Jack Emmert Smack Talking City Of Heroes

[Peregrine Falcon]

In an interview published earlier today, Jack Emmert was talking about Neverwinter and free-to-play. As he often does in these interviews he went on to throw one of his previous products under the bus. This time it was City of Heroes.

"I was a subscription die-hard who had choice words for F2P, but the methodology behind quality free gaming design totally converted me. I see what it's done to Star Trek Online and, believe it or not, 'that game is much bigger than City of Heroes ever was at its peak! And that's due entirely to how we approach free-to-play gaming -- how we commit to providing an option for players who don't want to pay, period."

I saw him disparage Star Trek Online in an interview some years back when he was talking about Neverwinter. It just makes me wonder if he loses interest in the old games and then likes to smack talk them, as so many people seem to like doing, or if he just throws these one-liners out without thinking about what he's saying.

[eabrace]

It just makes me wonder if he loses interest in the old games and then likes to smack talk them, as so many people seem to like doing, or if he just throws these one-liners out without thinking about what he's saying.

Probably a little of A, a little of B...

[Nightmarer]

Well, I can understand why is he bitter with CoH since the game improved very much after he left, then he made an attempt to beat CoH with another Super Hero MMO and failed miserably, heck, he couldn't even make it with such a massive IP as Star Trek so no wonder he's resentful, heck I even bet he had a different "vision"  .-

[Knightslayer]

Well, I can understand why is he bitter with CoH since the game improved very much after he left, then he made an attempt to beat CoH with another Super Hero MMO and failed miserably, heck, he couldn't even make it with such a massive IP as Star Trek so no wonder he's resentful, heck I even bet he had a different "vision"  .-

With the exception that his company is still thriving (even picking up some of the former Paragon devs) while CoH is gathering dust... =/
All in all I could see how he'd get a little smug.
That being said, I don't think he was really "smack talking" it, and rather saying that he has surpassed something that he once considered to be quite the achievement.

[Mysterious J]

I'm not sure saying that you can get more players with free to play than subs is "talking smack" about City of Heroes.  City went F2P as well, after all.  What made CoX good wasn't its revenue model.

[Knightslayer]

I'm not sure saying that you can get more players with free to play than subs is "talking smack" about City of Heroes.  City went F2P as well, after all.  What made CoX good wasn't it's revenue model.

I thought he was talking about the size of the game world and the amount of content.

[Lothic]

That being said, I don't think he was really "smack talking" it, and rather saying that he has surpassed something that he once considered to be quite the achievement.

I believe Jack sort of meant well here, but as per usual managed to express his ideas in his typical foot-in-mouth way.

I tend to think most game designers like Jack have been completely surprised with how well the F2P model has worked for them in the last few years.  I suspect they assumed the old subscription paradigm was the "smart business" move and didn't trust they could actually succeed with F2P.  So when he mentions CoH here I think it's in the context of saying its original subscription model was a profit-making limitation compared to the relatively newer F2P concepts.

Sadly when trying to explain that point it comes off like Jack's trashing CoH as a game in general.  He's simply using the several games he's actually worked on as examples here - if he had worked on a different subscription-based game back in 2004 he probably would have used that as an example instead of CoH.

[dwturducken]

[...] quality free gaming design [...]

Interesting choice of words, since most of his stuff is quality-free until he stops working on it. *rimshot*

[Colette]

Well, I don't see what he said as insulting to the quality of City. Revenues are quantifiable, and facts are facts.

[JaguarX]

Well, I don't see what he said as insulting to the quality of City. Revenues are quantifiable, and facts are facts.

hear hear

[Ashen Fury]

Its Jack. Just seems like this is how he always talks.

[Megajoule]

as I said else-board:

That's great, Jack. For what it's worth, those of us who stuck with CoH until the end - and saw it become, IMO, a much better game after you moved on - don't miss you either.

[Arcana]

I honestly do not see the quoted passage as remotely derogatory to City of Heroes.  Not even microscopically.

The most neutrally objective interpretation of what Jack said is that he considers City of Heroes to be the exemplar of his prior work with subscription-based MMOs in terms of subscriber and revenue base, and its therefore the standard to compare to the current incarnation of STO as an F2P game.  It is true that City was a subscription game for the entire time of Jack's involvement with it, and its also objectively true that in terms of subscriber base City's maximum size occurred while it was still a subscription game.

The interesting thing is that Jack did not compare STO to Champions Online, but to City of Heroes.  There are probably Champions Online players with a more justified gripe than we ought to have.  But the reason for that is also obvious: CO transitioned to F2P prior to STO under Cryptic.  From the perspective of Jack and Cryptic, the evolution of their thinking goes from the pure subscription based CoH (which it was while it was under Cryptic) to the first F2P transition attempt with CO to the current F2P transition with STO to the all F2P Neverwinter.

Honestly, if I was the design lead at Cryptic, I would be describing Cryptic's model evolution in similar ways, with CoH at the beginning of the timeline and NWN at the current end of the timeline.  CoH would always be the baseline by which Cryptic's methodology would be referenced.

[Nightmarer]

I honestly do not see the quoted passage as remotely derogatory to City of Heroes.  Not even microscopically.

The most neutrally objective interpretation of what Jack said is that he considers City of Heroes to be the exemplar of his prior work with subscription-based MMOs in terms of subscriber and revenue base, and its therefore the standard to compare to the current incarnation of STO as an F2P game.  It is true that City was a subscription game for the entire time of Jack's involvement with it, and its also objectively true that in terms of subscriber base City's maximum size occurred while it was still a subscription game.

The interesting thing is that Jack did not compare STO to Champions Online, but to City of Heroes.  There are probably Champions Online players with a more justified gripe than we ought to have.  But the reason for that is also obvious: CO transitioned to F2P prior to STO under Cryptic.  From the perspective of Jack and Cryptic, the evolution of their thinking goes from the pure subscription based CoH (which it was while it was under Cryptic) to the first F2P transition attempt with CO to the current F2P transition with STO to the all F2P Neverwinter.

Honestly, if I was the design lead at Cryptic, I would be describing Cryptic's model evolution in similar ways, with CoH at the beginning of the timeline and NWN at the current end of the timeline.  CoH would always be the baseline by which Cryptic's methodology would be referenced.

We all knew that already, we were just testing if you knew...

[Arcana]

We all knew that already, we were just testing if you knew...

Man, I hate it when that happens.

[Primantis]

Not so surprised.

The guy talked a lot of smack about CoH when CO was in development. Some of it was quite harsh iirc.


That being said, I don't see the quote as being too degrading to CoH, the man is just stating a fact.

Making more money =/= a better game. In fact, in my experience, the opposite is quite often true.

[Peregrine Falcon]

You're probably right.

Considering all of the times I've seen Jack smack-talk both CoH and STO in various interviews over the last few years I guess his statement just felt to me as if he was doing it yet again.

