LittleDavid
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Posts
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Quote:Pretty much. Not after what they did to him, and not after he won his lawsuit against them.Originally Posted by Smersh
If NCSoft were to even consider selling the IP, I can almost guarantee you that they would never sell it to Garriott.
On that note, I'm kind of sad Garriott didn't try to include rights to Tabula Rasa's IP as part of the lawsuit, but I guess he focused on the battles he knew he could win. -
Quote:Like I said, judging from what NCSoft did to get Richard Garriott out of the company, I think I'm justified in feeling that way about them.Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker
That doesn't excuse how they are behaving now but it does take out the "Oh noes, NCSoft is ebil" line.
That was corporate misconduct, and heck, I'd even argue that it was character assassination; they made Richard Garriott look like a crazy loon who skipped out of town the moment he got a chance to go into space.
I don't think NCSoft went that far this time around with Paragon Studios, but it shows how far they're willing to go. Almost as bad as CEO Bobby Kotick of Activision and his "Project Icebreaker" crap. -
Hoo boy. I'm gonna sound like a parrot here I think ... and I can't fit this into five reasons so I've added a few.
8. It's a love letter to all things about the superhero comic book culture.
The in-game history reads like a parallel to the real world trends in comic books. A world tailored especially to engineer that kind of thing. I loved it.
7. Macros and the POPMENU.
Holy crap, even if it's not something officially supported by Paragon Studios, I'm going to miss functionality like this. Each of my characters wound up with their own POPMENU for social macros (each having their own combination of phrases and emotes for saying "Hi," "You're welcome," "Thanks," or idling/goofing off) as well as functionality for my Mastermind guys.
6. The ability to actually turn OFF EXP gain if you want.
The completionist in me will never stop loving Paragon Studios for having added this. Content that can become unavailable by virtue of outleveling it has been a bane for me ever since Funcom's Anarchy Online. I'm glad Paragon provided a means for the more masochistic among us.
5. Travel powers in general.
Seriously, flying. Super leaping. Super speed. Teleportation. And that's not even getting into the super pack stuff that's not as effective or moddable via enhancements, but just looks so darned cool.
4. It's one of the few MMOs I can enjoy soloing.
Don't get me wrong--playing with friends is one of the reasons to play any MMO. But City of Heroes did enough to make the game interesting and enjoyable even when you were all alone. It's the primary reason I kept coming back to City of Heroes, always paying for more time. Sure, I ran into debt-earning missions solo every now and then, but by and large I never felt like the game was impossible to enjoy by myself, or because I picke the "wrong" combination of archetype and powers to do so.
3. The degree of customization.
City of Heroes might lack the more detailed body and face morph options of more recent games like Phantasy Star Online 2 and Champions Online, but the sheer breadth of ways you can assemble your character's appearance, including customizing the appearance of their powers, is just awesome.
I was so freaking happy when Paragon expanded it with powers customization, then with the ability to save your costumes and load them as separate files. Again, that's something not many other MMOs are doing.
While I'm at it, I'll also say that the ability to select different "builds" for a single character is also a godsend I will always love Paragon Studios for.
2. You can write your own stories.
I spent a lot of time just playing through Bubbawheat's recommended AE story arcs and the top-rated ones just for their stories. I played Astoria in G Minor early in the morning and it creeped me right out.
I always wanted to make my own story arcs. I never felt an urgent need to finish them ... I always thought there'd be time for that.
1. You really DO feel like a Hero.
This covers a lot of little details, but I once said before that it's the little things that make a difference. Out of all the MMOs I've played, City of Heroes felt the most alive, even if there were no other players around. Groups of enemies don't just wander around waiting for you to aggro them. They chat amongst themselves, they crack jokes, they casually commit crimes, they play games with eachother, they train. Citizens do similarly, and it was always a treat to talk to passerby in Rogue Isles (and later Paragon City).
The only other game I've felt came close to making the world feel alive without player involvement was Tabula Rasa.
