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Why the hate for NCsoft?
channel84
Member UncommonPosts: 585
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/03/18/ncsoft-makes-multi-million-dollar-japanese-relief-donation/
After reading this article, i was wondering to myself. Why do people hate NCsoft? Compare to other publisher out there NCsoft is quite decent in my book.
City of Heroes : Started the spandex revolution. Even by today it's the most complete package albert the aged gfx
Linage Series : Considered by many to be a cult classic nowadays. Not for the softcore thou
Aion : Beautiful gfx and animation. Unique flight system. Too hardcore for western audience (I always think of this as an example when someone for example proposed an old school high grind server for games like rift or everquest II).
Guild Wars : Story driven rpg aka swtor of the year 2005 minus the backtalking function. No grind, pure skill based combat, impressive amount of build and playstyle. Only drawback is the highly instance world. THE game for working people like me who need a lot of attention for RL.
Future title : GW2, Blade&Soul Both looks good to me
Compare to other big MMO publisher out there, i would say NCsoft didn't do anything that's worth pissing me off. So i was wondering why do i see people bashing on NCsoft? Poor customer service? or something else?
Comments
Due to Tabula Rasa. The way they literally frauded the Garriott letter to get rid of his options in NCSoft, is simply intolerable. This is way bigger scandal than what SoE did to their own game.
REALITY CHECK
People do hate publishers.
EA, Activision, Atari... The list is long. Part of the reason s that many publishers are messing with the companies they publish or forces them to release a game too early.
Oh...i know about tabula rasa going under but i didn't know a big scandal is involved
But anyway i'm not going to hold developer dispute againts them...but good point thou
Edited: Ncsoft did pay him compensation on court order and garriot is even happy about it.
Just because a company has extra money to throw at relief for publicity doesnt mean people will love them.
It is a big scandal, it is a huge scandal in fact the biggest in gaming history so far, as they losed $28 mil on a court that had to be to paid to Richard Garriott.
These NCSoft creeps (even can be called thieves) in fact, shut down the whole game above all, just to get rid of R.G. options.
REALITY CHECK
the list is pretty long.. but apart from the SWG debacle of SOE, theres also the infamous Earth and Beyond one from EA.. amongst many others.. gamers can have long memories...
OP has a point about delivering good games from their own makings. No problem there. But I agree with you as well Thillian. TR shows what NCSoft is made of... A bunch of Korean led lapdogs (no effence to any NCSoft employees here - I'm only referring to the US CEO's) that do the Korean HQ's biddings instantly...
Aside from TR there's also the botting and RMT problem in L2 where you can report ppl as much as you want, but they will never be banned / punished for breaking the EULA, though I was quite surprised to see NCSoft keep the amount of RMT's quite low in AIon (dunno about botting there though).
I'm trying to find out why people hate them. thillian got a good point there. Luckily nobody is above the law.
I think it's mostly because of the fact that they're big, and it's popular to pick on the big guys. Also, I'm afraid that NCSoft has a tendency to put too little into the Western release of their games. It's clear that NCSoft West are just a mouthpiece and that all the big decisions are made from Korea with Korean gamers in mind. Sure, they pulled the plug on Tabula Rasa, but it's heart had already stopped beating.
Not entirely true... I started 2 weeks before the plug was pulled, and the game as pretty crowded for a 'failed MMO'. I think that at any give moment about 1000 players were online (a lot more than Vanguard has), and even in the newbee/starter area's, there were enough new/low-level players.
Tabula Rasa, thats All I have to say about it. The way things were done and so forth. I could write a paragraph and a wall of text but I just don't have the time or the will to do that.
Tabula Rasa was just *one* of the games they axed. I quite enjoyed the game, myself. Sure it had some problems, but nothing that couldn't have been fixed. I suspect they would have at least tried, if the game had been done by an Asian group. If I remember right, all of the games they have axed have been by western groups.
