MXM Shutting Down - 'It Came Down to a Matter of Business'

SBFord

MXM Shutting Down - 'It Came Down to a Matter of Business'

MXM: Master X Master News - NCSoft has posted a sad not for fans of Master X Master. MXM will be closing down on January 31, 2018. The reason cited is cold, but plain, "Deciding to close the game is not a decision we come to lightly, but ultimately it came down to a matter of business -- we explored several options, but none of them were sustainable."

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Junglecharly

Dude wtf? Did you guys even try to do lootboxes before deciding to close it down?

brmily

Considering this is NCSoft, I'm surprised the game lasted as long as it did. They love to shut down games.

zigalucard

Sad that this launched in June of this year with exorbitant priced founders packs and now all that goes down the drain for players that bought them.

Jonnyp2

I thought it was a fun game, but I could never get anyone to play it with me. There's just no connection to NCsoft characters and "Master x Master" is a absolutely terrible name.

Rhygarth

Junglecharly said:

Dude wtf? Did you guys even try to do lootboxes before deciding to close it down?

lootboxes are whats wrong with todays games and you want them ?

Scarran

Not really surprised by this as I tried the game when it launched and having 3/4's of the character pool locked and then time gating some of them put me off this game.

What I do find surprising is how Wildstar has lasted so long considering how badly that game is doing.

Junglecharly

Rhygarth said:

Junglecharly said:

Dude wtf? Did you guys even try to do lootboxes before deciding to close it down?

lootboxes are whats wrong with todays games and you want them ?

That's just your opinion man.

Aeander

The game was far better than it had any right to be, but it was also misguided. 

Ultimately, NCSoft characters do not hold the brand recognition of Blizzard characters. Even speaking of my own favorite Guild Wars franchise, there are approximately 0 Guild Wars 1 characters with general gaming recognition and a small handful of popular Guild Wars 2 characters.

But even as a crossover, MxM failed. Imagine if Super Smash Bros filled out over 3/4 of its roster with random Mii's and gave each of its other franchises a mere 1-2 characters. That's basically what MxM did. It was a crossover that was ashamed to be a crossover. 

MadFrenchie

Only fanfare I remember about this game was how they were adding Statesman and many CoH fans all collectively went "<sigh>".

d_20

Rhygarth said:

Junglecharly said:

Dude wtf? Did you guys even try to do lootboxes before deciding to close it down?

lootboxes are whats wrong with todays games and you want them ?

It's probably meant to be a joke.

Albatroes

"Deciding to close the game is not a decision we come to lightly, but ultimately it came down to a matter of business -- we explored several options, but none of them were sustainable."

How has WS evaded this for so long then...?

d_20

zigalucard said:

Sad that this launched in June of this year with exorbitant priced founders packs and now all that goes down the drain for players that bought them.

I can't really feel sorry for anyone who bought these.

Golelorn

Maybe they will stop making these cut and paste games? Yeah, I doubt it, too.

Veexer_Nui

They are making sick money from Lineage 2 M. More than 10x the amount of all their pc mmos combined. It's not worth them running a game for so little profit.

Albatroes

Veexer_Nui said:

They are making sick money from Lineage 2 M. More than 10x the amount of all their pc mmos combined. It's not worth them running a game for so little profit.

Again....how has Wildstar evaded this for so long...?

Kyleran

Albatroes said:

Veexer_Nui said:

They are making sick money from Lineage 2 M. More than 10x the amount of all their pc mmos combined. It's not worth them running a game for so little profit.

Again....how has Wildstar evaded this for so long...?

Someone at WS has "pictures", with animals maybe. 

  

Albatroes

Kyleran said:

Albatroes said:

Veexer_Nui said:

They are making sick money from Lineage 2 M. More than 10x the amount of all their pc mmos combined. It's not worth them running a game for so little profit.

Again....how has Wildstar evaded this for so long...?

Someone at WS has "pictures", with animals maybe. 

  

Or.....and I know its a stretch by thinking this....but hear me out.....what if.....and a big if......
...
....
......
........they're shutting down MxM just so they open up CoH: Classic!
I mean the out cry for wanting CoH back has been around for a while so maybe they decided to cave like Blizzard is to wow vanilla. I know, a stretch.

Tiamat64

Golelorn said:

Maybe they will stop making these cut and paste games? Yeah, I doubt it, too.

Gameplay-wise, it's not a cut and paste game at all.  Not that NCSoft's marketting managed to get that across.  It was a twin-stick shooter for the most part, just with a MOBA mode as well as a PvE mode.  Sadly, shoehorning it into a MOBA was one of the problems, especially given how saturated the MOBA market was.

IMHO, they should have learned from Orcs Must Die Unchained (another game that started with both PvE and MOBA modes before deciding to ditch the MOBA mode) and focused more on the PvE and progression (RPG aspects, not to be confused with role-playing) systems.  Instead what we got was "Just another MOBA" in spite of how the base gameplay was completely different from other MOBAs, and the PvE mode basically became "twin-stick Diablo without itemization and levelling progression as well as very little content"

Grend

Tiamat64 said:

Golelorn said:

Maybe they will stop making these cut and paste games? Yeah, I doubt it, too.

