While SOE can be blamed and rightly so for the lackluster customer support, the true blame for the state of SWG lies squarely at the feet of LucasArts. LucasArts is the one that calls the shots on the game's development, they tell SOE what to put in and what to take out. SOE only has say so over support and even then a lot of things still needed approval of LucasArts. Hell, even the forum mods couldn't make posts regarding the game unless the post was approved by the marketing weazels at LucasArts. The early launch, CU revamp and NGE were done at the direction of LucasArts. Put the blame where it belongs. Former SWG player and CSR.
Unfortunately this will fall mostly on deaf ears. It's hip to hate SoE here for a lot of people for some reason. I think you can see with EQ2 versus SWG that SoE does good on games they control.
All you have to do is read to see the reasons, Please do .
Greenmarine really had some great ideas and had actually taken in some player input as well. Where did he end up going ? Always wondered if he was on some other MMO lurking.
I ran into Greenmarine in WoW in late 2005. Had a short, but interesting chat with him about SWG - it was pretty obvious that he had his hands tied by the suits on what could be done to fix elements of the game.
Wasn't he the one responsible for taking pre-CU carbineers from the depths of combat uselessness to actually being pretty formidable on the battlefield (without having to resort to raiding the bounty carbine tree)?
While SOE can be blamed and rightly so for the lackluster customer support, the true blame for the state of SWG lies squarely at the feet of LucasArts. LucasArts is the one that calls the shots on the game's development, they tell SOE what to put in and what to take out. SOE only has say so over support and even then a lot of things still needed approval of LucasArts.
Given that Raph Koster was an SOE employee and that he was actively engaged in trying to sort out the early bugs and balance issues, I can't accept the idea that SOE didn't lead the pre-CU version of SWG to the point that sweeping changes seemed like a good idea to either SOE or LucasArts.
The simple fact that so much was broken in the first year of the game set up the majority of the balance issues. I could easily knock out a sizeable laundry list of balance issues that were directly related to broken abilities. Instead of fixing the underlying problems, SOE chose to nerf / buff abilities to work around them.
I can understand that LucasArts was responsible for high level design, after all they've put out more than their fair share of Star Wars licensed turds. You're not trying to tell me that SOE wasn't responsible for the bugged or outright broken parts of the game, are you?
While SOE can be blamed and rightly so for the lackluster customer support, the true blame for the state of SWG lies squarely at the feet of LucasArts. LucasArts is the one that calls the shots on the game's development, they tell SOE what to put in and what to take out. SOE only has say so over support and even then a lot of things still needed approval of LucasArts. Hell, even the forum mods couldn't make posts regarding the game unless the post was approved by the marketing weazels at LucasArts. The early launch, CU revamp and NGE were done at the direction of LucasArts. Put the blame where it belongs. Former SWG player and CSR.
This is a downright lie. I have stated this numerous times. One only has to know SoE's record with other games (aka thier track record) versus LAs list of successful games to know that it was mostly SoE's doing. Heck if you want even more concrete proof, smed said it was their own (soe's.. not la folks..) fault that it was a failure.
So please, whoever is brainwashing you to believe this, ignore them.
"Do not fret! Your captain is about to enter Valhalla!" - General Beatrix of Alexandria
"The acquisition of knowledge is of use to the intellect, for nothing can be loved or hated without first being known." - Leo da Vinci
Originally posted by ArcheusCross This is a downright lie. I have stated this numerous times. One only has to know SoE's record with other games (aka thier track record) versus LAs list of successful games to know that it was mostly SoE's doing. Heck if you want even more concrete proof, smed said it was their own (soe's.. not la folks..) fault that it was a failure. So please, whoever is brainwashing you to believe this, ignore them.
So because you "stated it numerous times" it must be true huh? Please, if SoE has a known track record please point out them and exclude SWG.
To the OP - screw the snide little comments from the SOE fanbois; I think your post is great, an excellent litany of the insults and incompetence hundreds of thousands of subscribers had to put up from this comnpany.
Anyone remember when Greenmarine posted that the coding of the smuggler smuggling update was completed, and only lacked the conversation options to be added and pass Q&A?
A month later Greenmarine left SOE, and we never heard about the smugglers being able to smuggle again...until the NGE, where NOTHING of the original plans for smuggling was implemented.
