Talks with NCSoft take over a year?

[Zep]

Honestly I'd like to see COH go monthly with a cash shop again. With NCSoft getting a small/nominal percentage of the net profits. As say, the Franchise owner. 

 

In fact I would like to offer to be an employee in that case.

 

Bring in more money - proper and legit, keep NCSoft in the loop so that they dont take a reputation hit and are this interested giving Homecoming free reign. The work done so far, patches, etc are all awesome - compared to what they could be - a Modern DX 12, OGL 4.4, or Vulkan 1.2 based engine would not just have better eye candy it would do the work much faster.

[Rejolt]

The only thing I hate about talking about this is the idea that we'll eventually start to talk about something we have no power about and say its unfair but fair because its not really ours so we're powerless but we keep talking that we have no power to make it go faster and say its unfair but fair because we don't have the rights and see NCSoft's side of it but then hate the good, honest players who love this game don't have control of something they once rightfully paid for and say its unfair and feel powerless but fair because it was a service and...

 

/dies of HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy induced suicidal conversation avoidance protocol.

[roleki]

8 hours ago, Zep said:

Honestly I'd like to see COH go monthly with a cash shop again. With NCSoft getting a small/nominal percentage of the net profits. As say, the Franchise owner. 

 

In fact I would like to offer to be an employee in that case.

 

Bring in more money - proper and legit, keep NCSoft in the loop so that they dont take a reputation hit and are this interested giving Homecoming free reign. The work done so far, patches, etc are all awesome - compared to what they could be - a Modern DX 12, OGL 4.4, or Vulkan 1.2 based engine would not just have better eye candy it would do the work much faster.

These are all great things to aspire towards, but I can't help but wonder how many players will stick around for that first month, and of those, how many will be around for the second and subsequent months?   I know *I* would be on board, but I'm a weirdo.  How many normal folks would kick in, and how many would just let it go?

[FrauleinMental]

20 minutes ago, roleki said:

These are all great things to aspire towards, but I can't help but wonder how many players will stick around for that first month, and of those, how many will be around for the second and subsequent months?   I know *I* would be on board, but I'm a weirdo.  How many normal folks would kick in, and how many would just let it go?

I'm also that weird.  I joined at Issue #6 and subscribed annually all the way to shutdown, even when I took breaks to play other games.  (Even when I deployed in 2008 my sub was still active.)

[Herotu]

I remember when you paid for something and then you owned it. 

 

 

Now everybody wants to rent everything out because they've seen the landowners get away with it for centuries...  It always comes back to the landowners.

Edited June 30, 2020 by Herotu

[Frostbiter]

Being a landowner isn't that hard. You just need to get out of the city. I have 5 acres and a nice house and the best part is there isn't an HOA in sight. 

[Ironblade]

On 6/29/2020 at 1:04 AM, SuperPlyx said:

Umm,the deadline I was referring to was for the HC team. It takes 2 to negotiate.

 

So many keep saying it's in NCS best interest to just drag the talks out. But is it in HC best interest? And if a C&D is all it will take to close HC then go ahead and turn it off now, 

Yes and no.

Yes, it is in Homecoming's best interest to let the talks drag out.

No, let's not shut it down now just because you're having a snit.

[Lazarillo]

12 hours ago, Zep said:

Honestly I'd like to see COH go monthly with a cash shop again. With NCSoft getting a small/nominal percentage of the net profits. As say, the Franchise owner. 

Nothing would make me run any faster than NCSoft seeing so much as a dime at this point.  They had that chance and blew it long ago.  I love the HC experience, but I'll sooner virtual machine and solo exist for the rest of my days than participate in a system in which NCSoft gets anything.

 

That said, I also don't think NCSoft has any real match of HC's desire to "negotiate" anyway and figure they're just ignoring them like they've always done, so I'm not really "worried" from that side of things.

[MunkiLord]

3 hours ago, Herotu said:

I remember when you paid for something and then you owned it. 

 

 

Now everybody wants to rent everything out because they've seen the landowners get away with it for centuries...  It always comes back to the landowners.

I remember that too. But when has that ever really been the case with an MMORPG? Sure if we're talking about a game on Steam or Origin I get your point, but that seems to be a completely different issue than what we have here.

