How to Close an MMO: Glitch
By
Angry_Citizen,
Posted on: 2012-11-19 21:20 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
I find it surprising that they didn't make more of an effort to sell the game... did they really exhaust all options out there?
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Clearly not:|
Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
I find it surprising that they didn't make more of an effort to sell the game... did they really exhaust all options out there?
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[Why can't you just _______________? If there was a way to make it work, we would make it work. But there is not. We've been through this from all angles, over and over and over. We've shed tears, and we will probably shed some more ... but Glitch is over. |
Doom.
Yep.
This is really doom.
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I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic.
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Originally Posted by Angry_Citizen
Clearly not:
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Poor Glitch, an MMO long on quirkiness and originality, short on funds and subscribers. (Having to pull it back from release into a second beta, although commendable, probably hurt its chances of success as badly as multiple patches would have.) TinySpeck's farewell to its community is exactly how a developer should break such bad news to its customers.
Here's hoping its laid-off employees land on their feet - and TinySpeck has set up a page precisely to help them find their next game publisher, "Hire a Specker". Talk about a class act.
Hey, man, things are rough all over.
Send some of the Glitch players our way.
We understand. /em pat
@Rien
I am Lord Omi. Now and forever. They can take our City, but they can't take me.
well there goes another game down the tube. smh.
-Female Player-
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words.
"Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard.  Never change, E_L! |
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So it's all YOUR fault!|
Originally Posted by CannonballJack
Lacking faith in miracles, I reacted to the end of City of Heroes by looking for another game. The one I liked best was in many ways the anti-CoH: a crafting-focused, violence-free browser F2P named Glitch. Weird, silly, and far dirtier than youd expect from its cartoony façade, Glitch starts out fun and gradually becomes even better as you find new options to explore. It also has the second-best community Ive seen in the MMO world.
Naturally, it will be closing on December 9th. |
Stay away from Planetside 2 and Tribes: Ascend, please. I'm trying those next.
The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction
This gives them a what? 100% Close down rate of their games? Well now we know never to play their games!
Okay, sounds like the company is totally dead.
BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
Meh Glitch has been plagued with problems since the get go. They even had to "unlaunch: and return to beta 2 months after launch due to so many bugs. That alone makes them sound kinda flaky to me. I get bugs at launch, but not ones that make you UNLAUNCH 2 months later.
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Originally Posted by Paladiamors
I love you, I Burnt the Toast!
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On that note, also stay away from the Secret World lest you cause a "Glitch" over there too. |
Originally Posted by Ironik
So it's all YOUR fault!
Stay away from Planetside 2 and Tribes: Ascend, please. I'm trying those next. |
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Originally Posted by Ironik
So it's all YOUR fault!
Stay away from Planetside 2 and Tribes: Ascend, please. I'm trying those next. |
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Originally Posted by Thirty-Seven
On that note, also stay away from the Secret World lest you cause a "Glitch" over there too.
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You should watch Survivor Island...and love it!
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Originally Posted by CannonballJack
I think it only happens with things I love, so I'll be playing Champions Online instead. However, I will be watching your favorite TV shows. Try not to get attached!
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BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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I'll look it up just as soon as I'm done watching this Real Housewives of Cap au Diable marathon.
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Originally Posted by BrandX
You should watch Survivor Island...and love it!
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Hats off to Tiny Speck for trying to do this in a better way.
I wonder if they have played COH, too.
@Kyuu
Lacking faith in miracles, I reacted to the end of City of Heroes by looking for another game. The one I liked best was in many ways the anti-CoH: a crafting-focused, violence-free browser F2P named Glitch. Weird, silly, and far dirtier than youd expect from its cartoony façade, Glitch starts out fun and gradually becomes even better as you find new options to explore. It also has the second-best community Ive seen in the MMO world.
Naturally, it will be closing on December 9th.
It turns out that, with a little practice, you can make it through all five stages of grief on the first beer. A well-written closing announcement really helps, though. Ive taken a few selections from Glitchs farewell to show how to end a virtual world with grace:
For many of us at Tiny Speck, the creation of something like Glitch was a long-held dream. There's no better word than "heartbreaking" to describe what it feels like to have to do this. And we know that for many of you who poured your creativity, energy and imagination into Glitch and the community, it will be heartbreaking as well. We are sorry to have let you down.
It's complicated, but it comes down to this: if that were a transaction that made sense to the purchaser, we wouldn't be shutting the game down.
Why don't you give the game away or make it open source or let player volunteers run it?
Glitch looks simple, but it is not. Any massively multiplayer game is several orders of magnitude more complex than a multiplayer game (and those are usually an order of magnitude more complex than a single player game). The state of the world changes hundreds of thousands of times a second, and each of those changes has to be immediately saved in a way that is safe and redundant. Most of those changes decrease in a chicken's lifespan, the regeneration of a rock, the health of a tree, the movement of every player have to be sent from server to server and from server to player's local computers. If you're in a busy place in Glitch, your computer might be receiving hundreds or even thousands of messages about stuff that's happening around you every second.
It takes a full-time team of competent engineers & technical operations personnel just to keep the game open. Even if there was a competent team that was willing to work on it full time for free, it would take months to train them. Even then, the cost of hosting the servers would be prohibitively expensive.
Why can't you just _______________?
If there was a way to make it work, we would make it work. But there is not. We've been through this from all angles, over and over and over. We've shed tears, and we will probably shed some more ... but Glitch is over.