TonyV

Three things:

1) As pointed out above, NCsoft shutting down CoH permanently and NCsoft reversing their decision is a false dichotomy. A third, very reasonable--and not embarrassing at all--option exists to sell the game to another company, one for which City of Heroes would be in their long term goals. I'm not asking for charity here, real money could be offered for the game.

I've seen a lot of people vehemently insist that that would never happen. With all due respect, unless you're the CEO or on the board of NCsoft, I think it's impossible for you to know that. I have been presenting valid financial, public relations, and marketing reasons why NCsoft would be amenable to letting the game go to someone else. I've been hammering home the point that helping to keep City of Heroes alive is indeed a very smart move for the company with tangible, real benefits.

2) The studio is not yet "permanently gone." Yes, 80+ people are out there pounding the pavement looking for a job. But it's a tough economy, and it's only been a week. I'm certain that some of them will find new jobs fairly quickly; they do, after all, have a proven track record of developing a genre-defining game. But again, don't you think that one week is a little early to be declaring it "permanently gone"? I realize the time constraints we're under, which is why I've been staying up until after 5:00am every morning (6:30am or so this morning because I had some press releases to get out) and getting up at 9:00am.

3) Having said all that, THANK YOU for voting yes in the poll. This just goes to show that although we can disagree about minutiae, at the end of the day, we're all fans of the game. Pulling together and doing that even though you're not hopeful is a much appreciated sign of support. I hope that we'll eventually be able to turn the tide and give you positive reasons to think, "You know, this crazy movement might actually work..." Until then, like I said, thanks for helping us out.

Guilty; for quite a while I was a serial reporter, too. Not that the game is supposed to be all serious, but man that crap got under my skin. Consider it a pet peeve. Every time I saw someone like this, I thought, "Oh, gee. How clever. No one has EVER thought of making a suggestive or dirty name before." /petition...

In one of the betas a year or two ago, there was a bug where if you talked to the MA contact in Atlas Park, it would crash the server. I still have no idea how in the world that got in there; the issue had absolutely nothing to do with the MA system. Yet I'd click on him, accept the mission,... "Lost connection to map server." When I'd logged back on, everyone was saying, "What happened? The server crashed?" After about three or four times doing this and noticing that it was crashing right as I clicked the button, I finally figured out that I was doing it.

So I broadcasted something like, "Hey everyone, I think I'm crashing the server. I'm going to try it one more time just to rule out it being chance." I waited a few minutes just to make sure everything was stable, clicked, "Lost connection to map server." When I logged back in, people were pissed. I got a bunch of screamers yelling at me to stop doing whatever it was I was doing.

I wrote up a pretty detailed report about it, PMed it to Positron or somebody (can't remember exactly who), and it was fixed in the next beta release. Still, pretty funny.

Oh, and everyone who hasn't met me in person thinks that because I'm Tony Vazquez, I'm Hispanic. I'm not. I'm a pasty white computer geek that could probably pass as Norwegian or Finnish if I wanted to. It's funny meeting people who I've been talking online to for years. I get this a lot: "YOU'RE Tony!!?"

Speaking of meeting people, the first time I met Avatea, around 20 or so of us were in a room just hanging out eating bagels. She was walking around and after a minute or two as we were all mingling, she walked over to me. You have to keep in mind that Avatea, and I mean this in the most flattering of ways and I'm not exaggerating, is a six-foot-something Tahitian goddess. Anyone who has met her in person will vouch for me here.

Anyway, she walks up to me and introduces herself. "Hi, I'm Avatea, one of the Community Relations team."
I shake her hand and (still stunned by this goddess standing in front of me) say, "Hey there, I'm Tony V."
She takes a step back and says, "Oh my god, YOU'RE Tony V?"

Friends, let me tell you. In that moment more than any other time in my life, I felt like a rock star. I saw a lot of REALLY cool things that weekend and met a lot of REALLY cool people, but I'm just not sure that anything could top Avatea's reaction. In hindsight, as far as I know, she could have been thinking, "But you're a pasty white Norwegian computer geek!..." Don't know, don't care. But it was awesome.

Second best moment, though I have extremely little to do with Mids at all (you can thank Diellan for that gem), was when I think it was Matt Miller told me that at Paragon Studios, Mids was like Solitaire at every other company--that mindless time waster that people hide when the boss walks up.

To be honest, I don't know. On the one hand, I really see this as a gaming issue, not a City of Heroes issue. I really do hope that anyone can understand and relate to the object of our passion being destroyed, especially other gamers.

