As so many have pointed out it was the community that really elevated this game. I think our community was so vibrant because of the competition in almost every aspect of pre-CU gameplay. In the beginning it was almost a race to be the first Master Marksman or Master Artisan. It was virtually a contest to see who could craft the first T-21. People pulled together to achieve these goals.
It was pride that drove people to have the biggest house, best decorated guildhall, most dynamic city. It was ego that pressed people to be the greatest at combat, collect the best resources, have the rarest items.
In short pre-CU was the greatest MMO IMO because it was so dynamic. It was ever changing because of the desire to improve almost every part of your SWG experience.
Some may say that that experience is still there (and maybe to them it is) but most of us recognize the fact that it's a shadow of it's former self.
It was a point in the time of star wars galaxies timeline that was in the majority of past and present players opinion, the best. At this point in time the game was more of a sandbox that you could roleplay whatever you wished and basically choose what skills out of a tree you could do. Want to be a medic that shot a rifle? sure! It didnt go to class based until the dreaded NGE, where it alienated its players and thier work and about 8/10th of the subscriber base jetted for other games.
I tried to balance my opinion, but since you didn't do the same i'll also create a bias reason.
People used to stand at the starport petitioning sony to fix the massive amount of quest bugs and general exploits in the game, all the classes were unbalanced and little people cared about roleplay. They just wanted to grind jedi.
When sony updated the game there will still bugs, around 20% of the players left. There are now 9 classes, with a beast-master profession tree and a expertise for each (Helps diversity). 80% stayed in the game, most loving it.
The game has been receiving constant updates, sony's new dev team is doing a great job, they've been attracting heards of new players and 'veterans' back, most whiners havn't played it since the update.
oops, Strange thing is what i just wrong isn't bias atall. and you can still be a medic with a rifle.
What's become of this game is its the perfect game now for those whom want everything handed to them. It's nearly impossible to even die in this game anymore. If you want to get killed in combat you have to basically work for it. It's a gravy game now. The ones whom enjoy this game IMO are the ones you see in all the games asking for the answer, and solution to every quest in a game without having to work for it, or even giving it a try themselves.
What's become of this game is its the perfect game now for those whom want everything handed to them. It's nearly impossible to even die in this game anymore. If you want to get killed in combat you have to basically work for it. It's a gravy game now. The ones whom enjoy this game IMO are the ones you see in all the games asking for the answer, and solution to every quest in a game without having to work for it, or even giving it a try themselves.
There that's my bias and i'm sticking to it,
Raven
This is all quite true. Death has absolutely no sting at all, aside from the annoyance of having to return to where you died from the cloner.
What is even more amazing to me is that even though if you work your way through the Legacy quest series, you'll be a millionaire off the credit rewards and cashing in the endless stream of junk loot, new players are still standing around Mos Eisley begging for credits.
The live game is nearly as free with handing out credits as the blue frogs are on TC!
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
To sum up what Pre-CU was to me compared to NGE....It was a time of "total freedom". You didn't feel you were forced on your path of evolution. You played at your own pace, you built your star wars character as you saw fit. You weren't forced into being a certain level, doing specific quest, being restricted in any way at all. In many ways, it felt like real life but in a star wars universe. It was very very complicated at times yet fun for those willing to spend the time to "learn".
for CU and NGE, everything shifted towards restrictions. You have to be a certain level to do anything. YOu were restricted in what professions and uniqueness you wanted for your characters. No longer could you be a crafter with a weapon that was good enough to compete with someone who was a pure combatant. Now you are restricted to such a degree that your character wasn't unique anymore. Everyone of the same level is wearing and using the same items and look the same. 500 jedi running around with jedi master robes on all doing the exact same special attacks with the same effectiveness.
When I first started playing SWG (about 1 month after it launched summer of 2003), I felt that the virtual world was alive. when I met a rifeman in theed and a rifleman in coronet, they both were a bit mysterious. I was curious to find out what they were. You got a surprise when you engaged in pvp with them since you pretty much could have any combination of professions, attacks and skills (even though cookie cutter templates were still the most popular, but not nearly as many as CU or NGE). so attack that rifleman in theed and he retaliates with skills that you don't even know he had and you have to adjust on the fly. Attack that rifleman in coronet and it was a totally different experience. With CU and NGE, everyone is a clone of everyone else. You know 95% of everyones skills before you even engage in a fight with them. You know that they aren't a jedi who has some TKM, some Medic, some rifleman or some marksman. You know they aren't gonna toss some CM poison's at you being a jedi or being a smuggler.
so in my opinion, when there are 500 people walking around with the same sneakers that I have on, I want some new sneakers because I don't want to be like everyone else. With PRE-CU/NGE you could do that, with CU and NGE, you can't at all. the expertise tree is a small comprimise that allows a little bit of customization, but overall your so restricted in other aspects that your forced to take specific skills just to survive or compete. For example, pre-cu you didn't have to have healing to be effective as someone who could heal. You had alternatives to healing. My jedi could survive with or without healing. When CU came, healing was a must and then in NGE, no heal, no survive was basically the way it went. Of course it has balanced out a bit more now days, but nothing the CU and NGE have to offer is better than what SWG was Pre-cu. so anytime you take total freedom away from a person, they will not like it and will resent any other compromise you have to offer them. You've taken the candy from the kid so to speak and we all know how annoying that can be....magnify it 1000 times when your spending a couple hundred bucks a year on a game. Its like buying an expensive exotic sports car only to find out that the government has to take it away from you for their own reasons that don't affect you and replace it with a cheap clone with worse performance, yet you still have to pay the exotic price.
Now I will say that there were a lot of bugs and balance issues in pre-CU but nothing more than any other MMO would have. It just so happens that SOE had a lot of dev swapping in and out and that the new devs couldn't keep up with managing the original SWG because of it's uniqueness. It was a complicated game system to manage and so they needed (or wanted) to simplify it so the new devs could code and manage the game. Making it a clone of EQ was the simpliest solutions since a few of the devs came over from EQ. Also, pre-Cu, there was a lot of things you could do since you had so much freedom and there was practically never any time where you felt you reached the end game unless you had unlocked jedi and cheated your way up the force ranking system. The balance issues they had pre-cu were a productive of swapping developers around so much as I said and instead of balancing broken aspects, they deferred to just given us other things to cover up the problems. This is when it became really hard to balance stuff which is were the invincible rifleman, the dominant CM's in pvp, the super TKM's and godly jedi came into play. The composite armor that made you immune to 95% of all damage...seriously, that was bad design by the devs. Players didn't ask for that, devs just gave it to us. It got to a point were you could take on the toughest and most baddest bosses or encounters in the game solo and not even get hit by npc's. A nightsister elder was one of the baddest meanies in the game at one point and insane buffs, super composite armor and legendary weapons allowed you to slaughter them as fast as they spawned and never have to heal yourself or use any special tactics. You could literally start the fight, start up your automatic macro's and go take a shower, cook dinner, walk to the store, watch your favorite movie and when you came back, the enemy and any others that spawned would all be dead. You'd be a little more richer and have a inventory full of loot.
