srmalloy

If you get extremely nitpicky about it, all devout Catholics are cannibals, because when the wine and wafers are consecrated in the Eucharist, Catholic doctrine holds that they literally become the blood and body of Christ.

So far, the best of the parodies I've seen has to be the "David Lo Pan Style" 'Big Trouble in Little China' one.

Then their claim that they'd 'exhausted all options' would be out there as a matter of public record, and anyone who'd approached them would be able to come forward and present their side, including details of what NCSoft had set out as a price, so they'd essentially be making themselves open game for proving their statement to be utter fewmets.

Breaking the sound barrier from a standing start without a vehicle. He wasn't the first person to exceed Mach 1 in free fall; that goes to George Smith, who in 1955 had to eject from his F-100 Super Sabre in an uncontrolled dive at Mach 1.05 (he lost his boots, socks, flight gloves, wristwatch, ring, and helmet to the airstream when he left the plane, and suffered massive internal injuries that left him unconscious for five days in hospital). He doesn't get the record for fastest free fall; that goes to Bill Weaver, who in 1966 experienced a severe unstart of the right engine in his SR-71A and had the plane disintegrate around him, leaving him in free fall at Mach 3.18.

But neither of those were planned; Baumgartner was the first person to do it deliberately, and he and Kittinger deserve the props for their actions -- particularly Kittinger's willingness to go up and do it again because they needed more data.

Still, you know that it leads to an interesting perspective for other countries -- it has to suck when an energy drink has a better space program than your country...

That whole message read, to me, as "All the negative publicity we're getting from being such high-handed utter jerks is hurting us both in the MMO market and in the value of our stock; maybe we can feed them another batch of total ******** and they'll believe it and stop what they're doing so we can go back to raking in huge amounts of money from the games _we_ want to run instead of the games _you_ want to play."

GM_Lloyd and GM_Roland are the two GMs that stand out in my memory for the best response on the few occasions when I've had to resort to petitions.

Somehow, I just can't see legions of kids wearing "Great Leader" hats...

Think of Perez Park as an easter egg more subtle and hard to read than any of the labels applied to the various parts of Paragon City.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

You still can see NPCs in the Portal Corps building (the one at the base of the 'U' behind Tina McIntyre) walk out of a wall, across the lobby, and through a wall on the other side. For a while after the addition of Recluse's Victory, NPCs in City Hall would do it downstairs, too, sometimes walking across in mid-air.

This reminds me of a bug I found relatively early on in the game, back in 2004 or 2005; the outdoor map that had terrain like that of the very eastern edge of the Talos Island zone, with force fields on the west and south sides. Well, the force field on the south side went right up to the War Wall... but where the ledge did a jog inward, the force field continued straight up; if you got up on the ledge, you could just walk out through the gap between the War Wall's force field and the zone's force wall. The area outside was pretty boring -- it showed off even better that the map had been copied from the Talos Island geometry, as there were large holes in the terrain where the buildings had stood.

No; from Zwillinger's post, you'll be receiving a refund for the period from September 1 through the expiration of your paid account, so you'll be getting eight months plus whatever fraction of May you're paid up through.

Not just that, but at its very core, City of Heroes is close to the antithesis of the Korean-style MMO -- you don't spend 90% of your time in mindless repetition to grind skills or gather materials, you don't get forced into grouping to accomplish the vast majority of the tasks your contacts give you, you can do perfectly well without ever buying anything from the in-game store... The fact that CoH has succeeded, however modestly, while NCSoft's Korean MMOs tank in the Western market again and again creates the impression that they don't understand the Western market -- it makes them lose face. Sweep CoH under the rug, and now it's not that Western players don't want Korean-style grindfests, it's that they don't like the particular subject of the MMO; give them the right focus for an MMO, and they'll settle right into the grind like all their Korean customers and be happy.

I don't demonize NCSoft; I severely criticize the business acumen of the person who decided that City of Heroes didn't fit with the rest of the games they offer -- and I have my own suspicions that, by being the antithesis of the Korean grindfests that NCSoft brings to the Western MMO market again and again, and succeeding (however modestly) while the grindfests die, it creates the impression that NCSoft doesn't understand the Western market, and killing CoH lets them blame failures on the _subject, not the _style_, of the MMOs -- "it's not another Korean-style grindfest people don't want, it's an MMO about [subject]; if we keep throwing grindfests at them, they'll learn to love them just like they do in Korea".

