seebs

Mine too. Off, and a little to the left, just sort of hovering there. I'ma /bug that.

Not 100% sure, but I was under the distinct impression that Ray, at least, was very actively involved in game design and development. Back when BG came out, I traded a fair amount of email with him (I sent in SUCH lists of feature ideas), and he did not at ALL sound like someone who was just funding this stuff and staying uninvolved.

Commonly, but not universally. One of the reasons Rift is managing an impressive level of ongoing development is that they didn't do that; in fact, so far as I know, they've hired more devs than have left since launch.

Congratulations on your new role as Director of Merchandising.

It is, however, irrational to ignore an entity's patterns of behavior. At this point, I don't have confidence that ncsoft will continue to provide a paid-for service, or will offer any explanation for a refusal to do so. So I am never giving them money again. Not because I like or dislike GW2, but because I do not trust GW2 to not be randomly shut down if for some reason ncsoft feels a sudden need to "realign" again on "games that are more Korean" or whatever the actual reason was for killing CoH.

I have no basis for confidence that they are acting in good faith. My last couple of years of experience with ncsoft's web store, and the paragon market, has left me firmly convinced that ncsoft is deeply and fundamentally incompetent.

In short, how I feel about ArenaNet and GW2 is only relevant if it comes to pass that it is clear that ncsoft does not have the ability or power to shut them down. I cannot rely on "but no one would be that stupid", because if that were an effective argument, the paragon market would have been a completely different experience.

It's okay. Arcanaville has proved lots of us wrong before. We know how you feel.

I might well have. But in 2004, ncsoft did not have quite the same track record of abruptly killing games off. Nor had they decided to not contact me at all about the money I paid them for a service they are not going to provide.

Yeah. But also that it doesn't obviously help to take that chance on them -- because ncsoft can just yank the plug whenever. And that's sorta the thing; there are lots of things out there that I think are worth taking chances on. I bought into Rift fairly big early on because I liked their attitude, and same with TSW, and I'm happy with both of those. So far.

Yeah. Thing is... I have a hard time enjoying an MMO-type game if I have low confidence in the publisher to keep it running. Especially if I have low confidence in them to give explanations or warning. (I can handle change, grudgingly; I cannot cope well with unexplained change.)

Still works. I am running code I wrote in the early 90s on OS X with no changes. Only reason it's not older code is that before that I wasn't using ISO C, and that's a little *too* old, just from a language perspective.

This is entirely true.

The reason I will never give ncsoft another penny isn't that I particularly hate them (although I do consider ncsoft as a whole to be one of the most spectacularly incompetent companies I have ever encountered).

It's that they mostly sell MMOs. And they have a number of traits which make me think that giving them money for an MMO experience is a sucker bet.

1. They are spectacularly incompetent from a business standpoint. Paragon Market. They paid someone money for that. Perhaps more stunningly, they hired someone who could produce a thing like that. This testifies to a process which bears roughly the same relationship to due diligence that a cat macro does to an ecologically stable population of lions. And this was for something that was absolutely essential to a business plan.
2. They are spectacularly incompetent as MMO administrators. Compare the multiple-days server hardware shuffling ncsoft did for CoH to the way Rift or TSW handle hardware changes. Look at the six weeks of additional monkey farms because ncsoft decided not to permit ANY changes whatsoever because they wanted a thing shipped on a given deadline.
3. They are erratic and not-at-all transparent. I really value transparency; one of the reasons I am such a huge Rift fanboy is Trion coming out and saying "here's what we were trying to do, here's how it failed, here's how we're making it up to you, here's what we've learned and will change in future efforts". More than once. Ncsoft gives terse weasel-worded statements that are probably false.

Which means: I don't trust them. If I were making friends in a game run by ncsoft, I'd feel I had to try to make sure I had out-of-game contact methods for keeping in touch with them, because I'd have insufficient confidence that I could rely on being able to talk to them in-game later. I would be emotionally unable to become involved in long-term plans for characters, because I wouldn't have the confidence that there is a long-term.

Hate? No. Angry? Eh, maybe, but that'll pass. But will I ever trust them again? No. Will I invest of myself in characters in a world they have the ability to shut down? No. Can any MMO be fun to me if I can't do those things? No.

I'm angry at Blizzard. I consider the company itself to have shown consistent and active hostility to a small (but interesting to me) segment of their player base, and to have in general acted in ways which promote mistreatment of certain minority groups. I loathe them, and I will go to some lengths to convince people that it's not just that I shouldn't play their games, it's that no one who cares about the wellbeing of other people should continue supporting them. (I also freely admit that my optimistic faith that they'd continue as they once were after their "merger" was, in fact, totally misplaced.)

I'm not nearly as mad at ncsoft; it's just that they have carefully eradicated any way in which I could feel like spending money or emotions on their games.

Not so. I've been through a handful of layoffs (at least one, maybe two, where I was one of the people who left), and none of them were like that.

I dunno about "majority", but I have never come close to running out. Of course, I don't play through stuff super fast; my highest level CoH character is 45, I think.

Rfit, TSW, and DDO all have at least some unsoloable stuff to varying degrees. (DDO, I'm told, has puzzles in some dungeons which *require* two people to interact with things simultaneously. You cannot solo this no matter how much you outgear it.)

On the other hand, public groups are amazing. In Rift, when there's groupish content, and you're near someone who hasn't set themselves private, there's a Join Public Group button. Click it, you're in a group. Automatically forms full raids and everything. Makes life a LOT easier compared to manual invites. And... well, there's a LOT of stuff to do, so there's plenty that you can go mess with even if you're not up for grouping.