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Author Topic: NCSoft fires a bunch of people.  (Read 95720 times)
raydeen
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Reply #35 on: June 23, 2006, 12:31:47 PM

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.

I was drinking when I wrote this, so sue me if it goes astray.
HaemishM
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Reply #36 on: June 23, 2006, 12:59:17 PM

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

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.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2006, 01:05:35 PM by HaemishM »

eldaec
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Reply #37 on: June 23, 2006, 01:20:20 PM

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.

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Nevermore
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Reply #38 on: June 23, 2006, 01:23:10 PM

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

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.

Over and out.
Krakrok
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Reply #39 on: June 23, 2006, 01:28:08 PM


Guild Wars sold over a million copies. It's usually one of the top 10 daily games played on Xfire. That counts for something.
SpaceDrake
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Reply #40 on: June 23, 2006, 02:14:52 PM

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.
Righ
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Reply #41 on: June 23, 2006, 02:34:42 PM

Lum dodged a bullet. Nicely done.
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.
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?

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.

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Malathor
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Reply #42 on: June 23, 2006, 03:02:39 PM

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?

"Too much is always better than not enough." -Dobbs
Hoax
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Reply #43 on: June 23, 2006, 03:18:49 PM

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

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.
-William Gibson
Lantyssa
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Reply #44 on: June 23, 2006, 03:24:53 PM

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

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
Rhonstet
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Reply #45 on: June 23, 2006, 04:23:57 PM

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.

We now return to your regularly scheduled foolishness, already in progress.
stray
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Reply #46 on: June 23, 2006, 05:07:02 PM

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..
SpaceDrake
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Reply #47 on: June 23, 2006, 05:17:20 PM

are the bliz fanatics just going back to WC3 when they are done?

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.
Big Gulp
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Reply #48 on: June 23, 2006, 07:02:26 PM

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

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.
Jain Zar
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Reply #49 on: June 23, 2006, 07:14:52 PM

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.

Signe
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Reply #50 on: June 23, 2006, 07:31:58 PM

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.

My Sig Image: hath rid itself of this mortal coil.
Righ
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Reply #51 on: June 23, 2006, 08:04:13 PM

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.

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Soln
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Reply #52 on: June 23, 2006, 08:33:48 PM

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." 

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?

say what?  info plz

Google is your friend

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'?
Llava
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Reply #53 on: June 23, 2006, 08:41:50 PM

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:

Quote
NCsoft’s Austin business has announced an immediate restructuring within its organization that included the difficult task of reducing members of its workforce. The online games industry is one that is continually changing with the scaling up and down of business based on product launches and product development schedules.

Over the past two and a half years NCsoft has launched six major titles into the North American market and has grown with each title launch. As the company continues to grow its live products and prepares its next set of major online game releases for later in 2006 and 2007, the company sees a slowdown in its launch pattern and the need to streamline its business.

For this reason, NCsoft has reduced its 300 person workforce in Austin by approximately 70 people to accommodate this change. This decision has no impact on the schedules of any projects currently in development and service to NCsoft’s current games will continue without interruption.

EDIT

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

Quote
All this weekend on test everyone will get some XP love.

Starting now, the Training Room will provide *double* XP until Monday. That's right, you are reading this correctly...please do not adjust your monitor. Your monitor is working just fine. I'll say it again. Double XP. Did that get your attention?

So, what is this all about? This is *just* for testing purposes for a possible future event. Nothing has been finalized at this time and the XP scaling on test will indeed go back to normal on Monday.

Now enjoy your weekend!
« Last Edit: June 23, 2006, 08:47:09 PM by Llava »

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. -Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
schild
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Reply #54 on: June 23, 2006, 09:34:39 PM

The whole game should be double exp. Period. Whole Game.
Velorath
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Reply #55 on: June 23, 2006, 11:27:07 PM

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.
Reg
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Reply #56 on: June 24, 2006, 01:47:55 AM

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.
sawitcoming
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Reply #57 on: June 24, 2006, 02:54:45 AM

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.
Phred
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Reply #58 on: June 24, 2006, 03:50:07 AM

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.

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.

schild
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Reply #59 on: June 24, 2006, 06:14:47 AM

From Kotaku:

Quote
NCSoft's North American operation, based in Austin, recently fired 70 of its 300 employees, according to Gamespot. The company told GSpot that none of the publisher's development teams have been affected by the firings, with the Tabular Rasa team still hiring.

The company's prepared comment sought to cast the layoffs as a response to vagaries all publishers in the online space are subject to. "The online games industry is one that is continually changing with the scaling up and down of business based on product launches and product development schedules," the statement read in part.
But it also points to a more localized reason behind the layoffs--a slowdown in upcoming NCsoft launches: "As the company continues to grow its live products and prepares its next set of major online game releases for later in 2006 and 2007, the company sees a slowdown in its launch pattern and the need to streamline its business."

