The Latest from Tony (Oct. 4th)
By
Angelxman81,
Posted on: 2012-10-05 09:09 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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To be fair, I don't either, but only because mysterious PM's from mysterious sources from a mysterious stranger with an attitude on the internet is about as unmeaningful to my life as it could possibly be.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
In what warped dimension do you imagine I care if you believe me?
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Doom.
Yep.
This is really doom.
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It's a way to manipulate the numbers on the books so that a loss (such as eliminating an entire subsidiary) looks like a profit. This is because the expenses are gone and the subsidiary's worth can be written off. It's an accounting thing, and accounting isn't just arithmetic.
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Originally Posted by Angry_Citizen
I hear that a lot, and it smells like ********. Do you have an article on how "writing off profit" makes one look "better" to stockholders?
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Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)
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Well, it CAN mean that. It can also mean posting some PR fluff to get people to shut up. We don't actually know that they exhausted *ANY* options - that they tried at all.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
1. Of course "exhausted all options" means "exhausted all reasonable options."
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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Accounting is to arithmetic as psychology is to science.
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Originally Posted by BellaStrega
It's an accounting thing, and accounting isn't just arithmetic.
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I don't care if you care...just wanted to point out how stupid your post comes across. I mean seriously...like you wouldn't shred someone who said something similar "I has infos from a source that I can't reveal..because it's a PM and uhmm yeah it's reliable..trust me..cuz I has info!" LOL!
I just call BS when I see it 
And you showed some remarkable BS in your post
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Originally Posted by Brillig
In what warped dimension do you imagine I care if you believe me?
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Originally Posted by Paladiamors
I love you, I Burnt the Toast!
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In the beginning, I was angry to the point of writing some scathing posts on NC's facebook, and even telling Guild Wars 2 developers that they were walking on ice with NCSoft, that "hopefully you have your resumes tucked under your arms once the numbers drop."
Filch put it most aptly:
'I WANT TO SEE SOME PUNISHMENT!'
I still think the game could have been honestly put to bed instead of thrown into the cellar, that NCSoft's handling of the closure does not suit a situation of this nature, but after reading a deluge of counterarguments from posters who I thought to be unfeeling, cold robots, I'd hate to say this - but they are probably right.
NCSoft doesn't have to do a thing. Even if they could make some moves to smooth things over, legally - it's their product and they can't be touched for pulling the plug.
It is sobering, and bitter to be directly on the end of the sword of business.
I still think that the way that an MMO closing is handled needs to change, with more responsiveness from the core decisionmakers to their paying customers, and not statements from anonymous reps 'thanking us' for our 'suggestions'.
Jack Emmert himself, was nice enough to answer an important concern - and that has earned enormous respect with me. He didn't have to say a word, but he wasn't afraid to say something, even if it was indirectly through BAB.
It's the way things should work, but reality is a foul tasting medicine, and once again - NCSoft, legally doesn't owe us or TonyV a meaningful response.
I'm not telling anyone to give up. Maybe something will result from noise continuing to be made, and I honestly hope future efforts crush the currently accepted methods of silence, and secrecy when it comes to closing down a community.
Yet, if we devolve into a rioting mob, outsiders at large won't see this as a righteous campaign, but a rioting mob - and (wrongfully IMHO, but inevitably) dismiss the efforts as a whole.
If the comment section on Massively was any indication, we've failed to convince at least a few members of the jury - who made enough noise to pull a lot of the energy out of that article, once they deemed the effort to be founded on negative intentions.
I wish everyone continuing the fight luck. A lot of luck.
@Kyuu
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I'm another that doesn't believe you. Using the 'PM/privacy' thing just doesn't cut it when the game dies in under 2 months.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
In what warped dimension do you imagine I care if you believe me?
