Why do people get into a concrete-brained mindset on the subject of Alphas classes? There were and are many ways for MMO developers to control such Alphas classes without permadeath (making months of grinding suddenly worthless) or restricting the numbers allowed in each Alpha class (discriminatory and open to massive abuse) or making Alpha classes so weak that they are not worth attaining. Here are just some of the ideas that could have been considered but weren't by SWG - Make Jedi one of a number of Alpha classes - like Nightsister, Emperor's Hand, Royal Guard or Antaran Ranger, all mutually hostile - Make a scaleable penalty for Alpha class. You die, you can't clone for an hour/three hours/a day/a week, depending on when you were last killed. These time penalties would be degradeable over time. - Allowing BHs to group until they reach the destructive level of 1 Jedi. - Having powerful NPC guards in major cities who could 'see' Jedi etc, etc... You see? There are three ideas off the top of my head. SWG, of course, didn't implement any of them.
Wanna know why? Alpha Classes just do NOT work in an MMO. Even if you have 2 or 4 or 10 types of Alpha Classes you will still run into the same faults with it that SWG did. People will flock to whatever the Alpha Class is, and if it's 'too hard' or if there is some system to keep them in line. There will be outrage and after a few months those making the game will 'give in' and make it easyer.
Also think of the long term with Alpha Classes, we saw this with SWG. Those playing the Alpha Classes will find the game 'too easy' and those making the game will make it harder. So now the Alpha people have a harder game, those that are not playing it are going to have a really hard time and now are forced to go Alpha. Then there's PvP, and well look at what happen with the GCW system with all the Jedi running around in the CU. It turned into one big Jedi fight.
The point is Alpha Classes will never work in an MMORPG game. It just throws off any idea of balance and makes the game less fun for those coming into it.
All right, here it is:
What we have here is a simple difference in conclusion. You say that Alpha Classes didn't work in SWG; I say they did. Simple as that.
I actually posted a poll on mmorpg.com posing the question: if SWG were relaunched, would you want powerful Jedi unlockable after a long process or not? And 85% said yes. Not a scientific poll, I would immediately say, but the vast overwhelming majority it revealed in favour of the proposition shows that whatever you personally may feel about this, a lot more people believe the opposite.,
Jedi Worked fine in SWG at first with perma death.
the problem was more in the type of people reaching the goal of jedi. I never understood it everyone knew the frikkin rules about VIS and Perma death but yet some jedi cried about it. and it wasnt like you lost your unlocked jedi char slot, you just had create another jedi and start the grind all over. It kept most of us in line and it kept what jedi was meant to be.. NOT A MAIN TOON and yes SOE failed by not giving Jedi Content oustside of a broken FRS system and having an Alpha was cool and such but im not talkin about 30 times stronger than other profs either.
Jedi should be an alpha and unlockable but it should be more of a reward item for unlocking and working towards something, not a frikkin player class that becomes everyones main toon. When i unlocked and a few months later died i said to myself well i wont be that stupid ever agian! and jedi wasnt my main toon till the CU hit. even with just the XP loss. and yes i fought alot of BHs but since my death only lost to one and that was in the CU. but i was never hanging out at Theed doing PVP either. in fact i was enjoying my crafters and BH's on many different servers to hunt the new bold jedi!
So yeah it worked for a while but people wouldnt accept the rules to let it work...
And face it a Star Wars MMO without jedi would never fly! Jedi sells subs! look at this crap NGE system if it wasnt for free Jedi do you really think the game would be around?
For better or worse its part of the Star Wars world and should be in game but should have guildlines that keep it in check. running around killing a whole guild from the other faction isnt what i call in check.. minor Xp losses didnt work.it was never ment to ones main toon and the perma death thing should have never been removed. if your not mature enough to handle Jedi in a future SW MMO then mabey its not gonna be for you and in your learning process till you figure that out you can provide much content for BHs....:)
What we have here is a simple difference in conclusion. You say that Alpha Classes didn't work in SWG; I say they did. Simple as that. I actually posted a poll on mmorpg.com posing the question: if SWG were relaunched, would you want powerful Jedi unlockable after a long process or not? And 85% said yes. Not a scientific poll, I would immediately say, but the vast overwhelming majority it revealed in favour of the proposition shows that whatever you personally may feel about this, a lot more people believe the opposite.,
Jedi Worked fine in SWG at first with perma death.
the problem was more in the type of people reaching the goal of jedi. I never understood it everyone knew the frikkin rules about VIS and Perma death but yet some jedi cried about it. and it wasnt like you lost your unlocked jedi char slot, you just had create another jedi and start the grind all over. It kept most of us in line and it kept what jedi was meant to be.. NOT A MAIN TOON and yes SOE failed by not giving Jedi Content oustside of a broken FRS system and having an Alpha was cool and such but im not talkin about 30 times stronger than other profs either.
Jedi should be an alpha and unlockable but it should be more of a reward item for unlocking and working towards something, not a frikkin player class that becomes everyones main toon. When i unlocked and a few months later died i said to myself well i wont be that stupid ever agian! and jedi wasnt my main toon till the CU hit. even with just the XP loss. and yes i fought alot of BHs but since my death only lost to one and that was in the CU. but i was never hanging out at Theed doing PVP either. in fact i was enjoying my crafters and BH's on many different servers to hunt the new bold jedi!
So yeah it worked for a while but people wouldnt accept the rules to let it work...
And face it a Star Wars MMO without jedi would never fly! Jedi sells subs! look at this crap NGE system if it wasnt for free Jedi do you really think the game would be around?
For better or worse its part of the Star Wars world and should be in game but should have guildlines that keep it in check. running around killing a whole guild from the other faction isnt what i call in check.. minor Xp losses didnt work.it was never ment to ones main toon and the perma death thing should have never been removed. if your not mature enough to handle Jedi in a future SW MMO then mabey its not gonna be for you and in your learning process till you figure that out you can provide much content for BHs....:)
No, I'm sorry, Jedi didn't 'work just fine first with permadeath'.
