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Tabula Rasa Goes Free, Brings New Content
Last month we discussed NCSoft's announcement that Tabula Rasa would be closing its doors at the end of February, and their plans to remove the subscription fee for all players in January. Well, they've decided to go completely free a month early, alongside the release of a variety of new content. The game has finally gotten a first-person camera view, something many players have been asking for since launch. A new instance and several other bits of additional content are available as well. NCSoft also previewed player-controlled Mechs and PAUs, which will go live in the next major patch. Ten Ton Hammer has an interview with Net Devil's Scott Brown about the closure of Tabula Rasa.
I was just waiting for Cedega to support it or a version of Wine that does to last for more than one patch and not require installing Mono. :(
It's called Windows, try it one day, you'd be surprised how well it works.
None of that silly Cedega nonsense.
I LOOOVE when a company ends its services with a nice bonus. They could simply close all the servers thus saving money, instead they decide to pay the bills for an another month just for the sake of a nice ending.
There's always a reason...
If they plan on closing it down anyways, doesn't it make sense to open source it so people can run their own 3rd party servers?
or am I missing something obvious here?
How stupid are you?
They'd want a credit card back when you were subscribing too. They're just changing the cost to 0$.
Man, no wonder we have so many stupid anon posts.
TR was a creative game, and this is a great way to end things, heck, a free bonus is pretty nice.
Seems a bit pointless really. As an RPG I assume that it is designed to have a long play-time (what with levels or other character development mechanisms).
Why bother to invest time in such a game that'll be gone in a few months time?
.. but perhaps it should be made clear that the guy being interviewed has no knowledge at all of what happened to TR (nor does he claim this).
I record my sleeptalking
Way to be paranoid. It's good to be cautious, but NCSoft isn't exactly some obscure outfit with questionable origins.
While I read that too, I went ahead and set up a free account to see what the game was like. I was never asked for my credit card number - I assumed that they changed the sign up policy since they wrote that page on their support site.
and if this was fox news we'd be modded down for enjoying festivus or whatever it's called. My point here is there everywhere you go is bias and complaining about it is pointless.
You do realise that slashdot is part of the open source developer network don't you? It's pretty clear they'd have a bias towards open source.
u is so smart. u saw rite thruh there evil skem to carg u money on ur credit card with out asking.
Right.
There are plenty of people not worth tossing your credit card number too for a free activation. Doing it for a Russia snuff porn site? Eh, probably a poor idea. Doing to a multinational company running a handful of other MMORPGs? Probably not all that risky. If they do decide in a blatant act of malevolent glee to empty your bank account like some Nigerian scam, I am pretty sure that the law kicks in.
I kinda agree with you, but then I can also see why they wouldn't do this also. There are probably issues with IP and third-party licenses that keep them from distributing the server code.
What I would like to see, though, is maybe something like a "dead MMOG clearinghouse" company. If I were such a company, for example, I would pay NCsoft $x for the rights to set up and run one or more Tabula Rasa servers so that players could continue playing. There would never be any more updates to the game, except maybe content updates to advance the storylines given the existing mechanics. (I.e. the stuff probably stored in text files.) I would charge some nominal fee to access the game, and the client would be given away for free.
There's a difference between "free" and "free if you give us billing information but trust us we won't dick you". I thought we all learned that in the heyday of AOL free trials?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
eh I honestly suspect it's due to them doing a lazy approach to the billing where all they did to make it free was set the billing $ amount to 0 and leave the rest intact for now. Of course, I could be giving TR way more credit than due and I wouldn't doubt that you may be right. It's been so long I've forgotten about that kind of trash going on.
God help you, simple Slashdot poster, if you violate the holy rule. Windows = Hatred; Linux = Praise.
Yes, the generally insufferable Slashdot crowd. I've endured the inevitable downmods of un-inflammatory Microsoft remarks or constructively crticical linux remarks and maintained my Excellent karma status with the occasiona.... OH MY GOD A FLYING CHAIR.
Similes are like metaphors
Dunno if your bank supports anything like this, but Bank of America has a feature in their web banking system, called ShopSafe, which (if you have a CC account with them) lets you generate a one-time use CC number whenever you want, with a limit you set. For something like this, you could genenerate a number with a limit of like $1 (or whatever the minimum is). Then, you don't really have to worry about getting ripped off by companies.
Not only could it potentially give a leg up to a potential competitor, but from the perspective of a company like NCSoft, if you release the whole thing for free, and it starts to get popular once it's free, even though you couldn't make it a commercial success, you setup a potential competitor for your own future products. It's hard (though not impossible) to compete with free products. There's already enough competition, without creating more for yourself.
Now, some might say that if it's free, that it doesn't really count as 'competition', because the people still have the money in their pockets that they are not spending on that product, so they might still pay for your future products with the money they aren't spending. That might, in some cases be true, but in other cases, people might decide that they spend enough time on, and enjoy the free product enough, that they decide not to look at other, 'premium' options.
I picked up a copy of TR from Best Buy the other night cause it was going for fifteen bucks, and I wanted to see the world before it closed down.
I took it home, installed it, registered for an account and started playing. I had to enter the serial code for the game, but I don't remember giving them any credit card information. I was off and playing.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Tabula Rasa had some good basic ideas but felt like half a game. That was disappointing since there's still no decent sci-fi MMORPG out there. Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies filled that niche for the first couple of years before they each lost their way and I was hoping TR would pick up that mantle.
