srmalloy

If City of Heroes, with its operating costs and Paragon Studios behind it, is losing money, I would expect that the shutdown announcement would have been preceded by some sign in the company's quarterly financial announcement along with the itemization they published of all the other places where they've taken a financial hit in the quarter.

If City of Heroes is merely breaking even, then killing it outright kills any income from it, so shutting it down is a wash when it comes to the bottom line; it doesn't save them anything, it doesn't help them cover their shortfall, except insofar as it could be considered an 'asset' that they would be able to claim a loss on -- and if it's not making money for them, it has no real value as an asset, and I would expect that all the server hardware would already be fully depreciated.

If City of Heroes is turning a profit, then killing it deprives NCSoft of that profit while giving them only a one-time opportunity to claim a loss on the value of the game. If NCSoft expects a writeoff like that to balance the books enough for GW2 to bring them back into the green, they're betting the company on the success of one game following pissing off a tightly-knit and vocal player community. Passing up the opportunity to show off the GW2 beta at Comic-Con, where they could have whipped up a lot of buzz about the game, and following it up with the negative PR fallout from the cavalier way they threw the CoH playerbase into the dumpster, don't seem like good business decisions to me.

I think that the perennial gripers would agree with the paraphrase from Winston Churchill, "City of Heroes is the worst MMO ever created, except for all the others." There are things that it's done wrong, and some of them live on to this day, but even though it's a niche subject, City of Heroes has done more right than any other single MMO. Some of them do this thing better, and some of them do that thing better, but you and the other devs have given me, at least, a game that has set a bar that no other MMO has come close to reaching, and which is going to be difficult for any future MMO to reach. You are leaving enormous boots behind you, and looking back at my experience with CoH, I despair of ever seeing them filled.

And even if somehow the servers and code get sold to another company and continue running, the development team will have split up to new jobs long before then. If that happens, we may have the shell of City of Heroes, but it has always been the development and support teams that made it a living place and gave it the character we've come to love over the years. I don't see any other MMO that can replace it, either running now or in development. It -- and all of you -- will sorely be missed.

Both NCsoft and Paragon Studios are incredibly proud of the success of City of Heroes, but unfortunately, the continued support of the franchise no longer fits within our long term goals for the company... of running only the type of MMO designed around maximum grind for barely enough reward to keep the Korean and Chinese players coming back, while holding out the infinitesimal chance of a hugely powerful reward you'll outlevel in a month of play, while making most of our money on charging you over and over again for the supplies you require if you don't want all of your gear to degrade into uselessness within a week, all while investing only enough development effort to trot out essentially-cosmetic additions to the game -- for which you need to pay separately and which will leave your characters languishing as your fellow players experience the new content should you choose to forsake buying it -- that do nothing to improve the actual play, but merely extend the grind and conceal its endless nature, while catering to the players who require a "Bambi vs. Godzilla" style of PvP, wherein they can slaughter hordes of other players at no risk to themselves, so that they can believe that this somehow makes them 'better' at the game than everyone else.

It's all about the subtext. Korea and China are their biggest markets, so they're going to deep-six anything that doesn't play to how they want to profit from their games.

Aion is a grindfest typical of all the other grindfest MMOs that do well in Korea and China; I have no expectation that GW2 isn't going to be just another grindfest, with more eye candy, just as Aion was at launch. Given that they're not going to kill the game they just rolled out, which one would they choose to kill -- the one that has the same style as their basic business model and does best in their big markets, or the one that is an outlier and doesn't generate much revenue from their big markets?

I find this quote to be appropriate:

"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system,
in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and
replaced with new weaknesses."

-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

Make sure you don't miss this one:



(there are six plaques for Mr. Hogflume; most are in England, but there is one in New York City. I have no idea what badge you get for all of them, but I expect that it also awards Enrusted with the Secret)

It would probably be too difficult to code into the AI, but I would love for there to be special NPC dialog that gets triggered when mobs get confused, as the other NPCs in the spawn react to one of their own going gaga on them, and then attacking back as they get confused themselves, calling down dire predictions of their future if they survive their immediate retribution.

Tai Quan Leep FTW...

(Boot to the head!)

Your point is valid, although your last statement is factually wrong. Most of the purple sets have one single-aspect enhancement, Obliteration has a pure Damage enhancement, most of the Defense sets have a pure Defense enhancement, both Accurate Healing sets and most of the Healing sets have a pure Healing enhancement, most Resistance sets have a pure Resistance enhancement, etc. Most set IOs enhance multiple aspects of a power (the travel sets are the exception; only one set for each type of travel has a multiple-aspect enhancement -- the other two in the set are +speed/dist [jump/fly/run] and +EndRdx); for those that do, the combined bonus is greater than an equal-level common IO. For example, level-50 Acc or Dam IOs are +42.4%; a level-50 Acc/Dam IO is +26.5% to each -- two would be +53%.

