UberGuy

Does it being a crappy outcome sound like a "miracle" to you? After what I just posted, do you really think you're doing everyone some sort of service by singing a different version of "yeah, we're screwed"? Seriously?

Jesus, people.

Again, you can combine hope for the long-shot with reminding people that it's a really long shot without making it sound like hope of any sort is stupid.

I am very unlikely to actually go to another MMO. While I don't consider all modern ones bad, none of them call to me. The circumstances that got me into CoH were unique, and the characteristics of CoH were unique enough to keep me here after the original reasons I came no longer held true. It's just very unlikely any MMO will combine those factors again, and my life has changed a lot in 8 years to boot, so the necessary conditions are actually different now.

I'm likely to play video games, but they will probably be FPS games.

Like you, I don't own a console. Mostly, console games feel very dumbed down to me compared to games made for the PC. There are exceptions, but I find them very rare. If PCs die off as a viable gaming market, I may be forced to migrate, but mostly that does not appeal to me at all.

Very few people seem to be operating as if that's not true. It seems needlessly pessimistic to bother pointing it out. It's like reminding everyone that, yes, we will all actually die someday. We all know that. Some of us even make plans regarding it, especially as we grow older. But even when we're at an age where it's likely we'll keel over, no one really wants to be reminded over and over "hey, you know, you're probably going to die soon."

CoH ending isn't comparable to dying for its players, no matter how upset they may be over it, but they still really appreciate someone reminding them constantly how likely it is that CoH is going to end forever on November 30. The game is still here, and for some of us, we plan to make use of that fact until then.

And if someone pulls off a miracle, even a delayed one? That'd be fan-fricking-tastic. You can remind people to have well-grounded expectations without being a sourpuss.

Original Guild Wars did something very much like this, and I really disliked it a lot.

I get some of the reasons people dislike the level-based combat threat systems, but I think, ultimately, CoH ended up somewhere that really gave a best-of-breed combination of them. (Notice I said "a", not "the" best-of-breed.) Against stuff that it made gameplay sense to have be a roughly equal challenge to everyone, you had (mostly) leveleless foes. Against stuff that it would suck to have to worry about (hellions in Atlas park attacking 50+1s), you didn't.

I think that, done well, there's room for both systems, and I would dislike one where everything is levelless as much if not more than something where everything had a fixed level and would be "gray" or "purple" to based on relative levels.

Actually ... I completely did not remember the episode ... until you pasted that. So I suspect you're on to something there. Seriously, I now vaguely remember the plot and everything, and I did not at all before.

I did have a serious boy crush on Erin Gray, though, so, yeah.

Either that or Citadel is.

Hm, or maybe he's Twiki. I would probably run screaming if he broke out "bidi-bidi-bidi", though.

That's almost certainly because Aion was designed with (South) Korean customers in mind, where CoH was not, and was never popular there. There's more going on here than just intrinsic game quality or even profitability.

That leadership is apparently in place. However, they almost certainly cannot publicly share details of what is being negotiated. So far, they have only let out that negotiations are still ongoing.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that such leadership is "all" it will take. A lot of other things have to fall into place - the best leader in the world might not be able to get NCSoft to play ball. But the leadership is in place, and "someone else" is indeed working on saving the game.

Nothing at all might come of it, but people are trying.

While I agree strongly with this, I will at least say I doubt that was the original intent. I think they just didn't think it through that well. Granted, a lot of us told them that it was going to work that way, but probably very late in the total design.

The issue wasn't so much the IOs themselves. You can build pretty decent exemplar builds assuming unlimited access to the IOs you want. Not as rocking, perhaps, as a build slotted with straight 50s, but still way, way better than it would be otherwise. The problem is that "unlimited access to the IOs you want" was not close to typical. I gather it wasn't an insurmountable problem for a lot of posters in this thread, actually, but I don't think we're very typical.

I will definitely concede that some powersets are way, way stronger with one or two of their powers, and that they can be comparatively mediocre without them. The thing is, whether people can have fun progressing stuff we consider mediocre is very subjective. As long as a powerset met a certain basic level of functionality, I could play it through 25-odd levels on baseline or near baseline difficulty, then start bumping it up once I picked up the heavy hitters. I realize not everyone has that patience. To me, though, this was more a matter of "could be done better" as opposed to "is really bad".

I totally did not think about that. I believe that means this is not a good day/time for an attempt. First of all, I don't want to force people to decide between trying for the badge and attending a SaveCoH event. Second, I doubt we can afford the drain on players it would create to split attention that way.

I need to figure out my weekend so I can decide whether to try for Friday or Saturday instead. I will aim to start an hour later for west coast peeps either way, however.

Either you and I were reading the same document, or you were reading it through a filter that very much did have to do with your personal preferences. I can say that simply because I read the document, and while that answer was there for some things that disappointed me, it was there for somethings I frankly didn't care much that was the answer to, and it was not there for everything they answered.

Moreover, this was a document primarily on lore. People were asking about various story elements, some just stubs, some more filled out but old, and some new. While lore is usually used to explain movement in the game, such as new TFs, zones, enemies and sometimes even powersets, fleshing out old lore is not key to progressing the game. I like the lore to move forward, but, to pick an example, I don't need them to revisit and extend Cimerora to get new powersets or new TFs or new Incarnate powers. They could give us completely new lore that provides those things. I want new things to do and new shinies, and I don't really need them to update old lore to get those things.

I'm not a big fan of tons of dangling lore, but the game likely never depended on them tying up loose ends.

Edit: One other thing. The questions were not something we could consider a good statistical sample of things we could use to make broad conclusions about how often the devs left something dangling, and I don't mean because its a small sample set. I say that because people were most likely to ask questions about lore that's old and incomplete because its old and incomplete. What the answers tell us is that a lot of things which are old and incomplete are that way because the devs didn't have time to revisit it. We can't, however, safely extend that to say that the devs leave everything incomplete.

I don't understand the complaint. Did you enjoy the game? Did you enjoy the things they were doing? If the answer to that question was yes for enough players, then they were doing the right thing by focusing on those things and not stuff that would be nice to have. They could either go improve old and/or unfinished stuff, or they could work on new stuff. And given that choice, they simply often did not have time to work on the old stuff.

I completely understand that different players have vested interests in different parts of the game and/or its lore, and if you're saying that the parts of the lore or game you cared most about were never going to get fixed, then yeah, you were probably never going to be satisfied. It's ludicrous though, to ask why they ever did anything to start with. You always start things thinking they'll have the use and focus to justify maintaining or improving them ... and sometimes you're wrong.

I almost certainly enjoyed the Praetorian War story more than I would a Rikti-inspired archetype.

And no, that's not meant to be damning with faint praise. While the Praetorian War wore on a bit longer than I might have liked, I had no major issues with it as a concept for them to dwell on for an extended period.