Think about it, man. Encouraging players to grind a very hard character but telling them all the time they invested in protecting that character over the next two, three, six or (in my case) twelve months would be lost if some 14 year old leet player caught me zoning into a starport or during a dc would simply be ridiculous.
No-one ever complained about the rules of visibility. I certainly didn't. The only thing they did ask for was some clarification of what those rules were. I, for example, only ground on the hills on the top left hand corner of Dantoine. I was very careful never to use any force powers anywhere near a city, a pc or an npc. And yet, during the course of my long grind, I was attacked six times by BHs. I have no complaints about those attacks - however, I was always bewildered as to the specifics of the visibility rules.
As far as the Ferengi slime of LA are concerned, more Jedi = more money. So they were all for more Jedi no matter how much the integrity of the game was compromised.
As for the vis rules, they were little different from the slicing rules, or the experimentation rules. The devs somehow felt that not revealing the rules was an important part of the playing of the game, which would in an ideal world be true. The catch is, they had this bug filled game and used "working as intended" to obfuscate their incompetence.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15386 Read lesson 10.. this is the guy making the BioWare MMO, it's not a huge leap of faith to assume it will follow his design principles. Second Life isn't a game or there would be ESRB, PEGI and BBFC ratings for it, it's circumvented these rating systems by claiming it's not entertainment software. Which has partly led to the legal issues they now face for having adult rated content available to minors due to no previous rating or age verification systems. As an ex-Linden GM, I think I have a better understanding of what the product is.. pornographic content is the major money in SL, it may not be the most traded commodity, but it sells for a lot more than a chair or a pair of shoes. Though I may be a little bitter.. sorta get pissed off with it after the hundredth time of some prat telling you his virtual dick fell off as he teleported, the simple fact is, if you take porn out of SL, it's no longer profitable, as the rest of the item/service market is currently being saturated by a lady from China and her company of slaves who undercut all the home grown business people.
Thanks Bobfish you saved me having to type out my similar thoughts of the "game" that is 2nd life
As far as the Ferengi slime of LA are concerned, more Jedi = more money. So they were all for more Jedi no matter how much the integrity of the game was compromised.
Agreed..the way they think no lightsabres..no money
I think that Alpha class Jedi did work in SWG with the perma death, the system broke when everyone could become a Jedi and not lose their character, when the servers became saturated with Jedi, long before the NGE ever happened.
However, I don't think it would work in an MMO that is aiming to be more popular than SWG was, simply because the majority of the subscriber base in bigger games are casual players who won't want to grind out for an Alpha class, but will want to play as Jedi.
I'm sure if the BioWare MMO is Star Wars it will take a similiar approach to the Kotor games, where you start out as a normal profession and then become force sensitive and a Jedi at some point in your progression, hopefully being optional too.
I miss SWG and the approach it took, but I can't see anyone repeating it as long as popular games in the genre are more linear in their focus. When you're betting 20-30 million dollars on a game, you don't buck the trend.
All i want is a non Combat Level Based game skill based FTW, sandbox, with a rich story line of content for those who choose it while not forcing players to follow it. I dont even mind jedi in game but they should be alpha and have a perma death. this is where SOE failed and jedi started popping out like rabbits instead of being in hiding. and bringing on endless nerf cries from non jedi players as many jedi became more bold in game since there was no reactions to there actions... sometimes you just have to pay the pimp!!
First off, it's called 'Ultima Online' and oh SWG didn't have any 'rich storyline of content' unless you where a Role Player... "Dev's make the game, Players make the content!" And yeah what great content when I got a knockdown/dizzy from someone claiming their RP is "Vader is my dad lol!"
And know what? Jedi and Alpha Classes are one of the things that turned this game into the mess you see before you! People do NOT understand what Risk vs Reward means. And with that lovely little Alpha Class they believed just getting it should be the 'risk' not if you want to keep playing it there's a ton of 'risks' in that...
You want an Alpha Class back? Fine but guess what, bring back Perma-Death and SWG will be back in the same boat it was in the first time around. People will be on the forums screaming about how unfair it is, and how much Perma-Death sucks.
Wanna know what would have helped the game in the first place? SOE, LA and Raph Koster standing firm on the whole "No Player Jedi!" That they said when the game was first in the works. They should have come out and told everyone 'clearly' on why there should be no Jedi in the GCW timeline. And really I do blame both LA whom believed people wouldn't play unless Jedi was in. And Raph cuz lord knows the man loves testing people in MMO's (See Ultima Online 1998 till 2000 the Player Killer years) to see what they will do when there's something in place like that.
And on the whole "Will people hate the BioWare/LA MMO" chances are yes. Go check out Mass Effect, great game but it's everything the Pre-CU Vets hate. It's not going to be a Pre-CU system, and chances are it will be more of a storydriven 'content' game from the get go. That's not a bad thing in my eyes, and BioWare knows how to tell a great story... See ummmm every game they have put out... Hell even that Mech game they did back in the 1990's rocked.
Why do people get into a concrete-brained mindset on the subject of Alphas classes? There were and are many ways for MMO developers to control such Alphas classes without permadeath (making months of grinding suddenly worthless) or restricting the numbers allowed in each Alpha class (discriminatory and open to massive abuse) or making Alpha classes so weak that they are not worth attaining. Here are just some of the ideas that could have been considered but weren't by SWG
- Make Jedi one of a number of Alpha classes - like Nightsister, Emperor's Hand, Royal Guard or Antaran Ranger, all mutually hostile
- Make a scaleable penalty for Alpha class. You die, you can't clone for an hour/three hours/a day/a week, depending on when you were last killed. These time penalties would be degradeable over time.
- Allowing BHs to group until they reach the destructive level of 1 Jedi.
- Having powerful NPC guards in major cities who could 'see' Jedi
etc, etc... You see? There are three ideas off the top of my head. SWG, of course, didn't implement any of them.
