NCsoft is NOT our enemy
By
Acroyear2,
Posted on: 2012-09-04 10:26 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Back when I was an apprentice, my chef told me I should portion the fish so that it remains in the shape of a fish and therefore look more appealing on the plate. I asked him why we don't form the hamburgers into little tiny cows. He stopped making that request.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I prefer free range cows I can see live stress free peaceful lives, so I can walk up to them and pet them and say "he's cute, lets eat him."
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When I have a choice I try to buy the product that best supports a community and the people who made it. I don't have to live in a mud hut or grow my own crops or run my car on vegetable oil, but I can buy from the business that uses the best practices like hiring a father/son business to fix my roof, buy clothes made in the US (very hard to find), organic and free range meat and dairy, and produce grown locally. I do these things. Gasoline --- that's a tough one, there aren't any good oil companies there are just bad and worse. I do manage to keep my mileage under 100 mi/week and my car is 8 years old even though I could afford a new one, I don't believe in waste.|
Originally Posted by Leo_G
NCsoft does't make those products, they fund the studios that hire the talent that makes those products. To boycott a game you believe is worth buying because you hold a grudge against some business huddle that made a bad decision is also punishing the artist paying their student loans and feeding his wife and kids who was hired by a company who decided that artist was worth giving a salary to.
“To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.” -Confucious “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” -Anne Lamott The other studios under the NCsoft name had no participation in what happened to Paragon Studios. I bet the workers of Paragon Studios are mad at the situation they're in but I doubt they will hold a grudge. Video Games are part of the entertainment industry and the entertainment industry is even more cut-throat than just regular business fare. Do you only buy from thrift shops and mom-and-pop stores? Do you run your car on vegetable oil? Do you make all your own shoes or buy your clothes from only professional seamstresses who handcraft all their wares? If not, you support super-stores like Walmart who put mom-and-pop stores out of business. You support oil refineries that barely give two ****s about the environment. Those clothes and shoes were probably made by underpaid kids sweating in factories for long hours. Those hamburgers were probably made from mass-farmed cows whose living conditions are so horrid I couldn't describe it. Buck up. Unless you isolate yourself from anything mass-produced, you're likely deriving your products from the suffering of others. It's one thing to be picky about who you buy your products from and it's another to hold your ideals on a hypocritical soap box just because you feel wronged. |
If the game was just being cancelled because it wasn't profitable I'd be very sad. It's how the Paragon Studios staff was treated that has me angry.
And my mother cried when I told her. She's 66 and has been playing for a year and a half now. She looks forward to playing so much, says that it made her enjoy life again to be able to do this and share it with my brother and I. She is only able to do so because the UI is so accessible for her and the game is so much easier than other games for casual play. She has severe arthritis and we play by her using autofollow and the 1-0 keys for attacks. I manage the account and character setup to make it work.
They. Made. My. Mother. Cry.
For that there is no punishment too much.
Edit/Add: She plays Blue Darling on Liberty. @Steele's Mom
Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes. - Sweet_Sarah
BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517513781597443/
Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.
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This is necessary. Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I prefer free range cows I can see live stress free peaceful lives, so I can walk up to them and pet them and say "he's cute, lets eat him."
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/Ok. We'll meet the meat. That's cool.
Be well, people of CoH.
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*gets a chance to see Forbin's sig*|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Glad to hear it. I hope others get at least a smile out of it as well. I may be a PITA in many respects but a little laughter is good for everyone right now.
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Lol okay I'm still laughing
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Why would your parents leave your sister out in the pasture all the time?
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Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
My sister does something similar with the lambs that graze near her...
She runs up to them shouting "Mint Sauce" Made me giggle the 1st time i saw her for a few years and she did that |
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Hehehe I needed a good laugh.
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Originally Posted by Leo_G
*gets a chance to see Forbin's sig*
Lol okay I'm still laughing |
Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes. - Sweet_Sarah
BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517513781597443/
Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.
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Like the 'goat, I also am laughing a bit when I see your signature. |
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Glad to hear it. I hope others get at least a smile out of it as well. I may be a PITA in many respects but a little laughter is good for everyone right now.
