New efforts!

[ivanhedgehog]

This exactly :), I would advise caution. As long as Ncsoft does not say a flat out no, there is still hope to one day fly above our home once again.

one email saying hi! every month or so does not negotiation make. if nexon is still sitting on the fence in a year, it will be too late. at least 1 of the successors will be in beta by that time and that cuts the value of a long defunct coh by a lot. at some time the funding sources for the buyout will turn away. there is a finite amount of time and ncsoft is wasting it.

[Noyjitat]

I hear all the arguments with emp controller vs emp defender but this is really just my opinion. A controllers job is different than a defenders job and your expectations for each are also different. When I need a buffer/debuffer or heals for my team then I want the class that specializes in it which is a defender. That's the job they bring to the team, not extra damage or anything else. If I need controls i'm going to look for a dominator preferably followed by a controller. (although some controller combos were indeed better (like ice/cold and the famed fire/kin) Doms always seemed like the controller replacement to me when villains came out. Because with perma dom or saving domination for a boss fight that mag 5 - 6 hold is freaking awesome and the burst damage is great too.

I realize most are going to disagree with me here but I found the strengths of those archetypes to play better this way.

[Joshex]

When ever I miss City the drive to create city's functionality in my own game goes sky high, sadly so do the headaches and if no headaches, my egotistical side goes high instead.

procrastination is my main enemy, and it is defeated by one shot from [Missing.CoX] go figure.

the more I work on it the more I appreciate how much work and planning must have actually gone into CoX.

The more functions I recreate and tie together the more accomplished I feel. that feeling however is a two faced ally, one minute it buffs you the next minute suddenly the go red side and lay down the confuse and sleep. thats one thing CoX didn't have, a 'lazy' status effect.

[demotivational; Lazy Mag 4, +Mag1 /tick over time] your enemies laugh as you decide to pay them no attention at all, hey look there's a cat on youtube.

[Surelle]

This is correct in what I could find out about what happened except it wasn't a this OR that problem but rather and this AND that one.

NCSoft wasn't fixed on a single issue with CoH that caused the close. It was multiple issues.

1. Performance - Paragon Studios was given leave to hire more people and improve the game, they did so but also started to make at least 2 other projects that may or may not have been approved prior to the work being done. Having all of the people hired and not seeing the huge flow of cash coming in - during a time they were trying to cut a deal with Nexon sealed the games fate.

2. The ill advised buyout was done very poorly (the first Paragon one before the game was announced as closing). This buyout ticked some people at NCSoft off. The same anger bled over to the TF Hail Mary deal. It was close but personality issues blew everything up and NCSoft decided we won't sell the game to you. It always baffled me that after that attempt they said - let's find someone else NCSoft will sell to since they won't sell to us. I just sat and gathered all the information I could find and said - why won't they sell it to you?  Some of the folks angered NCSoft enough they said we will never sell it to you. This became - we will never sell the game in some people's eyes.

3. Current deal they are Tapping the Deal now. They are just stringing it along not to waste time but because the guy selling it is afraid Nexon will fire him if they win the struggle for the company control. If you do even a little research the reason Nexon gives for trying to takeover NCSoft is some of the older software. What I see while not on the inside is the tapping to keep a little life in the deal and the possibility still in place but no intent to close and finish the deal at this time, due mainly to Nexon and its efforts.

Do you have truly inside information on #3 or are you guessing?  Because it seems like it would be more than one guy selling the CoH IP/i23 image.  There would need to be other approvals I'd think, plus the IP holding company set up, etc.

Hope springs eternal and all that, but I find it hard to believe that Nate's financial backing is still holding on after a year and a half, and willing to wait with their money (that could have been invested elsewhere ages ago) another year or whatever because of a Nexon takeover that seems less and less like it will ever happen.  NCSoft not only shored up their upper echelon, but made a big deal with Netmarble to fend off Nexon.

I think if NCSoft had wanted to do anything but stall and hope we go away without making a public scene this time, they would have done it a long time ago.

[Winter Fable]

I hear all the arguments with emp controller vs emp defender but this is really just my opinion. A controllers job is different than a defenders job and your expectations for each are also different. When I need a buffer/debuffer or heals for my team then I want the class that specializes in it which is a defender. That's the job they bring to the team, not extra damage or anything else. If I need controls i'm going to look for a dominator preferably followed by a controller. (although some controller combos were indeed better (like ice/cold and the famed fire/kin) Doms always seemed like the controller replacement to me when villains came out. Because with perma dom or saving domination for a boss fight that mag 5 - 6 hold is freaking awesome and the burst damage is great too.