[Arcana]

The guy talked a lot of smack about CoH when CO was in development. Some of it was quite harsh iirc.

I'm unaware of Jack Emmert saying very much about CoH while CO was in development one way or the other.  Both he and the dev team often spoke the standard rhetoric about taking what was learned from one project and doing better in the next project, but that's normal.  Jack was hammered for making comments about CoH while STO was in development that some found unflattering, but at the time I didn't think they were all that noteworthy.

Honestly, I've said worse things about CoH than Jack has overall.  It was I who once (twice, three times...) said CoH appeared to be designed by a random number generator, the animation system looked like a Rube Goldbergian wet dream, and if Cryptic was a person I wouldn't let him balance my checkbook.  The fact is that everything I say was seen through the prism of being a long-time player and supporter of the game - and someone who would smite you with the dictionary for fun - while everything Jack ever said was seen through the prism of being someone who first was perceived as being the heavy that wouldn't let the game evolve in the direction the players wanted and then as someone who abandoned the game entirely.

The truth is that by the time momentum had really built to portray Jack as being the thing holding CoH back he had already mostly checked out and was involved primarily with MUO.  In my opinion, Jack has always been someone that enjoyed conceptualizing games far more than implementing and supporting them.  It was I that first came up with the "Johnny Appleseed" theory of Jack's direction for Cryptic.  The reason why so many people, I believe, think Jack is callous is that he really simply isn't all that interested in the nitty gritty details that people simply assume he must think about constantly and must be the context of everything he says.  Jack was often blamed for having bad ideas about subjects he literally had no specific knowledge of.  Or incorrect knowledge of.  The story of Defiance 1.0 comes to mind.

We should cut Jack some slack.  First, all evidence suggests that when Cryptic was first creating City of Heroes, the dev team was overreaching beyond their abilities farther than a kindergarten class trying to start a space program.  If Jack hadn't come along with the vision he was so reviled for after launch, odds are we would have never had a game at all.  Second, so much of what we blame Jack for in terms of holding back from the players are things the dev team couldn't have delivered on either way.  Who outside Cryptic even knows all the things Jack said we shouldn't have that in fact he knew we couldn't have, because Cryptic couldn't deliver it. 

He's just a guy who wants to work on the creative side of making MMOs.  And we just happened to be his first.  That's all.  He's long moved on, and its long past the time we should let go of his shadow.

[Ad_Astra]

I'm unaware of Jack Emmert saying very much about CoH while CO was in development one way or the other.  Both he and the dev team often spoke the standard rhetoric about taking what was learned from one project and doing better in the next project, but that's normal.  Jack was hammered for making comments about CoH while STO was in development that some found unflattering, but at the time I didn't think they were all that noteworthy.

Honestly, I've said worse things about CoH than Jack has overall.  It was I who once (twice, three times...) said CoH appeared to be designed by a random number generator, the animation system looked like a Rube Goldbergian wet dream, and if Cryptic was a person I wouldn't let him balance my checkbook.  The fact is that everything I say was seen through the prism of being a long-time player and supporter of the game - and someone who would smite you with the dictionary for fun - while everything Jack ever said was seen through the prism of being someone who first was perceived as being the heavy that wouldn't let the game evolve in the direction the players wanted and then as someone who abandoned the game entirely.

The truth is that by the time momentum had really built to portray Jack as being the thing holding CoH back he had already mostly checked out and was involved primarily with MUO.  In my opinion, Jack has always been someone that enjoyed conceptualizing games far more than implementing and supporting them.  It was I that first came up with the "Johnny Appleseed" theory of Jack's direction for Cryptic.  The reason why so many people, I believe, think Jack is callous is that he really simply isn't all that interested in the nitty gritty details that people simply assume he must think about constantly and must be the context of everything he says.  Jack was often blamed for having bad ideas about subjects he literally had no specific knowledge of.  Or incorrect knowledge of.  The story of Defiance 1.0 comes to mind.

We should cut Jack some slack.  First, all evidence suggests that when Cryptic was first creating City of Heroes, the dev team was overreaching beyond their abilities farther than a kindergarten class trying to start a space program.  If Jack hadn't come along with the vision he was so reviled for after launch, odds are we would have never had a game at all.  Second, so much of what we blame Jack for in terms of holding back from the players are things the dev team couldn't have delivered on either way.  Who outside Cryptic even knows all the things Jack said we shouldn't have that in fact he knew we couldn't have, because Cryptic couldn't deliver it. 

He's just a guy who wants to work on the creative side of making MMOs.  And we just happened to be his first.  That's all.  He's long moved on, and its long past the time we should let go of his shadow.

Hear, hear!

Too many people in the community want to see dark motivations to anything Jack does or ever did - but that's really crediting him with way too much power.

He's just a guy who thinks up cool games, does some of the early work on them, then turns them over to those who implement the "vision". He doesn't seem to be a nuts and bolts kinda guy, and I would certainly never put him in charge of any PR for anything, since at times he suffers from terminal "foot in mouth" disease. But he isn't EVIL INCARNATE", for cripe's sake.

And in this case, I think some are taking offense too easily and attributing insult where none was even remotely intended.

[Ironwolf]

Jack Emmert is the mouthpeice, he is not the guy who knows how the game even works - at least not at the level of an elite player. When he said his famous tanking example - he showed how absolutely ignorant he was of gameplay.

He said:

You take your tank and if you are weak against a carnie who has Psi damage instead you ignore that character and taunt something that has more smashing and lethal damage. So exactly who on a team can absorb more damage than the tank? His idea was let the others fend for themselves. Let the team eat the alpha and you just worry about the things you can handle.

In the real world the tank/melee tries to take as much of the alpha as possible and in fact I wrote guides on tanking that showed how you can hold aggro on almost everything even with an aggro cap. Leaping into the BACK of the group and taunting so the cones don't hit your team, fighting and using punchvoke to keep moving left to right to keep the cones on you and still hold aggro on almost the entire group/groups. Other tricks that you use because as a tank you have the most ability to withstand the damage that would face plant many on a team. Defiance 1.0 where if the team lets you nearly die you do more damage. Adding fear to burn, so very many silly things.

[srmalloy]

We should cut Jack some slack.  First, all evidence suggests that when Cryptic was first creating City of Heroes, the dev team was overreaching beyond their abilities farther than a kindergarten class trying to start a space program.  If Jack hadn't come along with the vision he was so reviled for after launch, odds are we would have never had a game at all.  Second, so much of what we blame Jack for in terms of holding back from the players are things the dev team couldn't have delivered on either way.  Who outside Cryptic even knows all the things Jack said we shouldn't have that in fact he knew we couldn't have, because Cryptic couldn't deliver it.

