Chase_Arcanum

To be fair, he wanted something more. He espected a single hero to be able to take on three "even conned" minions at a time, IIRC... so a team of eight could expect to wade into a mob of 24 even minions... not quite single pulling.

(IIRC, a (yellow) lieutenant was supposed to be a good 1-on-1 and a single boss (orange) would make you tap into your reserves (chew a few inspirations) or work with teammates.)

And when you think of it, it makes sense. "Conning" is supposed to be "considering" the threat of a foe to you... and we so often tackle the red-and-purple mobs easily at the higher levels... our characters, I guess, are really overestimating the threat, allowing us to have inflated egos regarding our fighting prowess.

Sorry, no time. Check for posts here and interviews with Jack at the time of the split. It really comes from both sources, if you piece them together. There's talk about NCSoft "paying for" x development, for example... and that does fit the known studio-publisher model.

I researched this once, but pretty sure that all the old forum links are broken. if I find some, or at least quotable text, I can PM you.

Not at all. Cryptic was an independent studio that partially owned City of Heroes. When MUO was planned- and while Cryptic still OWNED CoH, he was on record in video interviews on how he wanted people to "pay for both games." He was seeking unique gameplay, focusing tightly on the Marvel experience, and focusing on the console, so he hoped to have two different sustainable markets, and has said as much.

It was only after MS pulled the plug (as they did for many of their console MMO efforts... for both underlying tech and market study reasons... haven't seen Age of Conan console yet either, after all) that Jack really had to make a choice.

That was WELL AFTER the crew had been narrowed to 16.

as noted above. If I have time and you're honestly curious, I'll try to research it again.... it really is a breadcrumb series of posts to put together. Please, though, I'm wary of wasting the time on something where people have already decided what they wanted to hear is the truth, regardless of the facts. If you honestly want to learn how it was, I'll help. If you just want to continue to hold onto your belief and have your bad guy, then let it drop. I've got enough going on already and really DO want to do an I16 comic this time.

Very much so... and assuming otherwise is missing very basic business practices.

Pretend Cryptic and NCSoft are 50/50 co-owners. NCSoft also pays for continued development. If CoH brings in $30million. each side gets $15m. NCSoft then pays cryptic an additional $5m for additional development, leaving it with $10m.

It wants to boost sales with an additonal $20m development project over two years. That's the rest of its revenue. At the end of that, they earn a whopping $60m... split 30m each. They're ahead $10m, right? Still sounds good...

...except they have other titles that, if they invested that same amount, they'd get ALL that $60m of the return. What's a better investment?

Now, that's an overly simplified example, but hope you can see where the business logic creates the problem, not just one person.

You missed the whole point. Jack claimed to be BLINDSIDED by the staff reduction. He expected to keep the assembled production team. MANY MMO's at the time did the traditional "really small sustainment team" model post-launch and Jack *claimed* that he expected the cash to keep rolling in for larger production-level teams.

That was a massively interview, IIRC.

1) I'm not suggesting that Cryptic expected a free ride, but they didn't like the "deal" that was offered for continued investment.

2) Here, you're showing an lack of understanding of the basic business arrangement that was ALWAYS crystal clear. NCSOFT WAS NOT A PARENT COMPANY. Cryptic was a totally independent entity- it prided itself in that until Atari bought it. It WANTED TO develop CoH in-house, but ran low on cash. NCSoft gave them the $$ to finish the product for PARTIAL ownership of the product, not the company. It also published it, hosted it, and managed customer support services for it.

Perhaps that's what you missed in all of this. That's what defined the whole strained business relationship. While they remain (I hear) on good professional terms, they had their own separate business interests at heart... and until they could make SURE that their own cash investments would result in their own interests being fairly met, they were reluctant to put more than what was needed in the product.

Once NCSoft bought it, the problem was gone.

--

DISCLAIMER
I may be biased... I met Jack once at conference. He was a bit of an aloof academic, and seemed more comfortable talking to people that hadn't played CoH than people that were admitted fans (I think he expected me to jump out with a "YOU NERFED MY REGEN SCRAPPER" attack). We really didn't get along- not badly, mind you, but not like the other colleagues I met there.

One thing was VERY clear. He LOVED this game. He spoke about it with the energy in his body language and the sparkle in his eye that a father has for his kids. I've known other game developers, and they all have some affection (sometimes a love/hate relationship) with their products, but Jack was practically BOUNCING about CoH. This was not callous salesmanship. I don't think that selling the rights was easy for him to do. He had to accept, like any good parent, that a kid grows up and goes its own way.

