NCsoft is NOT our enemy
By
Acroyear2,
Posted on: 2012-09-04 10:26 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Indeed; if it was anyone who ragequit, it was NCSoft on Friday morning.
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Originally Posted by Slazenger
Is it too late to Ragequit?
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The Asian company Nexon bought 15% (controlling shares) of NCSoft in June.|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Yeah, while the "NCSoft sucks!" attiude is understandable when emotions are running high, it's important to remember that this is a totally out of the blue U-turn on their previouly supportive policy towards the game - and they had such confidence in the developers that they even green lit a new MMO from them, so something has clearly happened within NCSoft very recently to make them change that attitude.
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There were hints that this was coming, we just didn't see them. Such as when Aion and Lineage 2 began converting accounts to a different billing login system, but CoH was not required to convert.
I realize that certain players want to somehow present us as a pro-NCSoft group so they can somehow wrangle the sale of the CoH IP/engine etc. to a bunch of CoH players who want to try doing something with it, but A.) it isn't going to work and B.) this was a sleazy thing for NCSoft to do, it was handled in the worst way possible on top of it, and NCSoft could care less about its North American and European player bases anyway.
Arcana, you obviously have never played Aion or Lineage 2 in North America or Europe. You should try dealing with GameForge sometime, too. These things will teach you more about NCSoft than you will ever want to know.
Or even just peruse Aion's North American forums sometime! Whole Aion character databases have been accidentally wiped off the face of the earth with nary an apology or open admission, XP rates have been halved to the complete surprise of the NCWest translation/moderation Team who were not told in advance (making crafting and leveling take twice as long) when Korean patches have been installed, and nothing is ever fixed or openly admitted to, period. Routine lag of 2000-3000 ms from people with otherwise excellent broadband (not to mention getting bumped off in the middle of fort takeovers, which reset whilst the server crashed, etc.) happens daily. And NO ONE CARES, lol. Read the Aion NA forums! The whole entire world outside Asia is hosted on 4 tiny, lag-infested, crashing messes of servers in NA, and all they do is slow XP way down and jack up the prices of XP pots in the cash shop.
Sorry, kiddo, you just don't know much about NCSoft. But you'll see.
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"My God! It's full of short sighted greed!"
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Interesting how the belief that NC is a monolith that will be unaffected by anything we do goes hand in hand with calls to treat them kindly and think well of them.
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You won't be discrete with him because block-transfer computations can't be solved that way, and you intend to math him out of existence?|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I find the guy responsible for the shutdown, and he and I will have some words. Anyone who knows me in the real world, and has seen me in meetings, knows they will be interesting words. I'm definitely not known for being discrete.
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If so, that's cool. Just be discreet about it.
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Yes yes, if you absolutely must go nuclear, at least have the decency to be quiet about it!
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Originally Posted by Shagster
You won't be discrete with him because block-transfer computations can't be solved that way, and you intend to math him out of existence?
If so, that's cool. Just be discreet about it. |
Well if this is true, it does give hope that they or someone in the company at least may be willing to say, sell it to somone. Because some folks may well have a 'connection' to the game and may be quite willing to pass it on, while sur eI am about as in touch with how corps work as a walrus is about nuclear bombs. However it dont hurt our chances, it may be a good sign that they may sell COH on. Also the no emails could be a good sign in a odd way, maybe no goodbye emails means they are trying to sell it on. You know dont blow the doom trumpet till we are sure. Plus if that was the case and some of the devs were onb oard with it, I dont think they would be allowed to say. (I doubt this by the way) But having seen a similar situation before people tend not to speak till they are sure in the corporate world.
That is my take on this, sure they may not be the heroes of this but getting them to talk to us or negotiate the moving on of the IP to somone else is not a bad thing. All they need to be is willing to sell for things to move on, sure it may still fail and sure its not a bad thing to be angry at NCsoft, don't let that anger go too far though, sorry if this sound sliek arambling but that is my take on this kind of thing.
