Guild Wars 2

http://mmoculture.com/2015/02/nexon-vs-ncsoft-official-proposal-revealed-to-make-ncsoft-changes/

Already in the comment section of that article do people think it’s a bad idea.

Can anyone enlighten me on why Nexon supposedly sucks?

Most of Nexon’s game is pay to win.

NCSoft is probably one of the few companies most of their game is subscription, or isn’t so cash shop focus in asia.

I’m not sure what Nexon’s complain is. I’m not sure if it is even mmorpg related. Maybe they hope NCSoft develop more mobile game etc.

cancellation of the company’s treasury stock

no offense to Nexon but I would have told them to get the kitten out of my building if they tried to propose that in a conference.

laokoko.7403:

I’m not sure what Nexon’s complain is.

Based on that press release their complaint is that they aren’t earning a high enough rate of return on their investment. Or to put it more bluntly, Nexon wants to squeeze more quarterly profits out of NCsoft at the expense of NCsoft’s long tern prospects.

Nexon has this habit of taking games that worked perfectly well before their involvement and ruining them in absolutely the worst ways. Most notably, they make games pay to wind and every game of theirs has the most horrible grind.

I’m not really sure what Nexon is trying to accomplish by all their demands/ideas/“discussion” though. Time will tell, but typically my skin crawls at the mere mention of their name =/

Nexon’s games are utter crap. They’re all sub-par cookie cutter clones where 99.9% of their development budget goes towards the cash shop. It could possibly be excused if Nexon’s game weren’t complete trash but…they are…complete trash.

Suggestions 4 and 5 look like they’re designed to make NCsoft funnel more money to stockholders, possibly at the expense of investing in their own business. Number 6 implies they think the current CEO is overpaying his buddies in senior management, and perhaps those people should take a pay cut so that money can spent rewarding stockholders. Not sure about 3, requesting the sale of some buildings and landholdings might be a legit attempt to get rid of nonperforming assets, or might be an attempt to turn a source of continual small profit into a big one-time boost.

So, in short, Nexon wants more money, and hopefully NCsoft won’t listen to them.

Nexon is a bad, greedy, pay to win company. They probably would like NcSoft to be more like that. But since they only own 16% of the company they don’t get a say.

If Nexon had a say, we would’t have the cash shop we have today. That’s the best evidence that Nexon doesn’t have a say.

The worst case scenario I can see if Nexon being annoyed and selling their shares, because I don’t think that NcSoft wants Nexon’s reputation.

Nexon has horrible customer support.

Has anybody played a Nexon game since 2006 or so? Terrible customer support, yes.

Vindictus and Dragon’s nest are both largely gambling, or cosmetic. While you could theoretically get something good from gambling, you are probably looking at hundreds of dollars worth of doing it to get something good.

Otherwise you could sink 25$ into it or so and get nothing of any consequence. Get dyes, sell them on the market place. Same thing here would completely gear out a character.

Meanwhile you could just play the game.

Servanin.5021:

Has anybody played a Nexon game since 2006 or so? Terrible customer support, yes.

Vindictus and Dragon’s nest are both largely gambling, or cosmetic. While you could theoretically get something good from gambling, you are probably looking at hundreds of dollars worth of doing it to get something good.

Otherwise you could sink 25$ into it or so and get nothing of any consequence. Get dyes, sell them on the market place. Same thing here would completely gear out a character.

Meanwhile you could just play the game.

I couldn’t even play Dragon’s Nest without the entire game being forced to left-shift or down-shift off screen, disallowing me to see any NPC Dialog text, etc. I don’t like Vindictus much because it’s an action game. (Plus, I like TERA more in terms of action.)

What I take from the article…

Ncsoft is underperforming in the gaming market and Nexon wants to increase revenue.

If Ncsoft and Nexon want to “find effective ways to increase corporate and shareholder value”, it is by making better games and having their current portfolio of games improved for the end users. By improve, I don’t mean more cash shop stuff to bypass grinding (see gw2 legendaries), rng boxes and hiring more economists.

