Yeah, they wrote a whole fake goodbye letter from him. He wasn't still in space at that point, but he was in quarantine after returning. And they tried to forge this whole narrative where he departed voluntarily, instead of being fired, so they could deny him his stock options.
The sheer levels of illegality that sounds like is astronomical.
To the tune of $28 million.
He was in quarantine after his space-venture when they pulled this stunt. They called him, said yo you're terminated and to make it all the more, just like, god damn man, they forged the letter and his initials in order to make it look like he voluntarily left the company so that he would loose his stock options with NCSoft.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Yeah, they wrote a whole fake goodbye letter from him. He wasn't still in space at that point, but he was in quarantine after returning. And they tried to forge this whole narrative where he departed voluntarily, instead of being fired, so they could deny him his stock options.
The sheer levels of illegality that sounds like is astronomical.
ayyyyyyyy
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in that meeting. Just to see how the idea came up.
"I'M SO HIGH RIGHT NOW."
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
What is funny/ironic is their whole "master plan" was executed with the idea that he wouldn't be able to defend himself, what with him being in space and all. However it was that very fact that ended up screwing themselves. Since, "Yo I didn't write this. I was in space at the time." is a pretty solid alibi.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
What is funny/ironic is their whole "master plan" was executed with the idea that he wouldn't be able to defend himself, what with him being in space and all. However it was that very fact that ended up screwing themselves. Since, "Yo I didn't right this. I was in space at the time." is a pretty solid alibi.
That's almost comic book villain levels of evil combined with idiocy.
I only got to play CoX for a little bit before the end, but it was great. Pretty much anytime I play an MMO, I'm seriously disappointed that the level of customization is nowhere near as deep.
If they ever make another superhero mmo, I definitely think player-created content is the silver bullet. No matter how good the story or the raids are, at some point you'll want to make your own stories with your own hero, with more tools at your disposal than the chatbox.
You need a lot of quality control on that though. So much dev time on curated tools, so much curation on the end result ... we've seen what happens if players can just make whatever.
I only got to play CoX for a little bit before the end, but it was great. Pretty much anytime I play an MMO, I'm seriously disappointed that the level of customization is nowhere near as deep.
If they ever make another superhero mmo, I definitely think player-created content is the silver bullet. No matter how good the story or the raids are, at some point you'll want to make your own stories with your own hero, with more tools at your disposal than the chatbox.
I don't want to come off like an advertisement, but Star Trek Online has a very robust character creator as far as avatar appearances go, though it loses out substantially on the selection of powers to CoX.
With the ability to modify the appearance of not only your character but the whole bridge crew gives a lot of flexibility, and you can easily swap out crew members equipment (or just different crew members) for your away teams.
Ship customization is available too, but is rather limited. Choose from 3 saucer sections, three hulls, three nacelles and a dozen or so paint patterns for the most part.
community ratings are usually good enough to weed out the bullshit
Depends on how you define bullshit though. Are power level missions bullshit? Cause I remember the CoX community loved that long rectangular map just filled with green hamidon things for powerleveling.
Or are you trying to weed out bad (or offensive) writing on missions with actual stories?
I'd be worried that a group of people might tamper with the rating systems just because they can. Just imagine some group of trolls organize themselves to upvote or downvote certain maps because they think it's funny.
I only got to play CoX for a little bit before the end, but it was great. Pretty much anytime I play an MMO, I'm seriously disappointed that the level of customization is nowhere near as deep.
If they ever make another superhero mmo, I definitely think player-created content is the silver bullet. No matter how good the story or the raids are, at some point you'll want to make your own stories with your own hero, with more tools at your disposal than the chatbox.
I don't want to come off like an advertisement, but Star Trek Online has a very robust character creator as far as avatar appearances go, though it loses out substantially on the selection of powers to CoX.
With the ability to modify the appearance of not only your character but the whole bridge crew gives a lot of flexibility, and you can easily swap out crew members equipment (or just different crew members) for your away teams.
Ship customization is available too, but is rather limited. Choose from 3 saucer sections, three hulls, three nacelles and a dozen or so paint patterns for the most part.
community ratings are usually good enough to weed out the bullshit
Depends on how you define bullshit though. Are power level missions bullshit? Cause I remember the CoX community loved that long rectangular map just filled with green hamidon things for powerleveling.
Or are you trying to weed out bad (or offensive) writing on missions with actual stories?
