TonyV

"Irony can be so... ironic." --William Shatner

I'm not familiar with the WoW 3D printing company, but the impression I get is that it is based as much on art as it is on technology. Someone who is truly familiar with doing 3D prototyping would be able to take models such as the ones generated above and turn them into true 3D prototypes, plus you'd need a competent painter to paint and finish them.

This also explains why it is probably not an endeavor that Paragon Studios/NCsoft would want to undertake. There is a HUGE difference between 3D rendering for game design and 3D prototyping, and if they wanted to get into this business, they'd definitely have to invest a lot of money into buying expensive hardware, software, and experienced 3D prototyping gurus. In short, it would almost certainly have to be a completely different business unit, one they probably don't want to get into as a gaming company.

It also explains why the models are so expensive. Each one is a project unto itself, and it takes many hours of painstaking work to generate the finished product.

Now having said all of that, if someone has a lot of experience with 3D prototyping, or has a pile of cash and a lot of time and is willing to invest in learning it, it most certainly does seem to me to be a viable business model (no pun intended)--but only if Paragon Studios/NCsoft is willing to turn loose of some of the licensing rights, something I'm working on getting them to do for me as well. But it really would take a smart cookie: part computer whiz, huge chunk of 3D CAD guru, part sculptor, part artist. (Or someone willing to invest that pile of cash into hiring them and who has the leadership to get them coordinated.)

Edit: For what it's worth, I consider Arcanaville a really smart cookie, and that ain't so hypothetical. If I made a list of top contenders who I thought could pull it off based solely of what I know about them on these forums, she'd probably be at the top of it.

Black Pebble, I think I have the answer to everything. There's a really simple way that City of Heroes can have millions of subscribers, GUARANTEED. The best part is that it won't cost Paragon Studios a dime, not even one red cent, and I promise, every existing player will love it. Seriously, television shows will be begging you to advertise them!

It's so simple, I can't believe that no one has thought of it before. All you have to do is ***** ** *** ********.

Hey all, in case you didn't notice (ideal!), we had some nasty performance issues on the Titan Network server that affected, well, pretty much everything. We've been aware of it and worked on it for an hour or so, but we're in the mode of trying to catch a very intermittent error (once every week or two) red-handed and nail the sucker down. The good news is that we are making progress towards ironing this particular one out, and hopefully this won't be an issue much longer.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but everything should be good to go now. For what it's worth, we do actively monitor this server. I get paged when things go way south, and there's almost always an admin around watching over things. (Seriously. I don't know when Nicster and Steiner sleep. ) When things go wonky, I always make a point to have a stern talking-to with the server, and it really is playing a lot nicer these days than it used to.

Just as a heads-up, we're talking about doing a system-wide upgrade sometime, probably within the next week or two, during which we'll have an extended outage that will last a few hours. I'll post our schedule once we get closer to that time.

In the meantime, I'd also like to extend a HUGE public "Thank you!" to everyone who has been working hard to get the Paragon Wiki up to speed on Issue 17. Zombie Man, Blondeshell, Eabrace to name a few of the people who have been busting their butts, as well as a bunch of new and old editors adding your knowledge to the community, you guys are awesome.

While you're beta-ing about, be sure to get all the information your brain will hold, including checking out the main Issue 17 article itself, over at our humble corner of the Internet. I promise, I'll do my best to make sure it's up and running when you get there!

Cheers!

Tank you for the amusing anecdote!

You might want to consider making it shorter and releasing a show more often. 90+ minutes at a time is a pretty long haul.

Other than that, I really liked it. Heh, "hammer space." It's been a while since I've heard that term used, but it's perfect. "What the-- Where's my assault rifle? Where the hell did this gumball machine come from!?" I loved the story about the coffin.

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Edit: Changed to shift+x so as to not interfere with normal ctrl+x functionality (cut text).

Black Pebble, I hope that you're really paying attention to this thread. There are a few things that are jumping out at me.