In City of Heroes, I always felt compelled to help out any citizen I saw threatened by mobs regardless of whether I'd get EXP or influence for doing so. Little David would regularly do fly-by AoEs on mobs threatening citizens if no other heroes were around to fight them. I don't think there's any other MMO out there that actually makes me feel guilty if I ignore mobs that don't give decent EXP for my level.
And when you idled, nearby citizens would speak of your recent exploits. If you were a Villain, they might sneer or cower at the sight of you. If you were a Hero, they might cheer you on.
I might not be playing the right titles, but I've yet to play another MMO that comes close to doing this. -
I hear you. City of Heroes was one of my favorite MMO titles, and one that I've put a LOT of money into. It was just as fun to play solo as it was with friends and pick-up groups, the ability to make your own story arc with Mission Architect was awesome. For me it was worth rolling up a Praetorian just for seeing and exploring Praetoria and running the story arcs there.
I never farmed for EXP. I'll admit I did join a friend's farming endeavors a few times just to get prestige for my single-player supergroup, but I always turned EXP gain off when doing so. Heck, that became my SOP after that feature came out. I didn't want to miss a single contact mission as I climbed the ladder to 50.
I still haven't reached the cap on any of my guys--not my flagship hero (Little David), not my flagshiop Villain (Corrupted Haruspex), not my flagship staying-in-Praetoria Praetorian (Wildfire Pete). I thought I'd always have time for that, time to sort out computer issues, time to earn badges I'd missed in a holiday event next year, time to take care of other things before going back in to CoH for some more fun.
All of it, going up in smoke come November 30.
I play a lot of online games and MMOs off and on, but City of Heroes was one of the few I always came back to. I can't really recommend any titles that'd replace it, especially since I tend to play a lot of oddball games that break the conventions set by World of Warcraft, or came before it. -
Quote:He won it. NCSoft tried to appeal the decision, but he won it again.Originally Posted by Synergy One
That was 2009, how was that lawsuit resolved? Anyone know?
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Quote:This.Originally Posted by Paladiamors
No. Not when their only excuse is "It doesn't fit into our restructuring." Maybe when or if they ever come out with a GOOD reason, maybe then. But in the meantime, they've just killed off one of my favorite MMO's, and fired the best studio that I know of.
I get what you are saying, but please stop asking people to not be angry at the people responsible for killing CoH in the end.
But I'd also like to add that NCSoft has done much worse in the past.
I used to play Tabula Rasa alongside City of Heroes, so I think I've got plenty of reason to be bitter with NCSoft. When TR died, I vowed that City of Heroes would be the only NCSoft game I'd ever touch again, because I thought it was old enough and big enough to survive this kind of crap.
I was wrong, and NCSoft won't be getting any more of my money, no matter how cool their latest titles turn out to be. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Brillig
That's a pretty big leap. How does owning TWO money-losing superhero games help them?Quote:Originally Posted by St_Angelius
COH wasn't losing money!Isn't it equally pretty hard to establish that City of Heroes was costing more to maintain and develop than it was pulling in via revenue? I mean if you're going to dismiss someone taking the opposite claim as you based on those grounds, then it applies to your own claim as well.Quote:Originally Posted by Brillig
That's pretty hard to establish. Or do you have inside information?
We don't know for certain how mucn money City of Heroes was making after expenses, but we do know it was still bringing in several million bucks. Personally I think if, all things being equal, Paragon Studios was an independent studio that published the game on its own they would have stayed afloat based on the revenue numbers alone. -
Speaking of which, these forums have a lot of history and community culture here and I know a lot of people don't want to lose it all. Web Archive does not do well with archiving forums; it usually just grabs the main boards page with each "snapshot" and leaves everything else untouched.
Is there any way one of us can contact Jason Scott's Archive Team for the possibility of archiving the posts and threads here?
(Also, I want forum VIP status so I can see my avatar again ... ;_; ) -
(FAPARN!)
Thanks for everything, Tunnel Rat. I'm never gonna stop believing that this game had been gutted way before its time--and it's because it's all the life you and the all the other devs put into City of Heroes.
I really, really liked Going Rogue. I got into it way after the initial surge of players so Praetoria was mostly empty, but man it was amazing.
