Tic-Toc

I can ask him about it next time I see him, but he's probably just going to glare at me...

Ironically, Champions Online celebrated its 3rd year anniversary today and we had a quick company-wide meeting that where last Friday's bombshell about City of Heroes/Paragon came up.

During Q&A time with Jack, I pont-blank asked him if there was any truth to the rumors about expired licensing agreement with Cryptic's COH engine. He was taken aback about this, unaware of such rumors going around. His response was that NCSoft has the license to use the CoH engine "in perpituity" for both "City of Heroes/City of Villains" as well as a 2nd game.

I asked him if there was going to be any official response to this rumor concerning Cryptic/PWE and it's not something we plan on doing. We obviously can't be aware of or comment on every rumor floating around on the internet he wasn't sure of what they could say about this particular scenario if they wanted to.

So whatever reasons NCSoft had for shuttering Paragon, it had absolutely nothing to do with the IP, which they own, or the engine, which they had a license to use indefinitely.

That's about all I can do to quell this rumor. Take it as you will.

Again, thoughts go out to all my friends, former co-workers, and recent friendly rivals who've been released into the wild. I hope to see many of them here in the halls of Cryptic very soon. :P

That was always my arguement, but that's something you can't point to in a spreadsheet and justify in front of a bunch of suits and bean-counters

I had a lot of fun, and got into a lot of trouble for my forum antics. I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did.

If not, kiss my ***.

Again, as someone who was working on Auto Assault during it's final year of development and was there when it launched, they did not keep all of the devs on. NetDevil had to lay off a lot of people post-launch and scrambled to find other projects from other publishers to keep their doors open. When AA was shut down, that was pretty much the end of the partnership between NetDevil and NCSoft...and NetDevil was not owned by NCSoft like Paragon was.

As the person who got power customization implemented in CoH, this post is full of crap.

Jack never said nuffin about power-customization. It was probably me that said something about it and probably before the switch from working for Cryptic to working for Paragon (or shortly after). At the time, it was impossible. We didn't have the code to support it and it would require rebuilding every single player power effect, something that just wasn't feasible for one person who was the sole animator and VFX artist on the project at the time.

I did manage to get weapon customization in, because that was something we did have a way of doing.

Fast-forward a couple of years and Paragon's humming along, Champs is on the horizon trumpeting 'power customization' as a huge selling point and I, in a competitive spirit that I'm sure Jack would appreciate, decided we were going to beat them to the punch.

So I pushed for the feature. I came up with a way to do it. Wrote out a detailed process so one of the programmers could write a python script to do most of the heavy lifting. Then I and Keetsie (Tunnel Rat)--mostly Keetsie if memory serves--put a lot of time and work into tweaking a few values in every single player power particle and FX script. The UI interface was designed, implemented, code was written.

In short, it was a metric ****-ton of work. It was crazily expensive to implement, took a long time, and involved a lot of work from many people...which did not result in any real measurable gains for the game or studio. New player didn't flock to the game. Current players didnt' throw buckets of money at out feet. You guys playing at the time enjoyed it and appreciated it...but from a business perspective, it was a recklessly stupid thing to do. I'm honestly shocked it happened.

It's still one of my proudest accomplishments.

People talk a lot about Jack's vision this and Jack's vision that, but reality is that by the time CoH was being offered to NCSoft, Jack's "vision" was focused on other projects at Cryptic. Cryptic needed those other projects to keep it's doors open. So when Jack would say X wasn't possible, it was because little Timmy, who was actually working with X, told Jack, "X is probably not possible, and here's why..."

In reality, practically nothing is really impossible, but if it's going to take a dozen people 6 months to implement and probably not be a net gain for the business, then it's "impossible".

Side-switching was another one of those things. Technically, very possible. It's a couple of flags to flip on a character. BAM. Your Tank is a villain. Problem is, you've got no contacts, no way to get new missions, no story explanation as to why it happened, nothing organic about the process, etc. Again, I was involved in a lot of those conversations about 'Going Rogue' and it was a TON of work from multiple people to get implemented.