Then we have the Lambda shuttle, that was reported by the devs as nearly completed, and they just had to choose what kind of interior they wanted for it. As in Luxury(think limousine) or Army transport(Think APC, Trucks, Empire/Rebel shuttle). It even spawned with the help of the devs huge discussions about what kind of interior would be apropriate for a Lambda shuttle.
Then, we never heard about the lambda again.
Oh, and lets not forget the other MP ships that they also said were close to complete, and that they would be in the next publish or the one after that...
I remember I was so stoked about the Lambda comming, and the smuggler system... Instead we got the darn lavaexpansion and the NGE... And never was a word heard about the content they had worked on for months and gotten 90% complete.
While SOE can be blamed and rightly so for the lackluster customer support, the true blame for the state of SWG lies squarely at the feet of LucasArts. LucasArts is the one that calls the shots on the game's development, they tell SOE what to put in and what to take out. SOE only has say so over support and even then a lot of things still needed approval of LucasArts.
Given that Raph Koster was an SOE employee and that he was actively engaged in trying to sort out the early bugs and balance issues, I can't accept the idea that SOE didn't lead the pre-CU version of SWG to the point that sweeping changes seemed like a good idea to either SOE or LucasArts.
The simple fact that so much was broken in the first year of the game set up the majority of the balance issues. I could easily knock out a sizeable laundry list of balance issues that were directly related to broken abilities. Instead of fixing the underlying problems, SOE chose to nerf / buff abilities to work around them.
I can understand that LucasArts was responsible for high level design, after all they've put out more than their fair share of Star Wars licensed turds. You're not trying to tell me that SOE wasn't responsible for the bugged or outright broken parts of the game, are you?
Ralph Koster could not make any decision regarding the development of SWG until he received approval from LucasArt. You may not want to believe it and continue to stick your head in the sand but that fact isn't just going to go away. LucasArts is very protective of their IPs and exercise complete and utter control over them. Nothing was added or removed from SWG unless LucasArts said it was okay to. Bugs caused by bad programming, sure SOE can take some of the blame as they used their programmers but stuff like the Combat Revamps, character revamps, NGE, and the Obi-Wan expansion debacle and any other decisions regarding game design and the direction to take the game were purely made by LucasArts.
Those are the facts...you can either take them or do as you continue to do and ignore them. And I guess yes, I'm saying that SOE wasn't the main culprit for turning SWG into the mess it is. The main fault lies with LucasArts.
Oh and to the person that referred to me as a "SOE fanboi", hardly anything could be further from the truth. After working there for over 3 years (2 years as a CSR for SWG since launch day) and seeing how they like to screw over their employees, especially their contract employees have left a bitter taste for anything SOE.
Ralph Koster could not make any decision regarding the development of SWG until he received approval from LucasArt. You may not want to believe it and continue to stick your head in the sand but that fact isn't just going to go away. LucasArts is very protective of their IPs and exercise complete and utter control over them. Nothing was added or removed from SWG unless LucasArts said it was okay to. Bugs caused by bad programming, sure SOE can take some of the blame as they used their programmers but stuff like the Combat Revamps, character revamps, NGE, and the Obi-Wan expansion debacle and any other decisions regarding game design and the direction to take the game were purely made by LucasArts.
Those are the facts...you can either take them or do as you continue to do and ignore them. And I guess yes, I'm saying that SOE wasn't the main culprit for turning SWG into the mess it is. The main fault lies with LucasArts.
You missed the point of my post.
I can completely believe that the major development work - the NGE, the CU, the Jedi revamp, etc - was guided by LA. My point was that the incompetence of SOE to deal with the basics of the game's mechanics are what created any demand or need for such development.
The game was full of broken features and abilities. The fact that those features and abilities remained broken for over a year, were broken in different ways when an yattempt was made to fix them, or were nerfed due to community whining made it impossible to balance the game out. If SOE hadn't been chock full 'o incompetence, those bugs could have been fixed and a decent accessment of the state of the game could have been made.
That's why I blame SOE. LucasArts never had the ability to access the state of a fully functional pre-CU SWG because SOE couldn't create a fully functional pre-CU SWG.