The two bits that were part of the early design of City of Heroes that I hold Jack to blame for are both 'vision' aspects of the game: Jack's conviction that three minions should be the equal of one hero, and his conviction that boss fights where you had to jump into the fight and get defeated again and again before you learned the one trick unique to that boss that would allow you to defeat them was 'fun'. The former flies in the face of the player characters being heroes -- being able to blow through swarms of minions is one of the superhero tropes, after all -- and the latter, at least to my mind, inverts the whole point of the game -- you're not defeating the boss because you're playing your character to the limit of their ability, you're defeating the boss because you found the boss' Achilles Heel that has nothing to do with your playing your character better.

From what I see, though, the former isn't specific to Jack -- it's a common premise underlying many MMOs -- and the latter is often the result of it being so much easier for the developers to make a boss an otherwise undefeatable sack of hit points and massive attacks and program in an Achilles Heel that will let anyone defeat them if they take advantage of it than it is to make the boss a more normal mob that fights better and more intelligently than minions or lieutenants. And even after NCSoft bought out Cryptic, the latter persisted in some of the AVs. Look at Reichsman from the Khan TF, for example -- a quarter of a million hit points, with a rotating nigh-invulnerability to all attacks and a periodic PBAoE nuke that will flatten anyone not paying attention to getting out of the way of it; defeating him doesn't involve much in the way of intelligent employment of the TF members; it's a brute-force tank-and-spank with four interruptions to take down the other AVs as they're released.

[FatherXmas]

Jack's conviction that three minions should be the equal of one hero ... The former flies in the face of the player characters being heroes -- being able to blow through swarms of minions is one of the superhero tropes, after all

But at the time in other MMORPGs taking on more than one critter at a time was a near death sentence, even at lower levels where leveling (talking MMORPGs in general) was suppose to be quick and easy to hook the player.  I don't fault him for that.

[Thunder Glove]

Yeah, "one hero = three equal-level minions", while far less than what a CoH character could eventually handle, is still far better than most other games in the genre.  In many games, you're lucky if "one hero = one lower-leveled minion, maybe."

"One hero = one equal-level boss" is even a radical concept in most games to this day (where the ratio is usually "a full team = one equal-level boss", or even "a full raid group = one equal-level boss")

[Arcana]

But at the time in other MMORPGs taking on more than one critter at a time was a near death sentence, even at lower levels where leveling (talking MMORPGs in general) was suppose to be quick and easy to hook the player.  I don't fault him for that.

Not to mention the fact that at launch with the 2000 era hardware they had, and the 1990s software they had, designing the game to make the average character played by the average player require significantly more than three entities to pose a significant threat would quickly outstrip the ability for the servers to handle full teams of players.

I believe the devs always wanted us to be more than 1v1 like the standard MMO designs tended to reflect, but there are two practical limits to that which the devs could not trivially dismiss.  Balancing critters becomes much more complex (given the tools and methodologies in use at the time) and it requires far more hardware to support larger scale fights.  Three was the compromise number.

Plus, people need to understand what the equals sign means in one hero = three minions."  That doesn't mean three minions was the literal equal of a player.  If that was the case, you'd have about a 50/50 chance of winning such a fight.  In actuality one hero >>> three minions, because the probability of winning that fight was intended to be extremely high.  One hero = three minions means when the mapserver saw one player on the map, it spawned three minions of threat per spawn point.  One hero equals three minions.  That level of threat was supposed to be high enough to be interesting, strong enough to take a meaningful bite at the player, but not actually beat the player outright.  Otherwise average players with average characters would never finish missions.

[Hyperstrike]

Okay STO is bigger than CoH ever was.  Good for STO.

1: They had a larger community coming INTO the game (the zillions of Trek fans).
2: They have recognizable IP.  CoH basically had to create their own IP and recognition for it.  Mainly they got by with being "the only superhero MMO" then "the first superhero MMO".
3: STO gets advertisement in a way that CoH never, EVER had a chance of.  Every new Trek film, or series or Trek convention is a free ad for the game!
4: Yes.  Going F2P is also going to bring more people than subbing ever would.
5: And the kicker.  STO isn't, in and of itself, a bad game.  It's not everyone's cup of tea.  But it's eminently playable and at least mildly amusing.  That it doesn't actively SUCK like some other Trek games has its advantages.

STO is flourishing because it has all these things.
CoH flourished DESPITE having essentially none of the first four.


And Jack was a subscription diehard until Cryptic actively and regularly started stepping on their dangly-bits with their last few games due to financial pressures from their owner/publisher FORCING them to put out half-baked product.

Going F2P means there's less money that irate customers can legitimately demand back.
It also means its in their best interest to nickel and dime you with trinkets and lockboxes.

[Colette]

I really think it is in our best interests, as a community, to bury the hatchet with Jack Emmert. The only thing I have against him is he sold CoH to the hated NCSoft. And how could he have known?

Without Mr. Emmert, CoH prob'ly would never have existed, and we'd all be playing DCU right now... or not playing it. He did what he thought was best long-term for the game, despite shortsighted community outcries. For example, the I-5 "Enhancement Diversification" steps he took raised a huge outcry, but in the long term proved a perfectly fine game mechanism.

Mind, I don't like CO, and if that's the "vision" Mr. Emmert had, I think it's misguided. But that doesn't make him a bad guy. His in-game character was a very "Marty Stu" cross between Thor and Superman. Makes him a bad writer, not a bad guy.

Brutally closing a game, selling new stuff three days before that closure, tossing out your employees in a Gestapo-esque raid, that makes for bad guys. Mr. Emmert had nothing to do with that.

Perhaps his judgment has been questionable, but I'm not seeing how that justifies villification. Y'all feel free to correct me.

[Primantis]

The only thing I have against him is he sold CoH to the hated NCSoft. And how could he have known?

Well NCSoft wasn't so hated back then..

I think Jack selling the game was in CoH's best interest really.. I have a nagging feeling it would have been left out to try while all the funds went into CO (and later STO) if he hadn't.

NCSoft might not have been the best choice, but we can't fault Jack for that. Things were different back then and NCSoft was all gun ho in their "western expansion" thing.

[Primantis]

He's long moved on, and its long past the time we should let go of his shadow.

Never! Who would we use as a scapegoat for all of our problems then? The Devil is so cliche...

[Arcana]

Never! Who would we use as a scapegoat for all of our problems then? The Devil is so cliche...

Once the Phoenix Project and Heroes and Villains teams start rolling out code, we'll have a completely different set of people we can blame for having the audacity to give us a game we'll never stop complaining about.

[JaguarX]

Without Mr. Emmert, CoH prob'ly would never have existed, and we'd all be playing DCU right now... or not playing it. He did what he thought was best long-term for the game, despite shortsighted community outcries. For example, the I-5 "Enhancement Diversification" steps he took raised a huge outcry, but in the long term proved a perfectly fine game mechanism.

Oh yeah people was pissed over that royally. Almost as much anger show then about ED as now about closing the game. Yet, after it all died down and people seemed to got used to the change, it was nothing.

