Posi Confirms: COH Largest and Most Active MMO Ever Shut Down
Then sounds like you people and the people that got "ripped off", have a very solid case and should go ahead and sue them and the case should be a slam dunk for ya'll and be over quickly. Why isnt that in the works? What is stopping ya? With evidence that solid, you shouldnt even need a lawyer to prove that fraud. Its been what about two months now nearly since the refund announcement and no one started a case? Is it hesitation because the case is not as solid as they try to put on like the was hording points for months instead of actually spending them knowing an online game can end at any moment? Or is it they are just heated right now but knwo in their hearts that it is not fraud?
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If might not be illegal right now but neither was slavery 300 years ago.
It will change eventually because people are/will get sick of buying something like oh say a video game with a box(COH) then just cause it's on a computer and online they say "hey we can take this away when ever we want you only rented it" when no other console games this happens.
**** me I get the rental part I have cable and a phone and internet but this is like my cable company cancelling their service then stopping by to try and take my television and my internet provider trying to take my computer, get it? NCsoft cancelled their service and now are taking my game.
I wont play any games that are strictly online only anymore waste of money and time for myself.
I would just like to give a heart felt THANK YOU to all the unsung heroes of the game..The GM's ...Thank you for all of your help over the years. I would also like to specifically like to thank GM Roland for his extreme kindness and thoughtfulness.
You all at COH will be missed very ,very much.Thank you for your creativity and allowing me to live the dream of taking part in a live comic book. Thank you and may peace and prosperity bless you all.
And also a heart felt Thank You to all the moderators and staff here on the forums.Thank you for your patience and hard work.I am sure there were times you wished you could of thrown me out the window on the side..lol! Good luck and prosperity to you all in your future endeavor's.Take care all of you and may all the trails you travel be happy ones.
Sincerely
Charles R
P.S. If this is not the appropriate spot for this comment please move it to where all the staff may see.Thank You !
True.
Just as easily you can pick up another game and play it. Or maybe it's best only to stick to console games where the person is actually buying the game and even if it goes under, they still have the game? Or only buy stuff to own from places that never ever killed a product in their entire history? If you can find one. Never buy stuff that require updates to operate, see the console game? Many choices out there but just about everyone here made a choice to put money into something that could end at anytime. Some of us knowingly, and seemingly some of us that didnt know. Was the process lack a bit on an indelicate touch? Probably, but so do some cases of death, since some like to compare to this end of game as their life ending too, I'll bite. Some people get ran over while others die peacefully in their sleep. Some peopel die before they are 18 while others die when they are 90. Some people never get to see the outside of the womb. Some people are brutally hacked to bits and placed in a shallow grave, while others get a million dollar funeral from loves ones. Or maybe we are being the indelicate ones for wanting them to wait until they start losing money to shutdown, especially odd given how many people are upset at losing a few bucks on points. |
True.
Just as easily you can pick up another game and play it. Or maybe it's best only to stick to console games where the person is actually buying the game and even if it goes under, they still have the game? Or only buy stuff to own from places that never ever killed a product in their entire history? If you can find one. Never buy stuff that require updates to operate, see the console game? Many choices out there but just about everyone here made a choice to put money into something that could end at anytime. Some of us knowingly, and seemingly some of us that didnt know. Was the process lack a bit on an indelicate touch? Probably, but so do some cases of death, since some like to compare to this end of game as their life ending too, I'll bite. Some people get ran over while others die peacefully in their sleep. Some peopel die before they are 18 while others die when they are 90. Some people never get to see the outside of the womb. Some people are brutally hacked to bits and placed in a shallow grave, while others get a million dollar funeral from loves ones. Or maybe we are being the indelicate ones for wanting them to wait until they start losing money to shutdown, especially odd given how many people are upset at losing a few bucks on points. |
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Both the doctrine of right of first sale (which is itself being challenged recently) and the time-shifting and limited backup exceptions to copyright protection are rights given to consumers, in effect, for the sole reason that they want them, and it seems fair, and for no other "public good" reason. The 35 year copyright reversion option exists solely because it was seen as fair over and above any contractual agreement that exists. See also: Rule Against Perpetuities.
