Captain-Electric

You're not really cross-posting, since the other thread's getting a nuke up its rear. And your message deserves its own OP anyway.

There's enough crap flying around, so thanks for the reminder, and thanks again for keeping your eye on the ball, Winterminal. This makes sense; the devs won't forget about us. There are a lot of things I don't trust about this mess, but that's not something that's up for debate. I trust our team.

We may not get through this in the way that we want, or, maybe we will. But one thing's for sure, some people out there are trying to do something, and we need to hold it together, keep making noise in unison, and keep doing our calls to action as a community.

I'm very angry at NCSoft's decision. But I feel the most anger when I don't feel like there's anything we can do about it. But, we've been encouraged by our team, it's been said that our efforts ARE making a difference. How big a difference or in what way? We don't know. But since we've been told that our game's continued existence is worth a try, then it may very well be up to us and our continued antics in the press. The devs may be watching our efforts with as much hope as we have for their efforts.

Bite my shiny spandex.

THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO ME!!!

(Original post has been edited for clarity and brevity. Just a little.)

Well, last night and tonight, I've watched some gameplay videos and read some game information and lore and commentaries; and I'm really interested to know if this sprung from the mind (partly at least) of one of our community members. It's really a very impressive looking game, even more so when you consider how rich and full-bodied it appears even in its alpha stage. In some of the city area fly-through videos, I got a strong sense of inherent personality and just, well, tender loving care that few MMOs come out of their generic boxes with these days. I'm also curious whether "City of Steam" was inspired by the name of our currently embattled game universe here. That would be a nice touch.

I'll definitely be giving this a more thorough look-see, after November at the very earliest. For now, I'm going to log into City of Heroes and play some missions.

I'm not a die-hard fan of all things steampunk, but the aesthetic does entertain me. Enough so that several of my characters in City of Heroes have steampunk alternates...even if I've never seen fit to graduate most of them from the editor to a costume or character slot, I spent quite a bit of time on making them for my own personal amusement; and a couple of my characters are known ICly to have visited steampunk-themed dimensions via Portal Corp.

Right beside you, Tony.

To everyone who's been walking on tiptoes around eggshells, STOP TRYING NOT TO ROCK THE BOAT. You'll only wish you HAD later. This is your chance. Your ONLY chance. MAKE. NOISE. NOW.

Sitting quietly is what the decision-makers behind Paragon's closure would WANT from us.

An old game I sometimes play has got eight Virtues in it.

That's a lot of catgirls!

Watched another Unity Rally video earlier and it punched me in the gut. I've logged in every evening since the news broke; but I found it really hard to log in last night and tonight. When I did log in last night, I stood on a ledge overlooking the city and stewing: many of my friends have been scarce around Paragon City this week. I've had to explain to some of them that I'm not installing other MMOs on my computer right now. I've had to hold my ground against some surprisingly disparaging remarks about my choice to stick around, delivered by people I had looked forward to playing with till sunset. It's frustrating.

I guess there are also a few thousand others out there who still like it here, too. Not the worst consolation. But I wouldn't enjoy going out of this game the way I came in, a total stranger. My last sunset, in Earth and Beyond, we were all there till the end, having a blast. Different era, I guess!

Eventually, I flew down off my ledge, and made two new friends, who both had recognized me from our forums (this magically starts happening after 1,000 posts). A lone hero, soloing his missions, and a torchholder who wasn't AFK, who had coincidentally encouraged me here on the forums to mail my open letter to NCSoft, handwritten.

So, yeah. Moral of the story? You can jump off a ledge in Paragon City, not die, and meet super heroes. #SaveCoH

See, this news is related to why I can't decide whether I want to be a civil angry customer, or an angry angry customer. Every time I read a bit about NCSoft's business decisions post-Nexxon buyout, I get this painfully sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach. I'm not exaggerating. It's a real physical sensation that I'd never expected to feel about a matter like this. I feel like I'm watching some careless schizophrenic who just walked in out of nowhere, made some really harmful decisions that affected thousands of people, and who then walked out just as suddenly while mumbling some crazy line like, "This is good...this is good...I'm so focused..." every time you went and tried to shake some sense out of him.

With respect to Hyperstrike--I agree that civility is not only polite, but in our best interests during the negotiations you linked about--but all it takes is one poster to effectively say "No." (Not naming names but he's ALL OVER UR THREAD.) And your plea for a well-meaning thread is on its ear, for days and days and days, accomplishing much the opposite of what you sought. And you better believe that we have more than enough disenfranchised posters to fulfill that scenario.

What's more is, I'm not even sure if that's a bad thing. And this is coming from a guy who really feels best when he's got his Optimism hat on. Excuse my language, but NCSoft has royally pissed this community off. They ought to know about it. And just when they think they understand how pissed we are, maybe we ought to take that opportunity to let them know that we are, in fact, even more pissed than they ever imagined. (I'm aware these first two paragraphs seem to present a conflict, but in the end, ya'know, NCSoft should expect to see a variety of reactions--we're probably doing well by showing how passionate we are, in any case.)

However, while all of this anger might be somehow productive for building momentum, it's not going to sustain it. Different people deal with anger in different ways, which is what makes it unreliable. Past a certain point, most people will get sick and tired, and they'll want to feel good again.

Purpose makes people feel good, and it sustains momentum. You'd have been better off taking a different tact; perhaps finding a bit of good news to post, in order to lift morale around here. Again, I'll cite that great bit of news from Brian Clayton you linked to. You mentioned it as if it was some kind of footnote, dude. What the heck? I've got news for you. It's the best thing to happen in this thread so far.

My three years here are a drop in the bucket, but, long enough to know this community doesn't take well to having a finger wagged in its face--not even for a great reason. Take this advice with a grain of salt, of course. I'm just another poster with an opinion. Maybe I'm wrong.

Atlantea, scroll up and read my post.

A LOT of players in our area have already done the leg work.

Atlantea, it's because you're in Texas. My roomie and some other CO players did some trace-route research, and there's an issue with two pipeline providers, Time Warner and Cogent, who are for some reason losing a crap ton of packets in their data hand-off. A Time Warner engineer (not a support tech) has the trace route data from the players and has opened an investigation as of last night.

(I can't believe I'm helping with CO problems, but you're pretty awesome so I guess it's okay. But still, LONG LIVE CITY OF HEROES!!!)

You can also download all of that as a single zip file, full of all the PDFs for easy/mobile reading and saving. Just click File in the upper left-hand corner, then Download. If you don't have a PDF reader, Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader are good choices (Foxit is tiny and fast).

Email it to yourself, save it to your own Google or portable drive, but save it for the future. You might think you won't appreciate these documents as much years from now, but that's an awfully grand assumption you're making about your future self, and the future of the game.