When COH was wholly sold to NCSoft it was different times but many were heated about Atuo Assault closing. yeah, there were players that didnt like NCSoft much even years ago at least since 2007 when they closed down Auto Assault and sold COH/COV to NCSoft, but those people that talked bad about NCSoft then  usually was flamed and jumped all over and shouted down. Some by the very same people that are now wholly against NCSoft the same way and some saying the exact same thing as the person they flamed and jumped down their throats was saying back in the times between 2007 and 2009. Times has changed it seems.

[dwturducken]

Once the Phoenix Project and Heroes and Villains teams start rolling out code, we'll have a completely different set of people we can blame for having the audacity to give us a game we'll never stop complaining about.

WIN!

[Arcana]

Oh yeah people was pissed over that royally. Almost as much anger show then about ED as now about closing the game. Yet, after it all died down and people seemed to got used to the change, it was nothing.

When COH was wholly sold to NCSoft it was different times but many were heated about Atuo Assault closing. yeah, there were players that didnt like NCSoft much even years ago at least since 2007 when they closed down Auto Assault and sold COH/COV to NCSoft, but those people that talked bad about NCSoft then  usually was flamed and jumped all over and shouted down. Some by the very same people that are now wholly against NCSoft the same way and some saying the exact same thing as the person they flamed and jumped down their throats was saying back in the times between 2007 and 2009. Times has changed it seems.

An objective difference between the two situations was that City of Heroes was a successful game; it had more players than most MMOs that get shut down and it had sufficient revenues to be easily profitable, nit-picking about Paragon development costs aside.  Auto Assault was, at least as I recall, not a profitable game at shut down.  It had a loyal core of players, but that core was very small.

Something that wasn't really discussed when CoH was shutdown is that a publisher cannot simply give its IP away to its development team.  There were posters analyzing that situation completely wrong.  They assumed that if the property was losing money, then it wasn't worth anything by definition.  But that's not true.  If you set the precedent that a game that isn't making money is thus worth nothing, you create the opportunity for an unscrupulous development team to use a publisher to fund the majority of its development work, then take the property away when it "fails" and go off and make money on it owning it in full.  That cannot be allowed to occur.  I have no idea what sort of money the Auto Assault team put on the table to buy out the IP, but it had to be enough to compensate NCSoft for the full dev costs of the title and then some, or it would be dangerous to let the property go.  I cannot speak intelligently to how that went down, because I have no inside knowledge on that situation, but the shutdown occurred so soon after launch that its not unreasonable to assume that NC hadn't even recouped its dev costs yet, and thus had to hold out for a substantial amount in any buyout.

That was not the case for CoH.  NC had made its money on CoH several times over.  The devs had no specific motive to tank the title just to acquire the property.  Most importantly the title was still making money.  In this situation, if NCSoft didn't want to maintain the title it could have chosen to sell the property using normal ROI calculations in situations like this.  My best estimate is that NCSoft could have legitimately sold CoH for something between $6M and $15M while setting no dangerous precedent for future game development.

I believe that amount of money was on the table, but NCSoft balked, for reasons not directly related to a pure accounting calculation.  And because I'm more familiar with the situation on top of the fact the situation is fundamentally different in terms of precedent, my feelings are thus different for objectively different reasons.

Although not too different: I believed then that Auto Assault, while *extremely* flawed as a game, was worth spinning off and letting the dev team see what they could make of it.  I just wasn't sure if they could have pulled it off.  All investors want is a reasonable risk-adjusted return on investment.  The Paragon team had the numbers to demonstrate they could do that.  The Auto Assault team did not: they were a much higher risk.  So its unclear how much money they could have put together to attempt to buy the property.

[JaguarX]

An objective difference between the two situations was that City of Heroes was a successful game; it had more players than most MMOs that get shut down and it had sufficient revenues to be easily profitable, nit-picking about Paragon development costs aside.  Auto Assault was, at least as I recall, not a profitable game at shut down.  It had a loyal core of players, but that core was very small.

Something that wasn't really discussed when CoH was shutdown is that a publisher cannot simply give its IP away to its development team.  There were posters analyzing that situation completely wrong.  They assumed that if the property was losing money, then it wasn't worth anything by definition.  But that's not true.  If you set the precedent that a game that isn't making money is thus worth nothing, you create the opportunity for an unscrupulous development team to use a publisher to fund the majority of its development work, then take the property away when it "fails" and go off and make money on it owning it in full.  That cannot be allowed to occur.  I have no idea what sort of money the Auto Assault team put on the table to buy out the IP, but it had to be enough to compensate NCSoft for the full dev costs of the title and then some, or it would be dangerous to let the property go.  I cannot speak intelligently to how that went down, because I have no inside knowledge on that situation, but the shutdown occurred so soon after launch that its not unreasonable to assume that NC hadn't even recouped its dev costs yet, and thus had to hold out for a substantial amount in any buyout.

That was not the case for CoH.  NC had made its money on CoH several times over.  The devs had no specific motive to tank the title just to acquire the property.  Most importantly the title was still making money.  In this situation, if NCSoft didn't want to maintain the title it could have chosen to sell the property using normal ROI calculations in situations like this.  My best estimate is that NCSoft could have legitimately sold CoH for something between $6M and $15M while setting no dangerous precedent for future game development.

I believe that amount of money was on the table, but NCSoft balked, for reasons not directly related to a pure accounting calculation.  And because I'm more familiar with the situation on top of the fact the situation is fundamentally different in terms of precedent, my feelings are thus different for objectively different reasons.

Although not too different: I believed then that Auto Assault, while *extremely* flawed as a game, was worth spinning off and letting the dev team see what they could make of it.  I just wasn't sure if they could have pulled it off.  All investors want is a reasonable risk-adjusted return on investment.  The Paragon team had the numbers to demonstrate they could do that.  The Auto Assault team did not: they were a much higher risk.  So its unclear how much money they could have put together to attempt to buy the property.

This is all true, but didnt seem to stop of was considered with the NCSoft serial MMO killer memes but still, there was fans in each of those games I mentioned and people who lost their homes and they wasnt greeted as kindly and with understanding when they hurt by their loss as we demand to be greeted and understood. 

So if NCSOft had reason to shut down each game then it seem moot to label NCSOft as an MMO killer and their past closings shouldnt even be part of the equation in their reputation and thus thier reputation should be considered proper and just if that is the case of each other game besides COX ncsoft had proper excuse to close. But then again, it depends on the view. Even though most of those games were closed for financial reason depending on the view some could say that NCSOft had logical reason to close down COX too. I'm sure many here, and as many expressed in the past so not want to hear that, especially the term it was merely a business decision, but some dont and did not take account into the feelings of the past players of the other games NCSoft shutdwn and pass it off merely as ncsoft had good reason to shut the game down. Why is it easy and proper to treat other community player that lost their home as brushing it off as just business but it's a sin to do so for the closing of this game. How can we expect people to be understanding of our loss and cause if we cant even find it in our own hearts to be as equally understanding about the loss of the other communities destroyed by NCSoft? If the goal is to stop "evil" corporations from pushing players around then we have to get out the mindset that it's only about and should only care about COX.