I realize most are going to disagree with me here but I found the strengths of those archetypes to play better this way.

I'll still be making Defenders when the day comes.The non-uber builds make the fight tougher but the struggle makes it
fun.If it's too easy it gets boring.

[Vee]

thats one thing CoX didn't have, a 'lazy' status effect.

My erstwhile dissertation committee would strongly disagree.

[Felderburg]

I didn't say "Go and directly piss them off", I said "Stop tip-toeing around them like they're delicate fainting flowers that may be disturbed if we don't constantly shower them with praise."

I think that the reason there are many people who feel this way (pro-tip toeing) is due to the hullabaloo about Facebook posts nearly tanking the deal. I still have no idea how true that is or what the exact situation was, but the general impression I got from the posts here was that people in the know heard back from NCsoft that whatever was happening on Facebook was threatening the deal. If there is some sort of confirmation one way or the other about the actual events of that situation, it would probably help resolve the division between tip-toers and non-tip-toers.

[Arcana]

I hear all the arguments with emp controller vs emp defender but this is really just my opinion. A controllers job is different than a defenders job and your expectations for each are also different. When I need a buffer/debuffer or heals for my team then I want the class that specializes in it which is a defender. That's the job they bring to the team, not extra damage or anything else. If I need controls i'm going to look for a dominator preferably followed by a controller. (although some controller combos were indeed better (like ice/cold and the famed fire/kin) Doms always seemed like the controller replacement to me when villains came out. Because with perma dom or saving domination for a boss fight that mag 5 - 6 hold is freaking awesome and the burst damage is great too.

I realize most are going to disagree with me here but I found the strengths of those archetypes to play better this way.

I tended to look at things a little differently, in that except for very very rare corner cases, I didn't think about teams as needing very specific things like healing or damage.  I tended to look at things in more general terms: if people were dying they needed more damage mitigation, if they were getting caught up in a lot of status or debuffs they needed protection, if they were killing too slow they needed more offense.  Generally, there were multiple ways of getting there, and usually more than one archetype or powerset combination could get there.  If players were dying, a strong tank that could take and sustain aggro would help.  But a controller with enough control could mitigate that damage in a completely different way.  A Force field defender could tackle the same problem from a completely different angle, protecting the players from that damage with direct damage mitigation.

From that perspective no one archetype was universally better than another, or obviously more important to teams than any other.  But the question of which archetype has the best possible chance of contributing the most to a wide range of teams does have an objective answer, and its the archetype that on average has the most possible ways of doing so at a high level, which grants the widest possible set of options.  In my opinion, that's controllers.  But that doesn't make controllers better than defenders to have on teams; that's a completely different question that doesn't have an objective answer.

If you're asking what's the best thing to have on a team, well the answer to that question is: me.  I never let a team fail that was willing to push on, and I never abandoned a team for performance reasons.  I was once on a Positron task force where five of the players quit because they thought the team wouldn't be able to finish it.  I asked the last two if they wanted to push on and told them if they wanted to, I would stick it out.  They said they had never completed a Positron, so I told them I'd make sure they completed this one.  Took two and a half hours, and a lot of inspirations, but I made sure they got the win.  I think any player like that, both willing and able to keep the team going when it looks like they're in a bad place, is the best thing to have on a team.

I was on another team once where this guy had a kind of haphazard blaster build and wasn't really doing anything wrong exactly, and was very polite in chat, but the team leader decided he wasn't pulling his weight and decided to drop him.  He honestly had no idea why.  I decided to drop that team and team with him for a while.  I remember swapping from a scrapper I was playing to my Ill/Rad (my go-to for this sort of thing) and spent about an hour and a half teaming with him, exemping down to his missions and explaining how the game worked, while also basically backing his stick with my Ill/Rad: i.e. letting him play, and just making sure he didn't get into too much trouble while playing enough under speed so as to not make him completely redundant.  Just to make sure I didn't give him a false impression, at the very end I explained that I was playing a bit down to make things interesting, and I proceeded to show him what my build looked like at full speed.  I told him on a good team, it shouldn't matter if he was a little better or a little worse than average, because on a good team there should be plenty of room to play as you want.  But I also told him that over time, if he wanted to learn, he could eventually reach a level of performance that would let him set the rules for how he wanted to play.  I suggested that when that day came, he try to be patient with the next guy that thought having all the travel powers and leadership toggles was a good idea for a level 30 blaster.

