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NCSoft To Close North American Lineage Servers

Posted by Soulskill on from the end-of-an-era dept.

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."

5 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. I hate it when this happens by atari2600a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I say any MMO operator should freeware the servers once the game becomes abandonware like this. I mean, it's like you have an entire universe in these old optical discs but you're locked out of it because you can't log on...

    1. Re:I hate it when this happens by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 4, Informative

      For comparison, North America is 5% is the ncsoft's market for *all* their games (lineage, city of heroes/villains, aion, guild wars). They are not going to base any decision on releasing code on how the game is doing on the North American market.

    2. Re:I hate it when this happens by Exitar · · Score: 4, Informative

      They should just release the official server software into the public domain.

      They're shutting NA servers only, not all of them.

    3. Re:I hate it when this happens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have no idea for Lineage, but EVE Online make their server specs public. The database for their economy... well, you can't afford it. RAM. Lots and lots of RAM, in nice rackmount enclosures and linked by infiniband. They run it on a colossal ramdrive, because not even flash could handle the IOPS.

    4. Re:I hate it when this happens by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.