[FatherXmas]

NCsoft shut down four MMORPGs in NA, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners and City of Heroes.

Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa and Dungeon Runners were clear failures financially.  The other two MMOs listed on Wikipedia were shut down in Korea but they were licensed titles, NCsoft was just their publisher in Korea.  Those two games are still going strong in other parts of the world including NA (unclear if they got another publisher in Korea).

Exteel wasn't an MMORPG and it was closed world wide.

[Surelle]

In an interview published earlier today, Jack Emmert was talking about Neverwinter and free-to-play. As he often does in these interviews he went on to throw one of his previous products under the bus. This time it was City of Heroes.

"I was a subscription die-hard who had choice words for F2P, but the methodology behind quality free gaming design totally converted me. I see what it's done to Star Trek Online and, believe it or not, 'that game is much bigger than City of Heroes ever was at its peak! And that's due entirely to how we approach free-to-play gaming -- how we commit to providing an option for players who don't want to pay, period."

I saw him disparage Star Trek Online in an interview some years back when he was talking about Neverwinter. It just makes me wonder if he loses interest in the old games and then likes to smack talk them, as so many people seem to like doing, or if he just throws these one-liners out without thinking about what he's saying.

The thing is, though, that purely free players do nothing but cost money, and add lag and queues, without giving anything in return.  The *real* question here is, "Which one rakes/raked in more money at its peak?"

[FatherXmas]

Nexon's revenue model on F2P, and I've seen similar metrics from other F2P companies, that they only need 10% of the active player base to buy $15 worth of stuff from the item store every month to be acceptably profitable.  Note it doesn't need to be the same 10%.

[Arcana]

Even though most of those games were closed for financial reason depending on the view some could say that NCSOft had logical reason to close down COX too. I'm sure many here, and as many expressed in the past so not want to hear that, especially the term it was merely a business decision, but some dont and did not take account into the feelings of the past players of the other games NCSoft shutdwn and pass it off merely as ncsoft had good reason to shut the game down. Why is it easy and proper to treat other community player that lost their home as brushing it off as just business but it's a sin to do so for the closing of this game.

I'm not sure what precisely you mean by "brushing off" but there's a difference between being understanding about a shutdown, and nevertheless realistic as to the financial reasons compelling that shutdown.

Now, if there are people that believe the CoH shutdown was similarly financially motivated, they would have a similar reason to act accordingly.  However, they would also be wrong.  And while there are people who believe there exists a fundamental right to be wrong, I'm not one of those people.

[Knightslayer]

Oh yeah people was pissed over that royally. Almost as much anger show then about ED as now about closing the game. Yet, after it all died down and people seemed to got used to the change, it was nothing.

Those that stayed, I still occasionally see some that claim ED is what REALLY killed the game. 
When the shutdown was announced there were some like that on the official forums too.

[Ironwolf]

I would be one of the ones who believe ED killed the game.

It wasn't just the change that was the issue - it was making the change and saying well you didn't lose anything and if you did - tough go ahead and leave because people always come and go in MMO's. They could have implemented the IO's changes at the same time as the ED nerf and it would have been a far better solution. You took something away from people and then said - we don't care if you like it or not.

It was more the asshattery of Jack Emmert than the actual changes that made people extremely angry. I had a full (at the time) SG of 52 players and within 2 months we had 7 left. It really, really hurt and some people never came back after that.

[JaguarX]

I would be one of the ones who believe ED killed the game.

It wasn't just the change that was the issue - it was making the change and saying well you didn't lose anything and if you did - tough go ahead and leave because people always come and go in MMO's. They could have implemented the IO's changes at the same time as the ED nerf and it would have been a far better solution. You took something away from people and then said - we don't care if you like it or not.

It was more the asshattery of Jack Emmert than the actual changes that made people extremely angry. I had a full (at the time) SG of 52 players and within 2 months we had 7 left. It really, really hurt and some people never came back after that.

Yeah the tone of "tough go ahead and leave" is never good for business. Well, kind of like the end result.

I noticed that in four SG (most of my toons didnt join the same SG) I joined many was on their way way out because of ED. One SG had max people, we couldnt even invite anymore then the next day, it only was about ten people including the 4 that joined that day. I guess some people took it literal and actually left. Sad. Then i13 seemed to be the nail in the coffin for the rest of the SGs I was apart of besides two on virtue. After I14, I think only one had more than 10 people including the ones that havent logged in a couple of years, while some I logged into some characters to realize I was the only one in the SG.

But hindsight is 20/20. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time to someone, and some were especially the ones that left were extremely upset at Jack.

[Arcana]

They could have implemented the IO's changes at the same time as the ED nerf and it would have been a far better solution.

Theoretically yes.  Practically, no.  That was not possible.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I would be one of the ones who believe ED killed the game.

It wasn't just the change that was the issue - it was making the change and saying well you didn't lose anything and if you did - tough go ahead and leave because people always come and go in MMO's. They could have implemented the IO's changes at the same time as the ED nerf and it would have been a far better solution. You took something away from people and then said - we don't care if you like it or not.

It was more the asshattery of Jack Emmert than the actual changes that made people extremely angry. I had a full (at the time) SG of 52 players and within 2 months we had 7 left. It really, really hurt and some people never came back after that.

i don't agree that ED killed the game, especially considering how much longer it was around after than ED than before ED. Admittedly the way ED was introduced and how the reactions to its introduction were addressed were handled badly, but ED itself (even without IOs) didn't make the average character unplayable or even significantly more difficult to play in standard conditions. Well, maybe Blasters had it harder, but that was more to do with the problems with the AT's design than ED itself. (IMHO, YMMV, TBDI, ATSBBR)

[JaguarX]

I'm not sure what precisely you mean by "brushing off" but there's a difference between being understanding about a shutdown, and nevertheless realistic as to the financial reasons compelling that shutdown.

burshing off-Apathy, not caring, not showing the same emotional support and understand we damand for this game's closing.

Really there wasnt much "understanding" about the other games closing and the other groups losing their home and having their heart and investment ripped from them.

Even what is considered a realistic reason, even financially, is relative. It has even been stated here and in many times in old forum that some see why COX died. Some even said it was because it was merely collateral damage. In the last days, not too many here was keen to that viewpoint and called those people just about everything under the sun. Yet, when it came to the other games closing, it seemed it was easy to see the logical reason why even though logical reason varies by definition. Some say there was no logical reason outside spite that NCSOft closed down Tabula Rasa, yet many here say there wasa reason but will get offended if someone say there wasa logical reason that NCSoft closed down COX.