As an example to explain the above statement, let’s look at what gw2 can do individually to increase retention for current customers, bring back some old customers and make some new ones to increase revenue…

-Clearly show what is on the development “table” and have a public test server. Doing both of these shows transparency and confidence by the development team and builds better communication and faith among customers. Faith opens wallets and silence closes them.

-Regular and meaningful balance, profession and combat system mechanics improvements. There was a huge thread in the old balance section that made many valid points to the way the talented team of developers, with a great engine to back them up, ignores player concerns (1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 combat with 75% of your other skills on long cool downs), red flag issues (stealth, counter stealth, conditions, burst capabilities vs hp, almost meaningless trait number shuffling and reshuffling…) and squanders what could be one of the best class/profession combat systems in an mmo to date. Unfortunately for us customers, though, very little is done to improve the most important aspects of a game like this. In a combat centric game things need to move forward and I don’t have any faith the xpac will do anything meaningful for the profession and combat meta. Also, players like options and flexibilty to build their characters (see gw1 and city of heroes)to make them feel unique and interesting to play, not the current limitations that have been designed and imposed to make things less of a headache for the development team.

-Properly reward players for their time and effort (less gloppy gloop and junk rewards) and sort out the current wacky gear progression that allows customers to buy the bis slot gear (legendaries) and forces players to craft to reliably earn the second bis gear (ascended).

-Stop forcing customers to do things you want them to do (forced pvp for map completion anybody?). Multiple paths to achieve certain things is always better than one rigid path.

-Make games for the players first, not shareholders and corporate suits, and you will see more of our money. Also, a video game should be managed by players for players period.

-This game would probable earn more money for corporate, shareholders, employees and future development if there were an optional sub with benefits available.

Am I the only one who can’t open the site? If yes, can someone give me a brief explanation on what’s going on?

Trixie.7614:

Am I the only one who can’t open the site? If yes, can someone give me a brief explanation on what’s going on?

Image: http://i.imgur.com/tnJT2sT.png

Templar.3418:

Already in the comment section of that article do people think it’s a bad idea.

Can anyone enlighten me on why Nexon supposedly sucks?

Well, for one, if Nexon had it their way, the first thing that would happen is gear beyond ascended would be released, and the mats needed to make this gear would need to be purchased from the gemstore.

This gear would probably provide a significant boost in strength, then they would released a couple new zones where this gear is required to survive in, etc, etc.

Well, that’s probably not exactly what they would do, but that’s an example of the type of crap they would pull.

NeedsFoodBadly.2671:

Nexon’s games are utter crap. They’re all sub-par cookie cutter clones where 99.9% of their development budget goes towards the cash shop. It could possibly be excused if Nexon’s game weren’t complete trash but…they are…complete trash.

Vindictus, Dragon Nest and Dungeon Fighter were fun but the business model made them hard to stick with after a while.

Vindictus has much better boss fights than GW2.
On the other hand it is inferior in several other aspects.

The dialogs in Dragon Nest were also amusing. I got more enjoyment out of those than I ever did from the Personal Story in GW2. What they did with bloodstone dust/dragonite ore/empyreal fragments actually reminds me a lot of the problem with materials in Dragon Nest(and to a lesser degree in Vindictus as well).

nono ncsoft pls dont listen to nexon…

i like gw2 as it is … ofc its not perfect – but nexon would only make it worse im sure…

nexon has just some stupid kitten games (yes there are worse games… but still)

There’s nothing that trumps your competition like sabotage from the inside, and it looks like sneaky Nexon is at it again!

There was another thread on the subject that got locked, this one will be locked too when the mods see it

If they replaced primary shareholders with limited-term loans so companies could have startup funds without being squeezed for cash later on these kinds of issues wouldn’t come up.

Then companies could reward it’s employees rather than rewarding people who have nothing to do with business operations.

