f13.net

NCSoft fires a bunch of people.

Someone posted this on a dev only message board...

NC Soft (US) just had a big layoff today:

80% of GM's
90% of tech support
75% of QA

Numerous other staff, from producers to marketing/pr.

They are blaming the declining subscriber numbers for City of Heroes/COV which has slowly dropped to just over 100k total. Also to blame has been the disaster that is Auto Assault, which has yet to climb over 10k total subscribers since its launch in the third week in April.

Tabula Rasa continues to suck massive amounts of cash, yet still has no release date in sight.

... thus confirming some rumors that had been sent to me. That is all.

Ninja Edit: I feel the NEED to point out that WoW's success was not to blame, though it's very obvious that much of the pain felt is probably a direct result of Blizzard's success. Also, it's fairly arguable that NCSoft has not yet had a runaway hit in America and (obviously?) could use one right now.

Holy shit 10k subs? Wow...just wow...

Obviously this proves that the only games that will do well are games based on Elves!

I was grouping with some people in WoW earlier. The subject turned to MMO's and past games we've played. One guy started talking about CoV, and was trying to warn everyone about it. Like it was the crappiest game he'd ever played. I was surprised enough at that, but then a couple others agreed.

I don't know what their reasoning was, but I found it pretty strange. I wonder how many others there are like that? How in the world can it be that bad of a game to someone (unless Margalis is actually right about the Elves thing). Shit man -- Superjump? Superspeed? Flight? Those alone warrant at least a spot on a "Pretty cool game" list. How can you not like even that?

No suparlewt to get.

Most of NC soft's NA woes could have been solved by Altering the Korean-ness of L2, and the rest could have been solved by removing the grind from CoH, coming out with CoV fater, and focusing on good, balanced PvP. Allso, just making Car Wars Online with an expanded garage/car modification/cutomization subgame instead of whatever the fuck it is that they made would have made Auto Assault insanely good.

Is 100K subs bad? It's a quarter of what EQ1 had at it's peak. Maybe since WoW raised the sub bar well past Earth's atmosphere and out into the area of Pluto's orbit, 100K seems small but I'd think it's still a respectable number and not worth cutting personel over. But what do I know. CoH/CoV is still my current fav. Good no brainer game.

Don't know how much CoX cost. Obviously 100k is bad though.

Does this include Lum? Isn't he at NCsoft?

He is, or maybe was.

It depends on how much staff, if any, they added in anticipation of CoV and AA doing better than they did. 100K subs is certainly a respectable number for a small development team (I'm assuming Cryptic is reasonably small) but if NCSoft hired a lot of people anticipating CoH and CoV would reach, say, 200K - 250K combined and AA would be in the 50K - 75K range then that's just too many people sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

However cutting 90% of tech support suggests something else is going on over there. And from the deep cuts in QA I'm guessing there's a problem with Tabula Rasa as well. You would think the people that QA'd CoV and AA would then just move over to work on TR.

Their habit of going on rampages with the nerf bat alienated many people, myself included.

standard stuff

lay off CSR's and useless QA.  CSR's because there's less subs than expected.  QA's because the org doesn't care about quality anymore. 

Or more fairly, they have less releases and so less testing needed.

I cancelled after this last update.  I usually stay subbed to CoH/V, even though I don't play very often.  I am addicted to their character creation!  I remember reading a blurb from Statesman either at the end of beta or just when the game launched that nerfing wouldn't happen in this game.  The non-happening nerfs happened.  For some reason, I was surprised.  I can't imagine how cutting that much of the company's employees would leave enough to see to all their games...  unless, they meant cuts only to the CoH/V staff. 

I like Lum and I hope his job is safe, if this is true.

Just...wow.

I'm very curious about that 100k number.  Where did it come from and who is 'they'?  Subscription numbers for NCSoft titles are public record, 1Q numbers can be obtained from the earnings release posted here (http://ncsoft.com/eng/nccompany/ir_data_report04.asp).  NCSoft reports a monthly access of 182,858 as of March 06.  Jack Emmert posted here (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=general&Number=4011221&Forum=,,,All_Forums,,,&Words=&Searchpage=2&Limit=25&Main=4001499&Search=true&where=&Name=509&daterange=&newerval=&newertype=&olderval=&oldertype=&bodyprev=#Post4011221) the last time sub numbers came up on the CoH forums that the NCSoft numbers only include paid subscriptions (Jack loses points for referencing Bruce, but Bruce uses NCSoft's numbers so it doesn't really matter).  Did subscriptions 'slowly decline' by 80k in just two months?

I suppose the story could be true.  Actually I don't really doubt the layoffs happened, at least to an extent.  I'm skeptical about the drop in subscribers though.  That would be an enormous drop in numbers in just a couple of months.

CoX would get me back in a heartbeat if they added any of these things:  loot, crafting, or player housing.

40 should be the max level, or the experience gain curve should be steeper from 20 on.

I would not be  surprised by a drop of 80k since March.  CoV wasn't different enough, the xp grind was still too grindy, the guild housing was very disappointing, the nerfs were disheartening.

And WoW is still pretty shiny.

I cannot comment on this story for  :nda: :nda: reasons, however I am still here at NCsoft as is my team and we still plan to make a kickass MMO that you all will mock and deride!

There is a company at steak keke?

Wait, you have a team? You tell people what to do and they do it? No wonder you sold out!

If the percentages are true, then something must definately be up.  They have had a full year to know how CoH was doing when CoV released, so I am skeptical they made wildly inaccurate assumptions about that franchise.  They may have expected more from AA, but how popular did they expect it to be?  Would cutting CoX support almost in half (which seems too much), plus most of AA, and bits from the other games account for that high of a percentage?

Maybe Statesman will get off his fucking high horse now and flatten the exp curve. That is the ONLY reason I am not a highly profitable (6-10 hours a month) subscriber.  Moronic assholes. All the fun in CoX is new characters. Embrace it, dev team.

I am surprised at CoX's subscription numbers.  CoH had 180k or something, at release, if I recall.

I guess they have lousy retention.  The game is very tempting to jump into, and they launched CoV as well, but when you get there..  I played for a couple months, and I had no real incentive to make friends, no real incentive to join an SG, no shinies to get, and nothing to look forward to but grind in an admittedly entertaining combat game.  Of course, then the combat game gets old, and it's been forever since your last level..

/unsubscribe

Diminishing the grind would be enough I think.

But there will never be loot. I would hate to see loot in a game like this - you're a SUPERHERO, so why would you need to pick up "loot"?

Agreed. If the game didn't bog down to a slow grind 20+ I would have played a lot longer. Speed that shit up, let people max out multiple characters after a few months, it's all good.

Well, here's an announcement (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=info&Number=5847488&bodyprev=#Post5847488).  The official spin doesn't make it sound as bad as the front page story.

Tabula Rasa is a bit of an albatross, isn't it? NCSoft's best stuff is COH's PvE combat, and Lineage 1's siege PvP. American players do like therir personal achievement indicators more than most. Peacock feathers. One day I'll make a Mummer MMOG.

I wish I could laugh and say "I told you so!" (and I did, early in the beta), but this just makes me sad. It will scare away anyone who wants to make a GOOD car combat game (HINT- SEE CAR WARS KTHX). Diku cars = worst idea evar.

What makes you think this?  It seems that Asian games are the ones that routinely succeed despite MASSIVE grinds.  They are also the people that brought us free-to-play pay money for special shineys and have parlayed it into a successful strategy (it seems).  I'm not saying you are wrong but I am curious what you base that on?  Surely not WoW raid content, afterall if you aren't raiding wtf are you supposed to be doing?

I quit CoH when they made me recreate my character Hellboy.  He looked similar to the Hellboy we know, but was still different enough.  Mine had that ponytail look, no shirt on, and both arms were regular (there was no stone arm option).  He wasn't exactly like him, but semi-similar.  Similar to all the Aquamans, Wonder Womans, and others out there.  Actually... those other ones were practically exact duplicates.

Well after them resetting my characters appearance and emailing me I told them to kiss my butt.  I really enjoyed that character as well, but I was not willing to tolerate that shit.  They told me that he looked semi-similar to him.  My response was "Yeah, similar, but not exact.  What's the problem?  Maybe getting sued over something that is "semi-similar"?  I hope you guys watch out for those Supermans and Wonder Womans I see at the town square all the time." 

Part of me wants to feel for them as they are one of the smaller companies that are left (after Mythic selling out to EA), but part of me doesn't give a flying fuck.

OK, I'll shut up now.  I just had to let that out.  Everything I see CoH I get pissed off.

Shoulda kept that one in Chin.  I makes you sound like the morons who get bent b/c they named their character Heywood Jablomey and get tagged by the CS group after playing it for 3 months.
You made a character close enough to a well known one intentionally, knowing you werent supposed to, and they tagged you for it.

"He was speeding too and you didn't pull him over officer" ain't much of a defense.

It's just not that hard to avoid....

Give Cryptic grief over the grind and nerf stuff anyday, but not this.

Xilren

The GMs, tech support and QA could just be a shift to offshoring the jobs to India or something.  Maybe they kept the senior people in each area to do the training and management.

Or I could put on a tinfoil hat and come up with some wild conspiracy about how EA was thinking about buying NCSoft or Mythic and when they chose Mythic NCSoft had to take drastic action.  But that's silly so I won't.

