Just a tiny little nitpick, but i'm wondering just how correct the info about him working on Diablo is. I was in tech support there for a short time right after the D2 release, and from what i was told ALL design/prog work for the original diablo was handled by blizzard north - which no longer exists, and was in northern california, like 300+ miles away. Possible Strain was up there first and moved down to the Irvine office though. It's probably just worded funny, but he wouldnt have contributed to Diablo while at the Irvine office.

think GW2 will not be under NCsoft    but im suprised at this and hope GW2 will not be heavily affected

Originally posted by Maggnet

To pour some more water on the rumour mill:

when you look at Aion you will recognize, that it uses GameGuard. A hacking prevention system used primary by korean MMOs. The system is totaly crappy, the aion beta forum was full of error reports concerning GG and the people tried to make pressure to solve the problem or superior: remove GG completely from the game, because it behaves like a root kit.

What happend? Nothing happend till today, it wasn't even added to the known bugs list!

This is a beavior I found to appear in a lot of korean free to play MMOs: inconvenient but importent problems are successively beeing ignored.

I'm curious if they'll keep this behavior up. At the comming weekend there will be the next beta event and the betaboard with the buglists will be open again.

I ask myself if the shown problem management of NCSoft is highly influenced by the korean management and if it will find entrance as a general behaviour to the customers of NC Soft. 

 My experience with Game Guard has led me to inevitably ignore all games with Game Guard. I really wanted to play some of those games, too, but Game Guard makes that impossible. I've found 1000 ways to get around problems with games over the years, but Game Guard. . .~shudders~ It even kept me from playing a game I actually paid money for. Poof! Goodbye money. And no, I'm not a hacker, never been a hacker, never gonna be a hacker. Hacking is cheating, and cheating is for losers. :D Yes, I've unplugged everything possible and turned off everything you can turn off. No matter what I've tried, Game Guard is the DEVIL! ~makes a warding gesture~

Did I mention that I farking hate Game Guard?

Originally posted by needalife214

think GW2 will not be under NCsoft    but im suprised at this and hope GW2 will not be heavily affected

It will be, ArenaNet is owned by NCSoft

Jeff Strain wasnt working on GW2 , so i dont think GW2 will be affected much

Who cares about Aion, it's another Pay to Play money sucking time sink.

I'm sure there's more to it than we are being told.

Mark my words, GW2 will not be free to play, now that Jeff is gone.

NCSoft is just like all the rest, give me your credit card so we can use and abuse you.

NCSoft doesn't care about gamers, they care about $$$, unlike Jeff.

I personally will follow Jeff , just like I did with him leaving WoW and same for GW's.

I hope the next project he works on; he sticks to his ideals and leaves the Money Grubbers out of it.

You should consider yourself lucky they don't charge a subscription on top of an RMT item mall.

For me, I think the timing of these departures close to Aion release might imply a little corporate drama.

As someone mentioned before, I reckon they've intentionally held back GW2 so it doesn't steal Aion's thunder. If Arenanet had their way, I reckon it would have been released by now but the game's been held on a leash under heavy quarantine. As a big liker of Guild Wars, I confess I'm a little nervous as to the future of GW2 even under assurance, because even if we don't need to worry about the game becoming vaporware, some of us might be rightly concerned about the direction that GW2 will go.

There's hardly any info on the game and for all we know it could become subscription/MT based, and I never liked the idea of creating many racial characters like Charr and Asuras. It sounds too WOW to me.

i  think some people confuse David Reid with Mike O'brien.

From the 3 founders of Anet only Jeff left, and he already didnt work for Anet anymore

Originally posted by Leucrotta

i  think some people confuse David Reid with Mike O'brien.

 

From the 3 founders of Anet only Jeff left, and he already didnt work for Anet anymore

Agree completely.  People are assuming that because these people did good by certain projects in the past that they are somehow still currently attached to either those projects or their predecessors.  I am pretty sure both these guys were upper management people and really would not effect the outcome of games in development.  Though Paragon Studios, Arena.net, and Carbine Studios are all owned by NCSoft, but they are all given enough free reign that changes in upper management don't effect them all that much.  It seems like a loss do to these guys past accomplishments, but perhaps they were doing all that well in what was there current positions.  We don't know, but we all seem to like to jump to conclusions quite quickly based on assumptions rather than facts.

