BrandX
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Quote:People had their copies of GW2 pre-ordered long before the CoH cancellation.Originally Posted by Knightward
Basic question on human nature: How many people have been won over by being yelled at? What's the difference when the person being yelled at is someone with authority and power? How often has some jackass yelled at YOU and you figured, "**** that guy! I'll spite him and do the opposite!"? Why do you think that this situation is in any way different?
Ultimately this is a PR battle. We can't go after NCSoft financially because we don't have the numbers to make a meaningful impact. I mean, look on these boards at the number of people playing Guild Wars 2. We were the smaller part of their revenue, obviously small enough to be disposable, and we can't even boycott (nevermind all the obvious stuff about not being the target demographic, etc.) as a unified group. We need this to be a PR battle because otherwise we're about as effective as soloing Hami at level 1. TonyV's whole campaign here draws outside attention, because that's the only way we can have meaningful numbers on our side. It's the lever that moves the world, or whatever analogy of working effectively you like.
As far as PR goes, people generally like underdogs. We're underdogs. We've been getting all this media attention (more attention than the game has had in YEARS as near as I can tell) because we're underdogs. Even bigger, people are far more likely to support the side that's clearly the good guys. Those dinner donations last week for the devs? That clearly makes us the good guys. The other side of the good guy coin is that people love to see an ******* get what s/he deserves. If we're kicking, screaming, yelling, throwing tantrums and being pissy cause our toy is being taken away then, surprise surprise, we look like ********. At which point all that "City of Children" crap becomes the truth in the public eye and we're back to being too small to be capable of getting anything done.
So you want to fight? Fine, great! Fight effectively. Nuclear isn't effective. At best you're not doing yourself any favors, and at worst you're shooting yourself in the foot.
Have to agree with a previous poster, it's not that CoH was shut down, it's how it was shut down. :/
They had a new issue just waiting to be released. It new content that looked to be having people returning and resubbing.
Should of seen how it played out, then made the decission before the next beta test phase. -
Quote:It was mentioned four years ago, and people on these forums wanted to check it out, but of course, at that time, they weren't nearly as upset with NCSoft, and rules were added in later about no other game talk.Originally Posted by Tymers_Realm
Now I haven't taken a full look at why someone would use 'that' particular sequence from High School of the Dead in this discussion of B&S, but honestly it's seriously out of context.
HOTD is a fanservice title (Zombies, T&A, and extreme Violence. Go figure...), not arguing that in the least. But Ironik's comment is just as vulgar and ignorant to those of us who enjoy that sub-class of Anime/Manga. I'll even admit that Madhouse kinda went overboard with the 'Matrix Boobs' sequence, and I enjoy that Title.
I also have a Staff Fighting HOTD expy that might want to chat w/you Ironik...
Now then...
I don't clearly recall the discussion of B&S on these Boards nearly Four years ago, but I managed to rip the teaser vid from the web site that was linked in the discussion thread at that time. As someone who tends to play Female Characters, I don't really care for the overall 'normal' Female character design (I give the little critter race a pass). I think it has to do with the overall body shape. It just 'feels wrong' to me.
I just seriously wonder WTF took them that much time to do. IIRC, B&S was supposed to be (Asian) launched back in 2010 and was just launched there back in mid-summer...
Honestly, I'm not very impressed at this point.
Thank you for the time... -
Quote:Well duh. If everyone learned what you're saying they need to learn, they'd be playing WoW or EQ.Originally Posted by Captain-Electric
Some people never learn.
I want CoH to continue on, I still think it had life in it and a profit to be made. But I realize NCSoft isn't the only company to shut the doors to their MMOs
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Quote:Pretty much this. I find those who go straight to the "little kids in revealing outfit" when it comes to some ofthese games, when they know the characters aren't little kids at all, is basically them being trolls, to get others not to play it.Originally Posted by MrLiberty
I'm all for trying to make someone seem like the bad guy here, but really. Head size? In one game you can make kids who are 7-8 and dress them up however you want. In the other you can make them 13-15 at the yongest. Both have the potential to be abused. One is not worse than the other if abused.
