And the mask comes off.

[downix]

My understanding of the explanation is is not that  that is 12:1 takes/usable takes as it is 12:1 minutes/usable minutes.  I admint it still seems high to me noit working in that field but I expect that a good bit of that is "leaked time."

Leaked time as well as dialog adjustments. It costs extra to go back, so most studios I've dealt with have turned to dialog adjustments in-studio. "Ok, try changing the dialog this way." Frankly, for many projects, the ratio wound up closer to 20:1 or greater. I used 12:1 because that is considered normal in the game VA field today.

[Sinistar]

NOT agreed! I'd pay a fair and reasonable fee, not exceeding $20 and preferably more like in the $10 range.  I absolutely wouldn't pay $100 though! I'd rather just restart everything if that's how much is asked for!

Restart + subscription fees + costs of things like the tech pack, science pack, mutation pack, super packs could well equal above $100.

Alternatively,  since Codewalker explained to me the problems with the Sentinel files: IF they could still be used to partially restore characters such as name, level, powers, IO slotting, the amount of inf on the character and all the salvage they have stored on them, that would be fine.  I would then happily head to the tailor shops to reload stored costume files,  and happily pursue the reacquisition of all the badges and rerun the incarnate arc and trials.

[AlienOne]

^ When CoH was still running, I was on a 50mbit/sec line. The store was STILL slow as molasses...

Exactly the same here.... I am on a 90Mbps line, and the store was so ridiculously slow, it was....well....ridiculous.

[Last Known Hero]

Leaked time as well as dialog adjustments. It costs extra to go back, so most studios I've dealt with have turned to dialog adjustments in-studio. "Ok, try changing the dialog this way." Frankly, for many projects, the ratio wound up closer to 20:1 or greater. I used 12:1 because that is considered normal in the game VA field today.

Sorry just a quick question I'm sure it's been answered, what are the odds of getting open source from you guys after? Maybe a payable model, would be nice to play CoH/CoH1.5 on your own terms, plus it gets rid of the fear of it shutting down again. I'd be more than happy to pay even $200 for the ability to modify the 1.5 and develop more content.

[KennonGL]

Restart + subscription fees + costs of things like the tech pack, science pack, mutation pack, super packs could well equal above $100.

Alternatively,  since Codewalker explained to me the problems with the Sentinel files: IF they could still be used to partially restore characters such as name, level, powers, IO slotting, the amount of inf on the character and all the salvage they have stored on them, that would be fine.  I would then happily head to the tailor shops to reload stored costume files,  and happily pursue the reacquisition of all the badges and rerun the incarnate arc and trials.

I didn't really pay much attention to any 3-rd party stuff [other than Mid's builder] while CoH was live.  What is this Sentinel?  Was it something that
you had to sign up for and manually synch or did it grab everybody's data somehow? 

Even if it could be used to retrieve character data [in a technical sense], I don't think it could be used [in fairness terms] if it would only let some users restore.

[FloatingFatMan]

Sentinel CANNOT be used to restore characters to any kind of commercial server, so forget about it.

[dpawtows]

Sentinel CANNOT be used to restore characters to any kind of commercial server, so forget about it.

If anybody tried... folks would start selling Sentinel+ files of purpled-out 50's on Ebay.   Imagine the customer service nightmare when somebody sells multiple copies of the same character, and thus multiple folks insisting that the toon is 'theirs'.  And that's before the gold-farmer types decide to start hacking up fake 50's to sell.....

[Surelle]

If anybody tried... folks would start selling Sentinel+ files of purpled-out 50's on Ebay.   Imagine the customer service nightmare when somebody sells multiple copies of the same character, and thus multiple folks insisting that the toon is 'theirs'.  And that's before the gold-farmer types decide to start hacking up fake 50's to sell.....

Wow, that's a really great point!

Not to mention that whomever this group is that's trying to buy CoX and get it running in maintenance mode, I hope they've got experience with anti-hacking/anti-botting and gold farmer chat and mail suppression.  There's a lot of work that goes into running any MMO.  I also hope they can properly protect our new account info once they get it (doubt we'll ever get our old accounts/characters back, but the new ones will still need to be backed up and stored securely and properly too).

And I just hope this small lot of us left here on these boards are enough players to keep the overhead paid with "enough" leftover profit to our new overlords.

