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If you won the lottery, would fund you fix Champions?
sigmaseven0
Posts: 714 Arc User
Warning weird/random post:
Recently I ran across how Final Fantasy 14 was getting rebooted and it seems that the response on the "realm reborn" has been pretty positive. I thought to my self "CO would never get a 2nd chance like that because it would cost too much money".
With how scornful MMO players are I'm honestly surprised at how well the new FF 14 revamp is being received so far. This got me wondering if a brand as damaged as CO could be hypothetically reinvigorated if the funds became magically available.
Cryptic/PWE would never fix this (by fix i mean add the most requested features like fondry or whatever "fixing CO" means to you), but what if one of the hard core CO community members was suddenly sitting on hundreds of millions?
I see many post about how "CO is a waste of potential and if the devs had the budget to implement my ides it could be the best". Would you put your hypothetical money where your mouth is?
How much faith do you have in Cryptic as a studio?
Would you:
A. Not give CO a 2nd thought?
B. Want to see CO revitalized but not trust Cryptic not to waste your money?
C. Give them money and if so how much.
D. None of the above.
Bonus Question:
What do you think a "Realm Reborn" style revamp to CO would do for Champions and Cryptics reputation?
Recently I ran across how Final Fantasy 14 was getting rebooted and it seems that the response on the "realm reborn" has been pretty positive. I thought to my self "CO would never get a 2nd chance like that because it would cost too much money".
With how scornful MMO players are I'm honestly surprised at how well the new FF 14 revamp is being received so far. This got me wondering if a brand as damaged as CO could be hypothetically reinvigorated if the funds became magically available.
Cryptic/PWE would never fix this (by fix i mean add the most requested features like fondry or whatever "fixing CO" means to you), but what if one of the hard core CO community members was suddenly sitting on hundreds of millions?
I see many post about how "CO is a waste of potential and if the devs had the budget to implement my ides it could be the best". Would you put your hypothetical money where your mouth is?
How much faith do you have in Cryptic as a studio?
Would you:
A. Not give CO a 2nd thought?
B. Want to see CO revitalized but not trust Cryptic not to waste your money?
C. Give them money and if so how much.
D. None of the above.
Bonus Question:
What do you think a "Realm Reborn" style revamp to CO would do for Champions and Cryptics reputation?
PVP is starving without rewards
1. Please give us Daily PVP missions that reward Questionite.
2. Please give us an exchange rate between Acclaim and Recognition so that PVP has access to all "On Alert" PVE rewards.
Post edited by sigmaseven0 on
0
Comments
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
*Or, just make a new IP entirely.
Mostly cause if I did, I'd be making my own game. I has plans, you see...Buwaha. :biggrin:
Deliciously nutritious!
I've soloed Champs for years now and never had to ban anyone to do it.
Craptic code isn't the best to work with, from previous developer discussions in City of. Consider the reason bases didn't get a major overhaul is the spaghetti string that coding was.
Not to mention, it's best to work on something new, rather than trying to fix old and busted.
Occam's Razor makes the cutting clean.
IT WOULD FREAKING HELP ME!
Ima trying to solo Serpent Lantern and mah brofist Ginger PMs me and goes on about doing BASH with him. I mute him you think problem solved wouldnt you. NOT SOLVED! not. by. a. long. shot.
Phones me up calls me a beeatch then continues to annoy me about BASH ._.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
I probably could toss my large wallet on the screen and see what they would do with it.
But, there would be a To-Do List for every cent.
Pass #1, you get a treat and so on.
1st mill would go solemly for MORE TIGHTS!!
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
Even if I wanted to put renewed faith in Cryptic after having done so, they're currently contracted in the development of STO and NWO as well, so getting them to work on the game license I've just bought would be out of the question. Another development studio would have to be engaged to continue working on the game.
PVP is starving without rewards
1. Please give us Daily PVP missions that reward Questionite.
2. Please give us an exchange rate between Acclaim and Recognition so that PVP has access to all "On Alert" PVE rewards.
Completely new zones. New everything.
Basically, all the costumes and powers and such would be kept.
1. Buy the IP, and then fire all of the cryptic people and rehire the paragon boys and tell them to go to town.
2.Start a whole new IP, based on ALL of the current superhero MMOs taking the only good pieces
and for both points the game engine would be completely redone to run on either Unreal 4 or Cryengine 3
The Nemesis system needs fixing and here's ideas:
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. Henry Ford
Well the engine would remain the same. Using a different engine means rebuilding everything from scratch. I'd rather just build on from whatever is already there. If I had to buy the rights to use the engine, I think it would be more cost effective than spending the resources to rebuild the whole game from scratch, and people would have to wait for a long time to play the game again without actually spending anything.
