Hey guys! I'm a newbie here, but I've been playing COH since the beginning. I drifted away to other games here and there, but when I got a new computer to play a long-awaited new game recently, I installed the new game and COH right off the bat. Three weeks later came the COH shutdown announcement. NOOOOOO!
Yesterday I struck upon an idea that I haven't seen posted (though it might have been mentioned somewhere that I haven't seen). I could be behind the times here...
So the Paragon Studios developers are game designers, right? They create the world, draw up heroes and baddies, design adventures, and work up rules and combat systems to set it all in motion. Writers, artists, editors, etc. work together to create an environment where others join in and play. How is that different from the old pen and paper game developers? It's not. Well, except that the Paragon folks' work is pushed to your eyeballs via bits and bytes rather than paper. However, therein lies the Achilles heel of MMOs.
When a pen and paper game company goes belly-up, the "paper" is still out there. The world is still in the book. You can go and buy it at the store, bid on it at an auction (eBay, at a gaming con, etc), or trade for it. Heck, you could find it in a yard sale or have a friend give it to you. You crack open the book and it's there. The world, heroes and baddies, and adventures are yours to enjoy all you want. All the writers', artists', and editors' work is still available so long as the "paper" floats along through time.
An MMO designer's work is no less than a pen and paper designer's, IMO. Yet, when the company they work for goes belly-up or dumps their game, their work goes away. Forever? Oh, the screenshots and memories are still there, but there's no way to pick up the adventure again down the road. It just...ends. Surely that would strike a pen and paper game designer as quite awful. Particularly in this situation. We can't expect an MMO to last forever, but to shut it down so abruptly and essentially leave the gamers with the GTFO feeling (no correspondence from NCSoft) -- well, seems to me the Old Guard might be quite appalled.
What I'm getting at is why not try to rally some of the old pen and paper game designers and artists to the cause of the Paragon Studios developers? Some of them have been around since the dawn of the original Dungeons and Dragons boxed set and carry a lot of respect in the gaming world. They have been the "stars" of conventions all over North America and Europe for decades, along with the authors who write novels featuring their worlds. And let me tell you from experience, some of the biggest "stars" are some of the most friendly people you'll ever meet.
And what about the card game designers, too? The same applies to them.
What do you guys think? Perhaps this thread could be used to post contact information/Facebook links for some of them.