so when it finally got to those problems, the devs didn't make an effort to fix it because the new devs didn't understand how the old devs did it. Instead of halting the production of new content and bug fixes, the opted to make their own version as they would have done if they had started developing the game themselves.....the product is the CU and later the NGE. Again, neither is better than the original SWG simply becuase the original took MMO's way past what the WOW's and EQ's had. Changing SWG's revolutionary game play back to EQ style is like the world suddenly getting rid of all compact disc and make us use cassette tapes again. Players left SWG in massive amounts (despite what others say) because SWG became a EQ clone and if they wanted that, they would have subscribe to EQ instead of SWG.
Again, lots of players left. More than what people are saying anyway. there was a time where you could not get through coronet, theed or dantooine mining outpost without major lag from hundreds of players loitering there whether fighting, spamming the sale of their wares or simply having conversation and gatherings. Everywhere you went there were 20+, 50+ players. After CU hit, that dropped off like a plaque hit the virtual SWG galaxy or the empire executed order 66 on every person in the galaxy, not just jedi. NGE just has ghost towns now. Most people will say that it's just the evolution of a MMO that's been around for so long and has the normal population. I say it's because of the CU and NGE because the sudden drop off of players showed easily as soon as both systems hit. That is a major coincidence if they didn't cause players to hit the cancle button on their accounts a some people suggest.
So I agree with the person that said 8/10 (80%) of players left cause of CU or NGE. anyone who did not play the game before publish 9 (that pub was still pre-cu, cu was about 5 months away then) where path to jedi was practically given to everyone, just don't know and will never know the difference between the original SWG and CU/NGE. If you came after CU/NGE or basically after january of 2005, then you don't know the real SWG and how great a game it was. Anyone playing CU/NGE can't understand how people bash SWG because they simply was not there before the changes. the sad thing is that there were easy solutions to fixing the original SWG. There were easy solutions to the 95% composite armor, the mind bar being the defining factor in pvp, the 5k max damage (before using specials) that legendary weapons had when the best normal weapon barely reached 3k max damage and many other issues. The devs for whatever reason simply choose to go back to the drawing board though. If it was in beta, it probably would have went over well, but you just don't do that after a game has been out for 2 years. Oh, that's another thing, SWG wasn't ready to go live when it did, but I think (don't quote me on that) that L.A. and SOE pushed it's released, probably to be competitive in the market at the time....I don't know though, it was definitely published unfinished though.
I love the Sandbox term.. and guess what.. That was MOST of the problem..
There was too many players in SWG that love exploiting the game and using the tools in the sandbox to grieve others.. You reach for a rake in the sandbox to play while another takes the same rake, brakes off a few prongs and uses it like a pitch fork to stab you.. So in the end, the Sandbox needed rules, because others were unable to play well with others..
I suspect that many of the others are the ones wanting pre CU back again.. The want that lawless game back with no rules and let them exploit at will.. I doubt that will ever happen again..One thing SWG did show that if you try to have a rules free community/game, you will attract every nasty PvP exploiter under the sun.. If PvP is so fun for some of you.. GO PLAY Planetside or WoW.. You can go PvP yourself to death.. LITERALLY.. lol
I love the Sandbox term.. and guess what.. That was MOST of the problem..
There was too many players in SWG that love exploiting the game and using the tools in the sandbox to grieve others.. You reach for a rake in the sandbox to play while another takes the same rake, brakes off a few prongs and uses it like a pitch fork to stab you.. So in the end, the Sandbox needed rules, because others were unable to play well with others..
I suspect that many of the others are the ones wanting pre CU back again.. The want that lawless game back with no rules and let them exploit at will.. I doubt that will ever happen again..One thing SWG did show that if you try to have a rules free community/game, you will attract every nasty PvP exploiter under the sun.. If PvP is so fun for some of you.. GO PLAY Planetside or WoW.. You can go PvP yourself to death.. LITERALLY.. lol
heh..actually most of us wanted those bugs and exploits fixed..most of us didn't want 2 major revamps that changed all of the aspects of the game that we liked and didn't do anything to help the stability of the game. I just think its hillarious that your whole reasoning behind your arguement is that all of us "whiners" like PvP too much..crafters also got jipped in this game. Oh and theres also the whole thing of a GALACTIC CIVIL WAR supposed to be going on...
And really if your comparing a few bugs in a game to being stabbed in the stomach with a rake I feel sorry for you. I think a better analogy would be that a bunch of mentally ill kids kicked all of the intelligent people out of the only warehouse left on earth during an ice age so they could have all of the bread to themselves. The thing is though that the bread is made of crap and only the mentally ill kids are eating it while all of the intelligent people are hunting for fresh food. Thats my analogy for the NGE.
"The Sandbox" was not the problem. If it were the problem, then non-sandbox games (like WoW) would never have griefing going on, would never see player bans.
The problem was the game was (and is) rife with bugs and exploits. Some players will look for any seam they can find and rip it apart, and gleefully grief other players. It's the nature of the beast, and the anonymity of the MMO allows for a lot of antisocial behavior.
Also, frankly, I think the beta testers (and I was one of them) were not as aggressive in attempting to do things not "as intended" to really stress the game and find those seams.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
I love the Sandbox term.. and guess what.. That was MOST of the problem..
There was too many players in SWG that love exploiting the game and using the tools in the sandbox to grieve others.. You reach for a rake in the sandbox to play while another takes the same rake, brakes off a few prongs and uses it like a pitch fork to stab you.. So in the end, the Sandbox needed rules, because others were unable to play well with others..
I suspect that many of the others are the ones wanting pre CU back again.. The want that lawless game back with no rules and let them exploit at will.. I doubt that will ever happen again..One thing SWG did show that if you try to have a rules free community/game, you will attract every nasty PvP exploiter under the sun.. If PvP is so fun for some of you.. GO PLAY Planetside or WoW.. You can go PvP yourself to death.. LITERALLY.. lol
I agree for some of the points. I don't see an issue with the sandbox at all. The issue I see is with the little anti-social kiddies poping from game to game trying to make games into pvp this pvp that. They tried to make SWG into a fully pvp, and like wow. And they succeeded in having the devs make the game more like wow. The problem was that SWG Pre-CU wasnt about pvp, it was much more than that... it was a great social game where you could have houses, businesses, you could roleplay...