Now I agree I dont see the ogistics of COX closing, but I'm on the inside of COX. Just as the rest of us so I can understand it's hard to imagine the others that had inside view point of their respective games and how they probably didnt want to hear it was jus business, or there wasa good reason, etc. anymore than we want to hear those statements about closing of COX. There are people that think NCSoft had perfecty good reason to shutdown COX. I bet if they strolled right now in here and said that they probably would get the same response they got in the past. Not a good one. Hell, I seen here about people that agree with NCSoft decision must be paid employees out to undermine our efforts. Maybe, maybe not, but they might just see it in a different way that make logical sense for them to close just as we view there was logical reason for the other games closing without giving a second thought that they also lost their home, their investment, their characters, their work, their hobby, their therapy. For some I think there have been given more thought about it now, but prior to the closing, it was as no one gave a crap. It was just another game closing from a business decision. Yet, it seems like deadly sin to treat this situation as such as we (Asa whole) treated other game closing. Do I agree with that way of thinking? Nope. Just curious of why is apathy appropriate for those other 5 games closig and there is always an easy explaination and reason behind the decision but there is no way possible in the entire world in a logical mind that someone could see this closing as equally logical, even though the sititation is not exactly the same as the rest, and if they do they must be a paid NCSoft employee?

[srmalloy]

i don't agree that ED killed the game, especially considering how much longer it was around after than ED than before ED. Admittedly the way ED was introduced and how the reactions to its introduction were addressed were handled badly, but ED itself (even without IOs) didn't make the average character unplayable or even significantly more difficult to play in standard conditions. Well, maybe Blasters had it harder, but that was more to do with the problems with the AT's design than ED itself.

It was severely game-changing for a particular type of build -- if you picked the proper Ancillary pool to get Focused Accuracy, and slotted it to make the End cost bearable, you could rely on Focused Accuracy to provide the to-hit bonus to get a good accuracy against mobs, which would let you six-slot your attacks for damage, accepting the fact that getting stunned meant that you had one more toggle to light off again before you were combat-effective afterward as a tradeoff for doing significantly more damage. ED made this build pessimal by making half of the slotting in each attack virtually pointless and cutting the potential damage output of the character by a third. Between ED and the "small tweaks" to Regeneration that changed it from a mostly toggle-and-forget powerset to one of the more click-dependent powersets, I sidelined and eventually deleted a level 50 Katana/Regen scrapper. Although I always thought that the big problem with Regeneration was that Instant Healing was built wrong. Instead of a power that made you heal a lot faster, healing each hit again and again until it was all gone, IH should have been designed so that it took each hit and made it act like Spectral Wounds -- you take all the damage, then after a short delay, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' healed. By making it work once on each damage effect, rather than over and over again as many times as it took to heal it away, it would have been balanceable against the effects of Defense and Resistance, while making it truer to the name of the power. But that's water under the bridge now.

[Arcana]

It was severely game-changing for a particular type of build

That could be said for lots of powers-related changes.  Most of them, in fact.

If ED "killed" the game, it was an extremely time-delayed fuse.  There were lots of anecdotes about large groups of players leaving after ED, but the fact is that such pockets of people leaving occurred continuously from launch to shutdown.  No more of them occurred to my knowledge in the months after ED than at any other time.

The fact is that because ED occurred at the same time as the launch of City of Villains, anecdotes about the population of the game around that time are extremely unreliable.  I can say that overall server populations did not materially drop around that time.  Because it was a point of debate even before ED launched, it was something I collected statistics on.  If there was a drop in overall player population in the six months after Issue 6 launched relative to before Issue 6, it was immeasurable (populations spiked *upward* after Issue 6 launched because of an influx of players playing red side for the first time; that spike eventually dropped downward to near pre-I6 levels over time).

[Septipheran]

I guess I'm not banned here anymore! That's cool. I see Arcanaville is sticking up for Jack. That's neat- maybe she's now in Cryptic's pocket.The using three syllable words to prove a point approach might still be working, so I won't try too hard to poke holes in it.

As far as I know though, Jack is currently CEO of Cryptic. His company is freaking terrible. Champions Online gets no development whatsoever. If Champions got a third of the development that COH got, it would be a freaking miracle. Remember those random, bonus holiday missions that we got for a day or two in COH? In Champions Online, those are the new content. In COH, if you missed one of those, you missed out on a badge. You still got 2 new end game raids, a few new zones and a ton of new power sets every few months.

 Champions doesn't even have an end game. Jack and co. will sell you a super pack with an airplane looking costume change emote and then call it new content. Cryptic will fix a bug and then the community will erupt in more joy than COH fans would over a new issue being released.

The dude is shady as hell. But don't worry!! Cryptic has a STAR TREK GAME~! WOO! I BET NO ONE'S EVER MADE A STAR TREK GAME BEFORE!!!

Look it up. Star Trek online. It reports to its Korean overlords with lockbox sales, and it's still a third of the game that Eve Online is. It might be some percentage of WoW, but it's too small to calculate.

DON'T WORRY THOUGH!!!

CRYPTIC IS COMING OUT WITH A BRAND SPANKIN' NEW SWORDZ AND DRAGONZ AND DUNGEONZ N' MAGIC MMO!!!!!

NO 1 HAZ EVER DONE DIS B4!!!! GOOD IDEA JACK!!!

OMG. Awesome.

Meanwhile, never fear, super hero fans! We continue to strive and put effort into our projects!

Eventually, Champions Online might offer TWO LOCKBOXES AT A TIME!!!!!

Trust Jack. This guy, I tell ya, he knows how to run a business.


-TwoHeadedBoy

-Gofreakyerself,fgt

[Knightslayer]

I guess I'm not banned here anymore! That's cool. I see Arcanaville is sticking up for Jack. That's neat- maybe she's now in Cryptic's pocket.The using three syllable words to prove a point approach might still be working, so I won't try too hard to poke holes in it.

With such constructive posts I can't possibly fathom how that ever happened. 
Also, PWI is originally Chinese, not Korean.

[Knightslayer]

The thing is, though, that purely free players do nothing but cost money, and add lag and queues, without giving anything in return.  The *real* question here is, "Which one rakes/raked in more money at its peak?"

They also add (much needed) activity.
One of the most common complaints before Freedom was how hard it was to get a team sometimes (whether you thought it was a valid complaint or not, it was still one that popped up all the time).

[Ironwolf]

I believe ED killed the game in the long run.

It wasn't a BOOM and they are gone nuke - it was DoT that slowly whittled it down. Many people I tried to encourage trying the game again said flatout the Devs are clueless with the constant nerfs and rebalancing. Once you tick off your playerbase and they walk away it really is an uphill battle to get them to trust you again.

[Arcana]

I believe ED killed the game in the long run.

