Scarlet Shocker

It's hardly surprising they've pushed the boat out on this one for a number of reasons:

1. It's GW2's first ever holiday event since launch. To not have something special would have sent the wrong message
2. It's their first event after the announced closure of CoH. Again, not doing something good would have been seen as strange
3. CoH: No devs. There wasn't anything they could have done. It's likely that we'd have got something interesting had things been different, but with I24 just landed probably not quite as cool. But there's a lot of legacy stuff so it all adds up to content
4. It's hardly surprising then that GW2 is having a bigger, bolder event. It's NCSoft's one working product in the west now. They have to make it work or they may as well abandon the western market completely.
5. No, they ain't having any more of my money. End of!

You make a good point Mr Tow. That's an ace tat - it's the darkness that Marcus Cole never showed in game - his goatee-stroking alter-egos did that enough and I'm running out-of-hyphens too.

Mr Tow, the only way you can better this is by showing us your full body arachnos tattoo that you've kept secret for all this time.

The test server was "repurposed." Zwillinger made that quite clear.

It has always been a condition of the test server that players may be wiped and it is not a server to play the main game on. There have not always been backups made - and let's not forget with the list merge they suddenly found themselves with not one, but two test servers. One from the NA shards and one from the EU.

To maintain both of those would have been a waste of resources so however you cut it, wiping one test server is not a portent of doom.

There was once a TV studio. Made a TV series. It's genesis was some pseudo-hippie type with an idea about a pioneers in outer space. It ran for three seasons and then got cancelled. It was doing ok, nothing spectacular but the scheduling slot was more value than the series was bringing in.

So it died a death. The fans were really sad. They'd loved it and were loyal and the show got constant reruns across all networks and gathered new fans but never quite enough to make serious money.

Then a few years later there was a big Sci-Fi movie came out. Proved to be a huge blockbuster. And the studio that made the TV series thought "We need to cash in on this wave of sci-fi stuff that's coming out. Let's commission a new movie." But one bright exec put his hand up and said "We got one. It's got a track record. It's popular. It's got fans. It just never made quite enough money but we could take that IP and make a movie."

So they did. It was a success. So much so the movie spawned a sequel. And another. And another. And the studio realised it had a blockbuster on its hands. So they created a new, updated TV series. That proved to be even more popular than the three season original and ran for many many more seasons. And there were other TV series spin offs. At least 3 other series. And more movies. They even made a cross over movie featuring the cast of the original series and the new updated series. (It was a dogpile but still made $$$)

It's called Star Trek. You may have heard of it. And it's why you never ever sell an IP you own.

This looks really useful but... I can't seem able to use it properly. It doesn't actually do much so far as I can tell. I'm guessing I've done something wrong but... /em headscratch

That fits with the "refocusing" blurb on the original announcement. Buy a chunk of NCSoft and get them to turn their resources to mobile and social P2P games and axe anything that doesn't fit with that.

Again, that doesn't make sense.

We know some of the top Devs on CoH were drafted into this new game reasonably recently. Therefore it's not an unreasonably wild guess to suggest it was finally CoH2

We'd seen Freedom show signs of turning the game around and it was becoming more popular - and probably a lot more profitable. Certainly from my own experience I remained subscribed and usually bought £10 worth of points every month. Previously I'd paid for my sub and gotten a booster pack when they came out (except the dance/sport emote rip-off) so clearly my own spend went up and I'd notice Defiant, which is always a relatively low pop server spring to life with Freedom.

This all points to NCSoft being very happy with the overall state of the game and signing off on CoH2 as a modern successor. For all we love CoH it does look dated compared to more modern games and probably had a limited shelf-life if we're ultimately honestly pragmatic about it.

NCSoft made the call to invest in a new game from Paragon and then soon(ish) after kills one of it's improving games and the potential new world beater? CoH2 could put both other Superhero games in the shade quite easily and become a standout game.

Still doesn't make sense.

Oh, I'm sure they dreamed up an unrealistically high number, wrote it down on the back of a napkin and watched the reader(s) choke as s/he read it and walked off giggling.

Because there could have been a nice tasty revenue stream - with nothing for them to do but count the money. They could have quite happily licensed the game and left the rest to a new team and taken a revenue stream for sitting on their collective arses!

This

NCSoft have just said to us, and more importantly from a business point of view to their shareholders:

I have no idea. Why aren't I playing an electric?



what?

Not everyone wants a level bump. It would need code to give players a choice I guess. It's a lot of work - and there isn't anyone around to do that kind of stuff.