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In NCsoft's Mission Statement, their goal is "To make people in this world happier." As it is right now, the City of Heroes property is worthless, sitting on a shelf earning the company exactly KRW 0. If their mission is really to make people in this world happier, then really, almost any offer would be considered reasonable, "almost" being selling it for enough to cover the legal expenses of transferring the property and covering any indemnification and/or license fees that might be outstanding on the game.|
Originally Posted by Brillig
1. Of course "exhausted all options" means "exhausted all reasonable options." Do we really expect NCSoft to consider a leveraged buyout from Lord Xenu? And there's no indication that the Save CoH community actually understands what a reasonable option is. J.Random.Person sending an email to NCSoft saying that they want to buy CoH isn't a reasonable option for NCSoft. For it to be worth NCSoft's time to even evaluate an offer (even just an offer to talk), it needs to be credible. Aside from the talks with the former Paragoners, I haven't heard of anything that could be considered a credible offer. TonyV reaching out to NCSoft isn't a credible offer. If you're going to walk in off the street and expect to be able to sit down and talk, you're going to need a business plan and financial backing. And legal counsel in very short order.
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I'm certain that the offers that have been made are for considerably more than that amount, which means that even if you ignore their mission statement and just define reasonable as making a bundle of money off of it, then yeah, still reasonable.
It seems to not be about money, though. Otherwise, they would never make a blanket statement like, "exhausted all possibilities." If it were monetary, someone could always come along and offer you a bigger number. No, what NCsoft is doing is deliberately killing off the game even though they don't have to, even though we have spent a lot more money on it than they have (not even counting the value of our time and effort), and costing 80 people their jobs. Transactions such as selling City of Heroes take place every day in the business world, yet they're telling us that with two months left until the servers shut down, they have exhausted all options? By pretty much any definition I imagine, this is completely unreasonable.
As for the "but there are complicated legal issues!" argument, I'm well aware of that and I specifically addressed that in my post. NCsoft itself worked through these very same issues when it acquired complete ownership of the game from Cryptic. If anyone has experience working around those issues, this is the company that has it. Their unwillingness to do so tells me that it's not a matter of whether they can or can't, but they just don't want to. They'd rather sacrifice 80+ jobs, a crapton of our time, effort, and money, and the goodwill of our community because they just don't want to bother.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
2. He keeps going on and on that CoH was profitable. I've yet to see any proof of that, but even conceding the point, there's no way that CoH was significantly profitable. The idea that CoH was a part of what made Aion and GW2 possible is pretty ludicrous. Saying that GW2 was made possible by CoH profits is a joke. If CoH never existed, GW2 would still have been made. On the face of the numbers, it appears that the profit from CoH was what was sustaining new products development at Paragon. New products development at Paragon didn't actually produce any new products.
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However, I will put this forth to you and others who are hung up on the financials. We've had confirmation that the former management of Paragon Studios--who we are damn sure had access to financial data and who not only saw the numbers, but probably personally wrote the numbers--were in talks with NCsoft to acquire the property. If the game weren't significantly profitable, why would they have bothered? Why not just walk away and be done with it once and for all? The fact that they were the first ones in line to get the game indicates to me that it was in fact significantly profitable.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
3. The community hasn't invested money in CoH. Paying for a service is not an investment. There is no "ethical onus" on NCSoft to deliver anything to us just because we paid subscription fees in the past. Paying for lunch at McDonalds doesn't make you an investor. And no matter how many McRib sandwiches you buy, there's no "ethical onus" on McDonalds to continue to provide them after the limited offer time expires.
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To extend your metaphor, it's more like working up a deal with your local McDonald's manager that if you can drop by once a week for a McRib, you'll create some works of art to hang up on the walls. A few months pass with everything going well, and then the corporate McDonald's overlords decide to close the restaurant, fire all of its staff, and burn the building down, including your paintings that you really kind of like and are proud of. You try to work with them to get the paintings back, even offering to pay for them, but they just smile, tell you how proud they are to have had them hanging up, then toss the lit match in to set the place ablaze. Can they do it? Legally, probably. Should they do it? Again, I'll only speak for myself when I say that I think it's unethical. It's not the closing of the restaurant that has me so riled up, though I have to question the sanity of doing it. It's the needless deliberate act of destroying something of value that someone else created when there are viable options on the table not to.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
4. Yeah. Reverse engineering is illegal. Tell me again why NCSoft should listen to anything coming out of Save CoH? On the one hand, you're supporting an effort to steal their work, and then you're complaining they they don't want to talk with you?
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Originally Posted by Brillig
From the beginning, TonyV and Save CoH have done a great job of mobilizing the community and reaching out to the media, and a terrible job of pretty much everything else. Or to put it another way, you can be a businessman or a revolutionary, but you can't be both.
