Turjan

I don't like the word 'revenge'.
While the dictionary definition is 'retaliation for wrong done' (and we certainly do regard closing CoH as a 'wrong' act), it also defines the word 'revengeful' as 'vindictive'.

I am not vindictive.

I have no desire to see people hurt, or to pander to negative issues of either culture or race. That kind of 'revenge' is what has kept half the planet at war for centuries.
What I agree with however is that it would be a mistake to allow NCSoft to get away with repeatedly kicking their customers in the gaming nuts, particularly those customers outside Korea. So I will simply take my business elsewhere.

To one of their competitors.
If I stopped gaming entirely, then that's just one person's revenue they will no longer have. But if I support their direct competitors, then I magically acquire the financial impact of two people : the one whose revenue they have lost, and the one who's now strengthening their opposition.

The way to send a message to a company like NCSoft is to use the only language they seem to understand - that of profit and loss. In shutting down CoH they will have lost me and brought profit to their competitors.

Lot of good points in this thread

I'd like to chime in with a historical example that incorporates a lot of the notions raised here, namely Star Trek

When Star Trek first hit our tv screens in the 1960s it was like nothing out there. Visually, thematically, and in terms of pushing boundaries, it was so out of left field that it's a wonder it ever got aired at all. And once on air, the network execs didn't know what to do with it - they bounced it from day to day, timeslot to timeslot, in the hope of finding some sort of magic demographic with ever increasing viewing figures. When that didn't appear, they shunted the show to a dead zone slot, out of the way of their preferred ratings grabbers. And after 3 series of this, they pulled the plug.

What they failed to notice however, was even though the show wasn't pulling in increasing numbers of viewers, it had developed a hardcore of dedicated fans that went to great lengths to watch the show, no matter what timeslot it had been moved to. And that number didn't decline.

Fast forward to the groundbreaking release of Star Wars at the movies, and the revitalisation of a genre thought to be in decline - scifi. It was only natural that with the success of Star Wars, interest should be rekindled in Star Trek.

And so we had Star Trek The Movie, and subsequent TOS movies, and Star Trek The Next Generation, and then DS9, and Voyager, Enterprise...

...and somewhere along the way, things went weird. Shows started to be cancelled again (Voyager, Enterprise). This was because the next generation of network execs had done the exact opposite of what their predecessors had done : where their predecessors sidelined a cult series, they spun Star Trek out into a thin, watered down mass produced version of itself.

And so it is with MMOs, and indeed many artistic concepts. Familiarity is comfortable, but it also breeds contempt. Novelty ceases to have value when it becomes mass production.

You see the same thing with Supermarkets today - we accept the convenience they offer, the wide range of products, but at the same time we bemoan the loss of smaller stores with their more personalised services and higher quality goods.

Such small stores still do exist of course, and they accept (as they've always done) that their business isn't going to pull in millions of dollars, but they can still do quite nicely thankyou, for a small operation. Supermarkets and big corporations do not and indeed cannot operate in the same business mindset because they deal in quantity. It's nice if they can have quality too, but the reality of large market forces push them towards lower costs, so they sacrifice quality for quantity.

The MMO market today is in a similar state at the moment, with endless bland clones being pumped out (predominantly fantasy games from Korea) into an already saturated market. Total global subscriptions to MMOs reached a plateau some two years ago, leaving companies like NCSoft panicking that long development titles such as GW2 and Blade & Soul won't be able to generate a return on their investments. This has led them to invest in hugely expensive marketing campaigns for these titles in the hope they will save them from the profit slide they've been experiencing for several years now.

The global MMO bubble is about to burst - or indeed may have already burst, and the MMO companies just haven't realised it yet. I expect NCSoft to ultimately retreat back to within Korean borders, despite their claim to be "aggressively tailoring" Balde and Soul for the western market.

So where does this leave us?
Well oddly enough, I think we're actually in terra incognita here - we're off the edge of the map, here be dragons! City of Heroes is unprecedented in the MMO world, quite literally, being the first superhero MMO after all. And all NCSoft's previous game closures have indeed followed a more predictable pattern. Something about the way they're handling CoH feels different though.