[Herotu]

On 6/30/2020 at 9:13 PM, MunkiLord said:

I remember that too. But when has that ever really been the case with an MMORPG? Sure if we're talking about a game on Steam or Origin I get your point, but that seems to be a completely different issue than what we have here.

True enough, and I understand that infrastructure requires maintenance, but I would prefer to pay for things as they incur costs rather than a regular, rolling fees. In the case of contracts, it's inevitable that I'm paying through the nose.

Edited December 7, 2020 by Herotu

[Snarky]

also, Coronavirus.  any non essential legal work is now moving at breakneck 2020 speed of 1 mph.  check out the news.  courts are screwed, meetings are not happening, necessary stuff only.  unless people are throwing tons of weight (money) around.  no one is doing that in this negotiation.

[Omega-202]

6 hours ago, Snarky said:

also, Coronavirus.  any non essential legal work is now moving at breakneck 2020 speed of 1 mph.  check out the news.  courts are screwed, meetings are not happening, necessary stuff only.  unless people are throwing tons of weight (money) around.  no one is doing that in this negotiation.

As a legal professional, this isn't really accurate. You're correct that the court systems are backed up and mostly suspended globally, but the NCsoft/HC situation has nothing to do with the courts. Big time litigation has dropped off due to budget cuts and court delays, but contract negotiations should not be significantly stalled.   Meetings are definitely happening and if anything are easier than ever because of the increased adoption of video conferencing.  I work in international pharma IP and most firms I work alongside have transitioned to work-from-home like it was nothing. I have had more "face time" with my Chinese and Japanese counterparts in recent months than prior in my career because we've all had to accept that the semi annual all day in person conferences aren't going to happen, so we might as well hop on Zoom.    

 

These things take time, but I am going to be brutally honest and say (Covid or not), the fact that we're 18+ months in on a deal this trivial is a very bad sign.  

[Abraxus]

I will just state again that, without knowing the details on what exactly is being discussed, the schedule for those discussions, the degree of success already achieved, and projections for future milestones; everything in the way of comments on it are conjecture, speculation, and supposition.  There was never any expectation set for a time schedule, and no promises made that it would be concluded by a certain date.  At this point, we will know what can be known, when it is possible for it to be known.

 

In the meantime, I will play the game.  Mainly because I can do so without any difference between the moment the negotiations were still on-going, and that moment when they will be concluded.  If there are some good things that come our way once it's done, great!  But, for the moment, I have no complaints, and it doesn't appear that Homecoming, or any of the other servers are going anywhere, anytime soon as a consequence of the incomplete talks.

Edited December 7, 2020 by Abraxus

[Ironblade]

9 hours ago, Snarky said:

also, Coronavirus.  any non essential legal work is now moving at breakneck 2020 speed of 1 mph.  check out the news.  courts are screwed,

 

2 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

As a legal professional, this isn't really accurate. You're correct that the court systems are backed up and mostly suspended globally, but the NCsoft/HC situation has nothing to do with the courts.

Right.  I was reading about the NY City court system where they have held less than 10 trials in a time span that they would normally have hundreds.

I also know some lawyers and those that don't do criminal law or litigation are pretty much unaffected.

 

 

2 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

These things take time, but I am going to be brutally honest and say (Covid or not), the fact that we're 18+ months in on a deal this trivial is a very bad sign.  

Eh, not so much.  As I recall, one of the factors mentioned was getting non-profit organization status.  Now that means everything is proceeding at the speed of GOVERNMENT (specifically, the IRS).  So we should expect this to take about five minutes less than eternity.

[Ohsirus]

17 minutes ago, Krimson said:

On the bright side, if we wake up one day and Homecoming is just not there, then we can probably guess that things didn't pan out.

I remember guys saying there was a tool for Live that allowed them to back up their toons. I wonder if there is one for HC floating around.

[Omega-202]

9 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

Eh, not so much.  As I recall, one of the factors mentioned was getting non-profit organization status.  Now that means everything is proceeding at the speed of GOVERNMENT (specifically, the IRS).  So we should expect this to take about five minutes less than eternity.

The non-profit status was done ages ago in order to clear the way for donations.  Also, that sort of thing takes no time at all.  My group has overseen the formation of 7 startups in the same time window, one of them from conception to buy out.  The incorporation paperwork and approval timelines are not too different from the non-profit org formation, from what I have experienced.  The whole "government beaurocracy can take years" thing is more of a meme than a reality most of the time. 