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Originally Posted by Angelxman81
Dont come and tell us u saw it coming, Brillig... Not even the devs saw it.
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We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
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It's only arithmetic in terms of adding up numbers. Choosing where to put those numbers and how to frame them is a whole other thing.|
Originally Posted by Ogi
Accounting is to arithmetic as psychology is to science.
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However, I think that your statement about psychology is pretty uninformed. There is a lot of bad science in psychiatry, as there is in many other fields. However, psychology is still a science as long as one doesn't subscribe to overly elitist false beliefs.
Elsegame: Champions Online: @BellaStrega ||| Battle.net: Ashleigh#1834 ||| Bioware Social Network: BellaStrega ||| EA Origin: Bella_Strega ||| Steam: BellaStrega ||| The first Guild Wars: Kali Magdalene ||| The Secret World: BelleStarr (Arcadia)
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Take this for what its worth, coming from a second level IT guy for a major national retailer with a very dusty accounting minor: Just because the property isn't earning doesn't make it worthless. Its still an asset, it still has value as part of NCSoft's portfolio. They have accountants checking and re-checking their spreadsheets to make their best guesstimate as to what the value of the property is. Word was my own company sat on vacant lots for years with no intent to build or sell, but they were still assets. |
Originally Posted by TonyV
In NCsoft's Mission Statement, their goal is "To make people in this world happier." As it is right now, the City of Heroes property is worthless, sitting on a shelf earning the company exactly KRW 0. If their mission is really to make people in this world happier, then really, almost any offer would be considered reasonable, "almost" being selling it for enough to cover the legal expenses of transferring the property and covering any indemnification and/or license fees that might be outstanding on the game.
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Properties like Duke Nukem, APB, Hellgate, and Vanguard get stuffed away then sold years on down the road. And thats not barring NCSoft deciding to re-use the property. Maybe they'll make City of Heroes 2 when the MMO market looks better. Hell, my cynical side says they'll make City of Heroes iPhone games.
Right now, though, the property is in their hands, which means that - for good or ill - they get to decide its value. They have to explain to their shareholders why they're selling City of Heroes, so they get to decide what's reasonable. Its a hell of a situation, I know, but this is what happens when you're beholden to investors. Its never a pretty sight.
Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader
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I'm more curious about that part.|
Originally Posted by TonyV
I have had private conversations with people who have firsthand knowledge that CoH was significantly profitable. If the amount was only enough to sustain new development efforts at Paragon, I assure you that they would have cut the secret project that they were working on long before now.
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You may not have any links and don't have to name any names but what exactly did they say about profit? Did they give you specifics or something vague like "very well" and "significant"?
The second sentence makes it sound like you weren't told a numerical figure so have to ask...also when did they say it?
Sorry if this sounds annoying...it's been an ever nagging question for me.
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I know, I didn't mean literally mathematically zero. I meant that compared to what it's worth now, it's relatively worthless. Also, I chose the words "earning exactly KRW 0" carefully. Regardless of what it's worth on paper, it's not generating any income and it could be by selling it. Could they develop a City of Heroes iPhone app at some point? Meh, maybe. But if they're going to do that, I'm pretty sure that the net profit would be much higher to sell City of Heroes now and use new IP for their app, since the money that they're not getting from City of Heroes now also represents lost opportunity cost.|
Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon
Take this for what its worth, coming from a second level IT guy for a major national retailer with a very dusty accounting minor: Just because the property isn't earning doesn't make it worthless. Its still an asset, it still has value as part of NCSoft's portfolio. They have accountants checking and re-checking their spreadsheets to make their best guesstimate as to what the value of the property is. Word was my own company sat on vacant lots for years with no intent to build or sell, but they were still assets.
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Games aren't really like physical assets like an empty lot. As time goes on with no news or releases, the value deteriorates very quickly.
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Originally Posted by SpyralPegacyon
Right now, though, the property is in their hands, which means that - for good or ill - they get to decide its value.
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P.S. Please don't mistake my post as fussing at you.
