Posi Confirms: COH Largest and Most Active MMO Ever Shut Down

Thanks, Ogi. I honestly wasn't certain how I might attempt to state/explain what seems an obvious truth. I don't intend any insults with that statement towards those who posed the questions, but I honestly couldn't come up with it in the span of time I had to respond here, in-between working on other things.


E.L., as for your questions regarding how better could they have done this... The main point is that the situations didn't warrant it being done. They have the right to do it under any circumstances they want, but nothing short of the game truly suffering financially should have called for the termination of it and the community surrounding it.
What scenario are you painting in order to make the closure a requirement?
As for the handling of the situation, require or not... the game's earnings, legacy and current (at the time) activity and excitement level called for forewarning, time to plan and produce better fitting exits and a respectful handling of both employee and customers (i.e. not firing them and ceasing all work in one day and allowing players to return to VIP and have proper goodbyes with their characters and the game).
None of this seems like it really requires explaining!
It's pretty bleeding obvious what they botched.
Only... you keep suggesting it is not botched, because they didn't have to be nice about it at all.
Well, being people of respect and care, our feedback as that is pretty awful of them.

The NCSoft Cat says:

I have exhausted all efforts to give a ####!

It was the suddenness of it all that really shocked us. If we had say server consolidation or a public downsizing of the staff just before or right after Issue 23 we would have been more prepared for the "realignment".

However for long time players, over the years we were able to rationalize the changes in the perceived population of the game. In the early days the skies and streets were full of heroes, then the debt discount and mission bonus improvement drove a lot of heroes into instanced missions. That's okay because we still saw them racing from mission to mission, crossing Steel or Skyway to catch the other tram.

Then CoV came out which did two things. First the population was split between two games. You were either playing Heroes or Villains. Second the introduction of bases and their zone teleporters meant you only needed to get to a base portal or after Vet Rewards were introduced in Issue 8, the base transporter power at 2 years. So now we accepted a smattering of characters running about in the open on their way to trainers and stores.

Issue 9 introduced crafting, the consignment house and RMT spammers. This drove a lot of people off into hiding since the RMTers were pulling character names off of the search list to drive their spam email. So we learned to rely on our Friends contact list to see if they were online, besides SG and global channels.

Issue 13 altered PvP forever. PvP didn't really hold any real interest for me but from what I understand is significantly changed PvP in a way where existing tuned PvP builds were no longer optimal. Sadly they did add multiple builds at the same time, a feature that if existed earlier, would allow someone like me who didn't want to gimp their PvE build due to PvP or vice versa to have a specialized build as well as their regular one.

Issue 14 introduced AE and player created content it also created a class of players who never realized that there is a world outside of AE with a play style that was usually significantly different from the farms found in AE. Many proved to be difficult to team with players due to their lack of basic gameplay knowledge such as zone geography and travel to tactical knowledge about various critter groups (target the sapper/death shaman/DE pets first). This may have discouraged players from openly welcoming any new players.

The introduction of Praetoria in Issue 18 once again emptied out the existing areas as players went to try out the pretty and challenging Praetoria. The upside it was the only way to start a character with any standard AT before choosing a side. But the rather significant change in difficulty between blue/red to gold made the experience annoying to older players while newer players only exposed to the difficulty playing the first 20 levels experienced the opposite when they went either blue or red, not to mention the change in visual quality.

It was easy for us old timers to assume that everything was status quo over the last few years. We were accustom to seemingly empty zones and search results. Everything seemed alright since of friends and global channel and SG companions were still around in sufficient numbers but for a new player it was a ghost town and unless they were taken into someone's fold, they probably didn't stick around. Few who mentioned the substantial downturn in sales revenue since 2009 were lumped in with the doom and gloomers.

So when NCSoft made their "realignment" decision we were all blindsided by it. But how much of that blindside was us simply not noticing the actual state of the game? How many forum posts were there telling new players that the servers weren't ghost towns and all they needed to do was find an active global channel or SG to join. That the game was very solo friendly or team size or makeup wasn't that important as it is in other MMOs. I think a lot of us fooled ourselves that everything was okay as long as issues kept arriving and there wasn't any hints of large staff downsizing or word of server consolidation.

As for NCSoft's decision, selling the property may not even been discussed when they were doing whatever analysis that led to them choosing to close Paragon Studio and CoH. By the time they made the closure announcement it was fait accompli. Part of a larger plan already decided upon and changing a part of it like selling off Paragon and CoH was disruptive to the decided course of action. Who knows, it's all speculation as to the real reasons behind it. The game simply may not have hit some internally decided sales revenue goal after a year of F2P or a white knight in NCSoft's management left leaving Paragon with no protector. Maybe they decided that only MMOs that do well enough in Korea and the rest of Asia are only worth keeping. CoH may have been the family "black sheep" being only viable in the west. Again, who knows.

for those of you interested you can see here like ncsoft fares in the stock market.
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/036570:KS
If you scroll down to Income Statement for 036570 you will see like the income of the company was going down since 2010
This could explain because CoH was closed and Guild Wars2 went live early

who really cares anymore...you got 3 weeks and 3 days ...stop nerd raging and play the game.

the whos,wheres and whys are mute now.

Not new news savage.

In Nov 2010 they were predicting 850 billion KrW in sales for 2011 and 1 trillion KrW in 2012. In late 2011 they say that they will make 700 billion KrW for 2011 and 1.2 trillion KrW in 2012. They came up quite a bit short at 609 billion for 2011 and GW2, B&S will have to sell like gang busters if they any chance of hitting even the lower 1 trillion estimate considering they only had 288 billion KrW in sales for the first half of 2012.

That's the reason the stock is down over the last year, their growth estimates are way, way optimistic and if you invested expecting that growth, it's understandable selling it off. However the stock is still 4x higher than it was at the start of 2009, just not 7x.

Of course right now it's bouncing up in anticipation of the 3Q report coming out this week. It should include a full quarter of Blade & Soul sales in Korea, so expect those numbers highlighted, and one month of Guild Wars 2 sales. But that's only one side of the balance sheet, they will need to show that they are back in the black instead of pulling a Zynga (sales grew $600 million, costs grew $1 billion, oops).

And GW2 didn't go live early. NCSoft first suggested the game was going to be out in 2009, then 2010, then 2011. If anything it was late from NCSoft's PoV.

At this point, what we do know is that there were several interested buyers in the game besides the Ex Paragon Studio Devs. I can certainly see the Devs be so attached to the game they'd try to buy it even if it didn't make long term financial sense, but the fact that several other bidders were out there-- and Valve was one of them-- suggests that at least someone in the industry thought there was still money to be made.

The amount of positive-- and free!-- PR that NCSoft could have made from selling the game would have been considerable.

That they didn't sell the game suggests to me they are expecting a CONSIDERABLE tax write off from selling the game.

Well, that or they are now so emotionally invested in their original decision that they will stubbornly cut off their nose to spite their face even if it cost them buckets of money.