Someone please debunk this rumor

Yeah... they're actually using a combination of cue cards and semaphore.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

I once called theOcho the unluckiest man in the CoH/V community for having to deal with the community when BABs was laid off, because he had to walk a very limited company line.

I've changed my mind - Hit Streak is the unluckiest person now.

Why debunk it? If enough people believe it, it furthers the view that NCSoft was being run by fools which would lead to further PR (and possibly stock) damage for them, another nail in their coffin. If they won't let go of it now, there's a better chance of getting the IP in capable hands when the company finally goes under.

Just want to assure RIFT fans that I didn't mean to say RIFT sucks--just that I'm making a grand assumption that it probably sucks compared to City of Heroes. Because, I mean, come on, we're talkin' about City of Heroes.

However, based on your recommendation, I went to RIFT's website and watched the trailer for their latest expansion and, well, watched it again. And again. And again. You know, I'm not into fantasy MMOs and it still blows my mind how cool and BIG that game looks. Or maybe it's because the last fantasy MMO I played was Ultima Online. Maybe I'll take a vacation in RIFT after November.

Also, I went to your website looking to see if you were making RIFT trailers and low and behold, found THE Earth Eternal trailer. Ha! You made the official trailer for that?! I was a beta tester and played the heck out of it. Was so sad when it didn't make the cut. It wasn't my type of game at all and was pretty simple for an MMO, but my goodness did it have charm and personality and a great upstart community and GREAT teaming. Was just refreshing to play. Man, I miss that game.

And no, I didn't consider it fantasy because, after all, it takes place in the future and my character was a robot.

Actually, the quote you're linking to is this, part of a post by some guy named Jim Hague on those forums:

Lars Butler is the CEO of Trion Worlds and Red Door is the name of their new publishing platform. "Had had" is probably a typo.

Of course, it's hardly worth debating a rumor held up by toothpicks in any case, and I do appreciate your link to that post. But the post does seem to imply that Trion was prepared to pay up to $80 million for the property. It may be misinformation by someone not in the know, and the poster doesn't tell us where the $80 million figure comes from (perhaps his own pancake). But again, the poster does seem to imply that Trion was prepared to plop $80 million on the table according to Trion's own CEO.

If you follow that thread along, only one person ever asks for clarification, and they got this response:

So the real question here is: who is this Jim Hague, and why should we be listening to him? There are lots of Jim Hagues on Google, by the way, and the most prominent one is a sports writer.

And if you Google around for talk of $80 million connected to Lars Butler, it doesn't seem to be easy to link that figure directly to anything he's said on the record.

If ya'll don't like solving mysteries, you'd best just go with Hit Streak on this. If you do like solving mysteries, well, good luck and report back.

Jim Hague worked on the (never released) CoH roleplaying game. We know that much.

Ha! Googling around just now, I discovered that he's the one who leaked the story bible content recently. It was a very old batch of files from when he was developing the pen-and-paper City of Heroes RPG. One forum poster in that link mentioned that those files are from before the existence of Galaxy City. Of course you probably already know this.

So, does anyone here know Jim Hague? The RPG writer. Not the sports writer.

But NCSoft wants to make everyone happy and to do the right thing! They even say so in their mission statement so it must be true!

http://global.ncsoft.com/global/aboutus/visiongoals.aspx

As against the laughing stock of the Western MMO world which I think they are already.

Trading in wholesome family entertainment (CoH) for Korean soft pr0n (Blade and Soul) and thinking it's what the US market wants /em facepalm

Well, NCSoft seemed to state emphatically last week that was not going to happen. And even if they did announce otherwise, I'd assume that too was another in their growing list of lies.

In fact at this point I don't even like the fact they have access to my credit card info. They're that untrustworthy.


Maybe not right this second, but we know it's your job to pass along whatever drivel they hand you. Nobody faults you for it, but, like I said before, we know where it's coming from.

And, keep in mind I know what you said on one of the Coffee Talks, that some people at NCSoft are on our side. That's nice, but unfortunately for us they're obviously not the ones calling the shots in this and people above them are making the whole organization look bad by association.

Ironically, the people who are on our side are probably the ones hurt the most by NC bashing while the real villains don't give a damn. That's not fair or right, but nothing about what's happened around here since Aug 31st is fair or right.



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Which documentation is this? The letter to the players (which he signed and approved himself), or the resignation letter (which he never signed).

information taken from the appeals ruling

To be fair, NCsoft claimed that under Korean law, a resignation is always taken as voluntary unless it was under coercion or intimidation.[1]

Please note: That the case *didn't* revolve around the letters (or if they were forged), but in if he left voluntarily or was fired. It was all to do with his stock options in the long run of things.


[1] However, the Korean Supreme Court has come up with this ruling: "When an employer terminates a labor contract relationship ․ by receiving a letter of resignation from an employee and if the employee had no choice but to prepare and submit the letter of resignation even though the employee had no intent to resign, such termination corresponds to a forced dismissal since the termination of the employment contract relationship is based on the employer's unilateral intent."

Quite interestingly, in the original court case ruling that I can find this was said at the very start of it.

Now, fair enough. But unfortunately, I *cannot* find any reference to his resignation letter being forged. I can see where RG says that he *didnt* sign it. I can see where NCsoft says that "any resignation is considered voluntary unless..." (but then this is countered buy the Korean Supreme Court ruling).

Sorry, but with the evidence in front of me, I am finding it hard to believe that NCsoft forged a letter *internally* to say that he left willingly, and instead just put the resignation down as voluntary.