By the way, I wouldn't admit to being a SWG CSR. I've played five MMORPG's from four different companies, and SWG's CSR's were by far the worst. It wasn't even close. Forgive me for treading dangerously close to the realm of the ad homenim, but seriously, you may as well visit a corporate ethics forum and admit to being a former Enron executive.
"If your Jedi is having visibility issues, please check your video card drivers."
My wife hated that game because I took my comp to my parents house and spent the night there instead of in our place because the net was down and it was a guild night.
As much as she hated that game because of that one night she was actually sad when I finally quit playing because of all the NGE crap.
SOE has just gone further and further downhill since then.
The OP missed one important lie, but unless the OP was a CU alpha tester, would not know it.
In November of 2004, with great fanfare, it was announced that a number of players would be participating in a CU sandbox program. The promise was that actual players would help shape the CU.
The problem was, the players who participated never set foot in the sandbox to help shape the CU. Oh, they saw all the CU documents before everyone else did, and they got to post to a special forum to discuss the proposed CU changes, but they never got to play with the CU until it was put on Test Center.
So the entire CU sandbox, the "Alpha Tester" program, was a sham. A canard.
A lie.
The CU that was actually foisted on the SWG community bore very little resemblance to the documents I was permitted (under pain of NDA death) to read in late 2004. The CU I saw probably would have worked. But WoW came on the scene, took the industry by storm, and the numbers that were being racked up meant that Smedley and the rest of his MBA crew were simultanously pwned and mesmerized by those guys at Blizzard.
And so all the innovation of SWG was chucked in favor of slavish imitiation of WoW, except for the two things that really made WoW shine:
1. Relatively bug-free play
2. Responsive customer service.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Ok, read most of the first page, didn't read whole thread so excuse me if this was mentioned already.
I recall one lie that I felt was pretty much out right disrespect for every player paying to play SWG. It was when CU first came out and someone from SOE (I forget who) had an interview about the CU. Well that person basically said something to the effect that the vast majority of players supported the CU and were happy that the CU was implemented. However, during the time he said it, there was only the biggest petition in gaming history going on stating players did not want the CU. There were thousands of players signing the petition, including myself yet SOE made a statement that their polls showed most of the SOE customers wanted and liked the CU. I still can't figure out what polls they got their information from because they never polled us on whether we liked or wanted the CU, at least not when That dev made that statement. so to me, this was a major slap in the face and only reason I continued to give SWG a shot is because I consider myself a person that will give people the benefit of the doubt and let them prove to me that they should be forgiven for their past actions.
Well, I gave SWG the benefit of the doubt and they simply never proved to me that SOE or the game deserved my money any longer. SO I moved on after 3 years of commitment (that's keeping my account open the whole time, no lapses in payment at all). I simply stuck around so long because it was star wars and I was optimistic in that they would eventually fix the game and get it right. However, the more they tried to fix the game, the worse it got and the more I began to believe that the original version (that first year and a half) was and still is the better game. A unfinished, slightly broken 2003 - 04 SWG was worlds better than CU and NGE put together. It's say though because SOE has got in so deep with the changes to SWG that they simply can't afford to back track and that's what's killing the game. Seriously, I used their little 14 day free trials they gave to vet players only to find servers and cities were ghost towns and I'd be lucky to see 10 people in an hours time playing. I just didn't feel I was playing a MMO.
this thread really sums of everything wrong with SWG and SOE though. May SOE and SWG forever rest in peace. Oh, and I truely hope the L.A. doesn't hire SOE to make any future star wars games. If there ever will be another Star Wars MMO, I hope another game company makes it, SOE needs to stick to their EQ franchise and leave my beloved Star Wars alone.
Thanks Admriker4 for the brief reminder of just how honorless SOE is.
The lies start back in beta, when q3po swore up and down to the community that Jedis were going to be extremely rare, extremely difficult to obtain, and will be permadeath. Not to mention "blue glowies".
SOE lied to people who played on certain servers that were down constantly, and on one occasion mine was down for 4 days strait and we were promised compensation.... never happened.
I have a very strong dislike of anything sony from my experience with SWG. I was amazed, in a very negative way, just how blatant their lies were.
