Obitus

Semi-OT, but you work for a game company Hyper? Now that the forum rule against naming other products has crumbled away, you mind sharing? I'd like to support your company's product.

To my knowledge, we have no firm idea about CoH's net profits. We have estimates of CoH's gross revenue. To say that CoH was netting $10 million per year is wild-eyed optimism.

There's reason to believe that CoH was profitable. That is, we can guess based on financial reports and NCSoft's own statements that CoH took in more money than NCSoft spent to keep Paragon operating. But that's about it. Even if CoH was profitable, it surely wasn't profitable enough for NCSoft's purposes.

And that's a real shame. And the Paragon developers got a raw deal. And there's an outside shot that if we make enough noise, someone will pick up the game and keep it going -- but drastically over-stating CoH's profit margin doesn't help our case any.

This may be the last time I get a chance to QFT an Uberguy post. Man, this whole thing sucks so much.

For my part, I don't think I'll ever completely get rid of the MMO bug completely. I've messed with various online games in the past eight years, and I always make at least a token effort at learning the mechanics (which remind me of how shallow most games are with respect to their build customization relative to CoH's), and participating on the forums (which remind me of how shallow most games' communities are, relative to CoH's). Aaaand then inevitably when I play those other games, I'm reminded of how shallow their (aesthetic) character customization options are relative to CoH's.

Other games obviously have other weaknesses, and CoH obviously has other strengths, but those three things are what always drag me back. I think my average period of high interest in a non-CoH MMO is in the two-to-three month range. And with a couple of inadvertent exceptions (credit cards expiring and whatnot), I've never let my CoH subscription lapse.

CoH's great strength, to me, has always been that it's the most welcoming MMO in existence -- both in terms of its gameplay (which is intuitive enough to engage you even if you pick it up on a whim after months of absence, and which allows you so many easily approachable paths to progression whether you have six dozen hardcore guildmates or not), and in terms of its community, which can be prickly at times, but which is nonetheless almost always helpful. If you ask a dumb question on another game's forum, you'll get flamed; if you ask a dumb question here, you might get flamed, but the flamers will also usually answer your question.

So anyway, the concept of an RPG that never really ends will always appeal to me. But no MMO will ever be the same as this one. I suspect I'll just be one of the countless nomads (some might say, "locusts,") who wander from game to game, perpetually dissatisfied.

CoH had a great run, though. We'll always have that.

Yeah, pretty much. We don't know NCSoft's reasoning, so it's impossible to say that any realistic amount of extra CoH subscribers (absentee fans of the game who in an alternate universe subscribed full-time instead of subscribing off-and-on) would have changed anything.

Obviously, the game would have survived with an indeterminately large number of extra subscribers, but that's a pointless observation.

Internet acrimony is bad enough on its own. Pointing fingers now, on this forum? Silly doesn't even begin to cover it.

I wish. If they are going to reconsider though, they'd better do it soon -- because their chances of hiring back the bulk of the development team dwindle with each passing second.

If I were a (former) Paragon employee, I sure as hell wouldn't be jumping for joy at the prospect of going back to work for NC-ambush-layoff-Soft.

Yes, but in the meanwhile they free up cash -- cash that might be used better elsewhere. I don't know enough about the games' industry in general or NCSoft's situation in particular to judge the decision, but I can see why a business might reasonably decide to cut a marginally profitable product in order to reallocate resources.

All I think any of us can say for sure is that the decision sucks, and that Paragon deserved better.

There's no evidence, as far as I know, that CoH wasn't profitable under Freedom, and the statement released by NCSoft about the game's closing tends to suggest that CoH was profitable.

But it seems NCSoft thought that CoH wasn't profitable enough; they lost a lot of money on other ventures, and so they felt they should liquidate the resources they have tied up in CoH. Which is a legitimate thing for them to do, but it sucks.

