An Update

Yep, no auction house. The bazar itself did not exist until 2001 and required the purchase of an expansion.

Before that, there was a player designated area where eveyone gathered to consolidate their /trade spamming and barter face to face.

I think when we had "Rate this poster" as an option, it showed how cliquish the forum posters could be, buuut, I'd say CoH has had, overall, one of the best forum communities in an MMO.

WoW. TERA. Now there's some lousy forum communities for you.

The in game community was no different.

I wrote in detail about book value before, but:

(1) CoH has been around long enough that if it has any book value, it will be low, and the only tax writeoff is the book value of the game.

(2) If you sell an asset below its book value, you pay no income tax on the payment and get a write-off of the difference between book value and the selling price.

(3) If you write off an asset, the tax benefit is tax rate * book value so 1 mil book value 25% income tax means you'll pay 250K less in taxes. Furthermore, you have to write it down over time as it depreciates. If you sell an asset for less than the book value, you get the benefit of the full sales price and get to immediately write off the difference between book value and sales price.

So, selling an item is BETTER than taking the writeoff.

As for a million dollar price to sell the IP, unless you are represented by Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, legal fees won't be nearly that high unless there is something really tricky being attempted to screw the other guy.

The anonymous comments I used to get when we had that were completely off the wall. They made the stuff being tossed around the boards now look completely tame by comparison.

This community had/has an incredible amount of things that it knows but is absolutely completely wrong and it is amazing how stonewalling they are about it.

A good example is the unwillingness to even rationally discuss the idea that the devs weren't addressing game problems in anything approaching the time frames needed. You had people willing to use the development cycle as an excuse for not getting to bugs until years after they had been found in beta. Every excuse in the world would be made. In the end having problems in the game for such long periods and then fixing them in a way that just aggravated players took its toll.

On one hand, we've already seen that NCSoft is capable of this as part of the Tabula Rasa scandal.

On the other, they've shown that they're terrified of it happening again (or at least getting caught), so who knows if it's something that any potential buyers of CoH will have to deal with?

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Keep repeating that. Maybe you will even believe it's true. Hell I thought so as well before someone dug up the case information and it turned out it was due to differences in Korean and U.S. Law.

I hear you.

However, in that case wouldn't they have instead posted,

"Please try to have patience while we work out an alternative long-term solution" instead of what is equivalent to,

"Shut up once and for all! Je$^s!"

Well! That's basically what they said to us! :P

And I would think if they really wanted to temporarily halt this P.R. nightmare, they could always post an additional note on the launcher and/or website now. But they aren't doing it.

Honestly, I think NCSoft's entire game plan is to brazen out this firestorm and hope it dies out. It's just that Mercedes Lackey, her husband, and a few others don't see it that way, and are trying a last-ditch, long-shot plan to get the game going again post-shutdown under someone(s) else.

I really don't think NCSoft is planning on selling either now or after the game closes down. I just think Mercedes & crew are trying some sort of new angle to get them to see that it's their most profitable choice, perhaps not only in terms of actual cash in their hands but also as a salvaging of their rightly-earned, HORRIBLE reputation here in the west.

And I'm not sure that anything, saving CoH included, could ever completely repair that.

You saying that in Korean terms, it wasn't fraud?

It turned out that under Korean law his acceptance of the letter could be construed the way NCsoft presented it.

Here is the weird thing. I am fairly certain I saw you participating in that thread why cant you remember the stuff that contradicted your position but I can remember the stuff that contradicts mine ?

There's a lot of that going around. It's basically a stalling tactic - try to make your opponent waste time using search.

I may have been in that thread, whichever thread that is, but considering how all of this garbage has been going, the discussion was probably about something entirely different at that point in time. Had I seen anything about "It wasn't fraud" before today, I would have remembered that.

This is not Korea. I'm certain the whole thing didn't go to court with a Korean lawyer either, since you [obviously] need to be a US lawyer to practice in the US.

