Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Trials of Obi Wan - for Dundee
akevv
Member Posts: 208
Dundee,
You have made some pretty valid points regarding the choices, decisions, and direction of SWG. I hate how it has all turned out and still feel betrayed by the whole experience. I don't think I will devote that much time to a "game" ever again. I treated it like a hobby, but you all showed me that it was just a game.
What I want to know is why Trials of Obi Wan was not given a valid chance? It was released with the CU code behind it and it was a fun addition to the game. The expansion had a bit of something for everyone. In time, with the promised revamps for Ranger and such, things were finally looking pretty good, from a player's perspective. If I were in charge for a week, I would put THIS release on test center for folks to bang around on. It is STILL in a better condition, with more available working content than the NGE over a year later. Everyone knows that test center is not a permanent server and that customer service is limited/not available. Use test center with CU ToOW loaded and gauge interest. If the server fills to capacity, then try a real server. If it flops, no harm done.
I agree with your position regarding Pre-CU. It is too far gone. The ToOW release, however, is recent enough to still have most of what everyone is asking for. Really, the only things missing would be:
1. Restuss
2. PvP areas
3. Player bounty system
This is a pretty short list. Everything else that has been implemented in NGE has been repurposed content from the old game, including the GCW ranks (old FRS). I know you don't work there anymore, but ToOW never got a fair chance I think. Test center, loaded with ToOW would be a great way to gauge interest with little to no risk. You guys took a huge risk with the NGE. This risk is virtually nothing...
Akevv Ostone
No Longer SWG Free 
Comments
Restuss: Bad idea , no real goal in mind and very very buggy.
Player bounties: Entire system flawed, there is no loss... also nothing to gain... therefore no purpose at all.
(If your doing it just to do it then pretty much I could consider that hazing or griefing)... there is no goal or general concept behind it.
Now, I also will add that ToOW was released due to the movie and the play off that... the NGE came after it (about two week)... what was worse is the beta for ToOW that alot of us took part in.. such a lie....
Utter bullshit to waste our time with it. Things were almost looking up, there was some good things coming or so we hoped... then BAM --- the NGE...
No matter what, a hand in the bush rule applies... RISK? Do they get a award for that? Ok.. fine, but then they also get the award for not knowing thier customer base and how it would react to it.
______________________________
I usually picture the Career builder commercial with the room full of monkeys and upside down sales chart when thinking about the SOE/SWG decision making process.....
SOE's John Blakely and Todd Fiala issued a warning: "Don't make our mistakes." Ref NGE
Winner of the worst MMOS goes to.... the NGE and SWG..!!! http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=1034&bhcp=1
I would have loved to have had ToOW in a pre-CU version, I think it would have been really fun for me.
Although, ToOW and RotW just feel to much like a theme park to me. I would have much rather had a whole new world similar to all the others as an expansion.
I really should have forseen the direction SWG was going in when RotW was released. It was far to linear for my liking, but I can certainly understand why others liked it.
I don't see what that gets you Akevv. The CU was neither here nor there, not the original game AND not the NGE. So broken, that even SOE could see it. And I don't see how Obi-Wan was going to save the title. If they throw that up on test without the new GCW grind, which is all there is anymore, I can't see people going for that.
The CU wouldn't get nearly the amount of vets back that Pre-CU might get, and even that's not up for consideration.
Besides I think there's time and expense associated with that we as customers tend to downplay or miss entirely. All to just have yet another development staff sit by in frustration as the code base they're working on is abandoned, yet again. I'd be more concerned about the impact on my engineers' morale than shifting thousands over to yet another code base in hopes of luring in more imaginary customers - returning vets or otherwise.
At this point I doubt SOE is looking to get more subscriptions out of this thing anyway.
SWG Team Mtg.
AfroPuff brings up a valid point.. SOE doesn't seem to really be trying to get new people anymore. The only way you can even buy SWG now is to get a game pack that has 6 titles, including the original KOTOR which is a far superior game and carries no monthly fee's.
That being said, if SOE really wanted to increase their subscriptions, they should forget trying to bring in fresh blood and start working on the over 1 million people who have already purchased the game at one point. It's really the only viable choice for them in my opinion, besides it is much easier to market a product to those who already have expressed an interest in your product than to create a whole new market awarness campaign. If they were to open pre-CU servers, word of mouth would spread faster than any advertisement they could launch!