It feels to me almost like they're hedging their bets, as it were. Sure, it's one thing closing a minor profitable game, but it's another to do it when your company is already in the red. NCSoft was still nicely profitable when they axed Tabula Rasa, and there were long standing development disagreements with that one. Plus, they still actually owe Richard Garriott $32 million in damages. The original figure decreed by a Texas court was $28 million, but NCSoft appealed, and subsequently lost their appeal, incurring additional costs.

Perhaps they don't want a repeat back home of the embarrassment they've already suffered at the hands of the US courts? If I was a betting man, I'd be wondering if they were trying to work out a way of saving money by closing US operations, while also profiting from a franchise which, while never numerically profitable like their domestic grindfest titles, was still definitely in the black. Perhaps they plan to sell CoH, thereby mitigating any chance of legal issues, while also saving financial face.

*shrug*

tbh there's really no way of knowing what they're up to, except to say one thing - the way they're behaving now is not consistent with how they've handled things in the past. Guess we wait and see...

In an attempt to be even handed and balanced, I googled Hyung-Tae Kim's work to see what the big deal is, because the gaming press seems to keep banging on about his "distinctive style".

What I saw was pretty much what I'd see if I typed "Korean MMO" into Google's image search. Which I did btw, just to check
The only major difference was that Kim's work seems to have a higher than average boob size compared to most Korean games. And boob constriction. All his females (adult females, not the creepy kid ones) seem to be in perpetual satin bondage.

I've seen numerous nicknames in this thread for Blade and Soul and similar Korean MMOs so I'll add mine here - ever since I saw screenies from Lineage2, I've mentally grouped such things under the blanket name "Swords and Panties".

Someone said earlier that visual style alone isn't a reason to damn a game outright - and that's a valid point.
To a point.
I have several ancient PC game titles on my shelf that I keep playing, despite the fact some are a decade or more old, so obviously they must have something going for them besides the graphics. But I also have titles I've bought and never played more than 5 minutes because their visual style simply overwhelmed the gameplay.

Blade and Soul falls into that category for me - the visual style suffocates the game. I had to laugh when I read the text of the press release concerning the launch of Blade and Soul for the west. It said the designers were working to "aggressively tailor" the game for the western market. NCSoft's track record in the west says clearly they have absolutely no idea what works in the western market (pushing Aion while killing Tabula Rasa and City of Heroes), so I await the results of this "aggressive tailoring" with amusement.

Perhaps they'll replace one of the creepy kiddie races with a "Gun Bimbo" race that retains the huge constricted boobs, but fights using an M16 instead - that sounds quite western doesn't it?

City of Steam is based on The New Epoch, a series of table-top RPG books written by David Lindsay.

Here's a post by the man himself at the CoS forum concerning those books and how he's currently focusing all his creative attentions on CoS :-
http://forum.cityofsteam.com/index.php?topic=2003.0

Here's the game's wiki page too if folks want to have a nose into the game world
http://www.cityofsteamwiki.com/index...itle=Main_Page

What's impressed me most about City of Steam is the conceptualisation of the world itself - it's like D&D's Planes of Existence were introduced to Discworld by Jules Verne!
The history and backstory is not only clever and imaginative, but also chock full o'potential for future content and expansion.

City of Steam certainly gets my vote!

Leandro - Samuraiko...I'm just blown away by what you've done here. The Virtue Vigil was one thing (or rather 33 things) but managing to combine that scattered presence into one shot like this?

Awesome, just awesome.

Just think about it - every single hero in that video has a story. Every one is the product of a creative mind, wanting to see a heroic idea come to life.

When Marvel killed off Captain America a few years ago, the media ran the story almost as an affront, as if part of our collective culture was being taken from us, like a dream was being killed.

There are THOUSANDS of dreams in that video, all refusing to be killed off.

Because you cannot kill a dream.

Comicbook companies know this, which is why they keep bringing heroes back to life after killing them off. Now we have to convince NCSoft that the same is true of our heroes, our dreams. And this video if a piece of PR genius - if a picture paints a thousand words, then a video like this paints a million.

I salute you!

Steven Lomax, @Zoriel aka Avenging Fox and Colonel Savannah on the Union server and Colourless Girl on Defiant.

He left us on August 30th 2007. It's hard for me to believe that was 5 years ago.

Steve was born with a whole list of things wrong, including a twisted spine, defective heart valve, and having only one lung. He was pronounced dead just after birth, but confounded the doctors and medical science in general by refusing to stay dead, and then going on to live for a further 27 years.

He told me once that having already been declared dead as a newborn, every moment he'd lived after that was a bonus, and that was how he chose to live his life. Steve was just a little guy, physically, but his character and personality cast a huge shadow.

Roleplaying was his thing, and he could often be found in the Pocket D on Union and Defiant. His nickname IRL was "Darkfox" and he certainly did have the cunning of a fox, framed in the sort of dark humour you might expect from someone who'd cheated death.

His borrowed time did run out eventually though, as he always knew it would, but even in death his rebellious sense of humour prevailed - the song he had played at his funeral service was Monty Python's "Bright Side of Life".

One of my characters on Union exists today for the sole purpose of keeping Steve's old solo SuperGroup existing. And when CoH finally closes, that little part of Darkfox too will go with it.

Brilliant idea! After all, this is the time of social media and the empowerment of the "ordinary" citizen in the face of corporate muscle. The realisation of that is one of the reasons CNN set up their iReport facility in the first place

If I may add a proofready note to Vengeance's article though...

Paragraph 3 where it says :
'citing only “An a realignment of company focus and publishing support” '

- should probably be :
'citing only "...a realignment of'

Nice article - let's hope it gets the attention it deserves!

Another one for your collection - I sent you my main, Sword of Albion.

Good luck with whatever you've got planned!

We could always go out like Tabula Rasa.

For those who may not know, Tabula Rasa was another NCSoft MMO, one which met the same unjust fate the company has planned for CoH

Tabula Rasa went out with a huge invasion and a battle to retake Earth from the game's master villains, the Nephilim. The devs played the part of the Nephilim and the battle progressed across the game's planets, Foreas and Arieki, gradually overrunning every zone until the players were forced to all regroup on Earth for a final showdown with the Neph.

Here's some of the action from that fateful night, taken from the EU server - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_4B22Y8z28

(I'm actually in this video briefly btw - Starstone was my game handle. I still miss that game, even now. And I can't even begin to think how much I'll miss CoH)
*sigh*

A few hours after the EU server closed, we all met up again, for the absolute last time, on the US server.

We fought our way to the final rendevous, beating the mobs back as we went until all that remained was the players and the devs (still in their guise as the evil Neph).

And...we danced.
Players and devs alike, we danced and unloaded our ammo clips into the air, and then we danced some more until the final moment of shutdown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCgcizG3qbk

There are worse ways to go than in mid-dance, that's for sure!

I played Champions Online in beta, popped back for a brief look when it went F2P, and had another quick look a couple of weeks back, and I still think my girlfriend's description sums it up best. She took one look and said "Oh my gawd, it looks like CoH done by chavs!"

Tacky, that's the word really. Both visually and in story terms. And the combat mechanic has always felt like I was trying to play a console game while wearing boxing gloves. For me, the only thing CO has going for it is the fact you can make toons that have the classic "mask with glowing white eyes" look so iconic of many comicbook heroes.

So Champions? Eh....no.

All I've seen of DCUO has been gameplay videos that haven't really impressed, topped off by a US friend's opinion that DCUO is "...basically a console game for button-mashing kiddies". So no to that too.

And as far as I can see right now, that about wraps it up for the choice of available MMOs where the emphasis is on unique character creation and superheroic themed powers.

*shrug*

Other games then?
Used to play WoW long ago, no way in hell I'm going back there again. I reckon WoW has a sort of gaming escape velocity to it which, once reached, allows the ex-player to float free and look back down at what they've left behind, and say "Whatever did I see in that anyway?"

Can't go back to Tabula Rasa because NCSoft killed that too long ago of course...

