Leif_Roar

Sure I can. A company pulling back from a market, or delivering different levels of service to different markets is a simple concept.

While I like the game and I would like for NCSoft to be more attentive and focused on the EU market, it's important to keep a sense of perspective. It is just a game, and NCSoft is still delivering a good product on the EU servers too: we have the full game, we have good up-time on the servers and no critical infrastructure problems. The product is not as good as the one delivered on the US servers, but the difference is really not all that big.

You are of course entitled to your opinion.

But the main gist of my post was about that! It is not like the US servers are being pampered with attention and marketing, with the developers rushing to answer any question the US player base might have and ready to reveal marketing strategies and business decisions whenever the players ask.

Yes, there are reasons to suspect that NCSoft has downprioritized the EU servers and the European market for CoH, and yes there are reasons to complain about the difference in service between the EU and US products they deliver. But the grass is just not that much greener across the Atlantic. It's the same game, with the same development schedule, at equivalent price with access to the same community forums and communications.

I was responding directly to someone saying that the EU players are treated like "second class citizens", so the reference to Jim Crow laws was entirely apropos. It's a ridiculous extreme to bring up in a discussion about the service level of a computer game, of course, but then that was rather the point.

You're going a little heavy on the hyperbole there.

Yes, we're getting a slightly inferior service to the customers on the US servers -- fewer character slots, less convenient maintenance times and so on -- but it's not that much worse. It's not like the players on the US servers are woken in the mornings by having War Witch serve them freshly backed croissants and hot coffee while Positron fetches them their slippers and the newspaper.

Let's tone down the rhetoric a little. After all, we're talking about difference between Italian style service in a restaurant and Parisian style service -- not Jim Crow laws.

Anyway, the problem isn't that there are some reasons to prefer the US servers to the EU servers but that currently there are no reasons to prefer the EU servers to the US servers for someone new to the game. If someone were to ask me if they should sign up on the EU servers or the US servers, much as I'd like to, I couldn't in good conscience say the EU servers. Not because the advantages to playing on the US servers are all that big, but because there no longer exist any advantages to playing on the EU servers.

Unless NCSoft can provide some reason to pick the EU servers over the US servers, I don't see the state of the EU servers improving. But let me add that that's not the end of the world. It is, after all, just a game.

Please, for the love of Gutenberg: paragraph breaks, good sir. They're free, you know.

"Attention. Attention. May I have the board's attention? This week's mission will be When Willie Comes Marching Home. Uh... The biggest parade of laughs of Issue 9. All the love, laughs and escapades of the Willies who came marching home. This mission stars Clockwork, The Council, and fifteen Lost."

To be fair, to some extent much of that feeling probably stems more from the rest of the EU playerbase "talking it up" than directly from NCSoft's handling of the market. There's not that much difference in the attention and marketing NCSoft gives CoH in the EU and US CoH markets -- it's more different shades of negligible than anything else -- so I think we should be careful to read too much into it.

Eh. Hard for us to say if it was a bad idea, or a good idea that was badly implemented, or a good, but risky idea that just didn't work out, or a good idea that just wasn't followed through on, or if it was the best idea they could implement under the constraints in place at the time. It's probably hard even for NCSoft itself to say which it was.

Actually, conventional wisdom has it that the entertainment sector usually has an upswing during a recession.

*sighs* Possibly, if you keep those inane digs of yours up. They just might annoy me enough that I'll decide not to bother with Going Rogue in any case.

Speaking for myself, I'm going to wait for the reviews on that before I decide.

Don't be so quick to laugh. The brouhaha surrounding ED really was out of the ordinary, both in intensity and duration.

"Ve haf vays of making you loyal, Engländer."

Speaking as a battle-scarred software developer, I don't really think that's true (there's always a limited capacity to fix bugs before release) but even if it was true, I don't get it. When I go to eat dinner at a restaurant I don't particularly want to help prep the kitchen to make sure I get good food.

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate that a lot of people want to get in on the closed beta tests (if nothing else it helps detect any obvious load or performance issues), I just don't understand them.

Annoying as that is, it is just Monopoly money.

How would you prevent abuses? (Porn, copyright infringements, pictures in bad taste, trademark violations and so on.)

Avatea, when you make announcements about contests or awards like this, could you please mention early on if it only applies to one region and not leave that for the terms and conditions section?

I understand the legal reasons why you have to limit these kind of things to only one region, but it does get rather annoying when the announcement is written as if they are general and for everybody.

Not the Banished Pantheon, the Skulls.

They're small-time necromancers, but I don't think that's ever really explained to the players.

The problem with the story-progression for skulls and hellions is that they disappear so suddenly. There's not any kind of conclusion or wrap-up, and the lead in to the outcasts / trolls / family part of the story is sadly lacking.

That's a common problem with much of the oldest content: no or almost no lead-in to new enemy groups and lackluster or missing conclusions or end-notes. You never get a feeling that you've put a dent into for example the Skulls -- you just move on to beating up Outcasts instead.

Newer content is usually better at telling a proper story with beginning, middle and end, but the darker corners of CoH really need a good spring cleaning to get rid of the cobwebs.

A good idea, but I'd rather see it as an inventable temporary power with a reasonable total duration (say, ten minutes or so.)

Another option would be to provide a limited-range version of this as a set-bonus from a +ToHit Buff set.