NCSoft and Massively

Until Cap'd Bill started comparing balancing with steering a starship

He can't be dumb enough to open his face witho...wait never mind...

Darn? Did that come out? Chalk it up to a core dump of my inner monologue daemon...again...

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Actually, I commented in a thread back on May 20th about an interview that I read from Positron:

So, I can't comment on any proposed features - which would be idiocy for the devs to mention being so far out, but issues post-GR have already been in the planning stages for some time now.

To hell with your self-aggrandizing PC bovine excrement!

It's TREKKIE. Deal with it. I do, on...a...daily...BASIS!




And anyone who doesn't like it...well...I don't have a less offensive euphemism than rusty trombone...(and yes, I officially went "there")

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I think BaB is implying that if NCSoft was going to shut Paragon Studios down, BaB and Castle would be the last ones to know. *I* might find out before they do. Companies don't often give all of their employees advance notice they might all be fired.

Just out of curiosity, would knowing Paragon Studios had actual plans for post Going-Rogue development give you any confidence that NCSoft would not scale back Paragon Studios if Going Rogue isn't a "huge hit."

I kinda hope so. After my last post I got curious and did a count of articles dated October 5th or newer that had the tag champions-online associated to them on Massively, and then I counted the number of articles from that same time frame that had the tag city-of-heroes associated to them, and I came up with 33 CO related articles, and only 12 CoH ones (of course some of those talked about both CO and CoH, as well as other MMOs, so I'm not sure if that's truly a valid count).

We can excuse the small child, since children don't know any better.
The other two people in your examples are doing what is called LYING. It's lying no matter what background/explanation/dog and pony show you put around it.

To be fair, the manager may have been instructed to keep things secret and marketing people are paid to say whatever will be good for the company. It's still lying, though.

Get over it. It's like, way back in the day, when some people tried to change the common pronunciation of SCSI from 'scuzzy' to 'sexy'.

I'm a Trekkie.

And this, more than anything else, argues for the fact that something (maybe GR) needs to increase revenue somehow. I presume those people aren't volunteers. They draw salaries and need expensive things like computers in order to be productive.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Since everyone is saying this, I'm gonna ask for a source, because I never saw those "numbers".

Maybe they let their hair hang down!

Well it was actually the EU test server (not Defiant) pocket D for the 5th anniversary.

Snippets from my chatlog of the event:
* On planning ahead:
04-28-2009 17:45:18 [Local] Golden Girl1: Positron, I have a question about the dev team - now that it's bigger, do you work on content further in the future, or do you all just have more working on current content?
04-28-2009 17:45:38 [Local] Positron: Far further
04-28-2009 17:46:12 [Local] Positron: MA took 18 months, which is 13 months farther out than we were doing previously

04-28-2009 18:10:30 [Local] Fulcrum: Posi, just curious, how far ahead do you have plans for at the moment?
04-28-2009 18:11:25 [Local] Positron: Working on I18 prelim designs.

I was going to mention the pocket D event because of the revamping zones comments earlier in the thread....
Silver Gale was just pointing out the devs position on zone revamps as stated by Positron:

* On new content:
04-28-2009 18:06:08 [Local] Positron: We could write Arcs, but with MA out there, we'd rather write TF/SF's
04-28-2009 18:06:36 [Local] Golden Girl1: Positron, are there any plans to give older zones a Faultline-style makeover, like Boomtown, for example, or would you rather add new zones to the game first?
04-28-2009 18:06:53 [Local] Positron: Right now, we'd rather add zones
04-28-2009 18:07:04 [Local] Positron: since a revamp takes almost as much time

04-28-2009 18:31:29 [Local] Positron: So we've done two "revamps" to zones so far.
04-28-2009 18:31:41 [Local] Positron: So we have a good metric on how much time it takes
04-28-2009 18:31:54 [Local] Positron: And for a smidge more time, we can make a brand new zone.
04-28-2009 18:33:18 [Local] Positron: But we can make COOL zones

Note that that was the second reference to 'COOL' (both times capitalised, 1st time referring to the 5th TF/SFs)

What was interesting was that Positron stated that they'd done 2 zone revamps. It appeared (to me) that he seemed to be drawing some distinction between a full zone revamp and just adding a bit of sparkle/doing a makeover...

i.e. RCS -> RWZ and Faultline are clearly revamps. Both included a set of new full-length zone arcs, changes to mobs and also had some serious changes to zone architecture/geometry.

Hollows is, by comparison, a mere makeover, adding a bit of sparkle by relatively minor changes - mainly mob changes and a repeatable mission contact. The addition of a field hospital and trainer are pretty darn minor...

It's pretty easy to imagine that the scale of geometry/architecture/mob changes made to RWZ or FL are almost as big a job as creating a whole new zone. But players don't see it as anywhere near the value of a whole new zone...

I can understand that position. It's probably right that the devs don't expend too much energy doing full zone revamps, as they get better bang for their buck elsewhere.

But I don't think that Posi's statements discount zone makeovers akin to the hollows - or maybe even adding a zone arc or two. It's the full zone geometry/architecture work that's wasteful - and I don't think DA or the shadow shards would need a large-scale geometry rethink to make them actually serve a purpose and be visited/used more.

