Schismatrix

Fair enough. While i personally dislike the distortions of copyright law the Mouse has helped inflict upon America i will admit they've also done a good job of managing properties like Marvel. Even if that mostly consists of not meddling too much.

The kids aspect of Disney is of little relevance to me.

i always maintained it was so that all of his posts would have a point regardless of actual relevant content.
...

As for Arcanaville, i suspect it was all the times she countered all his unsupported assertions and contrafactual statements with actual hard numbers and clear logic. Nothing's worse than making some absurd, sweeping, completely un-thought-out proposal and then having the actual horrible results of that assertion clearly modeled and explained.

A few times near the end it actually got him to do some math when suggesting changes, which was pretty cool to see. Although the way it forced him to scale back his proposals to something fairly realistic must have rankled a bit. i don't think he ever accepted that it would be unbalanced to have one AT be able to deal and survive more damage than all the others right out of the character creator.

Still, i will miss those posts. i would love to see a game created according to J_B's specs. It would be one glorious whole.

i'd buy you one, but it's pretty unlikely i'll bother getting any at all.
(Lotteries are a tax on people who don't understand statistics. Mind you, i do pay that tax on occasion, but not very often.)

Legal reasons mostly, i would expect.

Actually quite a few people cared. Not just players of those games either.

Still, i personally was less unhappy over the cancellation of the other games because i'd tried most of them and found them not terribly appealing. i knew that NCsoft had a habit of cancelling games that were doing poorly with low populations, but the other 4 MMOs had considerably more warning of their terminations, and CoH was not doing as badly as the other cancelled MMOs by any metric i was aware of when the axe fell.

And the Garriott thing had given me a fairly low opinion of NCsoft management long before 8/31. i'd merely hoped that their Western division was an adequate firewall against the main company's practices. A misplaced hope in the end.

Good luck with the baby. You'll need more than luck if it truly does end up carrying on the Pingu legacy. There is almost nothing the Pingus wouldn't try to do just to see if they could and usually the answer was yes, we can.

What Billz said.

*shrugs*
i suppose that's one way of trying to find a silver lining.

Failed how, considering not one of those projects ever reached closed beta stage AFAIK? They certainly didn't reach the stage where it was even revealed to the public, which usually happens before even the closed beta stage with most games. If you're tasked to develop a project and then management changes their mind about it before it even reaches the beta stage that's not a failure on your part. It's not like you actually released something and it bombed, the bosses just decided to drop one project and start another.
Unless you happen to know more about those never completed projects than i've seen anywhere else... Well?

i've worked on several projects where clients changed their minds and redesigned everything and we ended up scrapping most of what had been done so far and starting over. Only an idiot would consider that failing. Or a Brillig, perhaps.

So... we should pick on Cardinal Richelieu?

Which makes it even more amusing.

Right, on with the show.

No, you're not sorry at all. Also, i'm not sure if you're actively lying, profoundly stupid, or just good at self-deception. You're certainly not talented enough to be all three at once. Your post is the sort of non-apology apology smegheads make when called out on acting like an *** and feel they should apologize for appearance's sake, but actually don't regret acting like a human waste stain.

In other words you're still behaving like a poorly-socialized-12-year-old. Although i have to admit your writing quality is better than what would usually be expected at that age, so i suspect your physical age is older than that, and it merely reflects your level of emotional development.

Moving on...

Once the game servers and forums go dark i will still be checking through Titan and other sources to see what, if anything, happens regarding City of Heroes. While i'm not exceedingly confident that it will be revived, if it does i will be there once again saying, "Shut up and take my money!" In the meantime i will miss the game, but there are so many other things i could be doing that CoH being gone will not be an enormous tragedy for me; it's but one of many creative outlets and social activities for me. i'll still miss it and the friends i've made in game quite a lot. And i feel for those for whom it was their main venue for socializing and entertainment. Games and communities like City of Heroes are sadly few and far between.

Empathy? Are you getting to get some sort of vicarious thrill from imagining the unhappiness your responses cause?

It's certainly not any sort of "tough love" BS. Everyone already knows that the game servers are being shut down and the various efforts to continue the CoH experience post shutdown will probably not succeed, but it's important enough to them that they intend to try anyway, so really empathy has little to do with your posts outside of a sado-masochistic context.

Very classy. While i do have several queer (and proud of it) friends, they would probably only laugh at your poorly-socialized-12-year-old antics. i found it offensive, but then i suppose it's because insults are always more offensive when they're aimed at a friend than when they're aimed at yourself. (For me anyway, i imagine it's not the case for sociopaths and those with no empathy at all.)

You, monkeyslap, are a right prat.

Oh, well that's totally different.

Right then, off to do something else.

Not possible. (IMHO, YMMV, BBR)

Like Aggelakis said, there are no Devs left to to make any changes to the game like you're suggesting. "Whoever's left" are simply techs who can push the existing "buttons" for events or reset/restart a server if something goes wrong. The programmers required to code in new events or modify code/NPC behavior were part of the Development team, and they were laid off with the rest of Paragon Studios on August 31st.

That's why even items like the cybertech pack, Super Packs 2, Sorcery, and Bio Armor that were ready for release can't be accessed in the markets despite some of them becoming visible in selection screens; the Devs needed to hook the items up to the market and authentication system were laid off without warning months ago, so there's no one left to enable access to anything new or add anything new.

The game's termination came as a complete surprise to everyone at Paragon Studios. Had they known the studio was going to be shut down they might've been able set up access or a special event beforehand. Now? Not so much.

And for many people firmly committed to a particular narrative no amount of facts or proof will sway them. Take a look Donald Trump and other "birthers", for example. Barring time travel you can't get much stronger proof than your birth being announced in the local paper in addition to having it repeatedly certified by the records department that has paper documents. There's been more proof produced than for any other president ever, and it's still "nuh-uh, I mean 'real' proof, like maybe a movie of the event that was sealed in a tin with the director of the FBI's signature, and if you do produce that I'll demand you also take me there in a time machine to witness it or I'll still doubt it, and even then..." Seriously, sometimes you have to recognize that there's no point in bothering; they already know the truth and no amount of facts will alter that.

One thing that i have to say about Arcanaville that i admire because i've never been able to do it myself: when she criticizes a post she refrains from directly criticizing the poster. Even if a stupid post is actually one of the most intelligent and inspired posts by that poster she still sticks to criticizing the post. i sometimes wish i had that sort of self-restraint.

It's more accurate to say Cryptic licenced the setting of Champions. They didn't licence the Hero System. The funny thing is that i've played Champions many times over the years not once i have i seen anyone use the stock setting out of the box other than using one of the sample adventures as a quick introduction. Every single game i've played either reworked the setting extensively or abandoned it completely.

Still, it works as a somewhat silly, cheesy superheroic game. Still not overly fond of the 1980s action figure character aesthetic, but that's just personal aesthetics.