Now its hard to roleplay without getting all sick at the changes. I can't be what I want to be anymore... I have to choose from a cookie-cutter system that was never meant to be there.... that is why alot of us are pissed off. No... the problem is with people that cant see past the pvp aspect of the game to the more rich parts, and try to take the game into a bad direction.
"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
I tried to balance my opinion, but since you didn't do the same i'll also create a bias reason.
People used to stand at the starport petitioning sony to fix the massive amount of quest bugs and general exploits in the game, all the classes were unbalanced and little people cared about roleplay. They just wanted to grind jedi.
When sony updated the game there will still bugs, around 20% of the players left. There are now 9 classes, with a beast-master profession tree and a expertise for each (Helps diversity). 80% stayed in the game, most loving it.
The game has been receiving constant updates, sony's new dev team is doing a great job, they've been attracting heards of new players and 'veterans' back, most whiners havn't played it since the update.
oops, Strange thing is what i just wrong isn't bias atall. and you can still be a medic with a rifle.
80% stayed. Are you friggin high?
So I started to walk into the water. I won't lie to you boys...I was terrified. But I pressed on, and as I made my way past the breakers, a strange calm came over me. I don't know if it was divine intervention or the kinship of all living things, but I tell you, Jerry, at that moment ... I was a marine biologist.
After the NGE debacle, the management team put out a spin statement that essentially said that only 2 in 10 customers were new, but was carefully worded to give the impression that they had only suffered 20% customer loss after the NGE. I personally saw the statement used 3 times, once by some random L/A marketing guy, once by Torres, and once more on the SWG official forums by an SOE team member.
I'm willing to bet this is what he's getting this 80% number from.
Stat migration and armor encumbrance are big thing missing. What was the major point of going to see an Image Designer? Stat Migration. It cost 10k on my server but it was necessary to change stats every time you bought new gear (armor, weapons ect) Armor had encumbrances and weapons had stat pool usages. Human characters for instance could migrate any Stat pool from 400-1100. There were 9 pools (or player attributes) that you could migrate. Health, action and mind (or HAM) where the only stats visible to other players.
-Health pools-
Health: Represents your characters physical health, including how much physical damage he can withstand
Strength (hidden)(Health drain Rate): Determines the “burn rate” for any actions that drain from the health pool, like using a special melee attack. The stronger a character is, the less health he or she loses when performing strenuous activity.
Constitution (hidden)(Health Regeneration Rate): Controls the health pools recharge rate. A high Constitution means recovering faster from attacks and drains affecting the health pool
-Action Pools-
Action: Your characters physical energy. It dictates how often you can perform certain actions. Can be drained by certain attacks, like Leg shot. Also drained by using specials or burst running
Quickness (hidden)(Action Drain Rate): Controls how rapidly a players action drain the action pool. A character with high quickness can perform more specials and more burst runs than lowbies
Stamina(hidden)(Action Regenerate rate) The rate at which the player’s action pool recharges. Characters with high stamina are less likely to become winded by using action-related moves.
-Mind Pools-
Mind: Your character’s mental strength, as well as a measure of his or her alertness and the ability to complete technical tasks. Many special moves that require concentration (like aiming) drain from your character’s mind pool. Certain attacks, such as head shot, can also detract from your mind pool.
Focus (hidden)(Mind drain rate) Affects how greatly a character’s mind-based actions reduce his or her mind pool. Essentially, it’s a measure of a player’s ability to concentrate when performing certain tasks. A character with a high focus can accomplish more mental feats in a shorter period of time before becoming mentally fatigued.
Willpower (hidden)(Mind regeneration rate) The recharge rate for the mind pool. A character with high willpower finds it easier to regain his or her wits and recover from mental stress and exhaustion.
Some weapons used certain amounts of each of these stats to fire off specials and armor could encumber these stats by placing a negative amount on the player attribute total. Like Say an armor helmet cost 9 focus, 12 Stamina and 13 constitution. That helmet when equipped would negatively effect the specified pools. Say a weapon you got had a stat on it of 12 constitution. Each time you fired off a special attack it would take away 12 points of your constitution on top of the normal special attack drains. Players were allowed to change these attributes freely to over come the encumbrances. No player was exactly the same as another. Weapons, armors and stats varied because none was the same (damage, HAM cost ect for weapons) (for armor it was encumbrances). Add that on top of a diverse skill system and you had diversity that the NGE can’t even come close to.
Tillamook summed up the pool stat system nicely (little typo where both secondary health pools are recharge, not one drain and one recharge, though).
One of the things that the pool point system did, particularly with pool point costs for using weapons, was create situations where using your weapon had the potential of rendering you incapacitated, the infamous Carbineer "I'll bet I can kill me faster than you can kill me" snark.
The major catch was that you could buff all these secondary stats through doctor buffs for health and action and entertainer buffs for mind, and you could also augment them with food buffs. The net effect of the buffs was to render all the encumbrances trivial. With secondary buffs on your health and action pools, you could wear armor for three hours with no ill effects whatsoever, which rendered you pretty much invinicible in PvE (PvP was another matter altogether).
This was especially true after the Great Nerf of CH intentionally defanged nearly all the critter mobs in the game as a way to take damage absorbing power away from the meatshields of the Creature Handlers, who were deemed too powerful, mainly because so many players had some CH in their templates for that very reason. This rendered most PvE content trivial to defeat, except for the most high end critters (Krayts and Kimos and Gorax and such) which were buffed up quite a bit (basically given a huge boost in hit points) because they were just not all that dangerous to a large group with tanks, be they critters or TKAs well armored and buffed.
Originally, you could migrate your own pool points around over a period of time slowly, but this was changed with the ID revamp in early 2004. I think the intent here was to give IDs a more concrete interdependency role aside from just changing the looks of avatars.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Tillamook summed up the pool stat system nicely (little typo where both secondary health pools are recharge, not one drain and one recharge, though). One of the things that the pool point system did, particularly with pool point costs for using weapons, was create situations where using your weapon had the potential of rendering you incapacitated, the infamous Carbineer "I'll bet I can kill me faster than you can kill me" snark. The major catch was that you could buff all these secondary stats through doctor buffs for health and action and entertainer buffs for mind, and you could also augment them with food buffs. The net effect of the buffs was to render all the encumbrances trivial. With secondary buffs on your health and action pools, you could wear armor for three hours with no ill effects whatsoever, which rendered you pretty much invinicible in PvE (PvP was another matter altogether). This was especially true after the Great Nerf of CH intentionally defanged nearly all the critter mobs in the game as a way to take damage absorbing power away from the meatshields of the Creature Handlers, who were deemed too powerful, mainly because so many players had some CH in their templates for that very reason. This rendered most PvE content trivial to defeat, except for the most high end critters (Krayts and Kimos and Gorax and such) which were buffed up quite a bit (basically given a huge boost in hit points) because they were just not all that dangerous to a large group with tanks, be they critters or TKAs well armored and buffed. Originally, you could migrate your own pool points around over a period of time slowly, but this was changed with the ID revamp in early 2004. I think the intent here was to give IDs a more concrete interdependency role aside from just changing the looks of avatars.