As for Blade and Soul, sadly its been a title I've been looking forward to since I first saw the premise of it however many years ago. Kung Fu MMO that uses real time fighting combo's rather than 1/2/3/4.
Games can be grindy if they make the grind fun. Hell I still log into generic farm maps in the AE to watch my Plant/Storm controller make a mess of as many 8 man mobs grouping up as possible.
I'm not trying to defend the game, there is no real need too. If you like it, play it. If you don't. Move along. Trying to slander while playing a game that has the same potential for the abuse you are playing makes you come off as silly. Trying to justify with with "Oh well our models are 8 head sizes where theirs are only 4.75" is just dumb. Espeically when you can scroll down face options and choose from ones designed specifically to look "Young". Its a 10ish year old game engine with 3 only character models for players. I somehow think the exclusion of young character models is tied that and not some moral high ground. -
Quote:minimum sliders, baggy pants, tight top, and I believe baseball cap.Originally Posted by Ironik
First of all, you need to take screenshots during the day with your character facing the sun. Your eyes adapt to the night shots and your brain will fill in what you can't actually see.
Secondly, no, you can't emulate that sort of look. I've tried to make a kid for one of my MA arcs and I can't get them to look like anything younger than a teenager. Children and adults have different proportions both in body structure and facial structure that's immediately apparent at a glance. If you take your head as a measurement (as artists do) the average adult is somewhere between 8 and 9 heads tall. A child, on the other hand, is generally about 4 or 5 heads tall. Doesn't sound like much, but you can instantly perceive the difference. Even when you shrink a CoH toon down to the smallest size of 4 feet tall, they're still 8 heads tall. You aren't even consciously aware of it, but your brain says, "adult."
SG member does a really good job of a 12-13ish looking character. -
Quote:That's okay. I can't mistake those other characters as kids either, but obviously, others do.Originally Posted by Power Armour
Well I was taking a guess and you proved me wrong, thanks for pointing that out.
Now the question is how much of the cosmetic gear is actually fairly sensible, and not shirts with boob-holes cut out of them like the marketing for the game would have us believe.
I understand that this is your opinion and I that I have my own, but I STRONGLY disagree with you on this point. I don't profess to have an incredibly detailed understanding of anatomy, but there is no way I could mistake a CoH character model, with the height slider turned down, for a human child. You can push teenager, at best, and even then the dissonance between the young faces and adult proportions goes way into uncanny valley. The length of all the limbs and the torso are just too long and the movements are all nothing like how a real child would move. As people have said before, to me they look like hobbits. -
Quote:One could say that's what they see in the other games. One could say they look like kids in CoH. *shrug*Originally Posted by Pitho
Minimum height characters in CoH look like tiny people, not children.
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Quote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4IOriginally Posted by Ironik
I think marketing just reinforces what we already have preferences for. It's an actual psychological quirk called the "familiarity principle" or the "mere-exposure effect," where we tend to prefer things that are similar to what we're already familiar with.
I once heard a comedian say, "Have you ever noticed that you forget how ugly your friends are? Then when you try to fix them up with someone you realize your buddy doesn't have a face?" That's the exact "familiarity principle" happening: the more familiar you are with someone and the more often you see them, the more attractive they become to you. It's the "I've grown accustomed to your face" thing in action.
Pop songs are so dominant because they sound similar to what we already know. (And the reason we get hooked on them is because our brains *love* to predict what the next note or lyric will be, and that's what pop -- and country -- music does. It doesn't matter what kind of music you like, every song in that genre sounds pretty much like every other one in that genre.
So I think police and medical shows are popular because they're familiar. Some of them are actually good, but we really don't have anything new to say in those genres. Fantasy MMOs are popular because that's what people are familiar with. No revolutionary game has become a blockbuster in the past 15 years. They're all just evolutionary iterations on what's gone before and what's familiar.