Its the time the players have to spend playing that you want to get the market share for. The money follows since they will have to pay to play, but if they want to play they will pay because its usually only $15 a month.
I play MMOs about 1-2 hrs a night most nights, maybe 2-4 hrs on the weekend occasionally. I am probably a typical player in that regard. Some will play only occasionally, some will play very hardcore and be on it for 4-6 hrs a night. I am in the middle.
Any company coming out with a new MMORPG is competing for my attention span. Do I want to play their game enough to buy a subscription and do I want to play it enough that I will renew that subscription? I am likely subscribed to more than one game at a time (I often am), so which one has my attention sufficiently for me to keep paying for it, rather than becoming another "churn" statistic? Currently I am playing City of Heroes/Villains (the best designed MMO out there IMHO), but was playing WAR as well until recently, and dabbling in SWG because they gave us a free month and I used to be quite addicted to SWG in its early years. My WAR subscription just ran out, but playing it has made me nostalgic for the good old days in DAOC and I may renew that to play it for a month in January or February. Currently NCSoft is winning the war for my attention span with City of Heroes, and has continued to do so for the most part when compared to Warcraft (hated it), Pirates of the Burning Sea (great promise but frustrating leveling and too much PvP when I wanted to solo etc), Warhammer Online (nice idea but the RvR is borked and the zones are poorly designed), LOTRO (gorgeous game but unsatisfying for some reason), AOC (didn't get past the tutorial), and Tabula Rasa (which I tried against my better judgement and was soundly disappointed in).
The finite element here is how much time I want to spend playing and therefore which game I deem worthy of spending the money on to engage in playing. City of Heroes, while quite niche in nature (You have to like the world of Superheroes and Villains), is an all-round extremely well designed game and offers a lot of casual entertainment for me, my wife and my friends - therefore they continue to get our bucks as a result.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Then I guess they're not going to trust your ass on their servers.
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1. As a former Tabula Rasa user, I can only say: that ideological point would maybe bother me, if TR had been actually worth playing. But, see, the whole reason they're throwing in the towel is that almost anyone who did touch it with a barge pole, cancelled their subscription _long_ before that 1.25 year was over.
It's hard to get worked up about the finer points of "OMG, their centralized servers can keep me from playing any more", when I wasn't planning to play it any more in the first place, or not without someone paying me to. It's about as hard as getting worked up about some law that forbids me from eating shit: I wasn't planning to anyway. So, from a pragmatic point of view, who cares?
2. That said, a gift is a gift. They're not trying to _sell_ COH to those people as a parting gift, they're giving them a free copy of COH and 3 months free play (as opposed to 1 if you buy it from the store.) Or, of course, one of the other 2 games, if that tempts you more.
I don't know, I could appreciate that for what it is: some free stuff. Sure, you could dissect it as some evil plot that maybe they just want you to subscribe after those 3 months, but then again nobody forces you to. In the meantime you do get the equivalent of the game's base cost and a 3 month game card, for free. What's so evil about that?
3. Again, as a former Tabula Rasa player, I can say that the problem wasn't as much lack of beta-testing, as just plain old bad design. The thing tried to reinvent MMOs by wiping the slate clean, and building it from scratch... i.e., ignoring everything that a decade of MMOs proved as working or non-working. The game mostly worked as intended at launch... except "as intended" didn't involve it actually being fun for most people. It wasn't a flawed implementation, as much as design which ignores what most people want in a game.
(Though tastes being subjective, I don't doubt that a very small niche actually liked it. The keywords and problem being: "very small.")
And how that came to pass:
4. It seems to me like some people are all too eager to give the publisher all the blame. You don't hear "the SWG team fucked up", you hear "Sony fucked up"... even if none of the other Sony games had the same problems. It seems to me like you're doing the same fallacy about NCSoft.
The truth is, they don't micro-manage those companies, and they don't all have the same problems. E.g., COH is nothing like Tabula Rasa, and its evolution and faults were nothing like those of Tabula Rasa.
It seems to me like NCSoft simply did the same mistake with "General British" as Sony did with Raph Koster or Eidos did with John Romero: let a superstar designer run amok and do whatever he wishes, simply because he's too great to be judged by mere mortals. I mean, OMG, British _invented_ the graphical MMORPG as we know it today. He must know what he's doing. So nobody took the time to dissect and maybe veto his design.
From another point of view, it might have even been a calculated risk. _If_ his clean-slate re-inventing MMOs worked, it could have made NCSoft billions. You can't blame them for at least giving that a try.
5. Or maybe "4.a.", the extreme costs of MMO development seem to scare most publishers. Oh, they all want to make one, but there's a lot of playing it safe and trusting the people who've done it before. Even teams which botched more than 1 MMO in a row, tend to get the contract because they're the guys who've made an MMO before.
Sorta like hiring Michael Brown, head of FEMA during the catastrophic handling of Katrin
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, it's not billing information so much as a verifiable means of identification that they already have access to. When you give a credit card number, the credit card company can verify who you are. This is easier than taking faxes a driver's license, for example, since the company already takes credit cards and has a system in place for verifying credit cards.
Why is this an issue? Because it allows them to ban accounts based on identity. If someone goes in and makes the game unpleasant for others, they can ban the account and make it harder (but not impossible, obviously) for the person to sign up again right away. Even with a "free" game slated to be shut down, you don't want troublemakers causing people to view your service negatively if you can't keep the unruly people from hurting the game for everyone else.
Some thoughts from an online game developer.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog