Venture

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And we've got no reason to think NCSoft isn't going to do the same.

Yeah, we do: NCsoft likes micropayments. There's a new sheriff in town, remember?

Blizzard also has a hundred times the revenue and a larger staff than NC does working on CoX.

That's not in dispute, but it's also not relevant.

Furthermore, there are few people that will deny that WoW isn't simply a retooling of existing MMO concepts done better, whereas CoX is treading largely uncharted waters.

CoX is just as much a retread of earlier MMOs as WoW. Reskinning the game as superheroes instead of fantasy is not a major innovation.

Also, most of WoW's "content" (when I left anyway) was jamming mega raids and raid targets down your throat.

So you don't like it. I don't like it either, that's why I don't play it. The vast majority of MMO players do seem to like it, though.

Would you say that's what WoW does by charging for expansions and charging a subscription fee?

Blizzard pushes out at least as much free content for WoW as we get here in CoX. Over and above the paid expansions.

If people are willing to pay for it, and charging this price allows NCSoft to develop this kind of stuff without impacting things that are more important to more people, then what's the harm?

Do you honestly think they're going to take the cash they pull in from this and use it to hire another costume artist so they can develop for-pay and for-issue costumes simultaneously? Or that we'll get the same number of costume elements per year that we've always gotten, only (if this goes over well) an increasingly-large number of them will find their way into "packs"?

Ask yourself this: wouldn't you be more upset if they did make this stuff part of the regular schedule? If it, say, bumped back some bug fix, or new content?

How would costumes impact bug fixes? And again, do you think it didn't impact production? Quoting Arcanaville from upthread:

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I'd write a check to Jay and BaB for custom animations and costumes right now, if that's the way it worked. But I have a feeling that the art department didn't burn the midnight oil and get a bonus for these extras: they would have worked just as hard - but on something else everyone would have gotten access to - if they didn't work on these.


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The volume of free content over the past year has been staggering, and it took place during what were no doubt intense negotiations that eventually led to the transfer of full ownership of the intellectual property to the publisher.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. The wedding pack has to stand or fall on its own merits.

The content of the wedding pack is completely non-essential to gameplay.

This makes no sense. The wedding pack is fluff, which is why it isn't worth money.

Though I have to laugh at the fact that many of the same people who screamed like stuck pigs over having to shell out virtual cash for rare costume recipes practically tripped over themselves in their rush to shell out real cash for costumes. If MMO customers are truly this stupid, we deserve whatever we get.

It's not like they're making you pay extra to get access to new powersets or mission content.

I would pay for new content, or new powersets (powersets and ATs are not content -- content is zones, missions, new enemies, etc.) I would happily pay for a new retail box if it delivered new content on the scale of CoV.

I am offended by the idea that I should pay for cosmetic frippery, the very same cosmetic frippery we were getting for free. Offended enough that, as I was already on the fence about keeping it, I cancelled my Dungeon Runners subscription and uninstalled the game.

Oh yes, and a great message it would be:

"Dear NCSoft, don't go out of your way for us. Don't spend extra time or money on developing or designing anything for us unless you are willing to accept no compensation for your efforts. Don't expect us to support you. We don't want anything more then what our subscription fees already cover."

No, it would be more like "don't try to charge us for stuff you used to give away as issue content or vet rewards".

The message I'm getting now is "we blew a big wad of dev time on this one-shot custom in-game event, so we're billing it all against a new revenue stream to sweeten the bottom line for the quarter." Kind of like those RL weddings where the in-laws picking up the tab let slip how much the reception cost per person when telling you where the lucky couple is registered.

P.S. for Mr. Scott: actually, I argued against ED. And if your "concept characters" need 100 million in IOs to function above Rugged, PEBCAK.

I am not paying any amount of real money for an expansion with nothing but cosmetic items in it. The event itself is the one of them most disgustingly self-indulgent instance of Mary-Sue-ism I've seen. (I wish I could say it was the worst, but I've been in too many tabletop campaigns with bad GMs for that.)

