Thunder Knight

I would have let the game stay alive for another year. In that time, I'd let the dev team know about the impending closure next August and reduce the staff by cutting the Secret Project, but keep the CoH team on so they could finish I24, and then work on a blockbuster I25 (different from the one they had planned; this one would be a Grand Finale - probably it'd have to be rushed, but it's better than no conclusion at all)

Then, when the time came to close the game, it wouldn't just disappear from the face of the Internet, I'd just have them cease all development, convert all accounts to VIP (minus the "Free" stuff VIP players got every month - i.e., no Paragon Points, no Paragon Rewards token, no free transfer, etc), leave the Paragon Market open for anyone who still wanted to make purchases there, and let the game stand as a testament of (what would be at that point) nine years of greatness.

Paragon Studios would have been kept open, but sold off to another publisher for a reasonable price. (No, I don't know what's "reasonable"; I'm not an accountant or an economist) NCSoft could keep the CoH name (and probably the Super Sekret Project).

Whether that's practical, I don't know. (As I said, not an accountant) It might go too far in the other direction from what NCSoft did. But it certainly wouldn't have garnered the same hate as what they did do. Which is, as you'll recall: "You're all fired. I24 is canceled. The game's years-in-the-making plot will never start, let alone finish. Game vanishes forever in three months. Anyone who wants to buy the IP from us to keep it running can do so for $80,000,000. We consider this 'going out on a high note'."

Wow. What's sad is that post is nearly three years old and yet still applies to the game as it exists right now.

You know, there was a reason that we often called Zwill one of the devs, even though he didn't actually work on the game itself. Paragon was such a close-knit group that it felt like he could just wander up and talk to them about stuff that was bugging us, and was truly delivering our messages to people willing to listen.

The more I read CO's forums, the more I get a "feel" for their community, and the general vibe is that Cryptic doesn't have anywhere near that level of communication between their CCM and their devs, and let alone between players and their devs.

Their players are unhappy, jaded, and defeated. "Why bother asking or even hoping for anything, we'll never get it" is the mantra. Nobody there - devs or players - is excited about anything. Updates consist of bland "we increased this power by 2%; we reduced that power by 2%" messages, with nothing big promised for the future other than more ways to milk the players for money. (Okay, even though I'm not into them personally, vehicles seem kinda neat, but not something to build an entire "issue" around with no other additions to the game)

It's really depressing, especially when contrasted with how bright and colorful and over-the-top cheerful the game itself looks. It makes the whole game feel like a run-down carnival with inflated ride prices.

That's what I was trying to ask. If you'll keep running them "every week as long as there's an audience", but the channel itself will probably be disappearing at the end of the month, will you be running them from another channel, or will they stop at the end of the month, audience or not?

In an interview a year or so back, she said she actually started out as an office manager, doing filing and data entry, and slowly worked her way up the design-side hierarchy to Producer.

Edit: found the interview: http://www.gamingangels.com/2011/04/...lead-designer/

So she was there from the beginning, but not in a major role at first.

It seems they're all getting snapped up quickly (except for Positron, who is still job-hunting). Good for them, though, again, I wish they'd been able to stay together.

Any bets on how long it'll take before he's out of work again due to NCSoft abruptly killing Wildstar without warning?

Given that the Beta server also closes at the end of the month, that's not exactly a solution to my sudden lack of long-term gaming. I have been logging into there, playing through the new arcs for I24, creating a Titan Weapons/Bio Armor character (blatantly based on Nightmare from Soul Calibur II), and so forth, but somehow it makes me sadder to play "What Might Have Been: The Video Game". (Also, it crashes a lot more than the regular game for me. I usually have to force-quit and restart the client multiple times over a single gaming session due to freezes. That's probably part of the reason it wasn't pushed to Live yet)

I used housing as an analogy because I like to settle into a single game and make it my long-term "home". After flitting from online game to online game for literally years (my previous "home" was a superhero-themed roleplay MUX that closed in the early 2000s - and, yes, my first character here was more or less a re-creation of my main character there) searching for that elusive "something", I'd finally, after nearly ten years of searching, once again found a home at CoH. I'd have been here sooner if they'd made a Mac port sooner. (Granted, the Mac port was shaky, but at least they had one).

As of November 30th, I'll be cast adrift again, hoping to find someplace welcoming and Mac-compatible in a sea of Windows games.

So Champions Online had better kick their development into gear if they want me to call it my new home, because I'm not looking forward to another ten-year search.

YET AGAIN, you're ignoring the forest and focusing on a bug hanging on one leaf in one tree, and then declaring that the bug in question is really a fairy ninja from space.

"Quite a while" in this case means "For the foreseeable future", because the game was still making money and updates were still being made and even more were still being planned and a new powerset had just been released and the studio had just started hiring and there was even a huge update in beta that was due to release any time now. How many of those games that shut down did so under those circumstances?

How I'd feel if Everquest were to shut down tomorrow is irrelevant, because it's not shutting. And whever it does shut down, I don't expect it to do so a couple of weeks before a major game update that had been hyped to death for months and had the entire playerbase drooling with anticipation, with the entire dev team kicked to the curb in the process. I expect one final "grand finale" update to let the game go out with a bang, then letting the game drift into eternal maintenance mode.

