I came across this late last year when reading about the shutdown of Wildstar.
https://kotaku.com/wildstar-developer-carbine-studios-shuts-down-1828862729
To find the actual post I've quoted below, you need to look for the first post by McMurderpaws, and expand the entire thread. Scroll down till you see the response from "exChua" (no idea what that means).
I have no idea how true it is, but it sounds credible, and if true, means the real villains in CoX's demise were not NCSoft, but Paragon Studios. I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows different, knows more etc... and can provide any extra info either way.
exChua > McMurderpaws
9/06/18 9:10pmOkay. I made this burner account because I need to correct the record here.
The stories passed around since the end of COH have been summed up as “Paragon Studios was so great and perfect until evil NCSoft closed them down.” And obviously telling this story would not be fun for my NDAs of the past...
And no, I’m not doing this out of love for NCSoft or any shit like that. We parted ways many many moons ago and we’re both happier for it. I just hate untruths being passed around because they let certain people keep skating around the industry causing the same shit over and over and being able to pin it on a nebulous entity to remove blame for their own actions.
Paragon Studios was shut down because they tried to pull a fast one on NCSoft. NCSoft was actually pretty happy with how COH was doing - they were never a huge hit, but they’d long since paid their dev costs and were a nice little money farm. They were happy enough with the brand that they even decided to move forward on an unannounced COH 2 project, and allocated funds to Paragon Studios for the development of a new COH property.
Yea, THAT is how committed NCSoft was to the brand.
So what happened?
Paragon Studios basically took the money, pretended to work on COH 2, but in actuality started building a completely unrelated new IP.
That’s right. NCSoft handed them a giant pile of money to make COH 2 and Paragon Studios, a studio literally created JUST to keep the COH IP going, said “Wait, no, let’s not do that. Let’s make some other shit nobody wants and not tell the publisher and presumably they will be completely understanding of it because we’ll show them a completely different prototype than what they asked for!”
NCSoft was not understanding.
See, this is what I learned when I worked for them - South Korean publishers are actually pretty hands off for the most part, as long as you give them reason to trust you. You hit your deadlines, you give them the product you promised, they’re actually pretty willing to put up with a lot.
Until you waste their money.
THEN the boot comes down.
The gap between the COH 2 debacle and the shutdown was less than a year from what I gathered talking to people in the know.
And now WildStar. NCSoft was pretty cool with us for a long time. They gave the company piles and piles of money and many years of extensions to get the game out. The totality of WildStar’s existence, from conception to release, was about a *decade*. A decade that NCSoft never saw a single return of investment on. So obviously... they had a lot of patience.
Carbine... was never a well managed studio. Ever. WildStar as you saw it was a completely different beast from what started development. It wasn’t even the same IP - Tim Cain, literally one of the creators of the original Fallout, used to be the creative lead and eventually he got pushed out of the studio. Which was a dumb idea because Carbine didn’t actually lock down their only IP when they did it and Tim owned all of it. So there was a huge freeze on production while they essentially had to do the game over from scratch because they didn’t own their own game!
And NCSoft actually let them when any sane publisher would have spotted the flaming shitshow brewing and cancelled the project entirely.
But okay. WildStar had its IP rebooted... then missed release date after release date after release date. The scope of the game was never realistic - we were supposed to ship with tons of extra zones, all of which got cut when they were well into production, because nobody actually knew what a pipeline was (oh but the higher ups would literally start screaming at the line designers for so much as laughing during work because obviously if we had time to laugh, we were wasting time that could have been used meeting these impossible deadlines.)
After yet another missed launch, NCSoft finally put the boot down and demanded more control over the project to actually make some money on this turd of an investment. Which meant there was finally an unmissable deadline that HAD to be hit. And then all hell broke loose.
Teams and personnel were constantly shuffled around at random without any real concern for if this was creating useable content. The economy team, which is, you know, the core of an MMO and literally the most important component to player retention and monetization, was a skeleton crew where staff were just flung at it when a producer didn’t like them but wouldn’t actually fire them. By the time someone went ‘Hey wait, isn’t the economy important?’ and reorganized the team, it was far too late to catch up on those systems... which included our end game content.
