TrueGentleman

While I wish Team Wildcard every chance of success - I'd like to see CoH continue as much as anyone - I fear those chances are slim precisely because of the competition with their in-house IP. Even though there's no real comparison from a gamer's perspective, I doubt the suits will see it that way.

I'd be more sanguine about SOE coming to CoH's 11th-hour rescue...

The eminently quotable Christopher Hitchens tried to explain the difference between the belief systems that ground religious faith and the rational (and empirical) perspective of atheism, which is, after all, only one facet of humanism:
Faith, however, should be differentiated from hope. I still hope that somehow City of Heroes can be rescued from the MMO scrapheap, but I have no faith in NCSoft, based on the evidence of their past actions, to do the right thing by Paragon Studios and their customers.

Unfortunately, those deadline pressures apply to the negotiating parties disproportionately. NCSoft had already crossed their Rubicon with CoH and Paragon Studios on August 31st (hereinafter referred to as Black Friday), so the passing of each one after that doesn't offer them enticements to return to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, anyone hoping to save CoH is under the gun, since as you say, once the lights go out, getting the customers back will be very difficult. If both parties stood to lose their stakes after a certain date, revisiting the sale of CoH would be more attractive, but that's not the case.

As things stand, NCSoft has decided to act, to put it in a less than kind simile, like gangsters torching a mobbed-up bar for the insurance, i.e. whatever balance sheet write-off NCSoft hopes to get from the closure of Paragon Studies, instead of worrying about its clientele.

The City of Heroes IP would definitely be another set of negotiations. The CoH lore, however, is probably the least valuable aspect of the game, particularly when established IPs from DC, Marvel, and even Champions* are taken into account. (The CoH code is strictly fire sale stuff.) If that also includes the CoH game's "look and feel", then maybe a spiritual successor with City of the Reborn or what have you might work. NCSoft has still shat in the punchbowl.


* My own impression is that Cryptic has done an absolutely dismal job of translating Champions lore to an MMORPG. Their snarky attitudes towards the superhero genre (which clearly come from the top) made playing the trial, well, a trial for me. More's the pity—Foxbat is actually a great villain in his pen-and-paper incarnation.

While your point about the back and forth of negotiations (even when they break down) is well taken, the NFL analogy has one aspect that's dissimilar from the CoH situation: Football has an understood window of opportunity, i.e. its "season", but MMORPGs have no sense of looming deadlines that would bring the parties back to the negotiating table. Worse, as time passes and new games are released, CoH loses perceived value as "old", making it easier for NCSoft to write it off as not worth the effort to sell or resurrect.

That's the only reason I'm not completely discouraged at the lack of news from either red names or NCSoft. In fact, if there were leaks coming out about the last round of negotiations, that would be a sign that people were burning their bridges and have given up entirely on making a deal.

Precisely. NCSoft clearly fancies themselves playing in the big leagues, the way MS did when it tried its hand at the MMORPG genre (and failed). Say what you will about MS—that it's often greedy, bullying, tasteless—it did accept Turbine's offer to buy out AC, and for that, it deserves the good will, as well as the money, it received.

Incidentally, while MS did shutter Asheron's Call 2 after only three that's a lesson more about when and how to launch an MMORPG sequel than about doing the right thing by a gaming community, i.e. customers.

Thank you for the link. It's encouraging that they decided to go the full native route, which should mean a more stable, less memory-hogging client than an emulated one. Since LotRO relies so much on DirectX (and it looks gorgeous with DirectX 10), I wonder how they're going to handle the graphics for OSX.

That sounds about right from what I remember of the Windows install before it went F2P, not to mention that it already has three expansions and a fourth on the way.

"Happier". That's a laugh.

Whether villains or heroes, everyone must learn the greatest lesson of all: Emperor Cole is infallibly right.


(Good grief, I'm going to miss the morality system of Going Rogue. Just another feature of CoH that doesn't really exist elsewhere.)

And then there are those who play exclusively Super Villains...

It sounds so simple when succinctly put. Sadly so many MMORPGs have no idea how to come up with a comparable system to promote grouping—which should be the defining aspect of the "MM" part. Consider how Blizzard sidestepped the problem when it instituted the cross-server Dungeon and Raid Finders, which immediately began eroding the sense of community on servers everywhere. (At least WoW now has implemented AoE looting and has swapped need-vs-greed drop rolls for fixed rewards in dungeons.)

i.e. not as good as either CoH's PUG'ing against giant monsters or in world events such as the Zombie Apocalypse and the Rikti World Invasion.

By the ******* Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, what did NCSoft have against Paragon Studios that they didn't want to invest in it? Were the projected profit margins that small that a no-brainer like this was rejected?

What we could really use is a 2-minute version of 40 inspirational movie speeches.

Sure, but ad hominem's aside, NCSoft lost their appeal against Garriott's lawsuit, so it looks like the ******* crazy guy's story has more credibility in a courtroom than NCSoft's. But go ahead and believe whatever you find easier.

Yes, those extremely general factors are listed in NCSoft's BBB entry, but they hardly tell the full story, hence asking here.

The subtext of how frequently those ratings are re-examined can wait until we have more information.

Eh, a game reviewing writing about Blade & Soul's combat mechanics needn't lead with a precis of NCSoft's dubious corporate practices, but that doesn't change the reasons why NCSoft deserves an enormous caveat emptor overall.

This isn't just about CoH—as has been discussed many times here, Auto Assault, Dungeon Runners, and Tabula Rasa are also notches in NCSoft's belt, to say nothing of their fraudulent dealings with Richard Garriott. Anyone covering the games industry owes their readers the due diligence necessary for playing an NCSoft game at this point. (Ironically, I was initially wary about taking up CoH because of NCSoft's general reputation but was won over by the Paragon Studios team.)

This isn't politics, just business.

Quite so, and this includes covering the MMO industry in general.

This means that if they cover NCSoft and its games, they're not doing their job if they overlook the company's past behavior, which wasn't exactly that of a paragon of corporate rectitude. Anyone who now reports on Blade & Soul or Wild Star ought to note that they're coming from a publisher notorious for abruptly terminating promising games. Since MMOs require a medium- to long-term investment from their players, that's a pretty damning reputation.

That's not the issue—plenty of MMOs have made it only a few years before being shut down for various reasons (usually financial, of course). Such games include Asheron's Call 2, Lego Universe, and The Sims Online, to name only a few. NCSoft, as we all know, has a significant number among them for just one publisher.

This, however, is a case of a long-time MMO being abruptly and arbitrarily sunsetted, even while it was generating a solid profit. There isn't exactly a huge number of MMORPG games as old as CoH to begin with, but those in that group tend to have stood the test of time.

Coincidentally, SaveCoH has a team on the Extra Life Charity Drive and Gameathon (http://www.extra-life.org/team/CoH).

If you'd like to play CoH in a marathon 24-hour session and feel heroic by raising money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, this event takes place from 8 AM in your local timezone on Saturday, October 20th to 8 AM on Sunday, October 21st.

Since NCSoft has revealed next nothing about their decision-making process here, there's no objective evidence about whether this was an easy choice, a tough one, or the unfortunate result of an all-night drunken bar crawl. All we've heard in fact since the news first broke are a few paragraphs of boilerplate PR-speak. While Paragon Studios prided itself on keeping in personal contact with their playing community, NCSoft has opted to remain as anonymous as only a corporate entity can be. If they expect us to swallow this, then they've managed to ingore the bad taste this weaksauce statement should have left in their mealy mouths.

At this point, CoH's condition must be downgraded to "hope for the best, expect the worst."