It's an issue of the development time needed to come up with a new pet model and animations. Electric Control's Gremlins, for example, are a minor variation on the Cap au Diable Demons, which are a graphic rework of the Rikti Monkey model (as are Fire Control's Imps -- take them out into the water and you can see the base model without the fire effects). I haven't paid enough close attention to be certain, but I'm pretty sure than the Demon Summoning pets are based off the Council/5th Column werewolf model -- many of the animations and vocalizations seem to be common between them. Beast Mastery required all-new rigging and animation for four-legged pets, so the devs will be looking to re-use all that work for other purposes; this is why we got the Coyote Run power in the market, for example.

I have to agree that I'm not particularly thrilled with the choice of the wolf model for the Bête noire pet in Dark Control; besides the howling, I see Beast Mastery MMs with their pets out, and the constant swaying of the pets seems utterly unnatural and fake -- you watch video of real wolves, and when they're not moving, they don't bounce and shift like a boxer looking for an opening, they just stand there. If the Umbral Beast was going to be a reskin of an existing mob type, I would have preferred a rework of the Hordeling Berserker or another rework of the werewolf. Android_5Point9's suggestion of reskinning the CoT Spectral Daemons is decent, but I think that the name 'Beast' for the power requires something that runs on the ground; the Spectral Daemons don't have legs and fly.

...as long as your definition of 'paradise' agrees with his, and have no qualms about giving up the things that he says it is necessary to sacrifice to bring it about.

One of the design considerations for the power pools was to make them more-or-less equivalent, so that you got pretty much the same set of powers unlocked regardless of which patron you picked. This was supposed to make the choice of patron a role-playing decision, rather than a minmax character-optimisation choice. We can see how well that worked out.

Then I don't feel so bad about reading the thread, remembering Kirk Mitchells alternate-history novels about a Rome that didn't fall (Procurator, The New Barbarians, and Cry Republic) and the name given to someone who worked with technology like the electricus motive (basically, the Roman equivalent of 'engineer') -- machinator -- then creating 'Machinator Magicus' for myself.

One thing I would really like to see happen with Titan Weapons is to be able to cancel out of an attack mid-animation; many of the attacks, if you don't have Momentum, take enough time to unload that your target goes down before the swing even begins. It would be nice if there were a mechanism in place where you could, if you hadn't actually started the swing on an attack, cancel it (still using up the attack and its End) and start another; it seems a little counter-intuitive to me that if you're standing there pulling a gigantic sword back over your shoulder, that if you see your target go down before you swing, you're going to uncork the shot and swing at the dead body instead of switching to a new target.

I've used it with several of my characters to make the laughable mantra "Range is a Blaster's defense" more true, although even with the additional separation Boost Range gives you, you still can't get out of range of many mobs and still be able to hit them.

I've always felt that Regeneration had a fundamental flaw that made it difficult or impossible to balance well against the other defensive sets. Both Defense and Resistance work by keeping you from taking a percentage of the incoming damage -- Defense by reducing how often you get hit, and Resistance by reducing how much damage you take after getting hit. Each of these works once against each incoming hit. Regeneration, on the other hand, works again and again on the damage you took until it's all gone. And 'Instant Healing' being just another big boost to regeneration doesn't feel as if it lives up to its name. It seems to me that a better way for Instant Healing to work would be to turn it back into a toggle that made all incoming damage work like Spectral Wounds -- you take all the damage, then after a second or two, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals back. Because it only happens once for every block of damage you take, it becomes a power that is comparable to, and balanceable against, the other defense types.

It depends on how you slot it, and what your secondary is. LRM slotted with three Dmg/Rng HOs, two level-50 Acc IOs, and a level-50 Rech IO, with Boost Range slapped on top, is amazing. "See that dot?"

I live in San Diego, and I'm seriously looking at this being my last SDCC; the con has been steadily moving away from being a convention by fans for the fandom, and becoming a four-day event where Comic-Con International is marketing 125,000 attendees to publishing houses and production studios, with a few token non-media events tucked in around the edges to pretend that it's still for the fans. Blocks of the dealers' room that used to have four to eight dealers have become monolithic pavilions for individual manufacturers and production houses like Marvel and DC and Hasbro and Toynami puffing the latest cross-licensed marketing gimmick. And if you decide you don't want to bother coming back, the con won't care; there will be hundreds of people clamoring for the opportunity to buy the pass you're not buying.