To the NCsoft Europe employee who took the time to rate this post as “1/5 stars”, it might be more helpful if you actually commented here with whatever your issue was ;).

Having the management team be a group of people with common backgrounds and viewpoints seems like a good idea, and the ANet leadership have a pretty solid track record, but it’s kind of disappointing that they decided to take one leadership monoculture and replace it with what is essentially another leadership monoculture.

If they make all the right decisions, it probably won’t matter – but it seems pointless to throw out all of the previous leadership experience and expertise that they had on board in the past, on what seems to be the basis of a single failure (TR). Seeing NetDevil and Cryptic Studios move on makes me worry that they’ve given up entirely on having a wide set of varied studios, though I can’t really speculate as to what went on behind closed doors in either case.

Speaking as a CoH EU player, I’ve found this to be something of a disaster. Our last community rep has lost his job, there haven’t been French or German reps for months, and now there’s NO-ONE left to mod the EU CoH forums.

One of the things that’s disappointed the players the most is the lack of statements to them regarding what’s going to happen with the EU servers, forums and characters. Will things continue as before with new reps working in the USA now, will we be merged into the USA servers, or will everything go the way of Tabula Rasa? Nobody knows, and it seems NC is still deciding.

We understand that these things can’t be decided immediately. A lot of NC Europe’s staff have been offered new positions in the USA and they won’t be able to make any decisions until they know what staff they retain. But the fact that nobody has been able to set the players minds at rest with just a vague statement makes this look, to some of us, like a rush job and a snap decision. Had this been planned more throughly, there would have been prepared statements to keep the fans content, but instead its caught a lot of NC staff by surprise and we players feel forgotten in the chaos. But hey, I’ve never worked at a MMO company, so what do I know…

Of course, any inconvenience the fans feel is going to pale in comparison to the staff who just lost their jobs. My condolences if you’re reading this.

I still find it hard to believe that anyone in NC Europe or Austin didn’t see this coming. It was pretty obvious to me, back in May/June even, that chances were pretty good that Arena.Net was going to be calling all the shots, and the reason that entire departments weren’t slashed immediately was to maintain service continuity until they could build redundant service departments in Seattle.

Obviously they couldn’t hide that kind of hiring within their existing GW2 and “other project” budgets, so they needed to push for NC West to happen.

For better or worse, the feeling I’ve always gotten from ArenaNet is that they would prefer to build everything themselves, in house, and that they are pretty sure they can do it better. I won’t comment on the veracity of that position, but as they say, it’s only arrogance if you can’t back it up with action. When you can, it’s bravado.

The thing that bothers me the most about the way things have gone down with this is that it feels like the failure of TR on the development side was a stone unfairly tossed around the neck of NC Austin on the publishing side, and they didn’t deserve it. From my experience, the ops and support organization in Austin was very good at what they did. I think the baby was thrown out with the bathwater here, and it’s not hard to connect the dots and see why, either.

To be fair, we Americans are also quite excellent at bashing reflexively socialist, anti-entrepreneurial Europeans.

As a side note, I rate them all very highly. I can’t say how well they’ll run a big multi-discipline multi-studio multi-national (apart from Chris, IIRC they’ve all been pure development not publishing to date, and they’ve all been single-studio focussed) – but I certainly have high hopes for them.

Maybe their approaches won’t be appropriate, but they DO know how to run development, and run studios, and make highly-acclaimed, successful games in a very recent market (the Origin folks, for whatever reason, hadn’t shipped an in-house game in a decade – the AN guys have had much much more recent experience). Who knows? But there’s hope.

Since I begun playing NCSoft titles.. I grew tired of asking for a division between EU and US. Even in support tickets.. you have to wait until the Americans wake up, to get a reply.

American’s only know how to advertise war, coke and movies… they should’ve left the rest to somebody that could do it. The division is extremely necessary.. but when and if they do it.. NC at the US will go bankrupt.. because they even pay less attention to the satisfaction/profit duo.

I don’t think that Arena.net will do anything big for NCWest.. they are possibly camping and waiting for a division.. before they can zerg… You know.. like an Hostile takeover.

Not taking care and listening to the community..
Almost no advertising
Looking at numbers instead of player satisfaction
Invested too much on a game that almost everyone could see that it would fail(Tabula Rasa).
Didn’t invest enough in titles like Lineage / Guild Wars.

Possible way to solve what will remain:
More “gamers” are needed in the ranks of the company.. not only “show-off” directors.
Listen to what your paying customers say.
Effectively fight RMT and automated play
Don’t launch new titles while current ones are in urgent need of attention.
Hire proactive staff
Keep customers, clients, partners, stock holders informed.

These are the basics.. everything else will come slowly.. because NCSoft’s name was burnt by everyone.. not only Korea.. Korea is only the usual scapegoat.

In this *particular* context, IMHO to decide what to invest in Europe, you need to look at Europe, independent of what you need to do in US.

Either some of the people driving it have misunderstood their task / don’t know enough how to do it, or some of the stakeholders have been allowed to retain their misconceptions (which the people driving it should have forced out before starting).

… And obviously the guys at ArenaNet have no interest in helping them understand and keep the european branch running : it’s more investment and staff towards them.