How could you expect less? I get more and more irritated with this pancake everytime a week passes and no news. I guess I don't understand why they simply can't sell the property they own and are not making a dime on it at all while it sits.
Someone there needs to take note of all the rage and desperation here and push things along.
Well, actually,
WE Don't Know if they are profiting from the closure. WE just don't have a good idea HOW they could be profiting IF they are.
For all we know they could have some sort of deal with their stockholders, like; the stockholders will lend an extra 10% (or give 10% debt forgiveness, or cancel the need for NCSoft to pay interest on past stocks).
From what it sounds like, we are assuming ONE of the possible reasons for CoX's shutdown was the financial backers led by Nexon calling foul and demanding the closure of the small profit titles to maximize their stock earnings. IF, IF that were true, then it would stand to reason that in an M,M (Money for Money) market the only bargaining tools would be Money. Naturally they'd make an offer of increased Money to NCSoft without interest in exchange for the shutdown of smaller titles, because in their mind they see "I pay you # million now, the interest rate goes up and you will continually pay me more than that over time".
AKA the broken capitalist model of M for M+ (Read Karl Marx's works, its the start of financial fascism because it's the sign of a deteriorating capitalist market)
to reference Marx, fascism is the distortion of capitalism, communism is the distortion of socialism. Also from marx and others, Money is a representation of labor to produce goods and services. The best model is C,C (Commodity for Commodity) AKA trade & bartering. however that isn't always possible, so money was created as a way to exchange goods for a neutral value that could be exchanged for anything, then this is exchanged for another commodity eventually. This model is CMC (Commodity for Money For Commodity), it's a modified and functional model of CC.
Marx says Capitalism forms when the model flips to MCM (Money for a Commodity for Money) this usually means Buying Labor aka becoming a 'capitalist'. The Laborer could work for him/her self and whatever they made they got to keep, however if someone buys your labor then they get to decide how much of your profits (including any surplus you made) that you get to keep and how much they take away for doing relatively nothing except organizing the group of laborers. In the MCM model they are in it for MCM+ (money for commodity for MORE money) so you will not get your surplus and they may not even pay you a decent working salary. Eventually people forget what money represents and end up creating money inflating groups (M for M+) such as offering interest and trading currencies, they cut out the labor and commodity directly and believe they can use money to get more money, this is a fascist financial market as stated by Karl Marx.
This is my evidence to support my claim made above about the POSSIBILITY that NCSoft is being paid to cancel less productive titles, not to say CoX was a poor profit game, it just didn't even-out with the other games. Stocks work off the overall profit or loss of the company as a whole, so the stockholders naturally want to make it easier to calculate their ability to profit by balancing out the profits from all games in the company as much as possible. This even means extremes such as pruning an incredibly highly successful title if it is too much more successful than the other titles owned by that company.
As rich people Lie, "if you want to be rich, then take risks" what they really mean is "if you want to be rich do M,M+ and take a risky situation and use your money to blackmail the risk into a situation where it's no longer risky."
What else could be the reason why NCSoft don't seem to care much or take it seriously, Yes Exactly as you said! CoX represents a Value, the longer that value sits without being used the more losses NCSoft is taking because that is money they COULD be making.
Time is a commodity as well, failing to make proper use of your time when you have it creates losses!
The only valid consolation is that NCSoft must be receiving compensation for their losses in exchange for the fact that those losses are taking place to keep the company's overall profits streamlined and predictable.
We must remember NCSoft is the Capitalist (MCM+), and they are being Bullied and blackmailed by the Fascists(M,M+)
The terms they agreed to to get the compensation for their losses obviously didn't stop them from selling the title, so long as it doesn't become an active money making value in their company, they can sell it and have someone else profit from it and continue to get the compensation for not profiting from it themselves.
There is a red line there, that by selling the game they would technically be making profits from it, and sudden profits at that, this would create an unforeseen spike in stock price, no matter how small, this may cause the M,M+ people to call foul.