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I thought that was a potentially interesting angle, until I found out they don't even have a seat on NCSoft's BoD. I think their influence has been greatly overestimated.
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Originally Posted by shadow35
The Asian company Nexon bought 15% (controlling shares) of NCSoft in June.
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I have played Aion for almost 3 years (only because my best friend won't give up the game) and can confirm all of the above and add a few more observations:|
Originally Posted by shadow35
Or even just peruse Aion's North American forums sometime! Whole Aion character databases have been accidentally wiped off the face of the earth with nary an apology or open admission, XP rates have been accidentally halved (making crafting and leveling take twice as long) when Korean patches have been installed, and nothing is ever fixed or openly admitted to, period. Routine lag of 2000-3000 ms from people with otherwise excellent broadband (not to mention getting bumped off in the middle of fort takeovers, which reset whilst the server crashed, etc.) happens daily. And NO ONE CARES, lol. Read the Aion NA forums! The whole entire world outside Asia is hosted on 4 tiny, lag-infested, crashing messes of servers in NA, and all they do is slow XP way down and jack up the prices of XP pots in the cash shop. |
Aion's store gouges. There's a reason the NCSoft Q2 report cited poor store sales for Aion's loss. $5 prices encourage a lot more sales than $20 prices. Aion's store leans towards the latter, even for one-use cosmetic items.
Aion's game model is based on repeatable quests, things you have to do dozens or even hundreds of times. It is a grindfest.
Level gaining is very, very slow.
Crafting is ridiculously slow, overpriced, and unproductive.
A game marketed because you can fly and you can only fly for very limited amounts of time in a few places.
When Aion went FTP it screwed veterans. Things that were previously veteran rewards remained with existing characters but had to be bought from the store for any new characters.
Aion only allows 8 characters per account. Period.
Aion's endgame model is based on alliance (league) raids and pvp, pvp, and more pvp.
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BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
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Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.
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I'm not making an argument. No one on the rage-side of the Force is going to reconsider because of anything I say, and so I post merely to highlight how ridiculous sentiments like this|
Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
HERE we go!
EDIT: Also: Using silly terms meant to diminish and/or offhandedly dismiss your opponents' points of view with intentions toward sarcasm and humor, when your main argument is presumably that we should not be demonizing a game publisher by making sweeping generalizations of them, is perhaps a bit both counterproductive and ironic. |
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
**** those ********, I hope their company dies a horrible death from corporate Ebola and they find themselves evicted from their HQ with a cheery "Sucks to be you!"
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NCSoft is a corporation. One of many. Statistically, corporations make decisions like the one NCSoft did on Friday on a fairly regular basis.
This in no way makes it right. All it does is prove that NCSoft really doesn't care about its NA and EU customers.
Now sure, it's up to NCSoft to sell the license and IP so we can continue playing this game in some form or another...and yes, I hope they do. I've sent a certified letter to the CEO's address as requested on Titan forums. I've signed petitions. Hell, I handed out flyers at PAX this weekend telling of this tragedy and detailing the letter address and site addresses of the petition.
I'm doing what I can, but it doesn't change how I feel. At all.
NCSoft gave us a big middle finger. We need to make it profitable for them to sell the game, then give them the middle finger back by making it succeed where they didn't see it happening. And also by not purchasing any more of their products. I'm not. Any game I see listed on NCSoft's main site is black flagged in my eyes.
As consumers and "the little people"...our ONLY way to make ourselves heard is by affecting what matters most to a corporation. Their bottom line. Money. We can do this, if we stick together about it.
This is not the first time a corporation has done something that has hurt its customer base...and it won't be the last time.....yet. It will take time and effort...but we can change this paradigm. And when enough of us get sick of being treated with more and more injustice from corporations....it WILL change.
