An Update

YES!!

I knew there'd be someone else out there who'd appreciate that!

And, right, that was the name! I could only remember the Sega Genesis port's name of it!

Fun game and yeah, his art style was distinctive and quite enjoyable!

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

Yeah. Kinda suckie. But being close to an 8 year vet myself, and having a few good IO builds, I'd be okay with it.

Even more okay with it if it was just the IP bought and then totally revamped and improved and *droools* Oooooh, the things they could do to make it so much better!

Depends on who bought it and what they were planning to do with it.

That is corprate talk for "we will tell you what ever you want to hear to shut you up till its too f'in late."

Speaking entirely as someone outside of any such experience...
I'd just imagine 2-3 months would be incredibly fast while 6 or so might be reasonable.
Honestly, I have nothing to base this on. Just my gut reaction to the question.

*shrugs*

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

I think we have to remember that even Mercedes Lackey herself described this as quite a long shot that the "Wildcard Team" was going to try and pitch to NCSoft. Believe me, I'd love to see it work as much as Mercedes herself would, but we should all know going in that a favorable outcome is akin to winning the lottery. Mercedes actually used a "it would be like winning the lottery" type of anecdote when describing a potentially positive outcome from all this on the Titan forums in fact. But she then stated she was still going to buy the ticket anyway, metaphorically speaking.

So we can cross our fingers, and appreciate her efforts, win or fail, but that's about all right now.

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

If the deal is struck fairly soon, it would be suicidal to let it sit offline for an extended period for reworking. The best thing a CoH: Phoenix would have going for it is a lot of people who are excited about making it happen, really want to see the game live. That excitement is going to fade over time. If the game isn't up by, picking an arbitrary date, March 1st, it's going to be a lot harder to relaunch.

Now, if, say, six months separate between the servers going dark and a deal being made, another couple months to make some tweeks wouldn't hurt. Things like removing naming exclusivity could be done in that time (though I'm in the group that thinks it's a bad idea, but I would be more aggressive at returning names to the available pool if someone hasn't logged in for a period). One server might be doable in that time if you have people who know the system well working on it.

But if you're changing the game mechanics in ways like removing ATs, that's a huge redesign and not something you'll pull off in a month or two.

If the new team wants to do major changes, a better strategy would be, as part of the "we bought the game announcement", something like this:

(1) We plan to bring the servers back up with the current game very quickly. It will have the servers as the old one, but we may be contemplating some server merges depending on what we see in terms of traffic.

(2) We will finish and launch I24 as quickly as we can, and will look at the state of of I25 to see how much is involved in finishing it and bringing it to live. I24 or I25 is expected to be the last major content update to CoH.

(3) Our primary development focus will be CoH 2 which we hope to launch in six months to a year. We will be announcing design goals and planned features as soon as possible. It's our intention that there will be a way to bring existing characters from CoH 1 to CoH 2, possibly with the equivalent of a "respec" required for the change in the system. Bases will not be transferred, we'll have a new system we can support. CoH2 will be a continuation of the CoH universe, there will always be an Atlas Park (and an Atlas Park33).

(4) You, the community of CoH, is why this is happening. So we will be collecting feedback and acting upon it along the way. This is the time to be polishing off your wishlist of what you'd like to see.

---------------

That keeps the enthusiasm up, the ability to play (and get money from players) nearly immediately, and set expectations for changes coming.

Well, depending in who bought it and what they were planning to do with it, having something ready in time fo the 9th anniversary at the end of April could be reasonably realistic.

That would not be consistent with the Paragon developers being completely surprised by the shutdown. Its more consistent with the facts that NCsoft did not push back at all, and in fact approved all of the major Paragon Studios expenses, the overwhelming largest of which would be staff salaries and the increase in staff over time.

Among the unequivocal facts we do have are that Paragon employees were really NC employees and were hired by NC (NC even advertised those positions directly). Paragon was using those employees to develop new titles as well as support CoH, and NC was directly aware of that (being that they were involved with defining the employee positions being filled). That that hiring happened over a significant period of time means NC was themselves authorizing a significant amount of expense for Paragon to internally develop new titles. That's not consistent with NC specifically starving Paragon for resources, at least in general.

