shadow35

Er, wouldn't it be better to actually tell Paragon Studios?

If nothing else, this shows that if a CoH/Paragon Studios buyout doesn't happen, then maybe the Paragon Studios devs should apply for jobs at Riot Games. :P

thanks, Obsidian, not only for writing this up which is fantastic, but for pointing that out. I was just going to remind everybody it said "not for free to the public" and said nothing about
"being bought out by another publisher" myself.

The odds might still be against this really happening, but even 5% of a chance is a heck of a lot better than 0% chance. And as others said, there must be some shred of hope on Paragon's side because they're not giving away the farm (so to speak) cash-shop-wise. (But could they even do that? They're no longer working at Paragon Studios nor for NCSoft. Does anyone even still have the "keys" to unlock that sort of thing at this point anyway?)

Tee hee!

Classic quote of the day.

Thanks a lot for this thread, people. I'm off to work now, but I will be smiling all day, if only for what might be.

Go Go Paragon! Go Go Us!

Thank you so much, Golden Girl! You have really made my day, no matter what happens.

I have always liked you on these boards. I know I never posted much but I always read these boards, and your continually positive outlook must make you a great person to know in real life.

And thanks for giving us some official word-- all the "false rumor/attention seeking" posts were getting to me here.

I will continue to hit other games' boards and the blogsphere with petition links, and do my part to spread the word.

Whether all our efforts pan out or not, it's good to know Paragon themselves are still dedicated to continuing the franchise (and probably that other game they were working on, too).

Yes, she's full of it. Here's CM Andy (Zwillinger)'s response to her nonsense:

The projects have been cancelled.
__________________
Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios

And here's the original thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=296106

Let's hope all those constantly contributing to the Rumor Mill of Nonsense finally stop now. It's hard enough dealing with what's really going on. Certain people don't need to continually drag corporation heads of other publishers into the spotlight, post ridiculously wrong rumors, and/or constantly imply that they are persons of importance with secret, inside information.

In reality I'm beginning to think certain people are just desperate for attention and will say just about anything to get it.

Thank you, Zwi. I really appreciate your honesty, professionalism and self-restraint in what is a very trying time for us, devs and players alike.

And I'm not listening to any more malarchy. Unless it comes straight from a Paragon Studios dev, I'm not paying it any mind.

Hasn't the silly rumor mill done enough damage already? I mean, forcing those who run other MMO publishers like Smedley, and even CO devs, to have to post publicly about a company and a game that in fact have nothing to do with them at this point?

When is it going to end?

And I would suggest the same amount of restraint and common sense be applied to the fantasies of those who think they're going to create a spiritual successor game to CoH, or hack it and rez it on private servers provided they get some big lump sum of money from players at large, etc.

I understand the sentiment and the hurt, believe me, but reality is still reality and we should start living in it. And as always, I hope the devs do tell us where they wind up, whether it be together doing a new start-up or apart.

And thanks again, Zwi. This forum is getting totally out of control.

Look, I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but The Rumor Mill has been nothing but people talking out their arses since August 31st. And I'm getting a little tired of the smell.

Post official links or please refrain from the "veiled secrecy from the all-knowing one" b.s., okay? If you're trying to be cute, it doesn't work now and it hasn't before, either.

NCSoft seems to have forgotten the golden rule of customer communcations: Angry customers will tell six times' more people about their dissatisfaction than those who are happy will.

Um, Aion NA is completely controlled, programmed and patched by NCSoft Korea. Period. The end. NCWest is a handful of people who merely translate Korea's text into English then push it through straight to live without even putting it up on a NA test server first (which has generated an enormous amount of problems in its own right, believe me). They are completely incapable of even changing the XP rate. They cannot generate or run scripts. Even when the last server merge occurred, character names were a complete disaster area and they could do absolutely nothing about it by themselves.

OY.

They have been uniformly treating NA and EU so badly for so many years I'm surprised there are any players left. However, both Lineage 2 and Aion have been forced to go F2P (and Truly Free to Play with no restrictions at that) to even get any players back on their servers. Pre-F2P, Lineage 2 was down to Chronos, one dead as a doornail NA server. Even with free reactivations, my daughter and I and one other young kid were literally the only players on that server. Lineage 1 was completely shut down here long ago due to having no population. And Aion, well what to say about Aion: It had merged down to 3 empty servers pre-F2P (Kahrun was added as a 4th once it re-launched with 3.0/F2P last April).

Aion and Lineage 2's horrid grind, Aion's terrible crafting and socketing systems, the complete lack of loot drops, and the awful leveling curve have been there since launch. NCSoft (Korea) never listens. Even since F2P, they have mercilessly made it twice as hard to level fighting and crafting levels and have jacked up their already-insane cash shop prices.

Good luck with your whatever presentation to NCSoft. You seem like a nice guy. But it isn't going to do the slightest bit of good. At least you can't say no one warned you.