Nowadays, Jack is the CEO at Cryptic. He has very little to do with games. Other people have stepped in and provided 'visions' because no game, NO GAME, gets done without someone having a vision for it. And no one person's vision is going to match every single player's vision. Hell, it won't even match half the developers vision.

As for rumors of Cryptic/PWE sabotaging CoH. There's one company and one company alone responsible for this. NCSoft. It was their decision to pull the plug on this, and it's perfectly in line with things they've done to other games and studios in the past.

FYI, I worked on Auto Assault, I worked for Cryptic on CoH, then Paragon on CoH, and I'm now back at Cryptic on something not CoH. Friday's news went through cryptic like a cold ripple. We were as shocked and dismayed as many of you. While many people who originally worked on CoH have moved on to other things, some to Paragon, some to other ventures entirely, there are still a lot of people at Cryptic who put love and care into this game that has so profoundaly touched all of our lives.

God, it's nice to not be a redname anymore. I can say things like metric ****-ton!

Never forget that I remade Sonic VFX just for you...

I don't believe this is accurate. As far as I know, NCSoft wholely owns the CoH IP. There was a license agreement for the engine in place, ie. Cryptic still owns the engine and licensed it to NCSoft/Paragon...but I wasn't aware of any 5 year term on that.

I may be misinformed, but I only work here...I'll ask Jack about it next time I see him.

Will this work?
http://faces.cohtitan.com/profile/Tic-Toc_inactive

Seeing as how I was laid off 2 years ago, posting as a redname wasn't possible. This is my player account from May, 2004 where I put thousands and thousands of hours into CoH on Justice.

For those that are curious, I was re-assimilated by Cryptic Studios almost 2 years ago. Right now I'm working on Neverwinter Online. The news has spread around here and while many of the original developers on CoH have moved on (some to Paragon, many to other ventures), there are still a lot of people here who put blood, sweat, and tears into this game and the news today was a shock.

BABs here. Thanks EG. CoH had a profound impact on my life and being a player and dev for a game that I had so much love for was a part of my life I will always cherish. There were times when my entire working and waking day revolved around working on, playing, or just thinking about this game. It's bittersweet to hear that things are coming to an end.

My thoughts go out to all the people at Paragon affected by this news as well as the hundreds of thousands of players that have come and gone and stayed with CoH over it's long history.

It's a sad, sad day.

Cheers Bobitron and the rest of Justice.

But "BABs" just sounds right.

"A tradition that I think should be continued for as long as the game is running."

I believe it was BABs who said that.

I'm up for this.

Best of luck with this.

FYI, this is why I originally created Justice For All; to try and assemble a rapidly fracturing community into neutral territory that could benefit every player on Justice.

I got flak for it at the time, pretty sure some of it was from Chrome Support...who took at as a personal attack against them trying to take ownership of the Rikti Ship mothership raids under their own mantle. Even though I gave operator status to some of those same people in JFA, I was still blasted for being on a power trip, having an ego, etc...so much that I removed myself from operator status immediately after creating the channel and completely handed the reigns off. Maybe I went about it wrong, maybe it was just the wrong time, who knows. It was a very shocking realization to think that you were generally well-liked and respected on the server only to find out that there were quite a number of people who outright didn't like you and apparently hadn't for a while.

I don't hold any ill will towards any particular person or groups, with the exception of only two people that I would say I actually disliked. One was a repeat griefer of Hami raids (who shall remain nameless) from ages ago, and the other was someone who's name I've honestly forgotten (I think they quit a long time ago). That person caused me hours of grief every time I logged in because of the drama centered around them in the Justice Badges channel.

I think Justice For All was the breaking point for me. That's the first time where I really felt isolated from the Justice community and cast doubt on my intentions up to that point. I don't think I ever really recovered from that. I no longer felt that I had a role in the server community, especially when the flashback system and event messages were added to chat making the need for a heavily moderated badge channel kind of moot. RL stepped in shortly after wards demanding more and more of my time. So, maybe it was all for the best. (sorry for not responding to your PMs of late Chrome)

So again, and I say this with all sincerity, best of luck to you guys.

Hi!