On the other hand, it could be seen as a deliberately provocative move. People might misinterpret you message as poking their community with a stick instead of the spirit in which it's intended, which is that we really need their help.

I'll leave it up to you. Not really being familiar with the community over there, I just have no way of knowing how it would be taken. Perhaps an appeal to their game might help, couching it in terms of the heroes of Paragon City needing the help of the heroes of Millennium City, a cross-over arc in which we band together to keep our home from being destroyed?

In fact, if someone here is also an avid CO or DCUO fan, you might want to consider feeling out the possibility of forming a "Save City of Heroes" effort in your own communities. When I was growing up, the University of Alabama and Auburn University were (and are still) bitter rivals. People would get into vehement arguments and fights over their respective football teams, people who never even went to university at all. But when something like this comes up, we all pulled together. I remember several years ago when a tornado devastated Tuscaloosa (where Alabama is) and Auburn started fund drives to help out the people who lost everything. After all, we're all people. And right now, to the CO and DCUO player base, we might have our differences of opinion about our respective games, but we are all gamers.

If you do go forward with it, I just ask you to be very humble, nice, and respectful. Tread very carefully. I'd rather have them indifferent to our cause than actively against it. Don't get mad when some trolls come in posting, "I'm GLAD it's being shut down!" messages. God knows we've got 'em here too, and I've cringed when people here have gone off on people when I felt that they shouldn't have. Just remember, the nicer and more defenseless you come off as, the more of a tool it will make anyone who attacks you or your posts, and you might very well have people defending you not so much on the basis of them wanting to save City of Heroes, but because they want their community represented with grace and dignity.

Also, if you do, don't be surprised or mad if a moderator locks or deletes the thread. For a long time here, we haven't even been able to mention another game, let alone prevail upon the CoH community to help them out. That's just business, and the mods are paid to make sure people aren't basically advertising another game on their own forums.

This is exactly right, and why I have been very careful to make sure in all of my communications to avoid saying things like NCsoft "made a mistake" or implying by saying they should reverse course.

They made a decision, one that I feel like we're going to have to respect: that City of Heroes is not in their long term goals as a company. As far as I'm concerned, we're not asking them to change their mind about that; if I decide that skydiving isn't in my personal long term goals, I don't want people protesting and trying to make me feel like I've made the wrong decision.

My communications have focused on a way out of this in which we all win, which is NCsoft allowing the game to be sold to another company. That way, we get to celebrate winning the battle to save City of Heroes, and NCsoft gets to tell its customers and investors that even when a game isn't in the long term goals of its company, it still cares so deeply about the community that it is willing to do something that is very rare in the industry: let its property go to someone to whom City of Heroes is in their long term goals; that it works very hard to build incredible communities like ours, and even when it gets to the point where it can no longer support that community, it takes necessary steps to ensure that the community continues. That's a PR and marketing win, and in no way does it reflect badly on their decision to divest City of Heroes from NCsoft's portfolio of games.

Please remember our message, because it is very important: Our goal is not to sink NCsoft. It is to save City of Heroes. I know that some of you disagree with this and I understand completely, but to me personally, if NCsoft works to ensure that City of Heroes continues in the hands of someone who is interested, that really makes them a damn cool company in my eyes. No, I'm not happy about it deciding to shed itself of Paragon Studios and City of Heroes, but at least in the end, they will have done the right thing.

As for Paragon Studios, when you see me referring to the really short time window of opportunity in which we're working on our immediate goals, this is the time window I'm talking about. In my mind, IF Paragon Studios is interested in re-forming under its own banner, that would be the optimal solution. However, I'm keenly aware of three facts killing us on the clock: 1) These people have a proven track record of developing a profitable game, 2) they have a lot of friends and contacts within the industry who can get them in the door, and 3) they need to put food on their table. I am under no illusion whatsoever that 80+ people are pounding the pavement right now looking for jobs. I'm guessing that the total number waiting around to see how this all plays out before looking for other work is exactly zero.

IF Paragon Studios is interested in re-forming under its own banner, time is of the essence. It's only a matter of time before we start losing Matt Millers, Melissa Biancos, or other key members of the team that would be difficult (and frankly, a bit demoralizing to the community) to replace. That's why I've been so insistent on us keeping longer-term goals with larger time windows out beyond our laser-focused efforts so far in communicating with the press and NCsoft what our optimal goal is.

I haven't heard back yet from NCsoft, but I hope to. If not directly, then through the media or even through a third party. And yes, I also subscribe to the notion that at least for now, no news is good news. I'm optimistic that it means that they are putting their heads together within the halls of the company and asking, "How are we going to get out of this?" and that's a good thing. I want them thinking that.