Wanna know why? Alpha Classes just do NOT work in an MMO. Even if you have 2 or 4 or 10 types of Alpha Classes you will still run into the same faults with it that SWG did. People will flock to whatever the Alpha Class is, and if it's 'too hard' or if there is some system to keep them in line. There will be outrage and after a few months those making the game will 'give in' and make it easyer.
Also think of the long term with Alpha Classes, we saw this with SWG. Those playing the Alpha Classes will find the game 'too easy' and those making the game will make it harder. So now the Alpha people have a harder game, those that are not playing it are going to have a really hard time and now are forced to go Alpha. Then there's PvP, and well look at what happen with the GCW system with all the Jedi running around in the CU. It turned into one big Jedi fight.
The point is Alpha Classes will never work in an MMORPG game. It just throws off any idea of balance and makes the game less fun for those coming into it.
I cant argue with you. I have yet to see a case where an alpha class situation would work. I would guess that if implemented most games would end up like SWG. For me SWG is the proof that Alpha classes create nothing but a nightmare for the developers and the community that do not want to be one. Its a horrible concept that is doomed to failure due to human nature. Most gamers want to be the most powerful thing they can be. In SWG's case it was the beginning of the end.
SOE making Jedi a starter class was the only thing about the NGE that made any sense to me. Since everyone wanted to be one might as well just nerf it down and give it to them from the start. It really should have been that way from day one. I never understood the obsession with Jedi. I never wanted to be one. I was obviously the minority though. I wanted to play a game set in the Star Wars universe. I never wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be something that I created. I was really ok being an Uncle Owen type.
If the NGE buried SWG playable Jedi was the first nail in the coffin.
I personally don't care as long as its a good entertaining mmo. Time and hype wont make me judge the game any differently.
With respect to forced grouping to advance. I personally like forced grouping. I want content that requires peers to complete to advance in the game. I don't really like the 5 of 8 looking for 1 boon prot monk, etc... that goes on in forced grouping, but that is easily remedied by having a skill based game instead of level based.
Grouping is a good thing. SWG one major complaint I had was it became a very solo player game over time. Early on you had to group. By the end of Pre-CU no one needed a group for all but 1 area of the game.
soloing an MMO ?? should be banned by MMO etiquette and every "MMO" basing on such stupid idea should be reviewed as unacceptable to MMO standards.
If i join a world i will meet other people and yes i will depend on them and i have to. Do not join MMO if you don't wanna meet other people and depend on them >.<
-----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)
I agree that the best time in SWG was when there was the visibility and permadeath system.
I want those moments when player Jedi whip out lightsabers to be "oh my god" moments. I don't want it to be as common as water in a lake like SWG Jedi became.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15386 Read lesson 10.. this is the guy making the BioWare MMO, it's not a huge leap of faith to assume it will follow his design principles. Second Life isn't a game or there would be ESRB, PEGI and BBFC ratings for it, it's circumvented these rating systems by claiming it's not entertainment software. Which has partly led to the legal issues they now face for having adult rated content available to minors due to no previous rating or age verification systems. As an ex-Linden GM, I think I have a better understanding of what the product is.. pornographic content is the major money in SL, it may not be the most traded commodity, but it sells for a lot more than a chair or a pair of shoes. Though I may be a little bitter.. sorta get pissed off with it after the hundredth time of some prat telling you his virtual dick fell off as he teleported, the simple fact is, if you take porn out of SL, it's no longer profitable, as the rest of the item/service market is currently being saturated by a lady from China and her company of slaves who undercut all the home grown business people.
Lol i found that quite funny (rerferring to lesson 10) , I play wow and have done since it got released and not once have I sat there for hours endlessly questing without thinking "god this is mind numbingly boring" I ended up sitting there for hours because I had a goal to achieve and I knew I had to do these "take me by the hand" quests to get my toon up to 60. You have two sorts of people in the world the ones who can try a cigarette and never smoke again and those who have one puff and get hooked. The ones who don't get hooked are the ones who don't follow the general way of thinking and are the minority, the masses are thick but like to think they are intelligent j/k
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
Why do people get into a concrete-brained mindset on the subject of Alphas classes? There were and are many ways for MMO developers to control such Alphas classes without permadeath (making months of grinding suddenly worthless) or restricting the numbers allowed in each Alpha class (discriminatory and open to massive abuse) or making Alpha classes so weak that they are not worth attaining. Here are just some of the ideas that could have been considered but weren't by SWG - Make Jedi one of a number of Alpha classes - like Nightsister, Emperor's Hand, Royal Guard or Antaran Ranger, all mutually hostile - Make a scaleable penalty for Alpha class. You die, you can't clone for an hour/three hours/a day/a week, depending on when you were last killed. These time penalties would be degradeable over time. - Allowing BHs to group until they reach the destructive level of 1 Jedi. - Having powerful NPC guards in major cities who could 'see' Jedi etc, etc... You see? There are three ideas off the top of my head. SWG, of course, didn't implement any of them.
Wanna know why? Alpha Classes just do NOT work in an MMO. Even if you have 2 or 4 or 10 types of Alpha Classes you will still run into the same faults with it that SWG did. People will flock to whatever the Alpha Class is, and if it's 'too hard' or if there is some system to keep them in line. There will be outrage and after a few months those making the game will 'give in' and make it easyer.
Also think of the long term with Alpha Classes, we saw this with SWG. Those playing the Alpha Classes will find the game 'too easy' and those making the game will make it harder. So now the Alpha people have a harder game, those that are not playing it are going to have a really hard time and now are forced to go Alpha. Then there's PvP, and well look at what happen with the GCW system with all the Jedi running around in the CU. It turned into one big Jedi fight.
The point is Alpha Classes will never work in an MMORPG game. It just throws off any idea of balance and makes the game less fun for those coming into it.
All right, here it is:
What we have here is a simple difference in conclusion. You say that Alpha Classes didn't work in SWG; I say they did. Simple as that.
