New efforts!

[Pyromantic]

All the theorycrafting is what's making me twitchy for news. ;p

I had a sudden urge to do the Freaklympics arc this evening.   :D

[Doc Artz]

Now I don't know if this deal is still a go or how much it will affect what COT's developers are attempting to do. Note the date of June 8. Forgive me if this has already been posted  :roll:
--------------                -------------------               ------------------
Nexon to buy 14.7% stake in NCsoft for $687 million:  TOKYO, June 8
Japanese online game provider Nexon Co said on Friday it will buy a stake in South Korea's NCsoft Corp for 804,522,750,000 Korean won ($686.8 million).
It will take a 14.7 percent stake in the developer and publisher of online games. 
Nexon aims to strengthen business opportunities by taking the stake in the gaming powerhouse, which has offices in Korea, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Britain and the United States. ($1 = 1171.4500 Korean won) (Reporting by Miki Kayaoka; Editing by Michael Watson)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/08/nexon-ncsoft-idUST9E8GV09P20120608

[Kelltick]

Note the date of June 8.

June 8......2012

[Doc Artz]

June 8......2012

I think I already said ""note the date"" 8)

[Mageman]

Time for Hardball!

I think it's time to start playing Hardball with NCSoft! Here's my proposal (if I were in negotiation with them).

1) Here's our best offer. Let's say $1,000,000. You have one month to accept it.
2) If you don't accept it within one month, the price drops $1,000 a day, six days a week (we'll give them a day of rest on Sundays). This becomes $312,000 a year.

#2 is very important. Several reasons are: It represents the steadily declining value of CoX. It shows them (in real time) the cost of inaction. And, who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000 when he dragged his feet for 2 weeks? This will continue up the ladder to the CEO, continuing to lose them money every day they delay action on the sale.

This will show them that you're very serious. You mean business. Stand up and fight for CoX or they will continue dragging their feet, costing you time, effort, and money. They don't care if you spend $500,000 trying to acquire CoX. They are in no hurry (as represented by it being over 1½ years since this post started, over a year since "The masks come off"). It's time to put them in a hurry!

It's been 34 MONTHS since the shutdown! Over 3 years since they announced the shutdown!

[Biz]

Time for Hardball!

I think it's time to start playing Hardball with NCSoft! Here's my proposal (if I were in negotiation with them).

1) Here's our best offer. Let's say $1,000,000. You have one month to accept it.
2) If you don't accept it within one month, the price drops $1,000 a day, six days a week (we'll give them a day of rest on Sundays). This becomes $312,000 a year.

#2 is very important. Several reasons are: It represents the steadily declining value of CoX. It shows them (in real time) the cost of inaction. And, who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000 when he dragged his feet for 2 weeks? This will continue up the ladder to the CEO, continuing to lose them money every day they delay action on the sale.

This will show them that you're very serious. You mean business. Stand up and fight for CoX or they will continue dragging their feet, costing you time, effort, and money. They don't care if you spend $500,000 trying to acquire CoX. They are in no hurry (as represented by it being over 1½ years since this post started, over a year since "The masks come off"). It's time to put them in a hurry!

It's been 34 MONTHS since the shutdown! Over 3 years since they announced the shutdown!

That is an interesting idea. Gold star for you! Perhaps that is exactly what The Team is doing, and are getting CoH back at an incredible deal! :)

[Vee]

I think that negotiating technique only works on tv.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I think I already said ""note the date"" 8)

But you made a point of referring to the June 8 and completely avoided mentioning the "three years ago." An odd choice of omissions. But yes, everything in that announcement is old news that was discussed extensively in various threads here back when it was still relevant and some of it has been superseded by other developments in three years since then.