I'm 110% behind Swellguy on this. |
So keep 'em coming. I need all the laughs I can get if this horrible decision isn't reversed.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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It was a safe place at the time... and she had a knack of shouting it out of the car window as they drove past them (she did it when I was in the care once, and i couldn't stop laughing).|
Originally Posted by SinisterDirge
Why would your parents leave your sister out in the pasture all the time?
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At least she didn't know what goes with horses, because she would have probably shouted it out as she was about to ride them.
... You guys are making me think crazy things.
Like a Water Blast hero with green-colored powers and a battle cry of "MINT SAUCE!"
Oh yes its the enemy.
At least it is to me. Will not give them my money, not even for Blade & Soul (been waiting that game for YEARS) if they ever get to release that for NA/EU.
I tried to be calm, and think they gave Paragon 2 big chances to reinvent the game:
Going Rogue and Freedom F2P.
It looks like neither of them met their expectations.
I dont care.
I still hate NCSoft for shutting down my game.
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Oh god... that would be *awesome*|
Originally Posted by LittleDavid
... You guys are making me think crazy things.
Like a Water Blast hero with green-colored powers and a battle cry of "MINT SAUCE!" |
Sorry for corrupting your mind (albeit slightly)
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Given that City of Heroes is the home of the decimal point error, I have to conclude you're 11% behind Swellguy.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
I'm 110% behind Swellguy on this.
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Add a 1 and 2 0s in front of that and you got a deal.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Given that City of Heroes is the home of the decimal point error, I have to conclude you're 11% behind Swellguy.
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total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Normally am very respectfull of NCSOFT , even with tabula rasa debacle .
On this point unless they sell the IP , or atleast give valid reason for this nazi actions on Friday !
I am pure hate for them , sure if they tell the team look you got till next week .
Then the layoffs happen , whatever human possible reasons .
Even if it is unofficially , then yeah NCSOFT could hold the moral highground .
On this case there is none , and there ability to not to see this as a commercial bummer of the biggest kind , while Paragon Studios were even trying to find the postives of it all .
Says how loyal they have been to NCSOFT !
Paragon Studios deserve beter then this , sorry no matter the money outcome , of all the teams they definetly were not NCSOFT enemies .
Sorry getting rid of babs was a hard pill to swallow for me , but this goes too far !
I consider myself a pragmatist, I play ball because thats how you get results, this has lead to me dealing with unpleasant people for a desired end result. I dont look kindly on ncsoft but am ware that like most people in this thread, i lack a real understanding of what went into this decision. I dont work in the industry, I dont have access to the financials nor do i have the academic background to correctly parse the data if i did. ultimately I enjoyed a game and now i wont be able to, I blame ncsoft, I blame the game buying public for adding this game to psychonauts, okami, and beyond good and evil in games I loved that sold poorly while mediocre games with popular features sell millions. And I blame white names. corporations are easy excuses to swing at, but the most uncomfortable truth for people to realize is that we live in the world of consequences of our decisions, and people who could have supported the gaem but chose not to, as opposed to people with real financial difficulties, took the game away from us as much as ncsoft did.
I've said this before - it's not just about closing the game, it's the way they closed it. They did it in the way that would be sure to garner the most ill-will from everyone.
If that was really part of a complicated plan to get the gaming world to take CoH off their hands, then... bravo, well played, NCSoft. David Xanatos would be proud of you.
If not... then, well, it wouldn't hurt if they extended some sort of olive branch.
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That. Exactly.
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Originally Posted by Mandu Your dad gives you a puppy. You grow up with the puppy. Your puppy grows into an adult and is your constant companion. He is still in the prime of his life and he's your best buddy. Then your dad drags him out behind the woodshed and kills him. Why? Because he wants to put an addition on the house and the money he will save on future vet bills and food will help out a little bit. Oh yeah, your dad is a great guy for getting you that puppy isn't he? Everything is all peaches and gravy because he let you keep the dog for 8 years before he decided to kill it. |
Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes. - Sweet_Sarah
BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517513781597443/
Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.
I greatly respect you Tony and I wish I could agree with you but I can't.
You see, NCsoft handling of the entire matter is treating both their own employees and customers as enemies. They stabbed Paragon Studios in the back then did a back flip and stabbed us. They didn't even give any advance warning to their own people.
The only official explanation it seems they've given everyone is some vague crap about "realignment" or "refocusing". Financial reasons aren't even mentioned.
