Tag: NCSoft

Tabula Rasa Revival Petition


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By the time it shut down, Tabula Rasa had a small but very dedicated community, and when NCSoft did announce that the servers would be coming down fans were enraged twofold. First for the simple fact that the game had launched in a rather poor state and the fan perception that NCSoft didn’t do a whole lot to save the title, and secondly when Richard Garriot sued the publisher (and won) for $32 million alleging that NCSoft fired Garriot, forging his letter of resignation to defraud him of stock options, and did all of this while he was in decontamination in Russia following his trip into space.

Much like our friends over at City of Heroes, the Tabula Rasa fans are yet another group of embittered fans who once called themselves NCSoft’s customers, and they are not going to let a game they enjoy go down with a whimper. A petition on gopetition.com is asking for ten thousand signatures to send over to NCSoft to bring back Tabula Rasa.

The petition is a nice touch, but we don’t see the endeavor going far. After all, we are talking about NCSoft, a company not known for its willingness to change course once the shutdown notice is given, and one which apparently would rather see its games rot in a digital warehouse than sell it off to a willing buyer. Second, the petition seems to assume that Richard Garriot was part of the game shutting down, which couldn’t be further from the truth. That being said, Garriot and NCSoft did not exactly part on a good note (see the above lawsuit), so any chance of the two getting together to revive Tabula Rasa is most likely slim.

There’s something to be said about horses and turnips here, but for the life of me I don’t know what it is.

(Source: Gopetition)

Guild Wars Is In Maintenance Mode


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I think most of us got the hint that this was coming around the time that NCSoft stopped listing Guild Wars on their quarterly financial releases. With the rousing success of Guild Wars 2 and the ever advancing age of Guild Wars, Arenanet has posted today to reveal that their ongoing updates to Guild Wars have had a secondary purpose: To teach the game to run itself. With Arenanet’s views moving elsewhere, Guild Wars is being updated to run on automation, or maintenance mode as many of you know it. The game will no longer be updated, except to better service the automation.

So what does this mean for players? Foremost, handing out trims at tournaments and the map rotation of the tournaments themselves will be completely automated. Weekend events will be extended to full week events and run on automated rotations as well. Basically everything that used to require the hand of Arenanet to start will be fully automated. The goal is to get Guild Wars to a point where it can operate mostly by itself, allowing the game to run in maintenance mode for “years to come.”

(Source: Guild Wars)

 

NCSoft Q1 2013 Finances


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(I apologize for the outdated screenshot. I will update with a graph once I’m in front of a real computer.)

NCSoft has released their first quarterly report for 2013, and I’m sure we are all wondering how Guild Wars 2 will perform following the initial rush, so let’s dive in. Sales remained strong in 2013 thanks to Guild Wars 2, Aion, and Lineage. Profit is understandably down since last quarter’s launch of Guild Wars 2, however NCSoft’s year over year figures are amazing: 31% higher sales, 348% increased profits, 256% pre-tax income, and 322% net income over Q1 2012.

Lineage 1 continues to be NCSoft’s big seller, consisting of 38% of the total game sales in Q1, with Guild Wars 2 at 21% and Aion at 16%. Aion and Lineage saw an increase in sales quarter over quarter while Lineage II, Guild Wars, and Blade & Soul saw a mild to heavy loss. NCSoft as a parent company has thankfully recovered from being in the red last quarter for pre-tax income and net income.

Korea remains NCSoft’s largest market at 64%, with North America and Europe dropping by about half to 13% and 8% respectively, Japan’s 7% percentage share remained the same even though sales dropped. Sales in Taiwan increased slightly, remaining at 1%. Royalties dropped about one third in total, remaining at the 6% percentage value from the last quarter.

As usual, Guild Wars is bundled in with the “other” and is not represented by its own category. For legal reasons, I must remind you that these results are un-audited and may be subject to change during the auditing process.

MMOrning Shots: Everyday Low Prices


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Auto Assault shut down nearly six years ago, so Walmart was kind enough to discount it to $29.88. This shot was taken 4/11/13.

MMOrning Shots is a (somewhat) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house or come to us in press releases, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

Paragon Studios Discusses Its Closure


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It’s been five months since City of Heroes shut down, and the more we hear about the events surrounding the closure of Paragon Studios, the less realistic that NCSoft’s explanation that they had “exhausted all options” seems to become. Gamasutra has published a very informative piece on the closing of Paragon Studios, detailing how Paragon Studios management attempted to buy out the studio, its employees, and its games. Due to a last minute roadblock, the deal fell through and we all know what happened next.

“It was very much a surprise. We all were really working as if things were going to work out. … It was business as usual right up until the last day.”
-Matt Miller, former lead designer at Paragon

You can read the rest of the three page article at the link below.

(Source: Gamasutra)

MMOrning Shots: Wildstar Housing


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NCSoft released a decent number of screenshots and concept art for Wildstar today, and I’ve taken the liberty of posting one of the more interesting (in my opinion at least) of the player housing screenshots. Set for release in 2013, Wildstar comes to us from Carbine Studios and will be published by NCSoft.

You can check out Wildstar’s February State of the Game to learn more about the upcoming MMO.

MMOrning Shots is a (somewhat) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken by our in-house editors, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

Wildstar In Less Than Five Minutes


Wildstar is an explosive cocktail just looking for someone to party with. Check it out when it heads into beta.

Lineage II Joins Aion In Automatic Block List Maintenance


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Mark this as a feature that all MMOs should adopt. For as long as online games have had gold farmers or abuse players, and ignore lists that are capped in how many people can be blocked, there has been the drudgery of spring cleaning said ignore list. Wouldn’t it just be easier for the game to automatically remove players who have been permanently banned, saving you the trouble of unblocking someone only to have them start harassing you again? NCSoft thinks so, and back in November Aion was treated to an update where the game now performs weekly sweeps of block lists, automatically removing any characters that have been removed from the game.

In the patch notes for March 13th’s server maintenance, Lineage II is following suit with its own implementation:

Block List Removal begins. Any characters that were banned since last week and were on your block list will be automatically removed during the maintenance. This will be a recurring process every week.

Maintenance should last about four hours.

(Source: Lineage II)

NCSoft Refuses To Censor Blade & Soul For The West


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Just once I’d like to see a game receive a mature rating because the content is so hard hitting that it requires an adult mindset to digest. Until then, however, we’re going to have to deal with the fact that an MMO’s ESRB rating is generally directly proportional to the level of exposure of a certain part of the female anatomy. Of course I’m speaking of breasts, whether large, small, and of all shapes and sizes. In the past few years, we’ve seen a number of titles translated for the western audiences that end up being censored out of fear of either controversy or a bad rating by the ESRB/PEGI. These censors usually end up affecting classes/characters who could be misconstrued as underage, when they are simply small and petite.

A few gamers noted that a recent trailer for Blade & Soul that the game appears to have several alterations, adding some clothing where it didn’t exist in the Korean version. NCSoft released a press statement clarifying that they have only the utmost respect for Team Bloodlust, and that the censored models are solely for promotional purposes.

Due to ESRB guidelines, however, our marketing material must abide by a different set of considerations than the final product. This is why Blade & Soul‘s rating is listed as “pending.” It is NCSOFT West’s intention to accurately depict the game in its original, unaltered form, with only minor adjustments for gameplay considerations. In short: We are not planning to censor or alter the actual in-game content you have come to expect from an artist such as Hyung-Tae Kim and a studio such as Team Bloodlust. Rest assured that we love Blade & Soul as much as you do, and any modifications to the marketing material are not indicative of our plans for the final content.

More on Blade & Soul as it appears.

(Source: Blade & Soul)