It wasn't a BOOM and they are gone nuke - it was DoT that slowly whittled it down. Many people I tried to encourage trying the game again said flatout the Devs are clueless with the constant nerfs and rebalancing. Once you tick off your playerbase and they walk away it really is an uphill battle to get them to trust you again.

"The players" say that about every dev team, including the WoW team.  Except in my experience, most of the players that complained about ED complained about lots of other problems in the game that didn't even exist, which made it difficult to consider any possibility of making them happy.

[JaguarX]

They also add (much needed) activity.
One of the most common complaints before Freedom was how hard it was to get a team sometimes (whether you thought it was a valid complaint or not, it was still one that popped up all the time).

Yeah on low pop servers especially outside the ever changing "peak hours" forming a full team got challenging. It got to a point where I rarely seen non-SG member full team outside freedom and virtue. Many occasions on other servers spent more time trying to get the required members than doing the actual TF. Many times just had to resort to trying to find even temporary fillers or dual multiple account people just to start. That IS my experience.

[Artillerie]

There can be compensating factors on being on a lower population server. Union was probably considered one of those but it had a real community feel as over time you got to know a good chunk of the playerbase. This actually helped team forming - it was quite easy to put together full teams at reasonable times of the day.

[Hyperstrike]

Champions doesn't even have an end game.

Champions barely has a game.
They have, essentially, one storyline leveling path and then Alerts (a pickup mission grinding path).

Teaming in CO bites.  You're hobbled by your lowest level teammates.  They essentially dictate what you can and cannot do and where you can and cannot go.  All content in the game is mono-level.  A level 15 mission is a level 15 mission.  There's no level "range" at all.  And the "difficulty" modifier simply steps up from "cakewalk" to "alpha strike kills you, beta strike kills the next guy, etc" and is only really suitable for heavily kitted out toons at max level.

Worse, the sidekicking is almost entirely manual.  Like the bad-old-days before super-sidekicking.  Only worse.  Because you have to put YOURSELF back into sidekick mode.
And if the person falling out of sidekick mode is higher level than the team leader, everyone stops earning XP, resulting in people screaming at teammates to get back in SK.

And if you just want to grind alerts (like doing radios in CoH), most lowbies don't have the durability or damage output to complete them successfully.  So you get a small smattering of kill XP, and no end of mission rewards...

And don't get me started on the byzantine, utility obfuscating piece of shit it has for a UI.

And the latest?

Their new event, being run like an alert.  Limited time.
Problems with the giant monster at the end being unaffected and untargetable because it's so big that it's target point is beyond player range for melee and many AoE.
And now, they've essentially exemplared everyone in the event to level 30.  This can cut damage output and durability of level 40 players by 50% or more.  Making them WEAKER than more or less equivalent L30 players.

I think at this point, CO is some pavlovian experiment to see how much pain they can inflict on players before said players say "fuck it" and leave.

[JaguarX]

Yeah this cycle of half done super hero MMOs have to be stopped. A fairly relatively compared ot the other mmo super hero mmo get murked, the other two seems half finished and no attention to it in sight. I bet if CO wasa fantasy MMO, they would have a budgte with more money and people than they would know what to do with.

I think which ever plan Z plan comes to fruitation, I hope they do it proper and treat the game with some actual attention, and avoid the pitfalls of the other MMOs which is treated like side projects while the fantasy ones get all the attention. Advertising, get the word out, do not depend on pure word of mouth. Bugs, if there bugs, fix them. Dont add new content that is buggy on top of bugs on top of bugs and leave it. Personnel, have enough personnel to ensure health of the game one to 3 guys cant do it especially a large game, and do not forget allowing creative minds with customizable stuff. Get those basics straight you can build a monster. The three superhero games had and have the potential to be beasts of a game in their own right but it seems that no one is willing to give super hero MMO a fair development fighting chance to be great. They build it half done and then say "oh aint a market for it." Of course not if half done bs and no development nor attention no advertising is ever done. there will never be a true market for it and it will stay niche. If they put even 1/4 half as much effort into a superhero mmo as they do those fantasy games, then a super hero game can rise and fill the market gap that is wide open and untapped at this moment while every flock to build another fantasy mmo among thousands of fantasy mmos that is like the rest of the fantasy mmos that is just a WoW rip off.

Am I the only one seeign the gold mine in the super hero MMO sector? Even in a gold mine, you still have to work to get the gold out. Cant arrive with a feather to dig the gold out and except must results. You might get a few dust bits and few lose rocks but the majority of the potential wont be realized until they get in and put effort into it.

[Arcana]

I have not followed Champions Online post-launch as much as I did during the beta, but I will say that in spite of the fact that I think there are many small things they got right that City of Heroes got wrong (and in many cases never fixed) the pieces of Champions Online never meshed together into a good game like City of Heroes did.

My honest opinion is that Cryptic got incredibly lucky with City of Heroes; luck that the Paragon team built upon.  They did not get lucky with Champions Online.  STO seems to me to be a better, if more superficial, game than CO.  A part of me wonders if STO is a better game *because* its more superficial, and therefore has less opportunity to make critical mistakes.

An objective comparison of CoH and CO - and a lesson the Plan Z developers should spend some time thinking about - is that a collection of good ideas does not make a good game: they are not synonymous.  And critically, a good game can house many bad ideas, but a bad game cannot be saved by any amount of good ideas. 

Unintended consequences are so potentially dangerous that no good game design should have any of them - good or bad.  CO is full of them.  You let people take any ranged or melee attacks they want, and the unintended consequence is that melee attacks become basically worthless.  You let everyone take the same defenses, and you make a mainstay of comic book heroes - scrappers and bricks - basically crippled.  You make a crafting system that is moderated in its effects so you do not need to apply something like ED to them, and you make them have lots of different options so you can craft many different kinds of things, and the combination of wide options and limited benefit makes them almost completely pointless (I'm speaking of the old system: I haven't even been able to gather enough attention span to carefully investigate the new system).

Of course, in one critical area CO was doomed from the start.  When Cryptic was making City of Heroes, they literally had no idea what they were doing numbers-wise, so they made lots of mistakes.  But they literally had no ability to put too many overly broken numerical frameworks into place because they couldn't construct them at all.  The Cryptic team that made CO *had* the ability to make strong numerical frameworks but *lacked* the ability to correctly balance them, and that made COs numbers in many ways worse than CoH's.  CoH's were practically random, and subject to intuitive negotiation.  COs were created by bad formulas, and as a result every potential fix was itself broken.  The fact that they refused (at least while I was there a lot) to reverse the Block/PFF decision was a priori proof to me that their numbers were built on really bad math with no escape hatch to negotiate around it.

The City of Heroes developers were *always* open to negotiation, because ironically they had a healthy distrust of their own numerical systems.  At least while I was a frequent player of CO, and throughout the beta process, Cryptic seemed to have a much stronger level of trust in their calculation prowess.  Which  is a very bad thing to have when your calculation prowess is often wrong.