I actually posted a poll on mmorpg.com posing the question: if SWG were relaunched, would you want powerful Jedi unlockable after a long process or not? And 85% said yes. Not a scientific poll, I would immediately say, but the vast overwhelming majority it revealed in favour of the proposition shows that whatever you personally may feel about this, a lot more people believe the opposite.,
Jedi Worked fine in SWG at first with perma death.
the problem was more in the type of people reaching the goal of jedi. I never understood it everyone knew the frikkin rules about VIS and Perma death but yet some jedi cried about it. and it wasnt like you lost your unlocked jedi char slot, you just had create another jedi and start the grind all over. It kept most of us in line and it kept what jedi was meant to be.. NOT A MAIN TOON and yes SOE failed by not giving Jedi Content oustside of a broken FRS system and having an Alpha was cool and such but im not talkin about 30 times stronger than other profs either.
Jedi should be an alpha and unlockable but it should be more of a reward item for unlocking and working towards something, not a frikkin player class that becomes everyones main toon. When i unlocked and a few months later died i said to myself well i wont be that stupid ever agian! and jedi wasnt my main toon till the CU hit. even with just the XP loss. and yes i fought alot of BHs but since my death only lost to one and that was in the CU. but i was never hanging out at Theed doing PVP either. in fact i was enjoying my crafters and BH's on many different servers to hunt the new bold jedi!
So yeah it worked for a while but people wouldnt accept the rules to let it work...
And face it a Star Wars MMO without jedi would never fly! Jedi sells subs! look at this crap NGE system if it wasnt for free Jedi do you really think the game would be around?
For better or worse its part of the Star Wars world and should be in game but should have guildlines that keep it in check. running around killing a whole guild from the other faction isnt what i call in check.. minor Xp losses didnt work.it was never ment to ones main toon and the perma death thing should have never been removed. if your not mature enough to handle Jedi in a future SW MMO then mabey its not gonna be for you and in your learning process till you figure that out you can provide much content for BHs....:)
Actually you lost everything all your items aswell so if you struggled to find crystals and pearls in the first place if you died 3 times you literally had to start over.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
Another reason people went for Jedi was because they never bothered putting any sort of content in for them i.e. free content which wasn't crap and wasn't some half assed expansion. I know plenty of people who were driven to unlock jedi because they ran out of things to do and got bored with everything in the game. Thats why you ended up with loads of people trying for jedi after the initial rush from the holocron era. Now if SOE actually had a clue about how to use the game code they were left with after removing most of the original devs and the brains behind it i'm sure they would have been able to do it eventually but since they didn't have any idea of what they were doing and how to do it they screwed up from the get go.
Also not everyone who unlocked a jedi actually used there character as a Jedi I had 4 crafting friends who used their 2nd slots as 2nd crafters.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
Another reason people went for Jedi was because they never bothered putting any sort of content in for them i.e. free content which wasn't crap and wasn't some half assed expansion. I know plenty of people who were driven to unlock jedi because they ran out of things to do and got bored with everything in the game. Thats why you ended up with loads of people trying for jedi after the initial rush from the holocron era. Now if SOE actually had a clue about how to use the game code they were left with after removing most of the original devs and the brains behind it i'm sure they would have been able to do it eventually but since they didn't have any idea of what they were doing and how to do it they screwed up from the get go.
Also not everyone who unlocked a jedi actually used there character as a Jedi I had 4 crafting friends who used their 2nd slots as 2nd crafters.
Yup i unlocked jedi on my BH for the defensive and harvesting bonus's, defense for tanking and pvp and the harvesting for gathering darn good sellable skins.
The original Jedi system (unlock via profession grinding, playing with permadeath and all sorts of TEFs) might have worked, but it was very much an untested system when it was turned on in the fall of 2003. It might have been "internally" tested but the problem with the internal tests is that they're done with knowledge of what is intended and the testing is shaped by those intentions. Let out of the loop players take it on and wildly different results will present themselves.
So a huge component of the imagined "endgame" of SWG was not just beta tested by paying customers, but alpha tested. The developers spent a huge part of their effort on a small part of the game, which wouldn't have been so bad if the entire friggin' game wasn't so unpolished and lacking at launch.
Which brings us back to LA's impatience to get their hands on the money of the players.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
The original Jedi system (unlock via profession grinding, playing with permadeath and all sorts of TEFs) might have worked, but it was very much an untested system when it was turned on in the fall of 2003. It might have been "internally" tested but the problem with the internal tests is that they're done with knowledge of what is intended and the testing is shaped by those intentions. Let out of the loop players take it on and wildly different results will present themselves. So a huge component of the imagined "endgame" of SWG was not just beta tested by paying customers, but alpha tested. The developers spent a huge part of their effort on a small part of the game, which wouldn't have been so bad if the entire friggin' game wasn't so unpolished and lacking at launch. Which brings us back to LA's impatience to get their hands on the money of the players.
Well 5 years of development is long enough. SWG at launch needed another year minimum. You can certainly fault LA for rushing things out, but, you cant fault them for not having an endless suplly of money to hand over to SOE. what SOE delivered at launch was a typical SOE game. They are both equally to blame for swg's poor launch. Soe austin was not known for its good work ethic and LA is not known for pushing back release dates. Is SOE to blame for VG's failure?
See you in the dream.. The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
Well 5 years of development is long enough. SWG at launch needed another year minimum. You can certainly fault LA for rushing things out, but, you cant fault them for not having an endless suplly of money to hand over to SOE. what SOE delivered at launch was a typical SOE game. They are both equally to blame for swg's poor launch. Soe austin was not known for its good work ethic and LA is not known for pushing back release dates. Is SOE to blame for VG's failure?
Actually, if there is any company in the world that you can fault for not having an endless supply of money, its LA, home of Star Wars.
However, LA and SOE are to blame for four things that ensured SWG right from the start never achieved its true potential:
It launched a game that was incredibly buggy and never fixed those bugs
It launched 39 excellent professions many of which were utterly broken and all the design/coding resources that should have been allocated to rebalancing them were devoted to creating money-milking expansions
It did not launch Jump To Lightspeed with the initial game as was planned
It did not market the game through US and European advertising channels.