Might pop in to SWTOR when it goes F2P - I was there for a couple of months at launch and got quite comfy, though never as comfy as I was in SWG...before SOE gave Galaxies the "New Game Experience" lobotomy that ultimately caused its demise after a long illness, bravely borne.

What is it about games publishers killing games anyway? Reminds me of when Star Trek was originally screened in the 1960s and the network execs messed its scheduling about and then eventually canned the series, all the time failing to realise that while the show may not have been bringing in ever more new viewers every week, the core number of viewers watching the show was fiercely loyal, dedicated, and reliable.
Like CoH fans today.
CoH may not have been a growing profit earner for NCSoft, but in an unstable economic world it offered something far more valuable - constancy.

*sigh*
Anyway, I digress.

So talking of Star Trek, there's always Star Trek Online. I was fortunate enough to win a lifetime sub to it not long after launch, and while it definitely has its flaws (the ground combat is nearly as frustrating and cumbersome as Champions Online for instance) it does have a lot going for it in terms of story and look, so perhaps I'll be stopping in there more often now I'm having to hang up my spandex.

As for the future?
Well, certainly not anything under the NCSoft banner, that's for sure. They've kicked me in the gaming nuts twice now with their closure of Tabula Rasa and now City of Heroes, so there's no way I'm going to invite them to kick me a third time!

When NCSoft killed off the sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa, the devs added special high-powered gear to the game and boosters that allowed for greatly accelerated levelling. The idea was not to just click their fingers and "godmode" everyone to max level who wasn't already max level, but rather to still preserve a sense of gameplay in the short time that remained for the servers.

At the same time, they also paid homage to the player community by naming the newly added weapons after some of the most active community players!

Upshot was that by the time of the server shutdown, and the big shutdown event the devs had planned, many players had been able to experience content that would otherwise have taken them many months - different classes, zones, strategies, bosses, instances...you get the idea.

Opening up VIP to all players in CoH would achieve the same thing, without question. Players who've so far only been able to get a taste of the full content of CoH would then be able to at least see the world they'd otherwise have missed, before it goes boom.

The more people can see the entirety of this great game, the better. I want memories of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles seared into the minds of every player. It would also allow those of us with subs to share our experiences ingame with the newly elevated F2P players, and every story told, every experience shared, is one that will live on.

Opening up VIP to all would achieve all of this - the idea gets my vote!

Hamidon raids used to be the only place I had to endure frame rates of 4fps while trying to fight...until now.
Now I have to add Issue 23's Magisterium Trial to that list.

Okay, so my PC is not exactly state of the art, but neither is it a digital fossil. It's more a sort of evolving Franken-PC cobbled together from miscellaneous parts over the years, and for the most part it serves me well enough (it even worked capably enough to beta test Star Wars The Old Republic, and at a decent frame rate too).

However, large assemblies of players (not players just standing around, I should add, but rather players in combat) in CoH appear to be becoming a problem for my "hybrid" PC lately. So it is perhaps ironic that as things stand, the "Hybrid" Incarnate slot is the one which will remain beyond my reach.

The reason is the ever increasing amount of visual effects introduced to the game by the Incarnate system, along with the fact these powers are most often seen in full flow in Leagues of 20+ players, numbers only previously encountered in action during Hamidon raids.

I could endure the existing Incarnate Trials to a point, because there tends to be team scattering and multiple objectives, but even so I breathed a sigh of relief when new Dark Astoria arrived with its promise of solo grinding Incarnate xp.

(Incidentally, and popping off at a tangent for a moment, prior to new DA I did find it highly ironic that the path of the Incarnate as related by Mender Ramiel was always pitched as a personal one, and yet the only way of gaining Incarnate xp was via multi-team Trials...)

When Issue 23 arrived I gritted my teeth and joined a Magisterium run, only to find immediately that it was Hamidon revisited, as far as my frame rate was concerned. I quickly turned down as many settings as I could find, but alas it was all in vain - seems as if it wasn't so much about the number of particles, but rather the NUMBER of number of particles. I fought Black Swan at melee range, saw her health bar drop to zero...and I still don't know what she actually looked like, because she was completely obscured by FLASH! BANG! BUBBLE! PET! BOOM!