(And I don't know what all you did as visual effects designer, but if you're the one who animated the /tanrum emote, I love you forever.) -
Quote:Going back in time, convincing Cryptic to NOT sell the City of Heroes/Villains IP to NCSoft, and fund them whatever they would have needed to keep from being bought by Atari while we're at it.Originally Posted by Sukothai
Devs,
What would it take, to keep this game up and running?
Sukothai
If only crowdfunding got a much earlier start ... -
Quote:Pretty much how I feel. I don't want to give NCSoft any more of my money.Originally Posted by Paladiamors
I understand what you are saying, but this is the fourth MMO I have been an active part of, and loved dearly, that NCsoft has pulled the plug on. At this point I just don't think it'd be smart of me to give them that opportunity again.
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Quote:I think that's what NCSoft will wind up doing, yeah. Shelve the IP so no one can ever play the game again, C&D anyone who tries to bring it back, or pursue further legal action.Originally Posted by Lonelyshade
What do they want to do , shelf it like tabula rosa , and let it rot , did paragon studios piss them off that much ?
I do not think so , infact they allowed them freedom , so what the heck went wrong ?
Honestly things were looking great , for the future .
It probably wasn't any slight of the folks at Paragon Studios that caused this to happen; NCSoft just decided City of Heroes was not making enough money to justify its continued existence in favor of its other titles. -
Quote:I'm still gonna miss killing Skuls. ;_;Originally Posted by Golden Girl
In the worst case, we'd have to develop our own CoH-but-not-quite-CoH-to-attract-lawyers IP - and when you consider just how many of the CoH story elements were based on classic comic book set ups, we'd be able to come pretty close.
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Quote:I agree with you on the "benefits me quite a bit part."Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
A boycott out of spite, no, I agree. A boycott because NCsoft has yet to field (and not instantly shut down) a decent game in years, however, benefits me quite a bit because I get to save a lot of money I might have otherwise spent on Guild Wars 2 under pressure from a friend of mine to play a game I genuinely do not like. Instead, I can spend that on Tera or World of Tanks or... I don't know, a new Lego set. Or maybe a new hat. My old Camel Trophy hat went limp.
Though in my case, my vow to never play another NCSoft title has a lot to do with the fact that NCSoft develops and discards MMOs so handily, and sometimes takes very nasty means to ensure it happens. And unlike a game studio that develops single-player offline games, or online games that don't depend on servers or networks owned by the studio or publisher, once the game is gone, it's gone. You can't blow the dust off of it later on down the line and play it again.
"All good things must come to an end," sure, but there's MMOs out there which are older than City of Heroes that are still alive, and don't have nearly as many people playing them. City of Heroes, to the best of my knowledge, was at least providing a measure of revenue to offset its own development and maintenance costs.
Anyway, my point is ... even if NCSoft continues to publish games that look fun and interesting to me, why should I put any more money on their titles when they've demonstrated such a willingness to kill them off, often just a few years after launching them? There's other things worth my time and money that won't just up and vanish abruptly as a cost-cutting measure by the parent company.
People invest a lot into the characters, communities, and worlds of games like this, enough that I have to wonder if what Jason Scott said at the time AOL Hometown went down could apply to MMOs and (especially) virtual worlds like Second Life. -
Quote:... oh for crying out loud, Positron was his tabletop gaming character in high school, wasn't it?Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Apparently, going by what he said on Twitter, Positron wont even be able to use his name anymore, as even though he came up with it way before CoH, it now counts as part of the IP.
And now that the character's become part of City of Heroes' lore, NCSoft will go after him with C&Ds or other measures if he "infringes" on the IP? That he helped create?
This is why I hate how the video game industry works, with the way publishers own everything. Just ain't right. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
*Spams Level 4 Yellows and Reds*
Oh, child, I'mma gonna beat you so hard...
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Haha, just imagine anybody who bought influence within the past month ... or the day just before the announcement.
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I wonder if maybe we could get Jason Scott's Archive Team to help us archive the forums? There's a lot of history and community culture here that I'd hate to see just up and vanish.