The kicker about buffs and armor was, I think they thought that the caps they had set were going to be what balanced things out because they would be harder to achieve and invisible to the players. They had hoped the rate that players could achieve the creation of superior goods would be slow and few. Balance based on resource spawn time tables, craft success rates, enhancements in the form of looted attachments ect. Little did they know players would figure out this hidden system and exploit it as much as they possibly could. The same thing will eventually happen with the new BM system they have implemented. People will soon learn many of the ways to increase the chances that they can create mutations ect and it will be over sooner than the uber buffs of pre-cu. Hidden systems in games never stay hidden, even if it’s based on numerous factors.
Tillamook summed up the pool stat system nicely (little typo where both secondary health pools are recharge, not one drain and one recharge, though). One of the things that the pool point system did, particularly with pool point costs for using weapons, was create situations where using your weapon had the potential of rendering you incapacitated, the infamous Carbineer "I'll bet I can kill me faster than you can kill me" snark. The major catch was that you could buff all these secondary stats through doctor buffs for health and action and entertainer buffs for mind, and you could also augment them with food buffs. The net effect of the buffs was to render all the encumbrances trivial. With secondary buffs on your health and action pools, you could wear armor for three hours with no ill effects whatsoever, which rendered you pretty much invinicible in PvE (PvP was another matter altogether). This was especially true after the Great Nerf of CH intentionally defanged nearly all the critter mobs in the game as a way to take damage absorbing power away from the meatshields of the Creature Handlers, who were deemed too powerful, mainly because so many players had some CH in their templates for that very reason. This rendered most PvE content trivial to defeat, except for the most high end critters (Krayts and Kimos and Gorax and such) which were buffed up quite a bit (basically given a huge boost in hit points) because they were just not all that dangerous to a large group with tanks, be they critters or TKAs well armored and buffed. Originally, you could migrate your own pool points around over a period of time slowly, but this was changed with the ID revamp in early 2004. I think the intent here was to give IDs a more concrete interdependency role aside from just changing the looks of avatars.
The kicker about buffs and armor was, I think they thought that the caps they had set were going to be what balanced things out because they would be harder to achieve and invisible to the players. They had hoped the rate that players could achieve the creation of superior goods would be slow and few. Balance based on resource spawn time tables, craft success rates, enhancements in the form of looted attachments ect. Little did they know players would figure out this hidden system and exploit it as much as they possibly could. The same thing will eventually happen with the new BM system they have implemented. People will soon learn many of the ways to increase the chances that they can create mutations ect and it will be over sooner than the uber buffs of pre-cu. Hidden systems in games never stay hidden, even if it’s based on numerous factors.
Case in point the 4 Piece Armor suit that provided full body protection. A hidden system that allowed the Helmet, Chestplate, Boots and Gloves that gave a player 100% armor coverage allowing you to drop unnecessary encumberance pieces like the pants, biceps and shoulder armor pieces. This further exeggerated the problem of secondary buffs because if you followed the basic game logic of stat selection you could barely wear a full suit of composite without it still draining your primary HAM pools. Because they had to fix the armor hole issue they had no way to stop smart players from adopting this configuration and utilize the stat migration maximizing secondary attributes. I loved the Zebrak's ability to equilbrium. Add in secondary stat buffing foods and you had anyone with 80% armor resistant composite to all damage types but stun able to take an ungodly punishment and continue to attack.
Add in ADK Kits on a properly sliced shield and you had a invincible character against NPC's.
I think it's interesting that one of the things the NGE did was to take away combat spam, in part because it was one of the windows on the supposedly "hidden" subsystems. The catch was that NGE combat was so dumbed down, and the effects so obvious, that the players knew what was going on despite this subterfuge...particulary that most of your combat power was directly tied to your combat level, regardless of what weapon you had equipped, which was just not true in the preNGE game, because you didn't have an overt level, you had skills that gave you access to more powerful weapons and specials.
The devs pretty consistently underestimated the players' ability and desire to figure out how the game worked.
One of the things that was never tested hard in beta was the high end of both combat and crafting professions, resulting in the madness of the buff system nullifying encumbrance as a balancing mechanism.
Buffs and armor also made the dominance of the Combat Medic in PvP inevitable, both because the CM could target the "unhealable pool" of mind, and that the ability of the CM to bypass armor made them fantastically powerful when everyone was armored and buffed to the gills. WIthout the armor and buffs, CMs would be relegated to support, because you'd die of melee/ranged attacks well before the CM's DOT poisons could harm you that much.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Also made Riflemen very desirable in PvP to spam Headshot 3.
But if you ever got in range you could destroy a Riflemen, that was great too, the range benefits/penalties on ranged weapons. It actually encouraged being in the back, or in ranks, crouching and whatnot.
I love the Sandbox term.. and guess what.. That was MOST of the problem..
There was too many players in SWG that love exploiting the game and using the tools in the sandbox to grieve others.. You reach for a rake in the sandbox to play while another takes the same rake, brakes off a few prongs and uses it like a pitch fork to stab you.. So in the end, the Sandbox needed rules, because others were unable to play well with others..
I suspect that many of the others are the ones wanting pre CU back again.. The want that lawless game back with no rules and let them exploit at will.. I doubt that will ever happen again..One thing SWG did show that if you try to have a rules free community/game, you will attract every nasty PvP exploiter under the sun.. If PvP is so fun for some of you.. GO PLAY Planetside or WoW.. You can go PvP yourself to death.. LITERALLY.. lol
I don't see that one bit. I think most of us were the kind that made the lives of exploiters a living hell. Sorta put interdependency on a whole new level. I.e. if there was a Jedi, that Jedi was not only on bounty terminals, but we used repetable contracts for a few days as a way to shame him. When people left my guild to exploit, they found themselves unable to leave their house for a day because of all the bounty hunters. Is that a bit mean? Sure. But it was the price of exploiting. Known exploiters were banned from our city, banned from our facilities, etc.