And as for the final battle, well...one more player's FX and I swear my frame rate would actually have been counting in REVERSE!

So basically (as there's no way I can afford a new PC) unless either the devs can add a "Supress all Incarnate FX" option, or they introduce a way to grind Hybrid xp solo, that slot will remain locked for me.

I agree with the posters saying this is the most stupid debuff the game has seen so far.

It's bad enough that the foes you face in the combat missions after getting the debuff are end drainers anyway (Carnies' death aoe and Crey's voltaic tanks), but to have the debuff persist AFTER THE ARC IS FINISHED AT ALL is just silliness.

Arc over, debuff over, it should be a no brainer.

Alas, this debuff speaks to me of sloppy thinking, hints of which I also see in the general feel of the whole arc itself. Nothing specific, but I sense crowbars and plots and timelines underlying the arc, so I can't say I'm terribly surprised really that the arc also carries oversights - and bugs for that matter...

When I reached the final mission and used the bow, Red Widow attacked me. I could not harm her, but she could harm me (which itself doesn't make sense in story terms of blood pacts, but I digress...). So I flew out of range until she reset and tried again. This time the mission completed correctly. From what I saw of the dialogue, I expect there should've been some sort of cut off point or trigger in the combat, but as I had no indication of such I opted for the evade solution instead.

*shrug*

Disappointment really, that's the feeling I'm left with after playing this arc. Thankfully I only have one serious badge toon and he has the badge now (and the 20hr debuff), so I will not be playing this arc again.

I've completely given up even trying to edit one of my arcs (Starstone Industries : Crey vs the Giant Hogweed) because of this befuddling copyright/profane nonsense.

I first noticed trouble when I couldn't even get the thing to acknowledge a contact hologram when I clicked "Play". I wondered fleetingly if this might have been because I had to change my handle during the great global merger (the arcs were still showing under my old name, though the game was still registering my AE slots as 3/3) but a quick click on one of my other arcs did produce the correct custom contact hologram.

So I swapped back to "Crey vs the Giant Hogweed" and popped into the editor to see what was broken, and was assaulted by a slew of errors when I clicked Edit - none of which had been there previously (obviously) because the arc was already published and rated. One of these errors referred to my custom boss Special Agent Jenks who was now seemingly invalid because his name contained "Agent J".

When I tried to edit him, no new name I tried would save. I even tried renaming him to Diddlydiddlydoo, but the game reported that as invalid too.

I quit the character editor and noticed that in addition to Jenks in that mission, now Countess Crey was showing up as profane/copyrighted too. In fact, EVERY standard game group entity within the arc I clicked on after that returned the same proafne/copyright message.

Having given up on trying to fix this fiasco, I certainly didn't then feel like tackling the "looping errors" newly reported in the arc - errors which, I might add, I had previously completely eradicated after a long and careful battle of if/then logic steps.

I probably spend no more than 2% of my game time involved with any AE stuff anyway (whether writing my own stories or playing other people's), and whenever I do pop in and find myself confronted by yet another dose of fail like this, I am reminded of exactly why it is that AE occupies so little of my time.

It's a shame really, I rather liked that story.
*shrug*

Deleting commons for lulz? How bizarre... Takes all sorts, as they say o_O

Frogfather - Ah, I wasn't aware there was another AE exploit on the go right now, so that would certainly explain a lot, aye. They're a bit like solar flare activity I guess : they seem to cycle round and have a delayed negative effect on any economy they come into contact with

Don't really do much in the Mission Architect myself I must say - sure, I've filled my 3 arc slots with an origin story and a couple of light-hearted yarns (probably like about 2/3 of us have, lol), and I have on occasion nosed through several pages of missions looking for an interesting and well written story, but for some reason I always seem to end up back on the standard dev arcs out in the big city.

As far as rare salvage goes, I still haven't finished Brain Storming all the gazillion bits of base salvage my SG's collected over the years and converting it into rares, so I confess I don't tend to look at the rare salvage prices in WW!

I've been wondering about the apparent mad recent rise in common invention salvage prcies too actually - which is in fact why I found this thread...I was looking to see if anyone else had commented on the same thing.

