SlickRiptide

Try The Secret World from Funcom.

Yes. It happens that way sometimes when businesses close.

With luck, the employees of the studio will receive either a severance package or offers of employment elsewhere within NCSoft. You never know, though.

A local restaurant near where I live closed one day, without warning. One day, they were open. The next there was a sign on the door thanking customers for their business. They were part of a chain and the corporate office had decided to close several of the down to cut costs.

The employees were given two week's notice of the closing, and no sort of severance that I heard about.

I hope that the employees of the studio are being treated better than that. It sounds right now as if it could be a situation where they came to work, someone called Matt from Corporate and said "Send everyone home, NOW." and that was that.

According to Arcanaville there are several thousand codes in the lists and Hit Streak intimated that more could be coming.

They're going to some effort to make plenty available for everyone who uses the forums and then some. Better to assume that you'll find one, than not.

CK is a good ten years older than Penny, if not more. As you say, his portrayal in SSA2.1 is borderline juvenile, which is what pushed me towards his behavior being primarily overcompensation ("I will prove to you that only I truly see you and appreciate your true value").

It might be that he's simply deluded himself into thinking that she'd only remain with him if he was her peer, so he behaves the way that he imagines/half-remembers that children behave without really thinking about the fact that she's now about the same age he was when he underwent his "transformation".

I'm actually kind of curious how this thread turned into that perception. I don't see where anything of the sort has happened. The closest I can come is the complaint that making the Skulls entirely ethnic now is something of a contradiction to how they've been portrayed for the last eight years.

I don't see it as a game breaker but I also don't see it as a minor nitpick when there are so many other ways of portraying the same information.

Otherwise, I don't really see where anything that's going on here amounts to demands for unswerving adherence to canon or whatever.

Put another way, I don't see where justifying the changes in light of the history of the game setting is some kind of demand that lore never deviate from previous canon. At worst, it's a request to express the "deviation" in terms of the established canon instead of ignoring it. I fail to see how this could be a bad thing.

To wit - If the Skulls ARE an ethnic gang through and through, where is the ethnic neighborhood now that Perez Park is sealed off and nobody is living there? Unless King's Row turned into Little Prussia overnight, the question deserves a couple of minutes worth of thought by whoever is doing the writing.

It does make one wonder what is going on.

Consider that Arenanet is basically the top of the NCSoft North America pyramid these days and they have Guild Wars 2 in world-wide release this week and they are located 15 minutes away from downtown Seattle.

It's almost inconceivable that they would NOT be at Pax Prime, even if the rest of the company was financially incapable of going.

I won't engage in public speculation about it but I'd surely be curious about what it means.

Last I heard, Paragon Studios is not attending Pax. Hopefully that means that they are so busy that they can't spare the time. Heck, if it was about the expense of the thing, they could all just crash on the couches of Arenanet. :-p

*shrug* Red names have already responded to some of these questions, though they've put the responses on the beta forums which is arguably where they belonged.

I don't really see what the point is of entering a thread that has stayed more or less on the original topic and advising people to not discuss the topic.

If you think it's much ado about nothing, well, that's a valid opinion and it's certainly worth sharing. You would hardly be the only person to hold such an opinion.

If you think that you're "waking people up" or something, or telling them to stop wasting their time, then I can only reply that it's our own time to waste. Kind of like doing an AE farm. The fact is that many/most of the people on both "sides" are veterans who have a pretty good idea already just how much the studio bends in any particular direction. We've been doing this for eight years or more in some cases.

Blanket statements that "the devs do this or don't do that or don't listen or will do just what they're going to do without regard to player opinion" are the sorts of statements that should be thought through before being made. It only takes one example to make it provably false, after all.

In the end, though, there's no harm from discussing people's opinions, especially when the topic is both currently topical and the thread train is more-or-less on its original track. If the whole thing is just the opinion of a small vocal minority and the devs do end up proceding along the path they've already laid out, then we still all had our say. I don't see where that should bother anyone or require anyone to "educate" or "wake up" or otherwise address the players involved in the discussion instead of addressing the discussion itself.

Discussion is fun and stimulating. If the topic fails to interest a reader, the reader is always free to go read something else, right? If everyone was a fatalist and took the atitude that "Well, they're just going to do what they do so why venture an opinion?" then what would be the point of ever discussing the game at all?

They're free to do what they want. It's their game. We DO all realize that, whether we think it's a case of splitting hairs about paint color or we think it's the studio changing the paint and saying "it was this color the whole time". Spirited discussion is a good thing. Nothing is gained by discouraging it or "rescuing" people from their delusions of importance. They typically have opinions even if they don't have delusions about the importance of those opinions.

Read again, GG. I didn't say it was gone. I said they were changing it which, as you well know, is what Protean said.

For the last eight years they have NOT been a "mono-ethnic" gang. Why change it now just to change it?

King's Row has never been portrayed as a community that could be called ethnic at all. The lore on the Petrovic brothers is that their ethnic community was located near Perez Park, in what amounts to no-man's land today.

The Skulls could not own King's Row the way they do and still realistically be an ethnic gang. They would have to both recruit from the indigenous community and defeat and absorb the inidigenous gangs just as they did to the Shadows. Either that or the Petrovics are just so bad-*** that they are able to fend off the Hellions single(double?) handedly and the rest of the gang is just for show.

The question in the end, is not "is it realistic?" but "how does it improve the game?" That's a subjective question but from my subjective point of view the answer is, "it does not".

Better to let the Petrovics be the ethnic leaders of a gang that succeeded by outgrowing its roots.

*NOTE* - At the current time, the gang is still a diverse one in the beta, though it seems it might be prone to some sort of "clumping" by the RNG. It's not really an issue, especially since they've stated that they're dispensing with the current bad-movie-dialog as a vehicle for portraying an "accent".