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**** me I get the rental part I have cable and a phone and internet but this is like my cable company cancelling their service then stopping by to try and take my television and my internet provider trying to take my computer, get it? NCsoft cancelled their service and now are taking my game.
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**** me I get the rental part I have cable and a phone and internet but this is like my cable company cancelling their service then stopping by to try and take my television and my internet provider trying to take my computer, get it?
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This was an online-only game and you knew it. Stop trying to pretend otherwise.
I wont play any games that are strictly online only anymore waste of money and time for myself. |
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**** me I get the rental part I have cable and a phone and internet but this is like my cable company cancelling their service then stopping by to try and take my television and my internet provider trying to take my computer, get it? NCsoft cancelled their service and now are taking my game.
I wont play any games that are strictly online only anymore waste of money and time for myself. |
Oh and cable companies do expect you to return their cable boxes when you stop using their services. At least all the ones I've ever dealt with have.
You know I stop in here= I read, I browse, look around... And, what I see is pretty clearly some GW2 fans (maybe former GW fans?) that are here dropping pancakes on Save CoH - and saying it's not ArenaNet's fault that NCsoft is taking CoH out behind the woodshed & bending the community over - apparently for the sake of their stock value...
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While a law to do that sounds like a nice idea, it wont be in practice. You think games now are trying to be WoW or WoW is the only one of it's kind? With that law, Game makers will take their buisness elsewhere, stop maling games for here or build games that are imatation of the most successful one to minimize risks.
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See: Minecraft.
I bought Minecraft for $35 about a year and a half ago. I own Minecraft. Minecraft does not host servers. I host my own server (we pay about $60/year for a rented server host, however, we could run a (laggy) server from my home computer. Or play it single player.
When the Minecraft.net login server is down? I don't lose access to my single player games. I can even set my server to ignore login IDs and allow me to continue playing online when I can't log in, but that's a proposition that opens me up to hackers and griefers stopping by the server, so I don't.
In the year and a half I've owned Minecraft, it has put out 5 or 6 content updates that have significantly altered and improved gameplay, added new things, fixed bugs, and generally made the game more pleasant to play. We have never paid Mojang a single cent, over and above the initial purchase price, yet the programmers continue to work on it and add things to it.
Is it less complicated than a "real" MMO? In many ways yes, and in some ways no - I'd love to see any MMO allow free-form building and the server load that creates (let me tell you, the server map that my 9 friends and I have been playing on for the past year? It is ENORMOUS and takes forever to render in a mapping program!!!) It also allows the creation of lots of mods, skins, and server tools. You want to fly around? There's a mod for that. You want the game graphics to look prettier? You can do that. You want a system of banks like other MMOs (all banks access the same inventory) or PvP or character classes or factions? There are mods for all those things. The players have an almost inifinite ability to shape the game to their own style.
So yeah. It can be done. And Mojang has sold millions of copies and made a ton of money. And no one would ever call Minecraft a "WoW clone."
Second, it would have taken zero effort for Cryptic to make a stand alone version of the game to satisfy the law because such things existed for the developers before launch. Not every MMO has such things, but I have first hand knowledge that City of Heroes did, at least from alpha to significantly past launch. I'm not just randomly guessing here: I'm not the only person outside of Paragon that is aware of their existence. I don't know they were kept up to date into the NCsoft era, but I don't know they weren't either.
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I would honestly kill to have a version of COH that runs like Minecraft - you buy it, you own it, play it offline in singleplayer or on servers that you personally pay for to link up with friends.
I honestly believe that MMOs will end up there.
Not sure I agree the First Sale Doctrine isn't a case of public good. Doesn't this enable used re-sale markets and the like? But yes consumers do have other rights granted that just seemed fair, I suppose. I still don't see this as a reason for making laws about MMOs shutting down. Aren't there already sufficient laws governing service providers?
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To the extent that First Sale and other similar laws can be seen to be in the public good, there's no question that a hypothetical law that required MMO service provides to provide for a means to continue to use the content after shutdown provides for a comparable level of public good. It is to the benefit of all parties in the general sense that consumers have reasonable faith in the long-term integrity of the entertainment they purchase.