Even though the subs were falling, due in part to their poor decision making in the first place, they would have never fallen to the low levels they are now. SOE needs to re-evaluate their strategy. Just my $.02
Regarding ToOW. It was part of the NGE scam and in my mind is irrevokably tainted. As you may recall, SOE promised benefits in the ToOW maketing such as a special creature handler item for exmaple. One day after everyone was billed for pre-ordering ToOW, they annouced that class and consequently that item that they marketed the expansion on were being removed from the game. It was a trick to milk more money out the existing customers SOE had made the deliberate decision to screw over in favor trying to get a larger number of other customers.
More fundamentally, the content of ToOW is anti-Star Wars. They have the blue glow of Obi Wan appearing and even helping imperial players. This is a direct contridiction of Obi Wan's beliefs as portaryed in the movies. Mustafar, while it obviously still would have existied, should not play such a prominent role in the time frame the game is set in.
What it gets us is a point in time where the game was stable, had all of the expansion titles available, and the professions still reasonably intact. The quests on Mustafar were a lot more interesting than Rage of the Wookiees'. The Cube never got a fair chance to add schematics, parts, and trinkets to the game as it was. All of the other hard places in the game were still hard too. Maybe not as hard as the Pre-CU stuff, but still a challenge. Grinding in a group was intact, the animations were still good, and there were plenty of GCW hotspots as well.
I am asking this question as a halfway point. You are exactly right, it is neither Pre-CU or NGE. It is a place where all of the content worked and it is not so far in the past as to be an unreasonable starting point.
The test center status would give a good gauge as to how popular the ToOW publish might be. I wouldn't spend one dime on developing the new stuff that is truly new in NGE until the point was proven that it could be viable. I would leave it on test center, one of the test centers that is not always online. The snapshot ones they used to make available prior to a major release would be ideal. They haven't been used or seen online for a very long time. Oh yeah, no blue frogs. It would be a gauge to see how willing folks are to part with their items and start on a fresh server. Make it a worst case scenario, as cheap as possible to support. No developer time spent with respecs or character transfers IF the idea proves viable. No developer time and bare minimum customer support (think I'm stuck and that's about all) with just the bandwidth, electricity, and cubic feet to house the server.
I know I would resub, even if it only ever made it to test center.
Akevv Ostone
No Longer SWG Free
SWG Team Mtg.
No kidding. I suspect Oracle licensing fees are responsible for a number of bad design decisions, as well as Smedly's latest "We're interested in consolidating servers" statement.
First off, SWG's original DB design was godawful. I'm sorry, modern DB's should not have choked and died under the load SWG was putting on them. So either the Devs were badmouting the DBs to cover engine problems, or their original DB schema sucked monkey nuts and they didn't want to put forward the effort required to fix it.
Tied into that was the fact that too many servers shared a DB server -- to save on Oracle licenses, I would imagine.
I heard a lot of "You know each serial number represented a different DB entry, so ergo bad DB problems" --- DB access and retrieval times grow very slowly with record increases (log O, if I recall). Oracle could easily handle the number of records they had, the problem lay elsewhere.
Which sadly was way too common back when SWG was being designed. (I understand the situation has come a long way). Frankly, if I were designing an MMORPG, I'd hire an experienced DB admin with lots of game experience AND someone with experience doing banking or financial databases to design it. The financial industry wants reliability and speed -- they don't tolerate a lot of crap. A DB admin with games experience could fill out the domain knowledge issues, and you'd end up with a solid, reliable schema -- and probably less fudging of the requirements.
Offhand, the only MMORPG with DB requirements even remotely as tough as the financial industry is EVE -- their single shard design is a DB killer (well, a hard drive killer -- there's a reason they went to solid-state drives). MMORPG DB design isn't simple -- but judging from SWG, they were far from doing all they could with it.
I think it was a convienent thing to blame -- and Oracle really does charge out the ass.
I've heard that their Oracle implementation was broken, and that Oracle tried to tell them it was broken when they were building it, but they apparently didn't listen. Take that with a grain of salt though, it's one of those "I heard a former-roomates-girlfriends-ex-boyfriend was a janitor there when it happened"... whisperings. It could be totally off base.
On topic:
I think I see the OP's point. The sentiment seems to be that ANYTHING must be better than the NGE, and at least this would be a workable compromise. I just think the approach pre-supposes some dynamics that just aren't there in my estimation. But what do I know?
