NCSoft To Close North American Lineage Servers

NCSoft announced yesterday that they plan to shut down all North American servers for their long-running Lineage MMORPG on June 29th. The game came out in 1998 and gradually became one of the most successful MMOs of all time, reporting over a million subscribers as much as a decade after launch. Account creation on North American servers has been disabled, subscriptions for coming months have been refunded, and existing accounts have been reactivated for free. "We will not be making any additional content updates, but we do have US Ruleset changes and lots of great events planned for the next two months. We want to give you every opportunity to make all of your remaining Lineage dreams come true. We hope that everyone will stick around to have fun with the game you love in the time we have left. We know that we have incredibly loyal fans that have stood by us for the past ten years. As painful as it was, as a business, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision."

I hate it when this happens

[atari2600a]

I say any MMO operator should freeware the servers once the game becomes abandonware like this. I mean, it's like you have an entire universe in these old optical discs but you're locked out of it because you can't log on...

Re:I hate it when this happens

[Cimexus]

Agreed. Private server software does exist for most MMOs but it's usually not as functional or stable as the real thing (unsurprising given that the software was essentially reverse engineered by fans). They should just release the official server software into the public domain.

As an aside I've always wondered about the hardware and OS requirements for major MMO server software. Perhaps they can't release it because the hardware and environment requirements are so specific that the average Joe simply couldn't get a server running if they wanted to...

Re:I hate it when this happens

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea for Lineage, but EVE Online make their server specs public. The database for their economy... well, you can't afford it. RAM. Lots and lots of RAM, in nice rackmount enclosures and linked by infiniband. They run it on a colossal ramdrive, because not even flash could handle the IOPS.