Here's the thing.  I like playing STO for a few minutes or hours at a time.  Its very approachable in my opinion, you can just jump right in.  But I get bored quickly.  CoH is also very approachable in my opinion: you can just jump right in.  And its involving, so I enjoy playing it for stretches of time without getting bored.  CO is not approachable in my opinion.  Its not as easy to just jump into playing it, particularly after a significant break.  *And* it gets boring after a while.  A game that makes you want to take breaks from it and then is difficult to jump back into is a recipe for suicide in an MMO.  And no amount of otherwise good technology can overcome that (for example, in my opinion  the block/bigattack/mez system in CO is I think a brilliant gameplay component: it would have made CoH-style blasters far more viable for the average player if critters had to signal their intent to use particularly devastating attacks or mezzes, forcing blasters essentially to lower offense to temporarily boost defense, while melee archetypes could choose to dive in and challenge those critters during those attacks - perhaps even interrupt them).

[Arcana]

I think which ever plan Z plan comes to fruitation, I hope they do it proper and treat the game with some actual attention, and avoid the pitfalls of the other MMOs which is treated like side projects while the fantasy ones get all the attention.

I believe I've said this before, but it bears repeating.  I don't think the greatest contribution to the City of Heroes community that the Plan Z teams can make is to deliver a game to us.  In many ways, that's incidental.  The greatest contribution to our community they can make is to create a self-sustaining community-based development structure that can support a game indefinitely.  No one is going to want to build City of Heroes forever.  No one is going to have that kind of focus forever.  Most people won't even want to *play* City of Heroes forever.  But a community of players and developers that can collectively keep the game alive and evolving even as individuals leave would be something truly great.

The Plan Z teams may choose at least initially to use a conventional model to create their games: a development house that writes code and develops content to its playerbase.  But in the long run, if they deliver games that cannot be shut down so long as players want to play it, that would be, if not revolutionary, then at least uncommonly amazing.

The Plan Z teams are currently attempting to do what Cryptic and NCSoft already managed to do: create a game we want to play.  Where NCSoft failed was in how it handled walking away from that game.  Where the Plan Z teams can surpass NCSoft is in addressing that problem so it cannot strike us again.  That would be what they can do better than NCSoft can, better than any other publishing house probably can.

[JaguarX]

I believe I've said this before, but it bears repeating.  I don't think the greatest contribution to the City of Heroes community that the Plan Z teams can make is to deliver a game to us.  In many ways, that's incidental.  The greatest contribution to our community they can make is to create a self-sustaining community-based development structure that can support a game indefinitely.  No one is going to want to build City of Heroes forever.  No one is going to have that kind of focus forever.  Most people won't even want to *play* City of Heroes forever.  But a community of players and developers that can collectively keep the game alive and evolving even as individuals leave would be something truly great.

The Plan Z teams may choose at least initially to use a conventional model to create their games: a development house that writes code and develops content to its playerbase.  But in the long run, if they deliver games that cannot be shut down so long as players want to play it, that would be, if not revolutionary, then at least uncommonly amazing.

The Plan Z teams are currently attempting to do what Cryptic and NCSoft already managed to do: create a game we want to play.  Where NCSoft failed was in how it handled walking away from that game.  Where the Plan Z teams can surpass NCSoft is in addressing that problem so it cannot strike us again.  That would be what they can do better than NCSoft can, better than any other publishing house probably can.

I see.


Well it would be nice to have a super hero game that actually aims to be great and mainstream.

Maybe one day someone will see there is killer money to be made there is a serious effort is put into it that can appeal to a broader fan base than the small pocket of people we have here and scattered in the other two relatively small super mmos. If a fantasy game got the same effort that is considered a great effort for a super hero mmo then people would say that the publishing company basically sabatoged that game yet it's considered good enough effort for a super hero mmo standard, yet no where near good enough for fantasy mmo standard

[chasearcanum]

Its probably no surprise that I agree with Arcanaville's posts in this thread,  but I'll go further and even question the OP's claim that this was smack talk.  I don't see Jack "talking smack" in this interview at all. at all.  By comparing the game (STO) with the business model he once disparaged with his visible "high water mark" of his most visible product, he's making a comparison on what he's learned over the years and how that has impacted him.   

Some people put every post where Jack mentions CoH as if he has a vendetta against it, which doesn't reflect what I've heard about Jack at all.  I talked to Jack personally only once, but it was clear at that time that he saw CoH as one of his crowning achievements.  It was his baby, and even when it broke away on its own and actually was in competition with one of his other babies, he took pride in what it accomplished.  I've seen him speak since then and while we didn't have a chance to talk directly, it still becomes apparent that he is proud of his first great creation and proud of what became of it.  That said, it WAS his first title and there WAS a lot of winging it, a lot of learning moments, and a LOT of "if I could do it over" moments.  He's an academic at heart and does try to be open where he can be open.   He tries to be frank and sometimes his observations are incorrect or but they've never been malicious.   Combine all that with an ego not unlike many academics- and the tendency to use one common ego-massaging trick is to re-brand "I was wrong" into "I've learned a lot since then." 

• I always thought Free to Play models were bad, so when I did my first MMO (City of Heroes) we stuck to subscription
• We then switched to Free to Play in Star Trek Online at a very early stage in its lifecycle.
• Under Free to Play, STO has his play levels that far exceeded the userbase than CoH did.

See? He could have said "I was talking through my ass back then and totally missed a way to drive user adoption and bypass the 'first payment' barrier."  Instead he turned the "I was wrong" shame into a "I've learned so much!" proud moment.   Another trick in this is you tie your "failure" to something that turned out rather well (one reason he probably didn't use CO as his counterexample):

"Yeah, I was wrong to doubt the F2P model and it hampered my first game's adoption, so that first game only was able to make tens of millions annually, be widely received within the gaming media, and gave us the revenue to launch the studio's efforts in several other games.  What a screwup, eh?"

If that's the worst screwup you have, you don't look too bad, do you?*

Additionally, keep in mind the context of these posts.  Jack's out there building hype for a new game.  He's making the circuit.  When you do this you try to broadcast your resume, and slip them in where you can.  You want people to say "Hey, he made City of Heroes and Star Trek Online.  I liked those.  I wonder what the next one will be like?"    The fact that he mentioned COH- a recently SHUT DOWN game, means that he doesn't see anything to be shameful of in the game's rich lifespan.  Its one that he's still proud of, otherwise he wouldn't  hitch his wagon to it while peddling his next big thing.




*You see that in job applicant interviews all the time: Q: "what is your biggest weakness?" A:"Oh, I tend to take on too much work myself and end up having to stay late and work weekends to make the deadline.  I've got to get better at that before I ride myself ragged...."  ...so... your worst quality  is that you accept too much work and put in voluntary overtime to make sure deadlines are met?  Yeah, no employer's gonna like that..