Lothic

Not sure about Ford or Fisher making an appearance but the idea of Hamill getting a cameo as a very old Jedi Master doesn't seem too far fetched to me. I first heard of the concept of the Ep.7-9 trilogy as far back as the late 1970s and back then Lucas supposedly had the long-term plan to get Mark Hamill to reprise his role as Luke Skywalker in his 50-60s when Mark himself would be in his 50-60s. To me this just sounds like that pipedream finally becoming reality.

For me it ultimately depends on how far in the future they decide to set the new trilogy of movies - if it's like 50 years after Ep.VI then a Hamill cameo seems plausible but if it's like 100+ years then not so much.

It's been bad enough having to deal with WotC taking over for TSR, but the idea of Disney effectively owning D&D is simply surrealistic. Let's just say 20 years ago I would have never figured that likely in the least.

For what it's worth I never said I expected an attempt to do a conservative version of the Daily Show/Colbert would turn out well. I just said nothing's stopping anyone from trying. If conservatives can't step up to the plate and make something like that happen that's their problem, not mine. *shrugs*

I could imagine a bunch of players who probably would have been so mad that they would have -wanted- to sue NCsoft. But sadly according to the EULA they really would not have had any serious legal ground to stand on. NCsoft had every legal right to shut the game down on ANY day they wanted. Sure it would have been silly for them to do that on August 31st, but only from a company reputation point of view, not out of any fear of player-based litigation.

I myself had just spent $100 for Paragon Points about a week before August 31st. Sure that timing sucked for me, but I would not have been naive enough to have wasted my time trying to "sue" for that even if the game had shut down on August 31st. *shrugs*

No. The 3 extra months we got wasn't a "we don't want to get sued" maneuver because that wouldn't have been seriously possible anyway. The 3 months was a "we know we're doing an incredibly unpopular thing by shutting down this game so we want to diffuse the public relations damage to our company by giving our hyper-mad players a reasonable amount of time to scream about it then calm down enough to accept it".

NCsoft ultimately only cared enough about this situation to give everyone enough time for a semi-orderly account shutdown/refund period. Sure we can always remain mad that NCsoft killed our game, but we ought to be grateful they were reasonable enough to give us 3 full extra months to play essentially on their dime for free. If they were actually ever afraid of getting sued by angry players they probably wouldn't have shut the game down in the first place. The 3 months was in fact their way of "softening the blow".

Decades ago when the "Ep7-9" trilogy was first talked about there was the working idea that Mark Hamill would make a cameo appearance as Luke Skywalker as a very old Jedi Master when Mark would be in his fifties or sixties. As fate would have it Mark is now in his sixties IRL so it seems like that could actualy happen now.

Not really sure how you could handle most of the other character like Han or Leia. My guess is that the timeframe for the beginning of EP7 would be far enough in the future that most of the other characters would already be dead. Basically it would be like what ST:TNG was for ST:TOS - a new trilogy set in the Star Wars universe but focused primarily on an entirely new set of "next generation" characters. Obviously you'd still have C-3PO and R2-D2 to provide the over-arcing connection to all the movies.

For what it's worth nothing's stopping anyone from trying to make a center-right TV show similar to the Daily Show that caters to the "youth vote" with funny material that ultimately paints Obama as "evil". If people like you don't like the Daily Show you should stop complaining about it and support an effort to make something you think is better. For instance I'd honestly think it'd be funny to see a clever "liberal" version of Stephen Colbert. *shrugs*

Just for some historical perspective I first heard of Lucas proposing a post-Empire "Episode 7, 8 and 9" Star Wars trilogy as far back as the late 1970s even before Empire Strikes Back had made it to the big screen. So what's fascinating to me about all this is not that a third SW trilogy is happening but the fact that will have taken Lucas almost 40 years to accomplish. For me it's pretty much always been a matter of when, not if.

Now obviously 35+ years ago I'm sure Lucas never had a clue that he'd be selling a movie company he founded to Disney for $4+ billion so I'll admit that detail was surprising to me too. But the key idea that Star Wars was always meant to be (at the very least) a trio of trilogies has been Lucas' grand scheme for decades. I just hope for his sake he'll live long enough to see it come to fruition.

NCSoft may have been legally obligated to continue to pay people like Matt for a few months but they had zero obligation to keep the live servers up and running for -any- period of time after their final decision to kill the game. The servers could have been instantly shutdown on August 31st and that would have been all she wrote.

I am by no means saying I'm happy with NCSoft's decision to shut CoH down. But in the grand scheme of things I'm happier we got to play the game for 3 extra months (without updates) than not. *shrugs*

Much of your reasoning here about why SG base raiding failed is sound. But many of the negatives you mention for why players didn't like it were trumped by the simple fact that technically speaking base raids were unbalanced, lag-prone and ultimately unworkable.

Base raiding was an idea that sounded great "on paper" but in reality was a complete nightmare from a development point of view. This is why the Devs finally gave up on it and made the subsequent changes to Prestige costs and decoration collision removal. They realized that bases would never be usable for PvP and decided to do their best to make them useful/obtainable for PvE and roleplay purposes.

