'Who is Jack?'

This is a question I see coming up in my groups pretty frequently, either during downtime or even during combat if the team has managed to reach that pace. A certain beta being produced by a company that Mr. Emmert has a significant stake in is prompting some what more than the usual number discussions to come up.

However, there are indeed new a fairly large number of new players in the game and so explaining Who Jack was is growing difficult. What he did for the game, criticisms against him, and what he's doing now is enough information to fill a small book.

Then if you get to the end of that conversation, there's immediately another on the merits and problems of the Global Defense Nerf as well as Enhancement Diversification, again unknown concepts to a great number of players.

My usual response to these questions is something along the lines of:

'Jack is Jack Emmert, who posted as Statesman on the official boards. He left the CoH design team when it was purchased by NCSoft and remained at Cryptic, where he's engaged in the creation of a very similar game based on the 'Champions' RPG.

'I'm afraid he doesn't have a very good reputation among CoH players because SINCE leaving the NCSoft dev team, he's done things like recruit for his new game on the CoH message board. Even before that, he tended to earn enemies by making unkeepable promises-- such as promising 'no more power nerfs' and then implementing the 'enhancement diversification.

'For many players he's exhausted all his respect and credulity. I personally advise you to take anything you hear from him on the Champions Online forums with a big grain of salt. He's very good at making grandiose promises and then never living up to them.'


How do you reply to questions about Jack?

i actually have a twenty page paper exploring jack's alleged merits and failings that i copy & paste every time the subject comes up

it is always met with much excitement because everyone loves to hear my opinions on game designers that they're only dimly aware of

That guy who makes us worship his painfully generic mary sue(s), especially villains, and thinks that doing so is fun. That he had to have a whole "origin" made up for them because they are too uber to just be called magic origin simply adds to the nonsense.

Not sure if he actually created recluse, but recluse is basically evil states.

I was not there during those nerfs, so that's the main thing I think of.

Rick Dakan came up with the idea for City of Heroes and Michael Lewis put up the money and later became the CEO of the company but it was Jack Emmert who was the lead designer that made it a reality and without him the game might not exist or have been the success that it has. Whatever mistakes he may have made way back when or more recently you can't take that achievement away. Of course he's only one person and there have been lots of people who have had huge impact on this game, many of whom I bet never get any public recognition at all.

I get the feeling that most people on the forums actually like the guy and it's only a small but vocal minority of people who bash Jack. Naturally most players don't even know who he is unless they frequent the boards.

As far as I can tell the attitude the game designers for City of have is a much more open and interactive one than that of other games and while the designers often take a lot of heat for talking to the players as frequently as they do, they really deserve credit for making the effort.

Who is Jack?

Don't ask, don't tell.

That normally kills the conversation dead.

See my sig.

He brought us this game, he poured a lot of himself into it, and I've no doubt some of the good things we have are his doing. The problem I had was with his game theory and NIMGYD attitude, he was fixated on the idea that players secretly want to lose. I still remember (though not verbatim) the story about him losing a dozen or so times to a chu-boss in a handheld game and rush he had when he finally beat it and how he wanted to make encounters in CoH exactly like that.

That's a very hot topic and often leads to fights and disagreements. Even to this day Jack has supporters and followers in this game that cling to the notion everything he did was super-duper-awesome-candy with a side order of bacon. I'd just tell whomever asks that it's a VERYYYYYYYYY long story and if they don't have a half an hour to kill learning about him just know he's gone and were better off for it.

I just tell them I don't know Jack.

I always thought Jack was the dude you fought in Croatoa...

How can you speak of Jack without mentioning his seer-like 'Vision' that must be adhered to?

I heard that if you speak Jack's name three times into a mirror, you become equal to three white-con minions. :/

Jack is a guy I don't really know other than he has a cool job.

That description goes for all the devs, past and present. Just because they post on a message board sometimes doesn't mean we know them, any more than you know me, or I know any of you. So let's just enjoy the interaction we have with the developers of this game, and not project made-up personalities and motivations onto them. We all want the same thing- a better game.

You don't know Jack?

Jack is the guy that makes those delicious hamburgers.

"Jack was the Lead Designer of the game for quite some time, including at its release. He made enemies on the boards, and some forum posters twitch at even the sound of his name.

He was just a guy, though, and not really worth all the venom that gets passed around by some. The game is still here, it didn't die during his tenure, and now he's developing other games elsewhere."

I don't even discuss him in-game, though. I figure we have better things to discuss on a team than to bring up really long-dead horses to people who don't know what we are talking about. It's really rather rude to do so anyway. It's always rude to discuss topics others have no knowledge about unless they express an interest in learning about it, at least in a social setting like this game.

Geez, people, give it a rest already.

As long as I can make bad jokes about him, Jack will never truly be gone.

*wanders in*

Nope. Not a thread about me.

*wanders out*

//Jack

I thought this was going be another lame Candle Jack thread nonse

I'm so hardcore, when I say Candle Jack he doesn't even sho