We, the players of the game, want to be more than just consumers slopping up what goodies are being thrown at us. One thing I've noticed that's kind of funny is that a lot of your posts have been geared towards the Old Way™ of thinking, where you (Marketing) dole out information and we (players) consume it. You commented yourself that people weren't asking you questions about upcoming game features. Rather, most of us are actually interested in having a conversation with you about how we can work together to promote this game.

In other words, we want our experience with Paragon City to be an interactive one. We want to be involved, not just spectators to what you and the crew have in store for us. The problem is, a lot of people don't know how. For those of us who do, we don't want to be sued for doing something without permission, so we sit and we wait for some kind of sign that it's okay to do our thing. What Paragon Marketing ought to be doing is finding these people and saying, "Yes!" or "Let's figure out how to make this work." (Notice that there's not a "No" in there.)

I'm not just talking out of my *** here. I created the Paragon Wiki over five years ago. When I did, I spent a lot of time and effort updating it myself. I did it partly as a personal reference, but I knew that as one person, I'd never be able to keep the thing up-to-date like I'd want to. So I started publicizing it to the community. When people asked questions in the Player Questions forum, I'd write an article and post the answer with a link. Eventually, I got it big enough to reach critical mass and snagged the attention of some really good (and prolific!) editors to help me out.

At that point, I had leveraged my singular efforts to get several times more work out of it than I had put into it. That is the key to Marketing, and if I can do it with a fan-run side project, I know you can do it as an employee of the company with official backing. Imagine if you had an eager staff of ten people to do your job for you. For every ten hours you spent doing your job, you got a hundred hours of effort in return. All you have to do is tell them how its done. Well, my friend, I have great news. You have a staff of hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. When you think about it, that's mind-blowingly awesome.

But--and here's the catch--as long as you avoid giving us the direction we require ("We need presence at this convention." "We need you to visit your local comic store.") and the resources we require ("Here is some swag to give away." "Here are some free game discs." "Here is our official backing and approval."), you're going to have a massive, unpaid workforce champing at the bit but effectively doing nothing, and one hour's worth of effort will always equal only one measly hour's worth of work.

If I were you, I'd be excited as hell right now. Again, read this thread very carefully. Don't look at it from the perspective of what you have to offer us, but from the perspective of what we have to offer you. As much as you've tried to steer it towards getting us to beg for information, others have steered it back to, "Let us help you!" With a player base like this, there's no reason in the world why CoH shouldn't be kicking WoW's gluteus. You have a golden opportunity laid before you, and you really don't have to do very much to come off to your bosses as a Marketing god. You had a really good opener with this thread. Now finish the job and rally the forces!

I really do hope that you'll re-read this thread and find it eye-opening. Again (in case you haven't see it ten times already), tonyv@cohtitan.com. Seriously, let's talk.

Man, I saw this thread earlier today while I was goofing off at work, and I ended up working late and eating out with Belle, so I'm just now getting around to responding to it. Here is my two cent's worth. I'll highlight the central ideas to avoid tl;dr syndrome and give you as much or as little info as you want to handle.

1. Offer merchandise for sale. Better yet, create a merchandise license program, so that, for example, I could offer officially-sanctioned City of Heroes t-shirts for sale, t-shirts which would, of course, receive NCsoft's/Paragon Studio's approval. By doing this, you have zero risk but can almost immediately have a metric crapton of merchandise on the market. As soon as I can, I'd like to talk to you about this, because I'd like to be officially sanctioned to sell City of Heroes merchandise. (If you want to contact me sooner, drop an e-mail to tonyv@cohtitan.com)

2. Lemur Lad has one of the best suggestions on here: Give us the ability to gift City of Heroes stuff, including subscriptions and game time, to people. I'm not stupid, I know that by doing this, you face the risk of fraud happening. But please, consider this. Subscription time isn't something you guys manufacture and consume raw material to make. Worst-case scenario is that you have to refund time that was charged fraudulently. Write it off and go on with life, because virtual assets such as subscription time are, by definition, not real. However, the money you make from people legitimately gifting subscriptions and time most certainly is real.