Her source also believes that NCsoft will consider a sale.

pwnd

Thank you, Golden Girl! You rock! Even if nothing comes of any of this, I hope all those involved know we appreciate their efforts, and yours too, GG, for staying grounded, helpful and positive and not feeding the trolls. Most of us have given up, including me, for the most part. Thanks for shining a little light here.

This whole bit sounds sketchy to me, but mostly this:

Back Alley Brawler/TicToc said that Statesman/Jack himself said the engine was licensed, not sold, for perpetuity for use with CoH and one additional title (whatever Cryptic wanted that to be.) There is a rather large difference between this and having bought the license outright.

I would GUESS Statesman/Jack would know better than anyone that bit

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Maybe what was meant this license, for the two games, was a purchase by a single transaction as opposed to having to pay a licensing fee every year until the end of time? And so with a purchase of the CoH IP, the license for the engine will also be transferred?

Again, disclaimer: MAYBE.

I can't see how it would mean that all rights to the engine were bought by NCsoft, because that would eliminate any need to use the word "license."

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!

The Titan Sentinel+ was created with cheaters in mind and uses insane encryption. The idea behind that is the only one who will ever get the key to that encryption, is whoever buys CoH.

Hopefully we wouldn't even need to use it as an option. But I can see why there's some concern that the player/character info would NOT be included, because selling/sharing that info might constitute a violation of NCsoft's own privacy policy. Sentinel gives us the option to transfer our own data to a new IP holder without NCsoft needing to take any unnecessary legal risks. I guess there's another way around that too, by letting players log into their NC account and manually authorize the transfer.

Aye, I just finished all of my toons last night just to be sure.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Try it.

But ultimately it's more about compensating for 'accidents.' The databases could get wiped, or accidentally lost. I've heard of weird things like that happening before.

On the other hand, the safest thing for them to do would be to set up a way for us to log into our NC accounts, and authorize the transfer of our data to the new IP holder.

The license may have been stated to be transferrable with the game.

Actually, if there's any truth to the "must shut down" story (which seems questionable to me), it could be the license. A cautious lawyer could have put in a clause of "If we've shut down the game and want to sell, the license is transferrable". If that's the cause, someone from NCSoft should find that lawyer and slap him around for no transferability until the game is shut down (thus lowering the market value of the game).

Actually, there could be some clauses about Cryptic in general or Jack Emmett in specific getting a payday of the game is transferred while still in operation. I suppose Cryptic could have had some irrational fear that NCSoft was just going to flip the game. (Conceivably not rational, IF the clause was there, we don't know how it's affected NCSoft's decisions in the years since the sale to NCSoft.)

It still doesn't explain everything. For example - why would NCSoft have been refusing to respond to people who wanted to make offers? It would've been easy to negotiate a deal, privately let them know about the clause and why the game had to shut down before they could close the deal. Take offers, see how much they can get. Even if they didn't want to publicize the reason for the being unable to sell (maybe a fear that Cryptic would claim the shutdown was just a sham to get around the clause and sue), they at least could've said "we're continuing to talk to potential purchasers. We can say nothing about any progress and at present no sale is expected and the shutdown will happen as expected, but things could change."

This is all speculation. Personally, I'm skeptical of the report that they must shut down before they can sell, I find it highly unlikely that NCSoft will strike a deal within the foreseeable future. I think they're being stupid not to strike a deal, but they wouldn't be the first big company to do something stupid.

But I'd love to be proven wrong. And should a deal be announced in the first week or two of December, I'll say Fansy, looks like you were right.

I think that's just a misuse of technical/official terms on her part.
It's understandable though; her message is just being delivered as acounter to the notion that there's some sort of possible hangup regarding the engine.
All she was saying was that her sources tell her that the engine is full-sale with the game - no problem there.


It'd be great if any of these longshots pay off. Again, everyone involved understands the enormous potential for failure...

Anyway... potentially positive possibilities.

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