Auto Assault: AA French Commmunity Speaks

MadMike, the leader of the successful French clan Les Aigles de la Route, shared his opinion of the recent closure announcement representing the AA French community, which was growing tremendously in last few months:

From all members of « Les Aigles de la Route » clan and from the French community, here is what we think concerning NC Soft's announcement of Auto-Assault's future:

Auto Assault was not born premature but it was aborted. Who is responsible?
We don't want to know. But what is certain is that the AA concept is an untapped goldmine. NetDevil and NC Soft must be aware of this. Unfortunately, the game is losing money and took one year to finally be up to its potential (we believe that the game was complete enough since Update 4 as it is the way it should have been released) and since that update, our hopes were up and a new perspective of what Auto assault could offer were out there.

The problem of AA is not the game in itself, but the image it is sending. Thousands of player tested the game in its first Beta year, and most were not disappointed by the concept but by the lack of content, the balance problem between factions and of course the bugs. But AA's most serious flaw was, in our opinion, the laid out business strategy which had catastrophic impact as the game was still not well known. It was released out at 50€ and went down to 20€ 3 month after release and the French server Apocalypse was closed. That killed the game in France. The few French that knew the game were disappointed. The image of AA was damaged in their minds.

1 year after the release of AA, we «survivors of the apocalypse» have tried to change that image and to renew the discussion on French forums about AA. We had to do much hard work to give AA a good image and a better reputation and we succeeded. New French players were joining us and were getting their hopes up in the unique concept that is AA. We managed to get almost two new members each day for the last two week!! The players were delighted to find a unique MMO which was (almost) bug free with satisfactory content. It was a rebirth. The ugly image left from AA after launch was finally starting to vanish leaving the stage for a new future full of promise and perspective (especially since its one of the few game to be translated in French) and most importantly, its one of a kind.

That was before July 2 2007...

The announcement from NC Soft was totally absurd!

I am certain that all the necessary changes for AA have already been discussed by our Forum companions, as are the priority bugs needed to fix so we wont add to that. But all we can say is that the AA's concept was the most innovative and surprising at the moment in France and it stands out of the rest even with all the work that is still underway and all the space for improvement (like sound problems, desynch and lag issue) but the concept was finally ready to be exploited.

After lots of discussions between AA French speaking players, many of us understands that if AA cease to exist, we will not have any MMO that has what we are looking for. AA is the only MMO of its kind, and it is now very successful at what it does!

There are many solutions to keep AA adventure going. It has a place amongst all the current MMOs because it is unique!