Thanks for talking to us, Paragon.

Actually, in the form that seems most relevant to this particular matter, "TERA" is apparently an acronym for "The Exiled Realm of Arborea".

Maybe not nowadays, but don't forget about the great issue 13.

The issue that made over 90% of PvPers leave the game, destroyed every big organized event. The one that had Devs lying about their support on the subject, the one that had mods deleting more than -half- of the posts on the subject. The one that failed horribly but was considered a success? The one full of deceit and egos, inexperience and ignorance.

We have quotes saying they would keep investing time into it, we have quotes from them trying to justify the changes and we even have some quotes of people inside finally admitting it was a bad idea.

It's not much better than what you listed in the OP, just on a smaller scale.

I wish I could find the quote I'm looking for, but Macskull defined it perfectly by stating that COH PvP, a lot of players favourite part of their favourite game by far, was taken away from them, beat up, changed forever and thrown back saying "Here, you'll love this".

What part of the game do you love the most? Now imagine I've never done it before, but I walk in and decide how it should be done. Let's say I think badges should be purchasable from the market, or change old content to require teams with the new model, or let's just say that I hide all of the COH numbers from the min/maxers (or like DR, which is only understood by 1-2 PvErs)



Then again, maybe they made so many bad moves that they've learned from it. Castle's gone at least.

I honestly wouldn't wish what happened to PvP i13 on any part of the game.

It's by far the darkest history this game has. 4 years later I'm still digging through the ruins of all of it to learn exactly what happened, because there's an enormous amount of rage/hate/dissatisfaction about the subject. On these forums and others.

No No and more no, Their policy's are great for people in the NA, but completely screw over the rest of the world.

I have been treated better by community teams and devs in other games, the only reason I stick around here is because the game and people I team with on my server rock so much.

I would love to know which games. I say this because EVERY other MMO I have played not only had a crappy community team, but in most cases a crappy community. You are welcome to PM me and I will take a look at their boards. No snark here, I am serious Paragon has the best community team I have ever seen.

As for i13, the person most responsible for that mess is gone. Shoot, click IH still sucks too, and I am constantly told to let that go.

Different experience then. When I was going through radiation treatment I got multiple PMs from multiple Paragon staff members checking my status, and wishing me well. All I ever got from Cryptic was BS replies that ended up being...BS. YMMV, and it seems it does.

I know the EU community is a bit put out about some of the sales decisions, the merger of the servers, and the ability to maintain a separate EU staff, but that is the price of running a smaller company. I hate that for you guys, I really do. It however does not change the level of communication and respect the community managers and staff of Paragon give us. The weekly webcasts alone put them above any other MMO I can think of.

Before I am accused of being a Dev lackey, I call a spade a spade. When the Devs do something I object to, I am very clear about it. They are human and screw up, even in their screw ups they are better than the rest.

Out of curiosity, what current Community Team policies favor the North American playerbase over the EU? Meet and Greets not withstanding.

You all live in North America. Clearly you're biased.

Well, the problem here Zwhyareyouwastingyourweekendontheforums seems to be that since the OCR team is the one that tells us about unpopular decisions that have been made by either the Dev team or, more likely, NCSoft then the OCR team is obviously to blame for the unpopular decision.

You know what things we mean. Things like deciding to merge the forums (obviously an OCR team plot to rule the world) and the resultant name collisions and the decision made (most likely by someone dealing with the databases) that name collisions would be resolved by prepending an EU_ or _EU (whichever it is) to the username. I mean, that's very obviously a decision that was made by the OCR team and not by the NCSoft team that deals with the databases and accounts. Right?

Or the global database merges that resulted in the smaller EU database entries being changed instead of basing the decision on any other criteria that might be more work. That couldn't have been a decision made by those that maintain and work on the databases, it had to have been something decreed by the OCR team.

And the removal of localization in the game for German and French was obviously your decision since you couldn't even spell Zwillinge correctly when Avatea pronounced it for you but you just had to Americanize it by adding an r to the end of it. I mean, it's not like a cost analysis was done by someone in NCSoft that determined that this was no longer cost effective.

See? It's obvious that since the name of the studio was changed to Paragon Studios from NCSoft NorCal that the OCR team has had it in for the EU players.

Over 90% huh?

Destroyed every big organized event? Hmmm seems Freedom pvpers are gearing up for a new 5v5 tournament - this of course after the "small and completely unorganized"[sarcasm] 8v8 tournament where Ware.Gov won.

Well since we are just making statistics up - Over 90% of the player base has no interest in pvp - then and now - I have a feeling my "statistic" is more factual.


The decline of pvp must be attributed to solely Issue 13 and has nothing to do with oh... a multitude of other reasons. I mean Pre Issue 13 pvp had thousands of people pvping non stop. Pre Issue 13 pvp was obviously very successful. Pre Issue 13 pvp had no bugs/flaws that I can even think of and was completely balanced. No clue why they went messing around with such a great system.... oh wait.