Oh yeah, one more while I'm here... how about the false press reports concerning the actuall number of players? Heh... SOE ftl
I can sit here for a half hour or so and list additional instances where SOE fabricated information, or strait out lied to the public, but I think this thread and the OP's first post pretty much gets the message accross. With WoW getting quite tiresome, some of us may actually consider giving another run with SWG, but after reading your post... and remembering why I left so long ago, theres no way in hell I'd give SOE one cent to play their crap.
I remember one interesting little spin given to justify the CU. They said the reason they needed to change things was that artisans were laying down harvesters in the nightsister stronghold unbuffed and having no problems.
As a mining mogul, I knew this to be patently false. One, barely any surveyors went to Dathomir. The terrain was not very suitable for real mining. Second, in the areas where the NS was populous, you were unable to lay down harvesters! Second, even the strongest stacker never went to Dathomir unbuffed. Even if you had 95% comp, to travel around Dathomir unbuffed was to invite certain death.
What they said was certainly true. Armor was overpowered. Based on poor planning, 95% comp was making the game a single player game, and the night sister elders were able to be solo'ed, even though they were supposed to be some of the most wicked mobs in the game. Yet why did they have to invent a falsehood to tell the truth?
2. Jedi - We all know that jedi was NEVER possible at launch. Yet SOE made post after post dangling that carrot and offering encouragement. They told us to get married, explore every world, build a home, etc. It made some think that jedi was some random amazing quest to be discovered. Soon though we learned the truth when SOE patched in several .tre files with obvious jedi implications 5 months after launch. Then the day after a patch several unlocked all at once.
Don't forget - they told the same lie about Jedi that they told about Frogolks in EQ2 when it launched.
"No really, we swear it's in... you just have to unlock it... somehow..."
Then, sure enough, we find out what - four months later? - that the damn animations weren't even done for Frogloks yet. They weren't even finished, let alone "in game."
I' ve said it before and I will say it again - SOE is a cancer in the MMO genre. And John Smedley is the King of Lies.
While SOE can be blamed and rightly so for the lackluster customer support, the true blame for the state of SWG lies squarely at the feet of LucasArts. LucasArts is the one that calls the shots on the game's development, they tell SOE what to put in and what to take out. SOE only has say so over support and even then a lot of things still needed approval of LucasArts.
Given that Raph Koster was an SOE employee and that he was actively engaged in trying to sort out the early bugs and balance issues, I can't accept the idea that SOE didn't lead the pre-CU version of SWG to the point that sweeping changes seemed like a good idea to either SOE or LucasArts.
The simple fact that so much was broken in the first year of the game set up the majority of the balance issues. I could easily knock out a sizeable laundry list of balance issues that were directly related to broken abilities. Instead of fixing the underlying problems, SOE chose to nerf / buff abilities to work around them.
I can understand that LucasArts was responsible for high level design, after all they've put out more than their fair share of Star Wars licensed turds. You're not trying to tell me that SOE wasn't responsible for the bugged or outright broken parts of the game, are you?
Ralph Koster could not make any decision regarding the development of SWG until he received approval from LucasArt. You may not want to believe it and continue to stick your head in the sand but that fact isn't just going to go away. LucasArts is very protective of their IPs and exercise complete and utter control over them. Nothing was added or removed from SWG unless LucasArts said it was okay to. Bugs caused by bad programming, sure SOE can take some of the blame as they used their programmers but stuff like the Combat Revamps, character revamps, NGE, and the Obi-Wan expansion debacle and any other decisions regarding game design and the direction to take the game were purely made by LucasArts.
Those are the facts...you can either take them or do as you continue to do and ignore them. And I guess yes, I'm saying that SOE wasn't the main culprit for turning SWG into the mess it is. The main fault lies with LucasArts.
Oh and to the person that referred to me as a "SOE fanboi", hardly anything could be further from the truth. After working there for over 3 years (2 years as a CSR for SWG since launch day) and seeing how they like to screw over their employees, especially their contract employees have left a bitter taste for anything SOE.
-Fuhyo
Ok, Mr. "I Worked for SWG for two years"... He goes by Raph, not Ralph.
Comments
Unfortunately this will fall mostly on deaf ears. It's hip to hate SoE here for a lot of people for some reason.
I think you can see with EQ2 versus SWG that SoE does good on games they control.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
All you have to do is read to see the reasons, Please do .
I ran into Greenmarine in WoW in late 2005. Had a short, but interesting chat with him about SWG - it was pretty obvious that he had his hands tied by the suits on what could be done to fix elements of the game.
