Koster has to take his share of the shame for designing such an unbalanced game in the first place..
I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested. Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.
What was released was unbalanced. But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind. PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.
Yeah his vision of dancing wookies, craftards, musicians, hair dressers/plastic surgeons and the Sims is what everyone wanted in a Star Wars MMO. They paid too much attention to these things which should have been secondary systems instead of you know the Star WARS and maybe concentrating on gameplay and bugs? If they would release a WOW mod with a SW skin it would be the perfect game.
Koster has to take his share of the shame for designing such an unbalanced game in the first place..
I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested. Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.
What was released was unbalanced. But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind. PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.
I agree with what you're saying there SioBabble. People did want the bugs worked out of the game, and there was perhaps too much of a focus on one-on-one pvp balance.
The game seemed to have so many options and so much potential. You could unravel the mystery of the jedi if you wanted, be a stormtrooper, or play in the band in the cantina. I loved that. I also would have liked to have the bugs removed from the gameplay, and I would have liked missions more interesting than killing of bunch of dudes standing beside a flag.
Other solutions were available to SOE/LA to address why the game wasn't as popular as it could have been. They chose the NGE. In hindsight, I think it's clear that this wasn't a good solution. When people say things like the game would have died without the NGE, I just don't think that statement is supported by all the evidence indicating how much the NGE actually hurt the game and its players. Those statements come across as some kind of bizarre rationalization or attempt at justifying what was simply a bad decision for so many obvious reasons.
The NGE was never ever designed to save SWG. It was solely designed to attract new players and specifically those from world of warcraft. SOE even went so far as to hide and deny the NGEs existence until the very last moment.
It was rushed out to meet the holiday shopping season and there was the media blitz that specifically targeted only new subscriptions. Nothing was every presented to the current/former players and SOE figured there would be acceptable losses for all the Warcraft playerbase they would attract. They obviously over estimated the losses of current subscribers and the gain of "potentials".
Again, SOE never made the NGE to save the game, they simply wanted more money and turned their back on their customers.
Koster has to take his share of the shame for designing such an unbalanced game in the first place..
I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested. Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.
What was released was unbalanced. But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind. PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.
Yeah his vision of dancing wookies, craftards, musicians, hair dressers/plastic surgeons and the Sims is what everyone wanted in a Star Wars MMO. They paid too much attention to these things which should have been secondary systems instead of you know the Star WARS and maybe concentrating on gameplay and bugs? If they would release a WOW mod with a SW skin it would be the perfect game.
haha finally someone NGE was targeted to. Smed should award you a badge.
Koster's simulation of the Star Wars Universe, offered a home for many species , many activities and sometimes odd appearances like dancing Wookies according to George Lucas concepts of the Star Wars Universe. Did you knbow for example that in the first concept Han Solo looked like an Octopus with tentacles ?
Anakin and Luke just happen to be a single story in this big World. Koster offered you and all of us that WE can create our own story beside that one of Luke / Anakin etc. If someone don't understand this great vision then it is a case of casting pearls before swine.
Unfortunately the code was pushed to live to early and it has his bugs but instead to fix the issues and like always in case of great visions some greedy people want the easy cash thats why they betrayed this initial great vision and throwed NGE crap at us.
-----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)
Pfft, worse crimes have commited against Star Wars than the NGE. How about the Vong, or killing off Chewie for no reason other than "a main character had to die", or maybe Legacy where the Republic has once again fallen.
Seriously, NGE isn't a crime against Star Wars, it's just a crime against SWG.
I remember when SWG first launched, I think BH and TKA and pistoleer were the only classes that worked well. And every single profession had animations of their own, now in the NGE you see poke poke poke stab jab poke poke... fencer and pikeman had the finest ones, but at least entertainer's TKA has random animations, I still like to see my ent do UA3.
I remember when the CU launched, alot of things were broken again and Jedi's FR3 was about 5x faster than a swoop or AV-21 and Jedi didn't get their LS animations back until late August (when BH got their uber loot content patch) and player bounties were disabled. Lastly publish 24 was probably the best patch in a long time and only saw 3 weeks of life before the NGE and the day the servers went online with NGE, everything was broken AGAIN.
I remember when the NGE launched, people were making fun of the game and were speculating that SOE were designing SWG for gaming consoles (X360?) so 10 year olds can play it, right from the start there were negativity non-stop. The forum mods got out of control, people got banned left and right, profession corespondants weren't too happy (but eventually got blue glowie), and people were deleting their long lived characters before hitting cancel (there's videos of it).
The time between major publishes were fairly fast and productive, chapter 7 took about 6 months and built up hype. The collections thing is a time sink and is already boring, the heroics is nice though but yet another copy of dungeons from WoW.
Smed and the boatload-o'-morons believe in their hearts that doing the wrong thing was netter than doing nothing.
Which is nothing but complete corporate insanity. Especially when if they opened their damn ears from the start, they'd have learned what the RIGHT thing would have been.
Shayde - SWG (dead) Proud member of the Cabal.
