LittleDavid

Well, that's only if NCSoft is receptive to the idea of selling City of Heroes and its IP. If NCSoft absolutely refuses to consider selling the game to anyone--be it Paragon Studios, other investors, or some other option--that's their prerogative.

I've heard snatches of talk that Auto Assault's developer and fans tried to do this when NCSoft killed them off, but apparently it amounted to nothing. I'm hoping that whatever talks between Paragon's former employees, investors, and NCSoft goes better this time.

It wasn't TonyV or anyone from Titan Network (I think).

Here's an example of a person who tweeted all three. There may be more out there since I was just browsing the SaveCoH topic trend on Twitter and saw this in the midst of it (and it seems Twitter's system precludes searching for email addresses), but this is what I was talking about when I said that the e-mail addresses are "in the wild" where nobody's going to see TonyV's requests to be civil and constructive.

... What the heck? Is it just me, or does that game look nothing like Black Prophecy?

I'm absolutely baffled over here.

Well, there's also Neocron, Neocron 2: Dome of York and Anarchy Online. Neocron has the dubious honor of outliving its developer (Reakktor). Both games seem to be doing alright for now; the AO team is saying that the recent layoffs at Funcom only affect them in the sense that they won't be able to add members to their team like they hoped to, and thus can't get content or the graphics overhaul out as fast as they wanted.

I would add Myst Online: Uru Live to this list, but I don't think it counts since the game as an MMO has been resurrected and shut down repeatedly. It might stay up for good now, though (I hope) because Cyan Worlds is working on making the game open source, giving people the ability to create their own full-blown Ages (which I think was in their plans the whole time given the DRC's Guilds) ...

I'm still baffled why there doesn't seem to have ever been a serious attempt to reach out to the Japanese market for all eight years of CoH's run. I mean, I've come across evidence that Paragon City had its own Little Tokyo of sorts, from Japanese fansites and communities long dead.

It wouldn't be that hard selling the idea of CoH to the Japanese. The art style might not automatically appeal to them, but if it netted a lot of Japanese players in the past, surely they could have tried a more aggressive marketing campaign over there, right?

And if they were able to get a Korean version of CoH out there early on, how difficult would it have been to make a Japanese-language server?

Don't forget about what happened to Tabula Rasa; let people know about the reason for Richard Garriott's lawsuit. That NCSoft pulled an unscrupulous move to get him out of the company so they could kill off that game. And that the courts sided with Garriott. Several times.

This is a lot more helpful to the cause than calling people childish.

Though honestly, I don't see what's so bad about the OP keeping his rage and impatience contained here while actively participating in other calls to action. I mean, better I think it's better that he seethe, vent and get the pointy-sounding words out here, then trying to use them directly on the NCSoft heads.

As I said in the post to which you responded, that was not specifically directed at you but rather in consideration of the kind of hecklers we've had in the major gaming sites.

In other words, your attitude reminded me of those hecklers, even though you indicated you don't want to see City of Heroes go.

"The polarised attitiude of people like me," huh? Welp, considering this is where the rest of your post gets incredibly haughty, maybe I should just rescind my statements that separated you from the hecklers. I mean, it didn't matter to you anyway--you still took issue as if I was directly calling you a heckler (which makes your statement that rabble such as me have a "polarised attitude" really funny!). And if you're going to take the whole "City of Children" tone with me, why should I bother differentiating you from them?

Hmm. I wonder what exactly gave you the impression that I viewed myself as having the clout to either save City of Heroes by myself, or to break NCSoft if they won't react to the Save Paragon City campaign. Because I certainly said nothing of the sort in my post, nor did I so much as imply that I thought that way.

So where'd this one come from, SteelRat?

Not necessarily, but that delves into topics better left discussed elsewhere. That, and when you say things like this or "all the campaigns and shouting, jumping and name calling isn't going to change the bottom line," it's hard to take you seriously when you say you support Save Paragon City and want it to succeed. Putting aside angry, impatient folks like the OP here, is that really how you perceive all of the player base's efforts? The Unity Rally? The write-in campaigns? Showing our gratitude toward Paragon's former employees by treating them to a meal?

