NC Soft's BIG MISTAKE

Kinda like badge hunting then? :P

You can do that for free though.

I look forward to the day when Aion, Lineage II, or Guild Wars 2 will be the largest "active" MMO shut down.

No, I'm not bitter.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Yup! Nothing like hoping more people get put out of work! \o/

Or more people deprived of a past time they enjoy.

You can ?

How did that work with the loyalty program badges or the badges you could only get by being incarnate ?

Edit: The Really hard way, always looked like a scheme to see if they could leach more out of people that were paying. That looked like it needed every storebought insp you could carry, and amplifiers and anything else you could use.

From employee comments, working for another company would be considered a benefit.

It is going to happen. There will be a time when NCsoft shuts down another game. The company is a pathological game killer. I consider NCsoft going out of business so they won't kill more communities to be the one of the best things that could happen to the game industry.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Sound similar to what I heard about CCP and Blizzard.

I've been wondering if maybe this was NCSoft's rationale.

From all of the numbers and arguments I've seen tossed around, it seems like City of Heroes was profitable, but not very, and was gradually shrinking. It doesn't seem likely that it was actually losing money, or even that it was just one bad month away from it, but it's pretty clear (mostly from all of the research Father Xmas has done) that it wasn't growing, either. Still, if it was providing a reliable profit, what kind of reasonable businessperson would shut it down, especially with the dead loss of three months of uncompensated maintenance costs tacked on? That's just throwing money away.

Paragon wasn't growing, though. If NCSoft lacked confidence in the Secret Project, then cutting it would leave Paragon as a branch of the business that would, at best, turn in a gradually-diminishing profit year after year: Profit without growth. To a certain kind of business philosophy, that's a liability rather than a flawed asset.

So could that be the reason NCSoft pulled the plug on Paragon? It seems goofy, but I can picture some of the MBA-types I've known arguing for it.

For one thing, you need to remember that no matter when you killed CoH, you'd incur the three-month dead period. So if you think the game is going to go into the red soon (for example, you foresee a substantial exodus after you lay off half of Paragon due to the demise of Secret Project), killing CoH pre-emptively has a lot to recommend it.

Whoever said rich business people are reasonable? And even business people do things that seem reasonable and turn out not be.

My own company raised the prices on everything last year, only to realize that was a mistake, so lowered prices back down this year, but it cost them money the previous year.

Good point on the three dead months. I'm not convinced by the forecast-of-doom idea, though. I know us MMOers are the most panicky of sheep, but how many subscribers could NCSoft really expect to lose between "Paragon laid off half its staff" and "but none of them were working on CoH?" That could be literally the same announcement!

Everybody who's ever worked at a big company knows that their boss is an overpaid halfwit who's never even opened that copy of The Art of War.

Even so, an announcement of laying off *half* the studio can be viewed as a sign of that the game was only earning enough to *pay* for those staff members, and couldn't afford to pay for the others as it stood.

Now, I am not saying that is the case, but it isn't that much of a stretch for the normal player to come to, and do a knee jerk reaction to it.

If NC Soft had announced "Though COH is currently profitable, it's revenue is steadily declining and it will start losing money soon. To avoid that, we are pulling the plug now." I (and I think most players) would have sadly accepted it. However, NC Soft has to my knowledge never claimed that. Every thing that I've read suggests that it was doing fine, especially when compared against competing MMOs which are shutting down because they are actively losing money.

What other MMO's are closing down right now? The only one that I can think of is Glitch...

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

I get the feeling that some of those upset to that point have no other MMO they want to play.

Likely why they also say every other one is terrible and try to point out every bad thing about them.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

that's because it is silly Especially when none of them were boycotting NCSoft when it closed down those other MMOs that WERE failures.

So in order to stop NCsoft killing any more gaming communities, you want them to kill off ALL of their gaming communities by going out of business?

The best way to keep a game from closing down?

Don't keep leaving it when you rush to max level and go "What's next?" Also, get friends into it! May not work, but it'd help

I wasn't talking about ex-employee comments. When current employees in Korea say that "the company gives an almost free lunch" as the only good thing about a company, the corporate atmosphere is toxic.

Here is the thing: I don't wish any players of NCsoft games the disappointment when their game gets shut down. However it will happen.

I could care less about the employees though. They are supporting an unethical company. They know how bad things are internally.

Nope, I found a MMO I like. I liked it enough to commit to it for at least 14 months. I liked it enough that I put my money on that game when there are countless F2P and solo games I could play or even buy a console system to play that.

I have accounts with two F2P games as well (rarely used).

There comes a point where you have to say "Just go away." I've got to that point with NCsoft. I'm positive that players will find other games and employees will find other work (okay, given the attitude of some NCsoft employees, some won't) and life will go on without NCsoft. It is an overrated company, and a lot of its practices hindered development here.

NCsoft is paving the way to making itself go out of business, at least in North America. I will neither help it nor hinder its progress to oblivion.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

I'm saying it is just a matter of time. No point on a slow, lingering death.

I was prepared to stay with this game well into 2014. I never gave up trying to get players that left to come back.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Now, I'm not going to say, don't walk away from NCSoft. But, I don't really see how it got to the point of saying "Just go away".

Of all the games they've dropped (and CoH was the only one making any money), it just happened to be the one game you saw dropped and said it's reached that point?

Did you play any of the others? Did you even care when they got dropped? Did you even know they dropped those other games before they dropped CoH?

They dropped TR, Exteel, DR and you did or did not get up in arms about it?

Like I said. If people don't want to play any other NCSoft game because they shut down CoH, I understand. But saying it's because of their history, maybe they should of noticed it a long time ago