The Last Days of an Online World

These are the last days of Asheron's Call 2. We've known since late August that the online world was slated for sunset, and Wired has a stirring look at the final days of a dying world. From the article: "The economy has also tanked. When the announcement first came down, players say, a majority of gamers immediately fled. Previously, you'd log on and find several hundred people online; now you'll get nine or 10. High-powered character accounts used to sell for as much as $500, but the online auctions have gone silent. That's partly because, as the end nears, Turbine is tossing out some freebies and giving away more "rare" items, making them less rare. Without a sense of a future, capitalism ends. There's no demand in a condemned world."

Comments

Re:The Private MMORPG server.

[redheaded_stepchild]

The whole idea of paying a monthly fee is exactly why I won't purchase those types of games. I've been dying to try one, but I refuse to pay thier server tax.

Simple

[kenp2002]

Release the source code\ server code under a restricted license (non-commerical use) and allow people to take up the falg of using the old dated-engine to create new worlds or preserve the old world. Anything on the Internet can live forever, so long as there is space and people with time on their hands. It would be great to see those of us that still to this day use DIKU and ROM and SMUAG etc.. to run smaller, more imtimate worlds have tools to do the same but with graphics.

Free the code and AC will live forever.

Re:Simple

[Quarters]

The only problem with Asheron's Call was Turbine's credo of "We won't punish the hackers for finding an exploit and using it. We'll fix it." It was a noble but empty promise. There were too many people trying to find exploits relative to the number of people that were maintaining the game. Once SpeedHack hit after the firt 1.5 years or so the game was over. Either you exploited or you died. It's too bad, really, as the game was generations ahead of the other RPG MMOs of that time (Legends of Kesmai, Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and Everquest).

You get over it

[snuf23]

Leaving an MMO is practically the same thing. It "hurts" a bit at first, your uber character, your favorite places, your guildies - giving all those things up. If your like me, you've left to play something else and once you get sucked in you remember the sense of discovery and wonder that is missng from an MMO once you've "seen it all".
I'm a nostalgic dork myself however. I make heavy use of the screenshot button as I play through a game. I also tend to make some videos using FRAPs that I can view long after the game is gone or changed or I'm no longer playing it.

Re:The Private MMORPG server.

[LoRdTAW]

I guess you don't realize the amount of work that goes into the back end of an mmorpg. This isn't an FPS like half life where anyone can setup a simple server on a desktop machine and host games. We are talking about big iron or clusters of servers and a database with high speed storage to to handle all player stats and items. Think about it every time you open your inventory and move, sell, or aquire an item their data base has to handle it. The system also has to handle all the monsters, items dropped by them, timers on dungeons per player, exp and stats. The list goes on and on. Plus there are multiple installations like this to handle people from different geological locations so players can all enjoy low latency. Also these systems require human beings to constantly maintain them along with a team of developers that are constantly fixing bugs and adding more content.

Calling it a server tax is a very poor choice of words.

Re:I almost cried...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well laugh away, because they say laughing is healthy, and people like us really don't give a rat's ass what people like you think.

Re:Why not have an endgame?

[mwvdlee]

The idea sounds nice, but what good is an end-game if there's no way to deal with the result? If you're going to have an end-game, you'll want to have atleast a couple of days afterwards to wrap things up nicely; for people to see the devestated world or for people to appear in the afterlife (in which there is nothing to do but communicate, thus "naturally" ending the whole game aspect of it).

On the other hand, the way AC2 is going down is "clean" in that by the time the servers switch off, nobody is there to care about it anymore.