NetDevil screwed over the small player base of JumpGate to work on the trash known as "AutoAssault". So in my eyes, karma came around and bit them in the arse.

If they want success, its sitting there.. in the code they have already written. With the old acronym KISS...(keep it simple stupid)

The company created a fantastic game engine for space related games... with near real physics that brought praise from almost every single player who came into contact with it. What they need to do is revisit that old code (jumpgate) and capitalize on Sony's past screwup with swg and create a space based mmo.

Some things to remember.

1. Make sure you retain a good publisher (3DO ftl)

2. Play to your company's strengths.. (at the time, the best playing space sim out)

3. Follow the project through... (ND dropped the ball with JumpGate after their publisher failed to advertise and market a really great game)

4. Avoid milestones.. (also avoid the term "soon" and announcing dates that are just not within a reasonable reach.

Sure, AutoAssault may be an original idea for the MMO market, but lets be realistic here... who really wants to play hotwheels? By the way, didnt your player base warn ya about this? (shakes head)

Note to Scorch... if ya still working ND that is, go back to JG, rework the code, recreate the stage, keep the storyline (races), and keep the physics... add in a pinch of avatar work, carrier based combat, planets.. etc...  rework market and trade and you have the possiblity of a hit MMO. There is an entire community waiting, sitting, watching and wishing for the release of a game the fills this slot. You should really take a look into it.

It is time for a renaissance in gaming.

J.S. Mills

I dont believe in niche markets... any market can be a success if done well...

Twisted metal 1,2,3 all sold over 1 million copies each....if the game is fun people will buy it.

Other genres in games are harder to make mmo's becuase you cant just copy features.. so its harder to make a "WoW" when there are no games to steal from.

Originally posted by Kyleran
I found this quote to be the most profound of their lesson's learned?

"We should have been playing our game ourselves. The question you should ask yourself is 'If your own Devs aren't playing the game... who will?' Play your own game early and often. If people in your office are not playing your game, people outside will not either."

I had just assumed that in general developer's played their own games.... this was a surprise to me that they had to learn this...

I liked Auto Assualt, but it actually made me motion sick. I would have headaches that lasted hours after a sesson of gameplay.

I do hope ND goes back to work on Jumpgate. If jumpgate was created in a universe the size of Eve, it would be a first rate game. It's main problem was the size of the universe. Within a couple months you'd done/seen everything. It's commodities trading system was built as well as it's flight engine. I spent countless hours transporting loads between stations to make a profit in a game where mass affected manuverability and the amount of time it took a ship to reach zero accerleration. Only SWG FLS had a flight engine that came close to matching Jumpgates and it too suffered from a Galaxy too small.

A few follow up notes here: (not going to argue anyone’s thoughts, if you don't like something its your opinion I am certainly not going to change it)

The reason that my entire guild left the game had absolutely NOTHING to do with "complexity" of the game. Most of us had been beta testers and were enjoying the game itself. We all realized that it takes time for fixes to be implemented and were willing to wait. However, our patience was finally exhausted when after 6 mths of repeated annnouncements that the first patch for all the bugs reported during the final stages of beta and the beginning of live, they were still telling that the patch was coming out "soon". If you tell your players that a patch is coming out soon, this is not >6 mths down the road.  If you take a poll of people on here, I'm sure that soon would be < 3 mths.

I terminated my subscription at this point (and yes they had already stated it was free at this point), and left my email address up on their announcements. If I remember correctly, it took at least another 3-4 mths before that patch was released, AND THE BUGS WERE STILL NOT FIXED.

The real reason my guild and I left was that we were sick of being lied to.

Those are good advices for future game developers. If you screw up once it will scar your game for life and it's very hard to recover from bad impressions. First impression is very important here as consumers will only give you ONE chance to take a look at your game and will either dismiss is as crap or praise it and invite their friends over. Early beta are not good, you should polish your game first before going beta. Auto Assault is a good game, unfortunately people dismissed it as a blah game so it didn't caugh on the momentum and eventually the population of the game dwindled and that spelled it's death.