Well 5 years of development is long enough. SWG at launch needed another year minimum. You can certainly fault LA for rushing things out, but, you cant fault them for not having an endless suplly of money to hand over to SOE. what SOE delivered at launch was a typical SOE game. They are both equally to blame for swg's poor launch. Soe austin was not known for its good work ethic and LA is not known for pushing back release dates. Is SOE to blame for VG's failure?
Actually, if there is any company in the world that you can fault for not having an endless supply of money, its LA, home of Star Wars.
LOL, im sure LEC games division wishes that were true.
See you in the dream.. The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
The original SWG didn't appeal to Star Wars fans — that's why the subscription base never exceeded a million customers, and the population started to dwindle long before the CU was even a rumor.
Rather, the original SWG was developed for Raph Koster fans — people who wanted another time-sink laden, content-lacking, over-ambitious DikuMUD clone of Ultima Online in a sci-fi wrapper. And even they grew weary of a game that was mired in bugs and unfulfilled promise.
The so-called "depth" was largely a process of figuring out what actually worked. Or as the case may be, what could be exploited.
Honestly, I think the game was destined to mediocrity from the outset. It was rushed through development, launched in an incomplete state, and then poorly maintained/supported. Heck, some might argue the very choice of setting undermined success before even the first line of code was written.
The original SWG didn't appeal to Star Wars fans — that's why the subscription base never exceeded a million customers, and the population started to dwindle long before the CU was even a rumor.
Rather, the original SWG was developed for Raph Koster fans — people who wanted another time-sink laden, content-lacking, over-ambitious DikuMUD clone of Ultima Online in a sci-fi wrapper. And even they grew weary of a game that was mired in bugs and unfulfilled promise.
The so-called "depth" was largely a process of figuring out what actually worked. Or as the case may be, what could be exploited.
Honestly, I think the game was destined to mediocrity from the outset. It was rushed through development, launched in an incomplete state, and then poorly maintained/supported. Heck, some might argue the very choice of setting undermined success before even the first line of code was written.
The game never reached SWG fans because the idiots at SOE spent all the money on creating unnecessary expansions and not on marketing. In real life I knew a tonne of SW fans but none of them had ever heard of SWG until I told them about it.
As for the game itself...
It didn't take that long to figure out how SWG worked. I guess you just needed to concentrate, look around you and be a little quicker on the uptake than the average 'Feed Me, Feed Me, Mommy' MMORPGer. Yes, you had to make your own way in the world and, certainly, you had to be bright enough to work around some of the more major bugs but that was doable - and, in fact, in a bizarre way became part opf the game's challenge for me.
The content was there in the interaction with other people over PVPing, PVEing, grouping for levelling, trading, getting cantina buffs, getting med buffs, positioning your house, getting into a city and in a thousand other things. If, on the other hand, you needed an NPC to tell you, 'Go to Anchorhead and kill 50 worts' then, no, the content wasn't for you.
All in all, SWG was not for those with a short-attention span, for those without the social skills to make friends and talk to people, for those without the ingenuity and self-reliance to define their own life not in a virtual game but on a virtual world.
I don't know why a dev hasn't developed a true sandbox mmo that allows players to help input content. And when I say sandbox, I mean a truly online world. Not just fighting and killing, but a true social world online. If someone wants to log in and fight baddies all day, so be it. If someone wants to come online and craft or harvest all day, do it. If someone wants to come on simply to chat with friends in a virtual movie theatre, let them! Not only that, but let players help with input to push the game forward. Give them a starting base and let them, through their input and suggestions, develop their world.
I don't know why a dev hasn't developed a true sandbox mmo that allows players to help input content. And when I say sandbox, I mean a truly online world. Not just fighting and killing, but a true social world online. If someone wants to log in and fight baddies all day, so be it. If someone wants to come online and craft or harvest all day, do it. If someone wants to come on simply to chat with friends in a virtual movie theatre, let them! Not only that, but let players help with input to push the game forward. Give them a starting base and let them, through their input and suggestions, develop their world.
Well, that's the thing. There are games that allow you to do all those activities seperately - but not one game that lets you do them all. Well, SWG came closest and then, of course, it was all swept away by the NGE. That damnable Smedly!
Comments
Wanna know why? Alpha Classes just do NOT work in an MMO. Even if you have 2 or 4 or 10 types of Alpha Classes you will still run into the same faults with it that SWG did. People will flock to whatever the Alpha Class is, and if it's 'too hard' or if there is some system to keep them in line. There will be outrage and after a few months those making the game will 'give in' and make it easyer.Also think of the long term with Alpha Classes, we saw this with SWG. Those playing the Alpha Classes will find the game 'too easy' and those making the game will make it harder. So now the Alpha people have a harder game, those that are not playing it are going to have a really hard time and now are forced to go Alpha. Then there's PvP, and well look at what happen with the GCW system with all the Jedi running around in the CU. It turned into one big Jedi fight.
The point is Alpha Classes will never work in an MMORPG game. It just throws off any idea of balance and makes the game less fun for those coming into it.
All right, here it is:What we have here is a simple difference in conclusion. You say that Alpha Classes didn't work in SWG; I say they did. Simple as that.
I actually posted a poll on mmorpg.com posing the question: if SWG were relaunched, would you want powerful Jedi unlockable after a long process or not? And 85% said yes. Not a scientific poll, I would immediately say, but the vast overwhelming majority it revealed in favour of the proposition shows that whatever you personally may feel about this, a lot more people believe the opposite.,
Jedi Worked fine in SWG at first with perma death.
the problem was more in the type of people reaching the goal of jedi. I never understood it everyone knew the frikkin rules about VIS and Perma death but yet some jedi cried about it. and it wasnt like you lost your unlocked jedi char slot, you just had create another jedi and start the grind all over. It kept most of us in line and it kept what jedi was meant to be.. NOT A MAIN TOON and yes SOE failed by not giving Jedi Content oustside of a broken FRS system and having an Alpha was cool and such but im not talkin about 30 times stronger than other profs either.
