TrueGentleman

Thirded. This perennial request seems like it would involve very little work, compared to the amount of coding necessary for adding fingers or customizing power pool/patron animation.

If that were true, then no MMO producer would bother with the "welcome back" free specials, which are offered by numerous ones, including Paragon. Potential returning customers are low-hanging fruit, especially compared to enticing new ones. And to reiterate, unless Paragon can be convinced they're going to lose current customers without a name change, the status quo trumps.

I'm suggesting that there's more than one side to the "all the good names hav been taken" discussion than the people who are arguing that absent players don't have a stake in a vocal minority are claiming to be what's fair.

For what it's worth, trial accounts that never picked up subscriptions don't have much pull with marketing, but even those have more value than a cold call. (Personally, I don't think they should get to hang on to names in perpetuity, but I can't claim to speak for, say, Black Pebble.)

From an ebil marketer's perspective, requiring a departing player to relinquish their claims to a superhero name after a period of inactivity would be an acceptable method of retaining a customer. Psychologically, it's considerably harder to give something up if there is a cost. (Some people are of course averse to such strong arm tactics, though.) And not to name names, but when I finally quit a certain wartorn online world, they made me jump through all manner of hoops to confirm I was cancelling my account.

Anecdotes and claims are not data, and as such, they don't advance a discussion in any direction. Unless there are figures to be cited - and Paragon Studios almost certainly has more extensive ones than a single player can produce - this isn't evidence.

Unless you can produce an affidavit from "Fire Girl", then you're not in a position to say what's fair to that player. Paragon, as an MMO developer and business, has to take into account a much larger picture than what a few vocal players on the boards claim is fair.

There are plenty of extensive discussions on this topic where the counterarguements have been presented, e.g. this one. Starting still another similar thread should oblige the OP to take into account at least some of what's been written already, e.g.

In order to persuade a business owner to fix what a given customer perceives to be a problem, one must first convince them that it's a problem for them, too. The suggestion that the company should undertake any project that could potentially turn away returning customers - which are the best kind to get and which businesses always hope for - is contrary to their bottom-line interests. Unless there is a convincing argument that NCSoft will lose more money by not executing a name purge, that their current paying playerbase will demonstrably drop off without one, the status will stay quo.

It's not enough to suggest to a business that there's a potential benefit to changing things if the supporters can't, or won't, fully take into account the concomitant disadvantages. In order to persuade a business owner to fix what a given customer perceives to be a problem, one must first convince them that it's a problem for them, too. Asking a business to do anything requires them to commit time/staff/resources/costs, so there has to be a more persuasive reason than handwaving away potential drawbacks. When taking an action risks the business losing clean profit - in this case, the low barrier for a former returning to play their old characters - it looks even less favorable to their balance sheet.

Contacting inactive players is a good marketing strategy in general, but this approach could be taken as holding a ray gun to the character names ("Resubscribe or Captain Ersatz gets reconned!"). Until NC Soft shells out for a proper focus group study that tells them they can expect a significant number of players leaving because of name issues, prudent business sense dictates that they shouldn't risk alienating potential returning customers - which MMOs love - when they already have invested in new features (Going Rogue, Incarnates) that definitely appeal to attracting back former subscribers. It's a bottom line issue, nothing more or less.

{I see on preview that while I've been recycling some of my points from the previous thread to underscore this argument's repetitious nature, Memphis Bill has posted one of his epic Copypastas.}

Interesting interview. Nonetheless, since Baker's performance inspired Tennant to take up an acting career as a boy (and a long floppy scarf as a sartorial statement), the edge goes to the Fourth Doctor.

I took that to be Moffat's statement as much as Tennant's, since it's fairly clear from the fifth and sixth series, that Moffat's next favorite is the Fifth Doctor after the Second. (And it doesn't hurt to flatter the father of the girl you're dating.)

ALL of them? The Quantity Theory of Superhero Naming is a shaky enough proposition from which to start this debate, but this is a transparent overexaggeration.

Meanwhile, there are enough superhero name generators on the web that Paragon Studios could incorporate one into the game if this were truly an extensive issue.

Absolutely. It's no coincidence that Baker was Tennant's favorite Doctor as a child.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate news that Series 7 "won't be a full series of Doctor Who in 2012, but a special run for the anniversary in 2013" has broken on Twitter.

It's not so much a wipe and reinstall/update as reformatting a previously partitioned drive, i.e. not only rebooting Super-/Aqua-/Hawk-man, etc., but also reincorporating characters who'd been segregated into the Vertigo line and introducing others from the Wildstorm imprint, much the same way as the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths inclusion of the Charlton Comics characters into the mainstream DCU.

(That seems like an awful lot of sitcom writers and very few science fiction ones.)

(And in some cases, get over.)

An analog of Element Girl who didn't die? Neil Gaiman wrote a superb short story about this C-list heroine (of course, he killed her in the end), but I'm not sure what the rationale to bringing her back for this alternate D.C. universe would be from the sound of this synopsis. While I'm an easy mark for both comics trivia and alternate universes, I do insist on some kind of thematic justification - which Flashpoint has yet to reveal as a prelude to DC's Great Renumbering.

No. Most likely. Yes. And no.

Nice daylight screenshot of the tentacle, though. Yours shows more detail than the few we've seen previously.

I'm unsure what a "comic book lifestyle" might entail, but I could be induced to make a cameo appearance to extol Hal Jordan as The One True Green Lantern.

Not too embarrassed:
Then again, what parent doesn't embarrass their teenage offspring?

They don't really need to right now, any more than they need to fix PVP. As I said, the game's still quite fun (and even an indifferent n00b marketeer like myself can regularly achieve a 99.95% profit margin on the right investment with a modicum of patience). But any proposals for an F2P model for CoH will have to include some plan for rebalancing the economy* and/or imposing the draconian limits on F2P accounts similar to those that other F2P-converted MMORPGs have had to adopt to hold back the hordes of gold farmers.

And that's just one of the numerous headaches that would arise in converting CoH to any kind of F2P system but that I haven't seen addressed in this starry-eyed thread.

* Taking into account the proliferation of "currencies" the game has experienced lately.

"Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

(Yes, "quietly ambivalent" sums up my position quite well.)

Sounds like a dynamic tip mission, an idea I'd support the devs implementing. As the Tip system stands (much as I like it), there's no external pressure on the player to choose one morality-themed mission over another.

Or to use another example, closer to in-game experiences, say Heroic B is patrolling Talos Island and happens upon a mugging by a couple of Tsoo. The Sorcerer (possibly even a named boss) takes off, with the victim's wallet/handbag, while the Green Ink Man stays behind, intending make sure there are no witnesses. Taking out the latter earns the player some sort of hero reward, the former a vigilante pont.

It's more like a hero.

The economy in CoH is already Weimarian wreck*. Inf farmers would have a field day if Paragon opened the doors to F2Pers, precisely because it's so easy. Moreover, any F2P model that incorporated in-game currency transactions would have to be put on hold until the devs figure out how to address the current issues of inflation and market manipulation as well.


* Amazingly, this hasn't really affected how fun the game is.