NCsoft has demonstrated countless times over the years, that they are clueless when it comes to the difference between the westerrn and eastern markets. Look at Aion for just one of many examples. Its MUCH more popular in the eastern markets, than its managed to become in the western markets. Its not that I hate NCsoft, I simply would not do business with them. From past history they can't be trusted.
This is a wrong attitude that doesn't touch the issue here. They frauded the whole situation, to make R.G. lose his options (made him to sell them, as if he would have left voluntarily - during the period when they were at their lowest value - shortly before Aion release, after which they skyrocketed). Court decided they had to pay $28 mil to R.G. So in fact, the court determined, that it was a fradulent behaviour.
Tabula Rasa termination - was kinda a byproduct of their whole superplan, it wasn't due to its low popularity. The game could go on even with the amount of subs it had at that time (10-20k), which is on the level with games like Fallen Earth, Darkfall, and even exceeding games like Asheron Call, Vanguard. Tabula Rasa was terminated solely for the reason that they wanted to get rid of R.G.
REALITY CHECK
Unless one happens to be a powerful politician, or those who own them(banks, insurance groups...). ^^ Its not so much that I hate NCsoft, as I simply do not trust them enough to ever do business with them. I've seen way too many example of their mentality over the years.
Ofcourse there were players, a month or 2 or so (could be less) the game was free to download and play till they pull the plug
I think it's already been said, but canning Auto Assault first followed by Tabula Rasa when both could have been easily saved if the little effort required was actually put into it is the big one. The only thing going for them really is Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 which, thankfully, is not in-house. City of Heroes is popular, but that has a more niche crowd than GW's broader layer-base. L2 and Aion, well, Aion looks pretty and that's about it. Never touched L2 so can't say much on it.
Well, there is the fact that they banned my master account without telling me why, and then gave me hell about getting it back. They seriously expected me to give them a list of all the serial keys associated with the account (like I'm gonna have my serial code from CoH which I activated in '04). To their credit I did eventually get the account back; although despite asking repeatedly I never got an explanation as to why the account was banned.
Oh, and the fact they cancelled Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault, and Dungeon Runners, three of the more innovative and fun MMOs to come out in the last few years. I refuse to give them any more of my hard earned cash.
I was not referring to February 2009, but November 2008, 2 weeks before NCSoft dropped the bomb that R.G would leave and the week following that TR would be canceled...
Is this "not trusting them to do business" about western vs eastern intolerant or is this about bobby kotick, mark zuckerberg style corporate scandal?
If it's the former then your really xenophobic
If it's the later then i can say that that is how survival of the fittest work in capitalism works. Thankfully the law will provide some justice. Too bad Tabula Rasa player suffered the brute force of the impact
My hate for them is how they shut down the only UNIQUE games. (Exteel, TR, AA) I know AA was lack of subs, but TR I know was shut down a bit after they forced Richard garriott out, while he was in quarentine, leaving CoH, GW, and their korean grind fests, Lineage 1 & 2. They got rid of everything that was unique.. and their customer support is HORRRID.
I found both aut assault and tabula rasa boring. I;ll admit TR was a little better than AA but they both lacked decent character customization. AA was unique, but really, how long would a game like that last. TR isn't unique. Compared to fantasy, anything would be unique, sure, but there plenty of Sci Fi things out there. The combat was decent enough, but I never saw anything in it that was worth a sub.
Considering I love both CoH and GW, and have only GW2 to look forward to, I'd say NC Soft was a decent publisher cause, you know, they actually give their devs time to finish their games before they're released (so far at least).
Then again, I don't get butthurt when companies do crazy stuff, the only thing they can do is disrupt my flow of entertainment which I can get from somewhere else.
Unique as in, not following the fantasy MMO formula. I'm SO tired of playing everquest every time a new game releases. AA and TR did something new.
From the feedback i've read. Most of the complaint are based on NCsoft decision to shut down AA, TB.
