DrGanglion

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NCSoft posts their numbers as part of their securities filings with the Korean stock exchange. NCSoft is a publicly-traded company. I'm not sure why other games made by publicly-traded companies in the US and Europe don't have to follow suit.


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Accounting regulations vary on a country by country basis. For publicly traded companies the exchange on which the securities of a given company trade may set disclosure guidelines above and beyond those set by the IASB (International Accounting Standards Board) or FASB (Federal Accounting Standards Board), or the established GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) standard.

But under all of these provisions a company need not disclose division specific information for lines of business that represent a minor portion of revenue (less than 10% in many case). Disclosing unit sales or subscriber numbers is an option that certain companies adopt to give potential investors greater financial transparency. Since NCSoft originated as a company with a single game (Lineage) as the source of its business, disclosing subscriber numbers was established as part of early financing and continued as a policy to woo further investors. Other game franchises are not a substantial portion of revenue for their parent companies, are developed with private financing and thus not subject to public disclosure regulation, or are developed by public companies that only report aggregate revenue due to substantial diversification in their titles (Electronic Arts is a good example of this).

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but it would be beyond reason for anyone to attain the 10,000 Monkey badge at this point.

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What about the "beyond reason" numbers attached to some of the other epic badges?

1 billion damage taken = 77 consecutive days (1852 hours) of taking 1500 points every 10 seconds. I'm not even sure a regen could stad up to 1500 points every 10 seconds.

1 billion points healed = Spam healing 10 targets every 5 seconds for 14 days (347 hours). This would probably only be possible from attending the mito phases of over 300 Hamidon raids.

How are either of these or even the earlier verions of them within reason? You might as well offer an epic Isolator badge: defeat 10,000 contaminated.

Oh and even without herding it would be possible to get the 10,000 monkey badge with an 8 man team in 3-4 hours. Much easier that either of the epic badges above.

I agree with the assessment of most people that this power has almost no utility past the early levels. For much of the game it is just too dangerous to let your health fall and stay at a low enough level to get much benefit from defiance. Statesman's suggestions of strategy to take advantege of defiance seem in direct contradiction to all the other changes proposed in Issue 5, which are leaning toward a more aggressive emphasis on team work.

However, I like the feature conceptually and would like to see it remain in an altered form. My two suggestions for this are

1) Damage buff scales from much earlier on:

90% health = 2.5% bonus
80% health = 5% bonus
70% health = 10% bonus
60% health = 15% bonus
50% health = 20% bonus
40% health = 40% bonus
30% health = 80% bonus
20% health = 160% bonus
10% health = 320% bonus
1% health = 400% bonus

2) Defiance buff remains on a short timer (or limited to the next attack only) even if the damage is healed.

Or even some combination of the two options, although the second is probably preferable as it does not invalidate the roles of defenders or the timely use of inspirations.

1) Please datamine the TF badges.

2) The numbers on some of the epic badges are truly unattainable. I crunched the numbers on a different thread and it would take 4 times as much gameplay as it did to get to level 50 to attain some of those. For example, the empath badge would require attending around 230 Hamidon raids and spam healing throughout the mito phase (not that anymore Hamidon raids are happening with any frequency on any of the servers)

3) Size of the new badges needs to be fixed

Thanks for making a great game and for the content Issue 3. While I don't necessarily agree with every change, the following additions are greatly enhancing my gameplay experience:

1) Mission difficulty slider
2) Ancillary power pools
3) Striga Isle
4) Global chat (when it goes live that is)


Keep up the good job and I am looking to further improvements in Issue 4.