So, thoughts/ideas, anyone?

[unladenswallow]

'Reality' is a construct of society and is in a constant state of flux. We have the capability to change reality, at least as far as the elements of reality that would not exist were it not for humans.

Other factors need to exist in the minds of businesses besides profit. I'm not suggesting we can change that overnight, but things like "It's just business" or "They're just doing their job" excuses their actions. It's like we're telling them it's all good as long as they're doing it for profit. As if that is somehow 'better' than doing it in the name of a god, or nationalism, or (insert cause here).

Using either conformation bias or adaptive preference formation to deal with the cognitive dissonance generated by doing something at your job you would consider morally objectionable in your personal life is how this is usually achieve. Either that or you just really don't care.

To be honest though we all do it. Most of the time it's to protect our self esteem or our egos when things don't go as we had planned or hoped. It's when we do this to make ourselves feel better when our actions harm others that it becomes dangerous. Intentional, unintentional or by following social norms or orders from a superior, it really doesn't matter it's the marginalization of the suffering or injury of others for your own personal comfort.

And no, we don't have to accept it even if all we can do is address directly when it shows up like it did here to let others know how we feel. That's how change starts.

[WolfSoul]

While I find this and other threads fascinating, I'm a bit lost and confused. What exactly are wedoing now? What actions are we to take to put more pressure on NCSoft? I'm having a difficult time pulling that out of all the philosophizing and Business Financing 101 discussions.

(Apologies if I come across a little snarky, I have a chronic illness that causes constant pain and I'm in the middle of a nice size flare up. It makes a bit short sometimes. )

Edited for missing word.

[dwturducken]

To take it to the extreme, "Just following orders" is often not considered a valid defense in war crimes trials.

Finally someone brings up Nazis, even if only by allusion!

To go back to VV's point from yesterday about the game being a relic of a desktop-dominated tech world, that's more a technical problem than a legal one.  They could fully intend to rework the game on a new engine/infrastructure and re-release it as CoH2, rather than bet on us hanging around or even growing our numbers while the devs and programmers made the changeover incrementally, glacially. Do I think it'll happen that way? Of course not. Do they have it in the back of their minds? Likely.

[Turjan]

While I find this and other threads fascinating, I'm a bit lost and confused. What exactly are wedoing now? What actions are we to take to put more pressure on NCSoft? I'm having a difficult time pulling that out of all the philosophizing and Business Financing 101 discussions.

(Apologies if I come across a little snarky, I have a chronic illness that causes constant pain and I'm in the middle of a nice size flare up. It makes a bit short sometimes.)

No apology necessary, the thread does indeed seem to be listing to port a bit, as it were

I think the gist of the ideas here so far is that we might have some success by forcing NCSoft to waste resources correcting negative PR. If they have to do this to the extent that such damage limitation would cost them more than whatever it is they're saving by closing CoH, then it's a victory for players over arrogant and unfeeling corporate thinking. That line of thinking is certainly behind the MMOKiller meme concept - and the beauty of that one is it's free and doesn't require full page advertising and such. All it requires is that the MMOKiller images at the Photobucket site be grabbed by as many of us as possible and spread as far as possible (Facebook, Twitter, other forums etc) until the meme starts to stick.

Resistance thinking there you see...if you can't win a conventional fight, don't try - use unconventional tactics instead

At the risk of keeping the thread listing however, I will just add a comment about NCSoft assets. While the company was awash with cash in 2011, don't forget they lashed a load out in 2012, so much so that they posted a loss in Q2. So if you were looking for something they were spending all that cash on, there you go. Here's a link to their Q2 financial results report :-

NCSoft-Q2-2012-Financial-Results

I'm an artist and numbers don't really agree with me, so I'll leave it to the more numerically capable here to take that info and dissect it

[NecrotechMaster]

based on all the numerical evidence presented i do have to agree with codewalker

if i were an investor and saw the company which had a VERY large amount of wealth in loose assets thats not particularly invested in anything and they were closing down a profitable and very potential game w/ studio i would question investing in the company

also as said if the total value of all of ncsofts IPs was barely over $2 million, we would have to assume that coh alone would be maybe $500,000 (+/- 250,000) (very rough estimate, dont take too literally)

also based on other threads, valve potentially offered ncsoft somewhere around $3 million for JUST coh along with profit sharing and ncsoft basically ignored it, which is more baffling and raises many questions (why would ncsoft turn down an offer for 1 IP which the offer was 150% of the total value of ALL of their IPs?)

[Artillerie]

So, what we must do is make them see that closing CoH is the more expensive solution.  It presents an opportunity cost of many hundreds of millions in increased spending to undo negative publicity that can affect not just future sales, but also the base share values of the company too.  Remember how in the figures we've seen the entire Western market was only around 5% of all revenue for NCsoft?  Well, share values have fallen 6% since the closure notice.  If they could be persuaded that it was the closure of CoH that had caused that, well, it means that they lost 6% to make about 2%.  In other words, it would be cheaper for them to have run all their Western market for free, no profit at all, than to lose 6% of their share value.

Suggestion 5:  So, here's how we force that decision.  Keep talking about this. More importantly, keep spreading the news about those who are.  Link to stories from your own websites, facebook profiles, twitter posts, etc.  All of these things mean that search engines see these stories as more important, more widespread.  That in turn makes those stories and site rank higher in searches for relevant words like "NCsoft" or "MMO" etc.  Meaning that when people search for 'NCsoft' as well as finding the official homepage, and some share prices, etc, there will be all the negative press we are creating.  Stories about how NCsoft have a questionable reputation, making ill-considered decisions.  Right where people who were investing in NCsoft shares (or games) were searching.


This is what i will be focusing on the most. Everyone here can link articles - i'm sure that very many have - but if it is done in sufficient numbers and search engines start displaying negative results for NCSoft then that has to be worth a great deal to us.

[edit] - the 2 paragraphs at the top are from Ammons post early in this thread, sorry - not so good at taking a part of it and having it display properly....