Yeah, and two months after the acquisition, PA still isn't on their homepage as one of their games.
Quote:
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The full plan for how Planetarion will be integrated with our current portal has not been decided.
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So... you just bought the rights and the source to a game, which you're now going to market and attempt to make money from, but you're in no way excited to get this out onto your homepage and make a big deal out of it.
Face it, they're as ashamed of PA as everyone else is. They bought a cheap and failing game. They'll slowly integrate it into their ecosystem, keep things going as they are, hope players migrate, take code snippets or features or ideas...
The
only way PA will ever be an appealing game is if the folks of old came along and put their passion and love into it, in an attempt to make it what it once was. Jagex has no idea of what it once was. They weren't around playing it.
They say many staff members play and enjoy the game, but yet they're busy familiarizing themselves with it still. Ok, so how many of those staff members were around in the PA glory days of <R10 when the might of Legion and Fury and Elysium were destroying worlds for power?
Give that guy project lead and let him run it. He remembers. But no, they've started playing when you started looking to buy the game and yeah, they enjoy what it is now, which is a shadow of it's former self.
PA will die. It'll die because it's commercialized. I don't care about paying for it, but I'd only pay if it was what it once was. Things change all the time, but PA never changed for the better. It went from great to... this.
PA, very simply, needs love and passion. It needs the personality back into it. 50% of what made the whole gaming experience great was the late nights in #forums, the late nights in #cnuts, the late nights on the PA forums - particularly GD. None of that exists anymore. This is likely because all us who roamed then have grown up and have families / jobs / lives, but shit, I still come here every day hoping to see a spark of life on GD.
How do we fix PA? We don't. Not until someone gets people who actually loved PA and are passionate about getting PA back to what it was (which, I note, will never happen). People who saw it more as some cash cow to milk with little development and a part time team. People who saw it as a community that they could fit into online and had a place to hang out whilst playing the game.
There's the solution.
Get the community back, get rid of that corporate feel, get rid of the whole "ooh I'm a community manager" jackassery and make PA feel like it belongs to the players again. Don't just turn up on the forums and make announcements. For ****s sake, don't make announcements via Appoc - at least make your own accounts. Join in with the community. Do a search and find Spinner and Oreo posts from back in the day under General Discussions - see how they were just guys on the forums? Yeah. You won't be - shit, I'll probably be banned for speaking out like this. Back then I'd have likely got a private message from one of them asking if things were cool and letting me know they took shit seriously.
But no one will, as no one will read this, and even if they do they'll just be like "well, who the **** is skiddy anyway?"
Whatever.
[/rant]