Site f13.net, which first reported on the firings, blamed the firings on Auto Assault. The site, quoting an unnamed developer-only message board, wrote that the car-themed massively multiplayer online game has less than 10,000 subscribers. That compares to City of Heroes and City of Villians, which has been at 150,000 subscribers for more than two years, according to NCSoft.

F13 goes on to say that the firings were mostly in the GM, tech support and QA departments. NCSoft denies the numbers reported on F13 were "not just barely wrong, but all wrong.

It's too bad that Auto Assault isn't doing better. Developer NetDevil is a Colorado-based company, but more importantly I think the game is quite well put together. I've met with the NetDevil folk numerous times, including on their gold day. The last time I spoke with them, Scott Brown told me that the game could make or break his studio.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you guys.

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:

Quote
First word of the layoffs was traced back to a report on fan site f13.net.

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

Gamespot goes on to further the statement in the Kotaku post:
Quote
Today, NCsoft staffers called the post incorrect, stating the figures listed were off by "high, double digit percentages." An NC rep said that while it is company policy not to break out layoffs by department, the numbers posted anonymously were incorrect, and "not just barely wrong, but all wrong."

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.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2006, 06:27:23 AM by schild »
Murgos
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Reply #60 on: June 24, 2006, 06:55:11 AM

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

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.

"You have all recieved youre last warning. I am in the process of currently tracking all of youre ips and pinging your home adressess. you should not have commencemed a war with me" - Aaron Rayburn
Righ
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Reply #61 on: June 24, 2006, 08:51:03 AM

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.

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.


The camera adds a thousand barrels. - Steven Colbert
Llava
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Rrava roves you rong time


Reply #62 on: June 24, 2006, 08:55:41 AM

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.

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.

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.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2006, 08:57:19 AM by Llava »

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. -Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
JoeTF
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Reply #63 on: June 24, 2006, 09:32:24 AM

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?
Merusk
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Reply #64 on: June 24, 2006, 10:01:07 AM

Some actual numbers:

Quote from: CuppaJoe on the COH Boards
NCsoft’s Austin business has announced an immediate restructuring within its organization that included the difficult task of reducing members of its workforce. The online games industry is one that is continually changing with the scaling up and down of business based on product launches and product development schedules.

Over the past two and a half years NCsoft has launched six major titles into the North American market and has grown with each title launch. As the company continues to grow its live products and prepares its next set of major online game releases for later in 2006 and 2007, the company sees a slowdown in its launch pattern and the need to streamline its business.

For this reason, NCsoft has reduced its 300 person workforce in Austin by approximately 70 people to accommodate this change. This decision has no impact on the schedules of any projects currently in development and service to NCsoft’s current games will continue without interruption.

The past cannot be changed. The future is yet within your power.
Signe
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Reply #65 on: June 24, 2006, 10:07:54 AM

Some actual numbers:

Quote from: CuppaJoe on the COH Boards
NCsoft’s Austin business has announced an immediate restructuring within its organization that included the difficult task of reducing members of its workforce. The online games industry is one that is continually changing with the scaling up and down of business based on product launches and product development schedules.

Over the past two and a half years NCsoft has launched six major titles into the North American market and has grown with each title launch. As the company continues to grow its live products and prepares its next set of major online game releases for later in 2006 and 2007, the company sees a slowdown in its launch pattern and the need to streamline its business.

For this reason, NCsoft has reduced its 300 person workforce in Austin by approximately 70 people to accommodate this change. This decision has no impact on the schedules of any projects currently in development and service to NCsoft’s current games will continue without interruption.

Quoth the Raven,  Nevermore!

(don't know what I did there, but you get the idea)
« Last Edit: June 24, 2006, 10:10:08 AM by Signe »

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Reg
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Reply #66 on: June 24, 2006, 10:27:25 AM

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.

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.

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.

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?

Righ
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Reply #67 on: June 24, 2006, 10:33:03 AM

Whine, whine, moan.

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.

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JoeTF
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Reply #68 on: June 24, 2006, 12:53:21 PM

I was writing mainly in regard to Schild's answer to this part:
Quote
Today, NC soft staffers called the post incorrect, stating the figures listed were off by "high, double digit percentages." An NC rep said that while it is company policy not to break out layoffs by department, the numbers posted anonymously were incorrect, and "not just barely wrong, but all wrong."

Oh, and he might consider using quotation marks. not necessary as big as Kotaku ones of course:P
Yoru
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Reply #69 on: June 24, 2006, 12:54:20 PM

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

Quote
First word of the layoffs was traced back to a report on fan site f13.net.

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

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.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2006, 12:55:58 PM by Yoru »
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