Wasn't he the one responsible for taking pre-CU carbineers from the depths of combat uselessness to actually being pretty formidable on the battlefield (without having to resort to raiding the bounty carbine tree)?
Given that Raph Koster was an SOE employee and that he was actively engaged in trying to sort out the early bugs and balance issues, I can't accept the idea that SOE didn't lead the pre-CU version of SWG to the point that sweeping changes seemed like a good idea to either SOE or LucasArts.
The simple fact that so much was broken in the first year of the game set up the majority of the balance issues. I could easily knock out a sizeable laundry list of balance issues that were directly related to broken abilities. Instead of fixing the underlying problems, SOE chose to nerf / buff abilities to work around them.
I can understand that LucasArts was responsible for high level design, after all they've put out more than their fair share of Star Wars licensed turds. You're not trying to tell me that SOE wasn't responsible for the bugged or outright broken parts of the game, are you?
So please, whoever is brainwashing you to believe this, ignore them.
"Do not fret! Your captain is about to enter Valhalla!" - General Beatrix of Alexandria
"The acquisition of knowledge is of use to the intellect, for nothing can be loved or hated without first being known." - Leo da Vinci
Good luck.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
.
.
.
/crickets
Hmm, I just remembered some other "lies".
Anyone remember when Greenmarine posted that the coding of the smuggler smuggling update was completed, and only lacked the conversation options to be added and pass Q&A?
A month later Greenmarine left SOE, and we never heard about the smugglers being able to smuggle again...until the NGE, where NOTHING of the original plans for smuggling was implemented.
Then we have the Lambda shuttle, that was reported by the devs as nearly completed, and they just had to choose what kind of interior they wanted for it. As in Luxury(think limousine) or Army transport(Think APC, Trucks, Empire/Rebel shuttle). It even spawned with the help of the devs huge discussions about what kind of interior would be apropriate for a Lambda shuttle.
Then, we never heard about the lambda again.
Oh, and lets not forget the other MP ships that they also said were close to complete, and that they would be in the next publish or the one after that...
I remember I was so stoked about the Lambda comming, and the smuggler system... Instead we got the darn lavaexpansion and the NGE... And never was a word heard about the content they had worked on for months and gotten 90% complete.
Given that Raph Koster was an SOE employee and that he was actively engaged in trying to sort out the early bugs and balance issues, I can't accept the idea that SOE didn't lead the pre-CU version of SWG to the point that sweeping changes seemed like a good idea to either SOE or LucasArts.
The simple fact that so much was broken in the first year of the game set up the majority of the balance issues. I could easily knock out a sizeable laundry list of balance issues that were directly related to broken abilities. Instead of fixing the underlying problems, SOE chose to nerf / buff abilities to work around them.
I can understand that LucasArts was responsible for high level design, after all they've put out more than their fair share of Star Wars licensed turds. You're not trying to tell me that SOE wasn't responsible for the bugged or outright broken parts of the game, are you?
Ralph Koster could not make any decision regarding the development of SWG until he received approval from LucasArt. You may not want to believe it and continue to stick your head in the sand but that fact isn't just going to go away. LucasArts is very protective of their IPs and exercise complete and utter control over them. Nothing was added or removed from SWG unless LucasArts said it was okay to. Bugs caused by bad programming, sure SOE can take some of the blame as they used their programmers but stuff like the Combat Revamps, character revamps, NGE, and the Obi-Wan expansion debacle and any other decisions regarding game design and the direction to take the game were purely made by LucasArts.
Those are the facts...you can either take them or do as you continue to do and ignore them. And I guess yes, I'm saying that SOE wasn't the main culprit for turning SWG into the mess it is. The main fault lies with LucasArts.
Oh and to the person that referred to me as a "SOE fanboi", hardly anything could be further from the truth. After working there for over 3 years (2 years as a CSR for SWG since launch day) and seeing how they like to screw over their employees, especially their contract employees have left a bitter taste for anything SOE.
-Fuhyo
Man...so much tasty looking Kool-Aid in this thread.....
But, from which punch bowl do I drink?
You missed the point of my post.