I'd be worried that a group of people might tamper with the rating systems just because they can. Just imagine some group of trolls organize themselves to upvote or downvote certain maps because they think it's funny.
Heh, preaching to the choir, my friend- I've been playing STO since open beta.
That's actually where a lot of this comes from. I know a lot of people make up their own backstories for their characters in any mmo, and I think the next step for the genre is giving players the tools to bring that into the game. Seems like that would be a more natural fit for a superhero game than anything else.
I only got to play CoX for a little bit before the end, but it was great. Pretty much anytime I play an MMO, I'm seriously disappointed that the level of customization is nowhere near as deep.
If they ever make another superhero mmo, I definitely think player-created content is the silver bullet. No matter how good the story or the raids are, at some point you'll want to make your own stories with your own hero, with more tools at your disposal than the chatbox.
I think Champions Online (their follow-up when they started a new company or some such... I forgot the exact history) has a fantastic creator. A good step forward from their CoX tools. The ability to apply things to only one side of the char, and to have stances and all that jive, really added a lot. Plus the color options for powers was something I yearned for in CoX.
Shame the game itself is sort of bleh. But man do I have a lot of cool characters that I never play!
You need a lot of quality control on that though. So much dev time on curated tools, so much curation on the end result ... we've seen what happens if players can just make whatever.
The problem is you need a Company that is behind user created content and support it from day one through the full game live.
As an example on how not to do this I would pick Neverwinter Online another Cryptic Game. This game got so much potential and in the first few weeks it was quite promising to live up to the name. We could create content, players would play them no matter if it would have a story or not. Cryptic did not deliver enough content in the first place so UGC was a excellent alternative.
The company did even have live streams every week about the game and some of the player UGC missions got even featured from the devs on a weekly base to stand out even a little more.
So what did go wrong?
The tools were OK, it even got one big upgrade that allows you to 3D edit but over time as Cryptic released more content for the basic game less and less updates were added to the UGC. So as the game ages, we did have less and less access to new items/npc/map that you could add to your own missions.
The problem was twofold. One side the dev tools where subpar, one of the STO devs did explain this once in a podcast, that you could not simple copy some code and then flag it for the UGC, it was way more complicated(points to CoX), so much that this simple task would require multiple steps and some "dev" time to do so.
The other side of the coin was that they found no way to monetize the UGC. For the own content the poor solution was to add repeatable missions/dailys that would give you some specific rewards to strenghtn your char so the could milk the player over and over. For the UGC it got worse and worse with the breath of the chinese PWE behind them.
The users that created the content did have a few problems. From lack of basic scripting, however we try to work around it like for timer you created npcs far outside of the range of the player and then kill them off, e.g using a npc patrol pattern that run over traps. To have no controll over the rewards that a player would get at the end. Comments like why did I recive the wrong item from my class to no loot at all, where always fun. This part got even worse after the killed the daily rewards for doing UGC content. Up to not having boss encounters, a solutuion from the players was to throw more mob groups into the battle but power creep and limited number of resource added up. In the end even the editor would not work for several weeks or even for some month.........
I could write for a few hours over it but lets finish it. Players can compensate only so much for missing tool before the run out of options. In my last mission I created on a open map a full 3D dwarf mine that would allow more then one way from the the outside to inside of a mine all the way down to the abyss (refused to use the same old stadard maps, 1 year in) with a custom difficulty slider and a few moral choices that would change the outcome and design of the map, it got featured like 3 others missions.
I don't care if some make powerlvl content, have used them myself in CoX more then a few times but IF the devs don't have a zero Idea what to do with the user content in the first place (e.g. missing dev tools/lack of rewards) plus don't offer support in the long run (points to Perfect World Entertainment) and even kill it or should I write put it on life/legacy support because the could milk the players with endless repeating daily mission better then instead of letting them try out thousands of UGC mission....
Or does Cryptic just leave a path of broken skeleton crews whenever they bounce to a new ill-conceived mmo?
Some of the original CoH team left to do CO, including the original lead dev, who really wanted to license the Champions property in the first place and sort of accepted CoH as a compromise. But a lot of the original team stayed, and most of the game's strongest content came well after the split.
That original lead also bounced out of CO to work on Star Trek Online, leaving behind a team who were clearly less into the Champions setting than he was.
