-
MY personal favorite company I've yet to find. SOE is the company that I've had the best experience with, excluding SWG and the NGE, but I don't think the NGE was totally their fault (Lucas Arts probably had a big part in it). After SOE, a lot of my game time is spent in indie games. The problem with indie games is that 90% of the time they have volunteer support staff, which means there is room for corruption and/or parts of the day/night that no one is online to cover the shift due to real life matters.
The company I had the worse experience with was Aeria games. Not sure which it was, but they either had (back a few years, when I was playing Kingdom Heroes) volunteer support staff, or very bad paid staff. Either way, they were immature and unprofessional. The other thing I do not like about them, at least in the past (I haven't played any of their games, at least not seriously, since Kingdom Heroes), was that they tended to publish games with extremely pay-to-win cash shops. Similar to what people claim about Nexon, I got the impression that they only cared about their profit and did not have any sort of pride as a company. I got the impression that they did not care about the customer, and (also similar to what I've read about Nexon) had a staff that had no idea what it was doing.
-
the best developer i've had experience with is Bioware. From the start to finish with neverwinter nights 1 they were extremely dedicated and professional. Nowadays im not sure they have the same developmental focus, maybe too much drift into storyline.
At its inception, Neverwinter Nights was and actually still is a revolutionary product. Extremely polished, elegant, very high attention to detail (spell icons could be read and understand with a glance) and supported by a very focussed, responsive and communicative forums and patch team. Every patch was meticulously detailed, cheats and hacks systematically prevented, comunity concerns diplomatically and firmly dealt with in extremely active forums. Many game developers today gained their first experience as developers on nwn's toolset forums.
NWN should still be a top mmo today except that Atari owns NWN and is unable to promote it because Atari is a failing company. But in truth, NWN outstrips games like Tera and Aion in playability (if not in gfx and action).
(peolpe like to say NWN is not an mmo, but if you look at mmos today, many have instancing, which is precisely what NWN's community server distribution model is).
-
I hate Nexon because I played Maple Story for like 5 years, and during that time I'm gonna guesstimate 3 of those years were ruined by hackers. They're making millions of dollars from that game, and they couldn't hire a few GMs to actually do their job?
