So What is Plan Z?

I have a possible confirmation, but it was in a PM (on these boards, not Titan).
The person was very specific about the source and its nature. I can't say anymore. Sorry. Specific numbers weren't actually used, but it was implied they were unusually large.

It was mentioned as a rumor that was born from misreading a quote.

But in that version, $80 million was the bid price offerred to NCSoft and now $80 million is the NCSoft asking price.

$80 million must be an interesting number, it keeps showing up in one form or another.


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Since we're talking about offers...separate question to AvelWorldCreator.

Setting aside the chosen method of communication (although, personally i would think asking one of the rednames to point you in the right direction would've gotten a better response than from customer support personnel)...but anyway, i know giving figures isn't always good prior to negotiations but since you're convinced there won't be any, it should be safe to say now.

If you were granted an audience, how much would your company be willing to offer?

Oh, yeah. I didn't mess much with the 64 but I remember reading that. I was stuck with an 8-bit color set on the 20.

I estimated at the time the IP was earning at minimum a rate of 5 mill a year. No less than 10 mil and no more than 15. My original estimate seems to have been pretty close as I found out later. Now, with the loss of Paragon Studios, its senior staff, and player accounts (among other things)... The IP is now probably worth at most 500k. NCSoft doesn't even own the engine. That still belongs to Cryptic Studios. We weren't after the IP. We were after the studio and player accounts. Those were the real assets.

So in your case, you were not even trying to save the game, but just trying to buy a development studio and a crap load of private information?

((Which for the EU players, you would have had to ask each and every single account holder if it is OK to share with others...))

You realize this is just a reworded 'I know a guy who knows a guy...', right?

The situation is that we are discussing an emotionally charged issue on the Internet. A culture pone to hyperbole (or worse) to avoid being seen as wrong over even trivial matters. In this case we have an antagonistic group, SaveCoX, with a repeatedly declared vested interest in making their chosen target, NCSoft, look as bad as possible. A group who's members have made claims in the past that were, as pointed out, demonstrably mistaken.

Given this state, along with the fact that the burden of proof generally rests with those making a claim, I don't think it is unreasonable to require more than faith to accept certain claims as fact.

Are there verified public statements from Valve, Trion, or Sony that they made a bid? Has any developer or group come forth with a statement taking credit for the alleged $80M offer?

Is there any proof from unbiased sources at all that reasonable offers were made by anyone except the former Paragon staff?

Actually that was the official stance. That was just the minimum desired assets. Having a functional game that was already generating revenue was definitely worth having.

And I'm aware of the EU issue. They are much better at privacy matters than they are here in the U.S.

I completely agree. I must admit though that I just won an Atari Tshirt right from the source via Facebook about 2 months ago.

Not sure about Atari and Commodore, but the minimum RAM for an Apple II was 4K (which is 4096 bytes, a K being 1024 which is an even power of 2). When I got one, I splurged and got 16K.

The 6502 processor had a 16 bit memory bus (which meant it capped out at 64K). It basically had two sets of read and write commands, one for page zero, the command was just two bytes long, "command byte" "0-255 address", and one for the rest of RAM, the command was three bytes long, "command" "low byte of address" "hi byte of address". The zero page instructions executed faster, as well as taking less memory to store the instruction. today, the idea of optimizing the code for one byte is laughable, but I once was on a team to create the ROM for a Novation Apple-Cat. 1024 bytes for the ROM. On our first assemble, the ROM was 3K. We'd keep finding tricks to shrink it, I remember a while celebration when we realized every case of "JSR (address); RTS;" could be replaced with "JMP (address)", saving one byte. There were 25 occurrences of that, so we cut 25 bytes in one blow!

Ah, those were the days. Glad they're over, but there was something special about that kind of focused programming for optimization.

Now, if I'm programming and need to allocate a buffer, I think nothing of reserving 32K space.

I suddenly imagined you as the Gaim, when Sheridan was trying to convince the League of non-aligned worlds to combine their forces against the growing darkness. Sheridan had to force Kosh to launch a Vorlon fleet directly against the Shadows and he was killed in retaliation.

And now Kosh is dead! I hope you're happy!