Desert Leviathan on
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Champions was originally supposed to be Marvel. However Marvel backed out of it part way through leaving the devs to scramble. Probably why the game doesn't have, uh, "heart" I guess is the best way to put it.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
The customization in CO was amazing enough to keep me playing for a while, and I really liked the way I could modify the controls to play like a third person action game with reticle aiming. I had one guy with snow and ice powers recolored to look like sand and glass, with an alternate strength mode with a different hulked out sand monster costume that I could switch to with a button press. Not very min/maxed, but it was pretty cool.
I think what bothered me most about champions was the whole thing had what looked like a vaseline smear across it. It was just hideous to look at compared to CoX's clean, straight lines.
Or does Cryptic just leave a path of broken skeleton crews whenever they bounce to a new ill-conceived mmo?
Some of the original CoH team left to do CO, including the original lead dev, who really wanted to license the Champions property in the first place and sort of accepted CoH as a compromise. But a lot of the original team stayed, and most of the game's strongest content came well after the split.
That original lead also bounced out of CO to work on Star Trek Online, leaving behind a team who were clearly less into the Champions setting than he was.
Actually, not a lot of the original team stayed. Not a lot of anybody stayed. Once CoV and I7 were out the door, and everybody got shuffled off to Champions, City of Heroes was left with a staff of 15 people. Some of the top devs were still on it but almost everybody was moved off, and most of who was left around to be in charge were second or third rank people who were suddenly put in charge of departments when the department heads moved on to what at the time was Marvel Universe Online.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I didn't join on to CoH until after the original staff split, but once they did, the game started getting a lot of quality of life / modernization updates from Paragon Studios. Things like buff timers and the like. From where I sit, sure, the original staff set the ground work for a good thing, but the staff that remained / carried it on molded it into something way better. That's the staff that I care about most; the ones who were present the day they found out, along with all of us, that NCSoft turned into a bag of dicks.
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MrVyngaardLive From New EtoileStraight Outta SosariaRegistered Userregular
If there's one thing that CoH's devteam always did right, they was that they took their own setting fairly seriously in the worldbuilding department. You could entirely believe in the setting. They took the time to add the city plaques and even bugs got changed to amusing world info, like that one "Rikti phenomenon" with the NPC civvies running in circles over that building basement enterance...
It all had a really SOLID feeling to it. Real pity that the tabletop RPG didn't get to pan out.
"now I've got this mental image of caucuses as cafeteria tables in prison, and new congressmen having to beat someone up on inauguration day." - Raiden333
Posts
To the tune of $28 million.
He was in quarantine after his space-venture when they pulled this stunt. They called him, said yo you're terminated and to make it all the more, just like, god damn man, they forged the letter and his initials in order to make it look like he voluntarily left the company so that he would loose his stock options with NCSoft.
ayyyyyyyy
Like, did they just think he wouldn't fight back?
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall in that meeting. Just to see how the idea came up.
That's almost comic book villain levels of evil combined with idiocy.
The Monarch comes up with beautifully elegant plans though.
Like being in international waters, only straight up. Right? Makes perfect sense.
I learned that from watching The Martian!
Edutainment!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
*catches up*
This is the worst April Fool's prank ever.
Activates time mirror
/hide
If they ever make another superhero mmo, I definitely think player-created content is the silver bullet. No matter how good the story or the raids are, at some point you'll want to make your own stories with your own hero, with more tools at your disposal than the chatbox.
I don't want to come off like an advertisement, but Star Trek Online has a very robust character creator as far as avatar appearances go, though it loses out substantially on the selection of powers to CoX.
With the ability to modify the appearance of not only your character but the whole bridge crew gives a lot of flexibility, and you can easily swap out crew members equipment (or just different crew members) for your away teams.
Ship customization is available too, but is rather limited. Choose from 3 saucer sections, three hulls, three nacelles and a dozen or so paint patterns for the most part.
Depends on how you define bullshit though. Are power level missions bullshit? Cause I remember the CoX community loved that long rectangular map just filled with green hamidon things for powerleveling.
Or are you trying to weed out bad (or offensive) writing on missions with actual stories?
I'd be worried that a group of people might tamper with the rating systems just because they can. Just imagine some group of trolls organize themselves to upvote or downvote certain maps because they think it's funny.
Heh, preaching to the choir, my friend- I've been playing STO since open beta.
That's actually where a lot of this comes from. I know a lot of people make up their own backstories for their characters in any mmo, and I think the next step for the genre is giving players the tools to bring that into the game. Seems like that would be a more natural fit for a superhero game than anything else.
