming it, specifically) is toxic to any player-lead efforts to talk to NCSoft, because they risk coloring the entire group. Fortunately, people seem to have backed off screaming for blood while ignoring the efforts to save CoH.

This is at least the second thread started to blame AE. Lack of a PvP focus/i13, though, handily beat it, with at least 5 threads I've personally seen (and many more random posts in threads).


We can largely only speculate, but I'd hazard a guess that Champions Online took a serious hit out of CoH. Even if the people that went to CO didn't stay with CO, they might not have bothered to come back to CoH. Around that period there was (IIRC) a huge number of MMOs being released, so there was lots of territory to explore. It was probably a number of factors that lead to the drop, but I doubt AE was very high up there at all.

I had no idea!

I'm not sure they'd notice.

For the last three quarters, the NA region consisted of 4-5% of NC's total revenue (likewise, CoH was 2%). With Guild Wars 2 now out, NCSoft'll likely see quite a large jump for NA... at the same time they killed CoH. For comparison, the original Guild Wars (which isn't sub based, and hadn't seen a new campaign/expansion since 2007) was generating about 1/2 the revenue of CoH during that same period of time.

Mind you, that's revenue and not profit.

Unfortunately for Paragon's bottom line, the Red Names had a taste for Weasel Poop Coffee, so Billy was actually taking home more than Posi and WW combined.


(I think it was 80 full time employees, anyways)

Paragon Studios had 80 employees. Assuming each employee costs about 50k (that's salary + all benefits, a massive low ball), that's $4,000,000 of the $10,000,000 revenue right there. I wouldn't be surprised if it was double that (an employee usually costs far more than their salary, and that 50k is lower than a lot of starting salaries for the field).

CoH, unfortunately, wasn't raking in the money, double so after all the costs. NC's other big name games, almost assuredly, have much higher profit margins.

Steam's statistics page.

Yes. I've actually already helped a Preem pay their Upkeep on (IIRC) Justice a week+ ago. You could try asking in AP (or somewhere on red if you're of that persuasion) if a VIP would lend you a hand. Failing that, someone here would likely be more than willing to help.

I like this date...

Don't confuse revenue with profit. They cut revenue by 2%, but profit likely by quite a bit less (Paragon wasn't working for free, you know).

Throw in a topless scene, and you've got yourself a Hollywood action movie!

You mean trademark the names, not copyright. Copyright covers specific implementations (i.e. I could write my own solitaire game and I'd own the copyright, even if it's absurdly simple). Patents would cover the idea (if someone patented how solitaire works, they could control whether anyone else could make a game that implements those rules). And then there's trademark, which has more so to do with protecting products from others trying to trick people into thinking one product is actually another, or some how associated with it (covering the name is the most common case, but the look of the product can fall under trade dress).

Exactly. In past closures, it was always a while between the initial announcement and when they said what the compensation was, so getting it right away would be out of character for NCSoft. If they were in talks with anyone, they also wouldn't say anything about that (hell, I'm pretty sure back when NCSoft bought CoH, the first we heard of it was after it was already finalized). Even if there were no parties inquiring about buying CoH, they might still be waiting X amount of time before they take the last step, just in case an entity comes forward.


People are simply blinding themselves with their rage. When I say that, I'm not saying CoH is doomed and you should give up in the slightest (50% chance someone still interprets it that way), I'm saying be smart about your moves and we might actually pull off one hell of a victory. Rash, emotion driven actions are simply counter productive.

You do realize that NCSoft is in the position of power here, right? They literally own City of Heroes. The best we can hope for is to slightly steer them into a direction we want. We can't force their hand.

It doesn't matter if they've made mistakes or have treated us poorly, being ******* won't get us results we want. If we want to be heard, we have to persuade them.