They were indeed plenty rude to us, aye! Dismissive, patronizing, haughty. I have made my share of anti-NCSoft memes, absolutely. But remember that damaging NCSoft is a means, not our goal. Our goal is to persuade NCSoft to sell Paragon City and to persuade a better caretaker to buy it.
This is my personal opinion, so please don't go quoting this as, "Titan Network/Plan Z/People Named Tony/whatever believes..."
They were
extremely rude to us. And while I see a glimmer of hope in the latest "nothing has been decided..." statement, until I see some positive affirmation that they are willing to sell the IP, I am still going on their original "exhausted all options"--that is, they are unwilling to sell the IP--statement.
When I started down this path, I was deliberately as nice, respectful, and deferential as I could be. I repeatedly kindly asked NCsoft to reconsider, to work with the player base and the developer who care so much for this game. I communicated that I was fully prepared to make public statements about how wise and smart NCsoft is, how much they care about their players. And lest anyone forget, Mercedes Lackey made a
very generous offer for free publicity to them that would have gone far in helping them to sell their games.
Their response was, at best, disingenuous.
So pardon me for saying so, but playing the role of subservience got us bupkiss. If I thought that it would help now, I'd do it, but I'm convinced that if we stop pushing, even for a minute, NCsoft will see that as a sign of weakness, a sign that surely this whole thing has almost blown over, that they should just wait it out a bit longer and everything will be fine. I warned them in no uncertain terms that if they proceeded down the path they were traveling, they would suffer a public relations black eye and a LOT of discontent from a LOT of people. Every single second along this journey, they have had the power to steer things in a different direction. There is absolutely nothing--
nothing--stopping them from right this second picking up the phone (yes, I know it's 1:15am Pacific), calling Brian Clayton, and saying, "We'd like to talk..." And I can almost assure you that if they did, the joy and excitement at having City of Heroes back would vastly overshadow continued negative publicity that some folks will continue heaping on them. (Which is normal--after this long, do they seriously expect there not to be any lingering affects?)
But to my knowledge, they haven't done it, so I aim to continue misbehavin'. The way I figure, even if we fail at getting NCsoft the sell the IP, we will at least make them pay for their bad business decisions and our treatment. And no, it's not just out of spite. The thing is, if NCsoft gets away with this clean, it will only encourage them and other publishers and industry behemoths to do the same thing to their own customers, axing games to the point where they can't even be played any more whenever they get some stick in their craw and want to change strategic direction. I'm tired of being treated like dirt by these companies, and it's time to draw a line in the sand and let them know--let them
all know--that we're not going to just stand here taking it any more. If you're going to take hundreds or thousands of my hard-earned dollars, then when you change whatever corporate goals that mean that my game gets cut, you'd better damn well make sure that I'm not going to be left out in the cold.
"But hey, Tony, it's an MMO, it happens," right? Wrong. To my knowledge, this is by far the biggest and longest-running game that I know of that's shut down like this, to the point where it couldn't be played. Yes, I know that some other MMOs have gone under, but if you ranked them all according to how much the average player has spent on the game, I'm almost certain that City of Heroes would be right at the top of the list. And while something like this has always
hypothetically been possible, the chances of it have always been mitigated by the threat of a backlash. Kind of like how a bank could hypothetically demand the full balance of a credit card debt at any time, but realistically, they don't because of the huge blow in reputation they'd take. Well, now it's no longer a hypothetical, it's a reality. NCsoft actually threw the switches, and now millions of dollars in collective investment, to say nothing of the intellectual property of countless numbers of players, has been destroyed. And I'll be damned if I just sit back and let them get away with it without doing my part to incur the wrath of the former customers they've screwed over--if for no other reason in the end, to send a crystal clear message to other companies, "Do this at the peril of your reputation and even your financial stability."
I'd like to think that if our actions are successful within the industry, if something like World of Warcraft ever shuts down, its players will either have a sequel to migrate their accounts to, get some kind of single-player or small group local server they can use to keep playing, or
something besides just, "That's it, thanks for thousands of dollars, have a nice life." Because in this day and age when computing resources are so cheap, that's simply unacceptable.
...But I digress. My main point is that we've
tried doing the deferential thing and it didn't work. So we've moved on to something else. NCsoft knows what the score is and can at any time quell the uprising, and doing so is actually quite easy. The time for "saving face" is over; at this point, the only question is just how deep into the jar of stupid they're willing to dip before they cut their losses and start being smart again.
