04 | March | 2019 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Sometimes I just want alliteration in my headlines.

The news today from Perfect World Entertainment, owners of Cryptic Studios, is that they will be killing off the Foundry, the player content creation portal, for Star Trek Online and Neverwinter.

Just down the street from EA HQ

The Foundry in both games will be discontinued come April 11, 2019.

Anybody who created or played in a mission from the Foundry before March 4, 2019 will get special in-game items in acknowledgement.

As for why the Foundry is being discontinued, the announcement says:

Our team at Cryptic strives to create excellent content and maintain a high standard of quality for our games. However, the legacy knowledge required to maintain the Foundry at our quality standards is no longer available.

Given that they describe the Foundry as a “passion project” elsewhere in the announcement, it sounds as though the person whose passion it was has left the company and PWE isn’t willing to spend the time and money to get somebody else on board to handle it.

This is unmistakably a blow to those who champion the idea of user created content as an answer to the age old problem of players consuming content faster than a studio can make it. The Foundry was pretty much the poster child, the prime example, the proof that such a solution was viable.

And, of course, there are those who actually play Neverwinter and Star Trek Online and who look to the Foundry to provide interesting and diverse content as an adjunct to what the company provides. That avenue will soon be closed.

PWE vows to continue to creating top notch content for these games, but it seems unlikely that the pace of such content, even were it stepped up, could off-set what will be taken away come mid-April.

Others on this topic:

The news came as something of a blow when I found out that CCP Guard announced in a forum post his departure from CCP. What do you say when that sort of thing comes to pass?

What does this even mean? And did he interview in that suit?

He has been for years the happy face of EVE Online, appearing in videos, streaming shows, and live events.

CCP Guard on the stream

And, of course, he was the front man for PermaBand.

It says in the info about that most (in)famous video, lyrics and vocals by Sveinn J Kjarval. That’s CCP Guard.

Nobody is indispensable. The company will go on. He didn’t write code or design game mechanics after all. But he was generally liked by the people who played the game and he was passionate about EVE Online. I was on his team for a trivia contest at EVE Vegas a couple of years back and he was clearly carrying us posers with the depth of his knowledge of not just the game itself, but the player driven history thereof. You are unlikely to have ever have been as into EVE Online as he was.

Hat tip to Rhavas…

In the end, he made the game a better place.

I am sure a lot of people have stories about him. One thing I remember was back during the dark days of CSM 10 and the sparring between the community team that was their interface. When it was announced that CCP Guard and CCP Logibro (another fine former member of the community team) would be taking over the management of the CSM, I remember thinking that things would get better. CCP Guard simply inspired that confidence. And things did get better. A year later, as the election process for CSM 12 was ramping up, I noted how drama free CSM 11 had been under their stewardship.

I still have my own issues with the whole CSM idea, but CCP Guard helped at least make the best of what it was.

Anyway, CCP Guard, after 16 years with CCP, is moving on to a new opportunity. He says in his post that it is time for him to take a chance after spending most of his adult life so far with one company, so it probably isn’t CCP Falcon continuing to purge anybody from the community team that is taller than him.