Perhaps NCSoft is doing us a favor?

[dwturducken]

I don't disagree, but my feeling was more one of pressure. After the change to F2P, there were a couple of things that were put out that really felt like they were the product of a deadline, more than a creative process. I don't think they were substandard, just forced, like they were required to put something out every month, so things that wouldn't normally make it out of brainstorming sessions were getting developed.

[chaparralshrub]

I don't disagree, but my feeling was more one of pressure. After the change to F2P, there were a couple of things that were put out that really felt like they were the product of a deadline, more than a creative process. I don't think they were substandard, just forced, like they were required to put something out every month, so things that wouldn't normally make it out of brainstorming sessions were getting developed.

That could be. In that case, what they should have done was revisit old special events that came out occasionally. But the Who Will Die arcs, as well as Praetoria, are unavailable to non VIP-subscribers...

The Who will die arc is in no way worse than the entire Praetorian zone.

I'm not sure what you mean here; I'd be happy to hear your thoughts. I, as usual, am very story-focused, so my first and foremost reasons for disliking the Who Will Die arc is for story reasons. Namely, I felt that Statesman's death was anticlimactic (because States is linked by fate to Recluse, and his death has nothing to do with/no discernable effect that I know of on Recluse), and I felt that Psyche's death made Manticore go back to being too much like Batman, whereas beforehand there was one, obvious, major difference between the two (namely, Manticore being married). I can think of a variety of different ways that each of them could have been done better.

[ohms]

Netdevil was bought by Gazillion Entertainment in July 2008 (the same company who are doing the Marvel online games, and that a former NCsoft bod (Stephen "Rockjaw" Reid) is working for right now (for the 2nd time)

And NetDevil was shut down by Gazillion not too long afterwards. They don't seem all that much better than NCSoftcore tbh.

[Mantic]

Doc Aeon discussed the process behind that monthly story content on his blog.

It was new for City of Heroes to do monthly story content. But it didn't displace normal 'issue' content. Rather, it was mostly it's own little team apart from that. So it was MOAR than before, rushed or not. As one of the money-flinging idiots who was anything but grousing about the market, this year had more to offer than ever.

The only poor decision, I thought, was not repeating the "loyalty program." Even though some players misread that the first time and were disappointed because they actually had left to go play DCUO and didn't maintain a subscription the whole time, it was an incentive to keep subscriptions even if you weren't playing much. During the summer I saw several players mention letting subs lapse to save money (possibly indicating a broad trend, since I wasn't able to find a lot of time for the game this summer, either). After waiting several months for the loyalty program to be repeated, even I eventually decided to let my second account lapse and spend that money on more Paragon Points for my main account (now that second account is locked... d'oh!).

Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. The audience for City of Heroes was not exploding, and it appears that is the only thing that would have saved it from NCSoft's chopping block.

Sadly, I don't represent much money. I can keep making noise, though. Maybe even get into some propaganda efforts to shame NCSoft in the coming year.

[Ironwolf]

Before the thread is completely off tangent - I will say my issue with the Praetorian arc is that to make a zone where the only encouragement is to LEAVE so you can team with others - is not well thought out from a business slant.

You want players to go to your new content - similar to the solo incarnate stuff that is only slightly faster than a glacier in speed. Making a grind might be a valid playstyle but we haven't done that in this game before.

[darkquill]

Re: VV
I've got no intel on NetDevils' later concerns with AutoAssault. I haven't seen any indication about it.

I suppose the general concern with is the fragmentation of the dev team and loss of continuity. Even with well-documented code, it's helpful if you've got the previous generation of developers to train the next one on tips and tricks of dealing with the code. (cf, extreme example: loss of continuity with the base-building that led to anyone being afraid to make major changes to bases without breaking them).

You've also got fragmentation of the community -- people going on to play other games (or RL) and getting hooked and not just bouncing right back into the arms of CoH when it re-appears. 

These two kinds of fragmentation will both be obstacles we'll need to work to overcome when #SaveCOH succeeds.

[Victoria Victrix]

Ok then.  Of the games canceled by NCSoftcore until this point, with the exception of Tabula Rasa, it appears that no one attempted to buyout the IP after shutdown.  I get the impression that the Garriott brothers did attempt to buyout post-cancellation, or acquire the IP in some other fashion.  That impression may be incorrect; at that point the acrimony between NCSoftcore and the Garriotts was so high I think that NCSoftcore was inclined to wiping all the disks and burning the paper copies of the programs (assuming anyone still saves paper copies of programs) before they would let Richard have his baby back.

Short form here is it appears that no one has made an attempt to buy an IP from NCSoftcore post-shutdown.  This actually has potential.  They can have their cake and eat it...if the reason for shutdown is in whole or in part taking a tax write-off, they can shut down this fiscal year, then sell next fiscal year.  As long as we keep pushing them and making it clear that the negativity machine is not going away.