Hey, remember that memetic chart that went around showing all the obnoxious and pointlessly time consuming quests needed to actually unlock endgame raids? Guess what? That content was literally injected in at the very last minute because A) our raids weren’t actually completely done at launch and B) the creative director literally said we should add raid keys to artificially lengthen the game enough to force people to have to pay for a subscription past the free trial period in order to actually raid.
Oh there was shit from NCSoft, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not exactly the villains destroying the lives of saintly devs. Though they did try to push really hard on the art team to dress up all the female characters in the equivalent of lingerie. Given that they were already insanely over sexualized, this ended up being a tipping point and the artists tried to rebel. Believe it or not, the only reason the actual artists of the game got their way was because of Tumblr users kicking up a shitstorm over the obsessive pointless T&A. Those tumblr threads gave the artists enough momentum to at least keep the sexy ladies dressed in normal (but still revealing) clothing.
So with all this in mind... how did WildStar do?
They were already culling people before the end of the second month of release. Behind the scenes, they knew it was going to lose so much money that they were actually greatful so many people quit right after launch because it saved them money on personnel. But then people stopped quitting, so they started looking into how many people they could fire before someone at the state labor board got suspicious of them trying to duck out on the WARN Act. Given that they’d already gotten into legal trouble for illegally exempting employees from overtime pay, it’s kind of amazing they rolled the dice again anyway. But they did manage to hide the true state of the game until October 2014 when they finally had their first major layoff.
Coincidentally, most of that first wave were people that had at any point raised criticism of the company’s management.
I can’t speak to much to WildStar’s existence past their first huge layoff, because I was in that. I remember being shocked and surprised it stayed online as long as it did because it never, ever turned a profit - though almost all of the original leadership either quit or were fired, which is probably how it stabilized. But it still had a terrible launch that was actively on fire. We literally promised our players *monthly* content updates... then we couldn’t even hit the goal of *quartely* updates. Because, once again, nobody actually had a reasonable scope of what it took to actually make shippable content and how long that would actually take to be more meaningful than an occasional holiday event.
So really, you shouldn’t be angry at NCSoft for finally pulling the plug. My experience with them was that they were a tough but surprisingly forgiving master that overlooked an exceedingly troubled development and still put a lot of faith and money into a title they never saw an ROI on. WildStar had it’s four-year anniversary this June. Given that I assumed it wouldn’t even make it to a first year anniversary, that’s pretty darn impressive.
Also I learned that a few idiots running a game studio can basically screw over hundreds of talented game devs by performing utterly boneheaded decisions, but really, anyone who’s shipped more than one title can tell you that.
So now, you know... the whole story. From the mouth of an exChua on a burner account.
I remember when that post first hit reddit and the various camps that either A) poo-pooed all over it by calling it into question not with facts and logic but at the simple fact that the person wouldn't reveal who they were and therefore wasn't credible, or B) the other camp demanding answers from people (e.g. former devs) who haven't been involved in either project in over a decade plus and probably don't care to once again rehash the past and/or admit to being directly or indirectly responsible for their game being shut down.
I prefer, in most cases, to let sleeping dogs lie.
And some kill them in their sleep.
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We can agree to disagree on how to handle sleeping dogs. I'm not on reddit so I missed that exchange. I don't blame any dev for wanting to stay quiet either way, what would be in it for them? And the damage was already done regardless. But its an interesting piece of gaming history's "great wrongs" if you like, such as SWG's "NGE".
Although gaming is entertainment, it is also an industry. Like any industry, if it doesn't "know itself", its likely to repeat continual mistakes due to lack of oversight, best practise, good standards etc... Likewise, if its customers don't scrutinise the industry they are paying for a product, they will get the same low bar from that industry until it self corrects due to falling retention/sales.
