What I have learned (longish)

What I have learned

CoH has taught me many great lessons about leadership, dealing with people, time management, and other important real-life skills. I've also learned more about Superhero comics and the people who read them during my stay in Paragon City than I did the ENTIRE time I regularly bought 'The Uncanny X-Men' and its spin-offs from my local comic shop.

The recent actions and announcements by NCSoft and NCSoft's failure in handling the reaction to those announcements has taught me some important lessons as well.



'Virtual' Property is a service and not physically worth any value. It can be taken away at any time and there is VERY little you can do about it.

I've spent around $120 on the Paragon store since its inception. I bought enough Super Pack cards to get the entire Elemental Order costume set, and all the costume slots. I bought several costume sets, powers, emotes, and the like.

My expectation was that the things I was buying would be available to me for as long as I had interest in the game. The idea that NCSoft would try to shutter the game BEFORE I lost interest never occurred to me. Why would it? Sony's Everquest is an older game and is still running with about the same Population that CoH has. A few MMOs are actually growing in numbers. Cryptic continues to maintain Champions Online despite relatively poor numbers. That NCSoft would suddenly yank a service with relatively good numbers like CoH was inconceivable a month ago.

I very much hope that NCSoft manages to reverse their cranio-rectal insertion issues to stop it from happening, but if things do NOT change for the better, I will simply lose access to those items I 'purchased' along with the rest of the game in November. I will have very little or no legal recourse. Heck, $120 probably wouldn't make small claims courts, and the people who have long-term subscriptions are certainly ahead of me in line when it comes to refunds of any kind.

Unless there is some kind of group legal action-- and there probably won't be one regardless of the outcome of this sad situation-- I will likely see very little of that $120. Come November, it will be naught but memories. The memories of time spent with my teammates and friends will outshine them by several orders of magnitude.



There is no such thing as a 'Smart' corporation.

Publicly traded corporations are by their very nature subject to a kind of terrified, psychotic mob mentality that results from having multiple, often competing executives in charge who are also beholden to a potentially huge number of private shareholders.

We know that corporations who make bad decisions are capable of making even more bad decisions, even if it's not in their or their customers' best interest. It's nice to think that since a given corporation has made good decisions in the past that it will continue to do so in the future. That is simply not the case. NCSoft's actions proves that ANY corporation can be driven to make bad decisions DESPITE the fact that those decisions will ultimately hurt them and us, their customers.



Both We and They know less about each other's culture than we think.

I've learned more about Korean business practices and issues facing the Korean gaming industry in the last few weeks than the entire time I've played City of Heroes. What I've learned has convinced me that there's a whole library's worth more that I don't know that will ultimately effect what happens to CoH and NCSoft's gaming market in the U.S..

This stings. When I can't buy quality U.S.-made goods, I've been making a real, concerted effort to buy products made by or manufactured in Korea. I was convinced that Korea as a whole had a good thing going and treated their workers relatively well, especially compared to the rest of mainland Asia.

Now that I realize I know so very little about Korea, I have to reevaluate if this decision was a good one. NCSoft has certainly made mistakes with my business and LG (Luk-Hee/Goldstar) is having more and more products manufactured in PDR China. I can't continue to make the childish mistake of simply assuming 'Korean == Good Quality and Ethical Business'. It certainly can't be made about American Business, so I *SHOULD* have known better.



My creations are too important to trust to a third party.

I began writing fanfiction when I was a teenager, and have written a great deal of original fiction since, mostly for my own enjoyment rather than a desire to publish or profit. I make a point of doing writing for my friends when they ask for it and have written some lengthy bio-fics for their characters. As you might guess, my characters have LOTS of fiction written for them. Volumes-- short stories, character sketches, characterization dialogue, fictional technology or business whitepapers, even a fictional medical case-study in one case.

Lots of that fiction is tied to the Paragon universe. Dr. Star is a high-ranking Vanguard scientist. Dr. Hawke is one of the researchers who worked on the teleportation technology in Paragon City. Rebecca Rose's powers are a result of an accident with the War Wall generators.

Happily, there's a great deal of fiction for my characters that's not tied to the CoH mythos. However, I'm now in the very difficult and painful process of divorcing my characters and their stories from that mythos. They will damn well be MY characters, and their stories will damn well be MY creations. Regardless of the fate of City of Heroes or any other game for which I create characters, this will be true forever more.

When they started making headlines, I was rather amused by the sudden celebrity of the '50 Shades of Grey' novels and their relationship to the 'Twilight' novels. I now have a new respect for Ms. Leonard and plan to read her novels at my earliest opportunity... and not for the BDSM porn (Not that there's anything wrong with that), but rather to see how she handled divorcing her story from Ms. Meyer's works. This may require me to actually read said Sparkly Vampire novels rather than the summaries I have. That will probably not be a pleasant experience, but it may be a good, if painful, learning experience. (Again with the BDSM?)


and finally

Watching a good-natured mob come together is a beautiful thing.

There have been several organizers both here and on the Titan forums that have rallied the community and directed efforts to try to stop or reverse what is happening. There have been tens of thousands of petition signatures. Woody Hearn and Scott Kurtz are now involved.

When I wanted addresses of people so I could write angry letters, they were RIGHT freakin' there!

Even dinner has been bought for the Paragon Studios staff! There is so much class, dignity, and style in that one action that it outshines ten thousand rich executives. I am applauding you and am sad you can't hear it.

You guys are wonderful. Every last one of you. Seeing you all work together for this cause, no matter the outcome, is beautiful. Thank you all so much for your emotion, effort, and hard work.

Please continue to fight for what's right and just in this, Paragon City's darkest hour.

Everyone needs to read that. Not because it's unique to what many of us are thinking and feeling, but because it encapsulates it so well. Over the last couple of days, there have been a lot of divided opinions and it's caused some bitterness. But it ought to be quickly forgotten. We've all been thrown into the same mess together.

I SO want to pick and prod at your summary of virtual property as a service. Not because I disagree with you, but because I know that you're right, and I don't think it's fair. I've used the analogy before that it's like throwing away good, timeless books instead of passing them on, donating them to a library, or selling them to your local bookstore. Most of us can get away with a handful of books, but when an MMORPG publisher does this to a rich, story-filled game like City of Heroes, they may as well be burning a warehouse full of books. Books worth reading, books worth passing on. There would be no problems with this set up (virtual property as a service) if the industry had established a tradition of passing these properties on for safekeeping. Instead they're teaching us to go suck an egg, after all our investments, for all they care. What if they treated their own stakeholders this way? (Maybe they do?) And they WONDER why the MMO market is losing consumer confidence? Seriously, get a clue, suits!

NCSoft isn't obligated in the slightest to help find another home for our game, its players and our stories. This fact alone doesn't make them evil. But, watching Atari and Perfect World in the news a year or so ago, doing the unimaginable for their Champions Online community filled me with hope for the industry's acknowledgement and respect for its customers. NCSoft looks so bad compared to them, now. And after watching our own game's fans raise so much money for charities over the years, I guess I was just naively surprised to learn that our own fate would be so lacking in charity. But I've seen better, I know that publishers are capable of doing right by their customers.

NCSoft taught me that NCSoft isn't one of these publishers.

This needs to be bumped back to the top to be read again and again and agreed 100% with both AmazingMoo and Captain Electric