From an asian publisher point of view the sub for those game may have too few sub to be viable. Quoting from Curt Schilling in his pax east dev panel speech "But we have not had a huge capacity in multiplayer games in the western hemisphere. You want to talk massive? I'm talking 50, 60, 70, 100 million users. They are seeing that in the Far East." http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/03/17/pax-east-2011-the-future-of-mmos-from-the-mouths-of-the-develop/
So i would say when a publisher get used to seeing this kind of gaming audience, their tolerant for 10k-20k sub goes down. My 2 cent of this issue.
I've played a lot of eastern mmo. Games like uncharted water online is the no.1 sandbox in japan but is hardly noticable in the western side. It's true that aion have very high grind level. But if we don't like the game choice from a publisher is it rasionally correct to bashes on the publisher?
I bashed on publisher because of poor support and poor management or even scheme to get more money from player.
Eg. Poor management of failhammer, Non existence support for vanguard, lame business model for cyptic.
But bashing aion for it's high grind is like complaining EVE online is not a themepark and start bashing ccp...rational in that?
What happened to Richard Garriott and what happened to Tabula Rasa are two different things. They are intertwined, but a lot of people mix the separate events up.
Tabula Rasa was cancelled because it was likely going to take a decade plus before it would have reached profitability due to low player numbers. There's some idea that NCsoft just decided to cancel it one day on a whim, but they'd given the game every opportunity to succeed. NCsoft Korea poured a lot of money into it (possibly over US$100m), even cancelling / cutting into other NCsoft North American titles to fund development. After nearly a year post-launch, NCsoft Korea crunched the numbers and realised they probably would never recoup that investment (especially with ongoing content development costs included), so they killed the game. Tabula Rasa just cost too much and launched incredibly badly.
What happened to Richard Garriott is another story.
When NCsoft expanded into the US seriously in 2001, they bought Destination Games and the expertise of Richard and Robert Garriott. Richard and Robert made deals for titles like City of Heroes and Auto Assault while Richard worked on NCsoft's ultimate game - one that would be successful both in Eastern and Western Markets (along with Starr Long and Jake Song as co-development leads). But TR didn't launch until 2007 after at least one near complete re-development. My understanding is that by this time Richard Garriott (who never wanted it to be "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa") had lost interest in developing the title. He stuck it out in being loyal to NCsoft and his studio, but his interest really was to go into space. Robert Garriott was head of NCsoft North America.
Up to the point that TR flopped, NCsoft Korea was happy letting the Garriott brothers run that side of the operation, but with this disaster they stepped up and took more control. Someone made a decision that the Garriotts had to go, and the people who were picked to replace them running things were ArenaNet veterans led by Chris Chung as CEO. (Richard Garriott was more interested in his space flight anyway; Robert Garriott had received a backwards promotion earlier to clear the way.) But firing the Garriotts would be expensive and messy - they had contracts and stock.
Pure supposition on my part, but the flop of TR caused a lot of bile internally at NCsoft West (a combination of NCsoft North America, NCsoft Europe and some other NCsoft entities - the combination probably caused by TR's failure). For years TR had been the golden child, getting all the attention and money - after it flopped, it was time for payback of sorts. Someone made the decision to force Richard Garriott out and the open letter that was published where he said he was quitting NCsoft was forged (according to the outcome of the lawsuit). Garriott said that Chung fired him, which would have given him greater options around what he could do with his stock than if he'd quit. There is no proof about who was responsible for this act, but it is highly coincidential that Chung got demoted and that a lot of the ArenaNet guys promoted to key NCsoft West positions have moved on.
Garriott was treated badly by NCsoft, but at the same time he had responsibility for a title that cost a lot of people their jobs. As for why hate NCsoft? I certainly don't, but I'm not surprised when they shutter one of their titles (e.g. Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners, Exteel) either.
Nice read up. Well i guess business is business.