NCSOFT, the company behind popular mmorpgs Blade and Soul, Wildstar, Guild Wars 2, Lineage 2 and Aion have decided to shut down their game Master x Master in January. The moba title was a short lived venture, having launched in late June without much success.
Master x Master featured characters from all of NCSOFT’s games. Players had the option to fight against each other in PvP arenas, conquer PvE dungeons using a unique tag-team system and compete while playing a variety of mini games. Unfortunately, even with the expanisve list of characters to play as, different combat modes and co-op capabilities, Master x Master did not fair well. Some users on Reddit believe the game was not marketed well enough to garner it enough players and well-deserved attention in the first place, while others believe there were too many problematic communication issues between NCSOFT and their branch NCSOFT West which handles the North American version of the game. Problems also arose with the game’s latest patch, which players believe negatively impacted gameplay and in-game trading of items.
There are still a number of players on the official NCSOFT Master x Master forums who expressed sadness over the game’s shutdown. Some players also felt angry about the abrupt shutdown decision and asked that NCSOFT try to release the game on another platform or refund money spent on the game.
In an official blog post, NCSOFT says the “final day of the game’s life is to be January 31,” and there is no indication that they plan to relaunch it after the shutdown. Only players who made Master x Master purchases between August 30 and November 16 will be automatically refunded within 7-14 days. In addition to this, all “real money purchases on the MXM Store will be permanently disabled, all game modes will be turned on, and available at all times,” and rewards of “500,000 X-Coin to unlock all content” will be offered with “the community-developed Lua skin which will be made available to all players for 1 X-Coin.”
NCSOFT says they will provide Master x Master updates on their official forum, Twitter, and Facebook accounts until the game closes on January 31.