Well, as we have seen, NCSoft has opened up a much bigger can of "We don't know what we're doing" by pulling a bolt-from-the-blue cancellation of a game with a very dedicated playerbase, and they're not helping the appearance by being utterly silent about the situation. I don't need to demonize NCSoft; they're doing a perfectly adequate job of it themselves.

What I will do is ensure that, should no acceptable resolution be found, resolve not to contribute financially to NCSoft by buying their games or any ingame items. I have not yet determined what I am going to do with my Aion account -- continuing to play but refusing to patronize the ingame store makes me a drag on their resources, but I find that the swiftly-ramping grind of the game and forced grouping has made it less and less attractive to play, no matter how impressive the game world is graphically.

I customized the powerset colors for all my characters with Radiation powers to remove the radium-paint green that's become the color of radiation and restored the proper color for Cerenkov radiation:

And it's things like this that make me believe NCSoft shut down City of Heroes because it was an embarrassment to them -- they bring Korean-style grinders to the US market again and again, and they keep sliding off into oblivion as people realize what a horrible, endless grind the game is for little payoff... while City of Heroes, almost the complete antithesis of Korean-style grinders, keeps bumbling along -- no sweeping success, but still making steady money for the company. By killing City of Heroes, NCSoft can look at its stable of MMOs and convince itself that when it brings a Korean-style MMO to the Western market and it flops, it flops because the Western market doesn't want an MMO about the subject of the MMO, and turn a blind eye to the reality that the Western market doesn't want Korean-style grinders, regardless of subject. By existing, City of Heroes is walking proof that NCSoft doesn't have a clue what the Western MMORPG market wants. So it had to go.

Losing Paragon City and the Rogue Isles is going to take a surprisingly big chunk out of my life; until NCSoft's announcement, I had never really thought about how many ties I had to people through the game. I've been playing since about ten days after launch -- without checking with NCSoft, I think my account creation date is May 8, 2004 -- and I've seen many changes over the years, including a mass character move from Pinnacle to Guardian when the friends I had been playing with -- most of whom were in the military -- either deployed or moved to other games.

In the first day or so after the announcement of CoH's impending shutdown -- and the already-accomplished out-of-the blue sacking of Paragon Studios -- my mind kept coming back to Prospero's valediction from Shakespeare's "The Tempest": (audio of John Gielgud's presentation)

You and the rest of the Paragon Studios staff have given us the stuff to create such glorious dreams. The world you created let us rise above ourselves -- become someone better (or worse) than we were, escape our daily lives, not to a world where we merely exchanged the daily grind of work for a protracted grind to stay in the same place relative to the NPCs, but to one where we grew above them and became the heroes and villains that made the news and were known all over. Between the player community and the developer community, there was a bond bringing people together in a way I haven't seen in any other game. You and your fellow developers gave us that, and you have made it incredibly difficult for any game to meet the bar you set.

If it turns out that there is no way to save City of Heroes, and we can't create a way to save the essence of what Paragon City was, then our revels may end, but I will go away with eight and a half years of memories, and a connection to people I have never and may never meet that will trail across other games and through conventions. All of us share the link of having been part of the grand vision that you spread out before us and invited us to play in... and my life will be richer for having been able to be part of it.

If Paragon Studios and City of Heroes were to be pulled back together under another company, or on its own, I will continue to support it as I have for the last eight years. If it can't, and a successor is built, then I hope that whoever builds it can bring back as many of you as possible and continue at least the heart of what made City of Heroes what it is. But regardless of what happens, I want you to know that you, and all of the rest of Paragon Studios, go with my deepest thanks for having given me these eight years, and my best wishes for your futures.

I don't know if it exists or not -- and it's a long shot that Cryptic was forward-thinking enough to do this -- but could there be a clause in the contract between Cryptic and NCSoft from back in 2007 that gives Cryptic the option to take back the City of Heroes IP if NCSoft closes the game?

I don't think it's very likely, and don't know whether there's anyone left at Paragon Studios who could check, but it would be a real shot in the arm if it turned out that NCSoft had already ceded the game to another company by declaring its closure.