All games tend to attract a tribal following. Football is an easy example, with supporters vilifying or beatifying various players/managers (devs/managers?) performance/decisions, regardless or because of the actual game itself. I don't care about tribes or the sanctity of the past so to speak. But I do think the mmo world is still evolving, and a lot of what is being attempted today would have been poo-poo'd by fanboi gamers of games gone by as (paraphrasing) "too expensive/too hard/too much" before finishing with those killa points "go play another game if you're not happy" or "you try to create a game then if you think its so easy"
... Until the game dies for predicted reasons, despite the fanboi's defence of the low bar set.
I certainly do not know if anything exChua posted is true. But I think we should scrutinise what we can know and make an effort to hold devs and game companies to account. Sleeping dogs sometimes wake and bite us in the ass regardless.
Wow. I feel inclined to believe it.
Make CoH2? Let's make something else! Not what people want, but what we want to make!
Sounds like something people in creative industries want to do.
Then there's the whole art debacle the post mentions.
Bosses: Do this.
Artists: Fuck that! We do what we want!
So people lost a game that people loved, because those in charge of making it, didn't feel like doing that job anymore.
This entire rant was debunked by pohsiB (an actual CoH dev) in another thread on reddit. Unlike the guy who posted the rant, pohsiB posted under his real account, so I tend to give that more credence. I don't remember exactly, but I don't think the OP ever returned to challenge anything pohsiB posted.
The Altruist, Invulnerability/Super Strength Stalwart.
From what I recall, nothing about what this person claimed was substantiated by anyone related to CoH. One former dev actually did come forward who had insight into financials and said that they were in fact working on CoH2 at the conceptual stage.
Apparently, from what I heard, the major issue with Parwgon purchasing CoH was they wanted not just the IP but all the customer data. NCSoft apparently didn’t want to, or there was too much legal hassle to, or couldn’t release the customer data. I can’t recall which was specifically stated.
I also recall a low level dev who worked at the studio that worked on CoH, hears they were working on 2 but didn’t have any info but never heard if anything like the person described.
If it is true, then no one else is coming to this one person’s aid to substantiate his statements even under the cloak of anonymity. I don’t hold much stock in what amounts to hearsay.
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After reading all of that rumor mongering about Paragon Studios, the first thing that comes to mind is ... [i]"how conveeeeeeeeenient"[/i] ... of an explanation it is, particularly since there is no evidence for it aside from a "trust me, I worked on a completely different game, so I know Stuff[b]™[/b]" claim.
Nah, I'm still going to hold NC$oft responsible for the extermination of Paragon Studios.
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"I worked on..." Or "My credentials are..." Without proof never ends well, in any industry.
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Just FYI, the link in the OP doesn’t work. Here it is, functional:
https://kotaku.com/wildstar-developer-carbine-studios-shuts-down-1828862729
Thanks @Atama, my bad, now also corrected in OP.
I'd be very interested to read any links you may have to pohsiB's posts on the topic. I did a quick google but nothing came back.
All we have is hearsay isn't it? I don't recall the actual devs coming forward and telling the player base the facts. Facts that this many years later, I don't see why they can't come out with.
I'm interested in that as well.
Going back to your OP, so much hearsay. Specifically to CoH the one biggest thing that gets me is that there was no repercussions (outside of possibly getting shut down) for them breaking the contract to develop CoH2. If NCSoft didn't trust Paragon Studios anymore after that it would have been, afaik, fairly easy to shift CoH (and CoH2) to another studio to keep it going if NCSoft really wanted to.
As for the exChua thing, since Chua was one of the races in WildStar I take it to mean "former Chua".
I'm not disagreeing that people shouldn't be held accountable, but they should be held accountable with verifiable facts and not anonymous hearsay. But if you, or anyone else for that matter, wishes to tilt away at that windmill, here's your lance.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cityofheroes/comments/9b4iaz/wildstar_dev_comments_on_closing_of_city_of_heroes/
Here's the thread. Top comment is from pohsyb, who was a developer on CoH:
"This is not true, we actually pitched CoH2 at one point and they didn’t seem interested.
We went into pre-production 3 times I think, CoH2, another superhero game but in the future (1st zone was London), and then finally some kind of survival game.
