Post by AKFrost on Dec 1, 2014 18:38:28 GMT -5
Let me just begin by saying today, having almost all of the details of this particular story, I still don't know what to think.
Softstar being a pain in the ass was there since I was first inducted into the GS ranks in 2008. Frequently, I would document an issue in both english and chinese, send them screenshots, and they'll completely misdiagnose the problem or just pretend they didn't see it.
Did you know that the Dragon's Den quests have a part 2? After you finish your shit for the recycling brothers, Hermione was supposed to send you on a further quest that would have ended with you receiving a 50-60 wrist onyx, slot 2. In fact, the description for this quest was even written into the in-game Mirror World guide.
I took pictures of that. I took pains explaining, in english and chinese, that we don't have this quest and that hermione never did shit when you spoke to her, but for a year and half Softstar kept thinking I was talking about the T3, which was named "Hermione's Expedition".
Really puts a perspective in it when the devs know their own damn game less than you do, doesn't it?
When Aeria announced the server merge, they were doing well enough. Eden Eternal was a huge success, and they were on the prowl for more acquisitions. Softstar on the other hand seemed to suffer one failure after another. Their new offerings were going nowhere. Some flatly failed before Open Beta. All their foreign affiliates are shutting down their domo servers, and Aeria was the only one remaining.
I also know that while they enforced the name collision rule on players, they never did for guilds, and that did cause quite a pain in the ass during their own server merges. In the end, they kind of winged it for their own server.
As for patching support from softstar. None of the feature requests we sent were ever honored. They just gave stuff to us wily-nily. Especially annoying was the lack of double exp in the placid towers, which would have removed much of babel's congestion.
So, at the time, I 100% believed that softstar was just not going to bother with the guild collision issue anytime soon, and that the merge couldn't proceed without it. whether Aeria was trying to do something about it, I can't say for certain.
After Vent resigned, the GM's became only part time, working on both DOMO and megaten. I'll be frank. At this point I didn't even believe anybody had much faith left in DOMO. The game had no new content, nor any prospect of new content for a year now. We had that kind of droughts before, but at least then we could look to TW for some hope. None of that remained.
For me, the implication was clear. Nothing is going to stop domo dying.
Maybe at this point, Aeria stopped caring about the merge. I personally thought they should have just went ahead and merged. If there's guild collisions, they should have fixed it manually. Hell, they could have given me a test cert and I would have fixed it for them (spoiler: they did give me test certs on live briefly, no I didn't abuse it.) Maybe some people would have lost their time records, or even inactive members, but you know what? I would have argued it was an acceptable loss.
But no, I was told only SS could merge the servers, which I ended up believing. Aeria had engineers, but they were all front-end people and their back-end bugs rarely got fixed in time. Even I, a Berkeley-trained Computer Scientist, would not have the confidence to merge databases that were probably non-standard (Even in 2008, Aeria was utterly relucant to edit the database directly, citing that every time they tried, something fucked up badly).
So things came and went. At one point Test broke down so hard that logging out wiped your inventory, and of course we were told there's basically no chance of that getting fixed, so I got into the habit of remaking characters and spawning everything manually, and not leaving anything logged out if i don't need to (my landlord was paying for electricity, not me, so I could afford around the clock afk).
I remember that forum blowup about server merge, of course, but at that point, I thought it was a pointless manuever. Softstar hasn't shown any sign of life for a year now. IC was mostly abandoned. Their forums are a ghost town. It looked to me as though they were ready to run Aeria's contract out and close down their online division. If Vent couldn't get the merge out of them, it just wasn't happening.
And then came the close. I'll be frank, I felt more relief about that than sadness. It was completely senseless and cruel to keep the players waiting for something that'll never be.
(As an aside to GSes: I did not know officially about the closure earlier than you. I just guessed that was the case about five months prior.)
In any case, this would have been my end conclusion, but softstar made several unpredicted moves.
First, they released a level cap raise after literally 5 years of waiting. Then, they decided to continue the MQ, which had zero progress since the P2P days. While the MQ thing didn't pan out. It sure felt to me that Softstar was making a statement that they were still committed to DOMO, but perhaps not Aeria's DOMO. At this point I still thought maybe they just wanted to keep their own server (after all, it was 'International' Chinese, meaning it was meant to serve the entire globe).
They then proved that wrong by licensing to Gamecyber (Also known as the HK publisher that drove Grand Fantasia into the ground). It sure sounds like a repudiation of Aeria, but I didn't give it much thought since I already put it behind me and was GSing for Grand Fantasia at that point.
Then, Aeria imploded. Their entire business was moved or sold (I think sold) overseas to Germany. The facts of the matter, now, are that Softstar's fine and dandy, and Aeria is the one that died. My initial assumptions about the two companies may have been wrong all along.
I began wondering just how much of this affair was Aeria just pretending it was doing something, and that it was softstar that lost faith in Aeria and didn't support it, or, even worse, that Aeria never actually passed on any support requests. It was just as possible that around the time Vent resigned, Aeria was already in a death spiral and it was eager to divest as much baggage as possible and only retain the profiting games. If that was the case, they intentionally mislead everyone about the plans with the game, and was just trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of DOMO.