As for the studio, I really don't know. My dream team would be the former Paragon developers for sure. The studios that are currently working on all those triple-A titles would be out of the question anyway since they're contracted with the big name publishers so I don't really know.
I don't have any real experience in the MMO industry so this is just fun speculation.
I'm a money man. If I could be assured that I would become the lead producer of CO I would offer them the cash in exchange for the position and my INVESTMENT. I would not GIVE any company money for free, but I would be prepared to lose on my investment but only if I lost it myself with the creative decisions I made for the betterment of the game.
I would need discretion on the programmers working, on the projects they work on and the option to release any programmer not working up to my extremely high standards.
But I am assured that if I gave Champions Online $500,000 with the terms outlined above for 2 years I would have been pleased with my investment of time and money and hopefully recovered my initial investment in 5 years time. (Tho I would still not have had a salary nor would I ever get my time spent in CO back).
And to be honest.. If I could do that, I would.. that's why I bought stock in PWE. But if it were more financially lucrative for me to do the same for one of the competitors games I completely would. Whether that be the smaller studios trying to get off the ground or even an established old studio.
I hope you win the power ball just so i can see this happen.
PVP is starving without rewards
1. Please give us Daily PVP missions that reward Questionite.
2. Please give us an exchange rate between Acclaim and Recognition so that PVP has access to all "On Alert" PVE rewards.
You'd buy the IP just so you could rewrite it completely? Do me a favor and never win the lottery.
Hey, you want a game with content coming out, or you want the same lore?
Let's face it- Even CO does Champs lore poorly.
As if the lore has anything to do with the rate at which content is released or it's quality. The CU lore isn't cheesy by nature, Cryptic's handling of it just makes it seem that way.
Hey, it was asked what I'd do if I won the lottery. It's just what I'd do- It'd be nice if one of the two superhero games wasn't either forcing you to be a sidekick, or pretty much playing a parody of comics.
I'd rewrite a lot of it. Maybe even have the same general basic layout of Champs lore, but put some real comics writers on it.
It seems the issue is with how the game is written, not the lore in general. All that needs to be done is to rewrite the game, you don't need to "Trash the IP lore" to fix the silliness spin the game put on things.
There's still so much untapped lore sitting around, like Dark Champions. A serious comic writer can utilize just that much to great effect.
I don't want a superhero game where everything is like "modern" comic books and where heroes are usually brooding.
Now, if we're talking about pop-culture references and parodies, then yes I agree that those need to be toned down a little bit. CO does have a lot of those.
I don't expect 'Dark and Broody'. I do expect something I play to not come off like a fourth grade fart joke or a Wayans brothers parody.
I dislike the Silver Age, because it was horrible in just as many ways- if not more- than the 1990's. Mr. Freeze? Magneto? Any cool villain? You'd have never seen them in the Silver Age. Go read up on the comics code to see how silly, homophobic, misogynistic, and outright backwards this age was.
Modern comics as a setting is fine. We still have capes and tights- it's just people are actually writing them better. Proof of concept: Injustice: Gods Among Us did perfectly fine capturing the heroic image of certain heroes while embracing something beyond corny camp. As did DCUO, for all its limitations.
I'll put it in another venture that benefits me.
Sorry, Champs, but there was once a time where some of us were willing to help for free. That offer has expired. What chance have you with even a dollar more from subscribers?
The problem I've found with power is that many people THINK they know best how to use it but few once granted power know how to LEAD with it in a balanced, wise, and just manner.
I mean this even with people with the best intentions. To manage wisely is to balance on a knife's edge, with leadership being the cornerstone to success.
I speak this from direct personal and directly observed experience.
Second, I feel an improvement can be made with angel investors putting money incentives for Cryptic/PerfectWorld in just the right areas:
Lower prices needs to take into account the worth of an item. Certain things are priced just right, some too much, others are too cheap. I can easily think of examples of both.
For more buyers, need to advertise to new players, create NEW EXPLORABLE CONTENT to bring back older players, and work to restore consumer confidence with safe & reliable billing combined with good customer service. Good customer service means prompt, personal (not automated BS), results-driven, and fixing the glitches/bugs in the software (and logging it in patch notes FFS!)