Originally posted by Kushiel666

Originally posted by Leucrotta

i  think some people confuse David Reid with Mike O'brien.

 

From the 3 founders of Anet only Jeff left, and he already didnt work for Anet anymore

 

Agree completely.  People are assuming that because these people did good by certain projects in the past that they are somehow still currently attached to either those projects or their predecessors.  I am pretty sure both these guys were upper management people and really would not effect the outcome of games in development.  Though Paragon Studios, Arena.net, and Carbine Studios are all owned by NCSoft, but they are all given enough free reign that changes in upper management don't effect them all that much.  It seems like a loss do to these guys past accomplishments, but perhaps they were doing all that well in what was there current positions.  We don't know, but we all seem to like to jump to conclusions quite quickly based on assumptions rather than facts.

Funny someone without a clue would be mouthing off about facts and ignoring assumptions.

They weren't just some guys in upper management, THEY WERE UPPER MANAGEMENT. They have been running ncwest for almost a year. You idiots suck down that pr bullshit like it's the sweet nectar of infallible truth. As of right now, ncwest is now in the hands of a few unknown koreans shipped directly from korea. This may or may not be a good thing depending on your view of things, but you have to be pretty stupid to think this won't effect anything just because some press release said so. This is the korean method of doing business, and it works fine in korea, but time and time again it has shown to rub westerners the wrong way. 

Tell me, seriously, what was the point of delaying aion for 6 months to "westernize" it and build a team committed to the western world and then basically replacing the heads of that team with some faceless koreans a month before the game is released?

Hi all,
I wanted to take a moment to offer my personal note on Jeff's departure.
Jeff is a personal friend of mine. We worked together very closely from the time he joined Blizzard in 1996, through our founding of ArenaNet in 2000, until he left ArenaNet to join NCsoft West in 2008. I'm sad to see him leaving NCsoft now. We remain good friends and I wish him great success in his next endeavor.
It's important to understand that ArenaNet is a separate and self-contained development studio. Jeff hasn't been involved in the day-to-day development of Guild Wars 2 since he left ArenaNet more than a year ago, and I don't expect his departure to have a direct impact on our studio or on Guild Wars 2. I continue to lead ArenaNet, and I'm not going anywhere.
We have an amazing team here at ArenaNet, and we continue to work hard on Guild Wars 2, preparing for the day when we can first reveal it to the world. That day is coming very soon now. I'm confident that, when you see Guild Wars 2 for the first time, you're going to love what you see, and any worries you have about its development will fade away.
--Mike O'Brien 01:56, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

thx a lot, that was a relief.

Funny how official PR = epic fail and O'Brian can do better with a simple reply...
 

This does not change our plans or negatively impact our upcoming launch of Aion

Thx, but Aion can go to hell.
I want Guild Wars 2, imo it will be the next WoW.

Originally posted by VowOfSilence

 

Hi all,
I wanted to take a moment to offer my personal note on Jeff's departure.
Jeff is a personal friend of mine. We worked together very closely from the time he joined Blizzard in 1996, through our founding of ArenaNet in 2000, until he left ArenaNet to join NCsoft West in 2008. I'm sad to see him leaving NCsoft now. We remain good friends and I wish him great success in his next endeavor.
It's important to understand that ArenaNet is a separate and self-contained development studio. Jeff hasn't been involved in the day-to-day development of Guild Wars 2 since he left ArenaNet more than a year ago, and I don't expect his departure to have a direct impact on our studio or on Guild Wars 2. I continue to lead ArenaNet, and I'm not going anywhere.
We have an amazing team here at ArenaNet, and we continue to work hard on Guild Wars 2, preparing for the day when we can first reveal it to the world. That day is coming very soon now. I'm confident that, when you see Guild Wars 2 for the first time, you're going to love what you see, and any worries you have about its development will fade away.
--Mike O'Brien 01:56, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

 

 

thx a lot, that was a relief.

Funny how official PR = epic fail and O'Brian can do better with a simple reply...
 

 

This does not change our plans or negatively impact our upcoming launch of Aion

 

Thx, but Aion can go to hell.
I want Guild Wars 2, imo it will be the next WoW.