Perhaps that's why I look at the grains of evidence and see a much more complex relationship than simply vilifying Jack would explain.

They just rearranged their office cubes, according to some twitter posts... and they're getting rather big-- to the point that not every department will know everything going in the other departments.

Time to pull a Brantley Foster. Just show up at their offices, set up in one of the unused cubicles, and start pretending like you've been working there for weeks. After you carve out your little niche, wait a week or two, then complain to HR about a payroll glitch.

Then, when you're fully established, remind them that I'm still telecommuting from Pennsylvania and try to get me a redname.

You're missing one IMPORTANT part here.

Jack didn't cut back the staff.

The relationship between NCSoft and Cryptic cut back the staff.

They both owned part of the game, so they shared revenue, but NCSoft also PAID cryptic for additional development under a traditional publisher-studio model. If NCSoft didn't pay for it, the resources weren't allocated to it.

What was the motivation for NCSoft to foot the bill for a huge sustainment budget when they split the proceeds with their co-owner?

Why would Cryptic invest MORE than they were being paid to?

Stalemate.

It was probably something neither of them wanted- Jack's gone on the record with saying that he was "blindsided by the reality of the business" by CoV's staffing decline- suggesting that he figured Cryptic would keep the ownership revenue AND get paid from NCSoft to sustain a large team. NCSoft probably expected that there would be "partnered investments" in expansions or they'd slowly begin to own more of the product if they invested "above and beyond" sustainment levels.

In this case, the stalemate was broken by buying Cryptic out. Now NCSoft has full ownership and full revenue, so it makes full sense to really push development.

Well, there's the idea that the "August 15, 2009 to November 15, 2009" roughly corresponds to the first 3 months ( including open beta) of a direct competitor. Knowing that you AT LEAST remained a paying customer during that period has some value.

My concern is this: Nov. 15-Jan 5. would be a TERRIBLE time to start closed betas. The holidays are approaching. People take time off. That means there's fewer man-hours to respond to the critical flaws that would crop up that early on. Patches would be slower coming.

At the same time, the holiday stressors (and shorter days... and the start of winter "cabin fever) can make even the most helpful playtester agitated... imagine what it'd do to the average forumite... not to mention they're playing a buggy pre-release product that isn't getting patches or dev responses to the problems in what the forumite sees as a "timely manner" (i.e. usually 15-20 minutes after their post)

I'd almost expect them to delay closed beta until mid-January just to avoid all that....

... which WOULD put them on schedule for a possible anniversary launch...

Who released your leg-chains? GET BACK TO WORK!

Yes, it's an old joke. Most of mine are.

Problem with these is they usually increase the gap in the distribution of wealth. The rapid-farm-all-you-can crew ignores the apartment, saves the wealth. The people that might USE the apartments aren't earning Inf while they are, so they're earning Inf at a lower rate while Spending it at a lower rate as well.

I've also found it quite profitable to convert the hundreds (thousands) of base salvage on my characters to brainstorm tokens. 1 token gives you 1 random common. It used to be better to spend 30 for a rare, but with the price of commons lately...

That's why I stressed the "that they can remember" part, which you might have missed.

The "buy it now" is handy, but a frantic-casual WILL notice that something frequently used- a rune, for example that he once bought for 5,000 is now going for 100,000. He doesn't have to remember exact numbers to be filled with righteous anger at being ripped off!

Heck, the frantic ubercasual will just ***** that ALL common don't go for relatively the same price! They're COMMON after all...

People can be rather casual market-players but still be damn hardcore when it comes to speccing out their build. (You can even more easily be a very hardcore marketer but be ridiculously casual about your character build). Don't mix those priorities.

A casual-market, casual-build player could just look for a cheaper recipe
A casual-market, hardcore-build player would likely stick to his guns (and become a frantic-casual marketer ******** the whole time...)

My thoughts exactly.

Ah, the comic book creator died on me, so I tinkered with doing a photoshop one. Looks like I lost the "actions" that I was tinkering with when I burnt out. Never did get it to be consistent with the colors between panels...

Damn, I thought I'd permanently burnt out. Getting the bug to write again.

Why does this happen during crunch time? I haven't been home before 9pm all week (and I leave home before 7am)

Must... prepare... website...

I think many of us do this to one degree or another.

