Gangrel_EU

It was a safe place at the time... and she had a knack of shouting it out of the car window as they drove past them (she did it when I was in the care once, and i couldn't stop laughing).

At least she didn't know what goes with horses, because she would have probably shouted it out as she was about to ride them.

My sister does something similar with the lambs that graze near her...

She runs up to them shouting "Mint Sauce"

Made me giggle the 1st time i saw her for a few years and she did that

I remember you guys over at the PlanetTR forums!

The AFS Bootcamp idea is something that was a marvelous idea... shame that it was limited to just those in the US

PegasusMD also wrote up about it on my forums (sorry about lack of images, Peg somehow got them hosted on the RGTR website, and as that went, they went )

Thanks for confirming for me... I knew I was in roughly the correct time frame, and the email shows that at least the *option* was there for you (I did use the CoX option as well... 3 months for free, yes please!)

Yeah, i know about it... although i was Fire/Emp controller, so until i got to 32, it was slow going ....

Then the pain* came at 32

*To NPC's that is.

Ahh, the nude Sarah Morrison pic that was done for Playboy i *think*.

Yeah, apart from that, there wasn't much advertising full stop for the game.

Agreed for the lack of options for the character creator, although they did also have a few unlockables later on

I heard several reasons why it failed, although I would probably say that it was ahead of its time in trying to cross over genre's (ie the 3rd person Shooter and MMO). Whilst there were games like Tribes/Planetside out previously, they relied heavily (at least in my experience) in actual FPS shooting skills. You *didn't* need them for TR (although they were handy), and so it was too removed for the MMO players (no tab targetting), and different enough for the FPS players (it needed a subscription, and their elite FPS skills were *not* needed).

Stuck in the great big no mans land with a distinct lack of advertising.

I still want my TR T-Shirt (have the beanie hat though )

Well, if was given enough time to live, it could have paid off its development costs... however, it had a very poor performance from launch, and could have well taken 10+ years to pay back, with minimal development on the game. It was doing *very* shakey financially.

In its complete financial year, it only made 12Mn Won (ish), and that included its launch period as well, where it made around 1/2 its yearly total (going from Launch Quarter to Last quarter). I am ignoring the actual last quarter that it was listed in, because it only made 182Mn Won (a drop of 90% from previous quarter, but as that is a partial financial quarter for money coming in, i can let that slide).

Chances are that after they slashed the development staff down, it was *possibly* starting to break even on a monthly basis... however, it was a declining playerbase. Would F2P have saved it? Quite possibly... but the conversion to F2P is something that you have plan out ahead of schedule, and cannot just flip at a moments notice if you havent even considered the option.

Nope, imps Pre ED, could spawn between 2 and 5 imps per cast. Post ED it was fixed at 3 with them lasting until death.

I would like to stick my neck out and actually state that these 4 failures were actually fairly wide divergences from the standard "WoW" fare of MMO's/Online gaming.

Dungeon Runners was *deliberately* a piss take of the Diablo style game.
Exteel: Group team games, along the lines of the current Monday Night COmbat games on steam... but i can see why you thought it was, and out of the 4 games you listed, this is the closest you got.
Auto Assault/Tabula Rasa: Yes, you had quests, but they both tried to be *different* from the standard fare of Eastern/Western style of MMO at that point in time.

To call Dungeon Runners/Auto Assault/Tabula Rasa "asian" style MMO's is a total disservice to the western developers (although if you were referring to the canned version of Tabula Rasa, I would have believed you) who worked on the games.

Considering the in the Q2 reports there are no financials for Blade and Soul and Guild Wars 2, it was most likely a one quarter blip. Did this introduce a knee jerk reaction from someone up high in NCsoft?