And if I have the story right, and Paragon's employees were laid off today with no warning -- then that doubly sucks. I know what it's like to get laid off on the Friday before a holiday, and my heart goes out to all the good people of Paragon.

Stay strong heroes, and best of luck in your next adventure.

All of that stuff is in the default installation of Mids. Arcanatime is an option you can select in the configuration menu; once it's selected, every power's activation time should incorporation the server-tick delay.

And because I'm slowly but surely working through some I-24 DPS Blaster DPS comparisons, I can personally vouch for Mids' recently added cancel-on-miss calculations for fire dots. I can't guarantee that they're all right, but the ones I checked were, so the program's got the right idea.

Mids' doesn't have the I-24 changes in yet, though, obviously. For those you'll have to hit up the public Beta.

You make a decent general point. I think the problem is that in order to make sure you're discussing the average performers, you have to hash out what the average performers actually are, first. And as we've seen from the various examples posted in this thread, that's not always a clear-cut evaluation. It's also not always clear that the average performer within a given AT or a given sub-set of builds is the appropriate benchmark for comparison.

And I think Draeth's first reply in the thread probably did the best job of illustrating that point. All things considered, Fire Blast is miles better than its peers -- but that doesn't mean that Fire Blast is broken, for a whole host of reasons; it might mean that its peers are broken. That's a topic worthy of discussion, at the very least.

That's just one example.

Heh, it does kinda make me wonder what the other 65 were. I think kill-the-jedi would've cracked my top 10

Excellent satire. Bravo.

Mental isn't getting Awesomer in I-24, as far as I know.

Yeah, WoW also came at just the right time, just as the internet really hit its stride, accessibility-wise, and just before social media and smart phones and iPads gave everyone a 24/7-entertainment/communication fix. If you pumped the Blizzard VIPs with truth serum, I'll bet even they couldn't tell you exactly why WoW was so successful. To say that it was a perfect storm is, I think, an understatement.

To their credit, Blizzard has managed their success well, but no one should assume that their success is repeatable. When we talk about the MMO industry, we should always remember just how young it is. Given the rate of change in technology and in the culture's response to technology, it's not surprising that the MMO model must undergo massive changes to remain relevant, just as the birth of the MMO model -- less than 15 years ago, by my count, and roughly 8 years ago if you're looking at the culturally relevant MMO -- was itself an adjustment to massive change.

The OP's linked article poses the question, "Is the MMO dying," as if the very suggestion were novel or provocative. But it wouldn't surprise me to see the MMO (as we know it) die off. What's surprising is the presupposition that it can't or shouldn't. We're not talking about the food industry here. Safe to say that online video games will continue in one form or another; beyond that, all that remains is speculation.

LOL, true.

Yeah, the Sith side seemed much more immersive in that sense. Whereas a "good" Jedi had to be (at times, by turns) preachy, wantonly irresponsible, and even perhaps vaguely fascist -- a good Sith is portrayed basically as an honorable, practical person who doesn't want to hurt or kill people. If you set out to play that exact character on the Jedi side, you'd probably end up with more Dark Side points than Light.

It's a measure of how screwed up the alignment system is that the same approach, the same philosophy, can lead you in opposite directions depending on which class you play.

Since you guys have already covered the infamous secret-tryst conversation on Tython, here's another example that absolutely floored me:

Late in the game, there's a Republic planet that defects to the Empire. The defection is organized by one particular man on the planet's high council. This councilor -- I'll call him councilor B -- later has a change of heart, and so he helps you (as a Republic PC) to overthrow the Empire, risking his life to feed you information and whatnot.

Immediately after you win back the planet, you're given a morality check: Arrest councilor B and let him stand trial with the rest of his peers (Dark Side), or forgive him and let him go free (Light Side). That choice is mildly bothersome, but it gets much worse:

Later on, and if you choose to let the councilor go free, you get another morality check: You can either recommend to the Republic that the councilor lose his previous position of power (Dark Side), or you can recommend that he retain his position in the government (Light Side). This one had me gaping stupidly at the screen for several minutes: it's one thing to forgive the guy for previous crimes (crimes that got millions killed, btw) because he "redeemed" himself later. I can (kinda, sorta) understand not throwing him in jail immedaitely after he helped you to liberate the planet.