[Ironblade]

49 minutes ago, Omega-202 said:

The non-profit status was done ages ago in order to clear the way for donations.

No, they were very clear about this.

On August 8, 2019, Jimmy said:

"The primary reason for setting up the LLC was actually tax protection. An LLC can spend money on server costs and write it off as an expense, essentially ending a financial period with zero income.  An individual cannot do this, they would be taxed on the income before being able to spend it on server costs."

And on September 3rd, he said:
"What we can say is that setting this up as a non-profit is complicated, if it's even going to be possible at all. There's no precedent for what we're doing here, so we (and the attorneys we're working with) are kinda going to be writing the book on it. Essentially, this is less of a "wait and see, trust us" and more of a "when we're confident in a plan then we'll talk about it".

Edited December 7, 2020 by Ironblade

[PeregrineFalcon]

The longer the talks go on without any statement from anyone the better for us.

 

First, NCSoft may not actually want to enter into a formal agreement with HC. They may also not want more bad publicity related to CoH that sending a C&D would certainly generate. And, since they probably don't want to lose their trademarked IP, one option that they have is to be involved in "talks" that don't go anywhere.

 

This prevents someone from being able to legally steal their IP by claiming that NCSoft wasn't defending it. NCSoft can claim that they were "in talks" (even if no one actually spoke to anyone else for years) with HC and thus they were taking action that was "in defense" of their IP, which is required to keep from losing their IP.

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, Ohsirus said:

I remember guys saying there was a tool for Live that allowed them to back up their toons. I wonder if there is one for HC floating around.

There was Sentinel+, a program that would read your character data and save it to an XML file, so you wound up with files that looked like this (just the head of the file):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<character>
	<name>Caloria</name>
	<server>Guardian</server>
	<global>@srmalloy</global>
	<title></title>
	<description>Born with the ability to suck thermal energy out of the environment around her -- and to release it back violently if startled or frightened -- Callie Byrne grew up with very little close personal contact; metabolizing the absorbed energy  caused her to grow unusually fast and tall, further isolating her from children her age. Getting frozen or burned didn&apos;t attract many people, and after the one boy to try to kiss her in high school was treated for both frostbite and second-degree burns, even fewer. Her father, a retired military officer with contacts, arranged to have a suit built for her that gave her finer control over her energy transfer ability; after participating in the fringes of the Rikti War, she came to Paragon City to continue making use of her abilities.</description>
	<origin>Technology</origin>
	<archetype>Tanker</archetype>
	<alignment>Hero</alignment>
	<dimension>Primal</dimension>
	<inf>6686943</inf>
	<xp>8155017</xp>
	<costume>0</costume>
	<build>0</build>
	<enhancementcap>20</enhancementcap>
	<salvagecap>63</salvagecap>
	<vaultcap>58</vaultcap>
	<recipecap>29</recipecap>
	<enhancements count="0">
	</enhancements>

It would need to be updated to account for the code changes from Homecoming, so that the program would be able to read the character data, but it saved out the costume(s) and build(s), with data like:

<power>
  <id>Tanker_Melee.Ice_Melee.Greater_Ice_Sword</id>
  <level>35</level>
  <slots count="6">
    <slot level="40" boost="0">Boosts.Technology_Recharge.Technology_Recharge</slot>
    <slot level="40" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Damage.Crafted_Damage</slot>
    <slot level="40" boost="1">Boosts.Technology_Damage.Technology_Damage</slot>
    <slot level="40" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Endurance_Discount.Crafted_Endurance_Discount</slot>
    <slot level="40" boost="0">Boosts.Crafted_Accuracy.Crafted_Accuracy</slot>
    <slot level="40" boost="2">Boosts.Technology_Damage.Technology_Damage</slot>
  </slots>
</power>

There was later a program that would read a Sentinel+ character save and dump all of its costume sections as .costume files that could be loaded back into the game, although with some errors that required correcting. It was never done, to my knowledge, but it should be possible to write a program that read the file and saved out the builds in a format Mids would read.

[Greycat]

1 hour ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

The longer the talks go on without any statement from anyone the better for us.

