Yes of course Lineage 1 and 2 have such a great track record of botting and corruption and very poor GM /support ,aside from the games the business itself is VERY shotty at best. After my time in L2 i had launched NCSOFT ahead of SOE and Frogster for being the worst dev/publisher on the planet,so i find it hilarious anyone could use the word TRUST in the same sentence as NCSOFT.
Oh did i mention the debacle with lord british and how they tried to cheat him of his money and closed down TR just to spite Lord British and his brother without giving a dam about the gamer's. I doubt they are handling the FFXI OSI,as that is Nexxon and Square collaboration,no need to use NCSOFT unless it is strictly for Korean purposes but that would be ok because i would be able ot stay clear of NCSOFT.
I do not think we know the complete story of what happened with Richard Garriott and NC Soft.
I for one do not believe the above to be true.
Closing a game to "spite" someone? Ya not gonna buy that at all. I was there playing and subbing to that game when it was decided to close down. There were numerous issues going back to pre-launch in fact.
Where they had to basically re-make the game. Who's fault that was? no idea. I was not there in the meetings to see what was going on..i do know the population was not what they wanted and had not been since launch.
Anyhow, to the OP.:
I really do not "trust' any game dev company in the way you seem to be talking about.
They are businesses first and last. And will do what they think is best for the business. They have closed quite a few games i was playing and enjoying over the years. Tabula rasa, Auto assault, City of heroes.
The last, city of heroes is really the only one i am still confused about. I thought it was a money making game for them and did not see why they closed it down. But again, i am not sitting in the board room where they have all the figures and all to make those decisions.
So i will play their games, if i like them...but have any special, or even any, trust for them? Naw not gonna happen.
Yes of course Lineage 1 and 2 have such a great track record of botting and corruption and very poor GM /support ,aside from the games the business itself is VERY shotty at best. After my time in L2 i had launched NCSOFT ahead of SOE and Frogster for being the worst dev/publisher on the planet,so i find it hilarious anyone could use the word TRUST in the same sentence as NCSOFT.
Oh did i mention the debacle with lord british and how they tried to cheat him of his money and closed down TR just to spite Lord British and his brother without giving a dam about the gamer's. I doubt they are handling the FFXI OSI,as that is Nexxon and Square collaboration,no need to use NCSOFT unless it is strictly for Korean purposes but that would be ok because i would be able ot stay clear of NCSOFT.
I do not think we know the complete story of what happened with Richard Garriott and NC Soft.
I for one do not believe the above to be true.
Closing a game to "spite" someone? Ya not gonna buy that at all. I was there playing and subbing to that game when it was decided to close down. There were numerous issues going back to pre-launch in fact.
Where they had to basically re-make the game. Who's fault that was? no idea. I was not there in the meetings to see what was going on..i do know the population was not what they wanted and had not been since launch.
Anyhow, to the OP.:
I really do not "trust' any game dev company in the way you seem to be talking about.
They are businesses first and last. And will do what they think is best for the business. They have closed quite a few games i was playing and enjoying over the years. Tabula rasa, Auto assault, City of heroes.
The last, city of heroes is really the only one i am still confused about. I thought it was a money making game for them and did not see why they closed it down. But again, i am not sitting in the board room where they have all the figures and all to make those decisions.
So i will play their games, if i like them...but have any special, or even any, trust for them? Naw not gonna happen.
It was actually talked about this week in a few gaming news articles, they closed City of Heroes "because it wasn't making enough money." They knew it was making a profit, but it wasn't enough. Now Carbine loses 40% of it's staff this month, and they say don't worry Wildstar is fine. I doubt it, I'm fairly sure that's NCSoft cutting the budget, because it's not making them WoW money, and they were told it was the next WoW on the pitch. That's my thought anyway.
Yes of course Lineage 1 and 2 have such a great track record of botting and corruption and very poor GM /support ,aside from the games the business itself is VERY shotty at best. After my time in L2 i had launched NCSOFT ahead of SOE and Frogster for being the worst dev/publisher on the planet,so i find it hilarious anyone could use the word TRUST in the same sentence as NCSOFT.
Oh did i mention the debacle with lord british and how they tried to cheat him of his money and closed down TR just to spite Lord British and his brother without giving a dam about the gamer's. I doubt they are handling the FFXI OSI,as that is Nexxon and Square collaboration,no need to use NCSOFT unless it is strictly for Korean purposes but that would be ok because i would be able ot stay clear of NCSOFT.
I do not think we know the complete story of what happened with Richard Garriott and NC Soft.
I for one do not believe the above to be true.