I downplay the frequent use of teleport in the game (teleport travel, medical teleport, arrest teleport, teleport-to-base) in my stories. I like the mortal danger element, so I usually tell stories that ignore medical teleports and insta-heals, for that matter. My supergroup bases have a distinct geographic location that's usually traveled to.

With a few exceptions, I largely ignore the existence of "Portal corp."

Heck, as excited as I may be for "Going Rogue," I'll ignore most of the interdimensional-travel aspects of it, when it comes to defining my characters. I may make characters native to that world, but few of my characters stories will actually acknowledge the travel between the worlds.

With a few exceptions, I strongly downplay or ignore stories that (aliens, interdimensional travel, time travel, etc), just as I largely ignore Marvel stories with Galacticus or the Skrulls or the Kree. They don't interest me and, in fact, frequently tend to subtract from what I enjoy. It was that way for the overarching story of City of Villains as the time travel & extradimensional nature of the overarching story became apparent. I did the quests, appreciated the storytelling, then purged all thought of it from all of my characters. It doesn't apply to them.

The rikti? The invasion defined so much of the CoH universe so its events define many of my characters as well- often the catalyst for becoming a hero. To be honest, I'm interested in seeing what GR's world is like without the rikti invasion & how some of my heroes would have turned out without it.

(As always, there are exceptions. I *do* have one "alien" and one "interdimensional" so I'm not OPPOSED to the idea, it just holds very limited interest for me.)

ok, this is distracting from the thread and really getting ridiculous. I'm glad to take it to PM's to continue if you wish but.

1) I'm sorry, I found the anecdotal testimony irrelevant because it was assuming there was only one absolute reason. Looking back, you did use the term 'faulty' which was probably intended to be conditional (not representative of all cases), where,as I always considered it VERY conditional (few things in social science are EVER an all-or-nothing thing) I took as trying to claim it was "dead wrong."

2) When one finds unexpected trends in data, like the fact that older males have a slightly greater tendency to gender-bend, the next obvious question "why." In this case, I saw this conversation evolve in, yes, blogs, AND the academic world. Nick's one of the first to do these self-report studies to this degree, so he's often referenced, and there's whole courses of study in communications for "avatar mediated communication" that are wondering how known and observed psycho-social factors in interaction change in this new medium.

What I DIDN'T want to do was imply any conclusions.

"Speculate"
a: to meditate on or ponder a subject : reflect
b: to review something idly or casually and often inconclusively

I used the word to make clear that this was NOT a conclusion, but a direction of thinking that people were going to. If anything, I under-represented it, because these were often educated guesses based on other data (some gathered in the same survey, some gathered differently (so of lesser value, but still somewhat useful if carefully applied) that could serve as a rationale for the behavior, and if so, might be a useful hypothesis to test in future studies to see if any hold.

Wherever you're getting that I'm ATTRIBUTING CAUSATION by intentionally using the least-weighted wording I can come up with, I have no idea.

EDIT: Also, I used Nick's "gender bend" terminology because it seemed less weighted. Some academics use the term "virtual transvestism." Maybe I have too much negative weight on the word or I'm too defensive, but I really REALLY dislike that one.

Oh, absolutely no implied resentment here. Sorry.

City of Heroes, in particular, lends itself really well to the other-universe contributions.

Incorrect, if you read the whole series of articles.

Again, I used the term "speculation", because as far as I know, there was no verification of the observation. I didn't want to give the observation too much weight.

They did, however, use observation, use additional questions from these and other surveys to see what peoples inclinations and preferences were, and noted that younger people ARE less likely to be in established relationships, ARE more likely to think favorable to encountering someone online leading to offline relationships and generally, ARE more uncertain of their sexuality than older people.

Given that these metrics ARE there DO exist, and given that they'd dovetail rather well into an explanation of why representing gender accurately would be more important, it creates a nice working hypothesis for future research. it doesn't PROVE causation, granted, but few things do. The field of research is still young

When dealing with aggregate data, you never use a single personal anecdote to explain every instance.

If you bothered to look, you'd see that although older married males are more likely to gender-bend, it still isn't predominant behavior. The question isn't "Why doesn't EVERYONE gender bend" which you seemed to think it was by your answer. it was "Why is there ANY difference based on age?"

Based on personal testimony and anecdotal experiences given during the surveys, this speculation arose to explain that little difference. That speculation could lead to topics to be tested in further surveys.

What about the "pull my finger" questline that unlocks the special emote?