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Richard Garriott Quits NCSoft
unc0nn3ct3d writes "In a shocking update on the seemingly endless troubles plaguing NCSoft, Richard Garriott — the king of online games, creator of The Ultima Series (and consequentially Ultima Online), as well as the recently troubled Tabula Rasa — has announced that he would be stepping down from his position at NCSoft. Apparently motivated by his recent trip into space, perhaps he has found a higher purpose while orbiting so high above the earth."
Where does that title come from? The guy is as much a "king" of online games as Duke Nukem is a "king" of action shooters.
I had no idea the definition of King was the exact same as "washed up has-been".
Will it place Guild Wars 2 at risk? A better question is why should you care?
Guild Wars 1 (GW) was an amazing display of how NOT to run a MMO.
1) Customer Service
There are no official Guild Wars forums. Their ability to submit a bug report ingame was removed early on (because too many people were using it to report bots, see #2).
Their community rep, Gaile Gray, was patronizing to everyone who actually played GW. She had no max level character - and reaching max level in GW took only a few hours (can be done in a single sitting). She was one of the sorts of players who picked her class because it was pretty and came with a pet cat, and would spend her play time wondering around the game world looking at all the pretty stuff. WHICH IS FINE, but I am (and most of GW's players were) NOT that kind of player and she was our only avenue to speak with the developers. Many people in my guild often called her intelligence into question.
I was one of the lucky few who knew developers in game, from my time in the beta and being in one of their guilds (so I knew not just their community-known accounts, but their personal ones and was thus actually able to contact them). When I found an exploit I would get in touch with one of them and inform them. For example, there was a bug where a specific low level quest reward could accept twice the amount of enchants it was supposed to. Game mechanics aside, this allowed you to trivialize all content by being immune to 99% of attacks. I informed them of this and the urgent need to replace this quest item (which had no level appropriate use), but was told (with a wink!) that they knew about it. Two weeks later the exploit went public and the in game market went belly up as prices for enchants for this weapon sky rocketed and everything else became useless. A week after that, all of these bugged items were removed. Some players lost millions of gold, after they were convinced that ArenaNet was not going to do anything about it.
In another incident a bug I reported about being able to indefinitely keep an enemy player knocked down (unable to act in any way) in PvP went unadressed for over a month before it went public. It still took weeks after to address.
2) Botting
Botting was not punished. Everyone knew botting was rampant. GW's instanced outposts would balloon with botters - there would be hundreds of characters (whose names were random character strings) all following the exact same route towards the instance portal... all day and night long. Even reporting, with video footage, these botters I saw absolutely no effort on ArenaNet's part to punish them. I added a few of these bots to my friends list, and they were still active months later.
GW would gladly let you hook your bot into memory and make function calls directly, which conveyed nasty in game advantages. (you could program a bot to always interrupt an enemy casting a specific spell, and it always would)
3) Lack of Endgame
Once you reached max level (which was easy) you were basically done with the game unless you wanted to PvP. The only other endgame PvE content (Underworld and Fissure of Woe) had access that was restricted by if your region (North America, Europe, Japan, etc) was on a PvP winning streak. This resulted in entire countries of Guild Wars players being unable to access the "endgame" for MONTHS at a time (especially Japan, which was introduced much later then NA and EU).
Once the first expansion came out some of the first truly difficult encounters in game were introduced - but they were in two instances, entry to who was locked based off of PvP! Except this time it wasnt a winning streak that granted access, but membership in an alliance (grouping of guilds, holding up to 1000 players) that managed to farm repetitive quests the most! One of these instances was never attempted by PUGs, and the other one was only executed in a singular manner (lay lots of traps, pull mobs into traps, hope that they die) which exacerbated the already severe class discrimin