Starsman

You missed the point big time. Sure in the blog (if you read it) he does mention a bit on the sexualization, but it's mostly about proportions. I wont put words on the guy's mouth but basically he is talking about the artist in charge of the design, not about the game in general. Here is a quote from the blog:

Think it depends a lot on the race. There are some tiny "cute" baby looking race that seems to be rather flat-chested (and similiar to Tera's controversy "pedo bait" race)

I think what we have seen so far are the defaults for every race.

I been googling around and so far have not seen anybody customization, everything I find seems to be on facial customization. There are some things I can't see due to work filters though, like youtube vidoes.

1 star reviews help spread that thought.

This game has no option to create "lemonboobs". The idea of lemonboobs are boobs that look like sideways lemons, often with nipples that tend to not only be pronounced but also on top of an already pronounced aurora.

Basically this:



AT some point CoH had nipples but they were textures, nothing more. In this game you just had a chance to do rather flat boobs or basketball-shaped-gigant-boobs, but not lemon shaped ones.

That would make a lot more sense, I never seen that report before so I can't understand it and was confused where the loss was reflected.

This is the breakdown of profit per title translated to USD:

$41,990,356 Guild Wars2
$35,088,296 Lineage
$29,918,392 Blade&Soul
$24,677,040 Aion
$12,182,800 Lineage II
$09,360,604 Others

Still odd that GW is making only 20% more than Lineage 1, but I guess that's some good profits there.

Actually, due to a lot of costs associated with laying off those 80 people (by law they were all employed until 8 days ago so there was no savings PLUS severance pays) they saved nothing out of CoH's closure. They won’t see any "positive" impact from CoH's cancelation until next quarter and that assumes they paid off every closure expense they had to during the previous month. I think there still will be some severance packages being offered in this next quarter, for the few staff members that will remain until shutdown.

The closure of this game would have the opposite effect. They lost more money, not less. Should the game be operating normally and players spent money in subscriptions and points things would have been better for them. The release of the new Bio power set and the new super pack was definitively going to have a small burst in profits for the quarter too; instead they were running CoH for the quarter at zero profit and still paying the non-working employees.

I am sure they would have been at zero loss, or less than 100k in losses, should CoH not been killed. Given I think CoH was still (I think) bringing in about a million in profits per quarter, NCSoft would have seen no losses at all and instead seen some tiny profits.

Mind you, I am not saying CoH was the only thing taking them down to a negative. The launch of GW2 likely involved an insane marketing budget, but that’s something that would have happened regardless, and given the game’s main source of profit are sales it’s also something that cant be killed or even lowered without huge backlash in sales.

Given CoH was profitable, they won’t ever see a positive effect from dropping CoH, but they won’t be “over” the costs of closure until Q1 2013.
Another thing “worries*” me is that this quarter included the huge burst of profit from launching GW2. Sales of games ALWAYS drop after the first month, so those sales will not be as good for next quarter. What will keep things afloat then?

I may be wrong, some other stuff may bring them some money. A Christmas miracle may bump GW2 sales for the one quarter. Or perhaps they will entirely kill marketing budget for GW2 (that may be stupid since the game can only make money as long as it sells new copies.)

*To be honest, it does not worry me. They deserve all negative that comes to them.

It's one of those shows that had a great idea but never designed for perpetuation. "Save the world in 24 hours!!!" OK... then next session... hey... guess what? Got to save the world again... and yea you only got 24 hours again.

And yea, you got to be extremely dense and oblivious to not have heard of 24. I don’t think even living in another country justifies it these days.

2 lvl 50s and countless alts in their mid 20s and 30s. Handful in their 40s. I loved the game but only one character was my true avatar, the one I was able to play all the way to 50.

There were a few huge issues with iTrials:

• It took too long to get a team together.
• The auto-queue tool was rarely used for them (most people just wanted to fill their groups before queuing up defeating the goal of the tool.)
• The tool was not cross-server
• There was not enough variety in the trials.
• They were lag-fests (ever been in an iTrial with 16 masterminds?!)

Even if solo path was slower, I would not have to waste my evening looking for a trial that may get to form by the time I got to log out, and then for what? To run the same thing again? Even if I had time to play I would not waste most of it waiting for a team to do these things.

I know this tech was hard to get working but this type of content required cross-server teaming to be possible. Even World of Warcraft, the most densely populated MMO out there, found they required cross-server teaming for this type of content to work efficiently.

We talking "we never had enough time" disclaimer, or "we stuck to the design" disclaimer? I have been given both over time for different things various devs wished they were able to have done differently.

I was thiknking more along the lines of being cheaper for self-satisfactory reasons.

Ugh... thats the annoying type of allergy. I was thinking more along the lines of "I get dizzy, red faced and basically over-intoxicated" type of alergies (like my non-lethal allergy to Aspirin.)


Not if some one got to pay for your pills on top of the booze!

Hmmm... curious... would not a non-lethal hop allergy result in an even stronger punch from beer?

The raiding thing was not something Posi did out of pure "i want to develop a raiding MMO without quitting my job" whim. He did it because it was what people were demanding.