When a rebel guild was exploting a spawn on our server, to the point they were throwing the GCW into serious imbalance, the fixing actually came from the more respectable rebel guilds, who declared /guildwar on them. The most respectable of the rebel guilds (and also the most skilled at PvP) even sent emissaries to Imperial guilds, requesting our temporary co-operation as they announced assault operations, which ultimately ended up in a humiliating 2 day occupation of their player city by a combined rebel AND imperial force. (wanna know what was most interesting, during that time rebels and imperials were not fighting each other in that city.) It was a rather impressive show of force, the strongest guilds on the server sending a message that exploiting would not be tolerated.
I think it's interesting that one of the things the NGE did was to take away combat spam, in part because it was one of the windows on the supposedly "hidden" subsystems. The catch was that NGE combat was so dumbed down, and the effects so obvious, that the players knew what was going on despite this subterfuge...particulary that most of your combat power was directly tied to your combat level, regardless of what weapon you had equipped, which was just not true in the preNGE game, because you didn't have an overt level, you had skills that gave you access to more powerful weapons and specials. The devs pretty consistently underestimated the players' ability and desire to figure out how the game worked. One of the things that was never tested hard in beta was the high end of both combat and crafting professions, resulting in the madness of the buff system nullifying encumbrance as a balancing mechanism. Buffs and armor also made the dominance of the Combat Medic in PvP inevitable, both because the CM could target the "unhealable pool" of mind, and that the ability of the CM to bypass armor made them fantastically powerful when everyone was armored and buffed to the gills. WIthout the armor and buffs, CMs would be relegated to support, because you'd die of melee/ranged attacks well before the CM's DOT poisons could harm you that much.
Even then you just needed a little bit of intelligence with the "godly cm." (I became one of them because the guild demanded it. What made it even worse was I actually knew what I was doing as a CM, whereas 95% of people who played it didn't.) We stuck a carbineer with us in PvP. That carbineer was able to obliterate the combat medic (CM's had little to no state defenses, especially your FOTM CM/RM or CM/DOC). While they were knocked down on the ground, me (or whoever was CM) fired off the dots, and EVERYONE focused their firepower on the knocked down cm. In short, he was dead in 5 seconds. Me, I always stayed just outside the standard CM dot range (I figured out what the ranges were since I was also a cm crafter) making me pretty much invulnerable from their attacks. I then made -100 tick poisons that had range well over 60m (that was after they nerfed the distance lol) which protected me from the rifleman, and also induced fear. Whenever somebody saw they had been poisoned, they got scared and tried to find the doc as quick as possible, even if the tick was minimal. It created confusion and disorganization, many times making the people we PvP'ed against easy pickings.
PvP had its problems, but those who were intelligent could get past the fotm rm/cm's and the headshot 3 spammers.
PRE CU was a Star Wars Universe were you can live in. It had given the abbreviation MMORPG a meaning. IMO Best MMORPG ever designed.
Like all live and breathing systems it needed much love. Many many players loved PRE CU ( great ingame films/videos show how much beloved PRE CU was) .
It is $OE who don't love Star Wars and dumped this once great game down with an "upgrade" called NGE so aments can be "starwarsy" now (in reality they took away anything mmos are about so they have not much work and nevertheless rob the pockets of weak minded careless fools, too bad for $OE they fooled only a minority lol ).
Players who really loves a live breathing world left since NGE and this crap NGE is about to die.
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE-------------------------------------------------- $OE - eternal enemy of online gaming -We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
Whenever somebody saw they had been poisoned, they got scared and tried to find the doc as quick as possible, even if the tick was minimal. It created confusion and disorganization, many times making the people we PvP'ed against easy pickings. PvP had its problems, but those who were intelligent could get past the fotm rm/cm's and the headshot 3 spammers.
This is a very good point; I think the CM's greatest power was psychological, people just feared them so much that if you saw a tick on your mind pool you got flustered and just lost any semblance of intelligence with blind panic.
Pretty much the way that people feared CHs; the smart way to deal with a CH was to go after the CH, and ignore the pet. This is true with a WoW Hunter or Warlock, too. But rancors just scared the poodoo out of inexperienced players, even though they just were not that great as combat pets on a stat basis. They did fill up the screen, and that counts for something. My gurreck had better attack and defense numbers than my rancor, but the rancor was big and, well, a rancor, and that made him my "best" pet.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Whenever somebody saw they had been poisoned, they got scared and tried to find the doc as quick as possible, even if the tick was minimal. It created confusion and disorganization, many times making the people we PvP'ed against easy pickings. PvP had its problems, but those who were intelligent could get past the fotm rm/cm's and the headshot 3 spammers.
This is a very good point; I think the CM's greatest power was psychological, people just feared them so much that if you saw a tick on your mind pool you got flustered and just lost any semblance of intelligence with blind panic.
Pretty much the way that people feared CHs; the smart way to deal with a CH was to go after the CH, and ignore the pet. This is true with a WoW Hunter or Warlock, too. But rancors just scared the poodoo out of inexperienced players, even though they just were not that great as combat pets on a stat basis. They did fill up the screen, and that counts for something. My gurreck had better attack and defense numbers than my rancor, but the rancor was big and, well, a rancor, and that made him my "best" pet.
Rancors were large and scary. I was a TKM and a Fencer, but I still didn't like looking at the horde of pets that CH carried around with them, I just left them alone.
Comments
As so many have pointed out it was the community that really elevated this game. I think our community was so vibrant because of the competition in almost every aspect of pre-CU gameplay. In the beginning it was almost a race to be the first Master Marksman or Master Artisan. It was virtually a contest to see who could craft the first T-21. People pulled together to achieve these goals.
It was pride that drove people to have the biggest house, best decorated guildhall, most dynamic city. It was ego that pressed people to be the greatest at combat, collect the best resources, have the rarest items.
In short pre-CU was the greatest MMO IMO because it was so dynamic. It was ever changing because of the desire to improve almost every part of your SWG experience.
Some may say that that experience is still there (and maybe to them it is) but most of us recognize the fact that it's a shadow of it's former self.
People used to stand at the starport petitioning sony to fix the massive amount of quest bugs and general exploits in the game, all the classes were unbalanced and little people cared about roleplay. They just wanted to grind jedi.
When sony updated the game there will still bugs, around 20% of the players left. There are now 9 classes, with a beast-master profession tree and a expertise for each (Helps diversity). 80% stayed in the game, most loving it.
