SlickRiptide

See, that's actually legal guff about NCSoft's OLD virtual currency. Or, if you prefer, it's NCSoft's currency while we will be using Paragon Studios' virtual currency.

History - A few years ago, around the time that Tabula Rasa launched, NCSoft took a stab at getting into the then-new freemium market by launching a series of limited scope games. By "limited scope" I mean that they were highly focused rather than implying something about their quality.

One of these games, Exteel, was a giant mech combat game. Once beta test ended and the game officially launched, it included a marketplace with purchasable game gear. The virtual currency was called NC Coin.

Though you can see from our EULA that they had plans to extend NC Coin to many, maybe all of their games, that never actually happened. Instead, one F2P game (Dungeon Runner) just stuck to dollars and another that was originally destined to support NC Coin (A soccer game) never materialized.

The point where NC Coin might have been folded into the City of Heroes experience was the point at which NCSoft took a step backwards instead, and started closing all of their freemium games in North America. Some of those games were successful in Korea and might still be running there for all I know.

They also shut down their under-performing North American MMO's, including Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa and eventually even Lineage, I believe. (But not Lineage 2, which is still operating.) The NC Coin experiment never really got off the ground. It's presence in the EULA is a historical artifact now, though it's conceivable that some similar clause about Paragon Points will be replacing it in the near future.

True, but I guess that now I'll make the effort. Thanks for listing where your information came from.

I have to say that I'm at lot less interested in a story that sounds rather more like what Venture described than a story where someone dies and you have to bring some meaning to their death. I prefer something like that to a monthly cliff-hanger, ala the old Republic serials.

Oh, well. Different strokes.

If you're referring to what I wrote, that was speculation, not reporting of verified fact. Despite Golden Girl's faith in her opinions, the reveal at the end of the story is also speculation as far as I've heard. There are no hard details about the story except that it will be seven chapters, someone will die and the villain missions will have a different viewpoint on the story from that of the hero missions.

Matt referred to it in the Ustream interview as a "murder mystery". What that means is anyone's guess, but most "murder mysteries" require that someone die under mysterious circumstances and that at least some part of the story resolution is the discovery of the culprit. Given that, I find the likelihood of the reveal in the final chapter to be small, but I have no more basis for that opinion than Golden Girl has for hers; at least until she gives some sort of citation for the facts that she's basing her opinion upon.

E-K: Do you play any freemium games? I ask because this disparity that concerns you is an unavoidable one that exists in every game, yet those games go rolling merrily along in spite of it.

It exists in our game as it stands now. I own every expansion and every booster pack except the party pack. My daughter owns CoH, CoV, and GR - the latter only because I made the effort to buy it for her. She has one booster pack - the magic pack. In contrast to me or, indeed, to the majority of subscribers currently playing the game, she has a huge disparity in her available content and she has no budget at all to speak of. (She wisely saves every penny for college.)

By your lights, this should be making her feel negative in some fashion and destroying her feng shui, game-wise.

In fact, the opposite is true. She pays little to no attention to what others have because she's having too much fun playing with the stuff that she has. I do not believe that she represents some kind of edge case. I believe that she is typical, rather.

I have some experience with a half-dozen or so freemium MMO's and while I don't claim special expertise, I do know this - I've rarely met anyone who was envious of another person's "toys". Oh, there are always the people who say "Subscriptions aren't fair. EVERYTHING should be free and nobody should have to pay for anything, ever, and the devs should give me a pony and a vorpal blade while they're at it."

It goes without saying that those people are not your target audience.

I HAVE found the situation where the store was considered to be too empty, where some store items were considered to be too expensive, and where there was a feeling that the store was the be-all end-all and that full-members (whatever that meant) were not being given enough consideration.

None of those things had to do with one person being unhappy about being deprived of something that another person had. In the cases where the players felt they were being forced into joining a higher tier of membership in order to have a complete game experience, they balked and said "We'll quit playing instead" and they did just that, forcing the devs to change their rules to hold onto their free players.

In short - there are many things to be concerned about, but the one you've stated, "being turned off by seeing the disparity between their budget and that of others", is NOT one of those concerns in my experience, at least not in any game that wasn't already committing the folly of "pay to win".

Since our devs are not going down that road, I don't see a problem in that regard.

Is that a signature shade of blue or is that one of the shades in the palette? It does look like the bandolier and the logo are the two signature bits. You have to wonder why the HC logo was not added to the 30-month veteran rewards. Seems like a glaring omission.

It's entirely possible that the Devs like it that way and that's why it seems that they've "forgotten" Hero Corps. They don't write any stories about them because they prefer them to be open to individual interpretation.

The only good counter-argument to that is their track record in going out of their way to explain other things that didn't require explanation, like power proliferation (Really? A mad scientist did it?) and Origins of Power ("Yes, yes. It's all a complex tapestry." 5 pts if you recognize the Simpson's episode) and of course Incarnation (which already has plenty of discussion threads devoted to it).

I guess that until they show an inclination to address the issue that we can assume that MemphisBill's #4 is the "right" answer.

In the "Globalism and the 90's" section of the history backgrounders.

I'd have to check with Paragon Wiki to be sure, but I think that the history plaques also make a brief, oblique reference to it.

Oh, I have no doubt that it was Crey that did it. I've posted my own take on the situation a couple of times upstream already. Still, it's all speculation at the current time and has to be treated as such when talking about what it all means.

The new plan still includes the same quantity of "Issues" that we currently enjoy. One of the devs already commented in an interview about working on issues 22 and 23. The existence of content that is exclusive to the store does not automatically mean that we will no longer receive the sort of "free" content that we are accustomed to receiving as subscribers.