I'd say it's more than just familiarity that's the problem with MMOs. It's a combination of everything.
Some people just don't care for the idea of buying a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to keep on playing it.
Then for the people who are willing to pay the monthly fee, there's just so many options. Which isn't bad for people, but it lessons the customer base.
Then there's the entitlement issues, which is just becoming more prevalent. "I should beable to play for free! Never mind paying for the game!"
Then you throw in the investors
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Quote:Okay. The races arent children. That's like saying those minimum slider, minimum height characters in CoH, that went around in almost nothing were children. Because if it looks like one, it must be one.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
CoH tends to keep the child pron to a minimum.
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Quote:Or A and they decided to up the morphine drip and it took effect?Originally Posted by cursedsorcerer
I wouldn't be surprised if the situation was that the game's population was steadly declining and the content was getting stale. But this is not that sort of situation. Yes, this game is old, but so is WoW and I haven't heard anything about Blizzard trashing them. This game has had no signs of declining and in fact has been THRIVING until NCSoft decided to kill it because it wasn't making 'enough' money for them.
Let me put it this way: which of these scenarios would make you more emotional.
A: Your grandfather, who lived a good long life, is SLOWLY dying of lung cancer.
B: Your spouse/BF/GF was SUDDENLY and brutally MURDERED simply because some punk WANTED him/her to DIE.
Currently, the CoH is experiencing scenario B.
CoH isn't WoW. So comparing them isn't the same.
I don't agree with the shutting down of CoH. Hate it in fact. :/
But still room for hope. It's only been two weeks. I'd start getting more worried if we haven't heard anything by the end of the month. -
Quote:Just like CoH then!Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
This pushes me closer to the conclusion that this game is going to end up being softcore porn.
Really, B&S looks like it has options to cover up your character. They don't seem to be selling with that point, but we go back to sex sells.
I know people said such things with TERA, but I found I could cover up any character in TERA at some point. Even the castanics, and they're basically a race of demons akin to succubus/incubus.
I mean really, a day never went by that I didn't see someone in CoH saving the day (or trying to take over the world) in almost nothing. And I'm not talking about gymnastic style leotards, I'm talking about them basically going around what amounts to fetish wear. And this includes male characters. -
Quote:I bought a ticket to PAX specifically to meet with PS and see any details on CoH. So sad when I found out they weren't going to be there.Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
Was mostly talking about the big shows. Think i remember Paragon not having a presence in this year's san diego comic con and pax...maybe there's more but can't place it.
Or i'm making more of it than i should.
Think i would count the player summit differently since it was funded or at least partially funded from the attending players tickets (verify).
In fact, I had just arrived in Washington when I heard the news. I may not have even made the trip, if I had heard about the news before I left (which I left RIGHT before the news was sent out).
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Quote:Wrong race.Originally Posted by Xieveral
I can summon a cute cat to beat the snot out of my opponents but to do so I have to roll as an all-female race of bunnycatgirls that are supposedly over 18 but look like they're 6 years old and wearing little more than some dentalfloss and a few bits of lace.
I am all for sending kittens to slaughter my foes but this game is crap. The Lyn can be male or female.
However, I do think that will be the downside to them in the western market. To play a Force Master, the players will have to play the all female race, or one of the tiny animalofchoice-girl/boy race.
There's just some players who don't want that, male or female. -
Quote:It very well could be. I know in TERA, I saw plenty of people go gaga over what someone would have done for the characters face sliders, and all I thought was "That's ugly"Originally Posted by Starsman
In my case, I am arguing that the Asian market has a history of rejecting western art styles. The west, on the other hand, tends to be much more accepting of Asian styles. Non-Asian masses tend to be more open minded in this respect. So at least my arguments are about the high chance of Wildstar failing in Korea.
However, on the art discussed in this thread, I think the point is about that particular female's head, not just the Asian style. It just seems broken... perhaps it's just an example of a character creator allowing users to create abominable things, though.