The game has been receiving constant updates, sony's new dev team is doing a great job, they've been attracting heards of new players and 'veterans' back, most whiners havn't played it since the update.
oops, Strange thing is what i just wrong isn't bias atall. and you can still be a medic with a rifle.
What's become of this game is its the perfect game now for those whom want everything handed to them. It's nearly impossible to even die in this game anymore. If you want to get killed in combat you have to basically work for it. It's a gravy game now. The ones whom enjoy this game IMO are the ones you see in all the games asking for the answer, and solution to every quest in a game without having to work for it, or even giving it a try themselves.
There that's my bias and i'm sticking to it,
Raven
This is all quite true. Death has absolutely no sting at all, aside from the annoyance of having to return to where you died from the cloner.
What is even more amazing to me is that even though if you work your way through the Legacy quest series, you'll be a millionaire off the credit rewards and cashing in the endless stream of junk loot, new players are still standing around Mos Eisley begging for credits.
The live game is nearly as free with handing out credits as the blue frogs are on TC!
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
for CU and NGE, everything shifted towards restrictions. You have to be a certain level to do anything. YOu were restricted in what professions and uniqueness you wanted for your characters. No longer could you be a crafter with a weapon that was good enough to compete with someone who was a pure combatant. Now you are restricted to such a degree that your character wasn't unique anymore. Everyone of the same level is wearing and using the same items and look the same. 500 jedi running around with jedi master robes on all doing the exact same special attacks with the same effectiveness.
When I first started playing SWG (about 1 month after it launched summer of 2003), I felt that the virtual world was alive. when I met a rifeman in theed and a rifleman in coronet, they both were a bit mysterious. I was curious to find out what they were. You got a surprise when you engaged in pvp with them since you pretty much could have any combination of professions, attacks and skills (even though cookie cutter templates were still the most popular, but not nearly as many as CU or NGE). so attack that rifleman in theed and he retaliates with skills that you don't even know he had and you have to adjust on the fly. Attack that rifleman in coronet and it was a totally different experience. With CU and NGE, everyone is a clone of everyone else. You know 95% of everyones skills before you even engage in a fight with them. You know that they aren't a jedi who has some TKM, some Medic, some rifleman or some marksman. You know they aren't gonna toss some CM poison's at you being a jedi or being a smuggler.
so in my opinion, when there are 500 people walking around with the same sneakers that I have on, I want some new sneakers because I don't want to be like everyone else. With PRE-CU/NGE you could do that, with CU and NGE, you can't at all. the expertise tree is a small comprimise that allows a little bit of customization, but overall your so restricted in other aspects that your forced to take specific skills just to survive or compete. For example, pre-cu you didn't have to have healing to be effective as someone who could heal. You had alternatives to healing. My jedi could survive with or without healing. When CU came, healing was a must and then in NGE, no heal, no survive was basically the way it went. Of course it has balanced out a bit more now days, but nothing the CU and NGE have to offer is better than what SWG was Pre-cu. so anytime you take total freedom away from a person, they will not like it and will resent any other compromise you have to offer them. You've taken the candy from the kid so to speak and we all know how annoying that can be....magnify it 1000 times when your spending a couple hundred bucks a year on a game. Its like buying an expensive exotic sports car only to find out that the government has to take it away from you for their own reasons that don't affect you and replace it with a cheap clone with worse performance, yet you still have to pay the exotic price.
Now I will say that there were a lot of bugs and balance issues in pre-CU but nothing more than any other MMO would have. It just so happens that SOE had a lot of dev swapping in and out and that the new devs couldn't keep up with managing the original SWG because of it's uniqueness. It was a complicated game system to manage and so they needed (or wanted) to simplify it so the new devs could code and manage the game. Making it a clone of EQ was the simpliest solutions since a few of the devs came over from EQ. Also, pre-Cu, there was a lot of things you could do since you had so much freedom and there was practically never any time where you felt you reached the end game unless you had unlocked jedi and cheated your way up the force ranking system. The balance issues they had pre-cu were a productive of swapping developers around so much as I said and instead of balancing broken aspects, they deferred to just given us other things to cover up the problems. This is when it became really hard to balance stuff which is were the invincible rifleman, the dominant CM's in pvp, the super TKM's and godly jedi came into play. The composite armor that made you immune to 95% of all damage...seriously, that was bad design by the devs. Players didn't ask for that, devs just gave it to us. It got to a point were you could take on the toughest and most baddest bosses or encounters in the game solo and not even get hit by npc's. A nightsister elder was one of the baddest meanies in the game at one point and insane buffs, super composite armor and legendary weapons allowed you to slaughter them as fast as they spawned and never have to heal yourself or use any special tactics. You could literally start the fight, start up your automatic macro's and go take a shower, cook dinner, walk to the store, watch your favorite movie and when you came back, the enemy and any others that spawned would all be dead. You'd be a little more richer and have a inventory full of loot.
so when it finally got to those problems, the devs didn't make an effort to fix it because the new devs didn't understand how the old devs did it. Instead of halting the production of new content and bug fixes, the opted to make their own version as they would have done if they had started developing the game themselves.....the product is the CU and later the NGE. Again, neither is better than the original SWG simply becuase the original took MMO's way past what the WOW's and EQ's had. Changing SWG's revolutionary game play back to EQ style is like the world suddenly getting rid of all compact disc and make us use cassette tapes again. Players left SWG in massive amounts (despite what others say) because SWG became a EQ clone and if they wanted that, they would have subscribe to EQ instead of SWG.
Again, lots of players left. More than what people are saying anyway. there was a time where you could not get through coronet, theed or dantooine mining outpost without major lag from hundreds of players loitering there whether fighting, spamming the sale of their wares or simply having conversation and gatherings. Everywhere you went there were 20+, 50+ players. After CU hit, that dropped off like a plaque hit the virtual SWG galaxy or the empire executed order 66 on every person in the galaxy, not just jedi. NGE just has ghost towns now. Most people will say that it's just the evolution of a MMO that's been around for so long and has the normal population. I say it's because of the CU and NGE because the sudden drop off of players showed easily as soon as both systems hit. That is a major coincidence if they didn't cause players to hit the cancle button on their accounts a some people suggest.
