Thunder Knight

This thread set off another wave of Sad for me over the game's closing. I know I'll miss the community, but I'll also miss the game. I've been trying to put my finger on why, what I loved so much about playing that I would create new characters in my head even when I couldn't play, what all the other MMOs didn't have that this one does, why I drifted away from them with a "yeah, it was fun, but...", and I think I just got it.

I think the unique thing that this game brought to the playing field was an entirely different philosophy than all other MMOs I've ever played.

You let us create unique individual avatars that really represent us, or aspects of us. Other games do that, to some extent.

But you then you let those avatars do amazing and awesome things. Whether flying, tearing through a roomful of enemies, or stacking Holds on a boss until all they could do was float helplessly and let us demolish them, we got to watch and control our avatars as they performed incredible feats of superhuman power. Sure, they lost every now and then (and we the players could choose - another important aspect - if we wanted a tougher challenge), but for the most part, they are just plain awesome, regardless of archetype, powersets, or build.

And that makes us feel awesome playing them. And that makes us want to stay.

Most other places I've played (including one of CoH's competitors in the superhero genre) that promise your character will be awesome, with incredible-sounding powers and abilities. But then you actually play them, and it turns out their game design involves characters so restricted and enemies so overpowered that you have to struggle to even reach the levels of Adequate. All your incredible-sounding powers are barely effective in practice, and it's the enemies who get to look awesome as they pound you into the dirt. One-on-one fights with basic equal-level enemies are struggles where you barely come out ahead. (Or, worse, you have to find a large team and perfectly coordinate a perfectly-timed strategy with them in order to reach Barely Adequate. On your own, you're guaranteed to be nothing but a stain on the floor, even at max level with optimal gear)

That, I think, is why I stuck around. In City of Heroes, I could take any concept, bring it to unique, personalized life, and then have my creation (whether Hero or Villain) go out and be utterly awesome. Not in the slangy sense, but in the original sense. Inspiring awe. And they could be awesome without me having to Min-Max the Perfect Build, or scrounging up enough money for Optimal Gear, or crossing my fingers that I'd get that Uber-Rare 0.00001% drop, or (for most content) having to find seven other people who wouldn't mock me for not Min-Maxing, having Optimal Gear, or having Uber-Rare drops.

And, judging by all the posts on this forum since the game's closing was announced, I think it's not just me.

Take that lesson into whatever game you wind up working on next: give the players amazing things to do and see, but also make the players feel awesome as they do them. Let the players who want a challenge increase the game's chalenge, but let those who just want to sign on and tear through a few bosses do so. Let us play the game with you, not against you.

As you can see, let the players feel Awesome, and the players will be Awesome in return.

So thank you (and the rest of the Ex-Paragon-ites) so much for letting me be Awesome for the last two years.

Man, I'm definitely not going to Champions Online after this. I've spent the last hour or two playing it, and ...

Well, the costume creator is not only sparse (with I'd say at least 60-70% of the pieces locked in some way, either behind quests, in-game currency, or real cash moneys), but the options utterly baffling. I couldn't recreate even the most basic of my characters' appearances from CoH. My character has one robot arm because I got fed up and hit "Random", and there is now no way to NOT have a robot arm except to hit Random again (which I didn't want to do, since I like most of the costume). There's no categories for that. (Or, there's a category, but "Robot arm" is the only option).

I know Free players of CO only get a limited selection of pre-made archetypes, but even if I were to subscribe for freeform power selection, I couldn't remake my Electric/Invulnerability Brute (no melee electric attacks, they're all blasts and holds), my Bots/Storm Mastermind (all the pet powers are magical or toys, and the wind powers are more like blasts than debuffs), or any of my existing characters. I can't recreate ANY of them with even the tiniest degree of accuracy. Not in appearance or powersets. (Don't get me started how my above-mentioned Brute and Mastermind are villains, which are not possible at all in CO)

(Heck, you know, I can't actually recreate my old Champions characters in Champions Online, but I could in City of Heroes)

And since I'm running it on a Crossover emulator to get it to run on a Mac, I have to turn the settings all the way down to get it to run at a reasonable framerate, which means that most of the game is a pixelated blur.

Finally, the actual gameplay is just similar enough to constantly remind me of what we're losing, and it makes me sadder than ever.