It's like a discussion I got into with a friend the other day who couldn't understand how someone could look at Van Gough's work and think it was ugly. To which I replied "You realize everyone thought he was terrible when he was alive, right?"
Art's just subjective. There's people on the forums who love the "realistic" comic book style art, to which I think it just looks terrible
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Quote:I always have that nagging feelingOriginally Posted by Megajoule
Cartoony, sci-fi WoW, etc etc -
You know what? I am perfectly fine with that.
I'm not as completely burnt out on such games as some (especially those who've been playing WoW for the last eight). Auto Assault was like that, in some ways, but this looks much more polished than that game ever was. (The driving was okay, but as we used to say in Interstate '76, never get out of the car.)
If it offers me decent gameplay that improves slightly on the standard, with explicit support for playstyles like explorer and builder, combined with an art direction and sensibility that makes me think of Firefly crossed with Titan AE (mmm, Bluth-y)... I'm there.
It's just that now, I think that in the back of my mind there'll always be that nagging "don't get too attached, because who knows" I had that nagging feeling for CoH long before the announcement. Not because it was failing (to my knowledge it was in the black, and was at the moment of the news) but because I knew at some point, the doors would close.
this is why the news shocked me. I knew it would come at some point, but I figured it would be when we saw CoH was losing money, not making it. :/ And especially not when a new issue was right around the corner and looked to be bringing back players. -
Quote:Maxed out. No. I wouldn't say that's common. Above 50%, I would.Originally Posted by Starsman
Some. I think I heard a lot more anger when they introduced anime inspired pieces, about how a LOT of players hated them in the game, than I ever heard before or after about CoH not being animeish enough.
That's the interesting bit. If you fly around the game you will find that super-sized boobs are not as common as we may guess at first. Perhaps its because we have a lot of female gamers playing female characters, but we have a farily good mixture of player created characters in all spectrum of breast slider settings.
That also may be key to Warcraft's success. It's not offensive to most women because unlike most MMOs it does not go crazy in the skinemax fan-service.
I think almost every case of MMO cancelation in the past (outside NCSoft) can be traced to either economical losses (Asheron's Call 2) or licensing agreements (Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies.)
But my comment on artistic style, was that artistic style is basically in the eye of the beholder. CO is an american made game, and what did people do? they complained about the look of the game.
I wouldn't say it's an asian or western thing, I'd say it's a personal thing.
I hear lots of postive comments about Elder Scrolls graphics, and I look at them and go "WTF THIS IS THE UGLIEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN!"
But then, I've loved the look of WoW (hated the game tho), TERA, and CoH.
As for them going the sexy/revealing style route with clothing on some of them. I think back to economics class...sex sells.
Actually, lots of things sell that would have the PC going "OMG WTF"
So basically, to that, I say, if you don't like it, don't buy/play it. This isn't me encouraging people to go out and get these games. But the idea that "OMG Standard Asian art" is somehow bad, because /they/ don't like it, when obviously enough people do.
But at least with B&S they seem to have more character customization than most other MMOs, and it looks pretty to me, I'll be checking it out. I was planning on checking it out long before the CoH news. Not happy about the CoH news. Not happy with how the company went about it.
But I imagine we'll be seeing some of CoH's devs playing other NCSoft games, both willingly and as part of their job, if they stay in the MMO field of things. -
Quote:I think those numbers are going to stay just as good as they planned, seeing as how there's a few CoH forum posters and plenty of CoH players, who picked up and still play GW2, even after the CoH news.Originally Posted by Scythus
We'll just see how those numbers keep going after the CoH fallout settles.
And while a lot of MMO communities have been supportive of the CoH fan base, remember, before then, a lot of them were saying "CoH isn't my type of game"
Hopefully, NC will sell the IP to whoever, so it can continue Hopefully if they do, there isn't a long downtime.
