Motor City: Where We Stand Now

Died: August 29th, 2003.......... RIP
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MCO's Demise

Post by Guest » Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:57 pm

I agree with you on the lack of marketing. Being a marketing major I cannot believe that they did not go after their target market. I also believe that MCO was too exclusive. It should have encompassed all performance cars even cars from today. It is just the same reason why I cannot get hyped up about any of the NFS games. It is all modern day cars and I just do enjoy them as much as the old muscle cars. I am really surprised that EA has not combined the two and release a driving game that would satisfy both the old school people and the fans of modern performance cars. Second, when releasing an online game of this type, their needs to be a plan of how to upgrade and update it. The updates were weak at times. I mean how many trim levels could they milk out of some of those cars, same car different trim(model). The updates need to be thought out in advance. When the game was going through beta testing, this is something that should have been on the developers minds. Lastly, the majority of people did not race their cars. The biggest pay outs should have been for circuit racing and all drivers should have received a payout. The last place person received nothing and if they were a lousy driver they did at least $1000 worth of damaged and received nothing for their trouble. So most people did sponsored racing or did open racing against the clock. I found it to be more of a racing game in the beta testing period than when the game went live. When it was live it was more of building cars and selling them for ungodly amounts of money.

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Re: MCO's Demise

Post by RVD » Tue Oct 25, 2005 7:01 am

SD455 wrote:I agree with you on the lack of marketing. Being a marketing major I cannot believe that they did not go after their target market. I also believe that MCO was too exclusive. It should have encompassed all performance cars even cars from today. It is just the same reason why I cannot get hyped up about any of the NFS games. It is all modern day cars and I just do enjoy them as much as the old muscle cars. I am really surprised that EA has not combined the two and release a driving game that would satisfy both the old school people and the fans of modern performance cars. Second, when releasing an online game of this type, their needs to be a plan of how to upgrade and update it. The updates were weak at times. I mean how many trim levels could they milk out of some of those cars, same car different trim(model). The updates need to be thought out in advance. When the game was going through beta testing, this is something that should have been on the developers minds. Lastly, the majority of people did not race their cars. The biggest pay outs should have been for circuit racing and all drivers should have received a payout. The last place person received nothing and if they were a lousy driver they did at least $1000 worth of damaged and received nothing for their trouble. So most people did sponsored racing or did open racing against the clock. I found it to be more of a racing game in the beta testing period than when the game went live. When it was live it was more of building cars and selling them for ungodly amounts of money.
I couldn't agree more SD455!

RVD

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Re: MCO's Demise

Post by Da_Rev » Thu Oct 27, 2005 3:19 pm

SD455 wrote:I agree with you on the lack of marketing. Being a marketing major I cannot believe that they did not go after their target market. I also believe that MCO was too exclusive. It should have encompassed all performance cars even cars from today.
Hmmm... Do you remember when they tried to test the waters by doing that very thing?

I loved the Eclipse in the game... I thought it was very underrated and I enjoyed driving mine to the very end.

It looked to me like they were going to try to bridge the gap... but what happened a lot of folks got mad and said if they put them in I quit... the end result the experiment failed and they shut the game down. The only way they could have made it work was to bring in the new generation of car folks with us.

Oh well...if I was running EA I don't know that I would have done anything different...

But with the resurgence of muscle car popularity... check out all the different shows that deal with them... I think I would be trying again!

I fully believe it would work right now.

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Re: MCO's Demise

Post by VRECrash » Mon Nov 21, 2005 2:57 pm

SD455 wrote:I agree with you on the lack of marketing. Being a marketing major I cannot believe that they did not go after their target market.
While I have never received confirmation of this I fully believe that EA made the decision to cancel MCO even before the game was released when they found out how much maintenance the database(s) would need.

This would explain why there was no real marketing done and would also explain their “downsizing” of the db staff to 0 shortly after the release.

Databases need maintenance or they slow down. As time progressed in MCO things got progressively worse, especially lag.
I attribute this to all the unused database entries for player’s cars, parts, and such that were never removed to keep the db functioning properly.

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Post by Drakkan » Mon Nov 21, 2005 6:48 pm

While I have never received confirmation of this I fully believe that EA made the decision to cancel MCO even before the game was released when they found out how much maintenance the database(s) would need.
I'm not entirely sure it was before release, but I would not be surprised if it was shortly after the golden 2 week window. There is a good article (or series of articles) over at http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/3 about the games industry in general. Reading it I couldn't help but think "wow, that makes sense now why motor city didn't make it". In fact it makes me wonder why EA even bothered to try motor city online. I'm not saying its a good thing, just saying thats about how it seems to be.

Guest

Post by Guest » Tue Nov 22, 2005 10:31 am

You know I wouldnt have cared too much, that they put the supra and eclipse into the game if they had just added the proper PARTS for them too. The whole bull crap of a 350 chevy powered eclispe was just retarded.. makes as much sense as making a FWD corvette... Keep the cars true to life.. other than that i didnt mind. Oh so far NFS most wanted is crappy, the black edition has a maro on the back and the box says you can race it and a BMW right out of the box but.. i have yet to see the maro.. such a jip and its the ONLY classic in the game.. everything else is rice or domestic rice ( not bashing imports just dont like some of the builds people to with them) so its a little depressing that i let EA rape me again... oh well the stunts and graphics are nice...... woooooo

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