SWG Team Mtg.
They simply tried to screw people, I don't think Freeman guy or Smedly can find a right answer for that, which can tell players something they believe. (I know they made refund, but they wouldn't have cared if there hadn't been people who said they could go law"
They knew people would leave, they knew they would lose massive numbers in just one month... I still wonder WHY they took that risk. SWG never had millions of players maybe, but it was going "well" for an MMO. Don't even try to tell me that you have to take risk for business bla bla. It was more than risk, it was clear: They would lose.
I have no idea about SOE/LA licence. Maybe their agreement was saying that both company would get money from players, so 200k players would mean 100k (maybe more or less) for each company. Hell, PreCU could have more with right decisions, though.
No kidding. I suspect Oracle licensing fees are responsible for a number of bad design decisions, as well as Smedly's latest "We're interested in consolidating servers" statement.
First off, SWG's original DB design was godawful. I'm sorry, modern DB's should not have choked and died under the load SWG was putting on them. So either the Devs were badmouting the DBs to cover engine problems, or their original DB schema sucked monkey nuts and they didn't want to put forward the effort required to fix it.
Tied into that was the fact that too many servers shared a DB server -- to save on Oracle licenses, I would imagine.
I heard a lot of "You know each serial number represented a different DB entry, so ergo bad DB problems" --- DB access and retrieval times grow very slowly with record increases (log O, if I recall). Oracle could easily handle the number of records they had, the problem lay elsewhere.
Which sadly was way too common back when SWG was being designed. (I understand the situation has come a long way). Frankly, if I were designing an MMORPG, I'd hire an experienced DB admin with lots of game experience AND someone with experience doing banking or financial databases to design it. The financial industry wants reliability and speed -- they don't tolerate a lot of crap. A DB admin with games experience could fill out the domain knowledge issues, and you'd end up with a solid, reliable schema -- and probably less fudging of the requirements.
Offhand, the only MMORPG with DB requirements even remotely as tough as the financial industry is EVE -- their single shard design is a DB killer (well, a hard drive killer -- there's a reason they went to solid-state drives). MMORPG DB design isn't simple -- but judging from SWG, they were far from doing all they could with it.
I think it was a convienent thing to blame -- and Oracle really does charge out the ass.
While SWG did have implementation issues, there was no one bottleneck as such.
SWG is complex in design - extremly generic and extremly flexible.
SWG wasn't so mis-designed as many would believe, it uses the standard aproach to MMO world design. But unlike other games, they didn't take the usual shortcuts, such as zoning and instancing.
Customization and flexibility was other factor. SWG was designed as virtual world, so instead of having a preset number of different items, each item was indeed unique. That means 16000 bytes to describe an individual item rather than 16 per item type. It adds up.
And Oracle isn't all it's hyped up to be. The reason why big companies like it is very simple. When they go to a customer, they say they use a $2 million DB. It sounds much better than saying you're using a free MySQL open source version. Not because it's so much better, but simply because something worth $2 mil has to be good.
As for financial industry not tolerating crap... Let's not go there, please.
But above all, MMOs are pushing the limits of today's viable technology. While research is being done, the oldfashioned aproach to zoning is still used by just about every working game. There simply isn't a reasonable alternative, and the per-zone limit is still around 200-300 players, this number doesn't change much, since it's implied by scalability issues which cannot be resolved by simply throwing more hardware at it.
Until some research brings a viable aproach to proper clustering that works for real-time applications nothing will change. Keep in mind, that military simulations which run on supercomputers connected with optics use extremly complex methods to cope with lag and to reduce total number of simulation steps needed, since even those can't handle large numbers of 30-50k entities. And we're talking really big facilities here with no dial-up nonsense.
NGE came when it did because there was a feeling that it had to come then. So no time to let ToOW out and about for a while, then NGE later.
That expansion team did a great job.
There's still the issue of maintaining two code bases, and probably a licensing restriction that just flat-out prohibits it. And that IP is owned by LucasFilm.
You can't find that running two versions is not contractually permitted, then find some clever way to do it anyway. These dudes sue.
Jeff Freeman
Dundee,
Thank you for the reply. I guess it comes down to two versions running concurrently then. No way to satisfy vets and the current players too. That is too bad, for everyone. I guess we all get to watch the game slide into oblivion then. Smedley's comments make so much more sense now.