Our best shot at ever playing CoH again is fading into the breeze more with each passing day, but there really needs to be a pro MMO publisher who is able to convince NCSoft to sell CoH/CoH2 if it's there too. Then they need to get Paragon Studios back together and working before it's too late. And I don't ever even see NCSoft selling, never mind the fact that we haven't heard anything concrete about any pro publishers even trying to get it.

Good luck talking to NCSoft, but don't expect anyone else to see them for anything but what they really are.

The Asian company Nexon bought 15% (controlling shares) of NCSoft in June.

There were hints that this was coming, we just didn't see them. Such as when Aion and Lineage 2 began converting accounts to a different billing login system, but CoH was not required to convert.

I realize that certain players want to somehow present us as a pro-NCSoft group so they can somehow wrangle the sale of the CoH IP/engine etc. to a bunch of CoH players who want to try doing something with it, but A.) it isn't going to work and B.) this was a sleazy thing for NCSoft to do, it was handled in the worst way possible on top of it, and NCSoft could care less about its North American and European player bases anyway.

Arcana, you obviously have never played Aion or Lineage 2 in North America or Europe. You should try dealing with GameForge sometime, too. These things will teach you more about NCSoft than you will ever want to know.

Or even just peruse Aion's North American forums sometime! Whole Aion character databases have been accidentally wiped off the face of the earth with nary an apology or open admission, XP rates have been halved to the complete surprise of the NCWest translation/moderation Team who were not told in advance (making crafting and leveling take twice as long) when Korean patches have been installed, and nothing is ever fixed or openly admitted to, period. Routine lag of 2000-3000 ms from people with otherwise excellent broadband (not to mention getting bumped off in the middle of fort takeovers, which reset whilst the server crashed, etc.) happens daily. And NO ONE CARES, lol. Read the Aion NA forums! The whole entire world outside Asia is hosted on 4 tiny, lag-infested, crashing messes of servers in NA, and all they do is slow XP way down and jack up the prices of XP pots in the cash shop.

Sorry, kiddo, you just don't know much about NCSoft. But you'll see.

This thread is currently funded by: Broken hopes and dreams.

We all love CoH and are miserable to see Paragon Studios and CoH die, but all these fantasy threads and alternate forums are getting a little depressing in and of themselves.

I have to say that if the game was going to be salvaged by any professional company worth it being salvaged for, it would have already happened.

Best of luck to Paragon in finding new jobs, though. Or if they want to stay together and get kickstarter funding for a new project that they can approach a new publisher with, best of luck with that, too. I just hope they let us all know where they wind up so we can follow.

IF NCSoft will sell.

IF the project is far enough along.

IF the Paragon team doesn't go their separate ways and get absorbed into different development houses.

It would still be great for a last-minute save to come through, don't get me wrong, and the thought of CoH otherwise being gone or becoming private server fodder makes me depressed to say the least. But it gets less and less likely that anything professional and positive will really happen as the days tick by here....

Thanks for the link to that very interesting article! Notice how it says that NCSoft has the *option* to buy 40 million stocks in China.... Well, perhaps it's more than an option-- maybe it's one of those "hidden requirements" of "you scratch my back and I'll let you bring your GW2 game into China" things.

That might be yet another reason that NC/Nexon needed to get a lot of cash together in a short period.

CoH shut down so GW2 could launch in China? Who knows, but China's government isn't exactly known for it's support of online gaming (they have forced in mega restrictions on online gaming useage, which require games to have automatic cutoffs for XP earning/loot drops stop dropping/some even kick you completely offline after X hours) and China has blocked/banned more games from running there than you can shake a stick at.... Heck, even WoW was shut down there for months.

I played C-Aion (Chinese Aion) while NA Aion was in beta, and whew! What a lot of tangles there were for the average player there. China is one very controlling country to say the least.

I'm not sure how much money they plan to make on GW2 over there, though, or how. Asians don't usually buy the box for online games, by the way, but merely pay pennies per hour (purchased time rolls over into the next month if you don't use it) to play. I probably still have 60 hours of time there, somewhere, if I ever felt like re-installing the C-Aion client with the English language pack....

Haha, yeah, I agree with you there. Not to mention that not only were CoH accounts not transitioned to a different login system like Aion and Lineage 2 were, but Guild Wars 1 was not, either.

At this point, I'd be more than a little nervous if I was still a Guild Wars 1 player in North America as well.

No matter what happens, this is still a fantastic idea. I'm sure the devs could use the morale boost right now, plus the public at large needs to learn about NC/Nexon and how they treat their customers, as well as what could happen to whatever games they play from that publisher.

Yeah, I was wondering that, too! And they should give us not only an exact day but an exact time (in specified time zones so we can convert if need be), too, so we can make sure to be there.

With the totally crappy way they have treated Paragon Studios and CoH's player base, it's the least they can do.