And your argument is circling right back to where I started: telling me "eight years is a long time to live in a house you love", while I'm now reduced to living in a cardboard box surrounded by newer fancier shinier houses I can't afford.

Again, you're being WAY too literal.

Compared to a house, true, it's not much money. Compared to my entertainment budget, however, a few thousand dollars is more money than I have to spend. It's more money than I have to spend for the next few years. I'm not a rich man, I don't have a high-paying job, and I'm on a tight budget. I can afford to spend $100 or so a year on a game subscription. I could even afford to spend $200-300 a year if I went without any other form of entertainment. However, I can't even begin to afford to spend $2000 or even $500 for a new high-end computer to run a new game and then pay for a subscription on top of it.

CoH was a free download, $15 a month to subscribe (with the ability to splurge now and then on Paragon Points - I spent a bit on Staff Fighting), and it ran on my existing machine. That's what I have a budget for. Any new game, in addition to scratching the same gaming "itch" that CoH was scratching, has to have the same requirements to fit into that same budget.

You do understand what an analogy is, don't you? "A is analogous to B" doesn't mean "A and B are exactly the same in every single way," it means "A and B are similar in ways that are relevant to the discussion, and may be different in terms of scale or in ways not related to the discussion."

In this case, the costs of a house and a computer compared to one's housing or computer budget are a matter of scale, and "Things you'd say to someone who lost their house" is something not related to the discusion.

NOW do you understand the analogy, or are you going to tell me some more about how houses cost more than computers?

Given that Everquest opened in 1999 and is still going strong and getting updates, with no signs of closing any time soon, and CoH was still making money, I'd say "for quite a while".

You're taking the analogy too literally.

My point was that, as much fun as I had in the past, I wanted to continue to have fun in the future, in the "house" I was already "living" in, and not have to start a new search hoping that maybe one of them won't suck.

(Though the analogy is beter than you think - again, I have a three-year-old Macintosh. Most of the games suggested as replacements don't run on a computer with my specs. I'd have to buy a brand-new top-end gaming computer to play most of them, so there's your "ton of money". I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on a new machine)

It's not that easy to just "replace" a home, even a virtual one, and CoH felt like home. A comfortable place where I loved its design and could roll with its quirks, where there were still things I wanted to do, and where I was expecting to stay for years to come. Now I have to start from square one and hope to find some place that has things I won't hate after a week (or, worse, after a few minutes - hello, CO Tutorial).

It's that "just" at the end that's the problem.

For me, that's exactly what's being taken away from me - the future. I still had many characters I still wanted to get to 50, many characters still in my head waiting to be created, many storylines I'll never get to see in the actual game, many new powersets and powerset combinations I wanted to try (including some that aren't actually in the game yet - my Wind/Storm Controller, for example).

People have compared it to losing beloved family members or pets, but maybe a better analogy would be finally finding a small but beautiful house for you and your family, spending years learning about the house's little quirks, and enjoying decorating and redecorating it to suit your whims.

And then, while you're reading about a new chair that's coming out in a few weeks that would look perfect in your living room, some big corporation comes along, throws you out on the street, rips your house out of the ground, puts it on a truck, and moves it to somewhere unknown. Everything you spent on that house is gone. All the things you created and built for it are gone. Everything you were planning to add to the house is now just a "what might have been".

Sure, you still have your happy memories of living in that house, but you're still homeless. Your comfortable routine in a familiar environment has still been shattered and tossed to the winds by some uncaring third party. And, worst of all, your house still physically exists, but some faceless organization refuses to give it back to you (even at a new location) and won't even say why.

"It's okay, other places to live exist" is not comforting. "Why, there's a rat-infested apartment in the slums available!" is not comforting. However, "Hey, there's a billion-dollar mansion available! It's much better than your old one!" is not comforting either when it costs more than you could ever afford to pay.

So, telling me that I'll just have to start yet another ten-year search to find a second game that suited me as much as CoH did, some other place that lets me create all the characters that are in my head (once I recreate all the ones I already had at my fingertips), some other place where the devs are as open and talkative and excited as they were in CoH, some other game that will run on a three-year-old Macintosh in less than 5 GB of HD space (this is the "billion-dollar mansion" part of the analogy: my computer can't run brand-new games like The Secret World, so it doesn't matter how good they are), "that's all", not only isn't comforting, it's downright condescending.

"That's all" is not the same as "that's easy". Not even close.

I want my home back.

It basically is the old Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk - right down to the transformation being triggered by anger and signaled by glowing eyes, and the main character pretending to be dead while searching for a cure - but with a bland pretty boy and CGI facial distortion for a lead character, with a Bella Swan lookalike for a love interest. (Except if she were as bland as Bella, it'd be an improvement. My wife and I watched the first episode, and we were immediately turned off by her shrill personality, and I joked that maybe she's actually the "beast" of the title rather than Vincent)

I really suspect that someone, somewhere, said "What's hot right now? Avengers and Twilight? What old show can we buy for cheap that we can twist to take advantage of that demographic?"