In slightly older news, i wonder what effect the secession of the Southern states of the US will have on their economy? Someone should look into that since it might affect the relative currency values.  ;)

[JKPhage]

All the theorycrafting is what's making me twitchy for news. ;p

I'm twitchy for news all day, every day. It's all I can do to keep myself distracted. I used to just sit on these forums reading with all my free time after the game went away, but that just made me anxious, stressed and depressed. I've essentially turned to getting my hands on a lot of classic games that I never got to play and forcing myself to pick them up and finish them one at a time so I have something to focus on, and when that doesn't work, my ever-growing (and very quickly becoming huge) movie collection serves as a back up. I just have to have something to *not* think about the game, or it gives me borderline withdrawal symptoms. The only thing I want to do is recreate all my favorite characters and just run around the entire world seeing the sights again, then curbstomping bad guys until my eyeballs bleeds. I just pop in from time to time to see how the community is doing, and seeing all the talk of different fun builds and things to do makes it worse. I never got to level my Water/Poison corruptor, or properly slot out my Staff/Invuln scrapper, or even roll up a Nature troller/defender or anything like that. it's just a crying shame really, and every day that I don't hear news that we have a deal made and plans to get some form of the game rolled back out is just painful. :(

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Time for Hardball!

I think it's time to start playing Hardball with NCSoft! Here's my proposal (if I were in negotiation with them).

1) Here's our best offer. Let's say $1,000,000. You have one month to accept it.
2) If you don't accept it within one month, the price drops $1,000 a day, six days a week (we'll give them a day of rest on Sundays). This becomes $312,000 a year.

#2 is very important. Several reasons are: It represents the steadily declining value of CoX. It shows them (in real time) the cost of inaction. And, who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000 when he dragged his feet for 2 weeks? This will continue up the ladder to the CEO, continuing to lose them money every day they delay action on the sale.

This will show them that you're very serious. You mean business. Stand up and fight for CoX or they will continue dragging their feet, costing you time, effort, and money. They don't care if you spend $500,000 trying to acquire CoX. They are in no hurry (as represented by it being over 1½ years since this post started, over a year since "The masks come off"). It's time to put them in a hurry!

It's been 34 MONTHS since the shutdown! Over 3 years since they announced the shutdown!

Um, yeah, the last time someone tried to play hardball the game was shut down and written off instead of Paragon Studios buying the game and going independent, which was what was being negotiated before the shutdown was finalized. Thus why we haven't been able to play CoH for several years. But i'm sure that'll work even better now that it's been written off completely. It's also such a tiny sum relative to what NCsoft deals with normally that it's more analogous to a guy at a small business telling his boss that he cost the company twenty cents by not caving into some pushy, arrogant loudmouths. NCsoft's CEO's response if it filtered all the way up the chain of command from the dead properties division would most likely be "Fuck those guys, delete all the backups and tell them to sod off."

[Aggelakis]

Time for Hardball!

I think it's time to start playing Hardball with NCSoft! Here's my proposal (if I were in negotiation with them).

1) Here's our best offer. Let's say $1,000,000. You have one month to accept it.
2) If you don't accept it within one month, the price drops $1,000 a day, six days a week (we'll give them a day of rest on Sundays). This becomes $312,000 a year.

#2 is very important. Several reasons are: It represents the steadily declining value of CoX. It shows them (in real time) the cost of inaction. And, who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000 when he dragged his feet for 2 weeks? This will continue up the ladder to the CEO, continuing to lose them money every day they delay action on the sale.

This will show them that you're very serious. You mean business. Stand up and fight for CoX or they will continue dragging their feet, costing you time, effort, and money. They don't care if you spend $500,000 trying to acquire CoX. They are in no hurry (as represented by it being over 1½ years since this post started, over a year since "The masks come off"). It's time to put them in a hurry!

It's been 34 MONTHS since the shutdown! Over 3 years since they announced the shutdown!

This would have an adverse effect. They already obviously aren't hurting to sell it, so threatening them with lower and lower offers is going to make them less likely to sell it, not more. "Their offer is reducing...might as well just keep it." Yeah, great idea! Let's not do that.

EDIT: Also, "who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000" - NCsoft operates on such huge sums of money that $12k is pocket lint. Just FYI.

[blacksly]

This would have an adverse effect. They already obviously aren't hurting to sell it, so threatening them with lower and lower offers is going to make them less likely to sell it, not more. "Their offer is reducing...might as well just keep it." Yeah, great idea! Let's not do that.

