TimTheEnchanter

Just what we needed. Another atheist/religion debate.

Apply that to the more specific question Jack was asking.

I've joked about Karma when it comes to things that in no way affect me, and I associate with neither party involved. So no. It doesn't have to happen in "my" favor.

From the opposing perspective, if CoH closing was Karma, who's?

Depends on what you're basing it on, I suppose. But "poetic justice" generally applies to the people who have the power. Not the people who don't.

Unless you're saying that if NCsoft is destined to fail because of its destructive tendencies, then CoH must just a necessary casualty of that... perhaps.

And yet, the U.S. gets decried for turning a blind eye all the time anyway. I guess your intense desire to invalidate my tasteless comparison only serves to prove my point. It's more important to nitpick that an entity did something too late, than be thankful that they did it at all.

At least for me, it has cast doubt on some of the other games as well, and attracted further analysis of the "Ncsoft story." It turns out the rumors of attempted purchases of CoH, while maybe wrong, they do fit in line with the past. Auto Assault saw a similar demise, with offers being turned down.

It has always fascinated me, that even with a company that has decided they just don't know the West well enough to market to it, would rather squat on an IP than sell it. It's of no use to them, it's not making them money. But at the same time it's so valuable that it can't be sold?

The "game killer" still holds merit, but it depends on how you look at it. There's the old joke, "The one common factor that is the same in all of your failed relationships, is you." With this kind of a track record, it's hard to assume that everything has always been right with their business model, when there's been this many problems. Not that every business doesn't have flops somewhere, but NCsoft has somehow made a habit of it. They're either extremely unlucky, or they've been doing something wrong. I'll admit that some of what I've seen in B&S looks cool. But do I dare trust that it'll be here in a year, considering who is funding it? And if we call CoH a failure, as numerous people have lately, it seems the ONLY thing that has ever worked out for NCsoft is Guildwars. It's like the Uwe Boll of games. Flop after flop, yet somehow can still afford to make more. But at least movies don't demand multi-year personal and financial commitments from customers.

The bizarre thing about that is, things seemed to be turning around. Not that I'd call it a comeback. More like a snail crawl. Whether that means the populations were better under Freedom, or they were worse and the stubborn remnant population was spending more at the store, I don't know. And NCsoft isn't going to give us the information we need to properly analyze this anyway. Even if it would be GOOD for them, it won't happen.

More on the server issue in a moment, since you brought up the kiss of the iceberg.

I say this to the warning signs. There are certain things you typically do with an MMO when it's in trouble. We got the F2P I'll give you that, but at the time it came out, F2P was already starting to become the standard. Now games are released that way. So was it a last ditch effort, or an attempt to compete with what is becoming the more popular model?

Either way, that's the new one. What do games usually do when populations start waning? Server merges. Many players, despite being given the option for free, will often just stop playing rather than bother with transfers. Yet when that decision is made for them, they are more likely to keep playing. Why were attempts not made to merge servers? It saves money on maintenance, and it gives more content for players who were struggling on dead servers. But it never happened. They also never tried running the game with a smaller PS staff. The only "maintenance mode" period we even got was AFTER the shutdown had been announced.

So the Titanic metaphor may actually not be bad enough. This time, they didn't even bother to try deploying the lifeboats.

Why, because there was death involved? If you can't see the relevance then I'm not sure there's any real help for you as a human with empathy or as a student of history. It's most likely that you're choosing to focus on the differences between the two scenarios so that you can ignore the similarities.

If you cared about history the way you're suggesting, you'd know that the "hypocrisy" argument could be applied to ANYONE who has ever tried to change ANYTHING.

I don't think there's anyone here who actually has the answers to that. At the very least, I certainly don't, since I was not involved at Titan (if the question is indeed directed at them) until SaveCoH.

