I’ve known about negotiations between unnamed buyers and NCSoft to purchase City of Heroes, the fact that attempts to buy the game have been ongoing since it shut down in 2012 should be of little surprise to anyone given the game’s fiercely loyal fanbase and revenue margin. I haven’t run any stories on it, and not because it was requested of me to keep the matter quiet (and it was), but because the story doesn’t have a whole lot of meat to it. Truth be told, there are always attempts by developers and indie outfits to purchase defunct MMOs and nine times out of ten nothing comes as a result of the “negotiations.” To write a story about the potential deal would only serve as a hype piece, and to provide a scapegoat for the community if and when the negotiations finally fell through.
And then Massively wrote an article, and what do you know? There are some who not only have already blamed Massively for messing up the deal, but are claiming that it was an intentional act of sabotage.
Justin’s articles are always belittling CoH and the fact that the playerbase continues to try. (Mostly because of his inherent hard-on for SWG.)
I saw that to and am annoyed. My trust in massively.com has gone down because of that. Like, seriously can’t they respect us until we got more details and the deal comes through? Can’t they wait for this deal and the team to finish or fail before posting about it? But the way Justin talks it’s clear he doesn’t give a crap.
On the other hand it has been requested time and again that people keep it low key while the negotiations are going on, so if Justin really does have some sort of animosity towards CoH and the associated community posting an article on Massively right at a time when negotiations are supposed to be at a critical stage could be a very deniable way to try to hinder the deal.
It almost seems like it was done purposefully. If the guy scoured the forum pages in an effort to undermine the effort, then he is truly a spiteful, little, miserable man.
If the team negotiating the deal didn’t want the situation being discussed, they shouldn’t have discussed it. Rather than keeping the situation quiet, however, small updates on the negotiations have trickled out onto the publicly available forums of the game’s most popular fansite, by a moderator of said forums, in a thread stickied to the top of the category called “new efforts,” in the section labeled “task force hail mary,” with a timeline of said statements compiled in the original post, with more than two hundred thousand views and nine thousand replies.
The answer to not wanting publicity is to not talk about the matter publicly. Loose lips sink ships, and a major gaming press website writing a story about this was guaranteed to happen sooner or later with chatter on the Titan forums growing larger every day. If anything, the surprise is that it took this long for a news site to jump on board.
MMO Fallout 