Gameplay-wise, it's not a cut and paste game at all.  Not that NCSoft's marketting managed to get that across.  It was a twin-stick shooter for the most part, just with a MOBA mode as well as a PvE mode.  Sadly, shoehorning it into a MOBA was one of the problems, especially given how saturated the MOBA market was.

IMHO, they should have learned from Orcs Must Die Unchained and focused more on the PvE and progression (RPG aspects, not to be confused with role-playing) systems.  Instead what we got was "Just another MOBA" in spite of how the base gameplay was completely different from other MOBAs, and the PvE mode basically became "twin-stick Diablo without itemization and levelling progression and very little content"

I agree. The PvE aspect of the game is what I love about it. Unfortunately after about a month or two of running the same stuff starts to wear on you. Would of loved to see more PvE maps and challenges.

Funny thing is that when it launched, there were a lot of players. I stopped after that 2nd month due to a little fatigue of running the same stuff but came back a few months later, there was hardly anyone around. Then I do wonder about the censorship issue that came up after the launch played a small part in it also. If you played during the alphas and betas, they changed and/or altered a lot of the female character skins a few days before the launch. I didn't notice it right away but started hearing more and more players talking about it as the weeks went on after launch. Even on the forums the staff were locking/deleting threads started about the skin changes/alterations.

Blaze_Rocker

MadFrenchie said:

Only fanfare I remember about this game was how they were adding Statesman and many CoH fans all collectively went "<sigh>".

I don't really remember a "sigh". It was more like fists crashing through computer screens for a couple of days after the initial announcement.

Phoenix_Hawk

I thought it was a pretty good game, but it did demonstrate the problem of mislabelling your game. I found it had far more PvE, than PvP content, and only one of its PvP game modes was what people would identify as a MOBA, so trying to sell a game as a MOBA, when so little of it was a MOBA, was just a bad idea. More people like me that preferred the PvE content would have played if it wasn't marketed as a MOBA. I had no plans to try it due to the MOBA label, but early on they had various simple crossover events with other NCSoft games, I wanted the costume for B&S from one such event, then ended up playing MXM, more than B&S. Although there was a rather limited amount of content in the game, so it got all rather repetitive before long, and not being able to select the PvE dungeon you wanted to do without a cash shop item was a real pain.

The other problem was a matter of trying to offer too many things, and much of the content required other players to do it effectively, or at all. There's just too many online games out there, and more coming all the time, yet only so many people to play them, which makes keeping multiplayer dependant games functional more difficult. If you're going to have a game that depends so much on playing with others, then spread the player base across a number of different things to do, it's just asking for trouble, as you have to know people will come to have a hard time finding other people to do what they want to do with. The more people have a hard time finding people to play the content with, the more people leave, until it's just rather empty, and you can't do much in the game any more.

Tiamat64

Phoenix_Hawk said:

I thought it was a pretty good game, but it did demonstrate the problem of mislabelling your game. I found it had far more PvE, than PvP content, and only one of its PvP game modes was what people would identify as a MOBA, so trying to sell a game as a MOBA, when so little of it was a MOBA, was just a bad idea. More people like me that preferred the PvE content would have played if it wasn't marketed as a MOBA. I had no plans to try it due to the MOBA label, but early on they had various simple crossover events with other NCSoft games, I wanted the costume for B&S from one such event, then ended up playing MXM, more than B&S. Although there was a rather limited amount of content in the game, so it got all rather repetitive before long, and not being able to select the PvE dungeon you wanted to do without a cash shop item was a real pain.

The other problem was a matter of trying to offer too many things, and much of the content required other players to do it effectively, or at all. There's just too many online games out there, and more coming all the time, yet only so many people to play them, which makes keeping multiplayer dependant games functional more difficult. If you're going to have a game that depends so much on playing with others, then spread the player base across a number of different things to do, it's just asking for trouble, as you have to know people will come to have a hard time finding other people to do what they want to do with. The more people have a hard time finding people to play the content with, the more people leave, until it's just rather empty, and you can't do much in the game any more.

Yea, there was a multiplayer queue for the normal PvE dungeons, for the PvP titan ruins mode, for the PvP arena mode, for EACH of the mini-games (that weren't so optional if you wanted to get your daily quests done), and pretty much all of them with the exception of the normal dungeons required other players (and even the normal PvE dungeons were only doable solo at higher difficulties if you were REALLY good at twin-stick shooter games)

Like, what were they thinking?  Oo

edujam

Fireworks from me !!!!! Yes yes yes baby! Now nothing with CoH Ip will be active!!! Ncsoft can bankrupt and sell CoH to someone else!!!!

Blaze_Rocker

edujam said:

Fireworks from me !!!!! Yes yes yes baby! Now nothing with CoH Ip will be active!!! Ncsoft can bankrupt and sell CoH to someone else!!!!

An interesting response.

Sadly, NCsoft knows how to market to their South Korean, and generally "Eastern", customers so their bankruptcy will remain nothing but a wet dream for many years to come. They're really going to have to get desperate to be willing to sell their IPs as they hang on to them with an iron grip.

BruceYee

I really enjoyed this game but like another poster above said after month 2 the number of players dropped significantly making queues for PvP too long for me to deal with.