Another reason to love NCsoft
I'm a big fan of how NCsoft does things, especially their support software. If you've played a few MMORPGs, you know the frustration that sometimes regardless of how well the game is designed, the software for patch downloads, logins, etc. is often very poor, not to mention the lack of server stability. NCsoft however, excels at these things, at least in my experience.
I love NCsoft's PlayNC Launcher:
Specifically, I love the PlayNC Launcher because it runs all of the time, scooping up any patches for the games it supports while you're away from your PC. No waiting to play after you get home from work, just because it's a patch day.
Back when I was playing City of Heroes, I loved their background downloader built into the game. Unlike downloaders from other companies (*cough* Blizzard *cough*) it was unintrusive, didn't add noticable lag or performance issues to the game and most of all it meant little or no manual downloading needed for patches. It was mess-free and hands-off. Because of its robustness, Cryptic was able to patch City of Heroes in small increments to solve problems quickly, which meant almost no major bugs or issues when larger content patches were added (again, unlike other companies).
I haven't played CoH in awhile, so I'm not sure if the PlayNC Launcher / Downloader replaces the built-in patcher, but I hope it doesn't and simply integrates and augments it instead.
Extra notes on Server Stability:
I was seriously impressed with the City of Heroes servers: in the 9 months that I played, I had only once experienced unexpected downtime on the server my characters were on and even then it was very brief. In fact, I had a hard time convincing our guild to switch to WoW because it was like night and day with so many problems on launch compared to what they were used to with CoH.
City of Heroes also had a flawless launch, which is almost unheard of within MMORPG history.