I like to think we had one of the better min/max MMO communities, in that many if not most of the most knowledgeable, and absolute best builders, were not elitists.  They didn't think it was their mission to teach the rest of the world how to be more like them, they often thought the whole reason for having all that power was to enable everyone else to do whatever they wanted.  Every once in a while I would run into a forumite in a PUG and we'd recognize each other, and we'd laugh between us when the team we were on was having moments of doubt when they thought something was going to be hard, and we'd just be a pair of anonymous nobodies telling the team to lets just see what happens, whereupon without them really knowing it we basically guardian angeled the team through the tough spots and letting them think they just got lucky.  To me, that's why you become one of the one percent: to look out for the other 99%.

[Abraxus]

I other news....900 pages....really?  Well, what the hell folks!  Might as well push it to 1,000!

I was hoping it would never need to get this far, but since this passes as a way to mark time while we wait for substantive things to happen in our admittedly small CoX world, let's do this!

[MegaWatt]

hey maybe we'll hear something by page 1000! i check back once a week now to catch up and hope there is good news...i miss my characters especially since my friends and i decided on retcons for them should the game relaunch and i've made about 30 costumes (i tweak them alot to get them perfect) for various characters....Icon is evil.

[MGLZadok]

Do you have truly inside information on #3 or are you guessing?  Because it seems like it would be more than one guy selling the CoH IP/i23 image.  There would need to be other approvals I'd think, plus the IP holding company set up, etc.

Hope springs eternal and all that, but I find it hard to believe that Nate's financial backing is still holding on after a year and a half, and willing to wait with their money (that could have been invested elsewhere ages ago) another year or whatever because of a Nexon takeover that seems less and less like it will ever happen.  NCSoft not only shored up their upper echelon, but made a big deal with Netmarble to fend off Nexon.

I think if NCSoft had wanted to do anything but stall and hope we go away without making a public scene this time, they would have done it a long time ago.

While I do agree that there's likely a group of people who would approve such a deal, there will always be at least one scapegoat.  Maybe there's a guy who would catch all the hell for it.  Then again, maybe the entire committee (assuming there is one) could have their necks at the Nexon guillotine, so no one's willing to be that first assenting vote for fear of being the scapegoat.

Corporate Korea is different from Corporate America, for sure, but "fecal matter rolls downhill" is universal.  And it'll stop on the lowest guy who was still high enough to have the pull to stop it.

[LaughingAlex]

I like to think we had one of the better min/max MMO communities, in that many if not most of the most knowledgeable, and absolute best builders, were not elitists.  They didn't think it was their mission to teach the rest of the world how to be more like them, they often thought the whole reason for having all that power was to enable everyone else to do whatever they wanted.  Every once in a while I would run into a forumite in a PUG and we'd recognize each other, and we'd laugh between us when the team we were on was having moments of doubt when they thought something was going to be hard, and we'd just be a pair of anonymous nobodies telling the team to lets just see what happens, whereupon without them really knowing it we basically guardian angeled the team through the tough spots and letting them think they just got lucky.  To me, that's why you become one of the one percent: to look out for the other 99%.

900th page,woot.

As for having the best min/maxers, I think that was true because a huge majority of us Min/Maxers tended to recognize that there was no real best primary/secondary/epic archtype combination in city of heroes.  You could take any combination and min/max them heavily with IO's, and later incarnate powers.  And course there was no perfect build in the game.  There were a tiny amount of bad builds, but those were more due to simply not knowing the power of buffs/debuffs/cc or simply over-specializing(like, as I often say, attackless defender or tanker who only has taunt and is also attackless).  You didn't want to skip to many of your primary/secondary powers but at the same time any primary/secondary could work in the game.  Us min/maxers tended to see that.

[GenericHero05]

one email saying hi! every month or so does not negotiation make. if nexon is still sitting on the fence in a year, it will be too late. at least 1 of the successors will be in beta by that time and that cuts the value of a long defunct coh by a lot. at some time the funding sources for the buyout will turn away. there is a finite amount of time and ncsoft is wasting it.

I don't believe ANY of the "successors" will be able to hold a candle to COH.  I've tried Valiance... I'll take a pass (sorry).

[Optimus Dex]

While I do agree that there's likely a group of people who would approve such a deal, there will always be at least one scapegoat.  Maybe there's a guy who would catch all the hell for it.  Then again, maybe the entire committee (assuming there is one) could have their necks at the Nexon guillotine, so no one's willing to be that first assenting vote for fear of being the scapegoat.

