Father Xmas

Honestly take the time to watch the first video I posted to witness the shear number of sliders and options the game has to tweak a character.

Looking at the patch notes they have a freaking thigh and calf length slider. You can adjust the size of the Iris as well as selecting various ones. You can change the length of the fingers. A whole face makeup section, eyes and lips. They have a skin shininess slider (I guess if you want them "oiled up"). However the neatest set up sliders allow you to age the face, wrinkles and skin shrinking.

Of course there's cloth, hair and breast physics.

However with all these options, you can go very, very wrong if you want to.

He also mocap Sonny, green suited acted in the scenes opposite the other actors and wasn't just the voice.

Found two rather longish videos on character creation in B&S for those interested in what extreme face/body editor could be like. You thought you can take a long time in the our editor, hah!

The game has preset models as well for each gender/class where the "normal" human sized female characters went from well endowed to "duck she's turning".

Video 1 - 11:47
Video 2 detailing changes from the latest patch. 6:01

Actually it looks like they have three or four sliders devoted to breasts. Size, spacing horizontally, location vertically and angle pointing apart (?!). Someone spent way too much time creating this.

The game uses OGG Vorbis audio compression so converting it from OGG to MP3 (or OGG to WAV to MP3) is relatively easy to do if you have the codecs loaded. It's getting them broken out of the pigg files is the part we can't talk about but I'm sure Google/Bing could be your friend in this.

Like I said earlier, I'm thinking investors expected B&S to add to the revenues like Aion did, not simply shift them from their other games.

Well as for the stock price, let's see. NCSoft released two games that quarter, a box game with a limited but pricey cash shop which you can avoid with enough grinding (GW2) and their heavily advertised Bounce & Strut, I mean Blade & Soul.

When Aion had it's first full quarter 1Q 2009, it added on top of the Lineage I+II revenues which remained flat. Regardless what they said in the conference call, it looks as if B&S simply sucked revenue from their other titles rather than adding new revenue.

As for GW2, it did very well for only being out for a third of the quarter but how consistent of a revenue stream do they expect from a box game? The original GW had good quarters only when a new expansion or combo box set hit the market in the first few years and then it dropped off. 4Q should be okay because of the holidays but when will the first paid expansion be coming out?

Stock plummeted because investors expected a much larger boost in the revenues, like what Aion did in 2009 but twice over because two new games. NCSoft's 800 billion 2012 annual sales estimate seems very unlikely with 650 to 700 billion a lot more likely and they already hit 650 billion once in 2010 so where's the revenue growth?

2011 was a disappointment and now even with two new games, 2012 isn't looking much better than 2010 in terms of sales. So those holding it expecting another huge revenue kick like Aion did are now dumping it. The volume of stock trading is 5 to 10 times normal so a lot of action today.

Still if you bought NCSoft at the start of 2009, the stock is still up over 3 1/2x.

And for a laugh you can check out the Google Translated Korean to Engrish (assuming you use Chrome) games news page from Korea's Money Today which includes a couple of posts about the NCSoft quarterly report. Nothing new there really.

Well it was certainly pretty and stylish.

Also it appears to me that there will be four heroines. I would hazard a guess that the first one is Red Riding Hood (duh) and guessing the next one will be based on Snow White.

I didn't bother to listen to the call, I would rather read a transcript.

But still, regardless what they said, if you sum their big four games and compare those numbers it really does look as if B&S affected all three of their other titles. They are all down significantly QoQ and those percentage drops aren't reflected in the regional sales numbers.

And no matter if they're expecting next quarter sales to be better, it still won't come close to their 2012 estimates they published last September of 1.2 Trillion. Talk about rose color glasses.

I take that back. Actually looking at that slide again they had a somewhat humorous foot note for the chart "Revenues for 2012 are not company's official guidance but example of substantial growth". Why stop at 1.2 Trillion then if you are noting the number is purely made up? Looking back at the previous IR reports all those optimistic estimated revenue numbers are noted the same way, "not official guidance, just illustrating substantial growth". WTH? I think we can estimate what x% growth looks like in a flipping bar chart.

Edit: Looking at their last IR from Aug 2012, they were guesstimating 800 Billion for 2012, no silly footnote. Still that would need 4Q to be 50% larger than 3Q to achieve that and all that's left there is expansion into other regions and the holiday season.

For all of you who thought Nexon's stock purchase was simply a way for them to control NCSoft from behind the curtain.

Mabinogi 2 is the first joint project for Nexon and NCsoft

Mabinogi is known here as Vindictus.

An article at Massively showing some of the combat animations from the new game.

Also I believe B&S was only released in Korea and not the rest of Asia yet. The opposite is true I believe with GW2, only in the west but not in Asia at all.

Some reason I thought the rules were one guess per person, not post.

85

Remaining: 20, 29, 32, 38, 59, 60, 61, 62, 86, 91, 94, 96

I think Jugs being a mutant is an Ultimate version.

I think one of the reasons I disliked 3 so much was the disconnect from the hint/promise of the ending of 2, when we see a Jean starting to glow while protecting the Blackbird. It would be like never seeing Thanos hinted at again in any of the future Disney/Marvel movies ever again.

