TrueGentleman

These bonus pieces go a long way to correct the imbalances and conceptual misfires in the original packs that players complained about. The devs listened and promised to take their criticisms into account in future, so we can look forward to better balanced and thematically coherent packs, e.g. the sci-fi and the elemental packs. Why complain about how a pair of jeans will get more use for someone whose office has "casual Fridays" than someone who always wears a suit during the working week?

Oh, and I have overwhelmingly male chars (regular build) among my numerous alts, and I'm perfectly happy with these updates. They mean much more to other players than any perceived slight toward my preferences.

No doubt these will be well worth the wait - many thanks for taking the time and trouble to port over all these pieces.

Thanks for the extra good news. That's going to spur sales, especially for those players on the fence about these costume packs.

It's absolutely unacceptable for this problem to exist five months after CoH Freedom was launched. At the time, we were assured repeatedly that subscribing players would be treated as VIP customers and that the transition to the new business model would retain the perks for longtime players. The persistent problems since then with getting Paragon Points and Rewards Tokens on time are only aggravated further by the reliability of purchasing them directly through the new Market, to say nothing of the coming new purchasing model of Super Packs.

This is precisely the kind of customer service problem that first chips away at individual customers and then the playerbase at large. It's past time for Paragon Studios to fix this.

And like the Platonic ideal of the crazy uncle, he's making these outrageous statements in part to goad us. Basically, George Lucas has turned into a troll.

Indeed They certainly haven't repeated the experiment of offering an unique holiday-themed item for a week after the Pilgrim Hat.

Nonetheless, it would be nice if the holiday-themed costume packs were more appropriate (the Roman and Pocket D packs certainly don't need to be time-gated) or more timely (the Chinese Dynasty, which may or may not have limited availability, is being released well after the Chinese New Year).

The Pilgrim Hat was available for only six days, but the costume packs vary between full availability and one-month ones.

On one hand, we've had the Barbarian Pack, the "Gunslinger" Pack, and the Carnival of Light Bundle, which are on offer year round.

On the other, there's the Halloween Costume Bundle (available from 10/18 to 11/18), the Winter Holiday Pack (12/20–1/31), the Roman Costume Bundle (1/31–2/29), and now the Pocket D Valentines Pack (2/7–3/6).

If the Chinese Dynasty Bundle similarly has only limited availability, then it would seem that Paragon Studios has decided that causing artificial scarcity is the best way to prod the CoH playerbase to burn through their points.

Any studies would be interesting to see. The microtransaction market spans such a wide variety of games - from grinder F2P MMOs to social network-based "cow-clicker", as well as MTX hybrids like COX - that there would have to be some pretty specific data to draw conclusions for our case.

And that's a huge challenge in marketing and business, especially since word-of-mouth is so valuable when it's positive and so toxic when it's the opposite.

The overall issue is that since CoH has moved from a subscription model with optional microtransactions to an F2P-MTX hybrid, there's a great deal of culture shock going on. Players who are used to being able to buy a given Super Pack year-round aren't going to react well to being informed that from now on, the Paragon Market equivalents will be available for only a week or a month at a time.

Any business that takes that attitude toward its customers soon finds itself abandonned by them for its competitors that don't.

Very nice job all around. The Pocket D Pack gives real value for money, even for those of us who already have the VIP teleporter*, and several of the pieces look especially flexible when it comes to incorporating them into other costume designs.

The limited time availability makes less sense, however, than offering this for a discount now and at full price for the rest of the year.

* Edit: Although those who have the teleporter and the dance emotes save only a little.

It's all in fun, Landis's commentary-performance included. Just wait until you get to Simon Pegg.

The editorial job of DC's execs is to find, nurture, and retain creative talent. Recycling old material after burning bridges with its creators is the opposite of that.

After The Dark Knight Strikes Again, The Kingdom, DC's new The Spirit, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Star Trek: Enterprise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Godfather Part III, etc., etc., etc., any corporate decision to push prequels or sequels ought to be greeted with intense scepticism.

Even if Alan Moore had taken DC's earlier offer to write more Watchmen-related stories in exchange for getting his creator's rights back, the odds are that the results would be inferior to the original. Lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, and when it does, it's even harder to bottle the second time around.

