Honestly I was thinking of not replying but it's rainy, cold and I'm quite bored.
It makes perfect sense to me considering how they handled City of Heroes and their communications to the US/EU markets thus far:
That we're not a market they care about or are really interested in, and the games we're interested in aren't games they are interested in, we're a quick cash in side project to help fund projects they care about that sell well in markets they care about.
I hardly think a 5 year commitment to developing a game would count as a "side project". And considering the game broke the 200 billion KrW mark in 7 months that took GW 7 years to accomplish, a mark that our game didn't, should pretty much define it as a major success and not as some stop gap income scheme because the chiefs at NCSOFT "knew" that 5 years down the line after they GW2 started development that they would need to shore up their own income. Right.
That makes perfect sense with shutting down CoH when it was merely making enough money for itself. NCSoft put almost no money into making CoH a better brand (programmers, advertisement) because it wasn't a game their CEOs either understood or cared about and we (US/EU) aren't a market they understand or care about. They wanted to throw in the bare minimal of effort to get a quick chunk of development change to throw towards their favored market, and the minute we were no longer funding their other games, even if we were in the black, we got the axe.
Advertisement argument again. Please show me where they advertise any of their games in the US marketplace a year out of their initial release or holiday season? They don't. As for staffing levels, Paragon had plenty of staff, they just weren't working on CoH. If ANet was being raided for income then why are they on a hiring bonanza?
They don't care about our perception of their company, because, again we're not who they're interested in selling to. We were an open wallet for Lineage and Blade & Soul development. Nothing more.
They won't sell CoH because the IP, in the hands of people who understand the genre and our market, could create competition for them, but they won't leave the lights on because it's not funding games they personally find interesting.
And this is where I award you the Tin Foil Hat conspiracy theory reward.
Lineage has been around since 1998. It's annual sales today are greater then when CoH first came out. It is South Korea's WoW. It's the country's #1 MMO and is only challenged by other NCSOFT titles. Sure some new hot MMO pops up every so often and rise to the top of the charts but it quickly fades away and Lineage once again assumes the lead. Now if you think the paltry income our game brought in was funneled off to pay for the continued development cost of Lineage, which at worse made only twice as much in the same quarter as CoH but usually made 5 to 10 times as much, then you are really invested in this notion that the chiefs at NCSOFT has an ax to grind with us or maybe just the whole western hemisphere.
So, hearing somebody complain that the same thing is happening with Guild Wars 2? Makes perfect sense to me.
What drives Dontain and his followers is the fact that GW2 offers a way to pay for cash shop items with in-game gold. If this didn't exist there would be a lot less bemoaning on the GW2 boards. But you ask, isn't that a good thing? Well yes and no. They implemented a proxy currency exchange which allows those who buy Gems (the name of the proxy currency) with cash to exchange them for gold, establishing an approved way to buy gold, and interlocking it with the gold for Gems. They made it a floating rate so as more players bought gems with gold, the exchange rate would change making it more expensive to buy gems with gold but make it more attractive to buy gold with gems bought with cash.
Problem is that now 8ish months in the Gold to Gem price is now 10x what it was in the beginning, 50% more than just two months ago. Why? Because they started to offer good stuff at the cash shop and everybody bought gems with all their gold. And what's worse, most of the items bought were gift boxes with a "rare" chance for something and a lot of players had a very different definition of "rare" than the developers. So now they are out of gold and it's not really easy to earn gold in GW2. There are a few "farms" and speed runs you can do until you are bored to death. You can try to become a market savvy trader but all the "good" items to flip are already squatted on by players more savvy than you. But ArenaNet is shutting down the prime farms because it destabilizes the price of some goods.
So it boils down to players upset that they can't earn lots of gold so they can get "for free" items off the cash shop who they blame on Nexon/NCSOFT because ArenaNet hired a former Nexon cash shop person for their expertise so it must be Nexon pulling NCSOFT's strings to saddle ArenaNet with a horrible cash shop person who implemented gift boxes that had "rare" desirable skins (think costume pieces) that they didn't get after they spent all the gold trying to.
Simply because they allowed players to buy cash shop items with gold. No good deed ...