 

First, NCSoft may not actually want to enter into a formal agreement with HC. They may also not want more bad publicity related to CoH that sending a C&D would certainly generate. And, since they probably don't want to lose their trademarked IP, one option that they have is to be involved in "talks" that don't go anywhere.

 

This prevents someone from being able to legally steal their IP by claiming that NCSoft wasn't defending it. NCSoft can claim that they were "in talks" (even if no one actually spoke to anyone else for years) with HC and thus they were taking action that was "in defense" of their IP, which is required to keep from losing their IP.

.... in other words, it's the MMO version of the infamously bad... think it was Fantastic 4 movie that was never officially released, done just to keep rights. (As opposed to the infamously bad Fantastic 4 movies that *have* been released...)

[Hyperstrike]

On 6/30/2020 at 2:29 AM, Zep said:

The work done so far, patches, etc are all awesome - compared to what they could be - a Modern DX 12, OGL 4.4, or Vulkan 1.2 based engine would not just have better eye candy it would do the work much faster.

I know this is 6 months old.  But I need to address this.
Without looking at the code yourself, you have NO WAY of knowing this.
You have no way of even knowing if such an engine rewrite is even POSSIBLE.

Now, OGL4 should (SHOULD) be fine since all the functions are backward compatible.
As to whether it'll be "faster"?

100% SPECULATION

[golstat2003]

5 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

As a legal professional, this isn't really accurate. You're correct that the court systems are backed up and mostly suspended globally, but the NCsoft/HC situation has nothing to do with the courts. Big time litigation has dropped off due to budget cuts and court delays, but contract negotiations should not be significantly stalled.   Meetings are definitely happening and if anything are easier than ever because of the increased adoption of video conferencing.  I work in international pharma IP and most firms I work alongside have transitioned to work-from-home like it was nothing. I have had more "face time" with my Chinese and Japanese counterparts in recent months than prior in my career because we've all had to accept that the semi annual all day in person conferences aren't going to happen, so we might as well hop on Zoom.    

 

These things take time, but I am going to be brutally honest and say (Covid or not), the fact that we're 18+ months in on a deal this trivial is a very bad sign.  

And how exactly do we know it's a trivial deal? We don't even know what HC is actually asking for. (I'm talking about the contract specifics).

Edited December 8, 2020 by golstat2003

[Hyperstrike]

25 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

There was Sentinel+, a program that would read your character data and save it to an XML file, so you wound up with files that looked like this (just the head of the file):
 

It would need to be updated to account for the code changes from Homecoming, so that the program would be able to read the character data, but it saved out the costume(s) and build(s), with data like:
 

There was later a program that would read a Sentinel+ character save and dump all of its costume sections as .costume files that could be loaded back into the game, although with some errors that required correcting. It was never done, to my knowledge, but it should be possible to write a program that read the file and saved out the builds in a format Mids would read.

Restoration of Sentinel_ files was done for a VERY short period on SCORE, as the servers were being tested and spun up.
The reconversion was an entirely manual process.
But later changes in the back-end system completely broke the functionality and no work was ever done to make it forward-compatible.

At this point, it's moot.
None of the current server-runners OWES you your Live characters back.
ESPECIALLY if they have to break their working setups to make such a thing possible.
 

[Snarky]

5 hours ago, Omega-202 said:

As a legal professional, this isn't really accurate. You're correct that the court systems are backed up and mostly suspended globally, but the NCsoft/HC situation has nothing to do with the courts. Big time litigation has dropped off due to budget cuts and court delays, but contract negotiations should not be significantly stalled.   Meetings are definitely happening and if anything are easier than ever because of the increased adoption of video conferencing.  I work in international pharma IP and most firms I work alongside have transitioned to work-from-home like it was nothing. I have had more "face time" with my Chinese and Japanese counterparts in recent months than prior in my career because we've all had to accept that the semi annual all day in person conferences aren't going to happen, so we might as well hop on Zoom.    

 

These things take time, but I am going to be brutally honest and say (Covid or not), the fact that we're 18+ months in on a deal this trivial is a very bad sign.  

i defer to your obvious knowledge.

 

also, you confirmed a sneaking suspicion i had with your last point.

 

i read from another post that the Korean business culture would frown on a thing being successful after you tossed it away.  That struck a chord of truth i think.

[Nerio72]

Well it took some people 5 1/2 months to respond to this post,so...

 

 

...seems legit.