Well, I have finally had some time to adjust to the pre christmas announcement from Turbine/WB.
For the few people that do not know about this announcement, here are the main points.
1. Standing Stone Games Company was created.
2. Developers from LOTRO and DDO were laid off from Turbine.
3. Developers that were laid off were hired by SSG.
4. AC and AC2 MMOs are still under the control of Turbine.
5. Turbine is now focused on phone games and not MMOs.
6. It was announced that AC/AC2 would shut down on January 31, 2017.
7. There are no private servers.
This hit like a bombshell. Everyone has been waiting for almost 3 years for Private Servers. We were told that they were coming and there were updates every so often indicating progress.
Like many others, I did not take this news well.
1. Turbine still controlled AC/AC2 however, they no longer had any AC staff.
2. SSG now controlled LOTRO and DDO. AC/AC2 was all part of those MMOs.
I presented an option to AC for maintaining the servers that was ignored.
I send Sev a private message offering some alternatives that would allow the game to be kept alive. No response yet.
The AC community is extremely upset over the situation. Where there used to be about 1200-1500 players logged on all of the AC worlds, now there are about 300-500. Many players have just left in disgust.
I, for one, plan on continuing to play until the worlds shut down.
We have no info on the reasons behind this decision. All we can do is speculate.
Maintenance costs cannot be a factor. The last time effort was spent on this was after Turbine moved the Data Center from Boston the New Jersey. That was a corporate decision.
Monthly costs for resource usage could be greatly reduced by dropping to one world.
Plain old fashioned Customer good will would be gained by keeping at least 1 world open. While I love AC, I also have 3 lifetime accounts on LOTRO and 2 Accounts on DDO.
At least my blog isn't going anywhere.
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