AA is a great game, plain and simple... Scott should not be out there apologizing for anything. It breaks my heart to read some of the comments that he made. Especially when I really think that he's missing the boat on what the core issue with the AA subscriber numbers are...

The issue with AA is this, and only this (imo): AA is deployed on the WRONG REVENUE BUSINESS MODEL. End of story. You can comment about this and that, the controls, the gameplay, blah - blah - blah. And this is fine, you are definitely entitled to your opinion. But I have maintained this from the start and I will continue to maintain it until NetDevil wakes up and changes things and starts earning money (I have 2 AA acounts btw - one for my son and one for myself) by having more subscribers.

AA is not a retail box + $15.00/month subscription based game. It's trying to compete in the wrong business space. There is just too much competition in this market area and AA is not the type of game that is going to glean a decent revenue stream out of this market.

NetDevil/NCSoft should try out another business model. Namely:

#1) Adopt a Station Pass (SOE) type of approach where AA is offered as one game in a set of games where a monthly fee is charged (let's say $15.00/month or $19.00/month) depending on what other games are included in the set.

#2) Adopt a Guild Wars style model where on-line play is free, and revenue is gleaned by offering timely expansion packs and releases.

#3) Offer a lower monthly sub (let's say $4.99/month) and do in-game advertising. Heck, it's an auto based game for heaven's sake. There are millions and millions of advertising dollars available in this arena. If they got one or two big in-game advertising accounts, and lowered the sub (or eliminated it), AA would be an incredible hit.

All of the other observations that Scott has made I feel are just way off base. Yes, there's beta, and communications, and frame-rate, and all of this other stuff. But when it comes down to it, it's not why AA has such a low subscriber base. He needs to think in terms of how much a person is going to spend on a monthly game fee. It's going to be a limited amount. As a basis, people are probably going to throw their $$ into one of the big boys: WoW, EvE, EQ, etc. etc. They are not going to throw it into a game like AA.

For $15.00/month people want some other immersive type of experience. But under a different revenue model - heck ya! People are gonna want to log in and blow stuff up, and trick out their car, do a little crafting... It's totally a no brainer.

I hope NetDevil doesn't throw this game away. It's just too good, and it's too much fun. Just get real about how you can make money with this title (and YOU CAN!).  Please think out of the box - and for Pete's sake: DON'T PULL THE PLUG ON NEXUS!!!!!

IMO Auto Assault suffered from the same problem that Earth and Beyond suffered from.  It isn't actually a science fiction setting, it's a fantasy setting.  In a technology based setting all abilities come from equipment and the skill to use it comes from the character.  In AA (and E&B) the character themselves have what equate to magical spells.  Other then the hazard mode there was no equipment requirment to use your special abilites which makes them spells, not technology.  In a sci-fi based game the technology should be disposable and easily replaced, it's the skills to use that technology that should lie in the character.  Players relate to the character, not the vehicle.  The vehicle should only be a tool.

Originally posted by ScorchND

1-I feel this "not playing the game" point needs some clarification. Its not that nobody played the game, many people played the game quite a bit. It is that EVERYONE did not play the game every day. With the team crunching we thought it was more important for people to work on deliverables than to force a time carved out every day for every person in the company to play. This is something we are doing now with each of our projects once the game is to a playable point.  

Here's the thing.  You should not have to schedule your staff to play your game.

Your game should be such that people WANT to play it -  you should be writing memos to your staff to STOP playing the game on company time.     Fun games are things the rest of us not in the gaming industry secretly load onto computer and play when the bosses aren't looking.    If you have a legitmate reason to have the game on your computer, then a fun game will keep you after work, at the office, playing with your co-workers. 

If enough people aren't doing this, and at a fairly early stage of the game, it's probably a good indication of the general fun level of it.