Jedi should be an alpha and unlockable but it should be more of a reward item for unlocking and working towards something, not a frikkin player class that becomes everyones main toon. When i unlocked and a few months later died i said to myself well i wont be that stupid ever agian! and jedi wasnt my main toon till the CU hit. even with just the XP loss. and yes i fought alot of BHs but since my death only lost to one and that was in the CU. but i was never hanging out at Theed doing PVP either. in fact i was enjoying my crafters and BH's on many different servers to hunt the new bold jedi!
So yeah it worked for a while but people wouldnt accept the rules to let it work...
And face it a Star Wars MMO without jedi would never fly! Jedi sells subs! look at this crap NGE system if it wasnt for free Jedi do you really think the game would be around?
For better or worse its part of the Star Wars world and should be in game but should have guildlines that keep it in check. running around killing a whole guild from the other faction isnt what i call in check.. minor Xp losses didnt work.it was never ment to ones main toon and the perma death thing should have never been removed. if your not mature enough to handle Jedi in a future SW MMO then mabey its not gonna be for you and in your learning process till you figure that out you can provide much content for BHs....:)
Jedi Worked fine in SWG at first with perma death.
the problem was more in the type of people reaching the goal of jedi. I never understood it everyone knew the frikkin rules about VIS and Perma death but yet some jedi cried about it. and it wasnt like you lost your unlocked jedi char slot, you just had create another jedi and start the grind all over. It kept most of us in line and it kept what jedi was meant to be.. NOT A MAIN TOON and yes SOE failed by not giving Jedi Content oustside of a broken FRS system and having an Alpha was cool and such but im not talkin about 30 times stronger than other profs either.
Jedi should be an alpha and unlockable but it should be more of a reward item for unlocking and working towards something, not a frikkin player class that becomes everyones main toon. When i unlocked and a few months later died i said to myself well i wont be that stupid ever agian! and jedi wasnt my main toon till the CU hit. even with just the XP loss. and yes i fought alot of BHs but since my death only lost to one and that was in the CU. but i was never hanging out at Theed doing PVP either. in fact i was enjoying my crafters and BH's on many different servers to hunt the new bold jedi!
So yeah it worked for a while but people wouldnt accept the rules to let it work...
And face it a Star Wars MMO without jedi would never fly! Jedi sells subs! look at this crap NGE system if it wasnt for free Jedi do you really think the game would be around?
For better or worse its part of the Star Wars world and should be in game but should have guildlines that keep it in check. running around killing a whole guild from the other faction isnt what i call in check.. minor Xp losses didnt work.it was never ment to ones main toon and the perma death thing should have never been removed. if your not mature enough to handle Jedi in a future SW MMO then mabey its not gonna be for you and in your learning process till you figure that out you can provide much content for BHs....:)
No, I'm sorry, Jedi didn't 'work just fine first with permadeath'.Think about it, man. Encouraging players to grind a very hard character but telling them all the time they invested in protecting that character over the next two, three, six or (in my case) twelve months would be lost if some 14 year old leet player caught me zoning into a starport or during a dc would simply be ridiculous.
No-one ever complained about the rules of visibility. I certainly didn't. The only thing they did ask for was some clarification of what those rules were. I, for example, only ground on the hills on the top left hand corner of Dantoine. I was very careful never to use any force powers anywhere near a city, a pc or an npc. And yet, during the course of my long grind, I was attacked six times by BHs. I have no complaints about those attacks - however, I was always bewildered as to the specifics of the visibility rules.
As far as the Ferengi slime of LA are concerned, more Jedi = more money. So they were all for more Jedi no matter how much the integrity of the game was compromised.
As for the vis rules, they were little different from the slicing rules, or the experimentation rules. The devs somehow felt that not revealing the rules was an important part of the playing of the game, which would in an ideal world be true. The catch is, they had this bug filled game and used "working as intended" to obfuscate their incompetence.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Thanks Bobfish you saved me having to type out my similar thoughts of the "game" that is 2nd life
Agreed..the way they think no lightsabres..no money
I think that Alpha class Jedi did work in SWG with the perma death, the system broke when everyone could become a Jedi and not lose their character, when the servers became saturated with Jedi, long before the NGE ever happened.
However, I don't think it would work in an MMO that is aiming to be more popular than SWG was, simply because the majority of the subscriber base in bigger games are casual players who won't want to grind out for an Alpha class, but will want to play as Jedi.
I'm sure if the BioWare MMO is Star Wars it will take a similiar approach to the Kotor games, where you start out as a normal profession and then become force sensitive and a Jedi at some point in your progression, hopefully being optional too.
I miss SWG and the approach it took, but I can't see anyone repeating it as long as popular games in the genre are more linear in their focus. When you're betting 20-30 million dollars on a game, you don't buck the trend.
First off, it's called 'Ultima Online' and oh SWG didn't have any 'rich storyline of content' unless you where a Role Player... "Dev's make the game, Players make the content!" And yeah what great content when I got a knockdown/dizzy from someone claiming their RP is "Vader is my dad lol!"
And know what? Jedi and Alpha Classes are one of the things that turned this game into the mess you see before you! People do NOT understand what Risk vs Reward means. And with that lovely little Alpha Class they believed just getting it should be the 'risk' not if you want to keep playing it there's a ton of 'risks' in that...
You want an Alpha Class back? Fine but guess what, bring back Perma-Death and SWG will be back in the same boat it was in the first time around. People will be on the forums screaming about how unfair it is, and how much Perma-Death sucks.
Wanna know what would have helped the game in the first place? SOE, LA and Raph Koster standing firm on the whole "No Player Jedi!" That they said when the game was first in the works. They should have come out and told everyone 'clearly' on why there should be no Jedi in the GCW timeline. And really I do blame both LA whom believed people wouldn't play unless Jedi was in. And Raph cuz lord knows the man loves testing people in MMO's (See Ultima Online 1998 till 2000 the Player Killer years) to see what they will do when there's something in place like that.