There's no need to "get used" to something when it's possible to take one's money to other services, products, and companies they find worth supporting. And frankly, with cloud computing? I've done just fine without it relying on it so far, and I will continue to avoid it ever since I saw how the Megaupload fiasco screwed over the people who used that service for legitimate reasons. But again, that's beyond the scope of this back-and-forth.

So. When you deride people who have sworn off paying for or playing any of NCSoft's products as short-sighted idiotic attempts to "stick it to the man," just who all are you implicating? Because this kind of thing oozes with that "City of Children" tone I talked about, and if it's a sweeping generalization of the motives of anyone who says they won't touch NCSoft titles after City of Heroes goes down, weeeeell then we have a problem.

Nah, no barrel jokes from me, I'm just basking in the glow your haughty aura. Gimme some more of dat so-called!

Whoa-hoah, and he plays the insignificance card again! Tell 'em what he's won, Angry_Citizen!

First, anything in this universe can be made to look insignificant or not worthy of caring about just by pulling back on the scope. Playing the "there's more significant things so you're foolish for caring about this" card is a specious argument. These things are significant to us in the scope and span of our lives. Sure, it's a big deal to me that the MMO genre is needlessly transient compared to other video games. Telling me that the sun's eventually going to blow up and vaporize all those copies of Super Mario Bros. anyway is irrelevant to what I said.

Or to put it your way: It. Doesn't. Matter. If. Nothing. Lasts. Forever. That's. Not. The. Point.

Second, caring about this game does not preclude someone from caring about issues of more importance. You are, after all, participating in the same community that has held its own charity drive for three years. I find it really silly that so many hecklers and naysayers are deriding people trying to save this game for being children who are wasting time on something "ultimately unimportant" when this game, and this community, has inspired things such as Real World Hero.

Oh, and while I'm at it, in response to something you said to Vauluur:

I could just point up at everything I quoted. Or, I could just point to something you wrote in response to Vauluur:

There's being realistic, and then there's this. The more I read over your posts, the more you come off as a heckler in denial than someone who's supportive of the cause while keeping their expectations in check. You spend more of your time belittling people involved in the Save Paragon City efforts more than you do showing support for those same efforts.

Now that you mention it ... *googles*

Yeah, right in the third quarter of '09 it seems.

Wait, so are you saying every MMO released since 2007 has been operating at a loss?

I find that a mite hard to believe. I won't deny that MMOs are expensive as all get out to maintain and develop, but I doubt that most of them have been operating at a loss and haven't paid for themselves.

Sounds like Scott Jennings lept out of the bubble bath and ... into ... a popping soap bubble?

Nah man, he's a Stalker!

*ducks random Propelled objects*

I would be genuinely surprised if they did. I'm pretty sure TonyV has not been campaigning in this direction, anyway.

As I understand it, what TonyV's hoping for is to get the game out from under NCSoft, so that Paragon Studios' employees can reform under a new name and continue developing it.

Dear SteelRat,

What I'm about to say is not specifically directed at you but rather in consideration of the kind of hecklers we've had in the major gaming sites ... but I really dislike your sort of cavalier attitude toward MMOs that get killed off. It's one thing to not expect our efforts to have any impact, but the people who say things like "get over it, the game's dead, they've made their decision, go play the latest hot new MMO" get on my nerves pretty bad.

Most MMOs are forever lost when the plug's pulled and the databases are wiped, unlike practically all other video games. With other games, when the company goes out of business, or their publisher gives them the axe, copies of their games aren't rendered useless (excepting cases with truly draconc DRM, but that's another story). People continue to cherish and play games that are 20, 30, heck, 40 years old and whose developing studios are long gone. The games can get republished on virtual consoles, or re-released some other way. They don't have an expiration date, they don't vanish leaving only memories and scarce movies, screenshots, or abandoned fansites.