EDIT: Also, "who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000" - NCsoft operates on such huge sums of money that $12k is pocket lint. Just FYI.

Sir,... uh,.... I'm really sorry, but I have to report that due to some really tough Amerikan negotiators, I lost some of our pocket lint.

[Sinistar]

This would have an adverse effect. They already obviously aren't hurting to sell it, so threatening them with lower and lower offers is going to make them less likely to sell it, not more. "Their offer is reducing...might as well just keep it." Yeah, great idea! Let's not do that.

EDIT: Also, "who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000" - NCsoft operates on such huge sums of money that $12k is pocket lint. Just FYI.

Perhaps they could offer to buy more then just CoH? Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa.....get a package deal as it were.

[Arcana]

Time for Hardball!

I think it's time to start playing Hardball with NCSoft! Here's my proposal (if I were in negotiation with them).

1) Here's our best offer. Let's say $1,000,000. You have one month to accept it.
2) If you don't accept it within one month, the price drops $1,000 a day, six days a week (we'll give them a day of rest on Sundays). This becomes $312,000 a year.

#2 is very important. Several reasons are: It represents the steadily declining value of CoX. It shows them (in real time) the cost of inaction. And, who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000 when he dragged his feet for 2 weeks? This will continue up the ladder to the CEO, continuing to lose them money every day they delay action on the sale.

This will show them that you're very serious. You mean business. Stand up and fight for CoX or they will continue dragging their feet, costing you time, effort, and money. They don't care if you spend $500,000 trying to acquire CoX. They are in no hurry (as represented by it being over 1½ years since this post started, over a year since "The masks come off"). It's time to put them in a hurry!

It's been 34 MONTHS since the shutdown! Over 3 years since they announced the shutdown!

This would be comparable to a car dealership demanding that I buy one of their cars, and every day I don't buy it the car gets $1000 more expensive.  How exactly is this supposed to work?

This sort of tactic only works against parties that actually have a requirement to do the deal.  It doesn't work against parties that have no specific obligation to do the deal.  "Take it or leave it" only works if you know the other party can't actually leave it.

[RGladden]

Sir,... uh,.... I'm really sorry, but I have to report that due to some really tough Amerikan negotiators, I lost some of our pocket lint.

Actually....it's "navel lint"....but why quibble over semantics... ;)

[Arcana]

I actually made a Ele/Psi for PvP reasons, but it worked just as well in PvE. With my build I could stack drain Psyche that actually drained the AVs in BAF. I always thought it was funny even with 0 end, they still used attack and cheated.

So I checked Siege.  Here are his attacks, and the endurance costs of them:

Energy Punch: 7
Bone Smasher: 11
Whirling Hands: 18
Power Blast: 11
Explosive Blast: 20

(Incidentally, Power Blast's range was 310 feet).  All of those attacks are well under the 53 points of endurance an AV recovers on a recovery tick.  Suppose Siege was actually drained to zero somehow - between drain, recovery debuffs, and his own endurance burning.  At zero, he can't attack.  But its literally impossible to prevent him from getting endurance back at least occasionally.  When he does, it will be a pretty big (in absolute numbers) tick of 53 end.  But *visually* that will look pretty small - in fact my recollection is that because of the way the endurance bar is drawn the first tick can be mostly masked by the actual outline of the bar.  Take a look at this video I made of a special no-stamina build (back around I8ish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbM1lN1Xn-4

Unfortunately this was back before I was making high res captures, but if you jump to near the end you can see what it looks like when you get down to the last end tick.  Around 3:20 it actually looks like I get an attack off at zero end.  And that attack is Eagle's Claw.  That's actually me getting an attack off when I have only one tick left (and all my attacks are heavily slotted for end reduction).  For me, that was around 7 end.  It looks like zero because its obscured by the bar itself.  For an AV, that same invisible last tick of end is 53 end, more than enough to get two or three attacks off.

I'm still recovering end ticks fairly quickly - about once every four seconds which is base recovery without stamina - but I think the visuals of me recovering 7 end ticks and using them a couple at a time for attacks is comparable to an AV recovering 53 end and burning them 7-20 at a time.  In fact, Siege's attack costs relative to his end tick are actually better than my highly endred slotted attacks verses my recovery tick in that video.