You do realize that they are forcing those Supermen and Wonder Women to change their names and characters too, right?  As part of a direct result of, say, getting sued by Marvel, right?

Bleah, I hope not. I've worked directly with offshored 'resources' and they've been nothing but headaches, blown time, missed deadlines, and rising blood pressures. From what I hear, customers aren't fond of 'em either.

say what?  info plz

Google is your friend (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7517)

That's all fine and dandy in the press and in the various fora, but in practice, they only come down on a character if a GM happens to notice a copyright/TOS violation, or if another player files a complaint. There is no magic anti-Marvel/DC filter in the costume creator. Someone has to notice your costume, and be enough of a busybody to narc.

I saw a pretty much perfect Vampirella clone (including name). I hope that person gets to keep the character. Made me smile and brought a nostalgic tear to my eye and lump to my pants.

Pretty simple to figure out why 100k is bad, though, especially if they are counting COH + COV as the less than 100k. COH started with @ 160k, and I can only guess that they expected CoV to either raise it back up to 160k or double their numbers, since they sold it as a second game. Only, as I said all along, it wasn't a second game, but an expansion, and consumers knew that or figured it out soon enough. Dropping below the 100k threshold is pretty bad for having the development/maintenence budget of two games.

Of course, Auto Assault being total shit didn't help either.

EDIT: Also, City of Heroes had a great opportunity to keep me as a customer, by just speeding up the xp grind. Hell, I might even have played CoV. But goddamn if they didn't make it slower and harder to gain experience after level 25, and it just got to be too much.

Of course, there's also more to this story than what's being told, but  :nda: tells me I can't say that either.

With CoH I always thought the initial protestations that there would not be nerfs were silly. Because anyone able to read a power list sheet and do basic maths could tell you that endlessly stacking buffs that easily allowed for sustainable 100%+ damage resistence or -100% chance to get hit or 100% HP regen every 3 seconds or +100% chance to hit or 100%+ slows combined with +400% damage wasn't going to fly.


I don't remember any Coh nerfs that really hurt the game.

The levelling speed does get far too slow once you are past level 25 though.

Does it have anything to do with the report that NCSoft shares have declined by a third since early May?  And is that 100K sub number only for North American subscriptions?  Because I still find it hard to believe CoX has lost 80K subs in two months but the NCSoft reported numbers are for all 16 servers, not just the 9 NA servers.

Guild Wars sold over a million copies. It's usually one of the top 10 daily games played on Xfire. That counts for something.

You know, I was going to ask that. Even if AA is a bomb and TR is a money leech, how on earth is NCSoft supposedly in the red and losing stock value that fast? 100k subs is still mighty respectable in terms of raw profit (and I agree with Nevermore, 100k doesn't sound right), and moreover, this is the company that owns goddamn Lineage and Guild Wars. They're still making money hand over fist.

Now maybe their NA operations aren't so hot (I highly suspect this was more a scaleback of Auto Assault staff than anything else), but still, I find it hard to believe NCSoft is in legitimate trouble.

The grinds can be for a number of reasons, as indeed can the loot, the most meaningful (in my book) being increased power in PvP engagements. It's also one of the things that satisfies my "explorer" fetish, as its interesting (for example) to see what happens when you push a hunter in WoW past x00 agility, etc. I'm more coming from the endless requests for "badges" and "trophies" that seem to plague MMOG populations in America. It was one of the most requested things on the Lineage US forums. Maybe it was also one of the most requsted things on the Lineage Korea forums, I certainly couldn't read them.

What ever happened to the idea that WoW would end up helping the rest of the industry by getting all these new people used to the idea of paying a monthly fee for MMORPGs, and that once they got tired of WoW they would be finding their way to all the other MMORPGs out there?  It's been 19 months since WoW's release. Eve notwithstanding, everything else out there seems flat or on the downslope.

Does WoW have no churn, or are the bliz fanatics just going back to WC3 when they are done?

If only we had a brave animal-loving poster with charts that could shed light on the situation...

Cutting resistances severely on tanks and scrappers then following it with ED the next patch hurt a lot.  Some tanks were too tough, but the combined reduction made me never want to play my tank again.  The lack of enhancement types to throw in my primaries (Resistance or, um, Resistance) didn't exactly make me feel very diverse either.  At least I freed up slots to put in Rest.

The Dark Defenders also got hit pretty hard that patch without any real compensation for the changes.  Controllers at least got a little with theirs.

Given NCSoft's recent remarkable mediocrity, maybe such a purge was actually needed.

Being one of the few people I know who plays Auto Assault on a regular basis, I find it remarkable how difficult it has been to contact tech support.  Firing 4 out of 5 of them will have no effect on quality, given what the past quality has been.

I don't think changing the grind will help much with CoX. Mind you, it would change things for me and some of you, but apparently, most people like grinds. Else they wouldn't be playing all of these fucking grindy games out there -- WoW included (and whichever one of you tried to pimp that game off back in the day as non-grindy, you were utterly full of shit). In fact, all things considered, CoX is less grindy than WoW. More convenient to find groups, faster traveling times, no insane sort of item scaling, etc..

Hole in one. WoW didn't expand the MMO market, it just proved that spending a decade building up a franchise is a great way to bilk people out of millions of dollars.

Yep.  Before they started really coming down with the Nerf bat my 60th SS/INV tank was a blast.  I'd finally gotten him to the point where he was an indestructible killing machine who could take down AV's solo.  What the hell's wrong with that?  I'd suffered through the early levels of tankdom, and finally being able to wade through seas of bad guys, and y'know actually feel super was fun.  Then all of a sudden perma-unstoppable was a thing of the past, endurance was a constant problem, and the fun was gone.

I was hoping that CoV would rekindle the love, but all it was was the same powers I'd already played through surrounded by a half-assed villain wrapper.  I completely gave up on the franchise at that point, and I'm glad I did.  I went from being a diehard advocate of the game that didn't even think twice about checking out WoW to someone who'd talk shit about the game and call the developers clueless.  They deserve their failure.

CoH was too grindy, and CoV runs like complete shit on my laptop.  Good thing I only bought the latter at a price reduction for the Heroclix.

Although I really do enjoy bits of the game, I doubt I'll re-sub again any time soon.  Maybe not at all.  Their customer service and support already lacks, let alone now that they've chopped it up.  I7 gave us lots of fun costume bits, but the rest of it was kind of "meh."  Too bad the game isn't as fun as character creation.  The only really notable update was I5.  That's the one where they nerfed us to bits and introduced the crazy grind.   CoV, as has been mentioned, wasn't nearly different enough to be called a stand alone game.  Maybe I8 will be the one where they listen to our complaints and give us something interesting to do other than play Barbie dolls and beat stuff up.

So they claim 300 people at NCSoft Austin, of which they reckon they laid off 70. Another 70 of them are credited as being on the Tabula Rasa team. You have to wonder how many techies that leaves on the other NCSoft Austin games once the office staff, executive masseuses and animal handlers are removed from the remaining 160. Hopefully Gary Gattis' team and whatever Lum is up to have the bulk of them.

well yeah I knew the old costume suit (hah!) by Marvel, but they also sued or included in that one suit litigation for *any* close character names?  I figured you can't be "Spiderman" but are they going after "Sp1drD00d" as well?  Poor guy, cause I know him and he just wants to play.  Why all the hatin'?

I'm a bit surprised at the reports of crappy customer service.  Every CS experience I've had in CoH has been hands down better than any other MMOG I've played.  Guess that's not necessarily saying a lot, though.  But waiting 5-10 minutes before my problem being fixed in CoH seems like a miracle coming from the 7-day-wait-followed-by-a-'Yeah-I'm-not-gonna-fix-that' experiences I had in DAoC.

The problem, I think, with CoH is not that it's too grindy.  It's that it's too transparent.  There's not enough window dressing to distract you from the fact that you're grinding.  As said above, you barely feel the grind in WoW but all things factored in it's actually a worse grind.  Because there's a lot of sparklies.

That's not to rag on sparklies.  Clearly, if you think you're grinding then you're not enjoying yourself.

But I don't think the answer is simply in cutting down the grind.  For one, I read the official boards pretty frequently and you know how many people are asking for a lower grind?  None.  Course, those are the people still playing, but what do you give to the people who went through that whole previous grind so they don't feel ripped off and quit,  then come here and post about how Cryptic ruined their game by letting a bunch of newbs level up really fast?

@Hellboy-
Don't rip off copyrighted material and your character won't be changed. :rimshot:

Out of curiosity, what WAS the character's name?  You said it's similar, but not exact.  Do tell.  (Unless you were saying he was named Hellboy.  If you named him Hellboy, then got a sawed-off-horn in your ass about them enforcing their copyright policy, that falls within the 9th Circle of Retardation, which speaks for itself.  But I'm assuming he wasn't actually named Hellboy, because that's a level of stupid that has to be proven.  You don't just assume that about people.)

Most of my supergroup, though, are extremely profitable players.  We play together for a few hours a week, and sometimes we log on ourselves.  Definitely less than 30 hours a month for our average member.

Cryptic, for what it's worth, is not owned by NCSoft and still has a bunch of job listings up.  Their last update was a few weeks ago, it could be outdated, but they don't seem to be showing any signs of financial trouble.

