Formation of NCWest

This puts ArenaNet in the same position they were already in (subsidiary of NCSoft) but with more people to go around. They will probably keep using the ArenaNet name too, I would think. (since it's really just a bunch of companies under one new moniker)

So am I, mainly from that developer interview about it and the "hundreds of hours leveling your character" stuff.

If it comes out in beta that you need to level that much, I think Anet would be happy if they sold 100K copies of GW2.

This could speed up Gw2 or slow it down. Let's hope for the best and some clarification.

As far as Tabula Rasa is concerned the Devs on their forums stated today there are no plans to cancel it...

http://www.planettr.com/forums/showt...?t=8763&page=3

3rd post down on that page.

Anyways as far as GW is concerned I'm sure the same people are going to still be working on it, wouldn't make any sense at all to bring in a whole new dev team that would have to restart from square 1.

Is it just me or is everyone forgetting the fact that NC Soft != Anet?

Anet is a development house that publishes through NC Soft, if NC Soft tanks, I am quite sure Anet retains the ability to hunt for a new distributor, although that is a harrowing process regardless if you had billions of subscribers or not.

NC Soft is consolidating its scope, because of the NC Soft inhouse (mostly) failures of its direct distribution MMOs (Tabula Rasa probably being a primary reason). I am assuming that the British aspect toppled because of that, and the American aspect of the company was doing fairly well, so they cut the fat and consolidated, renaming it for fancy-sake. Perhaps they offered a few prominent Anet founders the opportunity to get into the publishing business, and they accepted, looking at their own personal goals and potentially the ability to earmark their own former projects.

Either way, NCWests success depends upon its published products, in house and outside developers (Anet), so unless NC West completely guffs up the ideas in a poorly planned change of business practice, I doubt GW fans have much to worry about.

But now who are we supposed to blame for the world ending? "A Net" just rolled off the tongue nicely; "ENN CEE WEST" is a mouthful. :S

Wrong. At all times ANet was owned by NC Soft. They are not just the publisher.

I don't see the problem. Looks like NC West is basically Anet with added people. 2 out of the 4 leading people were working with Anet and one more has worked for them. And they are going to Seattle, probably into the building Anet is in at the moment already. If anything it is good news for GW2.

NC West doesnt sound as smooth like Arenanet did.

Got to love these forums, the world is always ending here. I read the articles, and what I take from it is the head people at NCSoft didn't like the way it was being run by the old people, so they got fired or placed somewhere else and they liked the way Guild Wars was being run so they promoted two key people from Arena Net to make their western teams better under their supervision. And I wonder why they said Tabula Rasa is going to be killed off, I thought it had a few hundred thousand subscribers and that is more than enough to run an MMO. Hell, that would have been a big success if not for a game called World of Warcraft.

Here is something from Regina:

Now we QQ to Nc not anet

As someone who has spent the equal of a pay to play game on GW, and is thoroughly miffed over a number of areas - I can see why this could happen.

I can confirm Tabula Rasa was a piece of shit. From rocky start to barely being called a finish. I'm interested in what this means for Anet and whether or not it will have any affect on the guildwars franchise.

<_<....comments like this with no substantive evidence (because THERE IS NO INFORMATION) are just stupid. Keep them in your pie hole until at least beta.

Anyway, I'm not really concerned at all about the merger. ANet doesn't have to move as all the other people have to move to Seattle. Hopefully, they don't add many people to GW2 to bog it down.

And people are misguided if they find this move punitive on ANet for any reason (Ursan nerf, playing to small minority, that bs). Obviously, the move to Seattle shows that they value the creation of GW2 above the Europe operations and the running of Tabula Rasa. And the fact that Jeff Strain, Patrick Wyatt, and Chris Chung (all ANet employees, though Chris got a promotion before this one) all got promotions shows that NCSoft likes ANet's direction and I guess NCSoft wanted to make that a larger part of the NCSoft ideology. After all, the guys that sell 5 million copies of any game are clearly doing something partially right.

As it was said, there's nothing final about the future of Anet but from my perspective it seems this will be better for GW2- just my two cents.

That's nice to know

Let's hope it's good.

So NCsoft is putting all there eggs in the GW2 basket? Might be good if more funds/workers, or bad is GW2 fails.

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling.....cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck". Sometimes consolidation is a good thing folks.