I can completely believe that the major development work - the NGE, the CU, the Jedi revamp, etc - was guided by LA. My point was that the incompetence of SOE to deal with the basics of the game's mechanics are what created any demand or need for such development.
The game was full of broken features and abilities. The fact that those features and abilities remained broken for over a year, were broken in different ways when an yattempt was made to fix them, or were nerfed due to community whining made it impossible to balance the game out. If SOE hadn't been chock full 'o incompetence, those bugs could have been fixed and a decent accessment of the state of the game could have been made.
That's why I blame SOE. LucasArts never had the ability to access the state of a fully functional pre-CU SWG because SOE couldn't create a fully functional pre-CU SWG.
By the way, I wouldn't admit to being a SWG CSR. I've played five MMORPG's from four different companies, and SWG's CSR's were by far the worst. It wasn't even close. Forgive me for treading dangerously close to the realm of the ad homenim, but seriously, you may as well visit a corporate ethics forum and admit to being a former Enron executive.
"If your Jedi is having visibility issues, please check your video card drivers."
The OP is my new hero.
I hated all that BS.
I played old school SWG more than any other game.
My wife hated that game because I took my comp to my parents house and spent the night there instead of in our place because the net was down and it was a guild night.
As much as she hated that game because of that one night she was actually sad when I finally quit playing because of all the NGE crap.
SOE has just gone further and further downhill since then.
The OP missed one important lie, but unless the OP was a CU alpha tester, would not know it.
In November of 2004, with great fanfare, it was announced that a number of players would be participating in a CU sandbox program. The promise was that actual players would help shape the CU.
The problem was, the players who participated never set foot in the sandbox to help shape the CU. Oh, they saw all the CU documents before everyone else did, and they got to post to a special forum to discuss the proposed CU changes, but they never got to play with the CU until it was put on Test Center.
So the entire CU sandbox, the "Alpha Tester" program, was a sham. A canard.
A lie.
The CU that was actually foisted on the SWG community bore very little resemblance to the documents I was permitted (under pain of NDA death) to read in late 2004. The CU I saw probably would have worked. But WoW came on the scene, took the industry by storm, and the numbers that were being racked up meant that Smedley and the rest of his MBA crew were simultanously pwned and mesmerized by those guys at Blizzard.
And so all the innovation of SWG was chucked in favor of slavish imitiation of WoW, except for the two things that really made WoW shine:
1. Relatively bug-free play
2. Responsive customer service.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Oh man oh man is that the classic CSR response.
I recall once being told by a CSR that the solution to the Warren key giver being stuck in a tree was to toss up a camp to make the tree go away.
The tree, of course, was located in a "metropolitan area" where you can't erect camps.
D'oh!
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
I recall one lie that I felt was pretty much out right disrespect for every player paying to play SWG. It was when CU first came out and someone from SOE (I forget who) had an interview about the CU. Well that person basically said something to the effect that the vast majority of players supported the CU and were happy that the CU was implemented. However, during the time he said it, there was only the biggest petition in gaming history going on stating players did not want the CU. There were thousands of players signing the petition, including myself yet SOE made a statement that their polls showed most of the SOE customers wanted and liked the CU. I still can't figure out what polls they got their information from because they never polled us on whether we liked or wanted the CU, at least not when That dev made that statement. so to me, this was a major slap in the face and only reason I continued to give SWG a shot is because I consider myself a person that will give people the benefit of the doubt and let them prove to me that they should be forgiven for their past actions.
Well, I gave SWG the benefit of the doubt and they simply never proved to me that SOE or the game deserved my money any longer. SO I moved on after 3 years of commitment (that's keeping my account open the whole time, no lapses in payment at all). I simply stuck around so long because it was star wars and I was optimistic in that they would eventually fix the game and get it right. However, the more they tried to fix the game, the worse it got and the more I began to believe that the original version (that first year and a half) was and still is the better game. A unfinished, slightly broken 2003 - 04 SWG was worlds better than CU and NGE put together. It's say though because SOE has got in so deep with the changes to SWG that they simply can't afford to back track and that's what's killing the game. Seriously, I used their little 14 day free trials they gave to vet players only to find servers and cities were ghost towns and I'd be lucky to see 10 people in an hours time playing. I just didn't feel I was playing a MMO.
this thread really sums of everything wrong with SWG and SOE though. May SOE and SWG forever rest in peace. Oh, and I truely hope the L.A. doesn't hire SOE to make any future star wars games. If there ever will be another Star Wars MMO, I hope another game company makes it, SOE needs to stick to their EQ franchise and leave my beloved Star Wars alone.
