Savior spelled = SOE?

One thing to be cautious about though. While there is a fair bit of talk that "NCSoft is looking to leave the Western Market", I've seen absolutely no evidence that is true.

Yeah, they've got a huge investment in GW2, which they'd just punt if they pulled out of the Western market... so it's way too early on that.

Even more importantly though, if that were their goal, then Carbine would have been dismembered just as Paragon was. Until I see the death notice on Carbine and Wildstar, I won't believe that they're bailing on the western market. CoH/Paragon as a part of a larger retrenchment? Yeah, I see that, but not so much a retreat from the West. (Though they could get rid of their Korean League baseball team instead..)

You know, you all bring up excellent points about CoH2. The super-secret new project that we all kinda more than suspect is CoH2 would definitely fit right in with SOE's longstanding commitment to multiple versions of its franchised games. And heck, even Praetoria and the revamped newbie zones, never mind the newer power sets and their awesome animations, show a little bit more of what the devs are capable of nowadays.

Even if this doesn't happen because NCSoft/Nexon won't sell it off, I'm glad to hear that SOE is on the ball and trying here, and I'm also glad because it shows that multiple publishers are smart enough to know what NCSoft is not. At least the devs can feel a little more appreciated and respected for all those years they've invested in CoH-- even just looking at the constantly-climbing petition amongst the few of us who ever visit forums compared to the gamers at large can show them that.

But I do SO hope SOE can pull this off!

As someone who held a bitter hatred of SoE for many years due to the NGE, I would have cringed at this, a while ago.

That said, I still believe that SoE was not the sole decider on putting that game on the NGE path. Also, the head of SOE is square with me. He apologized, he acknowledged that he recognized it was an abysmal mistake. They did a lot of things to try to revive it and when it did finally go dark, I am still convinced that decision was LucasArts, for fear of competing with ToR.

Nevertheless, outside of MXO and SWG, they keep their titles. They continue to work and improve them and they know how to do MMOs effectively. So I would rather they get it than the game go dark.

Thing is? It doesn't make sense, to me, that they would buy it given it would put the game in direct competition with DCUO. DCUO does tend to run more populated on Consoles however, the PC version does have a player base, too. Not a HEAVY one but it's there and still chugging along. When I play it, there's always people around! So with that knowledge, I'm taking it with a major grain of salt, a hopeful one, but a grain nevertheless.


All we can do is keep our spirits up and our hopes high but keep a realistic sense that these ARE just rumors. I feel that it may well still go dark in December so I am not holding my breath and I am going to go along as usual with my hopes and goals and story resolutions for my characters but I am still going to keep my idealistic hopes out there in possibilities like this.

They bought Vanguard, that was in direct competition of EQ. They made EQ2 in direct competition with EQ.

Honestly, I don't see CoX as being that much like DCUO, having now tried them both.

SOE is having a double-Station Cash sale this weekend.

I've been on the fence about buying some, since I'd just spend it on Free Realms TCG and I've got all of that I need at the moment. I might be tempted to buy a mount or a backpack in EQ2 but it's been awhile since I played EQ2 so it's not a good enough reason by itself.

Buying CoH goodies would do it for me, though. In case someone from SOE is listening in. ;-)

The flip side of that for CoH players is that SOE DOES periodically run "specials" on their virtual currency, as well as "events" where the entire stable of games has special sales on their merchandise.

I won't deny that the possibility of a CoH online TCG also piques my interest, and with a real-world TCG already designed, I can imagine that SOE finds that prospect somewhat interesting as well. They've got the infrastructure already in place.

Witch company is taking over the City of Heroes fancise dosn't matter for me or to say it with the words from Twinshot: They are on the "cool-guys-table" for me then...

Maybe we are lucky and NC-Soft will sell it. All in all it's much better to make a little bit of money with it at the end then just switch the servers off. Let us hope that they really need a dollar right now...

The one feature I see that makes a possible sale favorable, IMO, is the one I complained about in another thread. Namely, the abrupt dissolution of the studio compared to Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa where they had a lengthy sunset and the studio ran the game until the final day. Tabula Rasa even had a special "back to Terra" event where the war against the Bane was fought until, in the game, the final recourse was the ultimate doomsday bomb in a hail-Mary, "If we're going down then we're taking them with us" climax. A great way to end the game.