I PMed CuppaJo to make sure the OCR team we know is still intact, she confirmed that most of them are.  There was one name she didn't mention, but chances are she forgot who I am so she wouldn't realize I'd know who he is, plus he's like a Big Important Guy so he probably wasn't on the list of layoffs.  Plus, his name is still displayed at the bottom of the official forums as a moderator.

Oddly enough, I just finally brought over a new subscription to the game by giving out a free trial.  Usually people burn out by the end of the 14 days, which is not really all that surprising.  The game works for me and the way I play, but it's definitely not for everyone.

Also, this was posted as an official announcement on the board.  Doesn't contain all that much useful stuff, but let's put it here for thoroughness (is that a word?) anyways:


EDIT

Reading more Dev Digest stuff, maybe they heard you guys...

The whole game should be double exp. Period. Whole Game.

Still wouldn't make the game any more fun.  The game just needs new and different kinds of shit to do.

It wasn't the grind that got to me it was the constant stream of nerfs to my poor regen scrapper. The last time I played was when they reactivated all the old accounts for a holiday weekend. I signed on, went on a mission and died in 5 minutes when it turned out they'd made instant regen a power with a short duration and long recharge time.

Logged out and uninstalled and I have no plans to ever go back until that Statesman bozo takes his vision and goes to work for Brad McQuaid.

They laid off these people because they anticipate tons of players signing up to play crappy ass games. They invested all this time and effort into Auto Assault and the game sucks. I like how they say they're still hiring for Tabula Rasa. Nevermind the fact that its been in development for like 7 years, been scrapped and started over and still nothing. It went from men running around like fairies with little drumsticks and unicorns to some sort of futuristic war game. If the game ever comes out it will bomb just like Auto Assault. Just because it has the name Garriott attached to it doesn't make it a guaranteed hit.

Ditto here. Maybe some builds of regen were too uber but to completely gut the whole build because of it was insane. It's turned into a bad super reflexes build.

I originally quit because I couldn't hack the grind. As someone said, when your next level started to look to far away to be worth playing, it was time to quit. I think they lost a lot more than most people think as well. Last free week I logged in to check my old supergroup and couldn't find one person in it that had logged in in the past 250 days.

From Kotaku:


O RLY?

Edit: I suppose a "You stay classy, Kotaku" is in order too. If they could read, they would see that *I* didn't blame Auto Assault. In fact, I'd blame Tabula Rasa for being a money sink first and foremost. A money sink that WON'T pay off - no matter how much fun it is. Unknown license + Questionable Track Record (Ok, that's due to Auto Assault AND Lineage 2) does not a success story make. I didn't even really present an opinion in this story. I'm getting very tired of these so called NEWS outlets fucking with my words.

ALSO, I suppose I should add this bit from the Gamespot coverage:


A fan site? Of what? Did I miss a memo?

Gamespot goes on to further the statement in the Kotaku post:

It's funny, I didn't remember anyone from NCSoft contacting me and telling me the numbers need to be pulled or that "hey, those are wrong, at the very least don't misrepresent us." If you wanna get into it - QA Testers shouldn't even be considered members of a dev team. They don't get paid enough they have no input and they're generally hired as temporary help. The 70 people laid off was part of a massive restructuring because the studio is hemmorhaging money. It almost makes Mythic seem smart, doesn't it? No no, I kid. It's a matter of getting your priorities straight before investors decide where to allocate money and the US branch of NCSoft didn't really have those priorities straight. Auto Assault, in early beta was a disaster. A total overhaul by Epic couldn't have made the game fun. OK, maybe an overhaul by Epic could have, but not by NetDevil. And let's not kid ourselves, not everyone at NCSoft thought the game was going to be a runaway success. But the massive marketing push for it wasn't exactly the smartest move. The game was going to crash and burn, a strategic, incredibly cheap internet campaign would have been a far wiser way to spend those ad dollars.

But at the end of the day, I think it comes down to Tabula Rasa. Really, the game doesn't stand a chance. It's going up against all odds here. A lot of the public has lost faith in it due to the total redesign and removal of anything resembling "the norm" and it's still a question mark as to whether it will ever see release. And despite ALL OF THIS I still like NCSoft. But there's no doubt about it, they're at the point where they have to decide to go niche (lots of games that sell 25k-100k or keep chasing the dream. The latter will destroy them. Blizzard they are not.

Wouldn't help.  Just before I quit I did some number crunching, level 28 (I think) took 800 white con minion kills to level to 29.  Level 29 was over 1000.  Sure I oculd kill them in groups of 8 or so and Lt's and such were worth more but that was some retard level grinding.

I quit because I had found my self running in this big square that would respawn groups just before I got there, going 'round and 'round this pattern endlessly.

Double exp would just have pushed the grind back a few more levels.  The whole exp curve needs to be rethought and streamlined.

There's no doubt NCSoft North America is costing a vast amount of money, but the parent company has fairly deep pockets by market standards. But its starting to hurt, NCSoft stock is taking a beating, and TJ Kim is no fool. I seriously doubt that Tabula Rasa will destroy them, but it could very well spell the end of NCSoft North America mark I if Garriot's huge team cannot perform.

(http://chart.finance.yahoo.com/c/1y/0/036570.ks)

Regeneration is one of the most powerful secondary choices.

It's just not so much more incredibly powerful than the other secondary choices that you'd be a retard not to choose it.

It plays differently than it used to, but it still works damn well.

If you wanna say that you don't want to relearn how to play the game, that's fine.  But don't say the game is "broken".  Lots of people still play, and moreover lots of people still play regeneration.  It's still one of the most popular choices.

Shild:
Geez, go work on your competition bashing a little, you're really starting to sound like old geezer whining that soup was too hot.
Kotaku might be a bunch of manical-sony-haters (I bet they would find you shitloads of links between sony, ibn Laden and WTC bombings if you asked:P), but right now they just quoted NCSOFT official answer to your well, gossips. Which is their job. to quote official news. Don't bash Kotaku, bash NCSOFT.
That doesn't change the fact, that I'm more inclined to believe you and your contacts than some PR/mod dude. You could try to ridicule NCSOFT answer, or at least back up your with some facts. Since right now who knows - maybe it was your source who overblew the facts?

Some actual numbers: (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=info&Number=5847488&bodyprev=#Post5847488)

Quoth the Raven,   Nevermore!  (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=post;quote=199099;topic=7414.0;num_replies=64;sesc=7931ca760eb15393801d8a2e98a39e8f)

(don't know what I did there, but you get the idea)

They just kept nerfing and nerfing and nerfing. And with each nerf they made the game less fun. I adapted several times but they finally wore me out.

I couldn't care less if it's one of the "most popular choices" or not. Given that they've driven out most people who had the game spoiled for them by their ill considered nerfs it doesn't shock me to hear that the people still playing are enjoying the game. Of course that's a smaller number than it used to be isn't it?

Schild only complained about them saying that the f13 story blamed Auto Assault for the loss of jobs. It doesn't matter if everything said by NCSoft's PR monkey and/or Schild's anonymous source is true or not, NCSoft did not claim that f13 blamed Auto Assault, Kotaku did. And they were wrong in claiming that, so its fair enough to point it out. But you can dream up whatever imagined slight you like, I guess.

I was writing mainly in regard to Schild's answer to this part:
Oh, and he might consider using quotation marks. not necessary as big as Kotaku ones of course:P

Disregarding everything else... we're technically still a fan site, since we're run by, oh, I dunno... fans. In the strictest sense of the word, we're amateurs - we're not getting paid for this.

On the flip side, what Gamespot and Kotaku are probably trying to do there is dig away at our credibility to get in 'good' with NCSoft in order to please a (potential?) advertiser - I'm betting they want NCSoft to advertise for the launch of Tabula Rasa on their sites.

Fans of "what"?  :-D

Teh hate? Games? Getting peed on by dev shacks?

to Righ in re #61--

I've followed NCsoft stock and the corp for a few years now.  The dive in profits (even while income increases) is the indicator that ought to be shaking up the Koreans (even as Austin babbles about  gratitude to WOW for churning out new players that don't seem to be turning into NCsoft butter...Blizzard is eating NcSoft lunch in Asia, which NcSoft used to own)  Your posting of the stock chart caught my attn.  If you want to really see that chart sizzle, also do the technical anals for 50 day and 200 day MA-- watch how that green line and red line both move downhill.

It's said that a new online game now costs between 15-20M to produce and release.   It seems to me that Tabula Rasa is not going to cost what one game costs, because they've scrapped it once (twice?), started over,  and still can't even commit to a beta date after almost seven years.   (Supposedly Destination Games had Tabula Rasa moving and under development even  before NcSoft bought in).  It could end up costing even more than two ordinary games would have.  If Auto Assault cost fifteen mil, will Tabula Rasa cost 30 Mil?

Is Austin going to cost the Koreans 45-60Million in flop games?  Won't this make 'em angry in Seoul?

Garriot: So,i know our game has 20k subs,but come one,a good fanbase grows over time..
NC Soft Guy: KEKEKE WHERE IS RANG RANG

(http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=036570.KS&t=1y&q=l&l=on&z=m&p=m50,m100&a=)

Yep. It's certainly not pretty. This is a company that needs some good press, fast.


Tabula Rasa is going to be an expensive one, but I'm hoping that Auto Assault was a cheapo. There's no way that thing could have cost big time MMOG money, is there?


Very probably. But they should already be angry over the footie result against Switzerland.

It can't.  It won't.

