Maybe don't boycott NCSoft

That was always my arguement, but that's something you can't point to in a spreadsheet and justify in front of a bunch of suits and bean-counters

Me too. There were a ton of costumes, powersets and character slots that I purchased solely because of customization. Thanks to customization, I could have my "water blast" character long before that powerset came out, using Radiation. I could have a character using Pattern powers with blue-tinted Psychic powers. There were a LOT of things like that, that allowed me to make the character *I* wanted that the game's literal powersets didn't support.

So from me, thank you greatly, BaB. Here's one person it DID affect, who DID throw money at your feet for it

I love COH - and in fact, loved it for two years longer than you, sir. I was here when I1 hit.

I mourn its passing and am actively trying to save it.

I love GW2 and I'm playing it.

You go ahead and don't play GW2. I'm glad to not have you there.

My memory of this is extremely solid. Jack never said anything about power customization per se. You did: you never said it was impossible either; what you said was that as the animator for the game it would take a ton of work and you didn't think the engine could support it, so you didn't see it ever happening with this engine.

Other players starting quoting you as saying it was impossible, and *I* said, repeatedly, that a) you did not say it was impossible and b) you were probably wrong about the engine not being able to support it (it would still take a ton of work). And somewhere I have a copy of the post where you said that in fact, as you were not a programmer, your guess as to what the engine could support was just that: a guess.

People invent the narrative they want regardless of the facts. Its a subject I discussed with BaBs during his time here, in fact.


And I cannot stress this enough. Jack had his failings as a game designer, but without his vision, there would be no City of Heroes. Jack's vision is why we have a game at all, and not distant memories of a vaporware superhero game from 2003.

Every design lead and every designer has a vision: an internal compass that tells them that within the parameters they are allowed to work in, this is what they think the game should be. Every developer at Paragon Studios I've talked to from Jack to Positron to Castle to even BaB has shared with me their creative vision. Without that creative vision, you're a monkey with an accordion.

And while we're at it, however angry players are at NCSoft, and there is probably very good reason to be, the other thing that just doesn't fit into easy narratives is that it wasn't the design team turning over that allowed us to get all the things Jack "refused" to give us. It was NCSoft, and more importantly NCSoft's money that did that. NCSoft was willing to invest more in the game than Cryptic could afford to, and that's why there's an explosion of development after the buyout.

The real world does not have many villains that twirl mustaches. Without Jack, there would be no game. But Jack was not the best details guy, and he frankly was less interested in supporting games than launching them. In the short run, CoH needed his vision and focus. In the long run, we needed people like Positron to guide the game over the long haul. Without Cryptic's ability to support the game on a shoestring, the game might have died soon after launch. We needed that Spartan mentality, when only a Spartan mentality would have worked. But the game flourished in terms of development when a company like NCSoft gained the opportunity to take it and run with it, while Cryptic went off and did what it was better suited to do: design, create, and launch smaller MMO titles (I'm the singular originator of the Jack seeing himself as Johnny Appleseed theory as far as I know anywhere in print). Without NCSoft, we would not have much of the game we're now cursing them for destroying. If they had decided to pass on buying us, where do you think we'd be now?

The truth is nothing and no one was perfectly good for the game or perfectly bad for the game. The truth is complicated and messy and full of different people with different agendas and different viewpoints. The truth is hard to determine and appreciate.

Which is no excuse for replacing it with an easy fiction.


Companies are bad at keeping secrets for long. If Perfect World decided to sink City of Heroes, that story would come out. Hell, there would be no reason for NCSoft not to deflect blame from themselves by trumpeting that fact. The fact that they are not doing so strongly suggests to me that theory is a hallucination. In the meantime, there may be good reason to hate NCSoft as a corporate entity, bearing in mind 99.99% of its employees had nothing to do with this decision. But if you have to alter or ignore the facts just to create a comfortable narrative, then you're no longer fighting the good fight. You're just this guy:




I doubt Cryptic wants you saying metric ****-ton on other MMO boards, but then again at this point who gives a ****. I certainly don't give a ****. Last I checked, I was all out of ****. I had to borrow **** just to give the last ****.

Still, that's one reason why I don't have a red name either.

I'm with you on this. They couldn't even let the dev.'s ride out the next three months and give the game a decent send off and give Paragon Studios' employees even a small severance package.

I want NC Soft to burn. Good luck trying to push another fantasy genre MMO onto people that no longer want to be playing that kind of game. I have a feeling that, much with Aion, Guild Wars 2 will be in the red in six months to a year.

Fact is, NC Soft bought Paragon Studios in an attempt to really penetrate the American market with an American made MMO. Since it didn't do gangbusters in sales and because it didn't win over Korean gamers, they dropped City Of Heroes because (from what I can tell) they probably want to exit the American market. They keep making Asian style MMO's with game play that Asian's prefer, which mind you, is markedly different from what Western gamers want to play.

Nevertheless, NC Soft should have sent one of its oldest and most successful IP's off with somewhat of a bang. It's understandable that City Of Heroes is an old game and that it has been reaching its twilight years, but this is a game that could have been put into maintenance mode and given a half decade more at least. NC Soft's move has more to do with freeing up quick cash to float the losses incurred by its most recent MMO endeavors and its failing MMO, Aion, for which they refuse to assert as a failure because of Eastern company politics (someone's head would definitely roll if and when Aion goes under).

Only someone fairly clueless about the MMO market and GW2 in specific would say something like this so... /shrug.

You couldn't even make it this far without making **** up?

Please tell me how you know Paragon employees didn't get a severance package.

Brillig, I didn't intend to be presumptuous, but with such a sudden move made by NC Soft, it wouldn't surprise me if they only padded everyone's final paycheck a little bit. I didn't mean to speculate on that. I am simply angry for what they did. As for my other statement regarding NC Soft wanting to pull out of the American market, I do stand by what I said. It seems that they company has been motioning to do so for some time. They've paid no heed to even tweak the game play ever so slightly with their other Asian MMO's. That's fine to do on their part. It is disrespectful to the players and to the developers who have made them so much money thus far.

Hey, dips*h*i*t......http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsde7laPkI1qg1qm5.gif

Using a gif from a clever man does not make you clever.

Like I give a ****.

And no one else does either.

And to you....this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFLezxS1tA

Oh, I guess you are very clever.

City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

I'm stealing this quote.

Fact: That's how every company on the planet does layoffs. You don't tell them they're being laid off and them given them a chance to dump the databases. Or come back with a gun.

This.

It's true.

It's also been my complaint with companies in general, but it's how it goes.

Want to quit? Give us 2 weeks notice.

We want to lay you off? We'll give you a days notice.

Most I ever had on a layoff was 1 day notice that turned into a two day notice "Oh. We need you for one more day, so we're going to lay you off in two days instead of tomorrow."

They do this because workers (generally) will slack off once they know they're being laid off. They'll be to busy fretting about a new job, sulking, just not caring anymore, and some if they have the ability, will use those paid sick days.