NGE with all of its limitations and broken content will never compare to the old game. Just thinking about all of the little details that were thrown out makes the NGE not even the same game. Factions, languages, and skills training were just minor pieces of the game, but all of those little pieces add up to immersion, making the game feel more realistic. They haven't even been brought up for discussion in the NGE timeframe.
Making people pay for a respec rather than drop a skill to relearn something else is an example of the shortcuts taken under the NGE. It just doesn't seem like a world simulation anymore, and it won't ever without these elements and MORE complexity added back in. We got addicted to the game because it was HARD. When something was accomplished, it felt REAL. Even if it was just the dedication required to kill 25,000 pickets to become eligible to grind Jedi, it was an accomplishment.
Why don't I like the idea of grinding GCW points then? Because I simply don't trust SOE to keep their word that this progression will be honored. To date, not one thing, not one accomplishment, not one point of interest, not even a crappy forum ranking has kept its value. For instance, I spent a lot of time learning the map of the Warren. No one in the NGE has even been within 100 meters of that place because it simply doesn't matter in the game anymore.
It is a shame how this has all turned out. The game is more or less irrelevant at this point in its life. Anyone that was going to play it has tried it. The graphics are dated, and quite frankly, the particle effects have detracted so much from gameplay that anyone without a monster computer cannot even compete.
As long as I think of this experience as a service based contract, i don't get too mad. It is like the cable company. You pay them $50 a month to send a TV signal into your home. There is nothing more expected from them except to keep the signal running so long as you pay your monthly bill.
If I think about how I viewed the game going into it, however, I get quite upset. I intended to hand over Akevv to my daughter when she was old enough to play. I thought she might hand her on to her daughter when she was old enough in turn. Instead, I now teach all of my children to recognize the SOE logo as not worth the time and avoid purchasing. If SOE exists that long, I am quite certain that they will teach their kids to avoid the logo too.
How is that for a business to consumer relationship? I don't think SOE will ever recover from this sociology experiment. You were smart for leaving them. Their name is kaput.
Akevv Ostone
No Longer SWG Free
What exactly is buggy about Restuss?
Why does something need to reward/punish you for it to be fun? Personally I enjoy the duel, as do most PvP'ers (and you can only get a bounty by particpating in PvP and killing someone). I'd also love to know how it suddenly becomes griefing when you have no idea of the person you're taking the mission for and as you said, you don't lose anything if you do die.
What exactly is buggy about Restuss?
Why does something need to reward/punish you for it to be fun? Personally I enjoy the duel, as do most PvP'ers (and you can only get a bounty by particpating in PvP and killing someone). I'd also love to know how it suddenly becomes griefing when you have no idea of the person you're taking the mission for and as you said, you don't lose anything if you do die.
Supporting NGE doesn't mean that you will not see bad parts of it.What's buggy about Restuss?
1) Please remember the overspawn, it's been fixed but players can still cause overspawn,
2) "You cannot see target", I think you understand what I mean,
3) Duped rewards. It's maybe fixed but noone removed those rewards from game,
4) Warping. In every 50-100 meters you warp back.
I'm not even talking about lag, because I know that you'll say "Lag is not bug".
Besides Restuss, game has serious bugs like specials are not firing. Most of games have bugs, but not like the ones in NGE.
You can have group bugs, guild bugs... You can have buggy specials that you know they are not working, so you never fire them. But in NGE; you do know they are working -sometimes-, but in critical stages you can't fire them.
Please remember that, it's not the amount of bugs make people leave the game, it's the type of bug. I know many people who had that issue and tried to quit.
About bounty system, this idea was here in PreCU. Which I always wanted it to happen, shame they made it in NGE.
At first, when you hear it, you think it's a good thing. Idea is great but system shouldn't be like that. People have chance to get bounty after they kill just 1 person. It should've been something like 50 people to 500 people.
Kill 50 people, you get X amount of bounty,
Kill 10 people, you get XX amount of bounty,
etc.
Bounty hunting was a great thing in PreNGE, I know so many jedi who couldn't play on their jedi because there were afraid of XP loss. Even though the XP loss, there was less hate tells. Now, people lose nothing, but they keep sending hate tells for hours. Target audience anyone?
What exactly is buggy about Restuss?