I'll be giving this entire event a pass, thanks.

I've seen this movie. The ending sucks.

The recipe gives you a freespec. Don't know if you can use the recipe even if you have a freespec (thus getting nothing).

Nobody* replays the game for the content,

...because they can't.

Don't make me do you like I did the loot naysayers, Venture. Don't make me!

Bring it. :P

Because you know, despite the doomsaying about alting dying, I have this strange desire to make a mace tanker and an AR blaster.

I have no real interest in creating anything I wasn't creating before, though I am putting off the Axe Tanker I was thinking of rolling up until after I see what Willpower looks like.

I'm just so excited about this issue. This is seriously just too much win!!!

It's good stuff, but I'm just not seeing any cause for all the exuberance. Weapon customization is something we've wanted for a long time but it's nothing to squirt your shorts over. Flashback is at best a wash, and will probably do more harm than good over the long run, and we don't know much about the new loot.

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But it does sort of remind me of a standard Game Master (GM) technique for writing adventures.

Any GM who actually uses such a technique needs to be horse whipped.

The 'foreign terrorists' have a snowball's chance in hell of being the Fifth Column.

Fixed.

They aren't South American; they're foreign terrorists who fled to South America, which is what Nazis do.

They fled to Argentina, actually, which is kind of on the other end of the continent.

The mysterious foreign terrorists were driven out of America. The Fifth were driven out of America, by the Council coup.

No evidence in continuity that the 5th was driven out of the country. Yes, they might have been in an alternate timeline but then anyone else could have been too: the Sky Raiders, Malta, even the Council, all of which are actually known to have foreign operations to boot.

The ONLY group that Manticore and Swan both had a special interest in fighting is the Fith Column.

And the Council, which is who they're opposed to now in continuity.

Everybody hates them. The Columbians do, Manticore does, even Recluse does. That's about right for a Nazi group. Even the villains hate you.

Actually some of the Argentinans didn't hate them, among others....

Meta: The very fact that the writer of the article makes a mystery out of the group is good enough reason to suspect. Why not just name them?

Perhaps they just aren't important enough to be worth naming? Perhaps they were just Designated Receivers for Manticore and Recluse, to show the former had gone bad and was even shooting at his girlfriend?

Given what the devs have said in the past, if the 5th return (which they will not, at least not in anything like their old selves), it will not be as a side effect of something else. It will be with trumpets blaring and banners waving. The "compelling argument" for their involvement in i11 is a joke -- at least the Bigfoot advocates have pictures.

Different since 1937? This isn’t a future without _you_, this is flat out a parallel dimension. We aren’t even a part of the equation!


Unless "you" were eliminated by, say, someone assassinating your grandparents. In which case, thanks to Ye Olde Butterfly Effect, it's a minor miracle that the resultant timeline would be recognizable at all.

Here's the thing with the Zig story, though. If it is Breakout, THE Breakout, and not one of the latter returns to Ziggursky to bust out more villains, why is it happening two years later for them than it did for us?

There is a presumption that the CoH and CoV storylines are cotemporaneous. I'm not sure that really plays, but there it is.

(Although I'm beginning to wonder how Jenkins could have "sung" without having been captured and interrogated before the breakout attempt was even made...)

In Breakout, the Arachnos Flyer can't get away before the radar station is blown, which was Jenkins' job. When you're sent to follow up, Jenkins is captured and about to blab.

The sequence of events would be something like: prison riot starts, without anyone knowing it was instigated by Arachnos. Jenkins slips in to blow the radar station, but gets caught. In our history, you rescue Jenkins and blow up the station. In the alternate, Jenkins blabs to his captors, who radio in to HQ that Arachnos is behind the trouble at the Zig, Ms. Liberty tips off the Zig staff and pushes the panic button.

There's still a minor flub in the story -- Ballistae weren't developed at the start of the CoV storyline. Ballista-1, whom you meet in the 20s, is the prototype.

Things that didn't happen in a given reality don't tend to get mentioned in newspapers.