Closing a game to "spite" someone? Ya not gonna buy that at all. I was there playing and subbing to that game when it was decided to close down. There were numerous issues going back to pre-launch in fact.
Where they had to basically re-make the game. Who's fault that was? no idea. I was not there in the meetings to see what was going on..i do know the population was not what they wanted and had not been since launch.
Anyhow, to the OP.:
I really do not "trust' any game dev company in the way you seem to be talking about.
They are businesses first and last. And will do what they think is best for the business. They have closed quite a few games i was playing and enjoying over the years. Tabula rasa, Auto assault, City of heroes.
The last, city of heroes is really the only one i am still confused about. I thought it was a money making game for them and did not see why they closed it down. But again, i am not sitting in the board room where they have all the figures and all to make those decisions.
So i will play their games, if i like them...but have any special, or even any, trust for them? Naw not gonna happen.
It was actually talked about this week in a few gaming news articles, they closed City of Heroes "because it wasn't making enough money." They knew it was making a profit, but it wasn't enough. Now Carbine loses 40% of it's staff this month, and they say don't worry Wildstar is fine. I doubt it, I'm fairly sure that's NCSoft cutting the budget, because it's not making them WoW money, and they were told it was the next WoW on the pitch. That's my thought anyway.
Funny enough, that's the exact same reason EA shut down Earth & Beyond. It was making money, just not enough money. They could have just cut spending and slowed development, but nope, close that sucker down, piss off the fans, and fire all the talent behind it. And then refuse to sell the license to anybody else so the game can continue.
They really are the EA of Korea.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
NC Soft about the only MMORPG company that a mmo player can put some trust in.
April fools is 4 days from now, you are too early.
LOL agree here. NCsoft has shuttered a lot of games over the last dozen years, including some still making money. I have never had any satisfaction in a complaint to their support people. One time I put in a complaint, and did not hear back from anyone for 6 days. When they responded, it was to say that since they had not heard from me, they assumed the issue was taken care of - THEY NEVER EVEN SENT ME A REPLY TO MY ORIGINAL POST. In fact, I was so pissed off about how they handled this complaint that I took a year off from the game I was playing. You would think that 10 minutes of time for one of their support people to fix my problem was more than worth the USD $180 that I did not spend that year...
And their latest release, Blade & Soul, is not a game that I am very fond of.
Nothing less than bringing back City of Heroes or announcing City of Heroes 2 is going to get me involved in anything from NCsoft, although if my gaming guild jumps into one of their games, I'll begrudgingly give it a go.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
Thank you all for the responses. The reality is I have not played a mmo since Archeage came out. Looks like there is nothing good on the horizon for the mmo industry.
The responses here in part give reason as to why I play other games than mmo's. I did in part be quite selective on my original OP . Not necessarily trolling. But rather to see some selective responses.
Met my expectations for sure. In part we all can learn from this post. Why the mmo industry is failing. Being replaced by other types of games.
I like NcSoft. Pricing models on games is very fair, always had good and fast customer service experiences, the games they work with are generally very good. May be a little biased because I've been playing and enjoying BnS for a couple months, but still, can't really think of another big MMO company that's any better.
Certainly not Trion, EA or Perfect World. Blech.
Shutting down CoH seems to be what people rage about. That game ran for 8 years. People say it was "still making money", but they don't know the costs of continued development, keeping servers going etc. so they can't say that for sure.
Shutting down CoH seems to be what people rage about. That game ran for 8 years. People say it was "still making money", but they don't know the costs of continued development, keeping servers going etc. so they can't say that for sure.
What do you mean can't say for sure. The earnings report is public. Check the 2012 financials.
NC Soft about the only MMORPG company that a mmo player can put some trust in. I as of late have been looking at the many developers and game companies that have stayed true to its base. NC Soft is the only one out of many which has stuck to its mmo guns.
What do you think of NC Soft? Do you play any of NC Softs games?
I once thought Blizzard was the only game company I could put faith in. But looking back since 1998. NC Soft is the only company that has not let me down in a big way( I do miss Dungeon Runner"BLING"). But that is about it. Blizzard is a great company. But they are a gaming company. With a variety of different games.
NC Soft still holds true to just mmo's!
Which company do you like?
Interesting belief system you got there. I still play some NCsoft games. I can safely say without any reservations I never have fully trusted any gaming company. I'm not saying all of them are bad either, but giving my trust to a company is very hard for me to do.
NCSoft is only a slightly better than Electronic Arts. They have shut down multiple games that were still profitable. They forged Richard Garriott's resignation letter, lost in court twice, and had to pay him $32 million. Not just a bad gaming company, a bad company in general.