They've entrusted huge money to a guy who named his primary protagonist "Lord British", for Christ's sake.  A man who owns a castle and runs around dressed up for Renfaire 24/7.  Yeah, he was a pioneer back in the day when a one man operation could be pioneering.  That was in the Telengard days.

Is he really that goofy?  You make him sound almost furry-like only without the fur.

You bet your sweet ass, he's that goofy.  Oh, and I left out the "chasing a burglar who broke into his house with a longsword" incident.

The Madness of King Garriott is legendary.

Hell, I'd chase burglars with a longsword too.

The Chinese invented this bizarre substance made of charcoal, saltpeter, and sulphur.  Just recently we've managed to utilize this substance in a device which allows a projectile to be propelled forward at tremendous velocity.  It's all very cutting edge and technical, but trust me, it works.

Yeah, I have one of those. But I hate them. They make me twitch.

True story: My old "alternative school" teacher, Mr. McDaniel pulverized a burglar's knees with a baseball bat once. Even more sad is that McDaniel used to play for the Phillies. Ouch.

If a burglar broke into my house with a longsword, I'd run away!   :-P

I had heard he was strange but I figured it was just publicity stuff.  Was he always this way or did he get this looney after he became famous?  Or maybe after his fame disappeared?

Ren-faire stuff 24/7, yeah, that's strange. But I still don't get why chasing a thief with a sword is strange. All guys want to do that shit. Even non fantasy dorks.

Or so I thought...

The fact remains that most people don't have longswords and suits of armor laying around to conveniently chase off burglars with.  He probably has 'em in every room of the damned castle.  Hell, he probably holds a scepter when he takes a shit.

There's a fine line between eccentric and crazy, and Garriott is right on the motherfucker.  Now given all you know of the man would you be so quick to invest millions of dollars in his sound judgement?

I wouldn't give him the money simply because it's hard to telll whether he's done enough to warrant it. He seems more like an MMO figurehead than he does an MMO designer.

As for "crazy": I wouldn't care. I'd still let Phil Spector produce my albums too.

yes.

I've never been a Garriot fan...maybe if Tabula Rasa tanks, he'll finally dissappear from the gaming landscape?

It's more than just redoing the exp curve. Even if they sped up getting to level 50 then what? Hami raids? Those look more boring than the old-school EQ dragon raids. Base building? Maybe if salvage drops were more predictable it would be more interesting. The early levels are fun because you get new powers rapidly and those powers are generally your "bread and butter" powers by design. As you advance, the time between getting new powers extends greatly, not just because it takes more experience per level but also because past level 32 it's every 3rd level you get a new power instead of every 2nd. For many power sets the later powers are also very situational meaning when you do get a new power you don't really feel that much more powerful, unlike the early levels. And the power sets formerly known as "Epic" don't help matters (yes I know there are exceptions).

So the powers are continually nerfed to slow people down for what purpose? It's not like they need to slow people down cause they can't create end game content fast enough because there's only a trivial amount of end game content. For many die hard players the "end game" is rolling another alt and even for that there are not nearly enough character slots -- they should at least double the number and they should also allow Influence transfers between characters on the same account.

In Britain, there are a lot of people who hang those sorts of things on the wall and have suits of armour, although they don't normally wear them, in dusty corners of their homes.  My father has quite a large collection of swords and my father in law has a HUGE stuffed tiger that was presented to him by some African Indonesian tribal leader governor or something on his upstairs landing.  It's a bit alarming when you walk up the stairs.  I don't think he really wanted it but it's hard to say no in those sorts of circumstances and it's not the sort of thing you toss in the rubbish at the end of the drive when you get home.  Maybe Garriot is one of those larpy guys or something.  Just because he's loopy doesn't mean he can't do his job.  (though I think maybe everyone is right about Tabula Rasa.  I didn't realise it's been in the works for such a long time)

Edit:  yes, yes... I know there are no tigers in Africa.  Righ's family has just been to so many places, I get all the stories confuzzled.

I have some decorative swords.  I'd absolutely chase a burglar with one.

Much more effective than chasing them with my decorative pistols.

Garriott was a fencing student at UT. Pretty cool. He's also a member of "The Society for Creative Anachronism". Probably not that cool.

I'd have to smack the robber on the head with my Dali print.  Righ could use his bass guitar, I guess.  I don't have a lot of weapony type things in the house, not even decorative ones.  No way I'm using any of my kitchen knives!  They cost a fortune!

Actually, the no tigers in Africa thing was handy. When we moved to Nigeria, the tiger came with us, and it was in the hall. We're talking a huge elderly Sumatran tiger, some nine feet in length, stuffed in the position it was when it was shot (as a maneater, it needed to be) - pouncing with its jaws wide. A burglar who broke into our house one night ran out screaming that he'd seen a monster. The rumours of devils and monsters living in our house quickly circulated, and we weren't bothered by burglars again - unusual for ex-patriates in Lagos, I can assure you.

And since everybody seems to find it odd, I'll say very little about swords... except that they're not the sort of thing you want to bring to another country in your stuff, unless you like long delays and a lot of paperwork. So no swords here.

One time, I saw a blimp!

Agreed. I dont care how big a fan you were of his early work IMHO his time has come and gone.

NCSoft hired the fruit cake, gave him millions, and now their stock and profits are tanking. Sorry but I dont have much in the way of sympathy for them. Good riddance to the whole lot of 'em.

In good news we could all potentially get rich selling NCSoft shares short right now!

Garriot is pretty out there. I suspect Tabula will prove that Wish's investors were geniuses.

On COX, I popped over to the forums and whatever their subscription rates are, it certainly looks like a game that is very much alive and well. Maybe everyone who plays is just a forum junkie, but there's enthusiasm and interest and a lot of postings. Kind of makes me want to hurt my fingers again and resub.

The I5 nerfs, and the "Enhancement Diversification" nerf, were rolled out just in time for the CoV launch. The nerfs were put in place to make PvP balancing easier.

They spewed out a big pile of BS about PvE balancing, but anytime a huge, across-the-board power reduction is forced onto the playerbase, and given such a hideous euphemism as "Enhancement Diversification", those of us who've been around for awhile know when we're being lied to.

I agree with your other points. I'd like to have more characters per server myself, although in practical terms, 12 really is enough.
And I'd love to be able to transfer Inf between my characters, without having to get a guildmate to help. The trade window sucks for Inf transfers (limited to 99999 per transaction).

There were still a number of nerfs that were specific to PvE such as the massive nerf to the taunt abilities of Tankers combined with the massive nerf to the AoE abilities of Controllers. Sure maybe AoE groups were a wee bit too powerful but who cares? They were lots of fun and we're supposed to be superheroes (THOU SHALT NOT TAKE ON MORE THAN THREE MINIONS AT A TIME, DAMNIT!). And why the fuck would you nerf Fly and by extension Hover? Fly was already the slowest travel power and now you want to make it even slower? That's just retarded. I had to respec out of Siphon Power lowering my DPS (though I still have Fulcrum Shift) just to take Siphon Speed so I could make Hover useful again. *Sigh*

I'm a bit of a lurker, but, apparently unlike most people, I'm really looking forward to Tabula Rasa, and hoping it does well. IT's original incarnation didn't interest me at all, but after their revision, and seeing some of the stuff they've had at E3, I think the game could easily be one of the best MMOs coming out in a long time. I hate the repetitive, bland, and slow combat in most MMOs, so having something more fastpaced, tactical and mobile should be a massive improvement, at least for one with a playstyle like mine. Now, I'm no huge Garriott fan. I never played UO, and he doens't seem like anything particularly special, but anyone who tries something new and innovative (or at least different) can't be all bad. (even if he is edging on insanity).

The nerfs made I5 the most notable update of the game.  That's a bit unfortunate.  The ED just pissed me off.  Their explanation for it was so much bollocks.  In the past, I had gone hot and cold on the game, although playing for about a month at a time was always enough for me.  After that, I always needed a break.  I really think the main reason I keep going back for a few weeks or so after longish breaks, is character creation.  It makes me happy.  Maybe I should just buy Barbie dolls.

Better yet, I just bought my niece a Mr. Potatohead with 50 accessories for right around $10!  Now that's bang for your buck, young missy.

And he's the mayor of Munchkin Village! (http://www.dailytexanonline.com/media/paper410/news/2005/07/19/TopStories/Munchkin.Village.Mayor.Tries.To.Go.To.Space-963150.shtml?page=1)

(Thanks to the lurker who PMed me with this one.  I may need to compile a flow chart to keep track of all the crazy.)

LotD (http://www.lotd.org) was one of the top 4 PVP guilds nominated for the 2006 community awards for CoV, and across the CoH/CoV PVP community in the game has been mentioned repeated in player generated "top ranked" lists. The only reason I bring that up is to make it relevant to the topics I'll mention below.

CoV failed as a PVP expansion because...............

1. The level and content grind

The first 14 levels absolutely suck worse than anything I've ever played except the Shadowbane newbie experience. Since missions are instanced there isn't a reason to have to run all over creation and grab mob aggro when missions could be generated very close together. Prior to level 14, there are no travel powers so there is a lot of dumb downtime involved with running to missions.

The content is the same thing over and over and over and over.  Its the same mobs, mission maps, and objectives for 50 levels. By the time CoV was released, I think it was pretty commonly known that designing like this was a bad idea.

There were a lot of PVP guilds, reputable and otherwise, that came to CoV from other games and didn't last 60 days because of this item #1.