Markovia had a point when he said that the closure of games like City of Heroes is like erasing a part of our cultural record. It's a lot like what Jason Scott said of the abrupt no-warning closure of AOL Hometown and what he also said when he founded the Archie Team to prevent more wanton destruction of culture, history, and content when a site decides to shut down its services. Shrugging one's shoulders and saying "nothing lasts forever" comes off to me as welcoming the transient nature companies like NCSoft impose on this genre. But there's plenty of MMOs of CoH's age or older which show it doesn't have to be this way.

Yeah, Front Mission Online was shut down back around ... 2008-ish.

Think about the Massively poll to fight for City of Heroes or let it go, and why TonyV rallied to have people vote in support of keeping it up. There were still several hundred people voting to let the game die. If Tony hadn't put the call out, and it escaped the notice of the community, how would the numbers have looked?

As an informal, unscientific poll, it didn't hold much value as actual marketing research, but it did hold value symbolically by showing that the decision to shut the game down is unpopular on some level.

But this? This is a bit more serious, since it's directly contacting people in top management. Their e-mail addresses are "in the wild" now. I've seen people post them on Twitter, where nobody's going to see TonyV's pleas to be diplomatic. I have no doubt in my mind that these three are going to receive some abusive mail, whether it be from angry fans/players telling them off, or from trolls and anti-fans taking advantage of this to throw a wrench into things.

The only way to combat that is to write in yourself and try to drown out the negativity.

It did. I think they're using NCSoft's Investor's Report as data, because if you look at the charts from that, it also stops graphing active subscriptions around that point. Not sure why.

That wasn't the evil I was referring to at all. I spent my entire post addressing the very real possibility that publicly releasing the e-mail addresses of NCSoft's upper echelons will result in trolls and anti-fans sending abusive mail.

If there's people who could send in a clear-headed, convincing letter that demonstrates City of Heroes has more worth selling off than by sitting on the IP, but won't because they don't agree with what TonyV has done here, while the trolls and anti-fans send off their death threats and nastygrams, thereby decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio and giving the bigwigs the impression that the CoH fanbase is an internet hate machine ... That's a pretty good example of evil triumphing because good men did nothing, isn't it?

Seriously, I'm a mite ticked off at Ironblade right now for trying to make it look like I was calling NCSoft evil.

Did you even bother reading my post, or are you pretending that what you quoted is all I had to say?

But it was a response to what I quoted. I'm trying to tell you it's not a case of the gaming population being unable to support 50 MMOs. An MMO doesn't necessarily need the kind of population WoW has to be massively multiplayer. City of Heroes didn't. I've played a number of MMOs that only had a few thousand active accounts. In fact, have you ever seen MMO Charts? The size of active accounts and subscriptions among MMOs runs the gamut.

Quite a number of titles, City of Heroes included, would probably have done fine and continued operating if it was up to the company responsible for the game and not the parent company, or getting pressure put on them by stakeholders in the board of directors.

It would if we were talking about studios which aren't invested or owned by a publisher, because then all they'd have to worry about is making more money than they spend keeping the MMO going—any decision to shut down the game would be entirely their own, and not because a publisher has to convince shareholders that they're ever more profitable.

I don't think Myst Online Uru Live would have ever returned from the brink of oblivion if Cyan Worlds was under somebody's thumb.

I think quoting those posts in that order provides a good point-counterpoint to the situation here.

I fully expect that Taek-Jin Kim, Song-Yee Yoon, and Dong-Il Kim are going to recieve hateful nastygrams—or even death threats. Not just from people who can't be civil or diplomatic about this, but also from anti-fans and trolls looking to sabotage the player base's efforts to keep the game alive.

If it hasn't happened yet, it will. Especially since these e-mail addresses were Tweeted.

So the only thing we can do is try to drown out the death threats and hate speech with the kind of thing TonyV's asking from us: stories about how much City of Heroes has meant to us or affected our lives, or reasoned letters explaining why we feel the way we do about their decision to pull the plug and why selling City of Heroes to another party would be a good idea.

If you guys don't want to write letters to NCSoft, that's fine; but just remember, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.