They do get mentioned in alternate-timeline/"what if" works, if it is somehow relevant to the changed state of affairs that the event did not occur. Leaving out important details is not according to Hoyle.

Or, in this world, the plague. All I'm suggesting is that the phenomenon of a homeless army called 'the Lost' could happen without the Rikti.

If the Rikti war had not happened in the timeline depicted, it would have been explicitly mentioned, not implied. It certainly wouldn't have been "implied" by mentioning a faction that is a creation of the Rikti only to claim somewhere down the line that the Lost aren't really the Lost. That would be pretty terrible writing, don't you think? If I had ever done anything like that to my players, they'd have reached over the table and wench-slapped me, and I'd have deserved it.

The Rikti didn't create homeless people. The mutated Lost are obviously Rikti-influenced, but the rag-tag sewer dwellers aren't mutated yet.

The Rikti created the Lost. Please consult the Lost background page...there was no "homeless sewer people gang problem" until after the war.

I'm not doubting you, but how do we 'know for certain'?

Because events couldn't take place the way that they do in the various Rikti arcs if time wasn't moving at the same rate on each world.

gaaaaaaaaaah no.

The Outbreak Virus contains primitive 'Rikti genes', right?

It is a "Rikti mutation drug". That doesn't mean it contains Rikti genes or is related to Shift in any way.

But the newspaper article doesn't mention the Rikti ONCE. It's as if the Rikti didn't even exist in that world.

It mentions the Lost. The Lost only exist because they are created by Rikti stranded on Primal Earth after the first war.

People are reading way too much into the fact that the article says the Outbreak drug/virus/whatever was stolen from Crey. That doesn't mean it's a Crey product. Crey is up to its ears in stolen Rikti technology and is heavily infiltrated by Rikti shapechangers. Outbreak might have been some Rikti substance Crey was playing with, but the Rikti are still part of the picture.

So maybe, just maybe... it was the Outbreak virus, on this parallel world, that ultimately led to the mutation of all of humanity into the Rikti! And that's where the Rikti came from!

The Rikti were created by aliens thousands of years ago using Shift, or something like it.

So what if the newspaper report is actually from the distant past of the Rikti dimension? And it was not just the Rikti that created Outbreak, but Outbreak that created the Rikti?

Aside from the fact that this does not fit anything we already know about the Rikti, in order for it to be true time between Rikti Earth and Primal Earth would have to be out of synch, and we know for certain that is not the case. (If it was, events couldn't possibly have been transpiring as they have.)

Meaning, maybe in this alternate timeline (if it is an alternate timeline), Outbreak was developed by the Crey, not the Rikti, and maybe that is one reason why it has spread so fast and so far.

Crey is known to actively seek leftover Rikti tech, and the company has probably been extensively infiltrated by Rikti shapechangers.

What confuses me is why the paper put them in with the Outbreak victims. In 'the world without you' Katie clearly died from the Red Caps, Ernesto's trechery gets found out by the Council, and Sara Moore is left in the Shadow Shard with a loosed and rampaging Ruladak.

In the "world without you", none of those people lived long enough to fall victim to the events portrayed in the proper timeline....

I mean the Fifth have been trying to alter history for longer than anyone else.

Meaningless. The 5th per se never tried to alter history; that was the Nazis themselves, in Germany. And they only tried it once.

The most likely suspect is indeed Nemesis, which is boring and trite at this point. An issue named "Oroborus" should have involved the freaking Circle as the star.

The CH needs to be shot in the head, thrown into a shallow unmarked grave and replaced with a full disclosure system. Other than that, i9's a big win.

The OP's argument is basically:

1. PvP
2. ????
3. Profit!

Yes, WoW has PvP. So did Shadowbane, which tanked. It's just not that simple.

CoX's issues with its PvE content are contingent upon details of its design (which is a polite way of saying the devs screwed up). They're not indicative of problems with PvE play in general.

The only content bracket that needs attention is 45-50.

Well, OK, those stupid duplicated missions in the blueside 30-35 bracket have to go. After that, though, it should be nothing but endgame.