[Ironwolf]

Yes, VV this was why I posted the original thought on this. We need to look past the imminent doom towards a brighter future.

The best scenario was Paragon Studios buying the game. I honestly don't believe anything short of 3 or 4 times what the game is worth would have moved them. If this game is to survive in some form in the future it must be run as a BUSINESS. It must make money and the purchase price must be intelligently negotiated.

I don't want anyone to throw money at the game - lose cash for 12 months and fold up bitter and disappointed. A steady methodical plan needs to be worked. In fact I would continue the plan for noise and other petitioning for 2 reasons - morale and advertising.

Has any of you stopped and realized this game has now gotten more advertising than it EVER did in 8 years? We have celebrities who know who we are now. We aren't just those silly gamers who have no life. They are seeing US, the people who make stories and live as a famous man once said - lives of quiet desperation.

Don't give up, EVER, on your dreams.

The fight is a 15 rounder not a 4 round preliminary. We need to plan and schedule for actions aftter the game is down. If not despair will set in. In a battle (and I have been a general at Pennsic planning for thousands a side) you plan for winning the initial contact and losing it. NCSoft fooled everyone with a delaying tactic - the heat of emotion cooled as we thought they were seriously at the table.

In fact I can see as I said they could have done us a favor in allowing the price to drop and the ability to not have to go in on a shoestring but instead with a plan in place and taking advantage of all the good will our community generated.

[gypsyav]

(and I have been a general at Pennsic planning for thousands a side)

Sorry to derail the thread, but which Kingdom are you a part of?

[Ironwolf]

Sorry to derail the thread, but which Kingdom are you a part of?

Midrealm - I couldn't go this year as my daugter is getting married in Florida and footing the bill for that and Pennsic was a little too much.

Sir Michael Au Cluin of House Ironwolf at your service

[Segev]

I agree with all of the post referenced below except the part quoted.

Someone said on the CoH forums when Black Pebble told us the state of play with the CoH advertising that is was him, on not much money. Player comments "well you could have asked us". The thing is, he *shouldn't* have had to ask us to do it. It should have come naturally to us.

There was no reason the players should have thought, "Oh, we should help advertise the game." And it would have been...uncouth...for the ad department to ask its customers to help fund advertising - not directly and in so many words, anyway.

Going forward, you can bet there will be fan-based efforts to do this sort of thing, but the assumption was that NCSoft was at least being professional in its running of the game. $0 ad budget? REALLY?

[Moonfyire101]

I for one, didn't think about advertising until all this crap happened. I'm sure most players are the same. Usually companies advertise for themselves and the only advertising players do is casually telling friends and aquaintences "hey you should play city CoX". If the company needed advertising they should have either made a budget for it or asked us directly. Look at blizzard, WoW has been around almost as long as CoX and they still advertise it. Furthermore, how should we have gone about advertising it? Some of us paid our monthly subs but that was all the disposable income we had. Should we have not bought groceries and paid for flyers instead? It is really up to the company to advertise, not the players. As stated earlier players tell friends to play but thats as far as can be expected. If they really needed help becuase they forsaw shutdown, they should have asked. Under those circumstances we woulda done whatever it took to keep it going. Like we are doing now.

Anyway, i hope all of our efforts make the game more desirable to a potential buyer. I also hope NCSoft will actually sell. They have made no effort thus far. So let's keep on trying to save our game even when the servers go dark, something has to give sometime. Look at all the tv shows which have been brought back by fans. There is hope.

[Luna Eclypse]

Don't give up, EVER, on your dreams.

This might seem out of context... or not. It's an inspiring song for me. Maybe it'll work for others. Not trying to derail the thread, I've read along intently and this popped into my head when I got to this link of your post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2XFA7MU9jg

[Turjan]

NCSoft aren't doing us a favour - and perhaps more bizarrely, they're not doing themselves any favours either.

There's a whole bunch of twisty-turny ironies surrounding the issues of corporate communication, advertising, motive, and the question of IPs.

Yesterday I posted some links to Korea Times articles about NCSoft and Nexon, going back to June this year. When I was first reading those, an odd thought began to take hold in my head...the closure of City of Heroes made even less sense to me than it had before I started looking at them.