The Commodore 64 came with 64 kilobytes of RAM, hence its name. Of course it wasn't able to address all of that RAM normally, as some of that address space needed to be used by other things. Though it was possible to "shadow" the ROM into the underlying RAM, where it could be further modified.

Of all the memory locations on the C64 that I memorized, I still remember three of them. Locations 53280 and 53281; the color of the video screen background and border, and location 828; the start of the datasette input buffer.

The way business works more or less guarantees that there not be proof. Anyone who has concrete evidence can only disclose it at the risk of being sued, or at the very least, destroying any progress they may have made at completing a sale. Even years later, they will still be forced to adhere to these standards. This is why in the rare cases in which you DO hear insider information, press sources always refer to them as "an individual who chooses to remain anonymous", which only gives skeptics more ammo with which to cry "fake." Which leaves us at a perpetual stalemate. You can either choose to take someone on their word, or conclude that they're lying. And there's not much you can do to shed light on who is more likely to be truthful. For a gaming company, NCsoft's business history is rather dirty. On the other hand, SaveCoH wants NCsoft to look bad. Weighing the limited information we have, all you can do is decide which is more likely.

Maybe NCsoft did something wrong, and maybe not. But SaveCoH trying to make it look wrong, does not change the odds of whether or not it IS wrong.

Thanks, Pebblebrook. I find comparing the thread you linked with current statements to be an interesting illustration of why I was looking for proof to begin with.

When someone goes from dismissing a rumored amount to presenting the exact same number as though it were accepted fact, while flipping the alleged originator of said number, is it really a surprise that people might be concerned about accuracy and interested in seeing some proof?

I must admit I got the Amiga 500 for gaming first and everything else second. It had zero competition in that regard - the closest thing was the original NES, and it couldn't compare to something like this or have music like this.

Darn right. I never liked that guy. Always so smug and cryptic. "I have always been here" my foot.

Well, except for that whole "If you go to Z'ha'dum, you will die" line. That one didn't leave a whole lot of room for interpretation. And, admittedly, he was pretty spot on.

I remember that stuff. The Commodore computers (20, 64) had two 8k banks at the upper memory address range. The first bank was a form of BASIC (I used it tons of times for floating point work). The second bank was the Kernal OS. It was great for some of the IO, but I often found myself writing my own routines. A trick I used was to use the address of this one opcode for some two-byte instructions. The opcode itself rarely had much use other than testing some bit values. After that I went to Data Race and worked with a Z80 with a set of parallel 6502s for the DSP. I also worked with the 8088.

Don Thompson is the current CEO. Skinner retired. Both are 1st degree connections on my LinkedIN. Neither can be reached via GM's of restaurants, even McOpCo (corporate) locations. Indirectly, perhaps, if you filed a complaint that resulted in a lawsuit that made national headlines. But even that is a stretch.

Which is why I find this whole scheme of using the help desk as a gateway for M&A inquiry's.....interesting.

No, the only thing GMs can do is give you further contact information.
The help desk has an internal contact list and may be more familiar with which of a set of public lists is better for your needs. It was an experiment mostly on my part. It wasn't a planned one.

That seems to be the dilemma.

Only thing we can do is interpret the little information we have and as humans tend to to do, get 20 people in the room there will be 20 different interpretations. And until more facts come to light about the entire situation cant really say which interpretation is right or wrong and in the end, all 20 might be wrong.

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!

Interesting isn't the word for it. Especially when you consider that after one ticket receiving a boiler-plate reply, that apparently proved that NCSoft was closed to all communication.

I was always told never to "Feed the trolls" and I probably shouldn't reply to this, but the response was anything but boilerplate. And later evidence from other sources established this as the case.

It does strain credibility. Could I get in contact with Tim Cook by way of an Apple store? Could I seek an audience with Pope Benedict XVI by going to a local Roman Catholic church and asking one of the deacons? Could I get in contact with U.S. President Barack Obama by asking a clerk at my local city hall?

Possible but very very very unlikely.

I dont think it's guranteed to get in contact with those people if you went directly to Apple HQ, got inside the Vatican, or went to the White House's front door.

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!