So, now we are clearing the air. What mmorpg company is successful and does not have the complaints stated above?
getting a bit defensive now are we...? You do know that your opinions are not worth less just because people do not agree.
NCSoft used to be a fairly good publisher. Giving developer fair time to complete their games. Then they became more and more introverted. Auto Assault went first, then Tabula Rasa, then a slew of FTP titles, then CoH and for what it is worth WildStar will be next.
Not saying that they make bad choices, most of those games did not do all that well to begin with (or at all in the case of Auto Assault) but they are not what i would call reliable.
Shutting down CoH seems to be what people rage about. That game ran for 8 years. People say it was "still making money", but they don't know the costs of continued development, keeping servers going etc. so they can't say that for sure.
What do you mean can't say for sure. The earnings report is public. Check the 2012 financials.
Eh, care to link them? Along with all the costs associated with keeping the game going and resources allocated to a game that was in decline rather than shifting them to a game that was going to grow (Guild Wars 2)? Yeah that's not so easy to do, is it?
Here's a good quote on it:
"NCSoft is a publicly-traded company, and it suffered a $6 million loss in Q2 2012. A publicly-traded company that loses money needs to convince its shareholders that it will not continue to lose money, lest the shareholders jump ship. Clearly, NCSoft thought they could increase their profits by closing CoH.
This doesn't necessarily mean that City of Heroes was responsible for the $6 million loss. I haven't seen anything concrete one way or the other on that. It's possible that CoH was in the black, and it would still make sense for NCSoft to shutter it.
Let's make up some extremely arbitrary numbers for a thought experiment. Assume that CoH cost NCSoft $1 million a year and was bringing in $1.2 million a year. Sweet, profit! But what if they had another property with a higher profit potential? What if they could move that $1 million dollars from the somewhat-profitable project to an incredibly profitable project? Maybe they could spend that $1 million in such a way they it would generate $2 million in revenue instead of $1.2 million.
Enter Guild Wars 2. According to Massively, "NCsoft said that it is banking on Guild Wars 2 to produce a profitable third quarter" (NCsoft weathers $6M loss in Q2). Is it reasonable for NCSoft to conclude that the Guild Wars franchise has greater profit potential than CoH? I think so. CoH was on a fairly slow decline, but a decline nonetheless. GW2 still has potential for growth. And Q3 looked great for NCSoft, thanks to GW2.
It's also possible that the benefit for NCSoft was of a more arcane nature: taxes. I couldn't even begin to try to explain that one."
Anyway, bottomline, CoH was out for 8 years. In 2012 it was in decline and NcSoft was losing millions as a company. They shut it down, and apparently they made some good decisions at least because since then NcSoft has become very profitible.
Personally, I don't expect a company to keep a game going past 8 years if it's in decline, especially not if the company itself is losing millions.
Ncwest in particular sucks, they only care about sucking money from the whales. No care abour bots or other third party programs. I wish ncwest were shut down and the games went to another publisher.
I will not say that NCSoft is the worst, but I do believe that shutting down COH was a mistake. Also, not sure if this is a good point but I have never lost an account to hackers until GW2. Their response was to just perma-ban my account. Even when I proved that it was stolen from me, I wasn't given a new account or anything. They wanted me to pay for a new copy of the game. Seems pretty ridiculous to me.
I have been playing NCsoft games since Lineage 2 came out, and been enjoying a lot of what they have been putting out. The only problems I have ever had with them are usually from my own end, not theirs.
Every time I've delt with their customer service it has always been exceptional, even if most people don't have that same experience. I had some security pin I couldn't get back, I emailed them about it, within 5 minutes I had a reply with the ability to get back onto my account. Back in the day before there was a /stuck command in Lineage 2, we had to solely rely on their GM's to port you back to towns or out of the geometry when you would get stuck after falling down the side of a hill into a rock. They would always respond relatively quickly, usually within 30 minutes or so.
The only thing I noticed that they do that I don't really enjoy is not really advertising games that aren't their own titles (the exception being Wildstar which I saw a lot of ads for), I remember not once seeing an ad for Auto Assault, or City of Heroes, or any of the games they shut down. I understand not every MMO can stay open so I don't really hold grudges if they shut down games that aren't really all that profitable for them.
Since I've never had any real negative issues with them, I hold them pretty high on my list of publishers that I can trust with games.
Comments
I do not trust them them to keep the botters and gold spammers away.
I for one do not believe the above to be true.
Closing a game to "spite" someone? Ya not gonna buy that at all. I was there playing and subbing to that game when it was decided to close down. There were numerous issues going back to pre-launch in fact.
Where they had to basically re-make the game. Who's fault that was? no idea. I was not there in the meetings to see what was going on..i do know the population was not what they wanted and had not been since launch.
