Obitus

And they won't defend their ownership of your characters, because (among other reasons) you made a good-faith effort to delete them.

Seriously, the EULA isn't iron-clad. It's a giant exercise in CYA (and in this case, as noted earlier, the CYA is that NCsoft doesn't want players' claim to their characters interfering with NCSoft's business operation, not because NCsoft secretly wants to mine CoH's servers for the hidden comic-book gold lurking in every 1,000 players' bios). You can draw up an agreement that says anything and everything; that doesn't mean that what you say is legally binding.

And it especially doesn't matter in this context; every piece of software hits you square in the face with a wall of legalese. The reasonable expectation that consumers will read and digest every word of every software agreement dwindles as we speak. We're getting to the point where software companies may have actually CYA'd themselves into making their EULAs effectively worthless.

It's a noble objection to raise, and I think you may on to something generally; more and more of our collective knowledge and experiences will be stored virtually, and at some point the careless disposition of that knowledge may become a serious problem.

I just don't think this is a situation that fits particularly well with that narrative. Different strokes I guess.

If you made a good-faith effort to delete it, then NCSoft should lose any tenuous right they might have claimed to your intellectual property, even if they can technically scour their servers to pull your character out of the virtual dust bin.

In any case, NCSoft doesn't want your characters, so in practice it's a non-issue.

That's sensible, but the lifetime subscriptions offered in other games are a different animal, because they're an explicit and obvious gamble: you agree to pay a high up-front fee, one that is usually described in large lettering as non-refundable, on the basis that, if the game should survive beyond a certain point (say, 1.5-2 years), you'll have free gameplay forever thereafter (for sufficiently limited values of "forever").

Buying a 12 month subscription to COH only to find that CoH is closing in 3? Well that's no problem if the company closing down your game agrees to refund monies spent on a service they can no longer provide, but otherwise? Sketchy business. You're agreeing to pay for a given period of server access, and they're agreeing to provide that server access for that period. When they can no longer provide, you should no longer have to pay.

As for the EULA caveats, are they as prominent as the giant bold red numbers showing the spectacular potential SAVINGS for long-term subscriptions on the account management page? I doubt it. Like Jack said, there are disclaimers and contracts, and there are agreements made in good faith. The law at least theoretically tends to take a dim view of any agreement (or more appropriately, advertisement scheme) that isn't made in good faith.

Certainly not an expert on the subject, but I think perhaps the question isn't so clear-cut. The EULA is displayed every time we log into the game, and I'm sure it's displayed when we first sign up for an account. It may even be displayed every time we buy points for the Paragon Market (honestly not sure about that one offhand).

But whether the display of a lengthy and frankly abstruse EULA qualifies as a conspicuous and easily understood written notification of the refund policy, prior to sale, is another question. That, by the way, is the standard in California for store refund policies. I'm not even sure our situation with NCSoft is comparable or analogous, legally, but you could make a hell of an argument that NC's committed a fraud in the inducement if NC tries to foist a non-superhero game on us in return for subscription fees intended to pay for a superhero game. Likewise, and perhaps even more compelling, NC's taking virtual currency purchased with the express and unambiguous intent to buy items available in, and thematically appropriate to, COH -- and then replacing it with a different virtual currency, for a different set of intrinsically worthless virtual items that have an entirely different theme, context, and perhaps even price scheme?

Let's just say that that's a pretty extreme switcharoo. If I have a gift card from a hardware store, for power tools, and the hardware store suddenly goes out of business, then at least I have an opportunity to use the gift card in the store's waning days (and hey, if I go at the right time I might even benefit from a clearance sale!). The hardware store doesn't hand me a gift card for a women's shoe store instead and tell me to GTFO. The very notion is absurd.

What's worse this case is that NCSoft isn't going out of business. Yeah, they had a rough fiscal quarter, but they're not filing for bankruptcy. They're not pleading poverty with our sub fees or paragon points; they're certainly capable of refunding our money. They're simply forcing us to spend money we agreed to spend on one product on a different one instead, because hey, they like money. And unlike a real store, NCSoft is both low on selection (selling, as far as I know, only video games) and unable to offer any lasting value (tangible items) in return for our buck. What's even worse is that NCSoft is only one game publisher with a fairly limited selection of games, and games' value is almost entirely subjective. They're art, if you will, and NCSoft doesn't have any other art in the style that we agreed to buy (superhero-themed games).

So to torture another analogy, NCSoft sold us a Picasso and gave us a Velasquez. Except that our Velasquez has no monetary value, and by NCSoft's own policy, we're not allowed to sell it or give it away (sell our game accounts). Its value, as far as we're concerned, is purely a matter of preference, and because it's a product we never agreed to buy, our preference for or against that product cannot be presumed. Almost by definition, we're being cheated.