To give a specific example, on December 1 a strict interpretation of the EULA for the game requires I delete the game client from my computer, as I will no longer have a license to use it. However, its the only way to view demorecords I have preserved. So I won't. I'm aware I'm in violation of the EULA, which is still binding after the game terminates. I believe I have an ethical reason to do so which may not stand up in court, but I believe the rationale is entirely fair even in the legal sense and is worth following.
The question is: *should* I have that right? At the moment, its unclear that I do. But it definitely appears to be a situation that has public good ramifications in the general sense, if not in the strictly legal sense. It is a case where there is an unambiguous consumer benefit to limit the ability for EULAs to curtail this behavior, that is entirely analogous to the Sony timeshifting precedent.
I'll give you another example. Very long ago, I was involved in a project that involved a company managing large amounts of critical data for its customers. In their contract with those customers they claimed that if the customer cancelled the contract, they would make "ever effort" to return that data in a useable format.
The problem was that they deliberately made no attempt to document, analyze, or design a way to actually do that for any customer. They literally did not know how. This was on purpose. If a customer attempted to cancel service, they could truthfully claim that it would take an enormous amount of time to return the customer's data, and the information necessary to do so in a structured way might no longer exist by then.
All perfectly legal. The question is: should the law allow a service provider to take data they do not own, and essentially hold it for ransom from its customers? At the moment, it is entirely legal, and it happens all the time.
I ultimately walked away from that one, and never really looked back.
Before anyone points out the obvious, this situation is different in that NCsoft owns the data as well as the service. But the example illustrates the principle that the current legal rights of service providers is not obviously congruent to the public interest, and the rationale that a service provider should be allowed to do whatever they want with their service is not automatically obviously true. Service providers can easily escape the legal consequences of withholding customer data by not withholding it, and simply returning it in a proprietary format that is virtually useless to the customer.
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Arcanaville, I hate to ask, but is there any chance of finding out whether this still exists, and whether it's at all possible to distribute it? Whatever version it may be? Just finding out that existed makes me excited!!
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After the shutdown announcement, anyone notice the ustreams were being done on laptops? Anyone wonder why?
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I for one am hoping Project Z will turn into a new Project for Positron with a new Studio. Matt knows a whole lot about making a good Super Hero MMO and I'd immediately pre-buy anything Super Hero that Positron was involved in.
I don't want anything illegal. I have a terrible opinion of NCSoft, but I plan to do no more than pass on my opinion to the few gamers I am in touch with.
CoH was healthy enough and the Super Hero Genre deserves a quality MMO for all of us and future gamers.
You are dumb. See: Minecraft. I bought Minecraft for $35 about a year and a half ago. I own Minecraft. Minecraft does not host servers. I host my own server (we pay about $60/year for a rented server host, however, we could run a (laggy) server from my home computer. Or play it single player. When the Minecraft.net login server is down? I don't lose access to my single player games. I can even set my server to ignore login IDs and allow me to continue playing online when I can't log in, but that's a proposition that opens me up to hackers and griefers stopping by the server, so I don't. In the year and a half I've owned Minecraft, it has put out 5 or 6 content updates that have significantly altered and improved gameplay, added new things, fixed bugs, and generally made the game more pleasant to play. We have never paid Mojang a single cent, over and above the initial purchase price, yet the programmers continue to work on it and add things to it. Is it less complicated than a "real" MMO? In many ways yes, and in some ways no - I'd love to see any MMO allow free-form building and the server load that creates (let me tell you, the server map that my 9 friends and I have been playing on for the past year? It is ENORMOUS and takes forever to render in a mapping program!!!) It also allows the creation of lots of mods, skins, and server tools. You want to fly around? There's a mod for that. You want the game graphics to look prettier? You can do that. You want a system of banks like other MMOs (all banks access the same inventory) or PvP or character classes or factions? There are mods for all those things. The players have an almost inifinite ability to shape the game to their own style. So yeah. It can be done. And Mojang has sold millions of copies and made a ton of money. And no one would ever call Minecraft a "WoW clone." |
If those games are doing it the way it "should be done" then why have you bothered giving a company that is "doing it wrong" any money or time at all when you had the choice to go to a company that was doing it what you considered "should be forced by law" way of doing it?