I've seen gaming companies where people will be working on one game, then stay after hours at the office to play another game.   It can be a PC game, a console game, or even a card game.  But it's the fun level of these OTHER games that companies should be striving to produce.  If they're own game isn't competitive with games that are truly fun then they should realize their doing something wrong.

Originally posted by TCoops
  I dont believe this. Basically what the poor developers are saying is "we took a risk bringing something new to the MMO market, got unlucky and learned our lesson".. "take it from us, dont bother developing anything innovative, risky or creative" ... "we should have just made our game dummed down, pretty to look at (even if it was just superficially good), and mainstream".

  I followed Auto Assault since it was a rumour. And was lucky enough to play it for a while. I thought it was the best thing in a stale genre to come along in a while. The MMO market is going down hill - nothing but fantasy clones. They are also becoming dummed down. Games used to have elements of strategy or skill in them.. That used to be the draw - testing your wits and mettle against other players or the game AI. Now it just seems like a barely interractive movie. Get wowed by graphics and effects, direct your character and watch all the action take place with little or no input from yourself. Auto Assault was a little bit different. Tried to introduce some player skill in the equation and some speed and action. I thought the system they had was innovative and a fresh change from the norm. Some players love complexity and if the model is given a chance It can become popular to all players once they are weened off the 'norm' of dummed down games.

   I think Auto Assault suffered bad luck in its release. But in no way do i think that new developers out there should heed some of that advice. Without risk taking, trying new formulas and innovations we will be stuck with WoW/lineage clones for the next 10 years- people only playing it safe. And gamers being hypnotised into a consumer norm, only playing one type of experience and being made to believe anything remotely challenging is over complex and not fun.

  

Awesome first post, I 100% agree.

Wwelcome to0 MMORPG, we need a few more like you around here :)

They are still in denial, there was nothing complex about the game, at all.  It was far too simple.  Pretty graphics may grab your attention in the beggining, but complexity is what keeps you interested and draws you in deeper.

Massively:  What was massive about it?  You went from one small area, blasting a few enemy types that fall within your level range, and then move on to the next very small area, to blast whichever 1-2 new enemy types appear.  It couldn't have been more linear if it had been an old side-scrolling console game.

Multiplayer:  It felt dead already, during the month they launched.  As noted by others, the principle problem was bad word-of-mouth advertising, first from beta testers, and then early players such as myself.  Their advertising campaign wasn't anything special either, not that it would have mattered much in the end.  If you are doing something new, you really need to sell people on it.  A few banner adds here and there on sites like mmopg.com aren't enough.  Why was it Multiplayer?  It certainly never felt like a multiplayer game.  There was no reason to form teams or guilds or the like.   This ties closely with my next complaint:

Online:  Auto Assault is not an multiplayer online game.  It is a single player console game where  the creators wanted people to pay an additional monthly fee to keep playing it.  That's the only conclusion I can come to.  Its online because they want online fees.  The game would play vitually the same as a console version.

Role Playing:  What role was I playing, other than chump?  I looked the same as anyone else, and I functioned pretty much the same.  There was no real reason to play healer/buffer types, other than to try to self-inject a little variety into my playing experience.  Straight-up combat was the order of the day, every day,  24 hours a day, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars.  In a game where the only activity is shooting your weapons (even crafting began with you first blasting apart the terrain) then combat is the end-all be-all of your existence.  What's complex about that?  The coolest looking weapons often had the greatest drawbacks, so there wasn't even that to keep me entertained (I liked the single target lasers, but weapons that affected areas were of much greater utility).  And gettting a different chasis was mostly pointless, other than to make you spend your money.  There was no reason to advance, no world-building to engage in, no end-game other than pvp which, as someone pointed out earlier is completely missing from the early game  (and how weird is that?  Its like two different games, one you play PvE for a while, then Wham! suddenly its a PvP game).

I gave AA an honest try, and it was fun . . . for about 2 weeks.  By the fourth week of my included month of play, I had gone back to EQ2.  It wasn't bad, really, just nothing you can call a mmorpg.  And that's what I like to play.