Anyhow, to the OP.:
I really do not "trust' any game dev company in the way you seem to be talking about.
They are businesses first and last. And will do what they think is best for the business. They have closed quite a few games i was playing and enjoying over the years. Tabula rasa, Auto assault, City of heroes.
The last, city of heroes is really the only one i am still confused about. I thought it was a money making game for them and did not see why they closed it down. But again, i am not sitting in the board room where they have all the figures and all to make those decisions.
So i will play their games, if i like them...but have any special, or even any, trust for them? Naw not gonna happen.
They really are the EA of Korea.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
And their latest release, Blade & Soul, is not a game that I am very fond of.
Nothing less than bringing back City of Heroes or announcing City of Heroes 2 is going to get me involved in anything from NCsoft, although if my gaming guild jumps into one of their games, I'll begrudgingly give it a go.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
The responses here in part give reason as to why I play other games than mmo's. I did in part be quite selective on my original OP . Not necessarily trolling. But rather to see some selective responses.
Met my expectations for sure. In part we all can learn from this post. Why the mmo industry is failing. Being replaced by other types of games.
Thank you!
NC soft killed more MMOs than any and all other companies put together.
Certainly not Trion, EA or Perfect World. Blech.
Shutting down CoH seems to be what people rage about. That game ran for 8 years. People say it was "still making money", but they don't know the costs of continued development, keeping servers going etc. so they can't say that for sure.
NCSoft used to be a fairly good publisher. Giving developer fair time to complete their games. Then they became more and more introverted. Auto Assault went first, then Tabula Rasa, then a slew of FTP titles, then CoH and for what it is worth WildStar will be next.
Not saying that they make bad choices, most of those games did not do all that well to begin with (or at all in the case of Auto Assault) but they are not what i would call reliable.
This have been a good conversation
Here's a good quote on it:
"NCSoft is a publicly-traded company, and it suffered a $6 million loss in Q2 2012. A publicly-traded company that loses money needs to convince its shareholders that it will not continue to lose money, lest the shareholders jump ship. Clearly, NCSoft thought they could increase their profits by closing CoH.
This doesn't necessarily mean that City of Heroes was responsible for the $6 million loss. I haven't seen anything concrete one way or the other on that. It's possible that CoH was in the black, and it would still make sense for NCSoft to shutter it.
Let's make up some extremely arbitrary numbers for a thought experiment. Assume that CoH cost NCSoft $1 million a year and was bringing in $1.2 million a year. Sweet, profit! But what if they had another property with a higher profit potential? What if they could move that $1 million dollars from the somewhat-profitable project to an incredibly profitable project? Maybe they could spend that $1 million in such a way they it would generate $2 million in revenue instead of $1.2 million.
Enter Guild Wars 2. According to Massively, "NCsoft said that it is banking on Guild Wars 2 to produce a profitable third quarter" (NCsoft weathers $6M loss in Q2). Is it reasonable for NCSoft to conclude that the Guild Wars franchise has greater profit potential than CoH? I think so. CoH was on a fairly slow decline, but a decline nonetheless. GW2 still has potential for growth. And Q3 looked great for NCSoft, thanks to GW2.
It's also possible that the benefit for NCSoft was of a more arcane nature: taxes. I couldn't even begin to try to explain that one."
From https://www.quora.com/Why-did-City-of-Heroes-get-shut-down
***
Anyway, bottomline, CoH was out for 8 years. In 2012 it was in decline and NcSoft was losing millions as a company. They shut it down, and apparently they made some good decisions at least because since then NcSoft has become very profitible.
Personally, I don't expect a company to keep a game going past 8 years if it's in decline, especially not if the company itself is losing millions.
Also, GW1 > GW2
Such a disappointment.
Every time I've delt with their customer service it has always been exceptional, even if most people don't have that same experience. I had some security pin I couldn't get back, I emailed them about it, within 5 minutes I had a reply with the ability to get back onto my account. Back in the day before there was a /stuck command in Lineage 2, we had to solely rely on their GM's to port you back to towns or out of the geometry when you would get stuck after falling down the side of a hill into a rock. They would always respond relatively quickly, usually within 30 minutes or so.
The only thing I noticed that they do that I don't really enjoy is not really advertising games that aren't their own titles (the exception being Wildstar which I saw a lot of ads for), I remember not once seeing an ad for Auto Assault, or City of Heroes, or any of the games they shut down. I understand not every MMO can stay open so I don't really hold grudges if they shut down games that aren't really all that profitable for them.
Since I've never had any real negative issues with them, I hold them pretty high on my list of publishers that I can trust with games.