3. I'll add my vote to advertising on Hulu. Target shows that likely will result in subscribers. Sci-fi and fantasy shows would be great. (Stargate Universe, Caprica, Legend of the Seeker, FlashForward, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, Merlin, Eureka...) Want even more bang for your buck? Target shows that are old and canceled. (Forever Knight, The Dresden Files, New Amsterdam, Century City...) The ad rates will probably be dirt cheap, but you will precisely target the audience you're looking for. Say the word and I'll contact Hulu and see if I can get more details and save you some leg work. tonyv@cohtitan.com.

4. Send surrogates to conventions. I'll tell you what. Labor Day weekend, we have a HUMONGOUS convention in Atlanta every year, Dragon*Con. Atlanta is a major national hub, so it draws people from all over the Southeast, some from even further away. I'll contact you once the novelty of your joining us dies down a little bit, and we can talk about getting some people here in the area together to host a booth on behalf of NCsoft/Paragon Studios. I'll personally do the footwork of contacting the people who run the convention, coordinate getting space, help plan activities, gather volunteers to help run the thing. You (Paragon Studios) pay for the floor space, send displays and swag, work with me on what you want to make sure happens (and make sure doesn't happen) in promoting the game, and officially back our promotional efforts to the player community. Together, maybe we can come up with a plan to replicate this effort throughout the country. Again, tonyv@cohtitan.com.

5. Get your employees to have in-game events more often. I understand that Matt Miller can't attend every convention in the country. But you know what he can do? Take at least one night every two to three weeks and appear in the game. It absolutely baffles me that we don't see a much higher in-game presence of the developers and reps at Paragon Studios. Don't they like playing, too? It doesn't even have to be a huge event. Just pop in, hang out for a couple of hours in Pocket D, throw around some gold titles, answer a question or two, and head out. Two or three nights later, have Hero 1 pop in, PvP a few rounds, and head out. Once a week or so, War Witch PuGs with a random team. Once a week or so, Dr. Aeon drops by Architect Entertainment and tells everyone that he wants to get a team to run one of their mission arcs. Yes, this is catering to existing players, but if new players saw this kind of interaction, they'd be a hell of a lot more likely to stay with the game.

I don't want this to become a book, so I'll stop there. But as you can see from this thread, there are a TON of stunningly awesome ideas that we, the players, have for promoting this game. Listen to them. Now that you're here, don't hole back up, never to be heard from again. And don't get complacent, thinking that now that you've posted a few messages, we're all happy and hunky dory. Act on these suggestions. If there's someone that you think is particularly insightful, contact that person and say, "Hey, I like this idea, let's talk about how we can actually make it happen."

<QR> Don't know if it has been mentioned, but...

Two new powersets: Poetry and glue.

Okay, seriously...

One thing I'd like to see is a lot more tilesets and a lot more mission types. Right now, almost all missions are so ho hum. Just about every building looks the same to me. More signage and artwork would go a long way. I don't even think it would technically be that hard. Just have the client periodically check a repository for updated tilesets, and swap them in and out now and then.

I'd love to see smarter enemies. Enemies that lay traps, enemies that actually can defeat a reasonably competent group of heroes. Nobody promised us that we'll never be defeated, but these days, it's really hard to, unless you're just totally not paying attention or trying to.

I'd like to see a bunch of minigames added. See that pinball machine in Pocket D? How about for 25 influence, you actually get to play? Let us actually place bets on those monkey fights, maybe even letting us give them inspirations or something from outside the cage. Give out little token prizes for medalling on the ski runs.

I'd like for missions to vary according to the character I'm playing and the choices I make in the game. It's my understand that Going Rogue is actually implementing this to some degree, but I'd like, for example, consequences to screwing up. If I take a mission to rescue someone and blow it off for a day or two, that mission should be dropped from my contact, and maybe I don't have access to some other missions they have to give out. Maybe if you fail a mission, you don't get some sweet "bonus missions" from that contact, thus you have an incentive to actually try hard not to.

