Thunder Knight

SSA 2.4 is already available on Live. Played it there with all my characters. (But, again, it's VIP-only, with no way to unlock it if you're not VIP)

Note the words "as possible" in the phrase "re-hiring as much of the previous dev team as possible"

So many people seem to be assuming that "as much of the previous dev team as possible" (and I stress those words for emphasis this time) is zero, and that the General Manager of (what was) Paragon would, after going through all the trouble to pry the IP out of NC Soft's hands, just go and grab a bunch of random people off the street to be Paragon II rather than reforming the studio as it was (or as close to it as possible).

I don't claim they'll be able to get everyone back - heck, I know a few have been snatched up already - but that doesn't meant they'll get nobody back.

There are values that lie between 0 and 100%, is what I'm saying.

Topics like this just make me miss the days when little details about powers were the biggest issues we saw facing the game.

Can't believe that was only a month ago.

Since it's Paragon's General Manager that's handling the negotiations with NC Soft, I don't know why people are starting to assume that "saving" the game would somehow involve NOT re-hiring as much of the previous dev team as possible. I doubt they wouldn't jump at the chance.

http://kotaku.com/5946830/two-korean...g-to-buy-valve

The relevant portions:

I'm sad to be losing a game that finally scratched an itch I've had since I was three years old.

Let me bring up Superfriends. Remember Superfriends? Now, for a moment, forget all the jokes about it. I watched a bunch of episodes recently, and it occurred to me - it's painfully obvious to us, as teenagers or adults, that Superman is a lot more powerful than pretty much anyone else, Batman was still in his Adam West phase, Wonder Woman was reduced to "girl with lasso", and this is the version of Aquaman that created the (arguably unfair) "Aquaman is useless" meme.

But in the show itself, that didn't matter. The team considered Batman and Aquaman just as useful as they considered Superman or Green Lantern. (The Kid Sidekicks had their moments of incompetence, but even they could get it together) Everyone on the team was just as important as every other member of the team.

And this was finally the game where I felt that. With rare exceptions (most of which involve powerleveling on AE mobs), nobody in a team is useless.

In contrast, let me digress to tell another story:

A couple of weeks ago, I was teaming in another game, one I've been playing for years. I knew everyone on the team, so they weren't exactly mocking me, but I was still dozens of levels below everyone else, in gear that was, at best, average. Somewhere in the middle of the dungeon, due to game mechanics, we had to split the team into higher-level and lower-level halves (to meet again in the middle). This meant me and one other person of about the same level as I was. (This person was also playing a new class, just introduced to the game. Nobody really knows how to play them yet, and they had power-leveled their character)

Well, first fight we got into (against five enemies of approximately my level), my character - who I've been playing for years and have multiple strategies for depending on the situation - died almost immediately, while the other character - the one playing the new class who had been powerleveled - soloed all five of the monsters. At the end of the fight, I was revived. Next fight, after I'd healed myself up, the other player said "Hey, could you kill the one monster out of the five that's resistant to my attacks?" I said sure, figuring that I could do THAT much before dying. The fight starts.... I died almost immediately, while the other player soloed the map, including the monster that was highly resistant to their attacks, who I'd barely managed to dent before I died (despite them being NOT resistant to my attacks).

Then we rejoined the main group to fight the actual boss of the dungeon, and ... well, I didn't die, but I didn't exactly have much effect on the fight either way, with my attacks doing 10-20% as much damage as everyone else on the team. (And, bear in mind, I'm playing a DPS class. I was doing less damage than the healers and support types)

What I'm leading up to here - I like to feel that I'm a contributing member of a team, and CoH let me be that, all the time, regardless of which character I was playing or what level I was. Whatever I brought to the table is always more than enough. It's the only situation (game or RL) that's ever let me feel that way.

And I am going to seriously miss that.

I played through the Reside version first. Iiiiiinteresting developments.

I was going to do Blueside next, but I realized I never ran 2.3 Blueside, so I went to do that first. I'll get to Blueside 2.4 later today, after I've done a few chores and shopping and other stuff that I should have done while I was running Redside 2.4 and Blueside 2.3.

There is a design difference between the 2002 Pandaren and the 2012 (and the differences are no more extreme than the other races in WC3 compared to WoW), but neither one looks like Po.

Most notably, the Pandaren are wearing Chinese robes, hats, and armor, while Po is wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The Pandaren also have hair and even beards.