Oh boy…

Just when it was looking so good, the expansion, the progression of the living story, the content and gameplay behind silverwastes and all.

I can only hope they leave GW2 alone, considering that the cosmetic approach to their cash shop has worked well for ANet and their playerbase.

I think Anet also has a loophole in their contract that allows them to buy the company out of NCsoft if they want to, and they own the rights to all the IPs related to GW2.

I think GW2 is safe and I couldn’t care less about the rest of NCsoft’s portfolio.

Why are people acting as if this was a done deal? From reading this it seems nexon has not been getting its own way so they are trying to push for more power. They now need to get enough votes to get on the board, even on the board they would need to control a majority to pass their own vision of the company’s future.
For now it sounds like a whiny forum poster trying to get their own way with threats.

Like I said in previous thread.

inb4 Nexon Guild Wars 2 F2P publisher.

;)

Servanin.5021:

Has anybody played a Nexon game since 2006 or so?

Yes, Guild Wars 2 !!!

Honestly, i spent 2 years on a nexon game, and in hindsight i have to say. [B] even EA is better then nexon [/b]

Nexon is an abysmal company with a disgusting reputation. NCSoft would do very well to distance themselves as much as possible from any collaboration outside what is mandatory for a shareholder

Templar.3418:

Can anyone enlighten me on why Nexon supposedly sucks?

Growing up, from the time I was 12 to 18, every MMO/online game I had played was a Nexon game, so let me tell you a little bit about them.

First off, their games are notoriously grindy. Maplestory when it first came out back in 2005, was the epitome of grind. It took years and billions upon billions of experience to reach max level (which was 70). The only way to get exp was to kill monsters. If the monster’s level was higher than yours, you got a little extra exp. Every monster that I killed that was 2-5 levels higher than me netted me about 0.02-0.04 exp. To reach the next level, I needed around 10 million exp. After 9 hours of grinding on a Saturday, I would be lucky to have gained a 20% increase towards the next level. To make this worse, the best “mob grinding” spots were riddled with hackers, gold bots, and botters who would hog those spots for months, making it impossible for anyone else to level there, forcing us to go find less profitable and slower places to grind. Nexon hardly, if ever, took action against botters. About once a year there would be a mass ban of accounts, but I constantly saw the same webglkdjnjh guy fly-hacking around town, pulling every mob in the map to him and one-shotting them all.

On top of their games being grindy, their servers are the WORST. There is a weekly server maintenance down time every week (the day differs per game) which usually runs anywhere from 2-8 hours. That’s 2-8 hours of the game being offline and unplayable. Whenever Mabinogi or Maplestory had updates or needed to be patched, you could expect the game to be down for a MINIMUM of 5 hours. 90% of the time, an hour before the game was supposed to come back up, they would extend the maintenance/patch by another hour. The longest time a server was down was when elves and giants were introduced to Mabinogi, the game was down for 2 entire days. 48 hours. Then the game was online for about 12 hours, and was shut down again for 8 hours for weekly maintenance. The running joke was the staff at Nexon was a grand total of 2 employees who were pencil pushers, and not developers at all, and the servers were run by hamsters on wheels.

Their customer service is the WORST I have ever seen. You think not getting a reply after 3 days is bad? Try 3 MONTHS. It was common knowledge that if you had a problem and needed any kind of support/technical help, you were on your own. Tickets were hardly answered, if ever. Most help tickets submitted had about a 3 month wait time before you could get an answer, and 100% of the time it was an answer from a machine saying basically sorry but we can’t help you/thanks for submitting your input. I once was hacked, and I submitted a ticket to get my account back. 1.5 years later (yes one and a half years later) the ticket was still unanswered. For giggles, I checked back in on it a few years later and sometime around year 2.5 they gave up bothering to answer it and just straight up closed it without replying to it. I had managed to get my account back on my own after 3 months of guessing pin codes.