Why are they divesting Paragon Studios so suddenly? It sucks for the studio employees, to completely understate the situation, but it means that any possible buyer would be buying only the IP, not the studio. If the purchaser chose to tender offers to previous studio employees after the purchase, well that would be their business.

There's no way to know, though. I've seen speculation about tax considerations in closing the studio and if something like that is the case, then a sale is less hopeful. NCSoft has a 100% track record of NOT selling their IP. Offers by other publishers don't indicate that NCSoft was inviting such offers. They only indicate that certain publishers saw a business opportunity and acted upon it.

For now, we have to proceed as if the game is going to be gone by December.

Hmm, whatever goes (if it goes), I forsee the end of VIP.

I mean, if the game does keep going and VIP subscriptions continue I'll remain VIP but...I'm not feeling the need to feel privileged at the moment. Just make the game F2P but all the costume pieces, all the costume slots, inventory increases, dual inspirations/boosts, respec tokens, renames, transfers, character slots, etc...those can be what we buy but might as well just give everybody all the content. Let freems play SSA, incarnate and alignment...I think the meat of what players spend their $$$ on is powersets anyway...and I'd drop a good dime on new ATs, pools, APPs and PPPs without thought.

And if they had packs for custom animations? blech, I'd be broke...

Don't know if the rumour is true but, it would be difficult to remain interested without the creative folks that made this game, so great.

NC-Soft can fire them and Sony can give them a new job. Maybe they are still in contact, you can't know...

I don't see a big problem there...

If this is true, and it sounds like something Sony might do, I'd have to say I'll try to get past my differences in order to continue in CoH after so long. Under SoE though, I'm sure there'd be lots to adapt to: Inevitably this would mean server consolidation, and almost certainly a more static game - Although they would probably rehire some of the Paragon team, they are extremely corporate-minded and so would use most of their own staff, and the Devs would lose a lot of the freedoms they have had to innovate. Not ideal for creativity and job outlook for the team as a whole, but at least the Game-world would continue. This has always been my biggest issue with Sony, that although they cater to a creativity-oriented clientele & employ Creative Excellence to achieve their corporate gains, their decisions are always corporate-driven & often resemble what just happened to us here.

Server consolidation, if this happens, has some unavoidable repercussions:
1- Considering the current SG Base coding issues, it would likely mean starting from scratch on SGs at the least - no bases porting over, so whatever's in yours will be lost, but otoh that might mean scrapping the old code & actually fixing it.
2- Character renaming galore - in their past consolidations, where there are naming conflicts, SoE has allowed the first login to keep a name in the event of duplicates, this means that people out-of-time-synch with the restart would lose out every time - but I guess someone has to bite the bullet.
3- Population/Demographic shift: Think about the degree of Altitis among the CoX community suddenly squeezed into 1-3 servers with much more restrictive numbers of character slots. Each player will be forced to choose which to save, which must go. If I have that choice, I will chose the higher level toons I've put the most work into almost always. There's a resulting demographic shift to overwhelming numbers of Level 50 capped toons working on end-game content and crying out for more. - This would be a distinct shift in the game community as a whole.

All these things will change the game community in ways that can't be measured right now, and SoE is not known for corporate patience in not seeing immediate profits. All this is speculative and at best, still a little idyllic that it might happen at all. But I have already been going through my long roster of toons to do my own cutbacks of the ones that never really panned out, or are duplicates of ones who did. I plan to respec the hard-to-get IOs off the toons that will likely be locked or lost BEFORE the 30 November deadline and try to cut my losses in Base storage by turning a lot of it into cash. If the sale/transfer never happens, the investment is lost anyway along with all the rest of the game. If it does happen, maybe some of it will make the jump.

So if Sony (or anyone for that matter) buys COH what exactly would they get?

The lore and NPCs, for certain.

But how much of the powersets, graphics, and features are tied into the Cryptic engine? Could those things work in a non Cryptic engine?

Would they then have to lease the engine from Cryptic?