NCSoft was constantly pulling the rug out from under us and wanting something more “MMOEy”
We finally asked them to explain, my favorite part of the slide show they sent us was:
Q: Is FarmVille a MMO? A: No, but if you could burn down other peoples farms it would be a lot closer.
The wanted Lineage level griefing, but never seemed to understand that would not fly in the US"
The Altruist, Invulnerability/Super Strength Stalwart.
For those unaware, "pohsyb" = Bishop.
Of course they did.
Of course they FUDGING did.
Ask any former WoW player what STV is an acronym for and the common answer is "Stranglethorn Vietnam."
For anyone who didn't play WoW, the "right" answer is Stranglethorn Vale, but it was a contested jungle zone where ganking, griefing, corpse camping and all around corpse running was absurdly common (and only to be expected) on PvP servers.
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I just feel like in this regard of the situation, I am not in Paragon Studios's side or NCSoft's side in this argument or debacle about the reasoning the game is cancelled. I think in general, City of Heroes's devs needed their rest for working the game since 2004, sure. You could have returned for the newer version but at the same time NCSoft need the money for other games too. Maybe in the future, we can see them work togheter again?
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At first I had no idea what you guys were talking about with STV, then I watched the video and it’s like repressed memories returning. Especially around Booty Bay itself. Gah yeah, some not good times.
On the Titan Network, Matt Miller used to do an annual Q&A about CoX. He very clearly laid out the sequence of events surrounding the closure of CoX and the Paragon Studios branch that worked on it.
We will never know the extremely high end of thinks but NCSoft killed it because of disagreements about where the game needed to go and what to do about CoH2. They did not agree with the American version of the future (despite intimately knowing American attitudes) and pulled out.
Appreciate you digging that up @alltrueist, very grateful and good to see something to counter the OP.
Considering it took me 30+ minutes on Reddit looking for the thread, I wish he would edit the OP to indicate it's just gossip and rumor-mongering that has been debunked by actual staff.
The Altruist, Invulnerability/Super Strength Stalwart.
Umm... I am the OP poster, and I made no claims on the linked post about its veracity, except to say that it sounded credible. In fact, in the OP I'm actually asking for additional information for or against, rather than claiming anything as fact.
Its good to see that there is dialogue out there countering the OP, and I am grateful for your searching to get it. But this was never a witch hunt that now must be called off. It was just dialogue and a request for more info if anyone had any.
Bottom line, we don't know anything as fact, apart from the games shutdown. But the linked thread post in my OP is certainly now a little less credible. I'm good with that.
EDIT - another good link I think, that tries to avoid sensationalising either side of the story.
https://www.mmobomb.com/features/heres-take-city-heroes-shutdown-rumors-popping/
No offense to anyone here but the part of this Reddit post pertaining to Paragon is Bantha poo doo. Can I give you concrete evidence? No, but then again I doubt anyone could. It will probably always be he said/she said/they said. Still, intellectually I know darn good and well that NCSoft is the villain in this story. Let me give you some of the reasons.
1) The original developer on CoH was Cryptic Studios. In November of 2007 Cryptic sold the intellectual property rights to NCSoft and Paragon Studios was formed. During the transition, devs were given a choice as to whether they went with Cryptic or stayed with Paragon. Individuals like Melissa Bianco, (War Witch) Matt Miller, (Positron) et al, could have gone on to "work on other things" but they chose to stay with us. By 2010 Jack Emmert, aka Statesman, was the COO of Cryptic and in 2011 he became CEO. Had anyone in the Paragon team had the bright idea for something new and different it would have been very easy to take it to him.
2) Paragon was given a three month window to shut down CoH/V and some of the devs were there to the bitter end. Now, if you own a store and you're told that the employees are stealing, do you allow them to continue to work there whether or not you plan on closing said store, or do you covertly send in a group of employees you trust and lock all of the thieves out? Do you then burn down the store to spite the thieves instead of hiring new employees?