They betrayed Paragon Studios and they betrayed us. They didn't even have the courage, integrity or decency to be honest about it.
If they want to regain any amount of goodwill or respect, they need to come clean and give an honest reason why they are doing this - and it better be phenomenally good.
@Skolia
So many toons, so little time.
http://cit.cohtitan.com/profile/17258
We should just have somebody sneak word into North Korea that NCSoft buckled under handling the pressure of a game that had so much variety. That only a much more technologically and societally advanced country could manage it.
NK will be more than eager to pirate the whole game (probably through bribery which will set up our Devs for life) and make it available. Sure the servers will be a bunch of pentiums and the connection will be limited to 1200 baud but the game will survive.
And then the SK government will set up their own servers just to show what the really superior country can do. So we'll have CoH back up again on bigger servers with better connections.
So anybody here pen pals with Kim Jong Un?
Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!
Been playing and enjoying the game just over eight years now and I can tell you I never thought about what went on much on the Corporate side. I had a game I loved to play and let me do fantastic things. I lurk on the forums and check to see what the red names have to say and found the community helpful and knowledgeable.
Now, I know who NCsoft are (their from Korea !?!) and the way in which they handled the developers at Paragon did gain any loyality from me. Those folks work hard on the game and like many I was excited about what was coming next and i24 had great promise (could have even helped revenue).
I generally understand this is about the bottom line and the figures show the game was making some profits, NCsoft is looking at core asia market but the way the message was delivered and what happened to the paragon folks makes it tough for me trust putting dollars and time into one of their products. If CoH can be sold I could see maybe reading a review about one of their products in the future and possible make a purchase but not investment myself like I have done in CoH.
I do want to thank folks for work on trying to save the game, those providing updates on emerging details and the humor in time of impending doom. I will remain active in the game and support efforts to the best of my ability to preserve it in the future.
Celtic Fist - Victory Server
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I'm not giving NCSoft a free pass just because my decision to spend money elsewhere might somehow "hurt my [future] interests." What they did wasn't very nice, and I think they know that. I doubt they were expecting the amount of push-back this has generated though. |
Originally Posted by Leo_G
And just to mention, I agree with this sentiment. I just don't condone leaving it at that. Because a big corporation doesn't care if some single person stops buying their product, they care what products are worth funding.
The state of MMOs is bleak. At some point you have to wonder what you're hurting more, the corporation or your interests. |
If CoX can be saved, of course I will continue to play, and be grateful for the chance to do so. However this whole mess has been a harsh lesson to me: don't invest too much emotional energy in a thing controlled by someone else.
NCSoft can go ASSASSIN STRIKE! someone else next time. I think once is enough for me.... fool me once and all that. Their actions over the next week or so will strongly determine when and if I decide to play even another company's games, much less theirs.
Trust is earned. Right now, my trust is feeling pretty broken.
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This is entirely true.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
NCSoft is not our friend. NCSoft is not our enemy. NCSoft is not a bean counter, or a back stabber, or any of those things. NCSoft is a company. Its a building and some masthead. NCSoft doesn't have feelings, doesn't make decisions, can't be reasoned with or argued with.
NCSoft is a container of people. Some of those people probably wanted City of Heroes to go on. Some of those people wanted City of Heroes to end. That's probably always been true. On Friday, the latter group got what they wanted. But while those people may deserve our antipathy, there are lots of others who don't. NCSoft is an easy target for anger, but its also a completely unfeeling target for that anger. NCSoft won't care if we're angry. NCSoft won't care if we boybott the company. NCSoft won't notice if the world ends tomorrow. |
The reason I will never give ncsoft another penny isn't that I particularly hate them (although I do consider ncsoft as a whole to be one of the most spectacularly incompetent companies I have ever encountered).
It's that they mostly sell MMOs. And they have a number of traits which make me think that giving them money for an MMO experience is a sucker bet.
1. They are spectacularly incompetent from a business standpoint. Paragon Market. They paid someone money for that. Perhaps more stunningly, they hired someone who could produce a thing like that. This testifies to a process which bears roughly the same relationship to due diligence that a cat macro does to an ecologically stable population of lions. And this was for something that was absolutely essential to a business plan.