It sounds great, so great in fact, I pitty those who canceled - Some deluded SWG fanboi who pities me. I don't like it when you say things. - A Vanguard fan who does too. 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Comments
I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested. Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.
What was released was unbalanced. But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind. PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.
Yeah his vision of dancing wookies, craftards, musicians, hair dressers/plastic surgeons and the Sims is what everyone wanted in a Star Wars MMO. They paid too much attention to these things which should have been secondary systems instead of you know the Star WARS and maybe concentrating on gameplay and bugs? If they would release a WOW mod with a SW skin it would be the perfect game.
I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested. Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.
What was released was unbalanced. But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind. PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.
I agree with what you're saying there SioBabble. People did want the bugs worked out of the game, and there was perhaps too much of a focus on one-on-one pvp balance.
The game seemed to have so many options and so much potential. You could unravel the mystery of the jedi if you wanted, be a stormtrooper, or play in the band in the cantina. I loved that. I also would have liked to have the bugs removed from the gameplay, and I would have liked missions more interesting than killing of bunch of dudes standing beside a flag.
Other solutions were available to SOE/LA to address why the game wasn't as popular as it could have been. They chose the NGE. In hindsight, I think it's clear that this wasn't a good solution. When people say things like the game would have died without the NGE, I just don't think that statement is supported by all the evidence indicating how much the NGE actually hurt the game and its players. Those statements come across as some kind of bizarre rationalization or attempt at justifying what was simply a bad decision for so many obvious reasons.
The NGE was never ever designed to save SWG. It was solely designed to attract new players and specifically those from world of warcraft. SOE even went so far as to hide and deny the NGEs existence until the very last moment.
It was rushed out to meet the holiday shopping season and there was the media blitz that specifically targeted only new subscriptions. Nothing was every presented to the current/former players and SOE figured there would be acceptable losses for all the Warcraft playerbase they would attract. They obviously over estimated the losses of current subscribers and the gain of "potentials".
Again, SOE never made the NGE to save the game, they simply wanted more money and turned their back on their customers.
I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested. Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.
What was released was unbalanced. But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind. PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.
Yeah his vision of dancing wookies, craftards, musicians, hair dressers/plastic surgeons and the Sims is what everyone wanted in a Star Wars MMO. They paid too much attention to these things which should have been secondary systems instead of you know the Star WARS and maybe concentrating on gameplay and bugs? If they would release a WOW mod with a SW skin it would be the perfect game.
haha finally someone NGE was targeted to. Smed should award you a badge.
Koster's simulation of the Star Wars Universe, offered a home for many species , many activities and sometimes odd appearances like dancing Wookies according to George Lucas concepts of the Star Wars Universe. Did you knbow for example that in the first concept Han Solo looked like an Octopus with tentacles ?
Anakin and Luke just happen to be a single story in this big World. Koster offered you and all of us that WE can create our own story beside that one of Luke / Anakin etc. If someone don't understand this great vision then it is a case of casting pearls before swine.
Unfortunately the code was pushed to live to early and it has his bugs but instead to fix the issues and like always in case of great visions some greedy people want the easy cash thats why they betrayed this initial great vision and throwed NGE crap at us.
-----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)
Pfft, worse crimes have commited against Star Wars than the NGE. How about the Vong, or killing off Chewie for no reason other than "a main character had to die", or maybe Legacy where the Republic has once again fallen.
Seriously, NGE isn't a crime against Star Wars, it's just a crime against SWG.
I remember when SWG first launched, I think BH and TKA and pistoleer were the only classes that worked well. And every single profession had animations of their own, now in the NGE you see poke poke poke stab jab poke poke... fencer and pikeman had the finest ones, but at least entertainer's TKA has random animations, I still like to see my ent do UA3.
I remember when the CU launched, alot of things were broken again and Jedi's FR3 was about 5x faster than a swoop or AV-21 and Jedi didn't get their LS animations back until late August (when BH got their uber loot content patch) and player bounties were disabled. Lastly publish 24 was probably the best patch in a long time and only saw 3 weeks of life before the NGE and the day the servers went online with NGE, everything was broken AGAIN.
I remember when the NGE launched, people were making fun of the game and were speculating that SOE were designing SWG for gaming consoles (X360?) so 10 year olds can play it, right from the start there were negativity non-stop. The forum mods got out of control, people got banned left and right, profession corespondants weren't too happy (but eventually got blue glowie), and people were deleting their long lived characters before hitting cancel (there's videos of it).
The time between major publishes were fairly fast and productive, chapter 7 took about 6 months and built up hype. The collections thing is a time sink and is already boring, the heroics is nice though but yet another copy of dungeons from WoW.
Smed and the boatload-o'-morons believe in their hearts that doing the wrong thing was netter than doing nothing.
Which is nothing but complete corporate insanity. Especially when if they opened their damn ears from the start, they'd have learned what the RIGHT thing would have been.
Shayde - SWG (dead)
Proud member of the Cabal.
It sounds great, so great in fact, I pitty those who canceled
I don't like it when you say things. - A Vanguard fan who does too.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0