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OK, while he may have used different, more colorful words than I did, we both basically meant the same thing. That's how I read that post. Also, what he said was in part a reaction to what you said. At least that's how I saw it. If he thinks what you've said is silly and dumb, he'll respond accordingly.|
Originally Posted by Brillig
I'm not making an argument. No one on the rage-side of the Force is going to reconsider because of anything I say, and so I post merely to highlight how ridiculous sentiments like this
are. Mainly because it amuses me and probably some others who are at least a little more level-headed about this whole mess. |
Damn it, you're making me defend Nethergoat. These really are the end times!
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Those games are all supported by different people. They're *all* evil?|
Originally Posted by shadow35
The Asian company Nexon bought 15% (controlling shares) of NCSoft in June.
There were hints that this was coming, we just didn't see them. Such as when Aion and Lineage 2 began converting accounts to a different billing login system, but CoH was not required to convert. I realize that certain players want to somehow present us as a pro-NCSoft group so they can somehow wrangle the sale of the CoH IP/engine etc. to a bunch of CoH players who want to try doing something with it, but A.) it isn't going to work and B.) this was a sleazy thing for NCSoft to do, it was handled in the worst way possible on top of it, and NCSoft could care less about its North American and European player bases anyway. Arcana, you obviously have never played Aion or Lineage 2 in North America or Europe. You should try dealing with GameForge sometime, too. These things will teach you more about NCSoft than you will ever want to know. Or even just peruse Aion's North American forums sometime! Whole Aion character databases have been accidentally wiped off the face of the earth with nary an apology or open admission, XP rates have been halved to the complete surprise of the NCWest translation/moderation Team who were not told in advance (making crafting and leveling take twice as long) when Korean patches have been installed, and nothing is ever fixed or openly admitted to, period. Routine lag of 2000-3000 ms from people with otherwise excellent broadband (not to mention getting bumped off in the middle of fort takeovers, which reset whilst the server crashed, etc.) happens daily. And NO ONE CARES, lol. Read the Aion NA forums! The whole entire world outside Asia is hosted on 4 tiny, lag-infested, crashing messes of servers in NA, and all they do is slow XP way down and jack up the prices of XP pots in the cash shop. Sorry, kiddo, you just don't know much about NCSoft. But you'll see. |
Remember when the ban script happened here for the AE stuff, and everyone blamed Positron because it was so obvious Positron was all upset and decided to take it out on the players? Yeah: I actually know the backstory on that one, but I couldn't say it. I still shouldn't, but: Positron had nothing to do with the details of which characters got hit. Castle wrote the script that did that. And it wasn't Castle's fault either, because the developers can't directly touch the servers like that. An operations person had to execute Castle's script. Castle was worried the script might be too aggressive, so he added safeguard caveats, such as for level-pacted characters. But that got lost in translation, and someone pushed the big red button without double checking what was supposed to be double checked.
In other words, it wasn't malfeasance, it was an error. A really, really, bad error that is not supposed to happen, but error nonetheless. Both Positron and Castle could have said that, but that would mean throwing some poor admin guy under the bus, and neither of them wanted to do that. As the design lead, Positron took the full blame for that one without saying a word.
They probably still don't want me saying this because that's just not who they are, but its water over the bridge now and at this point there's no one that can get hurt over it anymore. And while I'm not going to spill all of their secrets, I think this one is worth it, because I know that so much of what happens, happens for complex reasons and not the simple narratives players like to create. And sometimes, things happen because the developers are human, and they make mistakes. And sometimes everyone isn't privy to everything that happens, nor will they ever be.
Everyone was so certain about what happened there. And so wrong.
And I do play other NCSoft games actually, so just because its obvious, doesn't mean its true.
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I agree. This is how I feel. I'm wondering just what it would take to trigger a sell off and drop in its price and investor confidence. |
Originally Posted by mercykilling
NCSoft gave us a big middle finger. We need to make it profitable for them to sell the game, then give them the middle finger back by making it succeed where they didn't see it happening. And also by not purchasing any more of their products. I'm not. Any game I see listed on NCSoft's main site is black flagged in my eyes.
