Posi Confirms: COH Largest and Most Active MMO Ever Shut Down

I've heard that this aspect is entirely untrue and just internet rumor stuff/rationalizing the scenario. And, doing a quick search shows the SOE president saying that they could have renewed the contract. Seems like more bunk trying to lessen SOE's blame (and shift it onto Luscasarts, just as people always did every time something went wrong there... which is bunk... If SOE did it, they are responsible and no one should be looking to pass the buck).

As a subscriber of SWG from launch and until a little after their NGE debacle in 2005, I don't believe that the game's population was enough to sustain it. SOE (possibly their only positive) is pretty stubborn in keeping titles running (especially after the disaster they created there... it would have looked even worse on them if the game was cancelled right after their ultimate game changes in '05), but the exodus from that game (who's population wasn't all that great after WoW and CoH came along anyway) left things pretty bad over there. I'm sure, after the server consolidation and the people remaining banded together, it seemed like a nice thing for those who enjoyed it, but it still wasn't what it was and I doubt it compared to our population.

Indeed, their Station Pass setup allows for inflated numbers and more people who may be around, but not necessarily subscribers/frequenters to that particular game. So, that may make calculating such things a bit difficult.


Anyway...

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Even though they continued to pay the developers and that was probably the largest outgo of cash, by sending almost everyone home there are savings. Plus, they can start dismantling the office, sell off equipment and furniture, etc.

It also may just be standard corporate policy being applied, that once someone is fired, they're out of the office unless there's a compelling need to keep them on. If they're still in the office, they've got access to servers, email systems, other things that a revenge minded person might choose to abuse. Less likely in the case with the whole office being shut down (to say nothing that from what I know of the people who worked at Paragon Studios, they wouldn't do it), but sometimes corporate policy gets set to handle some specific conditions and becomes the Word Of God to be applied in all conditions.

I don't think they were surprised the the players were unhappy the game was ending. Part may have been experience, players of other games they closed complained a little and then moved on.

I suspect the surprise more "Holy *bleep*, these people are angry, and they're ORGANIZED. They're getting the word out in ways that make us look bad."

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Corporate policy 101 dictates that once you give someone notice you do NOT give them freedom to do what they want. Posi and crew could have just as easily coded a virus into the launcher as disgruntled employees, exposing NCSoft to huge liability.

Not saying they WOULD but they sure COULD. Not worth the risk....safer to mothball the code as-is.

But what exactly is the end goal here

embarrass NCsoft until they hire everyone back?

I understand the concern to show NCsoft they can't treat companies and consumers like this but...I severely doubt they care.

I don't think they would've been THAT stupid.

Could you imagine the lawsuits?

People had just purchased points and a new powerset. Closure without being able to use those purchases would've been grounds for litigation.

No. The 3 months wasn't a 'we feel bad for you loyal customers'. It was a 'we don't want to get sued'.

If they really cared, they would've softened the blow with all number of giveaways and sendoffs. Instead they fired the dev team and left the game open 3 months to close out accounts and send out refunds.

to be fair, a lot of people were helping initially because we wanted to help the efforts of brian clayton and presumably a part of our dev team get the game back. with october being the great "go screw yourselves" from ncsoft, that goal mostly vanished, they weren't selling, and no crying westerners were going to change that. I am all for generating what negative publicity that I can for them, and have been preparing reader reviews of guild wars 2 for gamefaqa, amazon, gamerankings and metacritic to try and hurt them where i can, and I have been active on kotaku making sure people know what ncsoft did in every ncsoft related post that would make sense, they wont blink now, and the devs wouldnt be there if they did, so pretty much all I could do is go from "work with ncsoft" to "hurt ncsoft" and I can be persistent.


as a side note, i'm really glad to hear about the weight thing. that was a significant step for his health, and I'm betting he feels significantly better because of it.

Project Z over on the Titan Network forums should interest you....

Because as "large" as our playbase is, its twiddle sticks compared to the potential playerbase for western Tolkien middle eastern fantasy console mmos.

When it comes to super hero mmos theres nothing to...aspire to. Both the current super hero mmos can only be described as....."alive" (although DCOU is getting player housing soon)
'
any potential publisher or developer looking at making a new super hero mmo is just going to look at those two flops and assume that there isn't any money in it

My apologies to Cap'n and everyone, as I don't intend to turn this into a major thread derail!
Just quickly, the end goal would basically be to get them to sell the game/IP/code so that it could still be played.
Indeed (as frostdrake mentions below), the original intention was to get them to sell as quickly so that as much of Paragon Studios (and our game and community) could stay intact and continue on after the bump/detour in the road of NCSoft ditching us.
Even at the October 2nd mark, there was still a chance of us keeping such things. I'm under no delusion that NCSoft would change their minds ealiy, but it was always worth a shot.