Thank you very much for clearing things up Mike.. you're my hero! (luv GW) ^_^
 

Originally posted by Maggnet

To pour some more water on the rumour mill:

when you look at Aion you will recognize, that it uses GameGuard. A hacking prevention system used primary by korean MMOs. The system is totaly crappy, the aion beta forum was full of error reports concerning GG and the people tried to make pressure to solve the problem or superior: remove GG completely from the game, because it behaves like a root kit.

What happend? Nothing happend till today, it wasn't even added to the known bugs list!

This is a beavior I found to appear in a lot of korean free to play MMOs: inconvenient but importent problems are successively beeing ignored.

I'm curious if they'll keep this behavior up. At the comming weekend there will be the next beta event and the betaboard with the buglists will be open again.

I ask myself if the shown problem management of NCSoft is highly influenced by the korean management and if it will find entrance as a general behaviour to the customers of NC Soft

I posted this in reply to the mention of NC Soft being more and more dominated by the Korean management.
 

To update my post:

Yesterday did the 6th beta event start and the known bugs list still doesn't contain a word about the problems concerning GameGuard.

In addition comes, that the bug list is very similar to the last one and contains only a very, very small fraction of the reported bugs and a lot of minor bugs like translation mistakes, whereas a lot of major bugs are not mentioned.

As I said before a behavior I found in a lot of Korean MMOs.

 maybe then ncsoft will hire some new blood with new ideas. and make a game I really want to play. certainly hasn't happened so far.

I can see 2 things from this considering that Aion is a pretty big dissapointment. Either they were moved/letgo due to some restructuring because they pushed the game out too early. After all now they are the perfect fall guy because they are no longer with NCsoft

Or they left because they are upset at Aion's outcome and are leaving the ship just as it started sinking

Originally posted by grndzro

considering that Aion is a pretty big dissapointment.

How is it dissapointing?

Originally posted by Spaceweed10

I would imagine GW2 has been thrown in the bin.  Hardly surprising since GW1 was a huge embarrassment to the MMO genre.

No loss here.

This people, is a textbook troll. Learn to dismiss it as such.

Originally posted by Spaceweed10

I would imagine GW2 has been thrown in the bin.  Hardly surprising since GW1 was a huge embarrassment to the MMO genre.

No loss here.

Ah, so it being ready for release "very soon" according to the lead developer and the original having sold 6 million and counting, I can totally see why.

Seems to me you need a new imagination.

Originally posted by bjgladitsch

well there goes GW2...was wondering why there have been no updates on its development the past 6 months. I love GW...and was looking forward to it.  But with both co-founders gone....I dont see GW2 coming out now

Jeff have left Arenanet a year ago and not worked on GW2 since then, other people are working on it...

Hi all,

I wanted to take a moment to offer my personal note on Jeff's departure.

Jeff is a personal friend of mine. We worked together very closely from the time he joined Blizzard in 1996, through our founding of ArenaNet in 2000, until he left ArenaNet to join NCsoft West in 2008. I'm sad to see him leaving NCsoft now. We remain good friends and I wish him great success in his next endeavor.

It's important to understand that ArenaNet is a separate and self-contained development studio. Jeff hasn't been involved in the day-to-day development of Guild Wars 2 since he left ArenaNet more than a year ago, and I don't expect his departure to have a direct impact on our studio or on Guild Wars 2. I continue to lead ArenaNet, and I'm not going anywhere.

We have an amazing team here at ArenaNet, and we continue to work hard on Guild Wars 2, preparing for the day when we can first reveal it to the world. That day is coming very soon now. I'm confident that, when you see Guild Wars 2 for the first time, you're going to love what you see, and any worries you have about its development will fade away.

- Mike O'Brien

There is few guys of Jeffs talent and having him as director of NC soft west was a huge waste, I see why he got bored. I guess there is no hope that  he will go back to Arenanet. I hope he makes a new game, the only guy who makes as good games is Ray at Bioware.

Guildwars, Diablo, Warcraft 3. I have enjoyed those a lot.

But maybe Blizzard gave him an offer he couldn't refuse, they have missed them, the Blizzard games have not been the same since he left. I rather hope he starts a new company like Arenanet again.

Edit: Ooops, I didn't see this was posted before, It was a lot of things to read thru and I onle read the first pages...

Originally posted by Loke666

Edit: Ooops, I didn't see this was posted before, It was a lot of things to read thru and I onle read the first pages...

Yet some knobheads still don't get the message, so please continue to report it lol :P