Now, I know nothing about the proposed content of the next two issues so I can't say whether anyone will be pleased with that content and it's quality or quantity. Knowing that they are under active development is enough, for the moment, to satisfy me that the devs are continuing to insure that a subscription retains the same sort of value that it has had in the past.

No, the explanation I referred to is the explanation for the rise in super-villain crime in cities that contract out to Hero Corps. That isn't anything to do with Crey Corp.

The Crey connection to Hero Corps is pretty well limited to Paragon City and then (ignoring the possibility that Crey Tanks were the armored raiders that razed HC Paragon) only after they were threatening to pull out of Paragon City. If Crey has anything to do with them now that they're back in town, we haven't heard about it.

Whether it was Countess Crey, Justin Sinclair or someone else who manipulated the city government to prevent the rebuilding of HC Paragon back in 2001, that person(s) appears to have other fish to fry nowadays. It's worth noting that both Countess Crey and Justin Sinclair have their own private army of supers now, so that may account for their current lack of interest in Hero Corps.

As for Hero Corps' "curse", there's already so much super-villain activity in Paragon City that you'd have a difficult time noticing an uptick brought about specifically by Hero Corps.

This is why I don't see Hero Corps becoming a lackey of Crey Corp. Within their own field they're a big deal in their own right. Even at "five times their budget", they can absorb the loss of a building. My guess is that Crey pushed them out and then Crey kept them out, all the while making public noises about how wonderful it would be for there to be an alternative to relying on big-hearted do-gooders for protection.

There's lore around somewhere to the effect that Statesman welcomed Hero Corps back to Paragon City after the War, not embracing their philosophy but stating to the effect that "Anybody who wants to help cleanup the mess and make things better is welcome here." That's a little telling, I think. Paragon City is still refraining from becoming a customer of the company, so it isn't really clear just why they are here but that's maybe up to the players to decide.

(Yes, I was calling them Hero Corp, but that's because I've always thought of them as a corporation and routinely forget that the actual name of the company is "Corps".)

***EDIT***

With Freedom approaching, the devs will be pushing new content out a lot more frequently than in the past. Players who enjoy playing an employee of Hero Corps would be well served to open a suggestion thread asking for a Hero Corps costume pack as a Paragon Market item.

Well, you just explained why there aren't any Hero Corp story arcs. /shrug

I suppose that the story could be that you prove once and for all that there is NOT any corruption and, in fact, that Hero Corp has a shadowy nemesis, Villain Corp, that has been deliberately targeting them all of these years. heh

The flip side could be that you reveal the corruption and that Rebecca Foss pledges to clean up the company and restore it to the path of good and righteousness that she had originally intended for it to follow. The only thing Americans like better than an underdog is a reformed villain. ;-)

Hey, that even fits with the whole theme of the past few issues, go figure. :-p

If there are any irregularities happening in Hero Corp, they're at the upper management level. There's no reason at all that a rank-and-file employee of the company can't be just as idealistic as Statesman while wanting to make a living out of his talent instead of giving it away for free.

I can also how they could be "behind the scenes" irregularities. That is, Rebecca Foss and Kit Rafter could be 100% legitimate about their commitment and ideals. It could be that the corruption, if it exists, operates at a bureaucratic level two or three levels removed from their view. It might be that they are hopeless idealists who only believe that they are running the company when the true seat of power rests somewhere behind the throne, with the deliberately faceless VP's that do the day-to-day management of the corporation.

Then again, it may be simply be that Hero Corp is exactly what they claim to be and there is no corruption at all. Who can really say? If your hero works for a Hero Corp that is a legitimate company getting a bad rap, well, nobody can say that it isn't the case.

QFE. Grumble all you want and publish all of the analyses and breakdowns you want that "prove" that the cost should be $2.50. If you open your wallet and shell out the $10, then you just acknowledged that $10 is, in fact, the "real" price.

A better measure of value in all of this is to put yourself in the shoes of a newbie free player and ask how the value compares to similar store items in other games.

I won't start making a laundry list because that would run afoul of the forum rules, but I feel that if you look at the stores for other games and put their $10 offerings side-by-side with a powerset from this game that you'll find that the comparison is a favorable one in most instances. In many cases, you'll find that the value of the powerset far exceeds what another game offers for the same number of dollars.

There's still the open question as to whether Hero Corp is really a big scam in which the company uses its supers to clean up the ordinary crime and then imports its own super villains to justify the continuation of their contract with the city/country/whatever.

The Rikti War probably lent them some legitimacy, in that cities with Hero Corp contracts were more or less accidentally prepared to defend themselves against the invasion. I'd suspect that Hero Corp's advertising department plays heavily on that theme nowadays; especially in light of the "second invasion". Just when you thought it was safe to cancel your contract, *BAM*. Rebecca Foss couldn't have asked for better if she'd arranged it herself.

As far as that goes, it would be interesting to get a glimpse of the public face of the Paragon Protectors in light of the renewed Rikti hostilities.

In a way, the lore of the entire game is due for something of an overhaul.

I should double-check the current dialog of the Hero Corp Reps. With all of the changes to the "difficulty slider" it may not be so obvious any more that Hero Corp is accomplishing their job by manipulating the media to warp your hero's public image. It maybe that Hero Corp, from a game standpoint, has received a bit of a "whitewash".

In any case, I don't see them as a "good guy" company that naively ends up being manipulated into a Crey puppet. Best case is that Rebecca Foss actually believes in her ideals but, like a scientist who fudges his results to get a grant, for the greater good, she is willing to look the other way and overlook certain irregularities in the name of achieving the greater good of protecting everyone everywhere while making a living doing it.

I don't actually believe that the "best case" represents the actual case, frankly.

Heh. I still have occasons where I will edit a screenshot to post to a forum and have the "30Kb? I'll be crucified if I post something that large!" moment. Yay for broadband internet. :-p