At this point, yeah, it is likely way too late to salvage most of the team (although, perhaps my assessment of the job availabilities for them are overly optimistic). And this community and former playerbase is also likely fractured beyond what could have continued.

As for the overall reasons for fighting back, there is the microcosm and the macrocosm. We have/had the talented workers to fight for, the game to fight for, our community to fight for; We also have the ideals to fight for. Is this how we want the mmorpg landscape to be shaped? Profitable and relatively sizable games/communities that are highly enjoyed by loyal, paying customers/participants (and studio employees/designers) being shut down due to billion-dollar companies refocusing, because the profits the product makes (while quite a lot to some of us) is too small a hill for their mountain range?

I just saw someone mention recently, "NCSoft was selling a game. We were paying for access to a community". While, obviously, most of us were certainly paying for a game, first and foremost, the true community aspect is simply collateral damage to NCSoft's views. And, that's all fine... They should have separated themselves from the game (et all) and given it a much better chance to survive and continue. And our influence could (and possibly still can) alter the outcome of all of this.

Sure, but, at that time, instead of taking their "go screw yourselves" as the end of it, I felt like we should have stepped up and countered it with a larger show than we did at the initial announcement.
Even offering an announcement that no negotiations will tak place is a part of negotiating... otherwise, there'd be zero communication.
My final point is that, unfortunately, their tactic (with that announcement) worked like a charm for them.
"Stop protesting! You cannot win!"
And the majority of people walked away saying, "Oh, okay, that's over!".

Just boggles my mind that people would take that reaction.

Indeed! I intended to mention that as well. I'm happy to hear that and hope things go well with Matt!

Yeah, it is crazy.
Unfortunately, companies want the big, easily-marketed-to, most-ideal (according to our research) masses and not the hard to define, (somewhat) sensible, mature (somewhat), casual and loyal group of people with money in-hand.

Welcome to the crossroads of entertainment and business!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Basically this says that Paragon Studios tried to do all it could. I BELIEVE THAT! It says nothing about NCSoft being reasonable, setting reasonable goals. It actually sounds like many of the reasonable things we have all talked about were pushed to NCSoft and NCSoft was unreasonable and said no to all of them.

I also take it as further evidence that NCSoft was being unreasonable, when Positron takes the time to tell us that CoH is the largest MMO ever killed. Take that air in a second... Positron, who is in the industry, says that CoH is the most healthy MMO ever killed.

I'm still sick to my stomach. I hope that Positron does work on a CoH2 (Super Hero MMO) for some other gaming developer other than NCSoft. It would be wonderful to have a new improved Super Hero game.

Should there be a Zombie named Rob as well?

The end goal is to convince NCSoft that the costs of burying the game instead of selling it outweigh any potential tax benefit or pride benefit from burying it.

They could not have done that. I'm pretty certain the developers did not have the explicit ability to publish code. The devs could have been given the ability to continue to work on data, to finalize I24 and to give them an opportunity to create an appropriate send-off to the game, while disallowing requests for code publishes.


Edit: the notion that the way Paragon Studios was shutdown would be considered reasonable in the corporate world is something that's just not true. The fact that NCsoft had no *contractual* obligation to its customers to gracefully sunset the game has no bearing on whether or not the way they are going about it would be considered reasonable. I could legally liquidate my company tomorrow and walk away from all of my customers, and that would be legal. It would also severely impact their operations. I would also probably never work in this field again, because while "Corporate 101" says you can do whatever you can legally get away with, "Corporate 401" says forgive and forget is for greeting cards.

NCsoft is shutting down Paragon Studios and City of Heroes in a manner not consistent with caring what the people of the studio and the people who are the game's customers attitudes and perceptions are. And maybe that won't hurt them in the long run in a material way, but that's irrelevant to the fact they don't in fact believe any of those people are worth any real consideration beyond pro-forma.

I think you underestimate how stubborn corporations are. They would rather burn and bury the IP than risk the chance of someone else making money off of it.

Well, you never know. When Cryptic launched City of Heroes, everyone on earth said,

"Cryptic? Who the heck are they?"

They're both just groups of people who decided to make a superhero game. And one of those groups has been fanning the fires of outrage against the forces of injustice since August 31st besides. I'd imagine that could be a pretty potent motivator.

In my opinion, if it were a large enough player base to make developing a new game worth it, CoX never would have gone Freedom. Any investment team looking for a new game to bankroll is going to look at the performance of the offerings in the Super Hero MMO genre and move on.

Those members of SaveCoX who are continually spouting the 'if we don't get our way, we're just going to keep screaming at NCSoft until we hurt them forever' line are also doing a pretty good job of making sure it never happens. Strange as this may seem, companies aren't really interested in saddling themselves with a group of consumers who have been proven to make a stink at the first sign of injury, real or imagined. It just not worth getting into a position where you have to appease people who have demonstrated that they'll attack your image at every opportunity if you don't bow to their demands.