Thanks Admriker4 for the brief reminder of just how honorless SOE is.
The lies start back in beta, when q3po swore up and down to the community that Jedis were going to be extremely rare, extremely difficult to obtain, and will be permadeath. Not to mention "blue glowies".
SOE lied to people who played on certain servers that were down constantly, and on one occasion mine was down for 4 days strait and we were promised compensation.... never happened.
I have a very strong dislike of anything sony from my experience with SWG. I was amazed, in a very negative way, just how blatant their lies were.
Oh yeah, one more while I'm here... how about the false press reports concerning the actuall number of players? Heh... SOE ftl
I can sit here for a half hour or so and list additional instances where SOE fabricated information, or strait out lied to the public, but I think this thread and the OP's first post pretty much gets the message accross. With WoW getting quite tiresome, some of us may actually consider giving another run with SWG, but after reading your post... and remembering why I left so long ago, theres no way in hell I'd give SOE one cent to play their crap.
Tnx again
I remember one interesting little spin given to justify the CU. They said the reason they needed to change things was that artisans were laying down harvesters in the nightsister stronghold unbuffed and having no problems.
As a mining mogul, I knew this to be patently false. One, barely any surveyors went to Dathomir. The terrain was not very suitable for real mining. Second, in the areas where the NS was populous, you were unable to lay down harvesters! Second, even the strongest stacker never went to Dathomir unbuffed. Even if you had 95% comp, to travel around Dathomir unbuffed was to invite certain death.
What they said was certainly true. Armor was overpowered. Based on poor planning, 95% comp was making the game a single player game, and the night sister elders were able to be solo'ed, even though they were supposed to be some of the most wicked mobs in the game. Yet why did they have to invent a falsehood to tell the truth?
"No really, we swear it's in... you just have to unlock it... somehow..."
Then, sure enough, we find out what - four months later? - that the damn animations weren't even done for Frogloks yet. They weren't even finished, let alone "in game."
I' ve said it before and I will say it again - SOE is a cancer in the MMO genre. And John Smedley is the King of Lies.
Given that Raph Koster was an SOE employee and that he was actively engaged in trying to sort out the early bugs and balance issues, I can't accept the idea that SOE didn't lead the pre-CU version of SWG to the point that sweeping changes seemed like a good idea to either SOE or LucasArts.
The simple fact that so much was broken in the first year of the game set up the majority of the balance issues. I could easily knock out a sizeable laundry list of balance issues that were directly related to broken abilities. Instead of fixing the underlying problems, SOE chose to nerf / buff abilities to work around them.
I can understand that LucasArts was responsible for high level design, after all they've put out more than their fair share of Star Wars licensed turds. You're not trying to tell me that SOE wasn't responsible for the bugged or outright broken parts of the game, are you?
Ralph Koster could not make any decision regarding the development of SWG until he received approval from LucasArt. You may not want to believe it and continue to stick your head in the sand but that fact isn't just going to go away. LucasArts is very protective of their IPs and exercise complete and utter control over them. Nothing was added or removed from SWG unless LucasArts said it was okay to. Bugs caused by bad programming, sure SOE can take some of the blame as they used their programmers but stuff like the Combat Revamps, character revamps, NGE, and the Obi-Wan expansion debacle and any other decisions regarding game design and the direction to take the game were purely made by LucasArts.
Those are the facts...you can either take them or do as you continue to do and ignore them. And I guess yes, I'm saying that SOE wasn't the main culprit for turning SWG into the mess it is. The main fault lies with LucasArts.
Oh and to the person that referred to me as a "SOE fanboi", hardly anything could be further from the truth. After working there for over 3 years (2 years as a CSR for SWG since launch day) and seeing how they like to screw over their employees, especially their contract employees have left a bitter taste for anything SOE.
-Fuhyo
Ok, Mr. "I Worked for SWG for two years"... He goes by Raph, not Ralph.SWG Team Mtg.
this entire thread is a dead horse
Get over it.
Not to mention that at least half of the examples given as "proof" are outright lies.