Slashdot Mirror
NCSoft To Close North American Lineage Servers
NCSoft announced yesterday that they plan to shut down all North American servers for their long-running Lineage MMORPG on June 29th. The game came out in 1998 and gradually became one of the most successful MMOs of all time, reporting over a million subscribers as much as a decade after launch. Account creation on North American servers has been disabled, subscriptions for coming months have been refunded, and existing accounts have been reactivated for free.
"We will not be making any additional content updates, but we do have US Ruleset changes and lots of great events planned for the next two months. We want to give you every opportunity to make all of your remaining Lineage dreams come true. We hope that everyone will stick around to have fun with the game you love in the time we have left. We know that we have incredibly loyal fans that have stood by us for the past ten years. As painful as it was, as a business, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision."
Unless you actually, you know, like MMOs. Which are pretty much known for needing an online server to function. This isn't like refusing to buy games that have DRM requiring online authentication; this is a genre that functions only on the basis of large, centralised servers.
I've been "clean" for over a year now, but prior to that, I spent almost 7 years playing first Final Fantasy XI and then World of Warcraft. And I don't particularly regret it. I had some good times, met a few friends and then moved on when I got tired of it. For the average MMO-gamer, their initial purchase and monthly subs represent spectacularly efficient spending on an hours per dollar basis compared to pretty much any other form of entertainment purchase.
Having a moral objection to offline games that require online authentication for copy-protection is one thing. Objecting to a game that is fully online by its very nature for requiring players to be online just makes you look silly.