2. Experience Curve

Since most of the COH playerbase apparently didn't care about PVP at all, I have to think that Cryptic was trying to lure the PVP audience in by releasing CoV.  COH was already known for its grind, and maybe Cryptic thought that adding shorter "newspaper" missions in would create a feeling that people were leveling faster. The overall experience curve to level apparently remained the same, and PVPr's were expected to deal with thousands of newspaper missions with the issues listed above in item #1. It basically created a feeling of repetition hell.

If they truly wanted to attract a PVP audience, they would have made leveling much faster. They could also have created PVP XP and PVP Zone based objectives that provided massive XP rewards. They didn't do this, they just used the same COH based system that people hated.

3. PVP Zones

CoV launched with 3 PVP zones, and only 1 of those zones had any sort of reward or worthwhile objective. The zones were too small, virtually no rewards, there was no downtime for PVP death, and the result was nearly 8 months of one side or the other camping right in front of the other side's respawn area.

Also the PVP zones are divided down by level. In the long run I think that's a mistake because the end game is always in the highest level zone, and the lower level zones become ghost towns. This forces new players or old players rerolling to have to grind up in order to get to the good stuff.

With issue 7, they have added exp debt to the PVP zones and that has created a big disincentive for people to PVP until they are done leveling.

4. Base Raids / Items of Power

Nearly a year after CoV release we are still waiting for a key component of the initial product to be available. Base raids are in right now, but they are voluntary and there's no incentive for people to even want to do it at the moment.

5. No Rankings or Recognition

PVPr's love to see who's the official top dog. They obsess over rankings, point systems, K/D Ratio systems, etc. Base raids won or lost can't be hard to do, and some basic scoring or something for the PVP zones shouldn't be rocket science.

6. Respec's

There is little room for error here because your options for fixing your mistakes are limited. If you pick the wrong primary or secondary powers, you have to deal with a grueling reroll. If you need to do the respec mission, its long, boring, and you'll need a 5 man team more often than not.

Because you don't know how something will do until you get to the end game PVP, its a real gamble with time and effort to level a character to 50 and find out you got it wrong.


7. New content, fixes, enhancements, etc take too long

Just like base raids, and 6 months between new Issues, stuff just takes too long for most people to wait around for if its a make or break issue for them.


So the bottom line is that if Cryptic was planning on using CoV to bring in and retain new PVP oriented players in order to grow the overall subscriber base, I am not so sure they accomplished that. I do know that initially they did see a jump in new subscribers, but the things I've mentioned above have caused a majority of those new subs to cancel.

I have seen over 100 people come to CoV and leave within 60 days and many guilds from other games, and their comments related to their departure are pretty much the same. In the community a lot of the competitive PVP guilds all have the same types of issues with recruiting and retaining membership over the long term. It just boils down to a long repetitive grind just to get to a PVP end game, and the PVP end game is too shallow and doesn't do enough to promote, reward, and recognize competition.

The COH/COV community is as big as its going to get, and the only way they are going to grow CoV anymore is to seriously jack up the PVP content while addressing some of the other issues that kill people off before reaching the end game.

FWIW, CoH was still the best MMO launch I've ever seen, or been in. The level of polish and (known) defect count was impressive.  Blizz would equal or top that for their GM, except their networking was/is slack-jawed.

Someone around here thought that about SWG's NGE for quite some time...  In theory it might sound nice, but until it is proven to work I keep a healthy skepticism these days.

Uh, I dunno what game _you_ were playing, but when a single tank can take on an arbitrary number of enemies, or a single controller can lock them down forever, why should you want anything out of the other 7 guys on the team, other than "jack up the spawn count"? Something had to give.

--GF

To kill them quickly?

Screw I5. The first month of nerfs (to xp gain) was lame. It was fun when a tank could pile on camps of purples and get away with it. FUN I tell ya.

If it's the idea of some precious little con system going to waste that bothers some of you, then I will gladly take the same xp gain and have the mobs con white.  :lol:

If it's just the idea of fast xp gain that bothers some of you, then you're just no fun at all (that's about the only insult I feel like throwing your way).


Ughh....The more I think about it, I hope CoH goes down the crapper even further. It's bad enough that someone fucked up a Star Wars game, but c'mon.....Superheroes!! Wtf.

Interesting that you mention the other I7 changes but _don't_ mention that villains can pick up a jetpack at level 5 and a high-jump pack at level 10. Something like an hour of operation on each, which is more than enough time to spend in the overworld getting to level 14. Mayhem mission rewards FTW.

Actually, CoV has about twice the storyarcs CoH does and in many cases they're a lot shorter. Storyarc bonus XP is roughly equivalent to 2 or 3 paper missions where you kill everything, and on a storyarc you get to see much more varied environments than the common paper missions.

Heists have also been rolled into the paper now that MAYHEM has taken their place.

Missions in PvP zones, in addition to providing a crucial component of your base defenses, award something like 50% more experience.

More like they fixed a bug. If you're grinding stuff in a PvP zone for the XP bonus you can't get out of debt by having your buddy from the other side finish you off instead of the monsters.

And as soon as the latest test update rolls live, the big source of debt in Recluse's Victory - the signature heroes/villains - won't cause it anymore.

Yeah. There's not much of an excuse for this.

Or this. Except as detailed in number 7.

You can't "get the wrong" primaries or secondaries. Unless you have an idea in mind and click extremely carelessly about 5 times at character creation and then somehow don't realize your mistake until 50.

Both sides' respec missions can be completed in about an hour by a pickup team, faster with teams that have actually worked together before.

And the weird part of CoX is that it doesn't matter if you leave for six months and then come back. You'll basically owe one base upkeep's worth of rent and your base will be the way you left it, you can pick up with just about anybody to do just about anything (*&%^ing hazard zones) and aside from whatever special events have fired off it's the way you left it.

I5/ED will still hit like a brick sledge, unfortunately.

Putting in a lifetime ranking system would encourage people to play a game that isn't fun for them to keep their ranking up. And I don't think anybody wants that.

But maybe I'm just a terrible oddball. I'm playing CoX right now _precisely because_ it's not designed to be sticky, I enjoy the pre-travel levels because booking to a mission and back again is parkour on the cheap, and when I log in my mastermind tonight the first thing I'm going to do is head over to Grandville, wave at the Bane Spiders, and die horribly 5 times over, because perma-debt is the only way I can see everything the game has to offer, even at level 30.

--GF

And everyone forgets to mention that, assuming you're willing to take "red-equivalent" instead of "purple-equivalent", this is exactly what I5 did, for the "tank can pile on" levels. (post-25)

--GF

No way can you level as fast as you could in the first month. People were getting to 50 in 2 to 3 weeks. A casual could still get a good deal done in that time.

The people who were getting to 50 in 2 to 3 weeks were mostly AR/dev, or well anything/dev blasters, because Caltrops could actually stop things from moving (no slow cap) and the -hit on Smoke Grenade was about 10x greater than it was intended to be.

(and I'd really like to know how they could hit 50 when it was about 2 months before the level cap went _up_ to 50, but that's beside the point.)

--GF

"50" or not, they maxed out was my point. I'm just used to the number "50" being the max level now, I guess. That's why I stated it that way.

Secondly, it didn't matter if the /Device dudes did it faster than anyone else. At my pace, I took a Dark/Dark scrapper into his 20's two times and a Grav/Kin controller into his 30's by the time the xp gains were nurfed. I can't even get one character to the 30's in the same amount of time anymore. And no amount of fanboy apologetics is going to convince me that it didn't happen, or that the same xp rate is possible today.

[edit]

And besides, they wouldn't have issued out a freaking game wide emergency patch that curtailed xp gains if the problem was just assault/devices. They just didn't want anyone leveling the way they were. Bastards.

I don't know, let me think. Tanks and Controllers, Tanks and Controllers, hmm what do they lack that could be provided or amplified by Blasters, Scrappers, and Defenders?

Yeah you're right, no need for teammates.

And, as has already been pointed out: Being able to take on huge mobs of opponents, and survive, was fun. A game with a less painful grind was fun. It was an aberration from the diku slow-levelling-is-good model. You actually felt like a superhero, instead of just a warrior or mage dressed up in spandex, ridding the world of evil one orc at a time.

<shrug>

I enjoyed what I played of Tabula Rasa, and the capabilities they showed us looked even better.  I'm still interested in the game,  and I wasn't before having seen it and played it at E3.

It shows all the signs of being a crappy game, what with being recreated 36 times.  It should suck, but it doesn't.  Yet.

The real trick, assuming they do come out with a solid product, is going to be getting people to try it out.  Like I said, I didn't have any interest in it until I actually played it.

Having read all the old I5 / ED hate about CoH/V and all the whinging about nerfs, the fact is that some AT powerset combos were insanely powerful and needed to be pulled back. Unless 90% of ATs can solo AVs, it isn't balanced for Tanks or pet Controllers to be able to do it with no risk to themselves.

There were xp changes that went in specifically because of the powergamers who'd found all the tricks (eg mission / glowie farming, herding) and used them to hit max lvl very quickly. With no endgame for CoH/V, they'd just leave the game and complain it was too shallow. So the grind got amped up a bit - not the best solution, but a reasonable one if lots of people are lvling up very quickly. As fun as some people think reaching God Mode is, it's also the kind of thing that gets abused and subscriptions cancelled.