Hasn't ER just been mentioning the last 6 issues as rubbish? Or did I miss somewhere where they said last 7?

Just asking as you show the last 7 issues 10-16. If it's just the last 6 that ER's poo-pooing you should be looking at 11-16.

It's still a decent amount, just trying to eliminate false evidence sneaking into the discussion.

Given how the past 3 have been very dev-content-light (though very good quality content, IMO) I'm still hoping that there's a good amount of non-GR dev content on the radar.

Whilst I'm pretty sure that most people who've played CoX for more than a couple of months will get GR it is still a seperate paid expansion. There ought to be some new content for those who won't (or can't) be getting GR unless we're moving to a content-model where all new content is bought by a purchase seperate to the subscription.

It'd be good if the threads that have been running (well, limping slowly at least) for the past couple of years still make it into the game in non-GR form. Thinking of the coming storm and those letters we occasionally find...

Some players might.
I know I don't, for one.

But yeah, thinks like Astoria and Boomtown HAVE the architechture and everything just fine. Hell, all the 1-25 Blueside zones look fine. What they LACK is content, connected content and ease of getting to that content.

New shinies is NO GOOD if you can't GET to the level you need to be to play it, usually 35+
Sorry, bug-bear of mine...YMMV.
Hollows polishing was awesome, anyway. I wish blueside especially would get some more.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

This sounds like B_I's previous complaint that because we've had pay packs, we'll never ever ever get free costume parts again, and the evil dev overlords will FORCE us to buy packs to get costume pieces. When pointed toward all the free costume parts we've gotten since pay packs came out, B_I noted how none of those count.

Right now, lots of people are busy on GR. It's going to be a big expansion, and if it's going to be anywhere near as good as CoV was, all the mission and art people are very busy working on GR-related things. Considering the beta is probably about two months off at this point, it's crunch time for those folks. Maybe sometime in July we can start seeing the actual levels of free costume parts and arcs/TFs come back and start to make such claims.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Dungeon Runners was shut down despite a large amount of work to turn it browser compatible. Someone approved the resources being spent going in that direction prior to the switch being flipped.

Tabula Rasa also had an expansion in the planning stages and released things like mechs in the last two weeks of its life.

Auto Assault had four free content expansions before cancellation, the last one coming about 5 months before it closed.

NCsoft Korea has shut down several of its Korean titles previously, but information on them is sketchy (because I can't read Korean).

It's not exactly "major paid expansion, then close", but a lot of internal development can be promised and completed just before (or even while) the game is on the chopping block. Brad's point was that NCsoft has done this several times. GoRo isn't the first time post-CoV that CoH/V had a separate paid expansion planned either - we just know more about this one and it is more likely to actually appear.

MMOs require constant development, so they have content planned for a long time forward. Just because Paragon Studios has content planned for I18 and beyond isn't an inherent guarantee that said content will appear. It's planned that far forward for things like resource allocation, marketing and as justification on why development should keep continuing in the terms of millions of dollars a year.

Is CoH/V on track with its metrics? Revenue-wise, yes. The revenue target for CoH/V in 2009 is 25 000 M Won and the Q3 figures put it at about 19 000 M Won for the year. About 6 000 M Won is very doable in Q4 given historic data.

What might be telling is that Q3 2009 - which saw ChampO, Fallen Earth and Aion launch (and probably some other minor titles) - saw CoH/V achieve the lowest quarterly revenue figure since the start of 2008 and the end of a period of reasonable revenue growth (in Won, anyway). Whether it is a blip or the start of something isn't going to be clear for several months. Also, I do wonder how exchange rates (US$:KRWon) might have made CoH/V's revenue figures look better than they were, but I am going to recheck my figures before posting anything. (Also, I was wrong previously when I said Q4 would probably have no new content to buy - the Natural Booster pack is probably going to appear in Q4 to help boost revenue.)

What also isn't clear is the relationship of CoH/V revenue to profit. As pointed out above, NCsoft has increased personnel by a factor of around 4 since full acquisition of the IP. That has to eat into profitability figures and profitability is what key business decisions are often based around.

I don't secretly - or even openly - wish for the downfall of CoH/V, or believe that any one title is going to "kill" CoH/V. I've played CoH/V since beta and would love to be here for years to come. But what I think is obvious - although some disagree - is that Going Rogue has to dramatically increase the player numbers of CoH/V to avoid the title heading towards maintenance mode. I also think that among major MMO organisations, NCsoft has shown itself to be the least sentimental in dropping the axe. I appreciate that in a business, but dread it as a fan of the game.

Having lived through the post-CoV FREEM! 15 to what is supposedly a re-invigoration of developer resources, I'd rather development continue full speed that return to those staffing levels. As, I'm sure, do the devs (and I do wonder how the community would react to any of the well-known devs leaving, let alone a group of them at once.)

Side note: And yes, NCsoft responding to the post (even through Massively) is completely the wrong thing to have done from a PR point of view. It granted legitimacy to the post where it otherwise would have sunk without trace, regardless of NCsoft Europe's former CTO appreciating the analysis.

He's a WITCH! BURRRRRRN HIM!

I put I10 out there as the baseline.

I refuse to be burnt on anything other than antique mahogany and vanilla-scented white oak logs.