All of this stuff, frankly, is so new that I don't think any of us armchair consumer lawyers should assume that anything NCSoft decides to do with money we spent on CoH's post-closure period is legal simply because NCSoft stated an intent to do it.

Yes, FWIW, I think the best approach is to emphasize that we care, a lot. If we come off as sympathetic, then we might win some PR points and move NCSoft (or someone else, who can prod NC) to do something for us.

Trying to argue that somehow we're entitled to NC's charity because we care is significantly different, and I think far less sympathetic.

And yeah, the IP issue is a sticky one. I've personally never subscribed to the notion that NC could, say, prevent you from later publishing a comic book featuring a character you used in City of Heroes. Some people on the forums are fond of arguing that position; I don't take EULAs so literally. They're only as binding as the applicable court says they are in any given case.

But there is a very sensible reason for that IP clause in NC's documentation; the clause is there, in part, to address (and from NC's point of view, hopefully to invalidate) arguments like the one Electric made earlier. The player doesn't have a legal stake in the game's operation simply because his intellectual property (or the community's IP as a whole) happens to dwell on NCSoft's servers. NC doesn't have any designs on our characters, per se; they just don't want to have their operations interfered with on the spurious basis that we've invested our intellects into their product. And I can sympathize with that desire on their part, at least in principle.

Hey, I sympathize with your point of view; I really do.

But it's NCSoft's intellectual property. That's why they make us agree to that clause about our characters' likenesses, backstories, etc when we log into the game. And NCSoft isn't (necessarily) destroying the information in question (knowledge, as you call it). They're simply taking it offline.

You are both entitled to record and capable of recording your characters' data (via TonyV's excellent tool or by hand if you wish) and then deleting every hint of your characters before the servers shut off, to avoid the prickly IP issue. But to imply that NCSoft has some sort of moral obligation to keep the game open for the sake of knowledge? That's a stretch. Your passion is admirable, but that argument isn't going to get anyone anywhere.

EDIT to add the original comment, to clarify the point to which I'm responding:

Ok, I'll treat you like a rational adult for a moment: for the record, I didn't read all of Electric's post; what I did read suggested a rah-rah tone that I think is mildly depressing given the reality of the situation.

But that TL;DR stuff is simply obnoxious. If you don't wanna read the post, then skip over it. Or if you wish to be witty, then apply your no-doubt prodigious brain and invent a real joke instead of spending three seconds to find a beaten-to-death meme on Google image search. Until then?


I commented in support of Electric's decision not to censor himself. That's it. I thought it was silly for him to withdraw his comment simply because he was mocked in the most unimaginative way possible.

Yep, that's the appropriate response. Good on you.

Yeah, SWTOR's UI customization was introduced in the much-ballyhooed 1.2 Patch, sometime around April, IIRC. As far as I know, you still can't have more than five ability bars on the screen at the same time, though. And you're right; SWTOR is one of the few games in which I would actually want more than five bars on my screen. Talk about faux complexity; the game has ability bloat out the yin-yang, but build options are about as shallow as your average bird bath.

Builds that are predicated on DoT applications and/or situational triggers (on-crit talents, for instance) are still a nightmare to play even with the customizable UI; AFAIK the only visual cues for such builds (like my Sage) are the tiny little icons under the opponent's status bar, which can be moved, but who really wants to have a UI element sitting in the center of the screen?

So anyway, SWTOR's UI is customizable, but it still needs work. The UI's a pretty minor issue for me*, but I can understand why Bioware got hammered over it; if you're gonna design a game in 2012 that copies WoW's gameplay so slavishly, then you have to accept that all the rest of your features will be slavishly compared with WoW's.

* - My disappointment with the game, as a long-time Bioware fan, is more of the death-by-a-thousand-cuts variety. They got the story right, and almost nothing else. And even TOR's story is vaguely annoying simply because the rest of the MMO experience is so lackluster; if you want to play through for the story, you're constantly reminded that the story would be so much better if it weren't stretched so thin, mixed with obvious filler, and stripped of all meaningful choices for the sake of the MMO leveling curve.

In a way, CoH handles story better than SWTOR. The latter's story is arguably more immersive and more (for lack of a better term) front-and-center, but at least CoH generally lets you concentrate on one story at a time, rather than doing a class quest, and a planet quest, and a bajillion side quests, all at the same time, in long chunks based not on your character's obvious motivations, but rather, on your geographical location. Quest-hub style questing takes all of the urgency out of the story. "So you say my ally is wounded in an enemy base and taking heavy fire? Suuuure, I'll be there ASAP, and by ASAP, I mean after I handle this other dude's gopher quest, and that guy's data-gathering task, and this gal's code-breaking mission ... and who am I kidding? By the time I get there I won't even remember why I'm going there, but hey, the map highlights the entrance to the instance, so whatevs."