That movie was SOOOO cheesy, but to be honest, I actually kind of liked it. But then, I do like cheesy movies, so...

We did munge it up in various ways to try to make it incalculable. Like everything, though, if you get a dedicated hacker at it, I'm sure some people out there have the skills to reverse-engineer it. But if we did our job well enough (and we are at least pretty good...), you're not going to be able to guess what we did or brute force crack it.

If you are a low-level (as in close to the iron, not n00b) hacker and see this as some sort of challenge, we ask that you hold off on that for a couple of reasons. First, there's really not that much reward in doing it. Even for an experienced hacker, it would take a fair amount of time to deduce how we're calculating that checksum and all you'd get out of it is, at best, a bunch of decked-out 50s with sweet loot. At worst, you could be sabotaging our ability to allow everyone else to import their characters onto other servers at a later date or causing people who have spent hours exporting their characters to have to do it again because we'd have to change our checksum encryption algorithm and needlessly costing us time and effort working on other stuff when we need our skills focused on other reverse engineering efforts.

If you do manage to figure it out, please keep it to yourself. If it's just credit you're after, PM me or Guy Perfect and, if you're right and you have nailed it, I'll publicly acknowledge your greatness--IF you don't release what you found out.

I'm not going to sit here and say don't poke around with it because I know hackers, you're going to no matter what I say. But consider this: if you are one of those nitty-gritty close-to-the-iron type hackers with skills in reverse-engineering encryption protocols, how about instead of dinking around with this, you ping us at the Titan Network? If that's the kind of challenge you like, we've got much more interesting, hard, and worthwhile challenges for you.

No; there's nothing wrong with any files that were exported using version 1.0 of the utility. The only extra stuff in files exported by version 1.1 are inherent and temporary powers, so if you want those retained as well, you'll need to do a re-export. If you don't care about those, you can just keep your 1.0 files.

We set up a spredsheet specifically for this purpose. Enjoy!

Edit: But our spreadsheet focuses on our efforts to save CoH, not the shutdown.

Don't be stupid, man...





They're closed tomorrow. The sit-in is Wednesday.

Just a quick note...

Keep in mind the theme of the Paragon Appreciation Costume Contest. I saw several "CuppaJo" clones... and several Matt Miller clones, Melissa Bianco clones, etc.

There were definitely red names about, and there were definitely former developers about, and I'm certainly not saying that April Burba wasn't there; she may very well have been and that would be awesome. But there's a decent chance that if you saw someone without the NCsoft_ prefix on their name, they were just a regular player.

You know, for someone who who has been with this community since 2004, sometimes I can still be such a noob when it comes to underestimating it. Ten? Pfff... Ten is just a roadside marker on the way to awesomety-seven! Took this snapshot at 11. Still have over an hour to go before it's officially scheduled to start. This is going to be EPIC.



And here we are, live from Atlas 11 (of something like 15 now, I think?)

Hey, at least you didn't get killed off in it!

This is exactly the kind of viral creativity thing we need. I've updated the link in the post at the top to point to the newer version and again I have to say how brilliant this is. Thanks again a TON for sharing it, I've probably watched this thing twenty times and I've been telling all of my friends, "You've GOT to check this out."

Not so much a furry here, but I will admit that when I was entering that special time of young teenagerdom and Thundercats came out...

Cheetara will always hold a special place in my heart.

DING!

That's awesome news!

It does record salvage stored in the vault. It does not record salvage stored in the auction house or your base bins. The latter can be obtained by performing a /demorecord inside your base. Unfortunately, recording the former is not possibly using any utilities yet. If we are still up and running in December, I'll talk to Guy about some ideas regarding capturing some of the stuff we had to cut out to get this utility out there in reasonable time to allow people to capture their characters in case their VIP status expires.

And to one of the other posters above, no, there is no Mac version at this time. Some people are looking into possible solutions using WINE or other means, but we really don't know if those efforts will pan out. If you're on a Mac, right now, the only sure-fire options are to borrow someone else's PC to export your characters, or install a Virtual Machine software package (e.g. VMWare or VirtualBox) to emulate a Windows machine, or to dual-boot Windows using Boot Camp.

I'm guessing at least until 7:00pm, probably much later as I'm sure that some will hang around until the wee hours of the morning. Most of the big activities will probably wrap up in around two hours, though.

I can't say for 100% certain that rednames will be there on their personal accounts, but I can say that I'm about as certain of it as one can be. We'll also have press there as well, so it really is a big deal.

Thanks a ton for coming, let's raise the roof!