Yes and no. Leaving aside the obvious point that the original creators should be the first candidates to tell any such stories, there was disagreement from the start about when Moore and DC discussed even the possibility of more. DC wanted more of the same, featuring the main characters from the series, such as "Rorschach's Journal" and "The Comedian's Vietnam War Diary". Although those subplots figured prominently in Watchmen's main narrative, DC obviously felt that if the readers loved it once they'll like it again. Moore and Gibbons rejected them, especially under other writers and artists. The only derivative projects they considered as potentially interesting were a "Tales of the Black Freighter" series and a Golden Age-style Minutemen project. Whether or not they would be - and Gibbons says that on reflection, neither of them would have been good ideas - is apparently now going to be tested without Moore's consent, in addition to other plot ideas he rejected at the time.

For a long time, Moore's refusal was acceptable to DC, at least under ex-publisher Paul Levitz, who personally blocked Watchmen spinoffs because he didn't want to dilute the original or incur the backlash from the creative community. His replacement, Dan DiDio, has no such scruples, however, and DC tried to leverage their control over the copyright to convince Moore to acquiesce. Moore relates, "They offered me the rights to Watchmen back, if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels. So I just told them that if they said that 10 years ago, when I asked them for that, then yeah it might have worked, but these days I don’t want Watchmen back. Certainly, I don’t want it back under those kinds of terms.”
Moore won only a Pyrric victory with his Watchmen contract, which was compounded by a similar agreement for his original project V for Vendetta. He didn't get swindled out of royalty payments the way so many other comics creators have been, but he certainly lost creative control over his characters. DC definitely ought to be worried about fan backlash when the history of their dealings with Moore and Gibbons is reviewed in light of Before Watchmen.

Yes, but the deal was further complicated by the absence of the graphic novel genre and the reprint market. Even the term "graphic novel" was fairly new and applied to only a few works.

Watchmen was intended to be a 12-issue mini-series (a new-ish innovation at the time, too), not to be published as a single volume. Moore and Gibbons expected that DC would publish the series, reprinting some of the individual issues to fulfill backorders, and then revert the rights afterward. Reversion of publishing rights (and subsidiary rights, if any) to out-of-print books is a common practice in regular publishing and a standard part of boilerplate contracts. The copyright, however, remains the author's. In the comics industry, at the time, there was virtually no precedent for a self-contained mini-series being published as a single collection and then selling for decades.

Without realizing how Watchmen would change comics publishing, Moore and Gibbons negotiated a compromise deal with DC, giving the copyright to the corporation on what they though was a limited basis. In a work-for-hire industry, this was initially regarded as a victory for creator's rights. Instead, it turned into another sucker punch. Moore, stubborn S.O.B. that he is, refused to suck it up and broke off ties with DC as he had with Marvel, taking his work elsewhere and going independent. For a time, it looked as though the big two comics publishers had learned their lesson from this burned bridge and were much more receptive to new talents' copyrights. Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Brian Michael Bendis, etc., etc., have all benefited from Moore's principled obduracy.

DC is with its legal rights, barely, to publish this series, but ethically, they've always been on shaky ground.

Eric Stephenson, publisher of Image Comics, takes this argument on (at length):
The more the news of this project sinks in, the more scandalous it feels.

How quickly we forget that Watchmen was supposed to be a win for creators rights, since Moore and Gibbons were supposed to retain the ownership of their characters in a deal closer to what authors can expect from standard trade publishing.

Here they are discussing this at a panel at London’s UK Comic Art Convention, September 21, 1986—the very month their first issue came out (source: The Comics Journal #116, July, 1987):

Of course, DC realized that Watchmen was too valuable to ever let go out of print, and they've been more or less treating it as though it were just another work-for-hire property. The previous editorial regime at DC was a little more classy about exploiting the creative property than the current one, though.

In the first place, the characters in the original LoEG books are all public domain (or heavily concealed in allusion) - their creators haven't exactly expressed any opinions about their usage. In the second place, these days Moore loves employing old characters and tropes as metacommentary on the genres in which he's writing, so naturally he recycles obscure figures or creates analogs.

Since Watchmen was already in part a metacommentary on both the superhero genre and Charlton Comics characters that DC owned but didn't want Moore to use, what's left for this batch of writers to do with it? Will they just offer up more of the same from the flashback sequences in the original series, or will they reconstruct Moore's deconstruction by portraying the Watchmen characters as uncomplicated heroes? Either way, there's no creative integrity involved, especially when the writers and artists have proved more than capable of successfully coming up with their own original work.

EDIT: Leah Moore, a comics writer and Alan's daughter, makes a sharp observation:
I could almost sympathize if any of the Before Watchmen collaborators were new to the industry and needed to establish themselves with a high-profile project. Instead, I can't think of a reason besides a hefty paycheck for them to be involved.

(Thank goodness.)

Thanks for posting that image - that bow design is worth purchasing by itself if it's not pre-tinted. (Please, not another pre-tinted costume piece.)