I will say this for RIFT's marketing team - they have done absolutely stellar trailers for their game (and they are shot in-game). My absolute personal favorite, and one I wish that The Powers That Be had paralleled for COH, is this one. It is a brilliantly-executed video of what makes the game awesome.

I got into it during its beta because from what little I'd seen when John started beta testing it, it appeared to be everything I'd hoped AION would be (and wasn't). I'm still there over a year later.

And yes, I did do the official EARTH ETERNAL trailer. Guess who I have to thank for that? Ex Libris. Yep - while she was at Sparkplay, and they were talking about having a video made of the game, she showed them my COH vids, I did a quick sample for them just using the screenshots they had made available, and was invited to be a beta tester (and contracted to make the trailer). We storyboarded it out, shot in-game footage... I even had access to all the dev tools. It was wonderful fun.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

And NCSoft didn't just decide to shut down the game and lay off all the PS employees over night. So before they dropped the bomb on Paragon Studios they were treating them like mushrooms while they were making their plans to shut them down.

Frainkly, NCSoft is the laughing-stock of the entire MMO world, right now.

This entire debacle has been handled so badly, I wouldn't be surprised to hear it was engineered by the 10 to 12-year old children of the executives involved, much less by business-degree'd adults.

Shameful and sorry, is what I call it.

I don't actully *believe* the eighty million dollar thing, but Ifind it TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE. They would turn down a billion dollars for this game.

What competition? They've pretty much written off the western market.

Yeah, but you know, spite and all. They have to salt the earth just be be sure someone else doesn't pick up CoH and profit off it. That would be embarrassing to NCSoft. Saving face before reason; that's more important to them than alienating western customers because they don't really care if we never touch another NC game.



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Anyone buying the CoH IP isn't going to restrict themselves to only accepting customers from the Western market. They are going to accept any customers they can get and unlike NCSoft they are going to advertise the game to get more customers. And that will be competition against the games NCSoft has chosen to support in the Eastern market.


Edit: If I had the money and was able to get my hands on the CoH IP you can damn well bet I'd have some new zones developed and tailored to attract players in the Eastern market.

CoH Tokyo
CoH Seoul
CoH Beijing

Throw in some grindfest to appeal to that type of playstyle and Eastern AT's with dedicated storylines. then move back West with

CoH Sydney for our buddies down under and

CoH London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin etc. etc. etc.

let's see...anonymous source, ridiculous amount of money unsupported by the revenue the game generates, ON THE INTERNET....I'd say you'd already done a fair job of debunking it when you hit 'submit thread'.

*LOL*

My thoughts exactly when I read the OP.

Some guy on the internet told me Bill Gates was going to give me a bunch of money if I forwarded an email, too.

NCSoft wrote the resignation letter, not Garriott. When Garriott refused to sign and accept it as his own, that meant it could not be legally attributed to him. NCSoft did so anyway (it was their first line of attack in the court case). That's one of the primary definitions of forgery: To write a document to pass off as being authored by another.

Ok, I am assuming that we are referring to the letter to NCsoft management and *NOT* to the "Letter to the players" correct?

Can you provide a link for that information? Or is it all dependent on how you read the documents that I have been able to find?
Original court ruling
Appeals Ruling and information

The reason why I am asking for this, is to at least build upon the information i have to hand.

I have found this article from the attorneys who worked on the case.

Ok, the other reason why I believe that this has been viewed as "faked/forged" is because of what NCsoft also said in the court case in that: Now, once again, even if he *didn't* sign it, it would have (in their eyes) still been classified as voluntary[1].

Now granted from Ulimaaiera it does say

But not once does it say that they forged or faked the letter. It does say that he approved it. What it does imply if *anything* is that NCsoft tried to use the letter as evidence that he was leaving of his own free will. Not that it was faked or forged.

[1]The Korean Supreme Court explained the legal standard:  “When an employer terminates a labor contract relationship ․ by receiving a letter of resignation from an employee and if the employee had no choice but to prepare and submit the letter of resignation even though the employee had no intent to resign, such termination corresponds to a forced dismissal since the termination of the employment contract relationship is based on the employer's unilateral intent.”   Supreme Court, 2005Da38270, Nov. 25, 2005 (S.Kor.).   In the present case, the district court's instruction stated “if an employer has a unilateral intent to terminate the employee and gave the employee no option but to resign, then his resignation is not of his own free [sic] and involuntary.” Source

So, with that in mind, what can we draw from this? That NCsoft *lied* about how dismissal/letters of resignation can be interpreted over in South Korea. Sure, they might have tried to use his "Letter to the TR players" as proof of "hey this guy is leaving willingly". But if anything at *most* it would (in my mind) be classified as gross mischaracterisation, and not as a forgery or fake.

I dont agree with much of what Butane says, but this right here is pretty much a spot-on assessment. There seems to me to be a strong element of just plain spite in the mix.

Let's say this puts 75% of CoH players off of ever giving NC more money from now on.

That's only 3/4th of a number of people NCSoft doesn't even consider significant enough to keep the game running for.

Oh, but what about everyone else? The non-CoH players who the SaveCoH movement reaches out to? The players of other MMOs who sympathize? That's an even smaller number with an even lower percentage of people who will actually follow through.

And don't expect to reach many more. Notice how every time a story about SaveCoH, or one that paints NCSoft in a bad light goes up on the few MMO news sites that are covering this, a few hours later like three or more GW2 or Blade and Soul "articles" boot it off the front page? We've got NCSoft's attention alright, but they're doing what they can to prevent us from getting anyone else's (but not in a way that could be proven).
Just sayin'.



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People without active CoH subs who have had them in the past however make up a meaningful number also, and some of those people will also not touch anything NCSoft has anything to do with.