The Seekrit Projeckt!

Project X

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July 13th 2013

Look, I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but The Rumor Mill has been nothing but people talking out their arses since August 31st. And I'm getting a little tired of the smell.

Post official links or please refrain from the "veiled secrecy from the all-knowing one" b.s., okay? If you're trying to be cute, it doesn't work now and it hasn't before, either.

More proof that Mishii is about as full of sh** as I thought she was.

Excellent - now you can tell us about it.

I figured, as the entire studio is closed.

I'm guessing you are all posting from home as it is.

Thank you, Zwi. I really appreciate your honesty, professionalism and self-restraint in what is a very trying time for us, devs and players alike.

And I'm not listening to any more malarchy. Unless it comes straight from a Paragon Studios dev, I'm not paying it any mind.

Hasn't the silly rumor mill done enough damage already? I mean, forcing those who run other MMO publishers like Smedley, and even CO devs, to have to post publicly about a company and a game that in fact have nothing to do with them at this point?

When is it going to end?

And I would suggest the same amount of restraint and common sense be applied to the fantasies of those who think they're going to create a spiritual successor game to CoH, or hack it and rez it on private servers provided they get some big lump sum of money from players at large, etc.

I understand the sentiment and the hurt, believe me, but reality is still reality and we should start living in it. And as always, I hope the devs do tell us where they wind up, whether it be together doing a new start-up or apart.

And thanks again, Zwi. This forum is getting totally out of control.

I am disappoint.

Seriously, I get now why people are really down on the coy faux-insider bit that Mishii has been pulling in other threads. On a normal day when we are talking upcoming powersets and someone with a good intuition making armchair predictions, that's one thing. But considering that there is a community working to find form here with a clock ticking, not sure what positive thing these remarks add at this moment.

Edit: And deepest condolences Zwill to you, the rest of community relations and the former devs for not being able to see their work come to launch. I imagine that none of you will ever be in the legal position to publicly state what those projects were going to be or even the general character (narrative or gameplay genres).

Not if they don't want to convert their layoff into a termination for cause.

I on the other hand cannot be terminated for cause by NCSoft, so if a little birdy wants me to tell everyone what it was, they can slip a note under my door.

Don't worry, NC Legal can't make me talk. Actually, they can make me talk, but they will quickly regret asking me to talk. I can do that continuously for months without running out of topics.

I think you have shown us you can do that for years. Shame we will not be able to witness if you can do it for over a decade.

It aint over till its over Starsman

I hope this comes off as non-scary (pay no attention to the avatar) as possible when I simply say... I love ya, Arcanaville!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

You mean like how you were proud you just hit 30k posts and now you have (at this typing moment) 688 more posts?

Lay off the uppers!

Talking about cancelled projects that will never see the light of day, coming from a studio that no longer exists and from people that you no longer have any control over seems pretty safe to me, unless there was some severance packages or something.

Why would you need permission from former employees?

I'm not explicitly talking about any one player here, but the truth is I hated players pretending to be insiders. But I rarely could out them without sounding like a coy-insider myself. Except when its obviously for humorous purposes, claiming insider knowledge and just making things up seems so counter-productive, because it simultaneously seems to make an enemy of players and developers alike.

For the record, I have never manufactured or exaggerated the level of knowledge and communication I had with the devs. If anything I downplayed it significantly. In fact, somewhat humorously I've dropped so many hints on the forums that the devs sometimes literally groaned out loud. The only reason I wasn't perma-banned for it is that for some weird reason no one ever seemed to take me seriously when I did, which sometimes completely bewildered some devs.

No one ever stopped to ask me why I suddenly shifted from talking about the dearth of in-game documentation to asking hypothetical questions about what sorts of power data players would be interested in seeing (because Real Numbers would be announced two months later). No one ever asked why I started making jokes about when players would ever need to know how long it took an NPC to eat a doughnut (because the devs were working on this secret project to allow players to create their own missions). No one asked me why I started talking out of the blue about weapon redraw, and the specific impact it had on weapon sets (because BaB was about to eliminate weapon redraw buffering).

I *tried* to simultaneously keep my promise not to release information before the devs were ready, and steer player conversations in the right direction so that when that information was released players had already been thinking about it without even knowing it. That I succeeded so often is actually a bit of a mystery, considering how paranoid the playerbase is when it comes to that sort of thing.


Oh yeah, and to come clean: when I said I was guessing, I was guessing. Whenever I said I was "guessing" that meant I knew something about it first hand. Whenever I said I was guessing that meant a dev told me point blank. It was a surprisingly effective code.

Since they were terminated immediately, I assume they received, or will receive, severances. And the difference between laid off and terminated for cause is that the latter cannot file for unemployment benefits. Whether that distinction can be made retroactively in the event of a violation of a work contract is a murky part of the law to me, and one I personally would not chance. I don't expect the devs to do so just for fun.

8 years on and I think I just fell in love with you finally. Especially you and all your guessing. Or was it guessing? Oh bugger.