I share this assessment. I don't think there's been enough of CoX left to save since about a week after the announcement. It's just a matter of time vs consumer interest. Anything short of a complete reversal of shutting down on Nov 30th would have meant a lengthy time frame between shut down and restart, and the the majority of the player base would have (and already has) simply found something else to do.

Because to most people it was just a game that they liked playing, not some quixotic stand against corporate behavior. If there was a chance of keeping the status quo, that's worth some time and effort. When that's off the table, it's just not worth the investment. They shrugged and moved on to one of the countless other entertainment alternatives.

It doesn't help that the SaveCoX has never really had anything like a unified mission statement or measurable goals that an interested party could be directed to and identify with. Ask ten people what 'Saving CoX' means, and you'd get five different answers and five combinations of those answers. Keep NCSoft from shutting down Paragon. Get them to sell the IP. Shutter Paragon but keep the servers on. Release the code for emulators. And so on.

And sorry to say it but "Do *insert whatever my permutation of wants is here* by Nov 30th" isn't a measurable goal, it's just an ultimatum.

Take the Call to Actions. I applaud the concept, but not the execution. Which of the several definitions of 'saved' were they supposed to enable, and what measurement was used to determine how successful they were, or, just as important, weren't, at bringing those ends to pass?

Did anyone do any research on letter writing campaigns, for example, to determine what the effectiveness threshold was? Statistically, how many needed to be sent? What, historically, has been the best format? or Tone? or Content? Is it better to send them individually, or get a lot of them together and send them all as one package? Was there even an attempt to keep an accurate tally of how many were sent? And the letter writing campaign is followed up with the capes and masks attempt, which is basically the same thing. And what do you have to show for either? That the company set up an email account for you to send to directly, and speculation as to why that might be the case? So you have no idea who did what, or what it did or didn't accomplish, and nothing real to use as good or bad press.

"A bunch of people sent letters" is mumbled heresay. "We received 10,000 letters and packages from fans that we sent on to NCSoft" is a usable data point.

People and groups seriously working towards meaningful outcomes have defined and measurable goals, and systems in place to do those measurements. It's what makes them effective, because they know exactly how well something did or didn't work, and can focus their efforts appropriately.

Further, because the movement is fractured, anything short of a complete reversal of the decision to shut down Paragon/CoX (which is impossible now in any case) leaves you with a portion of the group feeling like their want wasn't catered to. That's a no-win situation for NCSoft.

And since there are still no clearly defined and measurable goals, how will you know you are successful in whatever you choose to do post-Nov 30th? How will you know your efforts had an effect on Blade and Soul, or Wildstar, or GW2? If Blade and Soul fails, for example, how will you know it's because of the negative press against NCSoft, and not because it is a crappy game, or even just a game that doesn't fit the current market? Or are you just going to take credit regardless of the truth and 'prove' it with anecdotes? Is there any consensus on when NCSoft has suffered enough? One different style game sunset? One failed game? NCSoft leaving the Western market? NCSoft going bankrupt? What's the unified end goal? When does the group think "justice" is done?

I find it highly unlikely a unified goal or a way of measuring the success of the post closure actions will suddenly emerge from the confusion. And honestly, without real focus you're going to be easily dismissed as just more random internet rage amongst the sea of it that shows up on every single comment thread ever made.

That has been the most frustrating part of the SaveCoX movement to me. I understand, respect, and agree with not wanting something you care about to go away. That is a fine and worthy sentiment. But without structure, that's all it is. Sentiment. And right now, the only thing that seems to be a unifying factor in the SaveCoX movement, at least if you go by the vocal posters, is general anger at NCSoft, and that's not really going to be an effective catalyst for change.

The loud, antagonistic, 'we will attack you if you/because you don't do what we want' crowd that currently dominates the loudest group of SaveCoXers would be what they aren't interested in, and is pretty much acting anything but sensible or mature, regardless of "(somewhat)" qualifiers.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone not to be angry. Anger is a perfectly respectable response to what's happened and motivation to change it. I just don't think venting anger is a useful method to get what you want. I think it's the exact opposite, in fact. And if people are just waiting for Dec 1 to unleash some vaguely defined internet justice on NCSoft, that says to me that they've already given up on CoX and any potential future iterations of the Super Hero MMO that, in time, might have replaced it.

Nope, because they had financial backing and full time employees, not a handful of people working a couple hours every day at best.

I've said it several times before: even if all of Paragon Studios were working on this, or even on reverse-engineering instead of Plan-Z, it might never happen, and if it did, we are talking years.