Seem pretty short when you put it like that but when you think about it if Champions was doing what I just wrote at a level
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
I do not know enough about software to guess whether or not it would be less expensive to start from scratch rather than toss money at CO.
But,
In other endeavors I know that it can at times be much more expensive to retrofit, when the foundation is not sound, than to demolish and start over.
It seems to me that just adding new content would be the least expensive thing to do with an infusion of money...It would also have little impact on my enjoyment of the game. To me, for any investment to matter, it would need to be a ground up revision of almost the entire game.
At that point I might as well fund a new game entirely.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
This is important, it's why even if I had a billion dollars, I wouldn't touch CO and Cryptic with a stick. After all, it means that either the code base really is **** and not worth investing in or that Cryptic are lazy-**** liars and not worth investing in (or possibly both).
I'd get a lifetime sub here for what its worth.
Maybe take a trip to Cryptic and Cryptic North to flash my money around and brain storm with drunken devs.
Maybe get someone there pregnant.
1) Base the business model on being sustainable with a smaller, long term, very loyal player base of Superhero fans but still try to get as much of the general "gamer" community by being inclusive (probably meaning sustainable on a moderate amount of subs, but with a free model that is attractive to migrating "gamers").
2) Bid for both CoH and CO IP and take the one you can get cheapest (probably CO, they probably won't sell CoH at all), or maybe even Freedom Force? FF could actually be kind of awesome! But if all else fails, start a new IP.
3) Put together a studio built mainly from as many former Paragon Studio people you can get your hands on plus maybe poaching people who worked on Champions (It wasn't their fault how things went with Champs, it was their higher-ups). MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH TO GET MATT MILLER!
4) Do NOT use Craptic engine, use a proven long-term engine.
5) After all of the lessons learned from CoH, Champions, and DCUOwowthisgameisprettybutsucks, build the Superhero game of the decade.
Sure, but I'd have to make sure that the money is actually goign towards fixing the problems and content, and not into some exec's pocket and or used to fix other games, and not used for lockboxes.
Given a official gurantee that the funds will be used to actually work on this game's bugs and or content, I will happily fund it if I won the lottery in a significant amount where it wouldnt be too big of a significant portion of the winnings.
Changing engines isn't exactly the easiest task on the planet. It takes tons of man hours just to port over graphics object and textures. Me personally I would keep the cryptic engines upgrades found in Neverwinter, and port CO's jangled mess over to the upgraded system. Keep cryptics team in tact, as well as hire as many people from paragon as possible as well as some new blood.
Ideally the coding work required and the man hours for just that alone, you're lookin at a good 2mil easy. (hope I'm wrong on that).
But, that 2 mil is the budget for a huge studio, with a huge corporate team backing it. As big as cryptic claims to be now, you could twiddle that ***** down to 200,000 dollars budget and still have enough sassyness to have your graphics team pile out another new map and overhaul the current graphics for 50,000 or less. Within the year. <
This is how hard new and up coming indy teams are working on their games.
Money where your mouth is? I'm not even gonna bull**** you guys here, but. Money in the game development side of things is a cop out. Unless you're gonna sit up for 2 years and write a new freakin engine, theres no reason for it to cost you that much.
If I had access to this engine, just based on freelance work in stuff like Twinity and Fiesta Online, I could be dropping you guys at least 5 costume sets a month. Some people like the toymaster could be dropping like 5 vehicles a month, plus 20 costume sets, plus new dances and emotes and hair styles like.....30 a month on just those.
Its a costume set, its a graphic overlay with a few animation meshes that you guys already have pre formed. Doesn't take that long to pound one out.
With a fully dedicated team you could chop this game up and make it look like you just re-released skyrim on the same engine.
But, the only thing keeping you from achieving that goal is, dedication and time.
If you're even missing a fraction of those, what would have taken a few weeks ends up spanning months and years.
If I won the lottery...
After a year long binge of drunken hedonism, I might wake long enough from my stupor to ask my money manager if investing in Champions Online would be worth it.
After a 5 minute laugh fit, he would say "No", and then we would move onto building my Lexcorp enterprise.
I'm just sayin'...
:biggrin:
CellarRat33 :: formerly Bsquared
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"The great thing about glory unending is that it's dirt cheap!" - Tateklys
From the Adventures of Thundrax (canadascott)
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