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I think the only person who has successfully attempted such a lawsuit was Richard Garriott; though he didn't sue specificially for these reasons, they did involve how NCSoft killed off Tabula Rasa. Too bad he didn't include ownership of the IP as part of the suit ...
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Quote:I'll drink to that, Technobot!Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
And Westwood. And Pandemic. And many others...
Rot in Hell, EA
*spams purples*
Yeah, I'm not doubting that. I'm just saying, don't doubt the other fanbases left shipwrecked by NCSoft; they've explored many of the same options that we as a community are. (Heck, Tabula Rasa's fanbase got pretty far with their community server project before NCSoft C&D'd them ...)Quote:Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
The power of CoX was always in its global community as opposed to the game itself. The game brought us together and captured our imaginations, but it was ultimately the quality of its base that made the game what it is. Even now, there are players organizing efforts to sustain and organize the mass of us ( http://www.facebook.com/groups/438489949523705/ for example).
Also, curse Facebook for keeping me from viewing that without registering first! -
Quote:And it gets hard to really gauge how much of that money is coming from whom. 300k people could be spending a few bucks' worth of Paragon Points on stuff (or not at all), while others could be spending hundreds of dollars.Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
Their quarterly reports put the *revenue* further down though... around $800K/month... which equates to 55,000 (ish) players (at $15/month).
With Free2Play though, it does get harder to gauge though how many active players there are though without official numbers being released.
Friend of mine last year went insane over the that super pack system, haha ... though I don't think he spent that much overall. -
Quote:Oh, they didn't get a free pass with Tabula Rasa's crowd, either. I saw some very vitrolic opinions expressed about all the attempts to get people to play Aion once TR went down.Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
But, what NCSoft doesn't realize is that the CoX community are among the most intelligent, and vindictive, lot of internet users in the world. They will NOT get a free pass on Churn like they did with Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, and Exteel.
You gotta remember, people in those player bases were as devoted to those games as we all are, and they've pursued similar means to rescue their games as well. Heck, I still miss Tabula Rasa like I'm gonna miss City of Heroes. But City of Heroes lived for much longer than most of the games NCSoft's shut down so far, and it certainly has a bigger player base. So who knows ... maybe this time something will give if the community tries hard enough. -
Quote:It's still worth trying, but given what NCSoft has done in the past I'm not expecting them to treat CoH's fans any differently.Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
Well! After reading that article, it looks like the only thing we could really do is to be so exceptionally vociferous in our opinions of NCSoft that it becomes so viral that they wish none of us ever existed. Haha.
Though, I do think word needs to get out--contact media outlets that haven't covered the story, get people aware of what's going on. And make it clear that the game did not fail--it was abruptly killed off in spite of the revenue it's been earning.
But honeslty I think this is just more evidence that aspiring MMO developers need to stay the hell away from NCSoft. Find a way to do it independently if possible, with the options available out there nowadays. I can't help but think that if we had crowdsourcing and digital distribution (like Steam) back when Cryptic was just planning City of Heroes, this wouldn't have turned out the way it did. -
Quote:As Microsoft demonstrated handily to us with "stack ranking" ...Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
Companies would like everyone to think they are intelligently operated, but oftentimes there is much wasting to be found and decisions are pushed so someone can creep further along the corporate ladder via short-term gains at the cost of long-term benefits to the company itself.
Perfect World is a different thing than The Secret World. The latter's a Funcom game (same guys who made Anarchy Online).Quote:Originally Posted by tanstaafl
Secret world is associated with NCSoft? -
Unless Tony's planned negotiation with NCSoft goes well and a solution to keep City of Heroes online works out, any private server efforts will probably get squelched.
It's happened before, much to the chagrin of Tabula Rasa fans. If that's anything to go by, NCSoft will not permit "competition" from community efforts. As is said in the link there, they don't care enough to keep the game playabe for its player base, but they care enough to keep said player base from ever playing it again.
I really hope Tony reaches some kind of deal with NCSoft, but I'm not that optimistic ...