That did it, although I'm not sure why, as the account I use is an administrator. Set the 'run as administrator' flag in properties, and aside from the stupid UAC prompt, it seems to be working correctly now.

I log into CoH, pick a character -- standing inside the tram in Talos -- use /infoself to bring up the info window, alt-tab out to the Explorer window I have open to the Sentinel+ directory, double-click the icon, and get the 'huh?' message. Same thing happens if I open a shell window, go to the directory where I put the executable, and get everything but the <cr> entered, then go back to CoH, make sure everything's ready, alt-tab to the command window, hit ENTER, and same thing.

Or do you have to be in windowed mode, so you can fire off Sentinel+ without alt-tabbing away from CoH? <edit> No, tried that, still fails. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit Professional.

Looking at NCSoft's financial report, City of Heroes revenue in Q2 2012 was 2.855 million won, up from 2.787 million won for the same quarter the previous year. Income from Guild Wars , on the other hand, was on a continuous decline, as was Aion and both Lineage I and II. Yes, City of Heros was a very small part of their income, but its revenue was climbing, not declining.

Seems as if that part of the CEO's message needs to be edited to change the position of City of Heroes to 'under the bus', where they threw it.

But I suspect that the whole website has gotten thrown under the bus, too. Looking at the press releases, the most recent is from 2009, talking about the Aion open beta, and the latest 'In the Press' article is from December 2007. So taking anything you find there as representative of the company as it now stands may be worse than useless.

I don't know if we'll ever find out for sure... but my guess is that City of Heroes has, and would have continued to be, an embarrassment for NCSoft, dragging its image down -- making them 'lose face'.

City of Heroes is an amazing game -- it did things that other MMOs copied, and things that we wish other MMOs would do -- and one that is highly amenable to the casual gamer -- you can log in, run a mission or two, and call it a night, then come back a day or two later, this time to get together with some friends to do a Task Force -- and if you fell a couple levels behind, that's what sidekicking is for.

Look at the type of MMOs that are popular in Korea. Grind. Grind. Grind. Gather materials so you can use them to grind your crafting skills. Buying from the ingame store or other players to get the gear you don't make yourself, in a constant struggle to keep from slipping behind the power curve, having to replace all your gear over and over again as it becomes trash relative to the opponents you face. Most of the world is set up so you need to go out in groups to survive. And PvP is an integral part of the game, with mechanics designed to actively push you out into the PvP areas, where the gank is the only true expression of superiority. NCSoft has brought this style of game to the Western MMO market again and again, and their track record is poor -- Auto Assault flopped, Exteel flopped, Dungeon Runner flopped, Tabula Rasa flopped, Aion's performance is 'disappointing' -- and Guild Wars deliberately took the game in a different direction to try to eliminate grinding.

The games NCSoft manages that are successful -- albeit only moderately, compared to the Asian market, which is 99% of their business -- are the ones that don't conform to the gaming style that is the core of NCSoft's game stable. And City of Heroes is almost the antithesis of this -- you're not forced into PvP, you don't have to team for the vast majority of the content (and what you do need to team for you can skip without it affecting your character), you get enough reward that you can readily advance your character, and you don't have to touch the in-game store to do it. Having City of Heroes succeed while the Asian-style MMOs that NCSoft brought to the Western market fail creates an appearance that NCSoft does not understand the Western market. And NCSoft needs to appear successful to maintain its reputation; they bought the casual-game company Ntreev in an attempt to buy the success in the casual gaming market they couldn't achieve on their own merits.

By throwing City of Heroes under the bus, NCSoft is left with a stable of MMOs all in the same vein -- even Guild Wars, and the newly-released Guild Wars 2, have enough grind in them to be 'familiar' -- which lets NCSoft look at a failing MMO and rationalize it as "The market didn't want a game about [subject]", instead of having to face the truth that the Western MMO market isn't the same as the Asian MMO market, and releasing Asian-style MMOs onto the Western market again and again in the hopes that us Westerners will finally see the superiority of the style of game [i]they[i] want us to desire won't give them the success they want.

Yes, it's a niche market, and I don't think that it could possibly ever accumulate enough subscribers to make a blip on Blizzard's radar, but City of Heroes, warts and all, did so many things right.