The problem with answering these questions is that I don't think they can be answered objectively. In the WWII example, there's plenty of analysis available on "Why wasn't the U.S. involved yet" that can be derived from countless records. It's much easier to dig those things up when everyone is keeping a diary like the government does. But in the case of previous issues with NCsoft, there's no core unit of players that have a common ground with all those games. And even if there were, what are the odds that there'd be any documentation on the reaction to one game getting killed, and then another, and then another? It may be out there, scattered across a thousand boards. But good luck writing the bot that's going to sift through it all and turn it into something that looks like a conclusion. There's nothing I can say about it that wouldn't have to end with a "maybe." Maybe it was just the final straw. Or maybe it's just because it's the first time one person stood up and tried to rally the others together. Or maybe it was summed up best with, "So you made a game where players spent 8 years defending their city? Tell me what they did when you threatened to destroy their city." This monster may have been brewing from the very beginning, just by having a game that encourages players to think like heroes.

I DID answer something of the question somewhere though. But I'm not sure if it was this thread or another. Why did this Players vs. NCsoft thing not happen sooner? Those other games were failing. The business logic there was simple enough for a 2-year-old to get. CoH was still profiting. Bicker all you want that it wasn't enough. It doesn't change the fact that CoH still being in the black made this case different. And it drastically alters what we all have to think about the future of MMO's. We can no longer base the long-term viability of a game on how well its doing. That should be enough to worry ANY MMO gamer, not just CoH players.

Convenient way to invalidate any movement you choose, eh?

And the U.S. just should've stayed out of WWII, and let the Axis take over the world. But only because, damn, "If we get involved now, we'll be hypocrites because we didn't do it until WE got attacked. Crap."

There is probably not a single cause in all of Earth's history that you could not apply this argument to. So all the question really implies is, "I don't like SaveCoH because it is run by humans."

All that shiny on their skin... it's like superglue.

It kinda goes by the same honor system as it would if you were typing it out. Just as with text, you can have the people who don't really know how to RP... *walks into the bar, nukes everyone with laser vision before they can try to dodge*, it takes a bit of trust using PvP to RP. But it was often funny to watch, especially in casual settings. And the point isn't really to drill your opponent into the ground. It's just to open up a whole bunch of extra "emotes."

75% of the portable market right now only exists because it's either reselling those games to a new generation or releasing clones of them.

I have screenshots of one of my heroines in full spandex from that early.

Maybe you were just seeing what you wanted to

Also, all the better graphics do is put an even bigger demand on the art team, making the game way more expensive, and therefore way harder to break even.

Deciding if it'd be worth it to have one of those Matrix ports on the back of my head, for the purpose of playing the most immersive frigging games ever.

I think this was discussed early on, and it was never implemented because it seemed too "un-hero-like" for them to be randomly bashing each others' brains in (even though based on today's movies, seems very normal). So, the arenas were done as an alternative.

All of this I thought was a detriment though. It took away the potential for a lot of fun player events that could've been held in public, where people could watch. Also, in most games that allow it, duels often get used for enhancing RP.

*zap* power suppression field.

I said... IDLE POSE.

Though I've gotta admit, the "skipping" walk animation made me smile. But what's with the "hobbit" race walking like tin-soldiers?

Standard idle pose for all female characters features the "buy-me" ability from the 'street corner prostitute' powerset. This ability is always on.

"All the world's a fashion show catwalk."

Philosophy of all cultures in the B&S universe.

Yeah... with all the whines I heard about PvP getting wrecked, part of me wonders what kind of a game this would be if they'd focused more on it. I can't imagine trying to balance a game like this for PvP. There's just way too many combinations to consider, which is a major reason most games all have the very same basic class system. So much time would have been wasted on PvP balance, that we would scarcely have ever seen anything new. Or they would've scrapped the mixable powers system we love for something much simpler. Imagine how much fear the devs would have had every time they introduced a new powerset. Re-balancing over and over and over. PvP balance... nothing cool would ever have been added.

This game was pretty rare, in that many characters were made because the concept was cool, not because it was the template flavor of the moment.

Heh, I was always driving myself crazy trying to decide what origin worked on the scientific side. Even magic isn't immediately a no-brainer. What's the origin for a Fairy? Is it magic, because they have magic? Or is it natural because they're natural beings? Or does it only count as magic origin if the being was created by magical workings?

Science/Natural/Mutant is even more confusing.

Or science/tech. Ugh...

Origins was a cool idea, but it became more of a hindrance than anything else once you realize you're limited by what contacts you can take if you want to get enhancements out of your missions.