An MMO Bites the Dust

Them and Lively in a week. Wow.

The beta test was too hard for me to enjoy much. Too many rules and things to remember. It looked good though.

If it's free now, I wonder if I can log in again.

Never tried it, was that from the City of Heroes peeps?

*shudders* Was in the TR beta too. Logged in exactly twice only to find it harder to figure out than any other MMO I had ever tried. And their in game tutorial felt sluggish and honestly worse than SL's. I honestly could get into it enough to consider giving a constructive critique.



Yes and no. It's is owned/hosted by NCSoft, but the original dev teams are different. One thing I'd love to know is if CuppaJo is going to come back as a forum mod for City of Heroes. I liked her a lot, although Ex Libris is cool too.

yup NCSoft

Yeah, NCSoft. Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa - the creator went to space recently, a second generation astronaut/passenger.

CuppaJo has gone? No way Jose! I thought I'd had emails about it, I used to love City of Heroes, then I found Wow, then I found SL, then I found Age of Conan and stuck with SL. I wish I still had enough time for WoW though, I need to find a way of making days longer than 24 hours!

Guess i wasn't the only one to stop playing.
Actually I thought the game was inovative and great, but didn't hold my interest beyond the 1st 6mths. Even weirder is the fact i got the account code to play Tabula Rasa, as a sort of consolation from them, when Auto Assault failed and closed.

I'd guess the reason so many are failing is simply the fact that compared to 10 years ago when EverQuest and the other pioneer MMO's first appeared, there are now many more of these games, and more starting every month. Though out of around 15 MMO's i have played over the last 11 years, this is only the 3rd that I tried that has closed down completely, although some of the early ones have had to cut back on the number of servers.

SL should have a much longer, if not more permanent shelf life for users, as there are so many new people with new idea arriving all the time. Its more like a "game" with unlimited creation developers, if that makes sense, and new content every day.

That said, LL needs to make things run smoother, and really work on their public relations.
So many things have been handled badly in the past.

Uh, maybe they should have advertised a little better. I never heard of Tabula Rasa before, and I thought I had a pretty good finger on the pulse MMO's.

As for Lively, it's hardly surprising. Those interested in that kind of experience already have IMVU, and they're unlikely to leave it. I never saw the wisdom in Google trying to clone it. I'm just glad that there will be no more half-assed comparisons now between Lively and SL. They're nothing alike, and I've never understood why news reporters couldn't see that.

Anyway, it seems MMO's as medium are getting to the age where the early experimentation phase is no longer sustainable in and of itself. Competition is starting to take its toll, as it should. I got an E-mail a couple weeks ago from Namco Bandai Games that Hellgate London will be shutting down at the end of the year, which puts the count at three in as many weeks. I suspect many other and game-based and small-time virtual worlds will follow.

And that's not a bad thing (unless your job happens to be working on any of those particular projects, of course). Evolution requires extinctions. It's unrealistic to expect all MMO's to last.

i was seriously looking at that game on the shelf of best Buy last month, came very close to buying into a doomed MMO it seems...

seems a shame when crap like Star Wars Galaxies just keeps chugging along forever despite failure after failure

oh well I still have my EVE

I tried it for a while... it was pretty, but the game itself was definatly meh. Finding groups was a pain, and then you wound up doing the quests solo

They had a nice background and worked on the quest text a lot... but it just didn't feel like fun. It was lacking any real energy or pull.

Reminded me a lot of Lineage II, just a solo/group grindfest

Tabula Rassa lost me with the account management process, I was going to sign up myself and my partner so we could play together, but I am careful with online purchasing and its use of 3rd party services and the way it handled the account management scared me off. I just had this feeling that somehow it would dissapear.

I'm glad I didnt go for it now, although very glad that by the announcement I see they have not dissapeared with anyones money, which is good.

This game was created by Richard Gariott, who was the founder of Origin Systems, and creator of one of the first sucessful MMORPG environments, Ultima Online. I happen to live in the same town as that millionaire game designer, and I've even met the man a few times.

Tabula Rasa got some splash coverage in the major newspapers at the time of its release, but I hardly saw anything more on it after that, even in Gariott's home town newspaper. Unlike many of his earlier efforts, Gariott created TR and then sold it to another company to market and operate.

NCSoft didn't market the game very well, and the game was also pretty much a "shoot first, and move on without bothering to ask questions" scenario, from what I could see in the advance PR. At least it gave that impession.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/9-Tabula-Rasa

(Link isn't PG, but isn't AO either)

A terrible shame... NCSoft and Gariott both I very much respect, and their Lineage2 is where I sharpened my skills prior to SL, and is a huge part of what made me a success here. Hardcore game, Lineage2; or at least it used to be.

Nonetheless, I keep hearing "Another one bites the dust" playing in my mind...

But that goes for SL as well.... Maybe not the account management. But many of the transactions between L$ and RL money (buying L$ included) are handled by a 3rf party. A Dutch company to be precise. I saw once the company logo when buying L$. I asked someone who knows that company very well and she confirmed that this company works for Linden.... as for Blizzard, Sony Online and many others.

Thing is, I don't think no company do this kind of things for themselves.

Morwen.

CuppaJo left NCSoft some time ago, and current whereabouts are unknown.

I never even tried Tabula Rasa, but I'm equally addicted to CoH/CoV as I am to SL. Of course, there's a bunch of "DOOM!" crying going on over at the CoH forums right now over the shocking inconceivability that NCSoft is turning off the servers on a game that at least a few people are still playing. The concept of profitability seems rather alien to some folks.

What a difference punctuation can make. It could have been:

Them and Lively. In a week, WOW.

Huh, last I heard was she was leaving the CoH side to be the community head for TR.

I think it's because they are more afraid that CoX (for those not following CoX is a shortening down of CoH/CoV, and something each of us snicker about when we type it) is next on the list. What they don't realize is that CoH has more going for it than TR had. First off, the team has found more ways to make us pay for things, via purchasing more character slots and even purchasing name changes (Hey LL you COULD do the same thing too!). Also, the in game ads, which I was surprised at how unobtrusive they were, to drum up revenues. It also helps that they gave us a way to turn them off if we did feel bothered by them.

Hadn't heard about Lively going down. Googled it and got the typical wrong headed remarks, this time by some clown named Michael Lee. "...Like Second Life, it’s essentially a fancier chat room." and "...However, Second Life continues to draw more people because beyond serving as a chat room, it’s also a marketplace." as SL's only attributes. All at http://www.redherring.com/blogs/25548 .

Since I've been around from before the Internet (yep, I used Arpanet, just didn't really think of it like that), and remember Pine, Compuserve, Prodigy, 300 baud modems (not correct term, but what we used), chat rooms, use/news groups, etc. for these last 30 years, his description is a typical careless and less than half informed set of comments. I haven't been much of a SL booster by any means, but every once in a while you have to be reminded how brain dead some blogs are. I guess the reason that it Googled first is that it made SL sound only slightly better than Lively...

(OTOH, maybe its because I have a cold and am in a really irritable mood right now. I'd kick a dog, but Scotties don't just get mad, they get even.)

Yup, that's exactly what I was talking about, Curtis. Now that Lively is going bye bye, at least we won't have to read silly comparisons like that anymore (not that I would have wished ill on Lively just for that reason, of course).