Texarkana

Originally Posted by Dark_Respite

There is only one name that could POSSIBLY be used for this character.

Behold...

The Pocket Protector!



A professional and timeless look. Note, however, that he has opted for more efficient (and less costly) sneakers, as ruining Italian leather shoes running into burning buildings and into sewers is just not a good return on investment. Also note that he has not sacrificed his vision to protect his anonymity - over his feature-concealing domino mask are his specialty prescription glasses. (He paid extra for the carbon protection after nearly catching shrapnel with the lenses, and glasses are just prohibitively expensive.)

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Originally Posted by RiOTWRAiTH

Analyst

Originally Posted by SteelRat

Gender in signature issues aside, the one thing that I'm little unclear with this thread, is.. well.. the point?

Your OP is a bit, well.. "rambly", if there's such a word, but if I get the gist of what you're saying correctly, you're basically saying that you can't understand why CoH wasn't more popular than it was because it appeared to offer all the things that gamers wanted?

Originally Posted by Another_Fan

What I always find surprising isn't that people left the game but that they stayed.

Originally Posted by Organica

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 73/74


Monday I barely logged on to do anything -- I spent most of my time writing, but logged on late in the evening. There were few people no, nothing apparently happening, so I ran two costume missions for Eternal Sweeper and then called it a night.

Tuesday I logged in early enough to join an ITF on Storm Girl Ten. This got her from 42 to 43. But it was something of a disappointment -- it was advertised as a "kill what's in front of you" ITF, but after two missions a couple of the players decided that it was going to be a speed ITF instead, so they rushed everything, ported people to the ends of missions, and the leader said nothing about it. But as soon as Rommy was dead and the ITF was complete she quit, so it seemed she was upset. But when you don't say anything and you're the leader, it's hard to complain about it later. Anyway it was annoying -- set to +0, rushed through the second half, everyone quit as soon as Rommy dropped, no interest in doing the towers. That's not how I like my ITFs to run.



And you know what they say -- if you want something done right, you should do it yourself. Grimrose announced that she'd just hit 35 and was ITF capable, and Ragey Cat (who had been on the other ITF with me and was equally dissatisfied with it) was willing to run another, so I switched to my brute Megami Hime and started up another, a real steamroll ITF run at +1, where you really did kill everything you saw, and the towers after. Whisper and no hero joined too, and we had a lot of fun, and by the time we were done Grimrose's "last 50" had gone from 35 to 39.

Originally Posted by Organica

I didn't realize that the month of November only counted as part of a month.

The Halloween event should have lasted through Halloween, and was stated as lasting through Monday, but it ended Sunday anyway. But we had some nice event teams on Virtue for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

And another new (to me) artist - warlordwardog (shane brathwaite)

Quite frankly, seeing his samples, I could *not* pass up the prices - even when the exchange rate jumped around a bit. This is my newest 50, an Arch/MM blaster, Madison Longshot:

Originally Posted by TonyV

If I were a business wonk at NCsoft, first of all, I would have told them NOT to kill City of Heroes, because that's the kind of game we'd want--the kind that generates money over the long run. But apparently, someone in the company has decided that they'd rather ditch long-term profits and go for the quick money instead--games that do really well initially, and they they can kill them off before the revenue plateaus and move on to something else.

Originally Posted by Dollhouse

Nope...because it's not "just sitting there." It's being dissolved. That means that whatever value NCSoft assigns to it (and will stand up to tax auditing...more on that in a sec) will make its way onto their balance sheets as a capital loss. This, along with their Q2 losses, can offset the very significant capital gains that they'll see from the GW2 launch, etc.

That valuation? It will without question be higher than any realistic offer they may have received for the CoH IP (low seven figures range at best). Corporations get away with shenanigans like overvaluing non-tangible assets for capital loss purposes all the time. They've probably valued all the Paragon City assets they're dissolving somewhere in the $5-6 million range (speculation on my part, please understand...). Not a chance in hell they received an offer anywhere near that.



I suspect you're absolutely right. I doubt they expected to even receive any, at least any that were close to the market value of the IP (to say nothing of the inflated tax valuation). All the furor probably took them by surprise. They've never shown much to make one think they "get" the Western market.

But in the end, this is a cold-blooded bottom line decision...and for all that I hate it, I understand it. Half a million or (maybe) a million...or five million or so in tax offsets? No competent executive would fail to choose the latter.

Originally Posted by Father Xmas

Well Broadcast Network TV Black/White morality. A bad guy wouldn't save the good guy but the good guy would save the bad guy.

The only time I remember it didn't happen was Buffy.

Ben: She could've killed me.
Giles: No, she couldn't. Never. And, sooner or later, Glory will reemerge and make Buffy pay for that mercy. And the world with her. Buffy even knows that, and still she couldn't take a human life. She's a hero, you see. She's not like us.
Ben: Us?