I'd like to see some puzzles in the game. In the back of my mind, I seem to recall one of the devs saying at one point that they didn't want puzzles in the game. (It might have been Statesman, who also said he didn't want user-generated content in the game.) Hopefully they'll change their mind at some point. I'm not talking about a chess match (although, that would be an interesting mini-game), but some things that you can't just run in, kill everything, and be wildly successful at. A simple example: You get assigned a reconnaissance mission where you actually have to avoid enemies. If one spots you (or god forbid, you attack one outright), you fail! Did I mention they can see through invisibility? Just stuff like that would be nice.

Graphically, I'd like for all of the characters to be updated. Right now, on a high resolution display, everything is kind of blocky. The polygons are painfully obvious. I know that Ultra Mode will fix some of that, but I've seen screenshots of it, and it looks like the improvements are marginal at best.

If I can reach for the pie in the sky dream, I'd like for them to release a Linux CoH client. They're already working with TransGaming, the company that provides the Cider layer that City of Heroes works on the Mac with. The same company makes a product called Cedega, based on WINE, but geared specifically towards making games work. And believe it or not, City of Heroes already works on that platform albeit without some of the graphical goodness we get in Windows. I'd like to see it become an officially supported platform.

Let's see, what else? Oh, I did see this already mentioned, but I want a City Vault so bad that it hurts me to even talk about it. I'd like a lot more out-of-game/in-game interaction. I'd love some kind of gateway where I could send people messages in the game from outside, or even vice versa for those who opt into it. I'd love an offline costume creator, and even an offline Architect Entertainment mission/critter editor. I'd love an officially supported version of the Ouroboros Portal, where we could create character and supergroup pages, and they are automatically updated with information from the game. (Pie in the sky dream would be some officially-supported API where fan sites could interact with that data!) To be bluntly honest, having worked with the Titan Network for a while, I'd love to get a call from Matt Miller or someone else from the Studio and collaborate with them on these tools. We'd sign an NDA and other various legal documents, and we get limited access to a database containing copies of player's publicly-accessible-in-game information to build stuff from.

Those are just a few thoughts to get me started...

Edit: Ooh, just read the post above mine, and it reminded me of something I desperately want to see...vastly improved sound! I want persistent and contextual music. Not just a few bars here and there, but an ambient soundtrack that changes based on what's going on around you. When you engage in battle, it turns exciting and builds to a crescendo. When you stroll past City Hall, it gets all formal. As you go into the seedier parts of town, it gets grungy. When you're walking through Perez Park at midnight, it gets creepy. And I'd love some voice work thrown in, too! Have the contacts actually tell us what the missions are!

Hey, congratulations, old-timer! Here's to another five, I can't wait until I get my 120 month badge!

One of the great things about being such a long-timer is having such a sense of history that has gone into the game. Don't get me wrong, I love meeting new folks, but there's just something about remembering the days before so many of the QoL improvements, content additions, features, and so on that is really neat. I mean, there are people who probably wouldn't even remember who Lighthouse and Ex Libris were, let alone Aura or CuppaJo. Does anyone remember (gasp!) Statesman? Arctic_Sun and Gilgamesh? Crickette?

My favorite old-time memory that probably blows people's minds is this:

Remember when there was no Icon store? You picked your costume when you rolled your character, and that was it. You had exactly one costume, and if you decided you wanted pants instead of tights, you literally had to re-create your character from scratch.

Ah, those were the days!

/agreed

To people who engage in this practice:

I honestly can't remember a cutscene task force recently where someone wasn't spamming the channels. It's like a hundred brat kids are telling you the same stupid knock-knock joke over and over and over. It's not cute. It's not funny. It's not clever. It's not original. Trust me, you are not the one gem of a cutscene spam comic in the midst of all of the spam dregs. And yes, I've seen entire spam conversations. And yes, I've seen people in cutscenes doing elaborately planned out "skits," complete with emotes and everything. If that's not impressive to me, trust me, you sure as hell aren't.

Personally, I'd love it if they completely silenced all team, broadcast, and local chat for however long the cutscenes last, it irritates me that much. I know they won't do it, because it falls into the realm of not really causing any harm, but it annoys me enough that I'd still like it nonetheless.

Cutscene spam was clever exactly one time.

/my humble opinion, I realize I'm probably in a minority.