Here's a bit of pondering I did -

• The 15% share stake Nexon bought in NCSoft was sold to them by NCSoft CEO Kim from his own stock. Prior, he owned 24% of NCSoft shares, then he sold 15% to Nexon meaning Kim now personally owns only 9% of his own company's stock and Nexon own 15% - NCSoft CEO Kim evidently really wanted this partnership of giants.
• NCSoft appears to have been conceptually pulling back to within Korea's borders for years, whereas Nexon are pushing to expand into overseas markets (especially the US).
• NCSoft have traditionally focused on making MMOs, spending years investing and developing each one. Nexon's success comes primarily from buying and marketing other developers' games (their homegrown ones seldom succeed)
• NCSoft's finance model has been biased towards subscription and 'game time' purchases at internet cafes, whereas Nexon pioneered the F2P system for MMOs
• The collaboration between NCSoft and Nexon brings a top game developer (with poor communication and marketing) to join forces with a successful marketing corporation (with poor self-developed titles)
• NCSoft have always mainly concerned themselves with desktop pc gaming, but share with Nexon a desire to "realign focus" into mobile and casual gaming

So...City of Heroes is a US-based, long established franchise, already in service successfully for years. Its finance model changed from NCSoft's favoured style to Nexon's favoured style months before Nexon were even in the picture. CoH has had numerous marketing/advertising issues in the past, but the playerbase has never dropped below profitable levels, and even pulled up under F2P, suggesting that despite its age, the game could actually prosper again if it was marketed better.

Seems to me, the NC-Nexon giant would have had far more to gain by taking advantage of their newly pooled skillsets and keeping CoH on, even if only as a testbed of corporate co-operation. The game wasn't costing the company anything because it was still profitable, albeit not massively - but at the end of the day, profit isn't loss.

So...what purpose is served by closing CoH?
That's the question I keep coming back to.
Panic button to hike share prices? I thought so initially, but the more I've looked into it, the more I think the share rise from GW2 sales would've made any share gain from CoH's closure irrelevant, so that's not a strong enough reason.

I can more understand their desire to keep the IP - Nexon might see it as something that could be developed in overseas markets in future (not domestic - superheroes don't seem to work in Korea), perhaps on a mobile platform. NCSoft would presumably be the ones making such a game from their own IP of course. If it costs you nothing to retain an IP you could use for a mutual future corporate venture, you'd be idiots to sell it really.

But an IP on ice isn't making a penny. And developing a new game based on it could take years and cost millions. And everyone would've forgotten the IP because in the meantime you've closed down the existing game and alienated the playerbase.

Now - is it just me, or does this make absolutely no sense whatsoever?

The more I think about it, the more I'm forced to conclude we're being shut down for one reason, and one reason only - we're old.

NC-Nexon is all about the future. Mobile gaming, shiny new platforms! Casual games, online smartphone games, e-sports...

Us? We're expendable. We're yesterday, the Ghost of Corporations Past.
Sure, Nexon's marketing savvy could've revitalised the game...so why didn't it? NCSoft's record for patience and support of development could've led to CoH enjoying pretty much a second life...but why hasn't it?

The more I think, the more I see reasons for keeping CoH alive, not killing it off.

And yet they are killing it, so whatever actual reason they had, it doesn't seem to be about business, a case of numbers on a balance sheet, or confidence from shareholders.
No, I believe this was all about image.

I think that's why their last statement took the tone it did. They wanted CoH to stay old, to stay in the past, to become nothing but memories, so they could stride together into a brave new future hand in hand.

The motto of Paragon City is "Birthplace of Tomorrow" - does anybody else see the irony here?

[Segev]

This is an interesting and potentially accurate observation. I want to take two elements of it and juxtapose them for some added potential clarity (though I don't know for a fact that it's accurate):

Turjan's hypothesis is that the closure is about image because CoH is "old news" and they want to look like they're breaking away from the old (ignore that the old was WORKING).

CoH is profitable, but we're not sure HOW profitable.



What would be the solution to the image problem if not to close CoH? Marketing. They'd have to do a fresh new campaign to make CoH look like a game of the future with exciting NEW things coming out that highlight the NEW advances. Marketing costs money; CoH had a $0 ad budget.

Would that marketing campaign have cost more than CoH was making, resulting in a net loss, even in the short term?

[Luna Eclypse]

What if they settle on selling the IP post-fiscal years end, to their own buddies at Nexon? Basically, "Why sell it to some Western publisher we have no prior dealings with when we can save face and pretty much 'keep it in the family' by selling it to Nexon with a condition that we get a percentage of the income?"

Just throwing that hypothetical scenario out there.

[TimtheEnchanter]

What if they settle on selling the IP post-fiscal years end, to their own buddies at Nexon? Basically, "Why sell it to some Western publisher we have no prior dealings with when we can save face and pretty much 'keep it in the family' by selling it to Nexon with a condition that we get a percentage of the income?"

Just throwing that hypothetical scenario out there.

That may not be a good thing either, based on the prior post. Nexon could just as soon buy the IP, and then never launch the old MMO, OR any new incarnation of the MMO, and turn it into another generic iPhone game.

[Turjan]

[Luna Eclypse]

However, of the two developers, it's NCSoft that has the success with developing titles inhouse, so there's not much logic selling an IP you successfully developed to your partner who doesn't do development as well as you do.

At this rate, you never know. Nexon could be fixing to do some realigning of their own in the coming months.