Stefan

Ok, lets say you own a business...selling...lightbulbs. You arent doing well. You invested a ton into a new lightbulb model and people just arent buying it. You make some changes to the lightbulb, shine it up a bit, make it prettier and get ready to launch the "new improved lightbulb model", knowing full well that if it doesnt sell well (and quickly) that you're going to have to close shop. Do you advertise with "OMG please buy this lightbulb or I'm going to have close!" or "Try out our new,improved Lightbulb! We here at Lightbulbs R Us are committed to this worth-while product and we know that you will be as well"

My bet is you'd go with the latter.

Of course NCsoft knew that unless things turned around for TR "sharpish" that it would have to be shut down. You say that to the public, however, and you've just shot any chance you had at attracting new players right in the foot.

2 months ago, they thought they had a real shot at turning TR around. Its numbers were low (very low) but they had a whole expansions worth of content additions and bug fixes that they thought could change people's minds about the game.
That didnt turn out to be the case. I mean, when you look at the "market" they are competing against - with Warhammer and the WoW expansion just gobbling up the market share- its not hard to see that people wouldnt be lured back to a "failed" game so easily.
From a business perspective, they had a game that was losing them money each day it was running. They tried to correct that, it didnt work, so they dumped the loss. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Any time you raise the lvl cap in a long standing MMO, there will be people who WERE top end raiders who are no longer top end raiders and will be pissed. We saw that with Burning Crusade and I totally understand the process. The issue I have with this xpac is that Blizzard has actually gone back and devalued items ALREADY earned by players, so that they can make the players earn them again. The infamous green armor value nerf for druids is a great example. Druids who had spent MONTHS raiding/doing heroics for badges to get top quality tanking gear suddenly had that gear's armor value basically halved, all with the notion that at "some time in the future" (read, at higher lvl in the expansion) they will be able to get armor with equivalent value.
I used to complain that all Blizz did with BC was give us a new treadmill to run on, well in WotLK, they didnt even bother with that, they just recycled the old treadmill.

I think the early MMOs, UO, EQ, AC, were much deeper and more involved than their more recent progeny. There was more to do and choices to make about how you do it. Today's MMOs seem to be, for the most part, linear experiences where you travel from zone to zone in a clear order as you gain levels, only to end up in a few top level zones with everyone else, doing the same things (raids/daily quests) for months if not years on end.
Somewhere along the line, developers realized they could sell their product without putting as much effort into the development of it as the first generation got. The new games are smaller in scope, offer quicker progression (the "hook") and almost no variation in gameplay. That trend has turned a multiplayer, role-playing genre into a series of games that are, imo, simply leveling simulators.

It would, indeed, be nice to see some non-standard themed MMOs. There have been some that have launched recently; a few pirate MMOs, a Space Marines MMO and the like, but they simply haven't done very well at all.

We fans seem to continually say "we are tired of Elves, Orc, and swords!' but when the bluff is called and its time to put the Credit info in for Subscriptions, all the top games in the field seem to be Fantasy based.

I guess what I'm saying is "there are non-fantasy MMOs out there, they just aren't doing all that well"

I imagine Blizzard's argument was that bots detract from the gaming experience of "normal" players, thus making those players less likely to renew their subscriptions. After having played through some WoW battlegrounds with what seemed to be a 90% bot population, I can attest to the accuracy of this claim. In an MMO, the real benefit from play is the interaction with other players and if those people are all bots, well, you wont really experience the content the way it was designed.

Don't you find it just a wee bit ironic that your example of a high quality casual game is one that was never launched because the Developer folded? ;)

Certainly, I think there is a market for casual games (look at the success of Maple Story and/or Puzzle Pirates) but if you are talking about dividing up development budgets between a AAA and 3 or 4 casual titles, the decision gets a bit more treacherous. I'm guessing that banking on big games just made more sense to the powers that be at NCsoft than hoping to strike it rich with one of a wide stable of smaller scale ones.

Sort of Run-and-Gun development vs a "4 yards and a cloud of dust" strategy. As I said before, I like some of NCsoft's games so I hope it works out.

NCsoft's experience with the "smaller, more agile" sort of games was uniformly negative. Its really no wonder they decided to ditch the concept. Sounds like NCsoft gave this guy a chance to prove his style of game development could actually make money and it didnt work out. These games arent cheap to make, even the small ones, and losing money is not a valid business model. I liked COH and I still play Guild Wars so I hope NCsoft's new strategy pays off in the end.