And on the whole "Will people hate the BioWare/LA MMO" chances are yes. Go check out Mass Effect, great game but it's everything the Pre-CU Vets hate. It's not going to be a Pre-CU system, and chances are it will be more of a storydriven 'content' game from the get go. That's not a bad thing in my eyes, and BioWare knows how to tell a great story... See ummmm every game they have put out... Hell even that Mech game they did back in the 1990's rocked.
Why do people get into a concrete-brained mindset on the subject of Alphas classes? There were and are many ways for MMO developers to control such Alphas classes without permadeath (making months of grinding suddenly worthless) or restricting the numbers allowed in each Alpha class (discriminatory and open to massive abuse) or making Alpha classes so weak that they are not worth attaining. Here are just some of the ideas that could have been considered but weren't by SWG
- Make Jedi one of a number of Alpha classes - like Nightsister, Emperor's Hand, Royal Guard or Antaran Ranger, all mutually hostile
- Make a scaleable penalty for Alpha class. You die, you can't clone for an hour/three hours/a day/a week, depending on when you were last killed. These time penalties would be degradeable over time.
- Allowing BHs to group until they reach the destructive level of 1 Jedi.
- Having powerful NPC guards in major cities who could 'see' Jedi
etc, etc... You see? There are three ideas off the top of my head. SWG, of course, didn't implement any of them.
Wanna know why? Alpha Classes just do NOT work in an MMO. Even if you have 2 or 4 or 10 types of Alpha Classes you will still run into the same faults with it that SWG did. People will flock to whatever the Alpha Class is, and if it's 'too hard' or if there is some system to keep them in line. There will be outrage and after a few months those making the game will 'give in' and make it easyer.Also think of the long term with Alpha Classes, we saw this with SWG. Those playing the Alpha Classes will find the game 'too easy' and those making the game will make it harder. So now the Alpha people have a harder game, those that are not playing it are going to have a really hard time and now are forced to go Alpha. Then there's PvP, and well look at what happen with the GCW system with all the Jedi running around in the CU. It turned into one big Jedi fight.
The point is Alpha Classes will never work in an MMORPG game. It just throws off any idea of balance and makes the game less fun for those coming into it.
I cant argue with you. I have yet to see a case where an alpha class situation would work. I would guess that if implemented most games would end up like SWG. For me SWG is the proof that Alpha classes create nothing but a nightmare for the developers and the community that do not want to be one. Its a horrible concept that is doomed to failure due to human nature. Most gamers want to be the most powerful thing they can be. In SWG's case it was the beginning of the end.
SOE making Jedi a starter class was the only thing about the NGE that made any sense to me. Since everyone wanted to be one might as well just nerf it down and give it to them from the start. It really should have been that way from day one. I never understood the obsession with Jedi. I never wanted to be one. I was obviously the minority though. I wanted to play a game set in the Star Wars universe. I never wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be something that I created. I was really ok being an Uncle Owen type.
If the NGE buried SWG playable Jedi was the first nail in the coffin.
I personally don't care as long as its a good entertaining mmo. Time and hype wont make me judge the game any differently.
With respect to forced grouping to advance. I personally like forced grouping. I want content that requires peers to complete to advance in the game. I don't really like the 5 of 8 looking for 1 boon prot monk, etc... that goes on in forced grouping, but that is easily remedied by having a skill based game instead of level based.
Grouping is a good thing. SWG one major complaint I had was it became a very solo player game over time. Early on you had to group. By the end of Pre-CU no one needed a group for all but 1 area of the game.
soloing an MMO ?? should be banned by MMO etiquette and every "MMO" basing on such stupid idea should be reviewed as unacceptable to MMO standards.
If i join a world i will meet other people and yes i will depend on them and i have to. Do not join MMO if you don't wanna meet other people and depend on them >.<
-----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)
I agree that the best time in SWG was when there was the visibility and permadeath system.
I want those moments when player Jedi whip out lightsabers to be "oh my god" moments. I don't want it to be as common as water in a lake like SWG Jedi became.
Lol i found that quite funny (rerferring to lesson 10) , I play wow and have done since it got released and not once have I sat there for hours endlessly questing without thinking "god this is mind numbingly boring" I ended up sitting there for hours because I had a goal to achieve and I knew I had to do these "take me by the hand" quests to get my toon up to 60. You have two sorts of people in the world the ones who can try a cigarette and never smoke again and those who have one puff and get hooked. The ones who don't get hooked are the ones who don't follow the general way of thinking and are the minority, the masses are thick but like to think they are intelligent j/k
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
Also think of the long term with Alpha Classes, we saw this with SWG. Those playing the Alpha Classes will find the game 'too easy' and those making the game will make it harder. So now the Alpha people have a harder game, those that are not playing it are going to have a really hard time and now are forced to go Alpha. Then there's PvP, and well look at what happen with the GCW system with all the Jedi running around in the CU. It turned into one big Jedi fight.
The point is Alpha Classes will never work in an MMORPG game. It just throws off any idea of balance and makes the game less fun for those coming into it.
All right, here it is:What we have here is a simple difference in conclusion. You say that Alpha Classes didn't work in SWG; I say they did. Simple as that.
I actually posted a poll on mmorpg.com posing the question: if SWG were relaunched, would you want powerful Jedi unlockable after a long process or not? And 85% said yes. Not a scientific poll, I would immediately say, but the vast overwhelming majority it revealed in favour of the proposition shows that whatever you personally may feel about this, a lot more people believe the opposite.,
Jedi Worked fine in SWG at first with perma death.
the problem was more in the type of people reaching the goal of jedi. I never understood it everyone knew the frikkin rules about VIS and Perma death but yet some jedi cried about it. and it wasnt like you lost your unlocked jedi char slot, you just had create another jedi and start the grind all over. It kept most of us in line and it kept what jedi was meant to be.. NOT A MAIN TOON and yes SOE failed by not giving Jedi Content oustside of a broken FRS system and having an Alpha was cool and such but im not talkin about 30 times stronger than other profs either.
