Auto Assault Goes Sunset Tonight

Mytob writes "Today is the last day of service for NCSoft / Net Devil's Auto Assault. The game, which has never proved that popular, will have its service terminated at midnight central time. Refund emails have already been sent out, and end-of game events have been happening since last week. From the Auto Assault Website: 'We are now in the final week of Auto Assault and to mark this occasion on Friday night we'll be doing all sorts of nutty things in-game — whatever you request, we'll try to make happen. Most of the fun will be in and around Ground Zero (don't worry if you don't have a high-level character, we'll boost you), but we'll be doing other stuff all around the game. We plan on starting around 9PM CDT (if not before) and should last right to midnight when the servers are shut down for the final time.'"

Comments

Nice try, but (mostly) too shallow

[Lonewolf666]

I've played in the beta, and AA had a few nice aspects that almost made me buy it.

The good things were
-halfway decent driving physics (albeit not perfect)
-innovative and interesting crafting system
-nice graphics

and the bad:
-Absolutely no death penalty, making combat somewhat meaningless
-got quite repetitive after level 20
-combat way too dependent on level: a mob 5 levels below you could hardly hurt you and vice versa...
In the end it was fun for three months of beta but by the release time I had grown somewhat tired of it. Now playing EVE which is still fun after 8 months :-)

Open Source it.

[paganizer]

Hopefully, the company will release the server & client code as open source; they can then watch in frustration as dozens of servers & tens of thousands of players jump on it.
I guess if it was me I would just open source the client, and release the server as a binary; that way you could still, in theory, make money by providing new material while getting away from hosting, hardware & advertising costs.
hmmm.

Re:Poor auto assault

[Andy Dodd]

This can really kill any online game. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, although even if that problem gets solved, it can really kill a game if subscriber count dips for any reason.

For example, this is a basic VERY concise history of Dark Age of Camelot:

Game launches successfully (I've heard that it is still regarded as the least buggy MMOG launch ever. This is sad since DAoC still had lots of annoying bugs.

First game expansion is well received

Not realizing that the reasons most of the DAoC subscriber base were playing DAoC instead of Everquest was because they hated certain aspects of EQ such as sitting around camping a rare mob spawn for hours on end, Mythic decided to try and capitalize on EQ's popularity by releasing a new expansion (Trials of Atlantis) which had very EQ-like mechanics. (Super-rare mob spawns as opposed to the previous DAoC model of super-rare drops off of mobs or drops off of super-hard mobs requiring lots of teamwork to beat.)

Playerbase almost universally hates ToA and constantly bitches about it to Mythic. Mythic ignores the bitching because people aren't quitting. Mythic does not realize that most of the complainers are just waiting for another place to go - While they like DAoC far less than they used to, there still aren't better options.

Eventually, Blizzard Entertainment provides just the option that over half of DAoC's playerbase is waiting for.
DAoC's subscriber count drops rapidly over the period of only a few months

Mythic finally realizes just how much ToA was hurting them, and starts fixing it

While the game is vastly improved (and in my opinion, is far better than WoW in terms of game mechanics), the fact that the playerbase is totally skewed towards hardcore players shifts RvR (Realm vs. Realm) mechanics in such a way that casual players can't compete. As a result, despite the reason for people originally leaving for WoW being gone, the reduced playerbase of DAoC makes people stay with WoW (or other games - EVE in my case).

DAoC is stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation in which they can't gain new/casual players until they gain more casual players.

Game mechanics-wise, I would rather be playing DAoC than EVE. But the decimated playerbase means DAoC is no longer fun, despite good game mechanics.