Players dating back to very early in the game (see Hamiddon) wanted content where multi-group leagues were required to defeat encounters. Some always hated Hammidon, but there were a lot of players that loved to do Hammiddon and Rikti Ship Raids as often as possible. These players always complained there was not enough of it in addition to there not being enough (any) end game content.

I always thought the invention thing was cumbersome.

IMO, the best approach would have been for alternate XP trees, not literally levels but you gain a full level you get your Alpha T1, then you have to earn the second level of Alpha that may take 2x to earn the T2, etc etc. Right now you just get XP to unlock the slot. I would have made you go through having to go through 2x versions of each to unlock each additional tier. Also it would have used normal XP, not restricted to content from certain zones. Just encourage the pursuit of xp in those zones or trials by giving insane xp values there.
There would not be any capability to hoard components with such a system, and progress would be predictable (lord do I hate randomness in progression systems and yes, I ignored inventions until Merits arrived.)

That's not exactly what I recall. What I recall is that only the Level Shift from Alpha would work outside of the raids and that no incarnate skill would work while exemplared, but incarnate skills other than Level Shifts should have worked.

Didn't help that nothing obeyed AT modifiers either.

My view is they made incarnate progression insanely powerful.

The system could have been seen as optional should it have offered less drastic bonuses, or at least bonuses that are mainly useful only against raid targets (let’s say, damage procs that only trigger against Pretorians.)

Making things insanely good, and universally usable resulted in everyone feeling it was simply necessary.

The more I think about it the more I come to think they should just have increased the level caps and demand insane XP for each new level. I also disliked, btw, the fact that all incarnate abilities were homogenized across ATs. Alpha was perfectly fine since it’s nature was precisely to boost your powers but the rest…

Discrimination is only real when the one complaining is the target. When he discriminates, it's just "objective observation" or "education."

It's sad when people that are victim of discrimination dont even notice how they treat others.

Hmm without having played WoW in a few years and having no special hate for the game (although have grudges about their login system being extremely insecure) I have to say your comment sounds a bit contradicting.

First you say the rep comes quickly... but then say the monotony can be broken up doing other things... but the rep you get playing the game.... those 3 things just don’t sound compatible.

If it can ever be monotonous then it does not come in quickly.

If it can be entirely earned by "just playing the game" it should never be monotonous.

And mind you: if it takes multiple weeks of daily gaming (if the previous poster is right) then there is no way it can be considered quick and any activity you do to break the monotony likely will just extend the time it will take for you to earn the rewards.

Not saying this kill the game at all, btw. The argument started with me bringing WoW up and my point was about industry standards: end game content IS a grind mainly intended for team cooperation at the end game. It’s “optional” only as long as you don’t care your Power Cap to be lower than the Power Cap of anyone with more social and active guilds. When I played WoW last, I never cared about the uber epic stuff. I found gearing up the regular random and eventually epic dungeons good enough for what I cared (and all I cared was to feel my power increase as long as it took for me to eat up all the soloable lore-focused quests available to me.)

The incarnate end grind in CoH had a similar goal to the uber-slow/raid grind found everywhere else in the industry. It was not intended for everyone, it was a direct response to the constant whining from industry vets that there was no equivalent to the WoW raid advancement in this game.

Thanks for that. So... I guess at the end it's insanely worse than any solo progression we got.

WoW is not "totally team based", you can easily solo your way to the level cap and then you are (were, Venture says latest expansion took a different approach) forced to team up.

Although WoW was never a herding game (should say not always, some classes did a good job at herding via kiting) solo was always an alternative. In fact, "soloing that next quest in my log" was the biggest appeal WoW had for me when I played it.

Mind you: the cross-server auto-find-team queue system made doing these team content easy for the soloist. He did not have to spam for group anywhere, or be part of a big and active guild, or be insanely social. A recluse can hop on a queue and get a dungeon team very quickly. Trials here would have benefit from such a cross-server teaming system.

Not saying I loved the iTrail based end game progression in this game. I sort of liked Dark Astoria as a source of progression but felt it was too repetitive. It would have been better if the repeatable missions simply had more variety.

Well, you got to admit that is VERY new.

Now lets translate this to a game like WoW, go try to get the end-game merit-thingy they use to progress for end-game armor in a team in random dungeons.

Then do the same solo... oh wait: they dont let you even do ANY progress towards that solo.

There have been some leaks indicating that there were indeed 2 attempts to push CoH 2 but both were disregarded by NCSoft. One was a full separate game, the other one was an "evolution" of CoH to turn the game itself into a 2.0 game.

But I do agree with you, no one cared about publishing a CoH 2 because the name did not carry the marketing strength to justify it.

Yea missed that, although she was in the back of my head when i wrote that. I just had (and perhaps still do) she was not actually part of the development team until at least after launch. I was under the impression she was either Q&A or had a community role at least at launch, and slowly dipped her feet into the game dev side of things. But yea, given today she is lead designer and has been around all this time, she would be definitively a key figure.

I guess, but the post I replied to was very specific about the strength of the IP so I am guessing he was talking about a true IP sequel.