Edit: I played for a little while longer. Once I got out of the tutorial (which it seems there is no way to skip), I kept dying repeatedly to small groups of ordinary gun-toting thugs (with a character who would be approximately a Dual Blades/Super Reflexes scrapper in CoH). So it even fails in the "makes you feel like a superhero" part. I don't recall the last time Superman got his *** repeatedly handed to him by a bunch of muggers.

So it's not only making me sadder than ever, it's going out of its way to downright piss me off by making me feel like a paper-mache punching bag instead of a superhero.

So Dofus it is.

This rumor was started when someone on this very forum simply speculated on that idea, and other people ran with it and spiraled it out of control.

And, yes, there has been "official word" - Zwilliger said it's false.

I would also point out that CoH was, despite NCSoft getting rid of them for being a failure, still in the top ten of MMO as ordered by subscribers, according to the latest numbers on MMOdata.net, and still profitable, according to NCSoft's own financial data.

At the very least, you could add a secondary note that (a) the Paragon team is out of work, and (b) there is now a huge hole in the Superhero MMO market (a hole that is even larger for the Mac community, which has nothing, since CO and DCAU are both Windows-only).

Maybe they can't buy the IP, but wouldn't it be nice if Valve hired all the ex-Paragon devs and put them to work on a brand-new Superhero game? It wouldn't be exactly the same thing, and it'd take years to come to fruition, but it'd essentially be City of Heroes 2 under another name.

I added that as part of my suggestion.

You know, one thing occurred to me after reading a thread from Feb 2011 saying that CoH was #8 on the list of MMOs by subscribers.

Well, I just checked MMOData.net. City of Heroes is, despite its relatively low numbers, still #8 in the top ten MMO subscribers list.

I repeat that for emphasis: out of the dozens of MMOs out there (most of which are trying to be just like WoW but failing), only seven are doing better than CoH. (WoW is doing so well that it's listed on there three times, but I'm counting WoW East, WoW West, and WoW Global as a single game)

Maybe CoH was the worst-performing NCSoft game (and, looking at those numbers actually confirms that), but I don't see how they can even pretend to think that throwing WoW Clone #2890174831 up against the 800-pound gorilla that is WoW itself is going to make them more money than the wholly original (in all senses of the word) product that was CoH.

People may leave WoW for the chance to play Batman or Spider-Man clones (again, eighth most subscribers in all of MMO-dom), but they're not going to leave WoW for "We're just like the game you were already playing, only with much less content! And far less developed lore! And, since we hate Mac and Linux, our new game is available for fewer operating systems! Why aren't you flocking to it?"

It makes me all the madder.

Any info on possible pricing for Sorcery? I want to see whether I would have gotten just Sorcery and Gadgetry or all five specialist pools.

CoH Wikia has power listings and icons for all five origin based pools. Are those accurate?

My subscription auto-renewed for three months on August 30th. That means it's good until the very last day the game will be open. (Or maybe the day before, I'm not quite sure how that works)

DCUO is still missing the one thing that is absolutely required before I play on it: A Mac version.

I'll be on Dofus until then.

I have to admit, I read an interview you gave last year, and, hearing about how you started as an office manager and worked your way up to Producer of the Whole Darn Game. I was so jealous. You had the job I've been trying to get for a decade.

It's awesome you got to live the dream with this game for as long as you did, and I hope that you and everyone else from Paragon find another place just as awesome very soon. Hopefully at least some of you will find yourselves working together again. (Heck, who knows? Maybe I'll get really lucky and be working with some of you, too)

I'm going to miss this game and all the people on it a lot. Good luck and farewell for now.

You'll probably not have heard of the games I'm going back to - Dofus, Wakfu, and Kingdom of Loathing. The first two are multi-platform games (Dofus runs in Adobe AIR, Wakfu in Java) with a turn-based strategic battle system (think Shining Force, Tactics Ogre, or Final Fantasy Tactics, except you only control your own character), the third is a silly but surprisingly deep browser-based game with a great community. (I used to think KoL's community was the best, until I came here). Dofus does have a great English Community Manager, though.

All three games are also published by their developers (Dofus and Wakfu by Ankama Games; Kingdom of Loathing by Asymmetric LLC, which is really just a half-dozen actual employees and a larger team of volunteers for internal playtesting and moderation), so there's no chance of the rug being pulled out from any of them.

And after this experience, that's important to me.