As consumers and "the little people"...our ONLY way to make ourselves heard is by affecting what matters most to a corporation. Their bottom line. Money. We can do this, if we stick together about it. This is not the first time a corporation has done something that has hurt its customer base...and it won't be the last time.....yet. It will take time and effort...but we can change this paradigm. And when enough of us get sick of being treated with more and more injustice from corporations....it WILL change. |
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Would 10% of all available shares be enough? That's about all I could afford.
Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes. - Sweet_Sarah
BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517513781597443/
Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.
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Good for you; its your money and you are free to spend it with a company that seems to embody "scorched earth policy": I'd call what they are doing now pretty damned scorched-earth. |
Originally Posted by Brillig
Well, speaking for the silent majority, we are sick and tired of the moronic scorched earth policy that some people are taking. We are hereby declaring our intent to continue to support NCSoft and buy even more NCSoft products.*
(*Not really speaking for anyone. But the NCSOFT EBIL chorus is, in fact, moronic.) |
Me, I tend to spend mine with companies which are a tidge more sensitive to the consumer's feelings.
I am waiting impatiently to find out what happens next. If we do indeed find out that NCSoft is not going to sell the property OR release the code, that's when my anger will truly become volcanic.
Now, will NCSoft care about my anger? Of course not. But I'm not the only one mad here, and this whole SORRY MESS!!! [because that is what it is! a sorry MESS] is not exactly gilding NCSoft's lily. They're getting bad press about this, even from people who dont play the game. Word's getting around, and if they refuse to play nice, it'll get around all the faster.
I would not trust them to run any game I cared about, ever again, if they withhold that code from the playerbase or don't at least sell it to a third party. I don't intend to reward such behavior with my cash.
If they play nice, we'll see. About the only way they could salvage this situation other than the two ways listed above, is to announce COH 2. Right now would be an excellent time to pull that rabbit out of that hat. [Not gonna happen, just sayin'.]
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Yeah, I think that kinda rage is misdirected. I wouldn't blame the developers of any game for this. This was totally a top level decision from the folks who run the publisher.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Those games are all supported by different people. They're *all* evil?
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However, it can be argued that because the publisher doesn't care enough about the NA or EU markets, that they don't give them enough resources to allow them to run their games well enough so that it causes problems like what was described. Or else they butt in and make decisions for the devs, which almost always causes a disaster or two, such as you described! But that's still not on the devs; they're still trying the best they can with what little they have!
What if NCSoft was playing both sides of the fence; making money from their legitimate subs and micros while being the controlling entity of the RMT rings?
As CoX implemented more deterrence to RMT, the heads of the NCSoft Hydra began to wither and the beast struck back with a killing blow; refocusing its hunger within its other prospects.
Don't take this seriously folks.
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If that were true, what were you doing here in the first place? What they did to TR was way worse, relatively speaking.
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Originally Posted by Bad_Influence
Me, I tend to spend mine with companies which are a tidge more sensitive to the consumer's feelings.
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Um, Aion NA is completely controlled, programmed and patched by NCSoft Korea. Period. The end. NCWest is a handful of people who merely translate Korea's text into English then push it through straight to live without even putting it up on a NA test server first (which has generated an enormous amount of problems in its own right, believe me). They are completely incapable of even changing the XP rate. They cannot generate or run scripts. Even when the last server merge occurred, character names were a complete disaster area and they could do absolutely nothing about it by themselves.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Those games are all supported by different people. They're *all* evil?
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OY.
They have been uniformly treating NA and EU so badly for so many years I'm surprised there are any players left. However, both Lineage 2 and Aion have been forced to go F2P (and Truly Free to Play with no restrictions at that) to even get any players back on their servers. Pre-F2P, Lineage 2 was down to Chronos, one dead as a doornail NA server. Even with free reactivations, my daughter and I and one other young kid were literally the only players on that server. Lineage 1 was completely shut down here long ago due to having no population. And Aion, well what to say about Aion: It had merged down to 3 empty servers pre-F2P (Kahrun was added as a 4th once it re-launched with 3.0/F2P last April).