Nexon is the worst as far as RNG/cash shop items:

Some classes in their games do not progress unless you pay cash for it. For example, to get necessary skills for the Evan class in Maplestory, you had to pay $5 for each skill. There were 5 skills the Evan class needed. So to play that character, you had to fork over $25. If you decided not to buy the skills, your character was laughably weak and would die instantly in dungeons because it was a magic use class and one of the skills was a necessary defensive skill with 100% uptime to keep itself protected against physical attacks. Without it, you were one-shotted.

Skins were available for cash only. There was no conversion of mesos (in game money)-real money. You had to buy skins with straight real cash. If you think $10.00 for a full outfit in GW2 is bad, then you will die when you find out $10.00 in Maplestory will get you a pair of shoes, and that’s about it. Skins in that game are extremely expensive. They offer bundle packs for $30.00 that provides you with an entire outfit (5 different item slots). On top of that, skins can only be “rented”. All skins disappear and are deleted from your inventory after 90 days. So you spend $30-$50 to look nice, and after 90 days it is deleted and you have to re-buy it all over again.

RNG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The RNG is worst I have ever seen in Nexon games. To make this as short as possible, imagine every time a cool new outfit came out, or a rare event item/limited time/seasonal item came up, whether it was a weapon with decent stats or an outfit that looked amazing, imagine if it was hidden behind RNG with a success rate of getting a precursor. In Maplestory, there was an RNG system called Gachapon. Players passionately named it Gachapwned. Because every time you played it, you got pwned/owned. It was basically the same as BLTC chests, except MUCH WORSE. The rate at which you actually got something decent was on a precursor rate, and to top it off, the trash loot you got were things like scrolls with bad stats and a 10% success rate (very bad).

TL;DR:
After years and years of playing Nexon games and getting royally screwed over by them, I have decided I do not care for them at all. They have terrible customer service. If you ever have a problem with ANYTHING, you’re on your own. Credit card got double charged? Kiss your money good bye because they don’t respond to their customer support tickets. RNG is worse than trying to get a precursor in GW2. Everything costs real life cash and is easily twice as expensive as GW2’s cash shop.

Oh maplestory, i too had spend a royal time there, maplestory europe to be precise. Yup service quality there can only be described as cesspool of fecal, rancid mindfleying lobotomy.

Oh and the P2W was strong with this one. You forgot to mention that the meaningful way to grind was to buy exp boosters, basic being the 2x exp card. And let’s not forget free market – place where you had to purchase a shop stand from cash shop if you wanted to make a sale at decent price. And it didn’t end there. It had to be the best one with shortest duration if you really wanted to make those sales happen, because the cheap ones had your character standing there running the shop themselves, unable to play, and what’s worse constantly at risk of getting dc’d by hackers and taking your spot away. Something the “best shop” owners were much less prone too as their was run by npc and whole channel needed to be crushed for that.

Oh and the forums. The warmest place on this side of the globe. Little did make your heart warmer then the 50 meter tall flames from players at the stuff for this horrid experience. Well deserved flames might i add.

And let’s not forget the unremovable censorship which screwed over 33% of stuff you wanted to write, despite it not having a single curse word in it.

EA compared to Nexon is like comparing a rich guy that has a foul smelling pungent cologne to a drug abusing mafia member.

I used to play Combat Arms (FPS), had sunk close to 500 euro into it over 2 years. They did an update and changed their password system, unfortunately, my password at the time included a symbol (shift + 4), this symbol was no longer avaliable for use and my password was corrupted. Asked customer support (they answered within 14 days) – got told to use my recovery info.
Told them that i had no clue about a few of the pieces of info and asked if they could reset my PW for me and if matching my current IP to the one being logged on their servers for 2 years (had static IP at that time) to verify me being me would be good enough.
Customer supports answer – Nope, cannot help. But you can always create a new account for free.