Siege did slightly "cheat" in a different way I didn't originally realize.  His version of Power Blast not only has immense range, it hits in an area of effect.  But its typed ranged, not AoE.  So AoE defenses wouldn't work against Siege's Power Blast even though its clearly an AoE.  An AoE with the range of a cruise missile.

[Arcana]

EDIT: Also, "who want's to be the person who tells his boss that he cost the company $12,000" - NCsoft operates on such huge sums of money that $12k is pocket lint. Just FYI.

Even for very large companies, straight up losing $12,000 is not something that's going to endear you to your supervisor.  But how I would deal with that would be to juist go to my boss and say "the people begging and pleading with me to buy the game has now set an ultimatum where their best offer is going to drop $1000/week for every week we don't close the deal.  Just FYI, in case you care."

I'm pretty sure he'd say "tell them to go climb a tree and stop talking to them" and that would end my problem.

[MM3squints]

So I checked Siege.  Here are his attacks, and the endurance costs of them:

Energy Punch: 7
Bone Smasher: 11
Whirling Hands: 18
Power Blast: 11
Explosive Blast: 20

(Incidentally, Power Blast's range was 310 feet).  All of those attacks are well under the 53 points of endurance an AV recovers on a recovery tick.  Suppose Siege was actually drained to zero somehow - between drain, recovery debuffs, and his own endurance burning.  At zero, he can't attack.  But its literally impossible to prevent him from getting endurance back at least occasionally.  When he does, it will be a pretty big (in absolute numbers) tick of 53 end.  But *visually* that will look pretty small - in fact my recollection is that because of the way the endurance bar is drawn the first tick can be mostly masked by the actual outline of the bar.  Take a look at this video I made of a special no-stamina build (back around I8ish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbM1lN1Xn-4

Unfortunately this was back before I was making high res captures, but if you jump to near the end you can see what it looks like when you get down to the last end tick.  Around 3:20 it actually looks like I get an attack off at zero end.  And that attack is Eagle's Claw.  That's actually me getting an attack off when I have only one tick left (and all my attacks are heavily slotted for end reduction).  For me, that was around 7 end.  It looks like zero because its obscured by the bar itself.  For an AV, that same invisible last tick of end is 53 end, more than enough to get two or three attacks off.

I'm still recovering end ticks fairly quickly - about once every four seconds which is base recovery without stamina - but I think the visuals of me recovering 7 end ticks and using them a couple at a time for attacks is comparable to an AV recovering 53 end and burning them 7-20 at a time.  In fact, Siege's attack costs relative to his end tick are actually better than my highly endred slotted attacks verses my recovery tick in that video.

Siege did slightly "cheat" in a different way I didn't originally realize.  His version of Power Blast not only has immense range, it hits in an area of effect.  But its typed ranged, not AoE.  So AoE defenses wouldn't work against Siege's Power Blast even though its clearly an AoE.  An AoE with the range of a cruise missile.

By visually it looks small, dose that mean AVs have a end pool greater than 110? I seen people with 110 end completely drained and they can't function.

[Arcana]

By visually it looks small, dose that mean AVs have a end pool greater than 110? I seen people with 110 end completely drained and they can't function.

AV end bars are 800 points.  That's why their recovery tick is 53 big.  Its the same 6.67% we have, but that 6.67% is about eight times larger.  Visually, their ticks are the same size as ours by percentage.  So its easy to mistake something that looks extremely tiny or non-existent on screen as actually being tiny or non-existent when it could be very large compared to what we have when our end bars look the same.

[Rejolt]

Has anyone seen the new Facebook post of someone asking if people are willing to spend $15 a month to be part of the game again? The person claims to be part of a private group wanting surveys to see if people would pay and sadly he's saying folks only would come back if it was free to play.

He said they are not part of the hail Mary group trying to get the game back just a private group conducting a survey. Many of the Facebook replies are saying overwhelmingly they would pay $15 or more a month