Aion and Lineage 2's horrid grind, Aion's terrible crafting and socketing systems, the complete lack of loot drops, and the awful leveling curve have been there since launch. NCSoft (Korea) never listens. Even since F2P, they have mercilessly made it twice as hard to level fighting and crafting levels and have jacked up their already-insane cash shop prices.
Good luck with your whatever presentation to NCSoft. You seem like a nice guy. But it isn't going to do the slightest bit of good. At least you can't say no one warned you.
Our best shot at ever playing CoH again is fading into the breeze more with each passing day, but there really needs to be a pro MMO publisher who is able to convince NCSoft to sell CoH/CoH2 if it's there too. Then they need to get Paragon Studios back together and working before it's too late. And I don't ever even see NCSoft selling, never mind the fact that we haven't heard anything concrete about any pro publishers even trying to get it.
Good luck talking to NCSoft, but don't expect anyone else to see them for anything but what they really are.
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Re: NCSoft: Straw. Camel. Back.|
Originally Posted by Brillig
If that were true, what were you doing here in the first place? What they did to TR was way worse, relatively speaking.
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I'm not sure anymore if you're actually being serious, or just trolling around.
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If you play Aion it's not beyond the realm of reason. I don't see this for COH, in this game there's really no need and shouldn't be a viable market for gold sellers. In Aion there is on both counts, though I don't see it being something the company officially endorses. It does feel as though the game economy is designed as an RMT's dream.|
Originally Posted by Yogi_Bare
What if NCSoft was playing both sides of the fence; making money from their legitimate subs and micros while being the controlling entity of the RMT rings?
As CoX implemented more deterrence to RMT, the heads of the NCSoft Hydra began to wither and the beast struck back with a killing blow; refocusing its hunger within its other prospects. Don't take this seriously folks. |
A friend literally saw a GM in game meet with a player, log off, RMT log on and back off, and the GM get back on. That's pretty damn blatant. If the company isn't doing it, some of its employees are.
Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes. - Sweet_Sarah
BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517513781597443/
Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.
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You wouldn't be the only one - we're offering to give them money for something that they wouldn't make a cent on if they followed through with their current plan - there's no way that our positon is unfair or unreasonable.
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Originally Posted by Bad_Influence
If we do indeed find out that NCSoft is not going to sell the property OR release the code, that's when my anger will truly become volcanic.
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@Golden Girl
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Perhaps so, but I never played TR and so was not really aware of what was going on. My presence on these forums is pretty sporadic. |
Originally Posted by Brillig
If that were true, what were you doing here in the first place? What they did to TR was way worse, relatively speaking.
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NCSoft tossed this game and that one out the window; I was willing to ignore as long as they didn't touch one of their foundation cash-cows: CoX.
It still seems crazy to me to outright trash a game that was still making money - and NCSoft seems literally desperate for money at the moment, perhaps I am misreading the situation - but what do I know. Stupider business decisions are made every day.
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Since Bad_Influence was alleging that he tries to spend money with companies that treat their customers with more sensitivity, I was inviting him to explain why he continued to spend money with NCSoft after they shut down TR.|
Originally Posted by Coyote_Seven
Re: NCSoft: Straw. Camel. Back.
I'm not sure anymore if you're actually being serious, or just trolling around. |
His assertions don't line up with his actions.
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In other words, you don't actually care if a company treats their customers with sensitivity, you care how they treat you.|
Originally Posted by Bad_Influence
NCSoft tossed this game and that one out the window; I was willing to ignore as long as they didn't touch one of their foundation cash-cows: CoX.
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BTW, CoX was far from a cash-cow. It was profitable (at least according to general consensus), but it didn't contribute hugely to NCSoft's bottom line.
NCSoft isn't a human being and doesn't have feelings, but I would still like to kick it in the nuts. It's only a game company, so I'll have to think of something else.
Jer