Captain-Electric

Leo. Have some class.

If she's brave enough to examine herself for error in front of this forum's unforgiving peanut gallery, she's probably got more character than you're giving her credit for.

By laying into her directly following her apology, you're telling us WAY more about yourself than I suspect you want to share.

Atlantea, you don't have to explain or defend yourself, it's not worth your effort when there are better ways to focus your time and energy; and ANYONE around here who has been paying attention should know by now that you're doing your part to save City of Heroes. And anyone who rakes you over the coals over where you choose to spend YOUR money is just looking to distract you from the real goal: Answering Calls to Action, and saving City of Heroes. It's also none of their fracking business in what direction you open your wallet.

As a customer, stand your ground and be proud of where you stand. I'm right here beside you, along with MANY others. I won't be giving any more money to NCSoft. Heck, I wasn't interested in any of their games anyway. I'm a super hero comic book fan. I DO wish their other studios well, I wish them the best, in fact. But what I don't wish well, or support in any way, is careless, clumsy customer service and NCSoft exemplifies it. And you know what? I bet anyone in any of those other studios would choose to understand and respect my stance.

So, the rest of you who have a problem with my stance? With Atlantea's stance? With any of us? You can whine, insult, bait us with silly mindgames all you wish. We. Aren't. Budging. Trust me. I didn't budge with the last publisher I boycotted. I've got practice.

TITANS

Yes, in all caps.

Success is the best form of revenge. Seeking to harm NCSoft would, in the end, corrupt us just as much as their corporate greed does them.

We'll do something that fills fans of City of Heroes with joy, something that leaves NCSoft behind to become a small, dim, unimportant memory.

I actually signed up for City of Heroes because of Issue 14: Mission Architect. In childhood, I always appropriated toys for my own fantastical universes and learned how to write my own adventure games in Basic (sometimes I wonder how life would have turned out if I had continued learning how to program). I didn't just read comics, I created my own comic book characters. Captain-Electric and several other characters have had long lives. I used to play a computer game by pre-evil Electronic Arts named Adventure Construction Set, that let me design my own worlds, quests, and characters. I loved it.

I waited many, many years for CRPGs to get back around to my dream game--one that let you participate in its creation. Years later, I learned how to emulate an Ultima Online server, but not for the reason you might expect (I still paid to play the official servers): I learned enough JavaScript to appropriate the engine for my own single-player Britannia, filled with custom gumps, characters and chained-together quest-lines. Only one other person ever played any adventures in my Ultima: Forgotten Tales world, an emulator engineer from Brazil who used to help me with troubleshooting. But they loved it. Good enough for me!

Mission Architect brought me in, but it would be a year before I picked it up. Instead I found friends, a dev team, and official story arcs that lured me into their official game world like no one has since my first year in Ultima Online; and also got me back into reading comics, which has added much enjoyment to bedtime reading for three years now.

For the past couple of years, Architect has added immensely to my play experience. This system brought me to City of Heroes, and I'd say it represents at least 1/3 of the reasons I stuck around. I was lucky enough to befriend a couple of players whose talent for creating stories has put them firmly among my favorite comic book authors, despite this being "a game". Several other authors also adorn my list of favorite talent, many of them largely undiscovered and with few ratings. I have SO many architect tickets and I never "farmed" for any of them. They're all from playing stories for the story's sake.

When one of my friends greatest works yet, a massive story arc trilogy pitting heroes against an unexpected Axis America invasion, was due out around the same time as the new Pandora's Box SSA, I realized I was actually looking forward to his arc more; which is saying something, considering I was REALLY looking forward to the new SSA. And that's when it hit me: this was another great first in gaming for me--fans becoming huge fans of other players content within mainstream MMORPGs--so much so that if he had been accepting donations, I would have opened my wallet.

The worst mistake Paragon made was to confuse the system's initial player reaction for an overall failure of the idea itself. Mission Architect should have blossomed over successive issues, giving players the power to create (and the power to reward, even if those rewards were particular to instanced Mission Architect content) their audiences with increasingly mind-blowing special effects tricks, worlds, maps, access-points (beyond the AE building's rather unimmersive access point), and multiple NPC contacts, contact chains and complex mission trees.

Other games have picked up the torch, and games will continue to pick up the torch, but it was a sad thing to see a great system with so much potential receive so little care after its creation. Still, it was amazing to see what my favorite authors did with so little. We created worlds.

I guess I'm not surprised to see that this thread is still chugging along, after two requests to have it nuked. (Hint: not surprising because our red-named allies in Paragon are just a little bit busy these days. )

At this point, they might as well leave it up. But for the record, those requests weren't owing to me wanting to take back what I wrote in the OP. I wrote what I felt; and what I still suspect: that these "talks" are merely related to the services cessation process; and that our kindness and patience has been exploited by NCSoft's NDA gagging of the Paragon team, while the Paragon team bleeds out into the workforce at large--and that we should have been more ruthlessly aggressive in our media-grabbing antics these past two weeks, not kinder and gentler.

But the problem with creating a thread like this is that it doesn't help cause ACTION. It becomes a meeting place to vent (and waste) steam. Like protesting in a park right outside NCSoft's iron fortress, when the park is completely concealed by trees.

Shining a spotlight on my anger is not wrong, per say, and several of you have written in support of my expression. And I'm not refusing you, but I want to acknowledge those who have taken me to task for this. Yes, even those who came bearing insults. I wouldn't have regretted posting the OP if we truly knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that our strongest displays of unity had been in vain and that we truly had nothing left to lose. But what we need right now is not a spotlight on our grief, which we'll have all the time in the world for if we fail as a community. What we need is a laser-like focus on our purpose: Saving City of Heroes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this really started to dawn on me the moment I pressed 'Submit New Thread'. 99 percent of what I type around here is straight-up encouragement for calls to action. Now? Straight-up rabblerouser. People have short memories, which is the other problem with creating a thread like this: words immortalize you at the specific point in time in which they're typed. Always a good idea to keep in mind when you're in the heat of a moment.