At that point, i didnt bother with their bullkitten anymore, left the game and went playing minecraft for a long long long time before starting with GW2

There is no good guy, bad guy scenario here. Both NCSoft and Nexon are huge companies going after profit, which is their whole reason of being (and rightfully so). Nexon has a bad reputation among gamers, but in the end, it is just another corporation, just like NCSoft – which, I may add, don´t exactly have an angelic reputation themselves.

I find it funny how people flame Nexon and make NCSoft look like a good corporation.

People are overreacting.

16% of a company is not enough to take total control.
Sure they can make changes, but even if the new person they place on the board says: “We should do this in order to increase income!” there would still be others that could simply counter with: “We have allowed them to make their own decisions for a long time and it is still very profitable, so we should not touch it”.

Actually they can’t make changes. What they have to do is get the bulk of the stock holders to become dissatisfied. That’s what they’re attempting.

They’re saying here NCSoft isn’t giving you enough return on your investment. So they can try to get a block of votes.

But NcSoft isn’t going to sit there and let this pass unchallenged. And most saavy stock holders will know this is a power play anyway.

Not to mention the Fair Trade Commission has their eye on Nexon and how they might be trying to force changes to NCSoft. I wouldn’t state ‘The sky is falling’ just yet.

Nexon has been influencing design decisions in Guild Wars 2 since launch. It’s pretty obvious if you look at all the things that are bad about Guild Wars 2, the majority can be blamed on what Nexon would have done.
It’ll only get worse once they are given more power.

^ People always seems to claim that, but I have never actually seen any sort of examples or evidence for it.

Milennin.4825:

Nexon has been influencing design decisions in Guild Wars 2 since launch. It’s pretty obvious if you look at all the things that are bad about Guild Wars 2, the majority can be blamed on what Nexon would have done.
It’ll only get worse once they are given more power.

Evidence of this? Because I don’t see it at all. People who played Nexon games before have said how much worse they are. This is just more tin foil hat stuff.

Oh, I don’t know… character bound dyes, RNG boxes, gear grind.

And before you say dyes are account bound now. Yes, I know. Only 1+ year after launch and after they broke their promise made in their pre-launch blog post. Little late with that. They probably had a good reason to make them account bound: incentivise collecting all dyes for your account, buy all the dye packs in store NAO!

Here’s pretty much all you need to know about Nexon…Combat Arms. Terribad.

Want even more bad? Counterstrike Zombies. Badbadbad.

You are aware that the original dye system was even worse than the system we had at launch, right?

I really don’t see how the “gear grind” would have anything at all to do with Nexon either tbh. It is not like the gear grind can be bypassed by using the store.

Milennin.4825:

Oh, I don’t know… character bound dyes, RNG boxes, gear grind.

And before you say dyes are account bound now. Yes, I know. Only 1+ year after launch and after they broke their promise made in their pre-launch blog post. Little late with that. They probably had a good reason to make them account bound: incentivise collecting all dyes for your account, buy all the dye packs in store NAO!

In Guild Wars 1 the dyes weren’t even that. They were one buy one use. Did Nexon do that too?

Templar.3418:

Already in the comment section of that article do people think it’s a bad idea.

Can anyone enlighten me on why Nexon supposedly sucks?

As one of the former Mabinogi EU players let me give you a brief play by play for how much they care about their players.

-One day out of the blue all contact outside of automated maintenance stopped, no GM’s, no customer support, no updates , no events.

- ~413 real world days later with absolutely no contact at all they dropped a massive half finished patch from the American version of the game onto the servers. It was completely unfinished , not localized and did not contain any of the fixes the American version had already undergone.

-The game started to destabilize completely , NPC’s and monsters stopped spawning properly , maintenance stopped occurring properly. Hackers started running rampant.

-A community moderator (a volunteer position) tried to get answers and was completely banned because of it, the hackers ended up actually getting his account back because they cared about the game more than the company.

-A short while after that the game was shutdown

-Despite there being a perfectly possible way to transfer the mabinogi EU players to the NA version with most of their character intact (AP potions). The players were given a small amount of nexons game currency (about 10-50 euros worth depending on how much you’d spent) and left out in the cold.