Corporate Korea is different from Corporate America, for sure, but "fecal matter rolls downhill" is universal.  And it'll stop on the lowest guy who was still high enough to have the pull to stop it.

My guess is if Nexon takes over  a lot of peoples heads will roll anyway-a new broom sweeps clean and all that. Does not matter if they sell it - oh Nexon wanted that or why did you not well it to aid the bottom line. if Nexon or any company wants old employees gone - well bye.

[ivanhedgehog]

I don't believe ANY of the "successors" will be able to hold a candle to COH.  I've tried Valiance... I'll take a pass (sorry).

one of their big problems will be cash. the money for this deal is sitting idle. how long will investors sit on their capital before they go somewhere that actually has promise? you might not like a vo, but they at least have progress. coh is a dead issue at this time. I would love to see that change, but my expectations are pretty much nil at this point. the nexon takeover seems to be a dead issue. time to fish or cut bait.

[Goddangit]

They are just stringing it along not to waste time but because the guy selling it is afraid Nexon will fire him if they win the struggle for the company control.

For crying out loud.  Is that the only thing holding things up?  Offer the man a "golden parachute" / signing bonus.  You know -- a bribe.  Half a million can buy you a lot of kimchi in your "retirement".  I'd pitch in.

There is one up side to this.  The longer this software sits on a shelf the older and less valuable it becomes.  Another twenty years and they may well drop it on the public as abandonware.  Of course you'll probably have to play it on antiquated hardware and it will look as sophisticated as Castle Wolfenstein.  And I'll likely be dead by then...

[Arcana]

900th page,woot.

As for having the best min/maxers, I think that was true because a huge majority of us Min/Maxers tended to recognize that there was no real best primary/secondary/epic archtype combination in city of heroes.  You could take any combination and min/max them heavily with IO's, and later incarnate powers.  And course there was no perfect build in the game.  There were a tiny amount of bad builds, but those were more due to simply not knowing the power of buffs/debuffs/cc or simply over-specializing(like, as I often say, attackless defender or tanker who only has taunt and is also attackless).  You didn't want to skip to many of your primary/secondary powers but at the same time any primary/secondary could work in the game.  Us min/maxers tended to see that.

The five levels of City of Heroes:

Level One: The team needs a tanker

Level Two: The good teams don't need a tanker

Level Three: The great teams don't need any archetype

Level Four: The best character builds don't need teams

Level Five: The best players know there are no best character builds

[Sinistar]

For crying out loud.  Is that the only thing holding things up?  Offer the man a "golden parachute" / signing bonus.  You know -- a bribe.  Half a million can buy you a lot of kimchi in your "retirement".  I'd pitch in.

There is one up side to this.  The longer this software sits on a shelf the older and less valuable it becomes.  Another twenty years and they may well drop it on the public as abandonware.  Of course you'll probably have to play it on antiquated hardware and it will look as sophisticated as Castle Wolfenstein.  And I'll likely be dead by then...

And on that cheery thought......anyone have a perfshifter proc and a regen tissue regen proc? I need to install them in myself to speed up my healing from a fight I was in the other day.

[Noyjitat]

Hope springs eternal and all that, but I find it hard to believe that Nate's financial backing is still holding on after a year and a half, and willing to wait with their money (that could have been invested elsewhere ages ago)

I have an unrelated type of business story in terms of holding onto money. My boss wants to get involved with a Pizza Franchise here in America called Papa Johns. One of the main requirements before they will even consider you is 50000$ in cash stored in a bank account for 9 months (or it might have been 12). This money cannot be touched or moved at all for that set time frame. And while I'm not trying to make excuses for anyone here I'm just saying similar businesses and investors may be use to having this same rule or waiting a certain amount of time with money.

I'm certain this deal doesn't have such a rule with money but I wouldn't doubt the investors have issues with waiting what seems to be an unreasonable amount of time. Because this has certainly been an unreasonable amount of time to.... SELL THE DAMN GAME ALREADY! aaugh!

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fpeanuts%2Fimages%2F1%2F1f%2FCharliebrown-1-.jpg%2Frevision%2Flatest%3Fcb%3D20130411035507

[Winter Fable]

I don't believe ANY of the "successors" will be able to hold a candle to COH.  I've tried Valiance... I'll take a pass (sorry).

This sounds harsh but I agree.Even though the successors are still being worked on I'm here and waiting on COH.Some of us
have lost people that we played with and with every year that passes we will lose more.I truly hope we can get the game back
sooner rather than later.