Wow, I can just worry about anything given two minutes to think about it, huh?   

[Sinistar]

Wow, that's a really great point!

Not to mention that whomever this group is that's trying to buy CoX and get it running in maintenance mode, I hope they've got experience with anti-hacking/anti-botting and gold farmer chat and mail suppression.  There's a lot of work that goes into running any MMO.  I also hope they can properly protect our new account info once they get it (doubt we'll ever get our old accounts/characters back, but the new ones will still need to be backed up and stored securely and properly too).

And I just hope this small lot of us left here on these boards are enough players to keep the overhead paid with "enough" leftover profit to our new overlords.

Wow, I can just worry about anything given two minutes to think about it, huh?   

Well for starters, no more trial accounts.  Someone starts a new account the first month is free, after that if they don't like it the account goes inactive until they decide to return.  Also once an account has been inactive for say 90 days, the character names become available again thus we get a mass reduction in name grieving.  Names are still first come, first serve, but if you aren't playing anymore then you shouldn't expect your names to remain.

The gold farmers should be watched out for and neutralized when possible and of course maximum possible security on our accounts.

[Sihada]

It seems rather like the mindset Nintendo took with HD graphics and Dialogue in the last generation console wars, and we see how that turned out.  At least the 200 or so of us who have a Wii U do.

As of June 30, 2014, Nintendo reports 6.68 million Wii U units and 36.67 million software units have been shipped worldwide.  That's hardly a failure.  More to the point, it would be a stretch to say that the reason that the Wii U isn't doing as well as the XBox One or PS4 is because of decisions made about voice acting.

[ParagonKid]

My thoughts and concerns on any potential subscription/payment model:
(this assumes any major changes probably CAN'T be made to the existing F2P system that was in place when the game shut down)

-We absolutely need free/trial accounts in some form. So many potential new players have expressed interest in trying the game should it come back, but asking them for pay to try a 10 year old MMORPG in this oversaturated F2P market is an unessisary roadblock to adoption.

-I think everyone who pays a one-time fee (say $50) should be set to Premium status, as defined by the old system, and immediately receive their 87 Months of Vet Status, all costume sets, power sets, Origin packs, Going Rogue and access to Pretoria. This is only fair to people who spent so much time and money back in the day to get some of it back at a reasonable price.

-VIP status should also return for players wishing to support the game monthly. My concerns are two-fold, however. First, I fear the returning number of paying VIPs will not be enough to keep the Incarnate system afloat; I don't think we'll have enough people willing to pay monthly to reliably fill Incarnate trials. My other concern is that many of the perks of VIP status are now moot (Access to Exalted, Priority server queueing, Premium in-game customer support ).

-With Sentinel not on the table, I think the potential new owners of the game should consider using the admin tools to instant level a number of trusted community members to 50 and kit them out so they can begin to float the AH economy, assist new players and in general round out the population so everyone isn't clustered in Atlas/Mercy/NP the first week.

[Arcana]

(/Looks around)

DAMN.

Edit: Not disagreeing, as it was a pain looking for the stuff I was actually interested in, but we're kind of stuck with the UI as is if the game comes back, right?

Not really, because the store wasn't part of the game.  The store interface was actually a web store running in an embedded browser in the client.  That's why there was exactly zero integration between the store and the game: except for the authentication and session tokens, you could have been running the store on a completely different computer for all it knew.

That also means that even if NCSoft handed the entire game to someone, it would not include the store.  The store was not an NCSoft system.

Also, speaking as someone that does PCI assessments, the store would have failed.

[Ankhammon]

Well for starters, no more trial accounts.  Someone starts a new account the first month is free, after that if they don't like it the account goes inactive until they decide to return.  Also once an account has been inactive for say 90 days, the character names become available again thus we get a mass reduction in name grieving.  Names are still first come, first serve, but if you aren't playing anymore then you shouldn't expect your names to remain.

The gold farmers should be watched out for and neutralized when possible and of course maximum possible security on our accounts.

Was there ever a gold farming problem in CoH? Seems to me they gave up almost the instant they started.

[Codewalker]

I used to get RMT spam all the time before they blocked trial accounts from sending in-game email. I also knew a couple of people who admitted to buying influence. Always seemed a little silly to me since inf was so easy to get, but I guess some people have to have everything Right Nao(TM).

