What happened in today's coffee talk?

Can anyone summarize what was said?

I am hoping that we heard that the former Paragon Studios staff are doing well on their job searches.

(COH may be going, but at least we have hopes that those talented people will again to create us something for us in the future!)

I logged in kind of late to it, but Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeny, Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee, Jesse "Hit Streak" Lawrence, Matt "Positron" Miller, and Positot stopped by to field questions. I got the feeling that it was mostly a Loregasm Live! kind of day, with them answering questions for the whole session. The recording should be up on Twitch.tv shortly if it's not already.

Oh, and Black Pebble wore an AP33 t-shirt. That was pretty durn awesome.

A bit about the Lunar Base was discussed and the mole that has been on Earth for some time. All I know, since I missed most, is those there declared themselves a new Boy Band cover group.

Direct link to the 10/17/2012 CoH Community Chat: http://www.twitch.tv/paragonstudios/b/335903329

KUDOS to Hit Streak and guests for another weekly chat! Thanks for recording it so those of us who didn't make it live can to enjoy later!

For those who for whatever reason are unable watch the recording, here is much of what was said...



First up, guests Positron and 9-year-old Andre (sp?) aka Positot. Positron's been playing a lot of X-Com (sp?) on Classic mode. Nothing has panned out on the job surfing and interviews. Been watching his son who has been playing Minecraft during his 3 week vacation. Their afternoon goal was to fly a video-recording helicopter at the park.

Positron has caught all the pets in a Pokemon-like aspect of another game (missed the name), except the two seasonal pets.

Positron had an Alternate Dimension version of Statesman being Emporer Cole being redeemed. The stipulation with killing Primal Earth Statesman was that he would stay dead. Recluse was not considered for being redeemable the way Cole was because after trying to adjust content for Statesman's death, they never wanted to retcon like that again.

Hit Steak went to Disneyland last weekend, apparently independently with a lot of other Paragon Studios. He got to try a half-beef, half-bacon hamburger.

Sythe weapon for Titan Weapons was on the wish list, but a lot of poking animations wouldn't have made sense.

Shadow Shard was high on the list of things to do. It would have involved A LOT of work on the zone as a whole.

The To Do list was forever long.

Remaining Incarnate powers were always undergoing shift and changes from the original list. For example, Hybrid was more supposed to be a multi-classing slot.

Hit Streak answered that, no, there is not any way to download the CoH Twitch videos. ((<.< >.>)) As long as the Paragon Studios account is active you can watch from the Twitch archives. ((Translation: Twitch videos archives are available until November 30, when the City Of Heroes game and all official community peripherals become defunct.))

There was going to be 5th Column, Crey, Arachnos, and Vanguard on the Moon, in addition to Battalion. A bunch was planned beyond Battalion. The hero, villain, and neutral ground geography was planned out.

Positron has not tried The Secret World. Not interested in the mythos. If he could start a new superhero MMO, first would be a equally epic costume creator. Evolve the combat. If he hasn't found something by November 1st he... doesn't know. There's always a possibility of doing a superhero MMO again.

Tanker questions are for Arbitor Hawk.

Positron re-affirmed that it was not the intention of Paragon Studios to just disappear.

The freezing water was not added to other winter events because the number of zones doubled and didn't have time to add to the new locations.

Positron read bios in-game but didn't otherwise get into the RP side of CoH.

Base tech lost since the people who made it no longer worked at Paragon Studios. They reverse engineered and added more as they could.

The chat is like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, where people just show up.

In comes Black Pebble and Black Scorpion, the Black devs. All together the guests make the worst boy band ever.

Most annoying thing done to Positron was getting a Flowbee haircut.

In response to making a coding that works as a base for everything... The problem is when someone wants to break it, say by min-max, and the game is still equally hard they don't feel stronger. Also there is simply no way to create a code that will cover every option that programs years later will want to try. And things get broken in a whole different way. Aka "What could possibly go wrong?"

AP33 shirt from Zazzle.

No, not possible to change VIP flag anymore. Paragon Studios are completely without power now.

Ultimate villain in the game was the one your character felt they had the most against. They tried to keep it open-ended, and not have any one NPC be stronger than the others.