Thoughts?
Softstar being a pain in the ass was there since I was first inducted into the GS ranks in 2008. Frequently, I would document an issue in both english and chinese, send them screenshots, and they'll completely misdiagnose the problem or just pretend they didn't see it.
Did you know that the Dragon's Den quests have a part 2? After you finish your shit for the recycling brothers, Hermione was supposed to send you on a further quest that would have ended with you receiving a 50-60 wrist onyx, slot 2. In fact, the description for this quest was even written into the in-game Mirror World guide.
I took pictures of that. I took pains explaining, in english and chinese, that we don't have this quest and that hermione never did shit when you spoke to her, but for a year and half Softstar kept thinking I was talking about the T3, which was named "Hermione's Expedition".
Really puts a perspective in it when the devs know their own damn game less than you do, doesn't it?
When Aeria announced the server merge, they were doing well enough. Eden Eternal was a huge success, and they were on the prowl for more acquisitions. Softstar on the other hand seemed to suffer one failure after another. Their new offerings were going nowhere. Some flatly failed before Open Beta. All their foreign affiliates are shutting down their domo servers, and Aeria was the only one remaining.
I also know that while they enforced the name collision rule on players, they never did for guilds, and that did cause quite a pain in the ass during their own server merges. In the end, they kind of winged it for their own server.
As for patching support from softstar. None of the feature requests we sent were ever honored. They just gave stuff to us wily-nily. Especially annoying was the lack of double exp in the placid towers, which would have removed much of babel's congestion.
So, at the time, I 100% believed that softstar was just not going to bother with the guild collision issue anytime soon, and that the merge couldn't proceed without it. whether Aeria was trying to do something about it, I can't say for certain.
After Vent resigned, the GM's became only part time, working on both DOMO and megaten. I'll be frank. At this point I didn't even believe anybody had much faith left in DOMO. The game had no new content, nor any prospect of new content for a year now. We had that kind of droughts before, but at least then we could look to TW for some hope. None of that remained.
For me, the implication was clear. Nothing is going to stop domo dying.
Maybe at this point, Aeria stopped caring about the merge. I personally thought they should have just went ahead and merged. If there's guild collisions, they should have fixed it manually. Hell, they could have given me a test cert and I would have fixed it for them (spoiler: they did give me test certs on live briefly, no I didn't abuse it.) Maybe some people would have lost their time records, or even inactive members, but you know what? I would have argued it was an acceptable loss.
But no, I was told only SS could merge the servers, which I ended up believing. Aeria had engineers, but they were all front-end people and their back-end bugs rarely got fixed in time. Even I, a Berkeley-trained Computer Scientist, would not have the confidence to merge databases that were probably non-standard (Even in 2008, Aeria was utterly relucant to edit the database directly, citing that every time they tried, something fucked up badly).
So things came and went. At one point Test broke down so hard that logging out wiped your inventory, and of course we were told there's basically no chance of that getting fixed, so I got into the habit of remaking characters and spawning everything manually, and not leaving anything logged out if i don't need to (my landlord was paying for electricity, not me, so I could afford around the clock afk).
I remember that forum blowup about server merge, of course, but at that point, I thought it was a pointless manuever. Softstar hasn't shown any sign of life for a year now. IC was mostly abandoned. Their forums are a ghost town. It looked to me as though they were ready to run Aeria's contract out and close down their online division. If Vent couldn't get the merge out of them, it just wasn't happening.
And then came the close. I'll be frank, I felt more relief about that than sadness. It was completely senseless and cruel to keep the players waiting for something that'll never be.
(As an aside to GSes: I did not know officially about the closure earlier than you. I just guessed that was the case about five months prior.)
In any case, this would have been my end conclusion, but softstar made several unpredicted moves.
First, they released a level cap raise after literally 5 years of waiting. Then, they decided to continue the MQ, which had zero progress since the P2P days. While the MQ thing didn't pan out. It sure felt to me that Softstar was making a statement that they were still committed to DOMO, but perhaps not Aeria's DOMO. At this point I still thought maybe they just wanted to keep their own server (after all, it was 'International' Chinese, meaning it was meant to serve the entire globe).
They then proved that wrong by licensing to Gamecyber (Also known as the HK publisher that drove Grand Fantasia into the ground). It sure sounds like a repudiation of Aeria, but I didn't give it much thought since I already put it behind me and was GSing for Grand Fantasia at that point.
Then, Aeria imploded. Their entire business was moved or sold (I think sold) overseas to Germany. The facts of the matter, now, are that Softstar's fine and dandy, and Aeria is the one that died. My initial assumptions about the two companies may have been wrong all along.
I began wondering just how much of this affair was Aeria just pretending it was doing something, and that it was softstar that lost faith in Aeria and didn't support it, or, even worse, that Aeria never actually passed on any support requests. It was just as possible that around the time Vent resigned, Aeria was already in a death spiral and it was eager to divest as much baggage as possible and only retain the profiting games. If that was the case, they intentionally mislead everyone about the plans with the game, and was just trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of DOMO.
Thoughts?
