Oliin

There were, on the old boards, dev comments to the effect that the game was projected for and proffitable at 100k subs. So take that for what you will. My memory might be slightly off, but not about the fact that CoH was generally considered a smashing success at release based on developer comments at the time.

Out of curiosity though, could you plainly explain why you think CoH was a dissapointment thatfailed to meed the dev and publisher expectations? And why it would still be around if it didn't measure up at least somewht? That it didn't break 200k subs doesn't really cut it, and that its subs are currently low doesn't mean it wasn't a success at one point.

One other thing you also shouldn't argue against is the idea that regardless of where it stands now or what happens to it in the future, CoH is a successful MMO.

During its development and at it's release the 'big dog' MMO of the time was EQ which had under 600k subscribers. I believe Lineage had more, but it didn't really have the name recognition here in the US so at the time breaking 100k subscribers was a 'big dea'(tm). CoH managed to beat that by a fairly significant margin while only aiming at what was considered to be a relatively niche market. Not only that, but it managed to sustain its population levels for a very long time due to (reportedly) one of the better retention rates in the industry, and that population level has only relatively recently dropped to around/below the 100k subscriber level.

I don't really see how you could look at that and not see it as a successful game.

Oh yea. If an attack was going to drain 80% of my life and 100% of my endurance then everything around me that isn't a GM or AV had better dang well have been defeated by it.

Basically, from what I can gather, you're saying that you want to pay for access to everything the game has to offer, but you don't want to pay on a monthly basis. You want to pay once and only once for access to all the parts of the game you want to use. Something like pay $60 and get unlimited access to all (current) game features and then never have to pay any kind of reoccurring fee again? Am I reading that correctly?

If I am that's unfortunately not a payment model that NCSoft and Paragon Studios seem to be implementing. It generally looks like they're more expanding on the regular subscription model than anything else. And aside from incarnate access, you pretty much can pay for only what you want. It's just that in some cases you have to pay for the things you want monthly.

Ok, I don't know about you, but I didn't actually work for any of my vet rewards. I basically paid $45 each for them and now they'll be worth $15. Plenty of things I've paid for get devalued over time (cars, books, movies, most of my video games except for Panzer Dragoon Saga, and the good majority of the comic books I bought in the '90s) and I don't see how this is really all that different.

Heck, I'll keep on getting stuff faster now as well so fun times about that.

What did it lock out for you? The only thing related to GR that someone who bought it might loose access to is the incarnate content, and that's only if they stop paying for being a VIP.

I find myself confused by this statement.

Are you suggesting that I'm getting 'the shaft' because other players can get what I now have faster than I managed to get it?

I haven't lost anything, and in fact since I've been here since a very short bit after release I'm getting more stuff with the new version of vet rewards. For those folks who've been here a long time but not long enough to have all the vet rewards, the new version puts all the things they didn't yet have much more immediately within reach.

I fail to see any form of 'shafting' in this setup.

There was also James Franco in that who's generally considered to be a pretty decent actor.

I have to admit though, I've found myself conflicted by Your Highness. The comedy in it was absolutely horrible. I mean, lowbrow humor has its place and can be funny, but this wasn't even good lowbrow humor. On the other hand, if your ignored the bad comedy the other half of the movie was actually a pretty good, if somewhat overly 'standard', fantasy film.

It's just that horrible, pathetic attempt at comedy that took a pretty serviceable 6/10 fantasy film, tied an albatross around its neck and turned it into about a 3.

Kosh? Is that you?

So, I know about the underground trial that's coming up, but has the second one been announced yet and I just missed it? Or is it going to be added later like in a half-issue release?

I'm expecting(hoping) it's the latter rather than the former. I don't have anything solid in the way of comments I can point you towards though, it's more just a general feeling I have based on this producer's letter ("other weeks we will release a new power set or an entire costume set") and various other comments the devs have made. At the very absolute worst I'd imagine they'd allow purchase of a 'set' of costume pieces when the last piece becomes available.

Have any of those been on Justice? It's where I play and I generally see a spike in player activity around 11pm-1pm here on the East Coast. I've actually been on a good number of trials (and TFs) in that time period.

He was pretty good in The Gift actually, and he gave a valiant (if horribly overdone) effort in Much Ado About Nothing. But yea, generally he's not exactly what anyone would call emotive.

See, I don't really think that fantasy is a genre unto it's own. Fantasy stories are stories about the fantastic, supernatural and myth. As a genre it cribs heavily from the vast wealth of historical fantasy (myths and folktales) out there. Sure there's a line between the two of them, but it's blurry and hazy at best. Heck, some of the more well-regarded fantasy novels out there are heavily steeped in mythology. Take Tolkien's works and American Gods for example.

It's not that I don't agree with you about 'traditional' dragons being a bad fit for CoH. I just don't agree with your argument. Personally I just think that CoH tends to lean more towards Lovecraft and the old sci-fi serials than anything else and as such dragons thrown into the mix heedlessly would have a good chance to clash with the setting.

Handled carefully it could very well work I'm sure, but dragons just for the sake of dragons would strike me as weird. Especially tiny dragon pets as henchmen.

Well, at least GW2 is free past the boxed set since they're following the paymet model of the first game. So buy the box, play forever for free ... and maybe buy a costume set or unlock of some kind every once in a while.

You'll really only have to worry about 2 games then, and I imagine Wildstar won't be out for a while yet.

For what it's worth, GW2 is apparently designed like a standard MMO. Shared zones that appear to be heavy with events and (assuming what they claim is correct) a heavy focus on encouraging players to actually play together (not even necessarily in groups).

Watch some more of the starting zone videos. There's a giant boss fight for the Norn and Humans too which makes it a pretty good bet there'll be one for the Asua and Sylvari to boot.

To be fair, RPGs as a genre aren't really well known for their quality voice overs. To be honest for the most part just consist of a lot of random and bad pseudo-european accents.

Yea they do. He's been on a couple of the panel videos I've seen and he co-wrote one of the Guild Wars novels they came out with a bit back. It's actually not all that bad considering it's a tie-in novel.

If anyone ever comes up with an effective context-sensitive censor then they clearly deserve to be a fairly rich person. They probably won't be, but dangit they'll deserve to be.

Oddly, outside of fantasy gaming I barely ever hear it used for either of those things. Usually hear it used as an insult or to refer to something being a weird amalgam of two other things.

That said, I'm not saying these boards don't go a little overboard on censoring things. More that knowing it is touchy it makes sense sense to me that they'd censor it. Give it a while and it'll probably drop off these type of censors though. Currently it's a pretty decent second-string insult, but the general perceived severity of it as one seems to be markedly decreasing in recent years (likely due to increased use of a lot of the alternate definitions for the word).

Wait ... why's it stupid for censoring a word that can be used as a relatively derogatory term? I know it's not generally used that way much anymore but it's still not a very nice thing to call someone.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that Incarnate powers operate outside the realm of AT mods.

You know, just from the movies alone it seems to me like we'd pretty much end up devastated.

Call me crazy, but that actually looks more like one of the random Evangelion-ish characters based off Rei than her specifically to me. I kind of want to say someone from Nadesico, but it's been more than 10 years since I saw either so I'm probably way off.

So it's a 4th edition thing and not from earlier then? So its 2005 trumps Rainbow's End's publication date of 2007. If you like the whole Augmented Reality thing you should read the book though. It did a whole heck of a lot with that sort of AR.

Yup. Felt it here in Charlottesville. There was a 3.4 last night at around this time that I noticed too.