Why does something need to reward/punish you for it to be fun? Personally I enjoy the duel, as do most PvP'ers (and you can only get a bounty by particpating in PvP and killing someone). I'd also love to know how it suddenly becomes griefing when you have no idea of the person you're taking the mission for and as you said, you don't lose anything if you do die.
Supporting NGE doesn't mean that you will not see bad parts of it.What's buggy about Restuss?
1) Please remember the overspawn, it's been fixed but players can still cause overspawn,
2) "You cannot see target", I think you understand what I mean,
3) Duped rewards. It's maybe fixed but noone removed those rewards from game,
4) Warping. In every 50-100 meters you warp back.
I'm not even talking about lag, because I know that you'll say "Lag is not bug".
Besides Restuss, game has serious bugs like specials are not firing. Most of games have bugs, but not like the ones in NGE.
You can have group bugs, guild bugs... You can have buggy specials that you know they are not working, so you never fire them. But in NGE; you do know they are working -sometimes-, but in critical stages you can't fire them.
Please remember that, it's not the amount of bugs make people leave the game, it's the type of bug. I know many people who had that issue and tried to quit.
About bounty system, this idea was here in PreCU. Which I always wanted it to happen, shame they made it in NGE.
At first, when you hear it, you think it's a good thing. Idea is great but system shouldn't be like that. People have chance to get bounty after they kill just 1 person. It should've been something like 50 people to 500 people.
Kill 50 people, you get X amount of bounty,
Kill 10 people, you get XX amount of bounty,
etc.
Bounty hunting was a great thing in PreNGE, I know so many jedi who couldn't play on their jedi because there were afraid of XP loss. Even though the XP loss, there was less hate tells. Now, people lose nothing, but they keep sending hate tells for hours. Target audience anyone?
Yeah, there used to be an overspawn, although it's been fixed for many months now. It didn't actually launch that way, they added more NPC's after people complained there wasn't enough NPC support. Not sure what you're meaning about the "cannot see target" thing, the only times I get that is, heh, when I can't see the target
Issues of specials not firing was fixed way back with Chapter 1 when they changed the way the special queing worked. They might still fail once in a blue moon, but it hasn't happened often enough for me to notice it.
The way this bounty system works, it doesn't introduce any new (or very little) new credits into the economy. Although you get 1k automatically added on you when you DB someone, the majority of the reward the BH gets is credits from another player. Although I'm sure it differs from server to server (and person to person), I very rarely get hate tell's from my marks. Then again, I don't go out of my way to try piss people off
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
You like NGE and the game, so still play. But, even as a NGE hater I know more than you about the game?
Overspawn is still there, don't make comments if you don't have any idea, you could just say "I dont go there much". Difference about overspawn is, it was by system months ago, now it's by players. You can call it exploit, but it's a bug.
There are too many places in Restuss that you get "You cannot see target" msg, everyone is using them.
Duped rewards are still there, my friend used and got 5-6 full set armor and all weapons, he put em to his house and they are still there.
If you say that "specials not firing bug is fixed", you don't play the game. Or you must be a crafter or entertainer.
I wonder if you say those word on porpuse, to show NGE is good thing, or you really talk just to talk?
Another one? Heehee. Oh man, I kill me.
I mean... I doubt it. Worst case for the emu team is they get a nasty letter for "emulating server code", the way Compaq and AMD were forced to shut down. Oh wait....
There'd be a whipping for a company like SOE to do it.
Jeff Freeman
The suits believe the nge is the way to go. PERIOD. They know damn well that if they offered classic code nobody'd play the nge. That'd make all the devs on the nge useless, all the time put into it useless.
They'd have to admit the nge is a failure and will always be a failure. They won't.
That's why Jeff said he's "not sure". If they never ask, if they never try to hash it out with LA, then they can claim they don't think it is possible. They can continue to blame LA for their failures.
Shayde - SWG (dead)
Proud member of the Cabal.
It sounds great, so great in fact, I pitty those who canceled
I don't like it when you say things. - A Vanguard fan who does too.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
You like NGE and the game, so still play. But, even as a NGE hater I know more than you about the game?
Overspawn is still there, don't make comments if you don't have any idea, you could just say "I dont go there much". Difference about overspawn is, it was by system months ago, now it's by players. You can call it exploit, but it's a bug.
There are too many places in Restuss that you get "You cannot see target" msg, everyone is using them.
