The critical thing I wish NCSoft would see is that Wildstar tried to appeal to the old-school raiding crowd and long-time MMOers-- exactly the people most likely to have been around long enough to have been burned by the closure of other NCSoft games in the past, or to have experienced the "overrun with gold farmers and lag since beta" way that they run their games that are still up, like Lineage 2 NA and Aion NA. And of course those are the very same people that wouldn't touch NCSoft's games with a 10-foot pole nowadays.
And according to their current Glass Door reviews, they're still just as bad as ever to work for. http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/NCsoft-Reviews-E23242.htm
The attitude that, after all this time, they refuse to try and understand the western market is the one that concerns me most. It doesn't bode well for any future for CoX:
"NCSOFT is a hostile environment with constant chaos and confusion which they call "reorganization." One of the core values is "never ending change," which translates to "never commit to any direction and abuse your employees by constantly changing their reporting structure, job duties, and priorities." They've repeated the same mistakes every couple of years since I've been here and refuse to accept that gaming in the West is different than in Korea and our customers aren't the same. They want to do everything the same as they do in Korea, which doesn't work here, but they are too stubborn and prideful to admit it."
I seriously hope the same thing with regards to what they see with Wildstar and where it was going wrong. Old-school mmorpgs in reality are not as popular as people seem to insist they are. Even WoW is when you consider it, just a single game. When you look at so many games out there and the sheer number of actual players, mmorpgs are actually on the lower end of the number of players in popularity. The fact that only one game has players in the millions range should say more there, especially with so many mmorpgs being near-clones of WoW. I'm often baffled by how many players can still see a WoW-like game as different than WoW just on the appearance.
Which generally means that they are trying to make a game compete with WoW that essentially copies WoW. That isn't going to work.
And equally baffled many will say X is a WoW clone when X doesn't happen to be. City of heroes had that problem, some would mistake it for one, bring WoW tactics in, and get a rude awakening then either really enjoy it or get mad they cannot be the attackless healer they wanted to be all that effectively, or that every mob but counsol and freaks were "to hard" when in reality, they never adapted any variety of tactics outside of the trinity.
But these same players go to developers and ask for their game to be playable with WoW tactics. This creates the first problem above.
Then of course there is the mismanagement issue, but then that generally results in rushed projects and further degrades the quality of the games being made when they are trying to copy WoW as it is by request of players or publisher. :/
Until some big mmorpg publishers really realise that things like the trinity, extreme grinds, and gambit-roulette-plan-reliant raids are not actually that popular I personally think mmorpgs are going to continue down that path of becoming a game genre most people really don't want to get into.