If NC was pouring resources into Paragon for the development of a new title and then suddenly pulled the plug on the entire studio and City of Heroes, that would explain why the developers were caught off guard. That is a dramatic one-eighty.

Even when I first read the article about EA doing it, the term never got used. They just called it "professional trolling."

Also, I can't make sense of the metaphor.

I'm thinking: false/artificial ground created (for the thing they are trying to bolster).

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

Again, it's from politics. There's long been a term of "grassroots movement". This isn't something coming from the top down, it's something that the citizens want (at least one large group of citizens). Traditionally, this was most often used when an issue was before congress and the offices of the elected officials started getting tons of letters, faxes, wire messages, and telephone calls pushing for action one way or another.

Sometimes, this isn't really the people rising up and making their voices known. Instead, it's either companies generating huge numbers of letters and mailing them from different locations, or even small organizations telling the members "write lots of letters, many of them, put different names on them". This "fake grassroots movement" got dubbed astroturfing.

In practical politics, of course, any movement for a policy you support is a legitimate grassroots movement and a movement for a policy you oppose is just astroturfing.

Ohhhhh. Yep, got it.

It's explained above. A political campaign term. Grassroots campaign: people genuinely excited about the candidate = real grass. People paid to act excited about the candidate, often pretending to be more than one individual = fake grass aka AstroTurf.

I wouldn't think we'd get much back in action before spring 2013 - the transaction has to happen, then relocate the servers, run everything up, test it...

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Just one of the reasons some believe that it's too late to resurrect CoX as we know it. 4-6 months seems to be the optimistic estimate on the time it would take to get the game back up and running, and, realistically, how many of the non-diehard general population are going to reserve that slot in their entertainment time budget for that length of time? Particularly for an 8+ year old game where, depending on the terms of sale, they may have to start completely from scratch?

Some might hypothesize that the bleed in customers over the last three months will have been significant enough to make the game unsellable, at least for the purposes of setting it back up as a revenue generating venture. The IP might be worth something as a setting, and the code might be worth buying to study for long term sequel or other game planning, but it is entirely possible that even if NCSoft were to manage to sell it, we still might never see CoX again.

Personally, I'm in the fence. I'd like to believe a buyer could get CoX back up in 6 months or less, but in my mind there are a whole lot of things that have to already be in process and that have to go just right for it to happen. A lot of 'ifs', so to speak.

Actually, it's very unlikely that any deal would include the physical servers.

If the purchasers were willing to use cloud servers, setting up the game servers could happen quite quickly (as in a week or so).

Setting up a new billing infrastructure would take some time though. But in theory, they could get the game running as a 'free beta test' for CoH 1.5 before they get billing going.

This really can't be stressed enough. Both of them are rather infamous at what they do.

I think it could be a great marketing opportunity if the new owners really took the initialive:

CoH Resurgence: Issue 24 live - it's back and better than ever!

The interest generated in the wider community with the whole Save CoH may well mean a big impact - especially if pricing plans are clever. For somebody good at marketing this could be a real opportunity.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Oh man, more proof that it's never to late for the ignore list.

In the absence of moderation, trolls can easily control any conversation however they see fit, or bury the topic under a pile of cinder, even if they're 'ignored'.

They'd just swap the data to a new centre is what I meant. But they'd want it to be right, they'd want to go live with I24 as their opening point when they officially open.

They may well offer an open beta but not long if they could help it.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

What fascinates me here is, A_F, one of the people who claims to be on the side of common sense, is still accusing GG of not only astroturfing, but getting paid to do so. That G_G is still here arguing, contradicts that. There is nothing left to astroturf, and no studio left to employ anyone for doing so. If A_F were just tossing the fanboy/girl title around, that would at least make more sense.

But it sounds like there's much more of a personal grudge in this case.