I'm probably going to at least give CO a try at some point, but I'm on a Mac, so that involves a lot of fiddling around with Wine and Crossover, which is why I haven't tried it yet.

And, you know, I never finished that game of Morrowind I was in the middle of. (Let alone Oblivion or, dare I say it, Skyrim)

And I still have a crapload of old SNES RPGs to play.

... yeah, I'm going to miss CoH a lot. I was playing it instead of all the other options I have available. But I do still have some options. Not anything close to equal (let alone better) options, but some.

Edited to add: I just remembered, my Avatar is from Dofus. That's the icon for the Lightning Strike spell. (Beware, Wikia link)

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TWDA-3U28-4GJB-M3TD-8CZD used here.

You'd have to ask NCSoft that. (Not even Paragon Studios - according to Matt "No Longer Legally Allowed To Call Himself Positron" Miller said on his Twitter, there isn't a Paragon Studios anymore)

Odds are the beancounters in Korea just don't care about us anymore. If they did, they wouldn't have killed the game the way they did, by cutting it off at the knees when the players and the devs were looking forward to I24 and beyond. I wouldn't look to them to do anything nice for us, like letting us play or even leaving the servers open in maintenance mode beyond November 30th.

Anyway...

I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere gets a private server or two up and running, though. I've seen some projects around the web trying to do just that, with the urgency only increased now.

Like some said, I'm not going to actively boycot them, but they have nothing I want to play. (Since I'm on a Mac, I'm not even sure they have anything I can play, and I don't care enough to do the research).

Plus, this whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Even if I was interested in other NCSoft properties, I wouldn't trust them to not just shut it off one day without warning.

Well said. I think I'm going back to Morrowind and SNES emulators after this.

These upbeat forward-looking topics from just a few short weeks ago look so sad in light of tonight's news.

... Did you read the forums before you posted this? Every single post since around 9 pm has been about the studio closing.

I'm sad, and confused, and a little angry, but I've probably made that clear enough on other posts.

In this topic, I'll just say I've not been around as long as some - only two years, and only three months ago did my finances finally become stable enough to regularly subscribe - but in that time this has become my favorite MMO easily.

There is literally nothing else like it out there - particularly the insane amount of customization and personalization of your character. In certain other games (by which I mean MOST other games), Level Cap Warrior A and Level Cap Warrior B were pretty much going to look exactly the same, but not on CoH.

And that's aside from the community. Despite a few disagreements and arguments here and there, this is still literally the friendliest community I've ever seen for a MMO. And great dev-player communications (even if I'd had my issues with that, too).

I guess I just have issues.

They all pale next to this news, though. I'm going to miss this game, I'm going to miss the community, and I'm going to miss being able to pretend, for a little while, that I was a little greater than I was (which is also something else not many other MMOs offer).

I hope that Q&A happens next week. It'll be small consolation to know where the game could have gone, but it's better than no consolation at all.

That's what baffles me. Apparently, they lost money on both Aion and their marketing for GW2, so they kill CoH? I don't understand it. And I'm going to miss this darn game, the one where I got to be an actual hero (or villain) of my own design, not just a clone wearing the same armor as everyone else.

Time to start screenshotting my characters.

Heh. I'd tried a bunch of codes that didn't work, saw the timestamp on this topic, and shrugged.

Then people at the end of the topic were saying they got one that worked, and those posts were only about twenty minutes ago, so I copied a big block of text from the middle of the bunch into Notepad, and prepared to go down it one by one.

34LA-34J3-RDHX-E7RN-NVVV

First try.

Thanks, guys!

The problem with the coffee talks for me is that all the stuff I want to know about is also the stuff they're not allowed to talk about yet. The Tech Knight set is cool, sure, but I'm not even close to Tier 9 and won't be for several more years (assuming I don't lose my job or the game doesn't close in the meantime), so it's just them waving something I can't have in front of my face.

Meanwhile, I am interested in the little slip of a tongue from last week's show (Stone Armor changes) and information about the other Origin-based power pools (I really like the looks of the Tech-based pool, if the CoH Wikia is accurate), but they're apparently not allowed to (or just don't want to) talk about those.

So, yeah, I'll pass on this week's show. Maybe next week.

Yeah, I went to one of the Mako Week post-Mako meetings in Pocket D hoping for a code, too. Still don't have one. (And it would go perfectly with one of my characters, too. Right now, she's using the Pixel aura, which is a poor substitute)