[Arcana]

^ When CoH was still running, I was on a 50mbit/sec line. The store was STILL slow as molasses...

Exactly the same here.... I am on a 90Mbps line, and the store was so ridiculously slow, it was....well....ridiculous.

Your internet connection had nothing to do with the speed of the store.  It was written horribly.  The front end looked like someone spent ten minutes browsing Ajax for Dummies and decided to write the most unoptimized javascript and style sheets in history, and the back end felt like it was running on dBase on a commodore 64.  You could have been connected to the internet with a gigabit feed and the store would still have run exactly as slow.

I know this because the store traffic was also unencrypted.  Yes, the thing you could spend money on did not encrypt its data.  You couldn't even blame SSL for the speed of the store.

Can't blame the devs for this one: as far as I know the Paragon devs had nothing to do with it because it was outsourced to "experts in monetization".  Someplace somewhere I have the name of the company scribbed down, but my brain seems to be blocking out the details of the experience.

[Ankhammon]

I used to get RMT spam all the time before they blocked trial accounts from sending in-game email. I also knew a couple of people who admitted to buying influence. Always seemed a little silly to me since inf was so easy to get, but I guess some people have to have everything Right Nao(TM).

I do remember the spam, but I always just laughed because it was obvious that they didn't know the game they were in.

You could always find a PL if you wanted one. If you took two days you could get a fire/kin farmer doing that, or you could just self PL through AE in about 10 hrs of game time to create a brutish farmer... Or several other kinds if you spent  15 hrs.

The whole thing just seemed crazy to me.

[Nightmarer]

I loathed the paragon store for that exact reason.

That reminds me of something, see, I have this question for you guys, when we the deal is successfully finished, if I am not mistaken, you guys will get an I23 disk image that cannot be modified but, will there be a chance of adding a store or will you have to use the old NCSoft one because the iomage disk does not admit any kind of modification? and, if you have to use the old NCSoft store, I guess getting the data for old characters could be a feasible option, right?

Apologies if these questions have aready been replied, I've read that the character data was not (at that moment) part of the deal but I haven't read anything regarding the game store for the upcoming Legacy CoH.-

[Luna Eclypse]

Names are still first come, first serve, but if you aren't playing anymore then you shouldn't expect your names to remain.

This is where I'd like to see them take a page from CO's book. Anyone can use a name that is already taken, because you're identified by your global handle overall and it can optionally be shown in chat as well as your toon name.

So if your global was @Sinistar and mine was @LunaEclypse but we both wanted to name a character "Mr. Sassypants," We'd come up in chat as...

@Sinistar-Mr. Sassypants: LF2M for ITF!
@LunaEclypse-Mr. Sassypants: LOLZ same name but my pants are sassier!

[Ankhammon]

I know this because the store traffic was also unencrypted.  Yes, the thing you could spend money on did not encrypt its data.  You couldn't even blame SSL for the speed of the store.

Holy sheep dip batman! That's one of the more egregious things I've heard.

Is that even legal? In today's market I would imagine they would get their behinds sued for that kind of thing.

[Arcana]

That reminds me of something, see, I have this question for you guys, when we the deal is successfully finished, if I am not mistaken, you guys will get an I23 disk image that cannot be modified but, will there be a chance of adding a store or will you have to use the old NCSoft one because the iomage disk does not admit any kind of modification? and, if you have to use the old NCSoft store, I guess getting the data for old characters could be a feasible option, right?

Apologies if these questions have aready been replied, I've read that the character data was not (at that moment) part of the deal but I haven't read anything regarding the game store for the upcoming Legacy CoH.-

Its impossible for NCSoft to give someone a read-only game.  The game doesn't work like that.  What people are talking about is the fact that without the game source code you can't easily make modifications to the game engine, and without all of the dev authoring tools and documentation it will be difficult to add new content to the game.

And as I mentioned above, the Freedom store was not actually part of the game: it was run as a separate service with a separate back end and a separate interface that was run in an embedded browser.  I think its all but impossible we're going to be getting that back.  But fortunately, any web developer with knowledge of PHP could probably write a better store in a weekend, minus things like item images and text descriptions.