Also Mincraft is a totally different kind of game than WoW. It's more similar to Warcraft 3 or Warcraft 2 if anything. WoW is considered to be Blizzrd's first true MMORPG just like COX is considered a MMORPG. If WoW servers were to go down, can you play it as a single player?
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I'm not sure if this is a new level of stupid, or just an uncharted part of the deepest level of stupid, but I do not believe you get a reward for clearing the fog of war from every map of stupid.
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I think I mentioned that many people will resort to personal attacks just for expressing a view and if for some reason there was no evidence prior, there sure is now.
You can get your point across just fine without resorting to personal attacks you know.
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Yes, you are being silly. Do not try to tell me you read "forever" in that ad and assumed the game would literally NEVER shut down. Because I don't believe you. And I don't think any court would either.
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If you don't mean "forever", then don't say "forever". Why is that so hard to understand?
That's an awesomely cool idea. The Paragon City we're now familiar with would be the base, as the game comes out-of-the-box. And you could add to it. Your own missions, your own contacts, your own NPC groups, your own zones. Or you could change other things you didn't like in the default game, or remove them altogether.
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Full scale buildings take a bit longer to load than 16 bit cubes.
Even then, only playing with a scant few friends at a time? eh, I'll pass. City of Heroes without the city full of heroes wouldn't last for me.
You can get your point across just fine without resorting to personal attacks you know.
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1. Pointing out that you can use other content when content access is revoked completely misses not just the point of Rangle's post, it fails to comprehend what the point of viewing content is. Human beings don't generally view content because they have a content viewing minimum they have to maintain, like calories or oxygen. If someone takes away my copy of The Avengers its not a trivial loss if I can just watch Halloween 5 instead. The loss of access to specific content is not replaceable with completely different content because content is not fungible.
2. Pointing out that other forms of games do not have a revocation problem is missing the point of a discussion of what MMOs *should* be as opposed to what they currently are. That's comparable to saying that if you were opposed to Aparteid, rather than complain about it you should simply avoid countries that practice it.
3. Speaking of analogies, analogizing the shutdown of an MMO to capricious and random ways of dying isn't stupid because of its extreme exaggeration, its stupid because it analogizes the shutdown of MMOs to other situations people would oppose and fight to prevent even more strongly. Which is a case of someone shooting themselves in their own foot, and having the bullet ricochet off the ground and blow a hole in their own forehead. Its implying the exact opposite of what was intended, in a manner worthy of ridicule besides.
4. And it ends with an implied statement about the profitability of the game, a subject you have zero knowledge about and are as a result completely wrong about. The game was, in fact, very profitable, and not in any danger of being unprofitable for the foreseeable future. That's the primary reason the developers themselves were surprised by the shutdown; they are simply barred from commenting on the specific circumstances of the shutdown.
Certainty in the face of ignorance, nonsense masquerading as logic, self-annihilating extreme exaggeration without irony, semantics without substance, all with the implication of the exact opposite of its vacuous extent.
"Stupid" seemed to cover it colloquially, but I'm generally open to elucidation upon request.
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Well, I tried looking up what legal precedents might exist in this regard, but my quick and cursory Google search came up with only one article on a UK website that essentially demonstrates that companies are doing what I already figured they were doing; legally redefining words and phrases so they can continue using them in their ads to make them sound better. Such as "forever" and "unlimited". And they actually act surprised when customers call them on it.
If you don't mean "forever", then don't say "forever". Why is that so hard to understand? |
So what's the problem?
I'm not defending every advertising claim ever, mind. Advertisers cross the line all the time and get called on it all the time. I don't think this is such a case is all. No one should have read this and actually believed it was a promise to keep this game running literally for all time.
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2. Pointing out that other forms of games do not have a revocation problem is missing the point of a discussion of what MMOs *should* be as opposed to what they currently are.
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That's comparable to saying that if you were opposed to Aparteid, rather than complain about it you should simply avoid countries that practice it. |
4. And it ends with an implied statement about the profitability of the game, a subject you have zero knowledge about and are as a result completely wrong about. The game was, in fact, very profitable, and not in any danger of being unprofitable for the foreseeable future. That's the primary reason the developers themselves were surprised by the shutdown; they are simply barred from commenting on the specific circumstances of the shutdown.