So I agree with the person that said 8/10 (80%) of players left cause of CU or NGE. anyone who did not play the game before publish 9 (that pub was still pre-cu, cu was about 5 months away then) where path to jedi was practically given to everyone, just don't know and will never know the difference between the original SWG and CU/NGE. If you came after CU/NGE or basically after january of 2005, then you don't know the real SWG and how great a game it was. Anyone playing CU/NGE can't understand how people bash SWG because they simply was not there before the changes. the sad thing is that there were easy solutions to fixing the original SWG. There were easy solutions to the 95% composite armor, the mind bar being the defining factor in pvp, the 5k max damage (before using specials) that legendary weapons had when the best normal weapon barely reached 3k max damage and many other issues. The devs for whatever reason simply choose to go back to the drawing board though. If it was in beta, it probably would have went over well, but you just don't do that after a game has been out for 2 years. Oh, that's another thing, SWG wasn't ready to go live when it did, but I think (don't quote me on that) that L.A. and SOE pushed it's released, probably to be competitive in the market at the time....I don't know though, it was definitely published unfinished though.
There was too many players in SWG that love exploiting the game and using the tools in the sandbox to grieve others.. You reach for a rake in the sandbox to play while another takes the same rake, brakes off a few prongs and uses it like a pitch fork to stab you.. So in the end, the Sandbox needed rules, because others were unable to play well with others..
I suspect that many of the others are the ones wanting pre CU back again.. The want that lawless game back with no rules and let them exploit at will.. I doubt that will ever happen again..One thing SWG did show that if you try to have a rules free community/game, you will attract every nasty PvP exploiter under the sun.. If PvP is so fun for some of you.. GO PLAY Planetside or WoW.. You can go PvP yourself to death.. LITERALLY.. lol
In summary:
Pre-CU = people
Post-CU = content
heh..actually most of us wanted those bugs and exploits fixed..most of us didn't want 2 major revamps that changed all of the aspects of the game that we liked and didn't do anything to help the stability of the game. I just think its hillarious that your whole reasoning behind your arguement is that all of us "whiners" like PvP too much..crafters also got jipped in this game. Oh and theres also the whole thing of a GALACTIC CIVIL WAR supposed to be going on...
And really if your comparing a few bugs in a game to being stabbed in the stomach with a rake I feel sorry for you. I think a better analogy would be that a bunch of mentally ill kids kicked all of the intelligent people out of the only warehouse left on earth during an ice age so they could have all of the bread to themselves. The thing is though that the bread is made of crap and only the mentally ill kids are eating it while all of the intelligent people are hunting for fresh food. Thats my analogy for the NGE.
"The Sandbox" was not the problem. If it were the problem, then non-sandbox games (like WoW) would never have griefing going on, would never see player bans.
The problem was the game was (and is) rife with bugs and exploits. Some players will look for any seam they can find and rip it apart, and gleefully grief other players. It's the nature of the beast, and the anonymity of the MMO allows for a lot of antisocial behavior.
Also, frankly, I think the beta testers (and I was one of them) were not as aggressive in attempting to do things not "as intended" to really stress the game and find those seams.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Now its hard to roleplay without getting all sick at the changes. I can't be what I want to be anymore... I have to choose from a cookie-cutter system that was never meant to be there.... that is why alot of us are pissed off. No... the problem is with people that cant see past the pvp aspect of the game to the more rich parts, and try to take the game into a bad direction.
"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
So I started to walk into the water. I won't lie to you boys...I was terrified. But I pressed on, and as I made my way past the breakers, a strange calm came over me. I don't know if it was divine intervention or the kinship of all living things, but I tell you, Jerry, at that moment ... I was a marine biologist.
Now it has about 50,000 subscribers. 250,000 is a lot more than a 20% loss.
I'm willing to bet this is what he's getting this 80% number from.
SWG Team Mtg.
-Health pools-
Health: Represents your characters physical health, including how much physical damage he can withstand
Strength (hidden)(Health drain Rate): Determines the “burn rate” for any actions that drain from the health pool, like using a special melee attack. The stronger a character is, the less health he or she loses when performing strenuous activity.
Constitution (hidden)(Health Regeneration Rate): Controls the health pools recharge rate. A high Constitution means recovering faster from attacks and drains affecting the health pool
-Action Pools-
Action: Your characters physical energy. It dictates how often you can perform certain actions. Can be drained by certain attacks, like Leg shot. Also drained by using specials or burst running
Quickness (hidden)(Action Drain Rate): Controls how rapidly a players action drain the action pool. A character with high quickness can perform more specials and more burst runs than lowbies
Stamina (hidden)(Action Regenerate rate) The rate at which the player’s action pool recharges. Characters with high stamina are less likely to become winded by using action-related moves.
-Mind Pools-
Mind: Your character’s mental strength, as well as a measure of his or her alertness and the ability to complete technical tasks. Many special moves that require concentration (like aiming) drain from your character’s mind pool. Certain attacks, such as head shot, can also detract from your mind pool.
Focus (hidden)(Mind drain rate) Affects how greatly a character’s mind-based actions reduce his or her mind pool. Essentially, it’s a measure of a player’s ability to concentrate when performing certain tasks. A character with a high focus can accomplish more mental feats in a shorter period of time before becoming mentally fatigued.
Willpower (hidden)(Mind regeneration rate) The recharge rate for the mind pool. A character with high willpower finds it easier to regain his or her wits and recover from mental stress and exhaustion.
Some weapons used certain amounts of each of these stats to fire off specials and armor could encumber these stats by placing a negative amount on the player attribute total. Like Say an armor helmet cost 9 focus, 12 Stamina and 13 constitution. That helmet when equipped would negatively effect the specified pools. Say a weapon you got had a stat on it of 12 constitution. Each time you fired off a special attack it would take away 12 points of your constitution on top of the normal special attack drains. Players were allowed to change these attributes freely to over come the encumbrances. No player was exactly the same as another. Weapons, armors and stats varied because none was the same (damage, HAM cost ect for weapons) (for armor it was encumbrances). Add that on top of a diverse skill system and you had diversity that the NGE can’t even come close to.
Tillamook summed up the pool stat system nicely (little typo where both secondary health pools are recharge, not one drain and one recharge, though).
One of the things that the pool point system did, particularly with pool point costs for using weapons, was create situations where using your weapon had the potential of rendering you incapacitated, the infamous Carbineer "I'll bet I can kill me faster than you can kill me" snark.
The major catch was that you could buff all these secondary stats through doctor buffs for health and action and entertainer buffs for mind, and you could also augment them with food buffs. The net effect of the buffs was to render all the encumbrances trivial. With secondary buffs on your health and action pools, you could wear armor for three hours with no ill effects whatsoever, which rendered you pretty much invinicible in PvE (PvP was another matter altogether).
This was especially true after the Great Nerf of CH intentionally defanged nearly all the critter mobs in the game as a way to take damage absorbing power away from the meatshields of the Creature Handlers, who were deemed too powerful, mainly because so many players had some CH in their templates for that very reason. This rendered most PvE content trivial to defeat, except for the most high end critters (Krayts and Kimos and Gorax and such) which were buffed up quite a bit (basically given a huge boost in hit points) because they were just not all that dangerous to a large group with tanks, be they critters or TKAs well armored and buffed.
