LittleDavid

Heh, the funny thing is, this is what I was thinking when NCSoft killed off Tabula Rasa as far as continuing to play City of Heroes goes. "I'm not going to cause them to do to Paragon Studios what they've just done to Destination Games."

And then they went and did it to Paragon Studios anyway ...

I thought it was supposed to be a punny way of being like a Russian Iron Man!



... I'll get my coat.

Things like this make me think back to some words Jason Scott had when AOL shut down AOL Hometown without warning a few years ago.

I wonder how much of he said can apply to situations like MMOs closing down. Or virtual worlds like Second Life, especially, considering that virtual property is bought, sold, and used there. Which also happens in MMOs, especially big, old ones like City of Heroes.

" We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter."

Paragon Studios has fallen victim to the same fate as Destination Games, NetDevil, and E & G Studios. All bets are off.

Heh, I was just as stunned as you, and I'm not even that into superhero stuff. I loved this game, and if there's a chance we can save it, I want to help.

I wish I knew. But honestly, with the abrupt announcement of City of Heroes shutting down, I think all bets are off as far as NCSoft goes. This was the one game I thought was "safe" to pay money for out of all of NCSoft's titles, given its age and strong player base.

Though maybe I should have learned that lesson with the way Richard Garriott got the heave-ho so they could shut Tabula Rasa down.

Well, I have seen NCSoft use that tactic before with Tabula Rasa. In the game's final month, especially on the final day, NCSoft was pushing Aion very hard on people in-game. That left me pretty bitter.

But again, that's a doing of NCSoft, not the guys behind Aion. The real tragedy here is that there are so many software development studios signing on with NCSoft (or getting bought out by them), despite the treatment they've shown to many titles.

Read the Joystiq link I posted. Garriott won his lawsuit, too, and won it again when NCSoft challenged the ruling--so there's more to the story than "low subscription numbers." TR didn't have as many people playing it as City of Heroes, but it was apparently turning a profit from some statements I've read in the past.

Well, what if they don't want to be subject to this treatment a few years on down the line? I can tell you that this is the third time I've personally been affected by a game published by NCSoft getting killed off. That was the charm for me, especially considering that in two of those three cases that I know of, the game itself was reasonably healthy. And in one of those cases, some really dirty tricks were involved in getting the game shut down.

Vowing not to touch another NCSoft game isn't the same thing as blaming ArenaNet for the death of City of Heroes. It may well be that all the effort spent on Guild Wars 2 was a factor in NCSoft's decision to kill City of Heroes and Paragon Studios, but in refusing to ever play another NCSoft title I am not putting the blame on the studios it owns.

Just NCSoft itself.

Oh, I know it happens. I'm still bitter over the death of Westwood, after all. And Looking Glass Studios, and Origin, and Dynamix ...

But in those cases, at least you can still play the games they developed. So long as they haven't done something like require an internet connection to a B.net-like service that's no longer around when the company is axed ...

If you're happy playing another NCSoft game, that's your prerogative; but I chafe at the implication that the rest of us should go out and buy and play Guild Wars 2 just to support ArenaNet.

Me, I'd rather not spend any more money on games published by a company with a track record of closing them in the manner that it has.

And some day NCSoft will do the same thing to ArenaNet that it has done to Paragon Studios, Destination Games, and all the other studios NCSoft has published games for that have since been axed.

After learning what exactly happened behind the scenes with Tabula Rasa's shutdown, and the abrupt death of City of Heroes here (several months' notice before shutdown aside), I am not willing to spend money to support games and developers under NCSoft's control, no matter how fun their games may be. It's just not worth it, and I don't feel like I should be obligated to continue playing other NCSoft titles just to support the other studios it owns.

That may be, but I still think it's a sign of how much an MMO has taken a hit if it's consolidating servers that used to have strong player bases individually, but didn't by the time the decision was made to make the merge.

Though, in Aion's case, it sounded less like a server merge and more like a short window to get your character moved to another server before the server was taken offline.

My sentiments exactly.

Zwillinger, I'm just another voice on the chorus here, but you and the rest of Paragon Studios made playing this game so awesome with your personal involvement. The Praetorian Surge from last year is still one of my fondest moments of City of Heroes. Well, that and the time when you popped up in the middle of my solo run, haha.

Man I am going to miss this game.

Huh. I was thinking that Aion wasn't doing nearly as well as City of Heroes, given the context of that article linked earlier.

Also, there were announcements from a year or so ago involving Aion shutting down a number of its servers. I didn't think they were making more money than City of Heroes in spite of all that.

Yeah, this was just a freaking bolt from the blue. I thought City of Heroes was safe from the whims that killed off so many other MMOs that NCSoft published, since it still has such a large player base and certainly must be getting a lot of income.

There's still so much I wanted to do in this game. Heck, I've been playing for quite a few years and I never got to the cap.

(If only my video card wasn't giving me so much trouble ...)

If they don't, there's some other crowdsourcing services we can also try, like Indiegogo.

It's kind of funny that they'd take the axe to City of Heroes when they were blaming Aion for their financial problems, though. Unless Aion is also getting killed off ...

My personal theory on why otherwise healthy or stable MMOs get killed off is because the executives are too focused on dethroning the Market Leader, or taking a big chunk out of its income.

It wasn't ignoring it; I was definitely seeing a change in graphics with it on, it helped refine the way light and shadow fell on in-game geometry.

I did try turning AO off now, though, and there's been no difference in frame rate. Same if I turn it all the way up to max. Should I try turning AO off and restarting City of Heroes?

Yeah ... When I overhauled my rig back in 2008 I got the Q6600 as future-proofing in hopes that I wouldn't have to buy new everything-else just to replace one part (my pre-2008 setup had a dying AGP video card, and by that point it was all PCI-E).

I figured quadcore would have been a great way to proof against the future. But we've got, what, octacores out now?

Oh dear. I hope it isn't too late to get data off of the drive. Thanks for letting me know about the USB to SATA/IDE cables, though; I just ordered one off of Newegg.

Once I get that and the replacement drive in, I'll see about moving stuff on my main drive there to free up space, and then defragment it. I'll also move my video card down to the PCIe 2.0 slot like Chad Gulzow-Man suggested ... If that doesn't cause an increase in performance then I'll look for the most recent stable driver for my card.

I'll let you guys know how it goes. If it turns out to be a CPU bottleneck ... I'll grin and bear it, I guess. My CPU and motherboard are both holding up for now, and I don't wanna have to go buy whole new replacement parts for them just yet.