2. They are spectacularly incompetent as MMO administrators. Compare the multiple-days server hardware shuffling ncsoft did for CoH to the way Rift or TSW handle hardware changes. Look at the six weeks of additional monkey farms because ncsoft decided not to permit ANY changes whatsoever because they wanted a thing shipped on a given deadline.
3. They are erratic and not-at-all transparent. I really value transparency; one of the reasons I am such a huge Rift fanboy is Trion coming out and saying "here's what we were trying to do, here's how it failed, here's how we're making it up to you, here's what we've learned and will change in future efforts". More than once. Ncsoft gives terse weasel-worded statements that are probably false.
Which means: I don't trust them. If I were making friends in a game run by ncsoft, I'd feel I had to try to make sure I had out-of-game contact methods for keeping in touch with them, because I'd have insufficient confidence that I could rely on being able to talk to them in-game later. I would be emotionally unable to become involved in long-term plans for characters, because I wouldn't have the confidence that there is a long-term.
Hate? No. Angry? Eh, maybe, but that'll pass. But will I ever trust them again? No. Will I invest of myself in characters in a world they have the ability to shut down? No. Can any MMO be fun to me if I can't do those things? No.
I'm angry at Blizzard. I consider the company itself to have shown consistent and active hostility to a small (but interesting to me) segment of their player base, and to have in general acted in ways which promote mistreatment of certain minority groups. I loathe them, and I will go to some lengths to convince people that it's not just that I shouldn't play their games, it's that no one who cares about the wellbeing of other people should continue supporting them. (I also freely admit that my optimistic faith that they'd continue as they once were after their "merger" was, in fact, totally misplaced.)
I'm not nearly as mad at ncsoft; it's just that they have carefully eradicated any way in which I could feel like spending money or emotions on their games.
Although Paragon Studios have informed us the servers will be shut down, it really wasn't their place to do so (I thank them for that). I pay NCsoft for my service to this game, and I am a NCsoft customer and yet as a customer I still haven't been informed by them that they are cancelling my subscription due to shutting the game down. That is very poor, each and everyone should have been informed via E-mail the day after they had come up with decision, we are at almost a week now, and still not heard anything. Yeah NCsoft does not do themselves any favours or the studios they are publishing for.
Too many 50's to list here's a few you may know.
Slazenger, Area51, Area53, Area54, Erruption, Mind Plague, Thresher, Sheath, Broadside, Debt
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I never trusted them. And to be fair, they never asked me to trust them.|
Originally Posted by seebs
Which means: I don't trust them.
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But, and I know this will sound hollow, if I had stayed away from NCSoft, I would have never gotten to play City of Heroes. I would have never gotten to know the developers at Cryptic and Paragon Studios. The same shmucks that did this thing today were the gatekeepers to some wonderful things I wouldn't have traded away. Had I known in 2004 this was coming in 2012, I would have still gladly signed up and paid my money.
Don't get me wrong: a part of me is very angry. I've thought up every way to get even with NCSoft I'm theoretically capable of and some of those involve the use of nuclear weapons. But Paragon Studios itself is proof that a company like NCSoft can contain people worth knowing, worth working with, worth taking a chance on. And that tempers my anger a bit.
I understand completely the people for whom this is the impetus to sever all ties with NCSoft permanently. I'm not going to advise otherwise. NCSoft has given them more than enough just cause. But I think to myself, what would I have said to someone thinking about joining the City of Heroes community a month ago, but had reservations about NCSoft itself. And I know I would have said City of Heroes was worth the risk; Paragon Studios was worth the risk. And I still believe they were worth the risk today.
I don't know any of the developers of Aion. I don't know any of the developers of Guild Wars 2, at least to the best of my knowledge. I didn't really care for Aion much when I tried it, and I've only had literally a couple hours of playtime with GW2 so far and it was sketchy for me. But if someone at Paragon told me they knew so and so working on GW2, he's a good guy, give him a chance, and give the game a chance, I would probably do so.
I'm not asking anyone else to. I'm just admitting what I would do.
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| They are spectacularly incompetent from a business standpoint. Paragon Market. They paid someone money for that. |
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In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
She runs up to them shouting "Mint Sauce"
Made me giggle the 1st time i saw her for a few years and she did that