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Despite the circumstancial evidence to support your statement that PS wasn't in the red, those that disagree will simply ask "well what proof do you have?"
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Certainty in the face of ignorance, nonsense masquerading as logic, self-annihilating extreme exaggeration without irony, semantics without substance, all with the implication of the exact opposite of its vacuous extent. "Stupid" seemed to cover it colloquially, but I'm generally open to elucidation upon request. |
NCSoft may have been legally obligated to continue to pay people like Matt for a few months but they had zero obligation to keep the live servers up and running for -any- period of time after their final decision to kill the game. The servers could have been instantly shutdown on August 31st and that would have been all she wrote.
I am by no means saying I'm happy with NCSoft's decision to shut CoH down. But in the grand scheme of things I'm happier we got to play the game for 3 extra months (without updates) than not. *shrugs* |
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.
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No. The 3 months wasn't a 'we feel bad for you loyal customers'. It was a 'we don't want to get sued'.
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NCsoft ultimately only cared enough about this situation to give everyone enough time for a semi-orderly account shutdown/refund period. Sure we can always remain mad that NCsoft killed our game, but we ought to be grateful they were reasonable enough to give us 3 full extra months to play essentially on their dime for free. If they were actually ever afraid of getting sued by angry players they probably wouldn't have shut the game down in the first place. The 3 months was in fact their way of "softening the blow".
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I haven't had the time or inclination to reply to some interesting posts and some things that I wanted to counter, but I'm happy to see that most of those things have been covered by others.
I did, however, just want to say:
4. And it ends with an implied statement about the profitability of the game, a subject you have zero knowledge about and are as a result completely wrong about. The game was, in fact, very profitable, and not in any danger of being unprofitable for the foreseeable future. That's the primary reason the developers themselves were surprised by the shutdown; they are simply barred from commenting on the specific circumstances of the shutdown.
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I'm not saying I fully believe there should be new laws in place (or any that would prevent this case). However, I am also not sure that there shouldn't. Laws just aren't really my thing (Hey, don't judge me!) and I haven't given it a lot of consideration (yet).
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It does seem to me that this is a clear matter of the continued new landscape of virtual properties and the internet and the world of inter-connectivity and trying to figure out the rules and laws of such things. Simple (and complicated) as that.
It's probably best to ditch the analogies. We've seen and learned a good amount about what an mmorpg is and/or could be.
If we want to see any others remotely like this one within our future, we may need to establish new rules (whether they are just codes of conduct or actual laws... and, honestly, I'm not sure the human race is capable of doing well with just codes of conduct any more).
Again, what is the kicker to all of this? It's not that this game was struggling and dying and no good, so there you have it.
It was thriving (as much or more than it had in a long while). People were pumping money in, because they believed in it and wanted it to do well for some time to come.
"Forever" in an advertisement may certainly not mean "forever" (yay), but I think a solid argument could be made for interpreting it as more than a year.
And, in the end, the argument is not that they can't legally (or even that they shouldn't be able to legally) shut down the game and their servers. The argument is the idea of legally requiring an offline backup quality of service for situations in which the cancellation of that service (and refusal/inability to sell it) seem less to do with an actual need to drop it as opposed to simply a new refocusing and lack of care/commitment.
Now, why should that be the case for a video game that you knew was an online only game?
The answer to that is that these mmorpgs are not simply just games, but communities built around a game and sustained by customers and hobbyists and people putting in real labors of love.
Again, I'm not saying that any of that should legally prevent a closure, but I could certainly see it enabling a backup recompense (that most would feel rather worthless anyway, heh).
I know I'd be a lot happier if I could have even just a strictly single-player instance of the game, despite NCSoft being tuna-brained lousy heads (that's a Calvin and Hobbes reference and not some sort of racially/nationally-charge slur!).
I like being able to log in as Electric-Knight and zap some baddies now and then and if they won't take my money for it, I'd kindly like to still be able to (without a costume, tasers and the risk of legal ramifications).
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