Negative Article on Massively

[Iron-Emerald]

I particularly like his reply to @jonno28nz. [Like, seriously--that comment has endeared him to me on so many levels]. I think ultimately he shares the realistic view many of us have.)

Yeah, I was really glad to get that response too. Eliot has been a great help to any efforts to save CoH and his initial article was a bit jarring. But from his comments it's just a call for people to be realistic, I'd think that he'd still share the word and lend support if a truly genuine prospect of getting the game back comes up.

[EDIT: Fixing quote box syntax ~Agge]

[Captain Electric]

I'm thinking more of an "Ark of the Covenant" moment where all the materials associated with the game is crated up, warehoused and then the paperwork is misplaced.

Congratulations, FatherXmas, in your last few comments, you've finally entered the garden of wild speculation along with the rest of us. You're just watering a different plant a few feet over.

You've been a bastion for the facts (which I appreciate despite the frustration involved). But you're just being lazy now. You're just being cynical and making stuff up. I like you, don't take this the wrong way. But...

"Yeah? Well...well uh...YEAH WELL I bet they LOST the data, CAPTAIN!!!"

Come on, now. Really? :roll:

NCSoft needs to sell.

[Tanklet]

Looks to me like Eliot Lefebvre's written something of a self-cathartic piece there - the fact that he brings up how he dealt with his own father's passing makes it pretty clear he's chosen his own path of how to handle the closure of CoH.

I can understand why he's gone off on a bit of a rant : because he's reached his own balancing point he's expecting others to do the same, and with that expectation in mind, he seems almost to take personal offence to the fact that some folk still have the hope he left behind.

Jealousy perhaps? Or sympathy? Possibly both. Losing CoH wasn't easy for any of us, and because we're all individuals, we all must deal with it in our own way. Eliot's found his way, and I think he's simply trying to pass on what he learned along that way. That's laudable, but it overlooks the fact that some of us did not, and will not accept that the loss of CoH was final.

He's right to say that he had to accept his father's passing because 'the alternative was dumb', but a video game is not a person. In a very real way, CoH still exists completely unchanged on each and every one of our hard drives. The game is not currently active, sure, but it certainly is NOT dead in the way people die. As a digital entity, CoH is merely currently dormant, so it's perfectly understandable for many people to outright refuse to accept that CoH is 'history'.

Eliot's good people, and he knows he's stuck his neck on a block here to an extent, because he's fully expecting rants and flames back at him. So while he and we may differ in how we regard the future of CoH, we should never forget that the only reason he stuck his neck out at all is because he loved CoH just as much as we do.

+1

[Illusionss]

Quick reply: Some guy on an MMO website decides to "move on."

That's nice. But we are in no way obligated to obey what he wants.

This is just like anti-CoXers on the official boards telling a grief-stricken, punch-drunk game population that we needed to "move on" because we were not this upset when Auto Assault closed, so we have no right to be upset now. Roffle! Really?! Because I and only I will decide when and what my response to any given thing will be.

Also an immediate family member dying is in no way equivalent to a game dying. None of us will get off this planet alive. But what happened to CoX was sheer senseless maliciousness; we know this because they are unwilling to sell. That's outright malice. Some guy's father dying isn't an act of malice, it is natural law, adjudicated by no company, and inescapable.

I have been through the loss of an immediate family member and therefore speak from experience. 

[Segev]

Quick reply: Some guy on an MMO website decides to "move on."

That's nice. But we are in no way obligated to obey what he wants.

I don't even read it as a "move on, already!" plea, but a "please take a reasoned, realistic stance when discussing possible hope" request. He's not spitting on anything. He's not questioning people's desire to see the game return. He is saying he doesn't expect it to. He is asking as a personal request that people not jump up and down in rabid excitement at the barest straws of hope, but instead examine such offered tidbits to determine if there's really anything likely to be there.

None of us will get off this planet alive.

Astronauts will disagree with you. ^_~

[TimtheEnchanter]

3) Mailbombing the media just isn't a good idea.  I know people are keen to get our story/idea out there, but from experience, if I have deadlines to meet and if 200 people sent me a 'write about this! ' email,  I would probably not have been too impressed either.  I know by our nature we're a bit of a multiheaded beast, and there will always be CoH players who aren't at this site, and will act independent of whatever advice is given here.  But harrassing people who can write and tell the world how we're behaving isn't a good plan if we want to keep them sympathetic to us.

