I once played this game called Space Cowboy Online. It was the most beautiful game i had ever played and it was free to play. I spent more money on that game than any other game and usually 6-8 hours a day on it. It was my life.
I was in the highest brigade (Guild) and the most well known, we paved way for other players.
We won wars, we found ways of beating the toughest bosses, we even found unknown mechanics of the game.
There was not one part of the game i didn’t enjoy. It was very skill based.
The Distributers of the english version were Gpotato, quite a well known free to play mmo provider at the time. I’m guessing they didn’t see much or any developments(income) for SCO so they slowly cut down the teams working on it and translating the Korean versions and patches.
Eventually we were left with one voice. The almighty Xarfox.
He was God.
The forums were full of people asking for updates and changes to specific parts of the game which were quality of life updates, well needed for over 3 years of playing. No response.
The population slowly diminished due to little communication from the almighty Xarfox.
One day the worst thing possible happened.
A notice was posted on the forums stating the game servers would be shutdown due to a cease and desist letter from the new licence holder without any prior announcements or knowledge given to player base. The last day was 12/26/2007
This was absolutely shattering.
Ontop of that, none of the characters could be transferred to this new publishers game.
Uproar.
Then on the day of server shutdown, Xarfox released this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPXemM-SJM
To this day i still get intense goosebumps and teary eyed from watching it.
The game licence was then bought and distributed to different parts of the world, NA and EU had different publishers. Yes we all played then, named out characters the same, but it wasn’t the same.
New Korean updates were welcomed until we realized it was all to make the game easier and into a cash shop game, pay to win.
The game was now dead to us.
This broke my gaming heart and have never been able to get into that same groove until GW2 came out. I am not a GW1 player, but i had a lot of friends who were hyped and my partner at the time loved GW1.
So of course i bought it, but it wasn’t the same game my friends wanted. They wanted a GW1 with better graphics.
To me though, this game is great. None of my IRL friends play anymore and have given me their accounts. I’m lucky i have a great guild.
My main concern is the silence on QoL fixes that should have been done years ago, i couldn’t care less how much the expansion costs, being that I’ve spent 3000+ hours on the game. And i support Anets business model, even if people are getting all antsy about not getting free bonuses.
As another thread has said, the silence is what is killing people. From my previous experience all i see from silence is the game closing eventually.
I am sure there is one person who works at Anet who absolutely adores the game but is trapped in by rules stating that they cannot reply to threads, it must be the social media experts. Let your employees reply to threads, as i am sure they all read the negativity coming from them due to the silence.
All we want is replies, we don’t need answers as we understand what it takes to make a game. Give us a sense that you actually care.
I highly doubt the game will shut down soon, but with the way it is going….. you will lose a lot of your players.
Speak to us, not to AngryJoe.