If you wanted to talk about why CoH/V probably isn't hitting its targets, it's more likely that it's a casual mmog that doesn't have a lot of mmog convention to it (eg loot, autoattacks, fantasy setting, twitch-ish combat). It doesn't play well, nor does it reward (much) grinding things out for hours on end. It's a better game if played in short-ish bursts. CoH/V is a mmog for the non-mmog player, which cripples it in many ways in the current market.

As for being called a fansite - if f13.net is going to post up a meesage from an unnamed source that backs it up by saying it "confirm some rumors", then 'fansite' is probably the most polite thing it could be called. There was no extra thought about the post, like how these sackings might impact on other NCsoft games that have currently been released or are waiting in the wings (Dungeon Runners, Aion, Exteel, Soccer Fury) - a bunch of unsourced numbers just get thrown around.

Also, there was no dispute over the numbers made, especially the one that could possibly be cross-checked - the CoH/V player number. Last time I looked (and I can't find the report right now, so we'll have to rely on SirBruce's recordings) it sits just over 182k in March 2006, showing some general upwards trends. Now (as has been commented) unless CoH/V lost 80k or so players in 3 months, the OP on the unnamed boards is 1) completely wrong, 2) right and the June 06 numbers will bear him out or 3) knows that NCsoft is lying in a public shareholder document. Guess which one I'm betting on? Sure, there was a long lead time on I7. I could see 20k players dropping out, maybe even 40k, but 80k? I'd be incredibly surprised, especially since CoH/V has started showing pretty strong activity across all servers in peak times.

But hey, it's from an unnamed source, which is automatically more reliable than anything else out there, right?

When you can solo battle all these guys at once:

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/lamLink/Screenshots/screenshot_2005-08-03-03-05-28.jpg)

and not break a sweat, you make every other AT who can't practically useless. It was unbalanced.

Hello :)
First of all here are the latest (march2006) "officials" numbers given by NC
(http://img450.imageshack.us/img450/5177/200605091703443qd.jpg)
There are a few thing to notice
1) the 180k number is a monthly access number not subscribers  (if bruce read this as a n° of subscriber, i never got anyone at ncsoft confirming it actualy was a subscriber number.)
2) Even in the event of a subscriber fiure notice that in the past this number has evolved from 164k to  120K sep=>dec 2004
3) also slightly miss leading the table states numbers for COH US+EU+KR while the Korean sale were not present from the start.

So what  would like to point out is that likely the numbers you are talking about could like not represent the same thing therfor no need to be sarcastic about a 100K subscribers figure that can actually be quite accurate.. then again some people thing there is 6 millions WoW subscriber...

Right.  Because everyone here who formerly was a player (and now has nothing good to say about the game) is just crazy, and the game really is better now!

Bullshit.  They increased the grind, hit the game damned hard with the nerf stick, and drained the fun out of it in the pursuit of Emmert's "vision".  There were plenty of people (myself included) who loved superheroes, loved fast action MMO's, and loved not having the usual trappings of loot whoring.  What those people aren't willing to do is play a game without all the usual trappings of MMO's, but that copies the worst parts of them (the grind).

The game's a pale shade of it's former glory, and the resulting player shortage is directly responsible for that.

... and that 1.5 million of them have killed Ragnaros. Zing.

Why is every devloper's reaction to "Your players hit max level!" is to flinch away in horror and drop the XP on mobs? I played CoH on release, had fun for a while, and quit becuase there was nothing else to do. The gameplay was shallow and uninteresting. I mostly played it for hero dressup. I had a ton of characters had had fun leveling them all up until I got to about 30 and the grind started to kick in hardcore. So I'd start a new character.

I think that reducing the power and increasing the time it takes to level is a bad move. In fact, I think it's the move that is currently destroying the game. This perceived causation of "Hit max level = Canceled Subscription" is not only inaccurate, it's dangerous. It sucks the fun out of the game until there's nothing left to do but cancel.

I think that's one of the reasons that WoW is so successful -- it's fun to level up and doesn't feel like a grind.

WoW players aren't going to leave WoW for OLD games, and nothing new that wasn't total shit (Auto Assault) or significantly different or better for the solo/casual player (DDO) has come out.

I am confused.  I thought there WERE 6 million WoW subs.  If this is incorrect then how many players do they have?

" how many players do they have?"
I do not know, the figure is not public as far as I know. ( if i was to make an educated guess for europe+usa :  1-1,5 million but to be honest i really do not know)
Because you read it from some presse who got the info from a PR that they did not understood or missread.

As far as i know Blizzard/vivendi comunicate in terms of activated account, box sold to key retailer, user base, etc etc... never in terms of current subscribers. altough they some time used the word subscribers  it always is ( as far as i have read ) in a way that does not refflect "current subscription". When do you stop bein accounted in Blizz user base, how do they account players playing wow from the9 or other asian distributors...

http://www.blizzard.com/press/051219.shtml

How could they be more clear?

Okay, I could be wrong on this but I don't think I am:

They have never once dropped the experience given for defeating enemies nor have they increased the amount of experience it takes to gain levels.

In fact, numerous times they've increased the amount of experience you receive for defeating enemies, so much so that most defeats over player level are worth double or more what they were near the original release of the game.

The only way they've "increased the grind" is through nerfs.  I hated ED when I first heard of it, so much that I closed my account.  Then I tried playing with it- I worked with it, rebuilt my characters, and guess what?  I was having more fun than before.  I stand behind that change- it fixed a LOT of crap that needed to get fixed.

Is the game perfect?  FUCK no.  I agree, the grind is still too boring (different from too long).  But it's not longer than it was.  It's definitely less boring than it was- that's just not as obvious because the "new! shiny!" has worn off, now we know what lal the enemies are and what they do and how they react, so we're not so easily distracted from the grind.  But new players coming in, and I've witnessed several, are still loving the game.

For most of you, the shiny just wore off.  And you're blaming it on the evolution of the game.  Call it was it really is- gamer boredom setting in.  Fact is, herding groups were boring as fuck and if you went back and played in one again for 15 minutes you'd remember that.

This was sent to me by PM. Not sure why the respondant didn't post it here, but its public and of interest to all in this thread:

Korea Times cites f13.net in business pages (http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/biz/200606/kt2006062617550211870.htm).

Ok. That's awesome. At least they called us a webzine. I wasn't aware anyone still used that word. :)

I had the exact opposite experience.

I never ground experience or herded.  I played in small groups and kept myself in constant debt until around level 30 so I did not outlevel my story arcs.  While I am smart with my build, I built around concept and did not want everything optimized.  I actually chose some powers because they were cool, not because they were useful or necessary.

I agreed with ED in theory (although I still think it should be diminishing returns and not a step function) and was willing to play through the changes to give them a fair shake.  Playing an Invulnerability Tank (yes, they were way overpowered if min/maxed) simply ceased to be fun after the patch though.  Other than Smashing/Lethal, my resistances couldn't hold up.  Taunting became tantamount to suicide.  I actually felt like I was holding my team back when playing.  It simply wasn't any fun at all.

Also, I consider only being able to three or four-slot (those that take endurance) Primaries while six-slotting all my secondaries due to excess slots is a bad design.  I want to focus on my primaries.  And I'd like a tangible return for them.  Most of the other ATs got some kind of compensation for all the changes or could at least have the option to 'diversify'.

I have tried going back since then, but I could never get back into my main character.  Maybe I5 and I6 were good for the game, but making those changes so late hurt the fun for me and a lot of others.  I don't think this had the negative consequences of say the NGE for SWG, but it did have a chilling effect that should not be ignored.

For those too lazy to click a link:

So, of course, I had to throw f13.net into Google news, nothing else as prestigious as The Korea Times, but we have:

Eurogamer (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=65730)
Total Video Games (http://www.totalvideogames.com/news/NCsoft_Austin_Confirms_Redundancies_10174_0_0.htm)
Gameindustry.biz (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=17928)
DailyTech (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3015&ref=y)
Playfuls (http://www.playfuls.com/news_6061_NCsoft_Austin_Layoffs_70_Down_230_To_Go.html)
Next Generation (http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3299&Itemid=2)
Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9837)
Gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6153106.html)
IGN (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/714/714465p1.html)

Playfuls? What, can anything go on Google News these days?

Not everything, no. Apparently Techgage (http://techgage.com/review.php?id=5265) can't. :)

Ooo, "developer blog".  I like that one.  Makes it sound like we're developers.

Lantyssa:

Tanks, largely invuln tanks, are one of two ATs I can sympathize with regarding ED.  The other is Warshades.  I've been saying since the global defense reduction that tanks need something to compensate.  They get by as it is, I don't consider it a "gimp" situation, but they're not quite up to the level they ought to be.

Warshades are just extremely hard to build, and a lot of really good builds were totally destroyed by ED.  The one I used relied very much on permanent Hasten.  I don't play him anymore, he's all screwed up and I can't fix him.  My 41 Illusion/Radiation Controller became significantly more fun after ED, and my Sonic/Energy Blaster was VASTLY more fun.  He'd been basically retired until I rebuilt him for ED.  All 3 of my Scrappers aren't as OMGPOWERFUL as they were before, but they can all do much better than hold their own.   Defenders are already better off with diverse slotting with a few rare exceptions- ED did force some to have a more active "attacking" role than they wanted, and I don't agree with forcing people into one playstyle when the AT lends itself to several.