3) I've chatted at one point or another with several of the previous devs individually and all have the same story as Prohsyb. These people had families, lives, bills; there is no way they would have en mass caused themselves to get fired short notice with no backup plan. They were as devastated as we were, if not more so since that was their baby and livelihood. All had been looking forward to CoH2. Now they're scattered to the four winds, some at Cryptic, quite a few not.
And last but definitely not least...
4) NCSoft has a really bad habit of shutting down games short notice, gutting dev teams and occasionally ripping off employees. Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Master X Master, Wildstar: all were killed two to three months after announcement, basically the same time period given to CoH. Some had offers to take over the game, buy the rights, all were denied. Fifteen out of eighteen Dungeon Runner devs were laid off fifteen months after it went gold and two plus years before it was shuttered, leaving the game with a skeleton crew. And for the piece de resistance, I'm not even going to try and describe what they did to Richard Garriott before killing Tabula Rasa, but you can see the basics here under controversies: [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSoft[/url]
So yeah, the killing of Paragon City was typical of NCSoft's MO and I'd personally say ol Chua drank the NCSoft koolaid when it came to CoH. As for Wildstar, maybe he's right, maybe he's not. I have no idea since, like a majority of CoH players, I ignore NCSoft properties now days. Of course he could also be a troll who knew that Paragon citizens were still salty and Wildstar players were in the process of being kicked to the curb as well.
NC$oft has a "lifetime ban" from my wallet.
That decision will not be overturned, no matter how many appeals are made.
Period.
End of discussion.
Moving on ...
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This whole situation feels so foreign to me now despite it only being a handful of years ago. That being said, I feel like a different person from my younger self looking at the situation lol
Probably not healthy to pick groups of people as villains tho. Not absolving NCSoft of blame but I'm more inclined to separate actions I disagree with and true evil. Within a narrative? It's hard to really pinpoint since, morally, most don't actively seeks to be a villain and do evil deeds.
How is this a reason that NCSoft is a villain?
As far as I know, the exact reason for the shutdown hasn't been presented. For all I know, there could have been someone within Paragon Studios who is yet discovered that had been embezzling thousands of dollars. While I am still annoyed NCSoft shut the game down, I've become more economically aware since my youth to understand that what you believe a company is to you is only a surface level interaction. There is a whole other circulatory system going on beneath that surface and it has nothing to do with you and you have little affect on it. I'm sure the process of shutting down a subsidiary isn't just a magic wand affair...there's likely a lot of paper work and paying off shareholders...but as a little cog, you can't expect to make big moves unless you put skin in the game.
I find this moral argument biased. It's the same circumstance with the government shutdown currently, using the moral ransom of starving families or unpaid rent as an argument against a particular action when, logically, there aren't many alternatives of enforcement besides financial. Once upon a time, there was physical force, but so long as nothing illegal is taking place, the only repercussions is to take away someone's money. It's a common enough tactic that people will use it on social media to punish people for saying things they don't like.
I'm not being heartless or anything, I'm just saying it's not right to take a situation out of context and then use that to pitch a moral argument and paint someone as some vile villain when, in reality, most individuals are the opposite and trying to do good or do their job.
Perhaps I've just become extremely skeptical over the years, but how many licenses has NCSoft ended within the past 5 years? Just Wildstar and Master X Master (no idea why they even bothered with the former in the 1st place) and I'd attribute those shutdowns to finances. It's possibly that NCSoft was hitting hard times 2010-2012.
You're free to boycott products. I'd just say that beyond a principle standpoint, it's a pointless gesture, especially if you're going off emotions, since what you're boycotting won't actually be affected. You need to go big to get more boycotters or spend money to compete with them. It's energy better spent to support City of Titans than to quibble about past corporate squabblings because those never end.
@Leo_G I wanted to pop in and let you know I'm not ignoring your post. Today has been hella long and I wouldn't make much sense if I did reply (already tried) so I'm leaving it alone for the time being. Give me a day or so to get my brains back in my head. ;)
So what I've gotten from this thread is basically "mis-management is the biggest threat to MMOs." Whether it's from the publisher or the development heads, poor management & lack of proper communication will kill a MMO faster than poor profits will do.
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