AA WarCry has done an interview with NetDevil CEO Scott Brown regarding the closure announcement.

NetDevil has no plans to salvage their automobile MMORPG Auto Assault, according to CEO Scott Brown. Publisher NCSoft announced early this week that after an inglorious year and four months of commercial service they will close the doors on August 31st of this year.

This very well closes any apparent door to the MMO being saved in its current form.

It is with deep sadness that we see any game that we love disappear. While I wasn't necessarily surprised to read the news, I was certainly disappointed.

NOTICE: Today NCsoft is announcing that it will be closing down service for Auto Assault at the end of the summer. The service will close at midnight on August 31, 2007. As of today, any player currently in the service with an active billed account will not be billed again. If players have previously purchased time via multi-month billing or time cards that extends their service past July 31, NCsoft will reconcile these accounts appropriately. There will be more announcements coming soon regarding the shut down of Auto Assault and its impact on current accounts. Please check back at www.autoassault.com for more information.

New auction house, vehicles and system upgrades featured in the games' fourth free update

AUSTIN, Texas, March 5, 2007 NCsoft today announced the release of the fourth free content expansion of Auto Assault which includes the installation of an auction house, the introduction of new vehicle chassis and a new tournament schedule as well as several quality of life system improvements.

The auction house is one of the most important additions to Auto Assault since its release, adding depth to the game while making it easier to profit from the game's voluminous loot drops. The auction house, for example, will enable lower level players to obtain currency by selling material to higher level players who can then craft more powerful weapons. Additionally, an email system will allow players, who are in the same faction, to send messages regarding items up for auction as well as sending items via email.

"Auto Assault is about collecting massive amounts of loot, and this auction house and mail delivery system will make it easier to profit from collecting loot," said Andrew Wagner, NCsoft's producer for Auto Assault. "The auction house and mail system will add a much needed additional layer of interactivity and item accessibility for all players and allow players to progress faster and build bigger, nastier vehicles."

The additional profits made from the auction house will help Auto Assault players to attain another feature from the update, two powerful, new epic vehicle chassis. The new chassis, available at the INC vehicle stores include the Switter, a medium-sized chassis available for all classes and the Backup, a small chassis usable by any scout class.

Rounding out the features are sweeping changes to the skills systems. Balance between races will be improved so success in player-versus-player combat will be based on skill rather than faction-based advantages. Additionally, skill building is now easier to manage and understand, allowing new players to create more powerful and useable skill sets.

"Skills will now be more standardized, which will let players understand better the cost of each skill and how to better select the right skill for the right level," Wagner said. "This will bring more balance to the game while making skill sets more fun and powerful."

Also, responding to player feedback, tournaments have a new schedule and reward system built in. The new tournament schedule system is timed to work for players regardless of their time-zone location. The tournaments have been level-balanced so all players can enjoy arena carnage. With additional loot and bigger rewards, arena action will be more profitable for all participants.

Auto Assault, developed by NetDevil, LTD, is the first multiplayer online (MMO) game featuring vehicle combat, set in a post-apocalyptic world with fully destructible environments. Auto Assault is available at retailers in North America and Europe as well as at the NCsoft online store at www.plaync.com. The game includes the first month of online game play. After the first month, players will be charged a monthly subscription fee of US$14.99.

For more information on Auto Assault go to: www.autoassault.com.

After the server consolidation you needed to transfer your character to the new merged server.

Well, I've been trying to - and getting web server errors from NCSoft's account software every time I've tried. So I just went ahead and cancelled - I haven't played in ages.

But I was kind of interested in giving it a shot again. Oh well. Maybe in a while.

So I'd found out my clanmates had levelled past me. D'oh! Enough looking for gears...

Off to Cinderfall. I ran around, mostly fighting TemperNet, and quickly gained over a level. Kinda nice to be heading back up again. The storylines are getting better, too.

I did hit one annoying bug - got stuck. My gun wouldn't stop firing, but wasn't building up heat at the same time. I thought I was going linkdead, but I found I could re-target. I was right in the middle of a lot of TemperNet, though, and so eventually I died.

I've started getting missions for the instances in here - Detour and the Titanium Factory. It should be interesting!

Oh, and they're doing a survey to see what people want added - if you've played, you should take it. Right now auction house/mail is winning by a large percentage, which I think is definitely something people want - but the end game has already caused a couple of my friends to quit.

126 MB! My download was steadily slowing down, so I avoided downloading the whole thing. But they've added some new features, like item linking, fixed a ton of bugs, and put in more missions. They also, in general, it appears, upped loot tables. So that's a good sign.

I'm glad they finally got this patch in - I just hope it doesn't introduce more bugs, like a lot of patches in other games do. I guess we'll see. Tomorrow, though. :-)

I only played a wee bit last night. No one else from my clan was on; and I can't check when they were last on, because the buggy clan interface just shows everyone last on as that day.

Sigh.

I had a hard time getting into it last night. Could it be this is my shortest lived MMO yet? I don't know.

We had our clan owner and a couple of our clanmates quit playing recently. Skyhawke, who'd founded our branch of the clan when we were playing, gave me his stuff, so in a LONG trading session (since you can only move things one stack at a time when they're crafting materials) I got a bunch of materials and clink - incidentally, getting the "bar" medal too (as he gave me about 2 2/3rds of a bar worth of clink).

He also couldn't figure out how to transfer ownership/rank of the clan to anyone else, so we're stuck at our current structure. That may not be a big deal, though, as our guild's presence is much reduced now.

Kinda depressing - but I guess I'm part of the problem - I'm more likely to be in EVE than Auto Assault. It's not that Auto Assault isn't fun, it's just that it's repetitious. The people leaving mostly did because they hit the upper levels, where there are still a ton of bugs.