Yeah, I agree. My point was to emphasize the amount of content in the game; even without any of the group content, CoH has much much more content than your average single-player RPG has. Whether that content is of sufficient quality for a single-player game is another question, of course.

Ideally, you'd get a big-time overhaul of the game before it were ported to single player. Making the group content work for single players would be among the easier things on the list, I would think -- but the more suggestions you make to change the game for a theoretical single-player version, the more I believe you stray from the spirit of the question posed in this thread.

Dunno. CoH obviously wasn't designed as a purely single-player game, so there are aspects of it that would probably be considered inadequate in the single-player market -- but that said, CoH also has a veritable mountain of content, love it or hate it.

Hell, even if a single-player port of the game simply cut out all of the group content in CoH (task forces, trials), the amount of story-arc content is absolutely staggering -- hundreds and hundreds of hours' worth. What's the playthrough time of the average single-player RPG these days? 20 hours? 40ish if you're lucky?

I'm not saying the game would be competitive as it is on the single-player market; the age of the engine alone would make CoH a hard sell there -- but I don't believe the game would have to be altered all that much to be a great value as a single-player game. In short, there are advantages and disadvantages to the game's MMO-focused development history, and the good far outweighs the bad.

(EDIT: Also, the character creator in COH absolutely crushes any character creator in any single-player RPG that I've ever played. You're simply not going to find a development house willing to put anywhere near as much time and attention into a character creator for a one-off-sale game. To the extent that single-player games give people more-than-MMO customizability, it's usually through a given game's after-market modding community.)

Yeah, NCSoft's problem was Aion, AFAIK. Not GW2. If anything, GW2 appears to have outsold expectations. Either that, or NC/ArenaNet made an informed decision not to over-commit server resources to the GW2 launch. In other words, they'll accept whatever downsides come from an over-crowded launch in order to avoid the longer-term population/PR problems that too many servers represent. (Most recently and notably, SWTOR launched with a bajillion servers and they're still paying for it, IMO.)

Now that you mention it, it's kind of extraordinary that NCSoft's other properties could do so badly that even the unreserved and spectacular success of GW2's launch couldn't save CoH.

(EDIT: SWTOR and GW2 probably aren't directly comparable, given that GW2 didn't launch as a subscription-based service. Perhaps I'm just projecting some of my disappointment with SWTOR onto the matter at hand.

In any case, as someone who has no experience with GW2, I've found this thread quite interesting. Thanks to all involved.)

Excellent job on the video.

Geko was high, though.

Yeah, one of the few useful lessons I've learned in my limited travels to MMOs not called CoH is never to read general discussion forums.

This forum is the one exception to the rule -- and even here, I've always found that the class forums are far superior.

There's an option to make the energy builders behave like toggles, or not, based on your preference. I don't remember if that was/is the default setting or not, but it probably should be.

FWIW, Specializations and the gear revamp mean that you can get some pretty significant mitigation just from gear bonuses.

Ha, fair enough. Different strokes and all that. I just wish that there were an alternative to Gandalf eyebrows or Uncle-Leo-from-Seinfeld, so-angry-they-look-fake eyebrows.

Spent an hour or so in CO today; it was like an entirely new game to me, despite that I was pretty dialed in back in the day (um, 2010ish? Before the F2P model and probably before the Perfect World buyout).

The new build options (specializations) seem very interesting, but that's just my inner power gamer talking. It'll probably take me a week just to settle on a build before I start playing -- and with my luck, I'll find that I can't stand playing.

Incidentally, I didn't have to link my old Cryptic account to a new Perfect World account to download and fire up the game. Apparently, you need to link your account to post on the forums or to buy Zen points (Perfect World's currency for use in the Cryptic Store), but the old Cryptic account works just fine for subscribing and logging into the game. Just thought I'd mention that for anyone who's put off by the prospect of the extra, uh, virtual paperwork. I actually think the fact that my accounts aren't linked is good; it forces me not to spend any extra money til I decide whether I like the game or not.

Don't knock your local McDonald's.

Yeah, FWIW, I cancelled on Friday after hearing the bad news, just so I could write a heated criticism of NCSoft's decision in the exit survey -- but according to NC's website, I was auto-renewed on Thursday, so I won't know til the very end of the month whether my VIP status will actually lapse.

(Bad timing, eh? Story of my life.)