Massively

It is just a form of trial offer. They know these are gamers that like mmo type of games, are willing to pay for it and that they are now looking for a new game. I bet every company would give these spesific players a 2 month trial to get them hooked on their game.

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well nc send out a big grab bag this time.
financially if you would for example only sell the aion beta key on ebay (wich motst likely would be illegal i know) youd make up for the tr box.

with all the mmos that gave up in the recent months it led me to rethink the whole online-game issue.

it never became that obvious to me that by buying the shiny new game (mmo) its a lot different then for example buying a single-player game that you can just reinstall and play 1, 2 or 10 years in the future (provided u still have a system that runs it)

with mmos you can build up a whole tower of boxes that youll never be able to play again since there wont be any servers anymore that host your game.

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It's hard to know much of a cynical spin to put on this since I haven't dealt with NCSoft at all. Given that, I don't see why it couldn't be both a nice gesture to customers and an attempt to retain those customers. The people at the coffee shop downtown treat me very nicely both because they want my business and because they are just very nice people.

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I think this is a good idea. However, it's not something that can be be universally applied. NCSoft is lucky in that they have other titles to fall back on, although fans of TR might have been attracted to it because of it's sci-fi setting. Saying that "Hey! Why not put on your spandex with 2 free months of our superhero game!" is like trading apples for oranges. Some companies might not HAVE another game to offer.

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It's a nice gesture, but they're offering it to the wrong people. Someone who played the game since launch and let their subscription lapse the day before the abrupt announcement would not get this severance package while someone who just created an account would - and with the game having been heavily discounted for a while, the most recent deal being just a dollar on Amazon and a penny at Gamestop/EB Games - I suspect that there's quite a few of the latter people receiving this package.

If NCsoft really cared, they'd be offering it to the veterans; the veterans program was designed to reward players in three-month intervals (the three months had to be consecutive). This way, only the actual loyal currently active players would receive it, and it would bring back the veteran players who might have leftover game cards, who might have been waiting for the new Earth maps or first-person camera to be implemented before resubscribing, or who had invested their hard-earned money and countless hours into NCsoft's last two monthly fee-required titles and feel ripped off now (note that Auto Assault's severance package was done the same way, and I really doubt many AA players played Tabula Rasa after their complementary month).

What incentives do currently active TR players have to play other NCsoft titles? Absolutely none - but many veterans already do.

I'm curious - what's the discussion at Massively like? I hope it's not "Free Aion for Tabula Rasa players? Damn, I would have subscribed if I had known." =p

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Well first off you got the amount of months incorrect. You get 3 months of CoH and 1 month of Aion not 2 of each plus L2.

Do I think companies should offer a severance packages? I guess it depends on what they are trying to do. Personally I don't see how or why they can't keep a server or 2 going with 30,000 subs for Tabula Rasa. Its not a ton of business but it is a fairly large group of people. I played a trial that ended last week and the servers where not "empty" by a long shot, in fact I never had an issue getting groups up to level 17 (when my trial ended) and areas always rated "medium" at prime time. People were playing the game.
I can see in cases like Auto Assault and Asheron's Call 2 where the subscriber numbers dipped under 10,000 but in this case you have a viable amount of customers AND the end game content that everyone was wanting about to be delivered.
I would think the better route would have been to see how successful D15 would have went before making this call.
Anyway, yanking a game for no real reason if it could have been scaled down a bit more isn't exactly going to endear NCSoft to the customers.
Some free time in other games is nice BUT those paying players obviously didn't want to play those games.
Anyway, its not the first time this has happened and its more then likely not going to be the last.

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It'd be nice assuming the publisher has other games. I do like, however, the fact they're making the game free to play for the last near two months.

"On February 28, 2009, Tabula Rasa will be shutting down its servers, and as of January 10, 2009, the game will be free to play. "

That's something for veteran (and not so veteran) players alike. Come back and get nearly two free months of play. I'm happy to see them offer anything, really, given TR was supposed to be quite a stone around their neck, financially.

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I think they should give a refund of the box price.

When you buy a single-player game, you get to play it forever, as long as you have the equipment to run it.

When you buy an MMO, you only get to play for as long as they keep the servers running, something they have no control over.

The most reasonable way to price these things, then, would be to provide an amount of free time at the beginning of your subscription commensurate with the price of the box. So an MMO with a $45 box price should come with THREE free months, not just one (assuming a subscription fee of $15/month).

But since no one does that, I guess three free months of other games is as close as one can expect to get to a refund of the box.

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I think this move [the severance package, not the closing of the servers/game] is really smart of NCSoft on many levels.

1> It rewards the people that paid for the game and stuck with it prior to the announcement. And some very sweet rewards they are, worth about $90+ before you count in the Aion stuff.

2> It is an attempt to addict the soon-to-be-former TR players to another game in NCSoft's stable of games. This makes good business sense out of that $90+ retail value of the severance package.

3> It gives the developers a chance to actually get to market with the latest things that have been in the pipe and MAYBE do something fitting with the game to develop the storyline and at least get it to a 'point of hope' in the struggle before it goes dark. OR they can be really DARK about it and have things go to 'ell in and handbasket and have fun all around. Absolute Mayhem. Maybe the troops leading a rebellion against leaders that turn out to be corrupt or something and Earth ISN'T lost! It was all a lie! Or something.

I'm not a big fan of TR. I've barely scratched the surface of it. Thanks to the Massively contest and the free play after Jan 10, I just might play more of it than I expected to. In that case, it's sad that it's going away.

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