I'm just elucidating on my explication. I'm not disputing that on the books, NCsoft will probably show some crazy made-up number that City of Heroes is "worth" for years to come; I'm just saying that they know the real score, what it's actually worth, not just what they're trying to use to impress the investors.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
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Sorry again, you just reminded me of another recent curiosity.|
Originally Posted by TonyV
But if they raise that value arbitrarily so high or put so many legal bombs in it so that no one can practically buy it and then claim that "all possibilities are exhausted," I find that extremely disingenuous.
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Some are posting about NCSoft's asking price and/or legal conditions are too unreasonable and they seem to phrase it in more certain terms. But you're using "if" in yours...is there specific info about NCSoft negotiating in bad faith?
Just out of curiosity, is there a post either here or on Titan that has a unified mission statement and clearly defined list of goals for the Save CoX movement? Maybe I don't know what I'm looking for in terms of post titles, but I'm not finding it. Maybe I'm just blind.
I do see a lot of 'Save our Community" and "Save our Game" comments, but no clear definition of what those things actually mean, or even if they have anything to do with each other.
Just as an example, what is the hoped for end goal of convincing NCSoft to sell the code/IP? Is it to restart the game completely? Is it to return the game, as close as possible, to the state it was pre-announcement? Is it just to put the game on life support so it continues in perpetuity? What's the specific goal? (Don't answer this here. Just point me at the mission statement and goal definition document that answers it.)
Ultimately, my point is that while the rallying cry seems strong, the actual mission statement and goals are muddled because there's no central location spelling them out in clear and unambiguous terms. I haven't found any one place you can point all these media outlets, or curious bystanders, to that says exactly what it is the Save CoX movement wants the end result(s) to be.
If you can point me at one, that'd be great.
Do anyone have any information of what really went on with those negotiation talks?
Lot of possibilities can happen. And all we have now is what NCSOft says and bunch of rumors and second third or fourth hand information. What seems like a "reasonable" offer to the potential buyer can be viewed as a scoff worthy offer by the seller and vice versa.
-Female Player-
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words.
"Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L! |
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I expect ol' Puffy Shirt to crawl out of whatever hole he went into at this point. |
Originally Posted by TonyV
I think he "saw it coming" about like anyone who has said, "That's it, the game is done," in the past eight and a half years. They're all coming out of the woodwork now to say, "See? I told you so."
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Virtue Server
Avatar art by Daggerpoint
The main reason people are fighting so hard to save CoH is that it's more than a game. It's our community. It's our version of Facebook, or MySpace, or Twitter, or Reddit. It's where we go to talk, to hang out, to pass information and connect with our friends. So...
Has anyone approached NCSoft with the angle of saving CoH from that point of view? Facebook is a social media system where you can play games. CoH is a game witha social media system. The line between the two is blurrier than one would think at first glance. If I want to play games, I can fire up my PS3. If I want to have basic chat and IM, I can use the Playstation Network. But if I want to actually hang out with my friends and do stuff, there's nothing out there like CoH. NOTHING.
If NCSoft simply kept CoH alive, no further development and only basic maintenance, the costs for doing so would be minimal: servers (which they already have), server space, skeleton crew for maintenance (which would most likely already be employed to maintain servers for other games as well, so no new hires would really be necessary), electricity (which is negligible, particularly if the servers are maintained at a central site). Many of us would still continue to pay monthly subscription fees to maintain access to the already existing VIP content, and CoH could still have many FTP customers pass through.
What would the financial upsides be for NCSoft in keeping COH alive as social media? Well, ongoing subscriptions, to begin with. Ingame ads (which is an argument for another time, but bear with us for just a moment) could raise quite a bit of money. Ability to cross-promote their other products without advertising costs in the CoH world. Maintaining goodwill from the CoH community and the gaming community in general. Being the first to debut an innovative concept that will generate a tremendous amount of buzz in the online gaming community and a significant amount of mainstream mention as well.
I think this is a possibility that someone needs to pitch to NCSoft. It has no risk of releasing property rights which someone else might make more profitable, very little financial risk or drain, a pre-built customer base, and it lets them look smart and caring instead of cold and aloof. It has almost certain profitability and potential to become much, much more. Facebook is one of the biggest software companies in the world, and CoH is a lot more fun. There's room to turn this situation in a win for both us as players (keeping our community) and NCSoft (maintaining steady profits as a definite with potential for greater profits).
Doom.
Yep.
This is really doom.