Paragon Layoffs??

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.

It's entirely possible that most of the layoffs are people we've never heard of. These things happen all the time; it's just that people usually don't go blabbing to websites about it.

So how was Paragon Studios not focusing on CoH?

Or does the top secret project mean something else?

Who are you and what have you done with Mod 08?
Eight un-named workers does not necessarily include BaBs. I'm not believing it until it's actually made properly clear, not the guff that marketting gives out.

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.

I thought it was just getting frustrated indoors, and was just sent outside to let off some steam?

You had me until this. If I worked with your company for a while, I wouldn't want the PR spin to be "impacted a small number of people". I understand that there has to be a PR spin and am at peace with that. This just sounds to minimize the contributions the people made while here.

Still, I'm not exactly arguing the point, am I? The point is that some people were let go. I wish them the best, thank them sincerely for their efforts, and hope that their time at Paragon Studios makes for a tasty resume when they move onto other career opportunities.

Why does it seem far-fetched? BaBs would be a logical choice to begin work on CoH 2. This isn't how I'm reading the spin, but I don't think you're way off base in suggesting it.

I trust your history enough to believe that you are correct. This is a shame what you say.

Good. Those slackers needed to GO.

I'm pretty sure it was a joke, as the working on the Vault is kind of a running joke

Well, something to remember is that C.Bruce was involved with NetDevil's Auto Assault before he was hired into Cryptic. It is possible that he could be being pulled off to work on another NCSoft published game, or it's possible that he's been head-hunted by another MMO developer, or by another game developer entirely.

It is also possible that he may have been feeling the burn-out of working on animating this game for so long, and voluntarily left, if he left.

What I can tell you is that NCSoft has committed a major chunk of cash to Paragon Studios, and to the continuation of the City of Heroes franchise. I think if Going Rogue turns out to be a sales disappointment, NCSoft will play the CoH2 card, and risk a bit more money now.

That being said, I'm not entirely convinced that NCSoft, as a corporation, fully understands the concepts of community or the player-base of City of Heroes. If C.Bruce has indeed left, and the no-comment lines are the extent of NCSoft's handling of the event, then somebody has royally dropped the ball.

Now, I'm sure several players will already make the argument that NCSoft has already dropped the community relations ball with one of their recent hires into CoH's support staff. I'm not going to argue that in the past couple of months there has been an NCSoft employee who has managed to mess things up. Part of me hopes that person was involved in these lay-offs, but we may not know for sure.

The big question is whether or not C.Bruce leaving will actually have an effect on the game as a whole.

My gut opinion is... no.

We already know, for point of fact, that a small percentage of the playing base interacts with the forums. We also have not really interacted with C.Bruce for several months now. His twitter has been gone since, well spring I think, maybe earlier. He hasn't posted outside of the Beta sections of the forum. We also know that at one point C.Bruce was swamped by constant Private Messages and requests for comments... such to the point that even I'm hesitant to poke the dev team myself.

C.Bruce's lack of interaction means that many players entering the game through Going Rogue don't really know what the rest of us are on about. Similar to how new players question the random anti-jack posts and comments. C.Bruce, as a developer, hasn't really been making an impact on new players.

I cannot come up with a good reason then why C.Bruce leaving Paragon Studios would have an ill effect on the game. There are other animators, and some of them are pretty good. They need a bit more polish, but there's the question of how much of that is the animators talent, and how much of that is the toolkit the animators actually have available.

Yep.