2002 Pandaren
2012 Pandaren
Po

It sounds interesting, but after glancing at the required system specs, it's definitely a no-buy for me.

Nice to know it's not just me. Not so nice to know that they somehow let a gigantic noticeable bug like that remain in the game.

Hunh. I thought objects disappearing when I picked them up was just because of my playing-it-through-Crossover-at-the-lowest-graphic-settings setup.

The Pandaren were first announced as an April Fools joke before the release of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002, appeared as a non-playable Creep type in the actual game, and then became playable Heroes in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne in 2003.

Kung-Fu Panda came out in 2008.

I guess you could call them a ripoff of Kung-Fu Panda, if you assume that time travel is involved.

I like that I specifically say "profit, not revenue", and I get shouted down.... because I used the numbers as given by the head of Paragon Studios.

Yeah, I guess that guy would have no way of knowing how much profit his little team is generating, huh? Silly me for believing him.

Even if that's the case and it only takes half a decade to get a new game up and running (which also presumes that Paragon reunites and starts working on one right now, which is not the case), that still doesn't take into account what I said about it being a "worthy successor". Define "worthy".

A new game made by the original CoH devs and running on the same engine as CoH is exactly what Champions Online is. I don't much like Champions Online. It's a spiritual successor, but I don't consider it "worthy".

And there's no guarantee that I'd automatically like any other game made by CoH devs and running on the CoH engine. (Especially if NeoParagon is legally not allowed to emulate CoH's "look and feel" because NC Soft still owns that)

I'd certainly give it a fair shake. I certainly wouldn't go "it's not CoH, so it sucks" and turn my nose up at it. But I don't know whether it would have that magic something that drew me into CoH and kept me playing. And I can't know that until the game already exists and I'm actively playing it.

(This is not meant to disparage the Paragon team, but it's difficult to catch lightning in a bottle twice. See, for example, Brutal Legends compared to Psychonauts, or Noby Noby Boy compared to Katamari Damacy)

Edited to add:

Yeah. Making a "worthy successor" isn't really up to us, is it? It requires a team of dozens of dedicated professionals working for years to put together a new game. If all of Paragon's devs reassembled under a new company name, got funding, and started working on a brand-new CoH-alike right this second, it wouldn't see the light of day until around 2020 or 2021. We probably wouldn't even see a bare-bones tech demo until 2016 or 2017.

And that'd be if we had a team of dozens of dedicated professionals to begin with. We don't. Part-timers scattered across the country tinkering with code with no real central leadership or direction (other than "be like CoH") would be lucky to have even the barest of basics done by 2020, assuming they don't lose interest by then.

I'd much rather work towards saving this game (even if there were a few months downtime) than sitting here waiting a decade for a "worthy successor" that I may not consider worthy at all.

(I mean, I'm sure Jack Emmert considers Champions Online to be a "worthy successor" to CoH in "all but name" — it even uses the same basic engine and everything — but I don't like it anywhere near as much as CoH, and there's no guarantee I'll like any other "successors" to CoH)

I'll probably continue to play an MMO here and there (including going back to games I played before I found CoH), but I doubt I'll get this invested ever again. (And a big part of that is that now I'm spoiled on CoH's customization system. In other games, 90% of the time when I try to make a build that I think will be interesting and unique, it turns out that "interesting and unique" are synonyms for "useless". Or it could be that my characters are wearing gear that's ten or more levels below what they're "supposed" to be wearing, because I don't like grinding)

That's... not what "Jumping the shark" means.

Jumping the Shark is that moment when you realize the writers are so out of ideas they they'll just throw anything at the screen in hopes of keeping viewer attention (like, for instance, having their motorcycle-riding leather-jacket-wearing cool guy - who really shouldn't be along on another family's vacation in the first place - try to waterski over a shark). The show may limp on after that for a while (even a few more seasons), but it's essentially over.

What happened to CoH was entirely different. It didn't run out of creative juice (the writers had stories planned for years to come), it wasn't losing player attention (the players were excited about the imminent I24 update), it was killed by outside forces.

I might be on CO. I created an account there, and I've played it a bit on my wife's laptop, but I'm not going to even attempt to install the game on my own computer until (and unless) CoH closes for good and I can free up another 10-ish GB of space to install it.

I was kinda thinking (or at least hoping) you'd be around until the game went completely dark. You were a great CM, and good luck wherever you go.