It wasn't my intention to start the profitable argument again. It was my intention to state there is a difference to the stack of cartridges vs running servers. Even if most of the help system was automated, it still needs to have some staff to take care of it and handle problems that it can't handle. All of that said, I believe one of two things happened:
- NC didn't know where to take the game next.
- NC got into some kind of financial trouble and couldn't put into coh what it needed.
Of the two, I really think the latter. Ever since villains came out, I've felt that the game lost direction for a year or two. Then NC started trying to modernize it after pouring a lot of cash into another project that wouldn't perform like coh did in its golden days. (Aeon comes to mind) The updates that were done in recent times took on an increasingly gimmicky feel.
Now, I'm not attacking the devs here. They did a really great job keeping the game alive as long as they did. My hat is off to them. In developing other games, NC probably painted itself in a financial corner and couldn't support all the games. They took a gamble on which one to cut. They gambled wrong and an entire division paid the price as well as the community that grew up out of the game. The community remains strong even to this day as evidenced by the efforts being made to recover the game. Of course no one likes to admit they made a mistake and that pride could very well be the reason why coh remains offline and might forever.
Now I don't know if my opinion is correct. I maybe well off base here. But I do say this to NCSoft's executives. If I am right and you killed the game by mistake, don't make another mistake by letting pride stand in the way. Recover the community and their meeting place (aka the game), let it go to the public domain or license it out to another company. Or think of it this way, it's a profit center you chose to kill off thus limiting your profits. As an investor, that doesn't make me very happy. If you have a profit center you're not making profits from then as an investor I have to ask why it is not being used and what needs to be done to make it turn profits. If it is being retired then I to know what will replace it. And, I want to know what you're doing about the public relations problem killing the profit center will cause. I'd ask the same regardless of which one would have been killed.
Lady Vamp aka Flying Snow Mouse
Rodent Consortium SuperGroup
"Making the streets safe for normal people"