FYI the changes to pvp are NOT by far the "darkest history this game has." Enhancement Diversification impacted almost every player and was met with such overwhelming disgust by a HUGE majority of the game that it makes the changes to pvp in I13 a footnote in this game's history. Heck I see more threads/complaints etc about Freedom than I did with pvp. I see more threads/complaints about gated costumes than I ever did with pvp. PVP never was and never will be an integral part of CoH - it was an after thought and imo one that should have never been implemented. Castle was/is a human being you know and I get very tired of people blaming Issue 13 on him and him alone. The changes that were made in I13 were actually in response to **gasp** player requests. And yet here we are 10 issues and 3.5 years later and people still whine and blame Castle. You do know he had a boss who approved everything right? You do know he was not the one solely responsible for Issue 13 - it was a DEV collaboration on every aspect - he just happened to be the one who paid the price of being vilified for caring about pvpers and trying to do what he could to appease the then current ones while trying to find a way to get new players into pvp.

So what do you say...after over 3.5 years you give the guy a break. He was/is an awesome person and truly got the short end of the stick when the small population of pvpers threw a hissy fit. He put up with a lot of crap from pvpers and to me it was a sad day when he quit because Castle was overall good at what he did - and his contributions to this game should not be forgotten. Then again it is so easy for people to sit behind their keyboard on the internet and spew misinformation about people they perceive to be wrong...forgetting the fact that the person they are demonizing is a person who gave an awful lot to this game.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Stop it.

Seriously.

We had two ladders that were pretty active, dozens of teams, live events nonstop and even the Devs were pretty lenient on taking down Test beceaus they knew we had a ladder going. Even CriticalKat's best efforts at the leagues fielded at most 10-12 teams, total. Now, there are none. As gallant as Sentry4 has been in hosting events nonstop on Virtue (and full credit for that), we've had at most a dozen to twenty people in RV and about the same in some Arena nights. That's not even mentioning the yeoman's work by Zwillinger helping with Leagues, Ex Libris before him and the blink of a Lighthouse somewhere in there too.

Not to say pre I13 was perfect, but instead of just working with us in fixing and balancing the most egregious stuff, it was all turned into a mashed up disaster.

People were always going to move to other games but our community is a shell of what it was and yeah, I13 can take a huge chunk of the blame.

As for your stat, we know it was around 10-15% of the playerbase, but seeing most of them had 2-3 accounts...

The players created that, making up some imaginary date in their own heads as to when it should come out and then feeling burnt when it didn't. That was not the devs fault at all, tbh.

This! As much as we sometimes RAAAAGEEE at each other, I wouldn't trade this community for any other.

Errrm, what?

I13 killed pvp full stop. PVP was never really popular in this game. Full stop.

10-15% of the playerbase was anemic.

Do I want them roll back I13 pvp? yes. Will it ever happen? no.

Do I care any longer? **** no!

The places they have spent that money instead have been 110% greater than anything they could have done with pvp after I13. I don't miss pre or post I13 pvp. At all.

Everyone else's mileage will probably vary by 1001 degrees.

We used to have Eu community mods that used to hold meet and greets and summits within the EU, since the likes of Bridger and Rockjaw have gone, the only meet and greets with the Eu are player organised only.

Meet and greets are big part of community relation's and cannot be dismissed, especially now when costume parts are being chosen at these events, I speak for myself when I feel excluded and bit distant from the community (hence why I tend to stick to my own server and not venture out) when this sort of thing happens. Having the choice later on at what you want them to look like is a bit of a P-Take when you haven't been allowed to determine what you want in the first place.

Also I have made various grievance reports regarding the global name change, and was clearly subjected to act of childishness to which since Freedom went live, I am still waiting for a response (I'm not holding my breath any longer).

Regeneration, with its delicious Instant Healing toggle.

I don't have to imagine. I'm still bitter about it. But I eventually took it in stride and moved on. I still don't play as fervently as I once did, though. There have been many changes to the PvE game that have made it overall less palatable to me.

All of this was explained over and over. If you didn't accept the answers given the first time, I doubt you will except them a second time. I personally have never been to a M&G because all of them have required a 3-6 hour flight for me. So this is not the land of Dev parties some think it is. :/

You are quite right I don't accept the answers and that is not solely down to M&G's, but that is me, I was asked a valid question and I gave a straight answer, If people don't like that, then there is not much I can do about it. I try to be as honest and truthful to myself as I can be and treat other people with the same yardstick, sometimes people don't like the answers I give but I'm afraid they are as valid as the next man's and I won't sugar coat for no-one.

To be fair then, what do you think the better options were? I followed all of the threads in question as they popped up on the NA boards and beta boards. Texas Justice covers it pretty well above even if it was in a sarcastic manner. You are welcome to feel how you do, and I and others are welcome to feel it is unreasonable. I am not holding it against you by any means.

They no longer have EU employees to organize such things.

While unfortunate, I don't see what you expect them to do here.
They tried to have a self-financing EU division and it didn't work.
C'est la vie.

Rather than complain about the failure of the venture, feel fortunate you had the opportunity to belong to that community in the first place. If they hadn't made that attempt you'd have nothing to complain about.