The evidence is that NCsoft wanted City of Heroes to go away quickly and quietly, but more than that, it expected it. The game, the developers, the players, they thought it would take nothing more than a letter to the studio and a flip of a switch for something that is to become something that was. In assuming so, they made a mistake, one in a long, long line, and not even the latest. The latest mistake was to pretend they made none to begin with - to defend their conviction with fanatical zealotry, to decide, against all evidence, that City of Heroes will and has simply ended, with no loose ends, no consequences for them. I don't see them admitting it - not publicly, not to themselves. It would shatter their pride, and the loose ends they're being whipped with and the flood of consequences washing their house away, if they close their eyes and cover their ears, they can believe, honestly believe, that they were, and always be right.
It is my belief that City of Heroes was shut down as a face-saving maneuver for NCSoft. The website with
NCSoft reviews by employees brings up, several times, that management sticks strongly to Korean cultural norms. In Korean culture, it is very hard for a Korean to admit failure, and it is almost unforgivable to fail a superior -- a subordinate may simply avoid bringing news of a failure to a superior, even if they're only the messenger, with no connection to the failure. Additionally, it is personally devastating to lose face, and the ability to read another's state of mind to read the true sense of what is being conveyed in an exchange regardless of what is
said -- a concept referred to as "
nunchi", is essential in business dealings.
What does this have to do with City of Heroes? Look at NCSoft's stable of games. Their bread and butter is the group of MMOs that they run in Korea, China, and Japan; Korean-style MMOs all share a number of basic characteristics. They're not designed around the single player at their home computer; MMOs in Korea began with cyber cafes, where playing an MMO was a social experience with your friends
at the cyber cafe, and continues to reflect this -- you don't sit in your room, log into the game, meet up with your guild, and do a quest, you go down to the cyber cafe, meet up with your guild, log into the game, and do a quest. The cyber cafes began with dial-up network access, which meant that graphically intensive games would strain or crash their bandwidth, so a cyber cafe would have only a few games on its computers, and they would not be complicated graphically (for example, one of the costs associated with NCSoft's rollout of Aion was paying cyber cafes to upgrade their computers to be able to run it). Early MMOs in Korea had limited storylines and engame content, so they kept players busy with large amounts of grinding -- repeating content over and over again either to advance a skill or to get a particular rare item that drops with a low probability from only a single particular mob; this playstyle has become the norm for Korean-style MMOs, oriented around people grinding in an MMO for a block of time with their friends in a cyber cafe. Quests couldn't give big rewards, because there weren't that many of them, and big rewards would create dissatisfaction with the grinding of the rest of the game, and much of the content was designed around the
expectation that you would be playing with a group of your friends, so the amount of solo-friendly content was even more limited. Open-world PvP was another way that the paucity of actual game content could be disguised, so an emphasis on PvP also became fixtures of Korean MMOs.
Western computer culture, on the other hand, had individual players at home connecting to the game server and socializing within the game server; the members of a guild could be scattered all across the country, and there was much more of a 'play when you have time' attitude, rather than the more structured 'go out and play as a group' socializing in Korea. Broadband was more widely available, so more graphically-intensive games like SW:G, Everquest 2, and WoW attracted players that they couldn't get in Korea, with the limited connections available at the cyber cafes of the time.
City of Heroes is about as close to an anthithesis of the Korean-style MMO as you're going to find -- the vast majority of the content can be done either solo or in a team, scaling the opposition to match your group, with few exceptions there are no 'single-source' loot drops, rewards drop to individual characters, not to the world where the group has to spend additional time arguing about who gets what rare drop
this time (with the accompanying rarity of 'bind on pickup' drops, which further softens the hunt for particular drops), and it's quite possible to make it through the entire game without ever buying anything from the in-game store -- a feat which is well-nigh impossible for many Korean-style MMOs, which keep players scrambling to obtain the gear to keep themselves from falling behind the power curve.
NCSoft has brought a number of MMOs to the Western market that are fundamentally Korean in their play style, and by and large these MMOs have done poorly; they are essentially unchanged from their Korean releases, with only a 'localization package' to change the language to English. Each time they release a new MMO, it attracts a flood of new players attracted by the 'new shiny', then the population begins to drain away as the grindy and solo-hostile nature of the game becomes apparent, alienating players who want a more casual game. While this has been going on, City of Heroes has continued, turning a steady but not impressive profit.
This creates the appearance of a lack of
nunchi on the part of NCSoft. They keep bringing games to the Western market that all share similar playstyles, and these games do poorly, while another of their games -- that is the
opposite of that playstyle in so many ways -- is successful. It makes them look as if they can't figure out
why City of Heroes has kept its following -- that they can't 'read' their customer base.
Killing City of Heroes eliminates the inconvenient counterexample. With it gone, NCSoft can return to bringing to the Western market its bread-and-butter grindfest MMOs, and convince itself that it's the
subject, not the
playstyle, that turns Western gamers off from their games. It preserves the
kibun -- the face, or harmony, or balance -- of NCSoft by not having CoH shoving itself in their face pointing up the fact that the Western MMO market
isn't the Korean MMO market, and they can't just transplant games to the Western market and expect that, if they find the right
subject, we'll all suddenly recognize the inherent superiority of the Korean-style MMO and flock to play it in droves.
And the
way that NCSoft handled the shutdown of City of Heroes shows that they do not -- or don't care to bother -- understand the difference between Korean and Western culture. Korean culture places a strong element on
accepting your position in a power hierarchy relative to those above you; you may not
like your superiors, but they must be shown respect and their decisions accepted. NCSoft's announcement that City of Heroes did not fit with their plans for the future of the company was a very Korean announcement, tailored to be neutral and avoid any implication of failure on the part of the game. Similarly, the Paragon Studios staff coming in on Friday and being hit with pink slips is also very Korean -- firing is often done 'out of the blue' on Fridays; this saves face for the employees by not making them come back and having to face their failure. NCSoft's subsequent announcement that they had "exhausted all opportunities" to sell the game was another quintissentially-Korean declaration, presenting a neutral and face-saving account to preserve
kibun on both sides; from our subordinate position relative to them, we were expected to accept the declaration and go off quietly and stop dragging their face in the mud.
Unfortunately, this falls into the cultural divide between Korean and Western cultures. Korean cultures focus on harmony in relationships, even when honesty gets sacrificed in its preservation; Western cultures prize honesty, even when it causes friction. With its bland, content-free announcements, we see NCSoft as lying to us, either overtly or by omission, and that offends our sensibilities -- we feel as if we're being treated like fools. NCSoft, on the other hand, is showing over and over again that they can't be
bothered to even
consider that there are other cultures that don't work the same way -- they're proceeding according to
their cultural precepts, and it's
us who are not responding appropriately. They are in the superior position relative to their customers, and they've made the appropriate
kibun-preserving nonstatements about the shutdown, and we're supposed to just accept it, go away, and not bother them.
