gameboy1234

I agree. I would have much rather done my villainy from within Paragon City.

Given this, it's perplexing why Praetoria was made a third side. A few months of "new shiny" and then it was deserted. Like Rogues Isles, but multiplied even more. I can see why new stories or new areas would interest the devs, but the unequal content and relatively small player base (which couldn't fill three factions) seemed to doom the value of any zone expansions.

That's probably an easy criticism to make with the benefit of hindsight, but it seems there were clues too that this would happen.

Reverse engineering is not illegal. However, there's still no guarantee that they'll be able to pull it off. If they're sued, will they have the money (and time) to even fight a legal battle?

Maybe they will, I dunno, but while not fundamentally illegal there's sure to be some challenges. I hope they get something nice going but it really is kinda a long shot.

No, not good news, and I'm not happy about it. It's NCSoft's perogative to not sell their stuff, but I don't have to like their descision.

Oh well, time to start copying my characters with the Titan export tool thingy, in order to prepare for the coming hackocalypse.

The "or Paragon Points" makes me think that it's possible, but I haven't seen any details. Does anyone have official or unofficial info?

+1 SM:AC reference.

Sad to see you go, Z, but I guess it as to happen. Unfortunately it's starting to feel like efforts to keep Paragon Studios are becoming increasingly long shots.

Well played sir. This gave me a smile today.

*groan*

While I'm not really hopeful myself, there's no point in not wishing for miracles. I'm going to keep all my points in my CoH account for now (I have about 4300), and hope that I'll be able to transfer them to Paragon Studios. I figure I have until Nov 1 at least to send customer support a message if it really looks like this isn't going to happen.

It's true I don't have hard data on player numbers, or even soft data. Those MMORPG charts were pretty much guesswork too though. But the main point is revenue; the only real reason a company sells a product. And those who track those things have been pointing out that CoH has been on a slow decline for a while, basically since NC Soft bought it.

It sucks but we really shouldn't be surprised. A player base around 50k to 75k sounds right, Going Rogue box sales were about 50k iirc. And those aren't great numbers for a MMORPG.

I'm still aggrieved that CoH wasn't tailed slowly off, though.

While I'm personally incensed that NC Soft is cutting off CoH with so little notice, I can see it from their perspective too. CoH has been on the decline financially for a while, and the latest effort to revive it with a free to play model haven't been spectacularly successful. I think population are even lower now than last year, even though revenue might be up somewhat.

So NC Soft has decided to roll the bones and try something new. It probably won't work, but CoH was clearly sliding downhill, so there's not a lot of down side from NC Soft's view point.

Again, I'm really mad that NC Soft isn't cutting staff slowly and letting CoH wind down naturally. I would have played for quite a while. But there's not a lot we can do, and the financials look pretty obvious. It the manner of the shutdown that has me torqued off.

Fortunately, I use AdBlock!

But yes, I looked at the website yesterday and noted the awkward grammar and odd formatting (hint: make paragraphs stand out more!) and dismissed it as a 10 year old and his blog. Nothing to get worked up about at all.

Again, that doesn't seem to be your Steam screen name. Do you have another name you go by?

Or join the CoH Steam group I listed above, that'll make it easier to find you.


EDIT:

Same, no "Orlock182" found. Join a CoH group or tell us your real name!


There's a "esutton.1" but no just esutton. Tell us your real name!

I'm pretty sure I found you on Steam (and I sent a friend invite) but your name on Steam was Dispari, no Scuro ending. It's your screen name, I think, that is visible. I think the other name maybe is your login?

* * *

Anyway, some of my contact info:

Steam: gameboy1234
HeroGames.com: gojira
RPG.net: GojiraRed

There's a bunch of folks (like 300+) in this CoH group. Steam is the best place to find me right now.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/coh-unofficial

# # #

I also play Pen-and-Paper rpgs. I post at the Hero Games forums (the original Champions) as gojira.

http://www.herogames.com/forums/forum.php

Feel free to stop by and say hi.

I also frequent the PnP RPG site, RPG.net.

Edit: There's a huge existing thread, so I switched the link to the other thread. Here's were PnP types can gather to b**** about CoH closing.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?...nd-of-the-year

There's like zillion "Baroness" on Steam, and I don't see a way to easily check their groups.

Do you have a link to your picture on Steam? That might help narrow it down.

EDIT: nm, after many clicks I think I found you.

There is also a CoH community on Steam. I hang out there, although I'm really bad with the controls and I'm not really sure how all the friend stuff works. My public profile is gameboy1234 btw.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/coh-unofficial

I vote we name him Posi and avoid the IP issues.

Note that I live very close to Paragon Studios and while expensive there's a lot of advantages. Sure it would be nice if housing were cheaper, but that's the price you pay for having a ton of profitable tech companies to work for.

I feel the same way but would make an exception for CoH, provided the dev team is kept intact. If only the property was bought but the devs let go, I'd have a hard time following the game to its new home.

Probably like "no chance" hard time.

Champions (the pen and paper RPG) is coming out with a new version this fall. It's a shorter, streamlined version of their main rules. That's a nice bonus if you are thinking of getting into it since you won't need the multiple books to start off.

If you do hang out on their forums, say "hi" on the forums, I hang out there.

http://www.herogames.com/home.htm

Guild Wars 2 just had a very successful launch. They are in fact in need of more servers. This might be a "resource reallocation" issue.

Unfortunately this is what I feared as well. Server populations seemed to be dropping. Freedom added a lot of life, but SW:TOR hit us hard. Numbers recovered a bit in the spring but never seemed to come back fully.

I really am confused why the whole game was shut down, and not a server merge with a skeleton crew to maintain it. It does feel like "corporate panic" is to blame on that front. I don't have the numbers in front of me of course but it really does feel ham-handed and that they could have planned this better.

x2.