Jedi should be an alpha and unlockable but it should be more of a reward item for unlocking and working towards something, not a frikkin player class that becomes everyones main toon. When i unlocked and a few months later died i said to myself well i wont be that stupid ever agian! and jedi wasnt my main toon till the CU hit. even with just the XP loss. and yes i fought alot of BHs but since my death only lost to one and that was in the CU. but i was never hanging out at Theed doing PVP either. in fact i was enjoying my crafters and BH's on many different servers to hunt the new bold jedi!
So yeah it worked for a while but people wouldnt accept the rules to let it work...
And face it a Star Wars MMO without jedi would never fly! Jedi sells subs! look at this crap NGE system if it wasnt for free Jedi do you really think the game would be around?
For better or worse its part of the Star Wars world and should be in game but should have guildlines that keep it in check. running around killing a whole guild from the other faction isnt what i call in check.. minor Xp losses didnt work.it was never ment to ones main toon and the perma death thing should have never been removed. if your not mature enough to handle Jedi in a future SW MMO then mabey its not gonna be for you and in your learning process till you figure that out you can provide much content for BHs....:)
Actually you lost everything all your items aswell so if you struggled to find crystals and pearls in the first place if you died 3 times you literally had to start over.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
Another reason people went for Jedi was because they never bothered putting any sort of content in for them i.e. free content which wasn't crap and wasn't some half assed expansion. I know plenty of people who were driven to unlock jedi because they ran out of things to do and got bored with everything in the game. Thats why you ended up with loads of people trying for jedi after the initial rush from the holocron era. Now if SOE actually had a clue about how to use the game code they were left with after removing most of the original devs and the brains behind it i'm sure they would have been able to do it eventually but since they didn't have any idea of what they were doing and how to do it they screwed up from the get go.
Also not everyone who unlocked a jedi actually used there character as a Jedi I had 4 crafting friends who used their 2nd slots as 2nd crafters.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
Yup i unlocked jedi on my BH for the defensive and harvesting bonus's, defense for tanking and pvp and the harvesting for gathering darn good sellable skins.
The original Jedi system (unlock via profession grinding, playing with permadeath and all sorts of TEFs) might have worked, but it was very much an untested system when it was turned on in the fall of 2003. It might have been "internally" tested but the problem with the internal tests is that they're done with knowledge of what is intended and the testing is shaped by those intentions. Let out of the loop players take it on and wildly different results will present themselves.
So a huge component of the imagined "endgame" of SWG was not just beta tested by paying customers, but alpha tested. The developers spent a huge part of their effort on a small part of the game, which wouldn't have been so bad if the entire friggin' game wasn't so unpolished and lacking at launch.
Which brings us back to LA's impatience to get their hands on the money of the players.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
if it's not pre-cu it will bomb.
if there is no unlockable classes it will bomb.
look at warcraft it's stealing swg's idea of alpha classes and people are happy that it's going in.
Well 5 years of development is long enough. SWG at launch needed another year minimum. You can certainly fault LA for rushing things out, but, you cant fault them for not having an endless suplly of money to hand over to SOE. what SOE delivered at launch was a typical SOE game. They are both equally to blame for swg's poor launch. Soe austin was not known for its good work ethic and LA is not known for pushing back release dates. Is SOE to blame for VG's failure?
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
However, LA and SOE are to blame for four things that ensured SWG right from the start never achieved its true potential:
This is an interesting read
www.1up.com/do/newsStory
If anything will screw up the Bioware MMO it will be EA.
LOL, im sure LEC games division wishes that were true.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
The original SWG didn't appeal to Star Wars fans — that's why the subscription base never exceeded a million customers, and the population started to dwindle long before the CU was even a rumor.
Rather, the original SWG was developed for Raph Koster fans — people who wanted another time-sink laden, content-lacking, over-ambitious DikuMUD clone of Ultima Online in a sci-fi wrapper. And even they grew weary of a game that was mired in bugs and unfulfilled promise.
The so-called "depth" was largely a process of figuring out what actually worked. Or as the case may be, what could be exploited.
Honestly, I think the game was destined to mediocrity from the outset. It was rushed through development, launched in an incomplete state, and then poorly maintained/supported. Heck, some might argue the very choice of setting undermined success before even the first line of code was written.
As for the game itself...
It didn't take that long to figure out how SWG worked. I guess you just needed to concentrate, look around you and be a little quicker on the uptake than the average 'Feed Me, Feed Me, Mommy' MMORPGer. Yes, you had to make your own way in the world and, certainly, you had to be bright enough to work around some of the more major bugs but that was doable - and, in fact, in a bizarre way became part opf the game's challenge for me.
The content was there in the interaction with other people over PVPing, PVEing, grouping for levelling, trading, getting cantina buffs, getting med buffs, positioning your house, getting into a city and in a thousand other things. If, on the other hand, you needed an NPC to tell you, 'Go to Anchorhead and kill 50 worts' then, no, the content wasn't for you.
All in all, SWG was not for those with a short-attention span, for those without the social skills to make friends and talk to people, for those without the ingenuity and self-reliance to define their own life not in a virtual game but on a virtual world.
I guess WoW must have been more your thing.
I don't know why a dev hasn't developed a true sandbox mmo that allows players to help input content. And when I say sandbox, I mean a truly online world. Not just fighting and killing, but a true social world online. If someone wants to log in and fight baddies all day, so be it. If someone wants to come online and craft or harvest all day, do it. If someone wants to come on simply to chat with friends in a virtual movie theatre, let them! Not only that, but let players help with input to push the game forward. Give them a starting base and let them, through their input and suggestions, develop their world.
Well, that's the thing. There are games that allow you to do all those activities seperately - but not one game that lets you do them all. Well, SWG came closest and then, of course, it was all swept away by the NGE. That damnable Smedly!