Originally, you could migrate your own pool points around over a period of time slowly, but this was changed with the ID revamp in early 2004. I think the intent here was to give IDs a more concrete interdependency role aside from just changing the looks of avatars.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Case in point the 4 Piece Armor suit that provided full body protection. A hidden system that allowed the Helmet, Chestplate, Boots and Gloves that gave a player 100% armor coverage allowing you to drop unnecessary encumberance pieces like the pants, biceps and shoulder armor pieces. This further exeggerated the problem of secondary buffs because if you followed the basic game logic of stat selection you could barely wear a full suit of composite without it still draining your primary HAM pools. Because they had to fix the armor hole issue they had no way to stop smart players from adopting this configuration and utilize the stat migration maximizing secondary attributes. I loved the Zebrak's ability to equilbrium. Add in secondary stat buffing foods and you had anyone with 80% armor resistant composite to all damage types but stun able to take an ungodly punishment and continue to attack.
Add in ADK Kits on a properly sliced shield and you had a invincible character against NPC's.
I think it's interesting that one of the things the NGE did was to take away combat spam, in part because it was one of the windows on the supposedly "hidden" subsystems. The catch was that NGE combat was so dumbed down, and the effects so obvious, that the players knew what was going on despite this subterfuge...particulary that most of your combat power was directly tied to your combat level, regardless of what weapon you had equipped, which was just not true in the preNGE game, because you didn't have an overt level, you had skills that gave you access to more powerful weapons and specials.
The devs pretty consistently underestimated the players' ability and desire to figure out how the game worked.
One of the things that was never tested hard in beta was the high end of both combat and crafting professions, resulting in the madness of the buff system nullifying encumbrance as a balancing mechanism.
Buffs and armor also made the dominance of the Combat Medic in PvP inevitable, both because the CM could target the "unhealable pool" of mind, and that the ability of the CM to bypass armor made them fantastically powerful when everyone was armored and buffed to the gills. WIthout the armor and buffs, CMs would be relegated to support, because you'd die of melee/ranged attacks well before the CM's DOT poisons could harm you that much.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
But if you ever got in range you could destroy a Riflemen, that was great too, the range benefits/penalties on ranged weapons. It actually encouraged being in the back, or in ranks, crouching and whatnot.
I don't see that one bit. I think most of us were the kind that made the lives of exploiters a living hell. Sorta put interdependency on a whole new level. I.e. if there was a Jedi, that Jedi was not only on bounty terminals, but we used repetable contracts for a few days as a way to shame him. When people left my guild to exploit, they found themselves unable to leave their house for a day because of all the bounty hunters. Is that a bit mean? Sure. But it was the price of exploiting. Known exploiters were banned from our city, banned from our facilities, etc.
When a rebel guild was exploting a spawn on our server, to the point they were throwing the GCW into serious imbalance, the fixing actually came from the more respectable rebel guilds, who declared /guildwar on them. The most respectable of the rebel guilds (and also the most skilled at PvP) even sent emissaries to Imperial guilds, requesting our temporary co-operation as they announced assault operations, which ultimately ended up in a humiliating 2 day occupation of their player city by a combined rebel AND imperial force. (wanna know what was most interesting, during that time rebels and imperials were not fighting each other in that city.) It was a rather impressive show of force, the strongest guilds on the server sending a message that exploiting would not be tolerated.
Even then you just needed a little bit of intelligence with the "godly cm." (I became one of them because the guild demanded it. What made it even worse was I actually knew what I was doing as a CM, whereas 95% of people who played it didn't.) We stuck a carbineer with us in PvP. That carbineer was able to obliterate the combat medic (CM's had little to no state defenses, especially your FOTM CM/RM or CM/DOC). While they were knocked down on the ground, me (or whoever was CM) fired off the dots, and EVERYONE focused their firepower on the knocked down cm. In short, he was dead in 5 seconds. Me, I always stayed just outside the standard CM dot range (I figured out what the ranges were since I was also a cm crafter) making me pretty much invulnerable from their attacks. I then made -100 tick poisons that had range well over 60m (that was after they nerfed the distance lol) which protected me from the rifleman, and also induced fear. Whenever somebody saw they had been poisoned, they got scared and tried to find the doc as quick as possible, even if the tick was minimal. It created confusion and disorganization, many times making the people we PvP'ed against easy pickings.
PvP had its problems, but those who were intelligent could get past the fotm rm/cm's and the headshot 3 spammers.
PRE CU was a Star Wars Universe were you can live in. It had given the abbreviation MMORPG a meaning. IMO Best MMORPG ever designed.
Like all live and breathing systems it needed much love. Many many players loved PRE CU ( great ingame films/videos show how much beloved PRE CU was) .
It is $OE who don't love Star Wars and dumped this once great game down with an "upgrade" called NGE so aments can be "starwarsy" now (in reality they took away anything mmos are about so they have not much work and nevertheless rob the pockets of weak minded careless fools, too bad for $OE they fooled only a minority lol ).
Players who really loves a live breathing world left since NGE and this crap NGE is about to die.
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
This is a very good point; I think the CM's greatest power was psychological, people just feared them so much that if you saw a tick on your mind pool you got flustered and just lost any semblance of intelligence with blind panic.
Pretty much the way that people feared CHs; the smart way to deal with a CH was to go after the CH, and ignore the pet. This is true with a WoW Hunter or Warlock, too. But rancors just scared the poodoo out of inexperienced players, even though they just were not that great as combat pets on a stat basis. They did fill up the screen, and that counts for something. My gurreck had better attack and defense numbers than my rancor, but the rancor was big and, well, a rancor, and that made him my "best" pet.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
This is a very good point; I think the CM's greatest power was psychological, people just feared them so much that if you saw a tick on your mind pool you got flustered and just lost any semblance of intelligence with blind panic.
Pretty much the way that people feared CHs; the smart way to deal with a CH was to go after the CH, and ignore the pet. This is true with a WoW Hunter or Warlock, too. But rancors just scared the poodoo out of inexperienced players, even though they just were not that great as combat pets on a stat basis. They did fill up the screen, and that counts for something. My gurreck had better attack and defense numbers than my rancor, but the rancor was big and, well, a rancor, and that made him my "best" pet.
Rancors were large and scary. I was a TKM and a Fencer, but I still didn't like looking at the horde of pets that CH carried around with them, I just left them alone.