But you don't appoint that same guy to his old leadership position. That's just flat-out stupid. Why is he entitled not just to his freedom, but to great wealth and power, when the helpless families of all the citizens he caused to die are still out in the rubble wailing?

It's the redemption theme that made me ill throughout the Jedi storylines. The councilor-tastrophe was perhaps the worst example, though not necessarily the most disturbing, when you really think about it: the concept that fallen Jedi can always be redeemed, no matter what atrocities they commit -- that fallen Jedi who are redeemed are simply whisked off to Tython to undergo mystic rehab instead of standing trial for their crimes, that (implicitly) only other Jedi are qualified to judge, redeem, and subsequently to detox their fallen brethren, that anything Jedi do while under the influence of the Dark Side is forgivable -- well let's just say that if I were a Republic citizen, I'd have a serious problem with that.

Redemption is a central theme of the movies, but at least Anakin had the good sense to die after he redeemed himself by chucking the Emperor down that reactor chute. If Luke'd just showed up with a healthy Vader afterwards, at the Ewok camp, can you imagine the response? "Wait, no guys, put away your weapons. It's cool; Dad is totally sorry for slaughtering innocents over the last two decades. And he'll buy your next round of drinks!"

Anyway, the point is that redemption is good, but the way the game constantly throws redemption in your face, constantly forces you to associate no-strings-attached-redemption with goodness and light, and by extension forces you to associate any kind of urge to punish with petty revenge -- all of that made the whole redemption theme look preposterous. And that's really a shame.

Yeah, I think the problem is that the whole thing is just too short. The waistline is too high, or the bust line is too low, or both. FWIW, the fashion rule, as I understand it, is that a very short-skirted dress should have sleeves (or a very low-cut dress should have a long skirt).

So whether you wanna say that the outfit emphasizes Carter's shoulders or elongates the shorts, I think those complaints are basically about the same thing.

If you look at the pic of Megan Fox, you see that the line of the belt on her outfit is lower than her belly button. (Incidentally, the lower edge of the belt traces a more classically reminiscent, cuirass-like line below the abdomen.) Carter is a more attractive woman than Fox, though; if you put Carter in the same outfit (sans the updated headband, which I think is unflattering to Fox), then zowie.

The outfit is unflattering; it emphasizes her shoulders. If you take the outfit out of the equation though, and just concentrate on her silhouette? Dayumn.

That's a woman.

I figured it was serious (delusional) talk, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. He might've been joking.

Still, that's off-topic. This is a good thread with good info.

Yeah, it's not my favored approach. I know there are several outspoken advocates for that playstyle though.

I still think the IO system as it exists today tends to encourage a range-biased playstyle and build strategy. That may change with I-24. Some of those new Resistance IOs are pretty sexy, for instance.

Not sure if srs.

I can't dispute that there will be IOs that are priced over 1 billion after I-24 goes live, but it's worth noting that prices don't exist in a vacuum. AFAIK, there's nothing particular to I-24 that will drastically increase the money supply, so if these new sets are priced sky-high, the natural conclusion is that prices for other things will fall to compensate.

It'd be almost the equivalent of telling SR Stalkers -- and only SR Stalkers -- that their entire secondary should shut off in escort situations. Stalkers as a whole AT lose Hide; they don't lose all of their defenses in escort missions.

Arcana makes a good point. The escort thing will have to be addressed for Devices Blasters. This issue also neatly encapsulates why I hope that Drain Psyche will be retooled in I-24.

Good info, thanks. I haven't kept up on all the new news, so apologies if this is a dumb question -- but do we have the other particulars of the proc? Is it mez protection of a certain magnitude? If so, what's the magnitude?