The final news post that caught my eye this weekend was about the Neverwinter Gateway having been shut down for good. (Gotta remember to remove that link on the side bar...) For those who didn't know, this was basically Neverwinter's "companion app", letting you access your professions from out of game, enabling you to prevent your celestial coins from disappearing if you couldn't log in (back when that was a thing), and offering the Sword Coast Adventures mini game, where you rolled dice to let your companions explore some small dungeons for loot.
I can't say that I'm personally very saddened by this, as I only ever used it a couple of times, such as to get the little white quality dog pet. But I find it interesting that during a time when people talk about mobile add-ons to MMOs clearly being the future (when even Blizzard does it, it must be so), companies that have had this sort of feature for a while are actually shutting it down again. Cryptic's reasoning was pretty much that it was too much effort for all the abuse it attracted, and RIFT already stopped work on its mobile companion app three years ago.
Darn, this is sad news. That was such a good website! It does seem to be a loss-leader to create such an app - perhaps Rift and the NW Gateway gave away more than they probably should have. So sad that these tools for players attract the botters so. I wonder whether the WoW Companion will last beyond Legion or whether it too will be a costly experiment for Blizzard?
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've seen the Legion app seems to be pretty safe for this expansion, but this may very well have been part of the reason they didn't make one for Garrisons. The Garrison missions caused crazy inflation as it is, now imagine if people had been able to collect their money even without logging in...
DeleteI've been thinking that Neverwinter might be ahead of the game, given that I expect the app ended up being used by a small percentage of players, the hardcore of the bunch. From what I've seen over the years, the highest percentage of hardcore players to overall players still resides with WoW, so Blizzard expanding their mobile app makes sense. Other games, maybe not so much.
ReplyDeleteStill, there's an undercurrent of shakeup in the MMO field. Blizzard is abandoning their battle.net branding, and there's a steady stream of concern on Gen Chat whether Turbine will be able to re-obtain the LotR license in 2017.
I hadn't heard about the battle.net thing, thanks for making me google it. :P
DeleteI'm not convinced you're correct pegging the app users as hardcore. After all mobile anything is very much the domain of the casual - the hardcore are actually at their PCs playing the "proper" game. :P