Yes but Nielson doesn't count chimps. Only humans over the age of 2.

This is a list of the top 25 Cable shows for last week. Nine of them were evening Fox News programs. That said each of two episodes of SpongeBob beat 8 of those shows in overall viewers. So did a show about gold miners in Alaska, Monday night WWE as well as an NBA game (I'm talking only about 8 of the 9 Fox News programs).

Of course other than NFL football and zombies rule.

I'll leave the inevitable comparison between SpongeBob viewers and Fox News viewers for someone else, it's too good of a straight man line for me.

And this is where it get's interesting. We only get to see two things about the subsidiaries, their profit or loss, and their sales contribution to the NCSoft Corporate.

What I saw as interesting is the massive sale revenue increases not only for ArenaNet but NC Interactive and NC Europe. Since Blade & Soul isn't out in NA or Europe yet this tells me some reason NC Interactive and NC Europe gets some kind of cut of the sales for GW2 (perhaps box sales in those regions and ArenaNet gets direct purchase sales?). Maybe NC Interactive and NC Europe acts as ArenaNet's publisher for those regions, who knows.

Also ArenaNet's P/L is actually a loss now that the game is out? Say what? Does this represent paying off development cost "loans" from daddy? We'll never know because the subsidiaries are "black boxes" that we only see sales in and profit/loss out. No idea how the money is spent.

Sadly but somewhat expected, CoH is no longer broken out in the game sales graphs or charts but is now lumped with "other" (so is GW1 BTW). B&S is broken out of "other" for 2Q which wasn't the case at the time. It only came out a week or two before the end of the quarter which is why it went from 2,582 in 2Q to 32,662 in 3Q. The interesting number about sales is that GW2 was the game with the largest sales revenue in 3Q beating all their mainstays. It also looks like B&S ate into Aion, L1 and L2 sales.

Also NCSoft's Korean sales revenues were actually down quarter to quarter and it was the big bounce in NA and Europe, likely due to GW2, which saved their bacon. The question now is what happens to GW2 sale numbers in 4Q? Do they plummet because the majority who were looking to buy the game already have. Does the holiday season hide the dropoff until 1Q next year. How soon until the first paid expansion due out? GW1 had a fairly spikey set of sales numbers as they release expansions and once they were done with that their sales quickly dropped off.

Will B&S continue to cannibalize sales numbers of NCSoft's older games or will it grow on it's own the way Aion originally did in it's first few quarters? As it stands right now I can't see NCSoft hitting either their 1 or 1.2 Trillion KrW sales targets they listed in their late 2010 and 2011 investor reports respectively. They don't even have 500 billion in sales after three quarters. They may hit 700-750 if the holidays are kind or B&S is released outside of Korea by then (likely in the other Asian markets) and is wildly successful.

13

Used so far 3, 7, 10, 12, 13, 17, 19, 23, 27, 37, 45, 57, 67, 73, 77, 82, 97

Well Molly would be about the same age as a youngest daughter for me so I would totally get the "how do I un-see that" as it dawns on you that you just unconsciously ogled your daughter.

Closest I came to that was when I finally realized a friend's mostly live in girlfriend at the time, who paraded around the apartment in rather tight PJs or the occasional (or not so since he bought her one for every color in the rainbow) Chinese silk dress, was actually my boss's boss's daughter who I only met once when she was like 12. I think my head spun like Beetlejuice.

Not new news savage.

In Nov 2010 they were predicting 850 billion KrW in sales for 2011 and 1 trillion KrW in 2012. In late 2011 they say that they will make 700 billion KrW for 2011 and 1.2 trillion KrW in 2012. They came up quite a bit short at 609 billion for 2011 and GW2, B&S will have to sell like gang busters if they any chance of hitting even the lower 1 trillion estimate considering they only had 288 billion KrW in sales for the first half of 2012.

That's the reason the stock is down over the last year, their growth estimates are way, way optimistic and if you invested expecting that growth, it's understandable selling it off. However the stock is still 4x higher than it was at the start of 2009, just not 7x.

Of course right now it's bouncing up in anticipation of the 3Q report coming out this week. It should include a full quarter of Blade & Soul sales in Korea, so expect those numbers highlighted, and one month of Guild Wars 2 sales. But that's only one side of the balance sheet, they will need to show that they are back in the black instead of pulling a Zynga (sales grew $600 million, costs grew $1 billion, oops).

And GW2 didn't go live early. NCSoft first suggested the game was going to be out in 2009, then 2010, then 2011. If anything it was late from NCSoft's PoV.

That's the name of last night's episode. It's set at a SciFi/Comic convention and is loaded with a variety of geek inside jokes. The episode was directed by Jonathan "Commander Riker" Frakes, ends with a song sung by Shatner and features Molly Quinn, who plays Nathan Fillion's daughter Alexis on the series, as a scantly clad cosplayer as seen here (sorry that's all you get to see her in that). And the actor playing the captain of the defunk "Nebula 9" tv series is none other than Nathan Stark from Eureka (I didn't recognize him with that hair and no facial hair). Even a Princess Bride reference shows up in the episode.

Very geektastic.

"I'm a fan of good sci-fi: Star Trek, Battlestar, that Joss Whedon show…"