TL/DR: Nexon completely abandoned a game did not even have the decency to inform the players and left people who spent large sums of money and time at a complete loss.
People rang their offices ,sent in letters all were ignored.
__________________________________________________________________

Aside from that massive reason, Nexon games are completely pay to win, You can buy a pet (only source of pets) that is roughly equivalent in attack power to a player who’s played the game for a year, you can buy weapons and armor statistically and visually better than in-game items , they have dozens of gambling boxes for everything from Dyes, weapons, armors to pets. These pets don’t come cheap some cost 30 euro for a single pet.

Then there is the grind, even basic quests and armors from nexon games require grinding repeatedly, One event required you to log in for roughly 80 hours over a two week period to get the reward, just log in not do anything, I had a laptop and PC running for four days constantly. Upgrading systems for making your items better are gem store linked (requiring special protection stones from the store or your expensive item can be destroyed forever). The equivalent to Achievement chest skins, also periodically ended up in the RNG boxes completely invalidating people playing the games work etc.

They are essentially the worst form of a gaming company, one whos primary goal is not to make a game but to make as large a profit as possible at the expense of all else.

Vayne.8563:

Milennin.4825:

Oh, I don’t know… character bound dyes, RNG boxes, gear grind.

And before you say dyes are account bound now. Yes, I know. Only 1+ year after launch and after they broke their promise made in their pre-launch blog post. Little late with that. They probably had a good reason to make them account bound: incentivise collecting all dyes for your account, buy all the dye packs in store NAO!

In Guild Wars 1 the dyes weren’t even that. They were one buy one use. Did Nexon do that too?

Ah right, I remember when you could access some dyes only through the cash shop and resell them in spamadan for gold to other players that got that gold without even playing the game and acquiring it directly from the cash stop with the gems to gold conversion, oh no wait… gems to platinum right right.

Milennin.4825:

Nexon has been influencing design decisions in Guild Wars 2 since launch. It’s pretty obvious if you look at all the things that are bad about Guild Wars 2, the majority can be blamed on what Nexon would have done.
It’ll only get worse once they are given more power.

Well at least it’s not like they put Cox, responsible of the (imo horrible) gambling system of the game, in the dev team that is working on the playable content. Oh wait…

Nexon makes its profits via parasitism.
They latch on to another company, take a controlling stock interest, influence the board and executives into making short term profits to drive up the stock prices and pay substantial dividends, then dump their stock to cash in leaving the company a cashless, directionless, customerless mess.

The fact that they are going public with this statement tells me that NCSoft has been resisting Nexon’s attempts to sink in their fangs… how long they can continue is the real question now (a 15% stake can turn into a controlling stake if you manage to get the board of directors stacked with people who you selected).

If anything this move shows that Nexon wasn’t calling the shots … ever.

The whole reason of trying to oust the current board of directors is because they feel that NCSOFT isn’t holding up their end of the bargain on their joint venture N Square. It’s first project got canceled about a year ago while their second project, MapleStory 2, looks like a smashup between MapleStory and Mindcraft is still moving forward but I don’t know how much help from NCSOFT.

It really doesn’t help that NCSOFT’s game in development, MXM is in the same genre as that canceled N Squared project.

But to oust the board Nexon needs more than their 15.08%.

Vayne.8563:

In Guild Wars 1 the dyes weren’t even that. They were one buy one use. Did Nexon do that too?

Guild Wars 1’s philosophy has always been grinding for cosmetics. They also never promised account-bound dye unlocks pre-launch. Come again?

Anyone here of a game called DFO aka dungeon fighter online? No? Google it. Nexon was the publisher they ignored bots, hackers, the last sale before the game went down they made a “flyer” and posted it on the front page for the game. It was made in Mspaint thats how bad it was. Months later “oh were closing the game here have some of your money back.”

If the devs go quiet for months in a nexon game abandon ship before it sinks.