Much like the game, ED wasn't perfect.  I still felt it did more good than bad, and I still feel it was a wholly beneficial change for the game.  But yes, it did screw some things up.  Welcome to game balance.

With regard to CoX, I played a blaster to 30s, a controller to 30s, a blaster-equivalent (forgot the name) villian to 30s, and everything else somewhere between 10 and 30.  Never min/maxed anything, just picked what seemed fun and slotted according to what the descriptions said would result. 

I don't know how fun the game is in the 40s.  All I know is that by 33, it started to suck massively in terms of fun.  Progress was slowed to the point of non-fun.  The mobs and missions were all too alike.  The game felt more shallow, more grindy, more weak overall as I levelled up.

If I was looking at 40 as being the end, I might have stuck with one toon to 40, maybe even two.  50 is just a ridiculous cap.  If I don't enjoy getting through the 30s, why in the world would I want to get a toon to 50?

Note to devs:  getting to max level quickly is not a problem for me.  It just means I will go level a new toon.  I usually start a few alts by the time my main is half way to cap.

I would much rather level up new toons than kill myself over and over so I can experience all the story lines.  That's just nutty, as far as I'm concerned (No offense Lantyssa and others ;).

I wish it didn't have such a steep curve.  There's just too much sameness in the game for that.

I hope WoW makes NCSoft go bankrupt.  I hope SOE goes out of business.  I hope Blizzard destroys the entire MMO genre by consuming all the customers and funneling them into Starcraft 2 or Warcraft 4 or something.  Then we can start over again.

No offense taken.  I tend to stick with one character throughout my time in a game.  I might make a few alts to try things out (or make new outfits in CoX's case), but that character is the game for me.

You also have a cabin up in the Montana hills with a bomb-proof bunker full of tinned produce, don't you?

I hope SOE buys NC Soft.  Then I hope Blizzard buys SOE.  Then I hope Blizzard goes out of business.  Everyone would stand around looking confused and saying, "Wha' happened?"  That would make me fucking giggle.

It is a very real possibility.  Real Money Transfers  (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=7456.0) could ruin multiple companies if it is not controlled IMMEDIATELY.

Whatever.  Artifact Entertainment is going to rise from the ashes and dominate you all.

I've already bought a pitchfork and my torch is made with citronella so it keeps the buggies away while we burn the witch.

I understand why this is hated, but what if RMT games were free to everyone, funded by those who want to RMT? Yes, this would never fly in a PvP game, but for a PvE game with good non-item dependent gameplay it shouldn't matter.

If it was designed properly, perhaps. But nothing in the current landscape of games makes me terribly confident that such designers exist.

Con....grats?  :|

Disagree there are several non worldy persistent online games that do just that and it works very well.  Gunbound comes to mind and I know there are several others that intend to or are currently using a similar strategy.

But I'd be confused. Where would I park?

Your trailer.  Obviously you would be out of the job and flipping burgers!

At home, I'd assume. You could probably run a lucrative RMT company out of your basement, for whatever games still exist in that brilliant vision of the future.

Don't the people who flip burgers usually have a job?

Yikes!  I'm so sorry.  I just made you redundant over and over with no place to go!  I feel awful.  If that scenario ever happened, I would go in the basement and eat worms!   :oops:

None of you people have what it takes to survive unemployment.

Sometimes you just need to strap on the g-string, bow tie, and rollerskates and head on down to the bus stop. 

I did that once. The children's parents were not amused.

Gee, what happened to my edit where I got Lum a job working for Schild and renamed him "Lum the Mod?"  I think I've lost my mind!

World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rule.

about 1 million subscribers in europe(January 19, 2006   )  and usa (August 29, 2005) (about 2 millions subscribers total), and 2,5 millions users in asia.

That one's old:

SPANISH VERSION OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT® IN DEVELOPMENT (http://www.blizzard.com/press/060228.shtml)
That's where the 6 million comes from and that was back in February. I also have it on very good authority that Blizzard actually *under reports* their subscription numbers.

That would be accurate. The last information I got said they were around 6.8-7.1M.

* I did not have a look at Blizz press release for a while,(bad bad)  I was wrong blizz now give actual figure(no longer estimates based on boxsale) >slap me
* I guessed a 1-1,5 millions subscribers for EU+US, I was wrong the number of subcriber for EU+US given by blizz indicate 2 millions +
* I think that stating/knowing that the is a distinction between subcriber and customer is needed, and that it is mistake to mix the 2

anyways ... :)
 

May 10th Blizzard Europe Press Release (http://www.blizzard.co.uk/press/060510.shtml)

WTF, I honestly do not understand.  Please elaborate!

I think he's trying to say, "Don't count Asia in the X-million number, because they don't pay a monthly fee."

However,  I'm sure Blizzard is much happier counting them as subscribers than the rest of the world when you start to look at the ROI of $15/ month for unlimited time vs X$/ Hour.  Particularly when you get to the hardcore time-investment players.

In Gunbound you can use money to buy items in-game that actually do make you more powerful - but players also have the (popular) option of playing on a server where items do not affect your gameplay other than making you look cool.

Koreans pay a subscription fee just like we do, though they can buy a 7 day subscription as well as a normal 30 day one, that's why there's a disclaimer about Game Room players and 30 days (they count the 7 days and 30 days together as long as the 7 days played within 30 days, if that makes sense). The Chinese speaking countries/territories just pay for the time in game but they are presumably counted in the same way as the 7 day Koreans -- i.e. any player who is playing on a paid game time card in the 30 days is counted as a "customer" or something along those lines.

Yeah, I know that and I wasn't referring to the 7 and 30-day game cards.  (Nor do I advocate their exclusion as customers.)  The whole idea was a separate thought from the "interpreting ynot's engrish" segment of the post.

I was talking about the Chineese model where you pay for X number of hours. If Blizzard was going to exclude anyone as some kind of book-cooking lunacy, hiding the accounts of US players who pay $15 but play 5+ hours a week makes more sense than hiding Asians who "only pay 50 cents an hour" from a cost->profit standpoint.

(they count the 7 days and 30 days together as long as the 7 days played within 30 days, if that makes sense)
= if you use one 7 days gaming card you are accounted in the same way than a player paying a 30 days one?
 


I dont understand

I'm just wondering how people in China can afford to play a MMO....by the hour...

Actually I'd put forth the Doubloon oceans in Puzzle Pirates as a great model. Most items are luxury items (clothing, stores, housing, ships) and it allows you to buy the real money Doubloons with in-game Pieces of Eight, so if you play often enough, you can actually pay your own way.

The downside is that if it's free, it's overrun by 12 year olds.

COH would be a good game for an alternative payment system.

I really dont think any non-worldy MMO's are going to last as subscription based much longer.  I will pay $15/mo for a persistent world that needs to be maintained and gives players the freedom to interact with it.  But if the only thing you do is bash other players or bash npc's.  I'm not paying for it much longer*.

Of course in order for this to happen someone will have to design a virtual world style MMO that doesn't suck, so I guess things will remain the same for a long time.

*sigh*



*edited to reflect reality.

Man, between that, a hangover and people talking about Superman, I just had a wicked idea for game-designer-themed superheroes.

"It's the Raphsignal! Save us from the Dastardly Dr. Diku, Raphman!"

And so on.


Maybe I shouldn't post before I've had coffee...

More than 50 mln chinese earn more than your average US salary.

All BS aside about RMT's, they are a waiting financial nightmare for some company.  With zero oversight, taxation, or GAAP conventions it's a money laundering dream.  Yeah, all that crap has been said before.  But the moment Homeland Security of some Senator starts up an audit and media interest about the "drug and terrorist money" going on in RMT's it will be painful for the companies getting away with it so far. 

I mean, there's a couple of people here on f13 who work in financial services and securities -- I am off base here?

Rubbish. It's well known that all Chinese people supplement the abject poverty gleaned from their day jobs of working in terraced padi fields by farming in Azshara in miserable sweat shops dominated by their cruel communist overlords.

Not to mention Im sure there are quite a few of us old schoolers on here who remember playing MMO's offered by AOL and getting $800+ bills per month.

Less than 5% of China workers makes more the average American? That doesn't sound implausable.

NWN for the lose :(  Man it was a happy day when the hourly fee went away!

You need to learn how to quote properly.
Yes both are paying players so both are counted as "customers" as long as the 7 day player played within 30 days of "census day".

Well for one thing it's pretty cheap by US standards -- at launch the cost was 0.45 Yuan an hour which is roughly US$0.056 an hour. So somebody playing 20 hours a week would pay the rough US equivalent of $4.85 a month. You'd have to be playing 60 hours or so a week to match the standard $14.95 a month that we pay over here.

Well damn, that's not fair.

Dude, it's China.

That's like saying it's not fair that people in Ethiopia get free food.

Do you want to move to China because WoW is cheaper?

No, of course not...but it would be nice if I could pay peanuts per hour for an MMO if I was so inclined.

You can, play RuneScape.

Nope. License to launder.

NCsoft has other troubles right now in SKorea.  They are in legal trouble on both the civil and criminal fronts -- an executive in Seoul has been arrested in regards to the allegations of "identity theft"--apparently in SKorea some things we consider torts are also crimes.  Rumor says this executive is rather highly placed.  NcSoft has already faced one civil judgement from a class-action 8000-strong, but hasn't come to terms with the hundreds of thousands (perhaps even a million) of potential other thefts.