I've been playing this game since CoH Beta - I know that base raiding was actually attempted in this game. It was one of the signature features that was to be introduced with CoV in 2005. But there was a very obvious and unfortunate reason why it was dropped: The Devs could never make it work the way they wanted.

Basically having up to 150 players together (two maxed out SGs back when the SG limit was 75 characters) on the same map put way too much strain on the servers and the Devs could never balance it out without horrible lag and bandwidth issues. So the Devs didn't just "pointlessly" remove it from the game - they never got it working in the first place. I won't even dwell on the fact that the Devs released the base raid feature a full year late (fall 2006) and that it only existed on the live servers for a few weeks before they pulled it back and gave up on it for good.

This is why I said what I said: CoH gave up on base raids because they couldn't figure out how to make it work. This also explains why DCUO will limit their game to "1v1 lair raids" because like CoH I'm sure it was much easier to manage things when they only had to deal with the PvP interactions of two characters on their lair maps

We may never know the full reason why NCsoft killed our game, but base raiding was a purely technical/implementation failure.

From the article it looks like DCUO's lairs will be mostly hardwired spaces, with just a few details that can be customized. On the upside it looks like they will have (as Captain-Electric mentioned) a feature I always dreamed CoH SG bases could have - the ability to "assign/attach" your lair's entrance to any door in the game world you want. That way your lair could physically be in a single spot of your choosing, just like a real place in the real world. It's also funny that they are going to allow 1v1 PVP in lairs. I guess since CoH could never figure out how to have full SG vs SG raids being able to fight 1v1 is better than nothing.

I must admit having lairs in DCUO does make me a tiny bit more interested in that game. Unfortunately I think there's still enough to dislike about it that'll still keep me from playing it. *shrugs*

I'm all for the sentiment behind the idea of "getting back on the horse". The problem is that game-wise the only things left to ride are goats, raccoons, and weasels. There really isn't a good game out there that's equivalent to the "horse" that was CoH.

Even if these saved characters can't be used for anything else the simple idea of saving our characters so that "some" version of them exist beyond the CoH server shutdown should be reason enough.

If a full CoH server emulator can't be set up I'm still hoping that someone may be able take the standalone CoH character creator (that was created for the Korean version of the game) and update it with the latest Issue 24 database. If we can't play the game anymore at least we'd be able to tinker with the latest-and-greatest costume creator. *shrugs*

There's no denying that the Incarnate system was CoH's version of "end game raids that never end". But unlike most games it actually didn't seem to be as grindy or boring as other end-game activites tend to be. Let's just say I never got totally bored with it. *shrugs*

Not trying to turn this into a political discussion but it's a shame that with so many billionaires out there tossing "ridiculous figures" of money at the presidential campaigns these days that one of them couldn't spare a couple of million to buy CoH and keep it going. Considering that maybe half of these billionaires out there are basically throwing their money away (when you realize that only one side is going to win the race in November) it doesn't seem like much to ask that some of that "wasted" money couldn't be invested on our game.

Ironically I always wanted CoH's character creator to allow for females with relatively "flat" chests. I have nothing against letting -some- of my girls be huge and bouncy in the chestal region where it made sense for them, but I would have loved to been able to make other characters with less-that-D-cup-as-minimum endowments. Go figure.

Anyway as has been implied earlier in this thread a game like CoH with 2012-era graphics and a costume creator like APB would have been a good start on a "perfect" superhero MMO for me.

Yep I remember those few glorious months when I had a Fire Controller high enough level to have Fire Imps while being able to cast around 10-12 of them at a time. It was ridiculously overpowered and I've long since accepted the need for that nerf, but still it was fun in a "I can kill anything almost instantly and the game was getting very boring because there was no challenge" sort of way.

That's why I mentioned that those were Airman_America's hyperbolic numbers, not the -actual- numbers.

I won't argue the point that the number of players playing this game did decline over its 8.5 year history. It's clearly debatable how much of an effect ED had on that overall.

But what you're trying to suggest is that even if we can blame ED for a drop from 1 million to 200K players (your numbers) then how do you explain that this game has "survived" for 7+ years like that? If that drop was as fatal as you're trying to claim then this game should have more logically shutdown back in like 2007 when that supposedly fatal player dropoff had existed for like a year or more.

Your theory can't explain why this game didn't die 5 or more years ago. That's why your sad attempt to blame ED on the game's death 7 years later is at the very least silly and highly hyperbolic.

Yes the timing of the Captain Mako event was, in hindsight, rather ironic all things considered.

So your theory is that this game was effectively killed by the nerfs that happened as much as 7 years ago and it simply "just took all these years" to finally get shutdown? You do realize how absolutely ridiculous that sounds don't you? Most games out there don't even last 7 years for their entire lifespans.

I've played with dozens of people over the years who didn't even know what things like ED were let alone remained upset that those things ever happened. I'm sorry you don't seem the realize that without ED we would have never been able to have things like IOs or the Incarnate system but I suppose that's your loss. This game was horribly broken BEFORE things like ED and the herding nerfs happened and the obvious fact that the game lasted for so long AFTER "those evil nerfs" is testament to the sound decisions the Devs made all those years ago.

I also would not say that CO "sucks" as a MMO in general.
But I will say that I probably won't consider playing it again -until- CoH no longer exists.