The trouble with even trying to prevent this though, is it would just lead to the exact opposite extreme: the word doesn't get out at all.

Nobody who sent an email knows that someone else did. And if we assume that someone else already has it covered, we risk running into the "stone in the road" scenario, where everyone leaves the issue alone based on the assumption that someone else will handle it. Not only is this a poor assumption to make in the everyday world, but it's also the exact opposite of how superheroes think.

And then there's the question of, would the PAX incident even have been reported without the mass of emails? Would one email have been sufficient? Everything I know about the media tells me no. In many ways, media is a democracy. They try to give what the majority wants to see, because that maximizes profit. If all of us who care, don't inform them that we care, then how will they know if a story is worth running?

[TimtheEnchanter]

"Yeah? Well...well uh...YEAH WELL I bet they LOST the data, CAPTAIN!!!"

Come on, now. Really? :roll:

Its not outside the realm of possibility though.

I seem to remember SOE losing the original code for SWG, sometime after the NGE fiasco happened.

[FatherXmas]

Congratulations, FatherXmas, in your last few comments, you've finally entered the garden of wild speculation along with the rest of us. You're just watering a different plant a few feet over.

You've been a bastion for the facts (which I appreciate despite the frustration involved). But you're just being lazy now. You're just being cynical and making stuff up. I like you, don't take this the wrong way. But...

"Yeah? Well...well uh...YEAH WELL I bet they LOST the data, CAPTAIN!!!"

Come on, now. Really? :roll:

NCSoft needs to sell.

Nope, actual personal experience.  A little over a decade ago I was working at a company on a project with around a half a dozen other developers.  The company had a couple of financial missteps, like betting the wrong way on the new Euro (we sold internationally so hedging overseas currency is SOP), the Y2K fix slowed production for 3 months because because the SAP migration from test to live didn't go smoothly, etc.  So they brought in new upper management and decimated the R&D department (and sales and training and service and manufacturing, it was company wide) including the product I was working on.  We had been developing a new version of a 10+ year old fairly successful product, from the ground up to embrace the "modern" computer of the day with loads of memory, huge hard drives and a proper Windows GUI.  They decided the current version, one which was developed as a DOS app running under a home brewed DOS 32-bit extender with virtual memory support but then hacked into a barely Windows program that took no advantage of a modern OS and computer, was good enough and could be sold for a few more years so they laid off the entire group (who most have worked on the product for 5 or more years) and mothball development.

They misplaced all that new code we worked on.  The SOP of the IT department is to wipe the drives of every laid off employee (because we are all evil corporate terrorists as soon as we are laid off) by the end of the day and since our group ran our own code archive server, just like every other project, they mindlessly wiped it as well.  The backup tapes had been packed up and sent off site and they couldn't find them (likely they were mistakenly sent with all our paper records to an industrial shredder).  While they could rebuild the existing product, they still had the source for that, about 6 man years worth of new code development went into the great bit bucket in the sky.

I still know people who work there, after 10 years of mothballing they finally started to rewrite the code, from scratch, again.

So don't underestimate the stupidity, well accidental stupidity, of an organization.  Everyone was just doing what they were suppose to do and FUBAR happens.

[JaguarX]

The trouble with even trying to prevent this though, is it would just lead to the exact opposite extreme: the word doesn't get out at all.

Nobody who sent an email knows that someone else did. And if we assume that someone else already has it covered, we risk running into the "stone in the road" scenario, where everyone leaves the issue alone based on the assumption that someone else will handle it. Not only is this a poor assumption to make in the everyday world, but it's also the exact opposite of how superheroes think.

And then there's the question of, would the PAX incident even have been reported without the mass of emails? Would one email have been sufficient? Everything I know about the media tells me no. In many ways, media is a democracy. They try to give what the majority wants to see, because that maximizes profit. If all of us who care, don't inform them that we care, then how will they know if a story is worth running?

Hmmm. Interesting good point. But in case of massively I think they stated at one point to slow to email bombing to them. Not to mention it seems even after they ran articles they continued to get bombed which one looks as if they the bombers are not looking at the stuff they write and come off as not being able to be satisfied.

I think the issue that it seems that some people don't know when to stop the bombing.
Which can be hard to gauge in itself because the receiver usually can't or won't reply to every email coming in.