Possibly... but from *my* interpretations of the financial quarterly loss is that it was simply that... a single quarterly loss. IF they dropped any of the other titles, it would make the *rest* of their financials look a lot worse next quarter (because in my mind, dropping Aion/Lineage/Lineage 2 would just drop them all that much closer to being permanently in the red, and nothing that CoX could do would save them in that state, because CoX *doesnt* make enough money to cover that loss in income).

Just tried it Win 7, Chrome... managed to download *all* of the comics listed there...

there was work going on a TR server emulator after TR closed down... it recieved a C&D letter from NCsoft.

I do not know its current status (ie if it went underground or anything like that)

The email didn't come for about month after the announcement (roughly) if i remember correctly. It might have been 2 months, or even in the final month.. but I know that it wasn't instantly.

And they didn't just give out account codes for Aion, they also gave out Lineage 2 and City of Heros account codes.

The reason why I said what i said, is that because i am OCD over my funds, i tend to notice money heading out a few days earlier than the actual *due* date (maybe this is a Barclays bank thing though)...

And yes, the purchasing of points etc is true, I couldn't resub when i had read the news.

I would check your bank statements... typically you need to give more than 24hours notice to ensure that it stops heading out (especially seeing as friday was 31'st)

I would like to correct something for you on this... Avatea was *already* on the move over to City of Heroes when the shake up happened (seeing as she was at that point in time the CM for Tabula Rasa). Martin Kerstein was also able to move over to the US. There are a few others that i can remember who still managed to stay with the company one way or another, although not necessarily for CoX... there were some who had moved over to Lineage 2, others got picked up for Aion.

Annoyingly for the EU side, it was a case of "if you can move, and the studio wants you, you can stay" (For the community team that is). Creative Concepts (Spaff, Rockjaw, Aero) were let go as a group. The GM's and support staff were slashed, and you had to "justify your place" to stay on. And then don't forget that the EU offices also had some development running as well (Which is why Bridger was let go)

You will notice that this is the time when the *studios* and not NCsoft became directly responsible for managing their community teams. This change also coincided with the leadership change up of NCSoft West.

((Little known fact for you guys out there: At least in the EU offices, you *didnt* just do CM work for MMO's. YOu had a lead CM, and then you had your backups. Both Ghostraptor and Kerensky have stepped in to cover Avatea for CM work on TR when she was out of the office... under the new scheme, there would be no-one unless they were already on the CM team for the studio)).

Tabula Rasa had 2 "going away" events...

One EU, one US.

Server turnoff for each region was at Midnight of the *following* day (of the server)... so you would have till effectively 23:59 of 30th November to play. It was how I managed to take part in both the EU and US closing server events.

For CoX, it would probably be due US time based (Seeing as that is where the servers are located)... however i can see them doing an EU Midnight shutdown, so that the staff can get hammered that night.

Nope, Tic-Toc is BackAlleyBrawler...

Nope, but there are cookies

I think its scary in that people are still posting to keep it alive!

Only if you hold my hand and join me....

He probably helped as a go between for NCsoft and Cryptic Studios (to be honest, the Exec Producer is an ambiguous title).

NCsoft list the development studio employees, and then their *own* relevent employees in the credits (which is why they tend to list whole departments together (ie QA/Billing/QA even if the actual individual barely touched the game).

Looking through the credits, you see some interesting names:

April Burba listed as Tech Support (yep, she was an NCsoft Employee and *not* Cryptic Studio's)

Not to mention as well that GW1 links forward through to GW2 (Hall of Monuments), so cutting that off would end up with one feature not being able to work *full stop*

I havent yet unlocked the HoM in GW1 (yeah, i know i suck), but i plan to...

Well, to be honest, if Starcraft 2 needed 2200 people, then that would make it the largest developmental staff *ever* for a game. NCsoft has just 3000 employees (according to Wikipedia), and most MMO's typically have a headcount (at least during crunch time) of up to 300 people.

After City of Villains was released, i believe the head count was just 15... and stayed that way until soon after the buyout by NCsoft, where more funds was made available to hire more people *specifically* for City of Heroes.