Duped rewards are still there, my friend used and got 5-6 full set armor and all weapons, he put em to his house and they are still there.
If you say that "specials not firing bug is fixed", you don't play the game. Or you must be a crafter or entertainer.
I wonder if you say those word on porpuse, to show NGE is good thing, or you really talk just to talk?
Heh, you think you know more
If you're getting a cannot see target message, maybe you should move up to where they are? There's no place someone can go where you can't also go and get a line of sight. Yes, I still standby that statement that specials not firing has been fixed, I've not had any issues with them and it's been a long time since I've heard people yelling about it on Vent
There are too many building in restuss, which are broken. People can just stay "inside them" and take/give no damage. You can go near them of course, but you get the msg as well as he does.
Talking bad about NGE doesn't mean we never tried it but only talking. I've played it like 2,5-3 months and quited this month (to play Vanguard). I was saying same while I was playing and I'm still saying the same: NGE sucks.
It has way more bug than any 3 years old game. System bugs, terrain bugs, profession bugs, race bugs... I don't even count exploits
There are too many building in restuss, which are broken. People can just stay "inside them" and take/give no damage. You can go near them of course, but you get the msg as well as he does.
Talking bad about NGE doesn't mean we never tried it but only talking. I've played it like 2,5-3 months and quited this month (to play Vanguard). I was saying same while I was playing and I'm still saying the same: NGE sucks.
It has way more bug than any 3 years old game. System bugs, terrain bugs, profession bugs, race bugs... I don't even count exploits
To this day I wonder what NGE he is playing... the one that has been called a failure, won the most awards for the worst MMO ever, the one that a month or so ago with my free trial allowed me to ONCE again be stuck in aggro and visit empty servers which Mr. Smedley has now recently said he is making it a priority to merge due to lack of players or people willing to pay for that product OR is he really playing Disney Toon Town Online and is very confused as to which game he is playing.
There is so many things wrong with the NGE on so many levels that you can't really start anywhere with them. From loot issues, to feel, to animations, to the sound effects, to the particle effects, to combat and like I said... just being stuck in aggro.
It is a joke. No other game has that many issues... let alone a MMO ..... I mean think about it... You actually argued about "Specials just simply working"... NOT messed up or out of balance... but simply just freaking working?????
How can any person not use common sense on this???
______________________________
I usually picture the Career builder commercial with the room full of monkeys and upside down sales chart when thinking about the SOE/SWG decision making process.....
SOE's John Blakely and Todd Fiala issued a warning: "Don't make our mistakes." Ref NGE
Winner of the worst MMOS goes to.... the NGE and SWG..!!! http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=1034&bhcp=1
There are too many building in restuss, which are broken. People can just stay "inside them" and take/give no damage. You can go near them of course, but you get the msg as well as he does.
Talking bad about NGE doesn't mean we never tried it but only talking. I've played it like 2,5-3 months and quited this month (to play Vanguard). I was saying same while I was playing and I'm still saying the same: NGE sucks.
It has way more bug than any 3 years old game. System bugs, terrain bugs, profession bugs, race bugs... I don't even count exploits
To this day I wonder what NGE he is playing... the one that has been called a failure, won the most awards for the worst MMO ever, the one that a month or so ago with my free trial allowed me to ONCE again be stuck in aggro and visit empty servers which Mr. Smedley has now recently said he is making it a priority to merge due to lack of players or people willing to pay for that product OR is he really playing Disney Toon Town Online and is very confused as to which game he is playing.
There is so many things wrong with the NGE on so many levels that you can't really start anywhere with them. From loot issues, to feel, to animations, to the sound effects, to the particle effects, to combat and like I said... just being stuck in aggro.
It is a joke. No other game has that many issues... let alone a MMO ..... I mean think about it... You actually argued about "Specials just simply working"... NOT messed up or out of balance... but simply just freaking working?????
How can any person not use common sense on this???
Last time i logged in i could verify all those bugs..but unfortunately i couldnt stomach what the game has become..It dont know what it wants to be..A WoW clone a FPS or what??Bugs aside its a subpar attempt to become a hybrid game.Now i couldnt stand the CU at all but at least it was playable and fun at times.The NGE is just plain Boring and it has no risk vs Reward system at all now..No tefs no players crafting items no populations..Now how can you support such a turd? All i want is the complexity back and the game to grow..It will not ever recover now no matter what SOE says or does short of a Classic server..