Coming Storm was the invasion of Battalion. There was a sleeper agent in Primal Earth for decades. At one point the agent was Lady Grey, then they changed it. Last plan was Doctor Science, an Italian super-agent since the 60s.

A few ideas for Omega slot might have been the invincibility star: No one can hurt you but you can affect the world. Or Burnout every few seconds, meaning powers were recharged all the time.

They were considering a power that would permit multiple summons of a pet that normally only allowed one at a time, such as Jack Frost.

The advantage of digital comics is buying when ready. The disadvantage is it is really easy to stop reading. With brick-and-mortar stores, orders were done months in advance so planning and commitment was involved.

Original First Ward was 20-25 and Night Ward was 25-30, with 30-35 being a syndicate-controlled zone in the jungle with their own hacked war walls.

Another story option was in issue 31 that all of Earth was really on Battalion mothership. That the war walls are the edge of the holodeck.

What have the black devs been up to? One has unsuccessfully been trying to grow a beard, the other obviously hasn't had that problem. Catching up on games and shows. Tim and Positron likes "Once Upon A Time", Hit Streak not as much.

Tim drove Positron out of Eclipse board game. Turns out that most of the game is decided by RNG.

Issue 26 was going to have Red Widow become an arbiter to replace Scirocco.

Players have picked up the torch for Extra Life this year. It's happening this Saturday, October 20th, during 2XP weekend.

Woofers was going to be part of a live trailer done by Rooster Teeth. He was a mastermind that ended up getting all the signature characters to kill each other.

No one is able to log on as signature characters aside from Hit Streak.

Sorry, Turg, you can't get Bug Hunter. If Positron still had access (which he doesn't), he was going to log on the last day and give the #2 badge hunter all the badges so they could be #1.

Hit Streak is still waiting for permission to give away swag.

Worst villain concept presented? The Battalion being geometric shapes of pure math.

Brian Darkshade was a signature NPC to go along with the rocket board. A hipster, annoying, want-to-punch-him-in-the-face, red jacket, short shorts, mirror glasses, etc Totally bonkers. When you defeat him in a trial, the board would self-destruct if you got close.

One option for meta-story was for having a shadowy hero that at the end of CoH was revealed to be Recluse.

Clowns are incredibly stylized, and might have become a Mastermind option if pets were ever customizable.

The end of Praetoria was to be against Hamidon, but players got exhausted and so they moved on to Battalion.

Did someone translate the Trilogy binary? Of course! Translation at ParagonWiki.

They offered apologies that they couldn't fix everything.



... Yeah, I probably botched at least half of what I heard. You are welcome to correct any or all of it.

Burn!

FPATRN?

Is that a trifecta of sorts?

Battalion as geometric shapes? Spewing equations of death! Awsome, math power set. Differential melee and intregral armor with a matrix of pool powers....

Speaking of which, were the platonic solids supposed to be items of power and battalion-like? Need some help with that.

Oh- and FPARN

I think it's safe to assume that if Matt remade "CoH" (Let's face it, There are many loopholes to be exploited to this end.) that it would be even more awesome, Hell, They would be able to have more freedom with less "Spaghetti" code.

To a certain extent, City of Heroes was a lucky accident, lightning in a bottle that even Paragon Studios might not be able to duplicate.

It's very casual friendly and it attracted people who had never played MMOs. (I had never touched one before COH and the idea of paying a monthly fee for a game over and over seemed silly to me, but the prospect of being a super hero lured me in.) The community-- for the most part-- FEELS a bit older and more mature. The lack of in game loot (gear that could significantly raise your performance) and forced PVP made COH pretty friendly for the novice.

I don't really think Cryptic expected the game to become what it did, and it may never come again no matter how hard anyone works to duplicate the experience.

Our ex Devs have a TREMENDOUS amount of good will and support from us right now. If I were a studio with openings, I would certainly hire as many of them as possible-- both because of their individual talents and what community support they might bring with them.

Could Melissa, Matt, and Brian et al form a new studio and make awesome new games? I have no doubt of that. Could they replicate the success of COH?

THAT I'm not so sure of.