Then it depends on the topic. Many topics that make the big news don't happen through mass emails. Sometimes its merely a person emailing them something that look interesting and then due to it being reported it becomes popular. Not to mention how they view email bombing the slant could be "a small group valiently standing up to a bully corporation against all odds." Or get them annoyed at being bombed and saying " Crazed game addicts. More at 6"

[JanessaVR]

None of us will get off this planet alive.

I'm a transhumanist with a cryonics contract (2 actually, primary and backup) - so speak for yourself as I plan on sticking around.   

So it's business as usual with me when I expect our game to rise from cold storage as well.  :)

[JaguarX]

I'm a transhumanist with a cryonics contract (2 actually, primary and backup) - so speak for yourself as I plan on sticking around.   

So it's business as usual with me when I expect our game to rise from cold storage as well.  :)

Heeeeeeeyyy! I heard rumors about those people existing but never even see one communicate in person. That is cool stuff. We might need a few of y'all at least in the future so the historians can't pretty up the time period and make it look like everything was all harmony with no worries in one to two hundred years. You can set the record straight.

Me when I buy the farm the farm is good ole fashioned bought for good.. If I wake up in 2080 id be pissed and probably go chewing on people's brain.

[Illusionss]

I'm a transhumanist with a cryonics contract (2 actually, primary and backup) - so speak for yourself as I plan on sticking around.   

So it's business as usual with me when I expect our game to rise from cold storage as well.  :)

Well, good luck with that. I have frozen steaks in my freezer this minute, and they look pretty dead to me.

[Segev]

Well, good luck with that. I have frozen steaks in my freezer this minute, and they look pretty dead to me.

Just give them some green color, and they will ask for more.

[Captain Electric]

Well, good luck with that. I have frozen steaks in my freezer this minute, and they look pretty dead to me.

Janessa is referring to vitrification, not freezing.

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/vitrification.html

[JanessaVR]

Janessa is referring to vitrification, not freezing.

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/vitrification.html

Indeed, thank you.  However, not wishing to hijack this thread (any further), if anyone wishes to open up a thread on this topic in General Discussion, I will be happy to expound on it there at greater length for the curious.

[Heroette]

Indeed, thank you.  However, not wishing to hijack this thread (any further), if anyone wishes to open up a thread on this topic in General Discussion, I will be happy to expound on it there at greater length for the curious.

And I don't want to hijack it either but I do want to say the old saying "You learn something new everyday".

Back to our regularly scheduled programing...

[Noyjitat]

Well I think it's time to start reporting the assholes in that thread. I've stopped responding to the nonsense... I think you probably see who I'm talking about.

[Surelle]

Well I think it's time to start reporting the assholes in that thread. I've stopped responding to the nonsense... I think you probably see who I'm talking about.

You can't let trolls get to you.  All you can do is respond with your own points in a rational way, and then move on.  Even though the troll might never change, other people that read your post might get something positive out of it.

[Triplash]

You can't let unicorns get to you.  All you can do is respond with your own points in a rational way, and then move on.  Even though the unicorn might never change, other people that read your post might get something positive out of it.

Exactly. There's relatively little chance of changing a unicorn's mind. If they're doing it for fun, then they're getting a kick out of making you angry and they'll never stop. And if they're doing it out of stubbornness, then there's nothing you can say because they're simply not listening.

What you have to do is talk, not to the unicorn, but to the other people reading it. Be positive and polite for them, because they're your best chance for a point to be heard. But if they see you acting just as negatively or rudely as the unicorn, they're not going to care which side is which. Because people who aren't involved in the conversation only see two sides: "worth listening to" and "not worth listening to".

[JaguarX]

Exactly. There's relatively little chance of changing a unicorn's mind. If they're doing it for fun, then they're getting a kick out of making you angry and they'll never stop. And if they're doing it out of stubbornness, then there's nothing you can say because they're simply not listening.

What you have to do is talk, not to the unicorn, but to the other people reading it. Be positive and polite for them, because they're your best chance for a point to be heard. But if they see you acting just as negatively or rudely as the unicorn, they're not going to care which side is which. Because people who aren't involved in the conversation only see two sides: "worth listening to" and "not worth listening to".

Basically.

What is that saying.

"Don't argue with an idiot; people watching may not be able to tell the difference."

and or

"Never wrestle with a pig—you get dirty and the pig likes it"