That being said, there is a way around it, which is to split the deal up into small segments and payments, only 10000 easy payments of $99.99 one for each development phase! In this way there is no sudden profit spike and thus no complaints from the fascist bullies. It also means the deal will go down VERY SLOWLY. Which is bad for us who so badly want the game back in the short term.
There is also a mauve line that the M,M+ bullies may try to call the deal out on and I'm sure NCSoft knows they may try it (Hence the NDA on the deal), the M,M+ bullies could say "We only offered you the extra profits if you
own that game and keep it dead" even though the words in red were not in the agreements nor agreed-to and may have only been loosely hinted to at all during any part of the process. This may require a short legal proceeding or a settlement, for all we know OUR deal could be done and NCSoft is just preparing an 'instant' rebuttal against this claim so they don't have to spend time in court.
ANOTHER Possibility is that because NCSoft is being paid to keep the game dead, they are looking at our deal in an unrealistic sense. kinda like if you were to take a blueprint for some nice machine to a company that doesn't make machines or has no need for the profits, so they are just extra. They will eyeball it say "this is very nice" then hold a meeting where it's discussed QUICKLY and determined that "we aren't loosing anything from not doing it, we will still make money in the current market from not doing it, it's a nice thought, but may be only wishful thinking until the situation changes. lets not put any effort into it till we think we need to."
The best option I would like to think is happening is that everything is going smoothly and it's just taking a while to reconfigure the server and add/remove whatever it is they need to add/remove to make it work.
For all we know they could be mulling over something like finishing the incarnate content, or finishing the next issue so the game isn't left looking like it's in a state of forever unfinished limbo. Remember the Paragon dev team halted making new content the moment the shutdown was announced so there's probably a lot of stuff that's unfinished. It's not like they can ask the paragon team what they were going to do either, that would require getting them all together and letting them hammer that out. And they probably don't have time to do that, or wont do that for free and when I say 'free' I mean it's kinda bad ethically, like not politically correct 'kinda bad'; to ask your former employees (whom you fired for their work on a game and gave them no other employment opportunities effectively dropping them on the street) to come back in and finish some content they never got to before you fired them with a kinda slap in the face note "no, this doesn't mean you have a job here again, and this work is only temporary till you're done."
So, NCSoft and our crew could very well be hammering that out carefully making sure to try and keep things in the same light and such that the paragon dev team would have done. That will take a lot of research, time and effort. Remember it's not like they can just "get the game back and go", this is a game that will be set to AUTO RUN ITSELF and there will be NO FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES for it after this final reconfiguring stage.
They probably have a list of things needing to be done!
1: fix the core level bugs in the code. (the server CANNOT successfully run itself if they are there, they'd need to pay GMs to get people unstuck and kill sticky missions etc.)
2: get it into a state where it can run itself and needs little if any maintenance. (more than just bugs, the server maintenance they always did will still have to be done, but they need to establish WHAT the list of maintenance things to be done IS and program that into a moderating program which will run the server and kill it and run it again when necessary.
3: switch who the shop pays out to, and switch the shops URL location, and set-up the new shop
4: Reconfigure the profit scheme - we all whine about it, but they probably will do it, However they probably wont change it so much that it offends anyone, probably just minor changes so you can't get all the new Nicey stuff for free just for being a vip and saving up your monthly store points..
and that's all I can think of, but there could be more.
but this is just Educated [AND CITED] speculation, it's an Educated Guess, and could be Very Wrong.
This concludes my statement on HOW NCSoft COULD be profiting from the closure and possibly how it MIGHT but MAY NOT BE effecting our deal.
To be very clear, this post is meant to attempt to clarify certain possibilities WHILE asserting the very important point that Although I may have /a/ citation this time, I actually don't know ANY inside information about the deal, as such it's just a guess and could be and should be considered as WRONG until the time comes that it is shown to be right or wrong by the deal finally being FINISHED.