Let me say at the outset, I'm hardly the world's biggest Wentworth's customer, but I do like to put the odd item there cheap (to count towards towards the WW badges), and I do sometimes hunt for a missing set recipe or single pesky piece of missing salvage.

So my experience of the ebb and flow of market prices is not huge - but I have to say that in the past, while I've seen individual common salvage items rocket in price as a FotM, it has usually been just that : a certain bit of salvage hiked in price for a limited time. I check back in a few days and it's back down to something sensible (like anywhere between 1 and 500inf).

Recently though, just about EVERY common salvage item I've looked at has seemed to be selling for thousands, or 10s of thousands - sometimes more. So now instead of lazily buying a piece I might be needing, I say "Stuff that!" and log my alts until I find one who has the piece I want. Time consuming perhaps, but on principle there's no way I'm paying 50k for a COMMON piece of salvage. Clue's in the name, people : common, i.e. they ain't really that hard to find...

So, as I pondered this last night ingame, another thought struck me - yes, I've seen price hikes ever since the Mission Architect arrived in the game...but it's only recently I've seen the number of items hiked up like they are now.

Two possible answers suggested themselves, both to do with the release of Going Rogue.
(ironic considering the alignment description of Rogue being all about wealth and riches, lol)

1) The market rises might be due an influx of new, eager players, suddenly flush with cash and impatience in equal measure, eager to buy that item NOW, and also having little experience of market history beyond the very short "recent history" price list.

2) The unpleasant spectre of Gold Farmers deliberately destabilising the market to persuade players to buy their illicit Inf...

Obviously, I'm hoping it's 1) and it will eventually settle down - but the paranoid part of me can't hep but remember the large gangs of bizarrely named and randomly costumed toons I saw hanging around the Portal Corps stargates in the weeks leading up to the release of Going Rogue.

Sure, a lot of folks have a farming alt (fire/kin anyone?) but when you see a full team of level 50 Chinese-named toons with no veteran badges (and the bare minimum of achievement badges for that matter), it is somewhat suspicious is it not?

Gold Farmers also have the financial pull to destabilise the market - after all, as I said earlier, a lot of players (especially new players) don't think beyond the list of recent sales of an item to gauge its price, and all you have to do as a gold farmer is to keep the price artificially inflated long enough to scroll the realistic prices off the recent list, and hope the eager players blow all their cash on common items so they'll then rush off to buy Inf online.

Well, for my part, I won't be buying any common salvage for a while, and hope the prices do return to normality soon, either by new players settling in, or the gold farmers realising they've picked the wrong game to peddle their wares.

Thank you devs for expanding email to include attachments! =D

You know what the problem is of course - when they carted all the data across the pond, they forgot to tell the transfer goblins, so now when you put in a transfer, the character gets pushed off a virtual cliff into a digital hole where the EU Test server used to be...

I'll add my name to the "Halp! My character is in Talos limbo!" list

In my case, I was heading to Talos from my SG telepad when I got the same symptoms as listed above - i.e. game hangs on Talos loading screen, and subsequent attempts to access that character from the selection screen are met with a box saying the character was "still logging out".

Logging a different toon in the same SG allowed me to see myself online twice according to the SG list, although I couldn't actually initiate a /t conversation with myself...thankfully...

Clicking the SG 'ghost' in the list and attempting to "Add a Note" to the poor limboed alter ego resulted in the standard message that the character was either hidden, offline, or (and for once this one seemed the most plausible of the three reasons) non-existent.

I /petitioned this too, but no response as yet for me either.

Same as The_Fish for me - I left the pc for a while, came back, and now the game patches and loads correctly.

A dev fix maybe? Or have the planets finally aligned? We may never know... =)

I'll throw my "Yep, this is happening to me too" onto the table as well.

I'm sure the devs are aware of it, so it looks like it's Kettle Time! Kick back, pour the PG Tips and wait til things are resolved. Unlike a lot of other MMOs I've played, I trust the CoX staff, so I'm confident this will be resolved asap

Cheers folks, seems like I'll be waiting for them to turn the lights out in future before coughing up to the bureaucrats' pockets then!