I think Champions Online (their follow-up when they started a new company or some such... I forgot the exact history) has a fantastic creator. A good step forward from their CoX tools. The ability to apply things to only one side of the char, and to have stances and all that jive, really added a lot. Plus the color options for powers was something I yearned for in CoX.
Shame the game itself is sort of bleh. But man do I have a lot of cool characters that I never play!
Agreed. Though, I will say it helps a ton to turn off the default black outline setting. Makes it look a little less plastic-y.
I can't take the lore, setting, or RP seriously like i could with CoH
CoH had its goofyness but for the most part had the general tone of, y'know, comic books
Whereas Champs just feels like a spoof of superhero stuff
The return of a hero and then something called MXM.
That was at 12am before bed.
It is now 4am for me and .... i am very upset.
i was in for CoH from the beta!
sigh
The problem is you need a Company that is behind user created content and support it from day one through the full game live.
As an example on how not to do this I would pick Neverwinter Online another Cryptic Game. This game got so much potential and in the first few weeks it was quite promising to live up to the name. We could create content, players would play them no matter if it would have a story or not. Cryptic did not deliver enough content in the first place so UGC was a excellent alternative.
The company did even have live streams every week about the game and some of the player UGC missions got even featured from the devs on a weekly base to stand out even a little more.
So what did go wrong?
The tools were OK, it even got one big upgrade that allows you to 3D edit but over time as Cryptic released more content for the basic game less and less updates were added to the UGC. So as the game ages, we did have less and less access to new items/npc/map that you could add to your own missions.
The problem was twofold. One side the dev tools where subpar, one of the STO devs did explain this once in a podcast, that you could not simple copy some code and then flag it for the UGC, it was way more complicated(points to CoX), so much that this simple task would require multiple steps and some "dev" time to do so.
The other side of the coin was that they found no way to monetize the UGC. For the own content the poor solution was to add repeatable missions/dailys that would give you some specific rewards to strenghtn your char so the could milk the player over and over. For the UGC it got worse and worse with the breath of the chinese PWE behind them.
The users that created the content did have a few problems. From lack of basic scripting, however we try to work around it like for timer you created npcs far outside of the range of the player and then kill them off, e.g using a npc patrol pattern that run over traps. To have no controll over the rewards that a player would get at the end. Comments like why did I recive the wrong item from my class to no loot at all, where always fun. This part got even worse after the killed the daily rewards for doing UGC content. Up to not having boss encounters, a solutuion from the players was to throw more mob groups into the battle but power creep and limited number of resource added up. In the end even the editor would not work for several weeks or even for some month.........
I could write for a few hours over it but lets finish it. Players can compensate only so much for missing tool before the run out of options. In my last mission I created on a open map a full 3D dwarf mine that would allow more then one way from the the outside to inside of a mine all the way down to the abyss (refused to use the same old stadard maps, 1 year in) with a custom difficulty slider and a few moral choices that would change the outcome and design of the map, it got featured like 3 others missions.
I don't care if some make powerlvl content, have used them myself in CoX more then a few times but IF the devs don't have a zero Idea what to do with the user content in the first place (e.g. missing dev tools/lack of rewards) plus don't offer support in the long run (points to Perfect World Entertainment) and even kill it or should I write put it on life/legacy support because the could milk the players with endless repeating daily mission better then instead of letting them try out thousands of UGC mission....
Or does Cryptic just leave a path of broken skeleton crews whenever they bounce to a new ill-conceived mmo?
Some of the original CoH team left to do CO, including the original lead dev, who really wanted to license the Champions property in the first place and sort of accepted CoH as a compromise. But a lot of the original team stayed, and most of the game's strongest content came well after the split.
That original lead also bounced out of CO to work on Star Trek Online, leaving behind a team who were clearly less into the Champions setting than he was.
That explains why the game is a tin man, yeah.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Actually, not a lot of the original team stayed. Not a lot of anybody stayed. Once CoV and I7 were out the door, and everybody got shuffled off to Champions, City of Heroes was left with a staff of 15 people. Some of the top devs were still on it but almost everybody was moved off, and most of who was left around to be in charge were second or third rank people who were suddenly put in charge of departments when the department heads moved on to what at the time was Marvel Universe Online.
It all had a really SOLID feeling to it. Real pity that the tabletop RPG didn't get to pan out.
Not much to this for vets, just cool to see a popular youtuber even mention the game nowadays