Though, with all the devs fired and looking for new jobs, will we even have the same dev team, if the game's IP is purchased by someone else? -
Hmmm...the complaints on their artistic style has me thinking.
Isn't that what some CoH players themselves complained about in CoH
In fact, I believe that's what CoH players have complained about in many western made games
So saying, "Gaaaah typical asian style art" is well...retarded.
And about the breast size of the characters? Like CoH didn't have people maxing out or not leaving the breast slider at minimum (when the default was at the 50% mark).
Now, the questioning of whether or not NCSoft will keep a game up and running, is valid. But then, I have that question with any game period.
NCSoft isn't the only MMO publisher that has canceled games that had a fan base. -
Quote:That sounds like it's TERA Online, about the prices on weapon skins.Originally Posted by SolarSentai
And on the monetary side of things - I truly believe that once the game companies realized that people would shell out small amounts of money for shineys they all just jumped on the gravy train. Stuff that would've normally been included with a release was put on the side and then charged for separately. For 1s and 0s these companies really do make a killing. In another recently release MMO I saw them releasing weapon skins for $10 a pop. Seriously? For -1- skin... $10. And (if I'm not mistaken) it was -per character-. And the sad part is that I'm sure there were people who bought them. Even though I wasn't a fan of the Paragon Market in general, I still think we got the most bang for our buck with it. I was one of the few who thought that the NPC Costume Transformations were appropriately priced when they were first released.
Anyway, yea, video games... I love(d) em... but these days... I dunno anymore.
That said, Bill, if you're looking for a game that you can solo in and has gorgeous graphics, you may want to check it out.
Cash Shop is all cosmetic items and mounts that have slightly faster run speed than the starting mounts (but later mounts can equal to them, and really the mount speed isn't that big of a difference), and Time Scrolls (the games way of avoiding gold spammers. You buy the time scroll with real money, you can then use it for 30 days of game time, or sell it on the market for gold, and someone else can use it for game time...basically it can get to the point where you can play for free).
Best gear is locked away behind group content (instance dungeons), but if you're looking to just solo, you can do that in TERA, and just buy it on the market.
And yes, I think we'll see most MMOs get to the point of cash shops, because most gamers (I didnt say all) believe they should beable to play computer games for free. They'll usually shell out money for the console game, but damn if buying a computer game is outrageous. -
Gave up on voice chat when no matter what I did, I kept echoing back. Lost the mic, never found it worth replacing.
Voice chat may not be immerssion breaking for all, but it is for quite a few people.
As for CO, I tab target, and go to town. Only the AOEs don't really need targets, but when using single target attacks, it's tab target.
Go to options get rid of the black outline. Personally, I've always prefered CoH's much more comic book style art than COs more cartoon looking art, but CO has some good points.
I don't really see the downside to CO's F2P model though. Freeform is best for sure, but you're playing for free. I remember a time with CoH that not paying meant you got nothing.
Also, you don't have to subscribe to get freeform, you can just buy a freeform slot. Works for only one character, but you're not subscribed.
Still hoping a miracle happens for CoH myself. Just have to wait it out and see. -
Quote:My experience with big corporations, is they are infact, ran just about as well as the local McDonalds.Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
Well then, I had no idea that huge mega corporations were run about as well as the local McDonald's. Buuut, maybe I should have.
The difference is in how much money you're playing with.
People are people. -
Quote:Because it's a job and it pays wellOriginally Posted by Coyote_Seven
Quite a good example of a dumb thing that makes no logical sense whatsoever. If you don't like cartoons, why on Earth would you accept a job to run a network that shows nothing but cartoons? Would Lee Iacocca walk into the main offices of Revlon, clap his hands together and say, "OK! From now on we're making pinball machines!"?
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Added myself to see myself so far away from others
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It would be the suckie, but I would handle it.
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Quote:Joe said "People like Sam"Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA
Damn you Sam, going into Joes country and stealing his nice things.
Fair play though, it's a long old journey.