NcSoft is probably in trouble for faciliating identity theft and profiting from theft rather than actual stealing of identities.  Most of these thefts are Chinese "farmers" who work for objects to sell for real money.  The unknown thing, to me, is why did the Chinese bother stealing SKorean identity numbers (#'s roughly corresponding to our SSecurity #'s)...couldn't they play under their own identities?  When I find the answer to this question, it will answer a lot of others.

Anyway, if I was a NCSoft exec in the US, I might be a little afraid of visiting Seoul.  The CEO should have taken a lesson in multiculturalism, and learned how to be sensitive to other races...a lot of the disaster of early development of Tabula Rasa had to do with sheer Hollywood-esque self-infatuation.  In point, how they drove Jake Song away from NcSoft entirely.

To Hutch on #34--in re Marvel/NcSoft suit

I've read lots of comment on this lawsuit, and it's usually the "what, are they going to copyright pens and pencils next, and not let me draw my picture of Spiderman?"  I was surprised that nobody checked out the Vivendi/Blizzard/Marvel connection.  The Marvel heroes are largely licensed to Vivendi (for the blockbuster movies) and to Blizzard (for the offshoot games for these movies)--

If Marvel does not protect their characters and copyright, then their licenses are worthless, and Vivendi/Blizzard will have a serious and actionable grievance for paying huge bucks for unprotected intellectual property.  In other words, if Marvel didn't sue NcSoft, then Vivendi/Blizzard may well have hung Marvel out to dry.

The lawsuit was protective covering--it works a little like "adverse possession" in property law.  If you let a squatter live and use your land long enough, the court may well decide that you don't really own it.  To keep that from happening, even when you don't care if the squatter squats...you have to file suit.   Who was the real plaintiff, Blizzard or Marvel? 

Blizzard, afaik, has positively nothing to do with Marvel characters. The vast majority of the Marvel games are put out by the Activisions and THQ's of the world. Blizzard probably couldn't give two shits less about what happens to Marvel characters. They have no stake in them, have never published a game with them in it, and have no plans to whatsoever since their own properties are bigger in gaming than Marvel EVER will be. I've never heard mention of the licenses from VU and none of their subsidaries make Marvel games.

Are you crossing streams here Caboose? Are you sure you don't mean Activision? Or even EA?

Edit: Didn't mean THQ.

in re reply--"Vivendi ain't Marvel"            Here is a site...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E2D61130F933A1575AC0A9649C8B63


 that refs Vivendi's involvement with Marvel.  Granted, they've not done much with it.

You can't create an account on the Korean servers without a valid Korean identity number.

Righ--

I did not know that.  I assumed that playing was available to the Chinese because Americans also play the games, but I guess it has to do with server access? 

The Americans who play the games have Korean identity cards. There are a lot of Koreans in America, some with dual nationality.

You can find Korean ID generators but they move from place to place as they're ever so slightly naughty.  There are programs that help you find where they are, though.

That was from 2002 and VUG isn't developing the Marvel MMOG stuff any more. The only mmog shit they have stake in now is Blizzard stuff. It will generate more dollars than any other license IN. THE. WORLD. I'm fairly sure the VU thing fell apart anyway since Microsoft got the license to make the Marvel MMOG and they're marking it for the 360.

re: Schild

The ten-year license was indeed begun in 2002, but it's been a year or three since the ncsoft/marvel lawsuit started, too.  A lot has transpired in the online gaming market in four years.

 At one point, Vivendi cared enough to buy the licenses,  thought they'd do the online superhero game, and considered the option one worth defending.  Since Blizzard is so mega-successful at online gaming, I do admit to making an  assumption that they'd have an involvement with *any*  VU online game.  But that's nothing more than plausible.  Vivendi owns Blizzard, after all.

The lawsuit was roughly at the same time that WOW was planned and released.  WOW's biggest Asian/US competitor was NcSoft's Lineage--now WOW is eating NcSoft's lunch in Asia as well as the US.  I think the whole progression of events is related, but I could certainly be mistaken. 

Not to derail the orginal intent of the thread, but Marvel is going the movie route alone now.

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2006/mft06070504.htm?source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=y&npu=y

  ))))

I think it's quite relevant.  Destination games supposedly consisted of a good team, both managerial and artistic , when the hapless Koreans signed on.

Very interesting.  Thanks for the link.  Arad was/is a bonafide genius--and a hugely productive one.   I'm not up with Marvel recently, but I remember he also had a financial genius as sidekick--Isak, Isaac?  Forgot his name, but he was somewhat reclusive so he wouldn't mind.  Is he still around?  They were a dazzling team--artistic and intellectual business powerhouses.

  And they were also disciplined workhorses rather than lazy, self-infatuated and self-indulgent.

I know you are right, but I just had to get it out.  A friend of mine who still plays actually messaged a few of those ppl and somehow those lucky fuckers haven't been "tagged" yet.  I just find it annoying, that is all.  Its not like my character was some exact replica.  Hell... all he looked like was some red big dude with no shirt on and pants on and w/ horns.  I don't think that really distinguishes him as Hellboy.  No stone arm, no tattoo's (or whatever they are called), no shaved off horns, hell... the hair wasn't even CLOSE to the same. 

I would have totally understood changing his name, but it wasn't that they were having issues with.  It was his look.  I even emailed them and they said it was his look.

I'll just drop it there because maybe its just me that sees no real similarities except for the ones the individual fills in themselves.  I guess that's enough to say "You can't do that".  No matter, I guess its just going to be the same old adage of... "why should you get away with it?  He was speeding too... blahblahblah" stuff.

CoH is a great game by many accounts - a great experience.

Two things annoy me:

1.  Barrier to Returning.  They introduced that rule sometime ago that unless your character had been logged in the last few months OR was level 34 or above - you would lose your name.  Needless to say, if you don't play for a few months at all - you lose everthing unless your characters are above level 34.  I applaud the intent here - but the implementation was too harsh.

2.  City of Villians.  I have not been compelled to try it since, barring recent changes, it sounded exactly like City of Heroes with regard to mission objectives and behavior.  Recently I gather that has changed - but by how much?

This policy was changed some time ago.  Names are no longer erased, regardless of inactivity.  99% chance you come back and your names are still there.

The archetypes' inherents make them very different to play, regardless of whatever "parallels" you might want to draw between them and anything on the CoH side.

Missions tend to not send you running all over creation. Also, to unlock a new contact you get to go to Paragon City, burn down buildings, rob jewelry stores, kidnap people, and generally smash the living daylights out of everything that moves and everything that doesn't.

Also, contacts have a lot of personality to them. Operative Vargus and Mr. Bocor are among the real hoots, at least for me.

--GF

Thanks for those answers guys.  I might just install this game again.

The Radio and the Slot Machine are awesome contacts.  I've heard the Television is great too, but I haven't gotten high enough to do those missions yet.

On the names, I thought you only lost your name if a new player wanted to use it and your character was under level 34 and dormant for X months. You did not lose your name/character just due to time lapse.

Correct.  I still had all of my character's names when I signed up again in April.

Somewhat back on topic: Auto Assault is merging all of its servers, including those in Europe (http://www.autoassault.com/news/2006/07/the_nexus_is_co.html).

Wow, that was fast.

Auto Assault lives its life one mile at a time.

That's right.  For how it used to work.

Now you keep your name, inactive or not, whether or not a new player tries to use it.  They've left the door open saying they might start this policy up again sometime in the future, but I'm not betting any time within the next year at least.

I think it was mainly for the purposes of freeing names for CoV.  If they re-implement it, it will probably for the big expansions or something they believe will draw a lot of new players.

Just check their European forums. Half of posts are whines about loneness.

Shortly after the numbers for AutoAssault were released, Lum got an urgent message:

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7414.0;attach=1840)

That's awesome.

What? On their forums? You could say the same of f13. Or the Intarweb in general.

People on The Internet: All we're looking for is a hug.

Yup.

There was a MASSIVE call for it on the beta forums.  So they did it.

Then there was a MASSIVE amount of bitching about it.  So they undid it.

Hey, I'm new to these forums and kind of late to post on this topic but I found you guys through searching for more info on Auto Assault.

I was thinking about buying it but after seeing how few subscribers there are I'm pretty wary now.

I'm a veteran Guild Wars/Factions player (5 fully maxed out toons) and was looking for a change of pace... I got City of Villains on clearance for $9.99 at my local Micro Center last weekend and although I really like it, I was saying to myself "wow where are all the people?" It's nowhere near as crowded as Guild Wars. On the plus side, it seems people on CoV are a lot more friendly and helpful to newbies than on Guild Wars (where I was lost in the wilderness for months until I found a good guild). Of course it helps that the controls for CoV are kind of similar to GW so I appear semi-competent right off the bat :wink:

So after that positive experience on CoV I thought about AA until I saw it has only 10% of the subscribers of CoV! It would be hella odd, going from Guild Wars with a miliion plus players and servers hopping 24/7, to a game with only 10K people. However, I will still probably buy it if it continues to flop and Micro Center eventually starts selling it too for $10 (or maybe even lower like Lineage II, which I got for $3 there and haven't even opened the box). Unfortunately as of now AA is still $50. But I like the idea of the whole game being merged to just one server.

Later,
-Adam in Philly

They have a free trial for auto assault (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6894.0) so you can give it a try.  I didn't really like it, neither did most people.