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The SOE hatred just has to stop..
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Fair enough, but who said I think hate = dislike ? Anyone can dislike something without hating it can they not ?
—John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment
heres a brief history of why people hate your precious company.
SWG:
Jedi
Players who wished to play a Jedi character had to first unlock their Jedi slot by fulfilling an unknown list of criteria. However, within four months of this stipulation, no player had yet achieved the goal. Jedi forum at the official site turned into a "flamer's paradise" as some subscribers accused the developers of lying about the Jedi system being in place. The first player unlocked their Jedi slot on Friday 7 November 2003.[32] Lucas Arts game producer Haden Blackman stated in an interview on 20 December 2003, with Gamespy: "We're confident in the [Jedi] system because the feedback from players has been extremely positive. Not only are Jedi players happy with the system and the powers they are receiving...." This caused a backlash by some players who felt this statement was misleading. Gamespy noted: "GameSpy's mail was so flooded with reports from the Galaxies community that we started researching this feature to present both sides of the story."[33] Because the time commitment to unlock a Jedi was substantial, players complained that perma-death of the character after three deaths was overly harsh. The developers eventually relented and lowered the penalty to skill loss in January, 2004.[34] The skill loss was later recanted.
Some players further complained that the process of unlocking the Jedi slot, known as "hologrinding", was overly long, painful and disruptive to the social fabric of the game. In August, 2004, the developers released a quest system as the new path to unlocking the Jedi slot.[35][36] With the NGE (see below) in November, 2005, allowing all players, including new ones, to play a Jedi character, there were complaints that the efforts that veteran players had expended in unlocking their Jedi slots were all for nothing. [37]
Many players have pointed out that canonically, there are very few Jedi active in the galaxy during the time period in which the game is set. The number of Jedi characters in the game, especially after the NGE, has thus raised some controversy[citation needed].
Combat Upgrade
SWG developers promised a "Combat Upgrade" or "CU," which was released 27 April 2005, and represented a major re-writing of the combat, armor, and weapons systems, wherein only certain professions could use specific weapons and armor. The combat mechanics in the game were shifted from a skill system to a combat level system for both players and game creatures. The UI icon graphics were changed from monochromatic to color.[38] This alteration resulted in controversy caused by players who criticized the changes,[39][40] and cancellations during that time.[41] However, subscriber numbers gradually grew back for the next seven months, hitting a peak around October 2005.[citation needed]
New Game Enhancements
Another set of game changes dubbed the "New Game Enhancements" (NGE) was announced on 3 November 2005 and started testing the next day. It went live on 15 November via digital download, and became available in retail as the Star Wars Galaxies: Starter Kit on 22 November.[42] Changes included the reduction of the 34 original professions to 9 "iconic" ones. The NGE changes also included a massive overhaul to the gameplay, deemphasizing the importance of tradeskills and replacing the CU combat system with a faster first-person shooter style game. Jedi Knight powers and status, once obtainable only after extremely long hours of play, became available to characters as starting class.[42]
The launch of the NGE introduced new bugs, broken quests, and induced client-side lag.[42] There were criticisms of the changes in several reviews, and negative player feedback was noted by media outlets outside the gaming industry, including CBS News, New York Times, New York Post and Wired Magazine.[43][44][45][46][47] On Slashdot, John Smedley explained that they felt it necessary to revamp the game to the NGE in order to reverse the deterioration they were seeing in the subscriber base.[48]
The development team affirmed this is their desired direction for the game, and they are slowly modifying parameters to address players' desires.[49] This progress includes the re-introduction of some pre-NGE features that were removed, such as creature handling, target locking, auto-firing, the ability to fire special attacks from their keys,[42] and the option to keep the camera behind the character, rather than the NGE's over-the-shoulder perspective.[50]
Since then, the development team has given each profession a set of "Expertise trees" to bring back some complexity and differentiation to characters.
After the announcement that SOE had acquired the MMORPG Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Smedley addressed that game's players, many of whom had come from Star Wars Galaxies, about the perceived threat of major changes to the game:
We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.
—John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment[51]
Expansion refund
The Trials of Obi-Wan expansion met with controversy as, two days after the expansion was released, the development team announced the NGE. Many players objected that they would not have purchased the expansion if they had known in advance about the NGE. Sony Online Entertainment eventually offered a refund to players who had purchased the expansion prior to the NGE.[52] Some subscribers threatened a class-action lawsuit,[citation needed] but eventually gave up once they learned it had no legal basis and since SOE was going to offer refunds.
Subscriber numbers
Veteran designer, Raph Koster, helmed the development and initial launch of the game. Many industry professionals expected that the subscription numbers would exceed the one million mark, a feat accomplished only thus far in Asia by MMORPGs such as Lineage and more recently by World of Warcraft.[53] Based on NPD figures as of February 2004, SWG sold more than 300,000 boxed copies at retail for a total initial revenue of over $18 million. Sony Online Entertainment confirmed in March 2004 that there were well over 200,000 monthly subscribers making it the 2nd largest MMORPG in North America.[54] The company later reported in 2004 that they had 250,000 subscribers.[55] In August 2005, Sony Online Entertainment reported that they had now sold 1,000,000 boxed copies of the game.[56] Media sources reported that the subscriber numbers have fallen substantially since the release of the CU and the NGE.[57][58] In early 2006 after the NGE, allegedly "hacked" numbers purported to show that only 10,363 subscribers were playing on a particular Friday night. The President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, denied that subscriptions had fallen this low: "Have the numbers in Star Wars Galaxies gone down? I will tell you that the concurrent numbers have gone down. Are they as low as what was shown there? Absolutely not."[59]
As of the second quarter of 2006, according to charts at MMOGchart.com, there were estimated to be between 110,000 and 175,000 subscribers. A more recent update from MMOGdata.com which uses the previous data from MMOGchart.com, estimates that the game has about 49,000 subscribers as of April 2007.[60] However, both MMOGchart.com and MMOGdata.com rated the subscriber number estimates at a "C" confidence level which mean they are "merely industry 'best guesses' or are otherwise questionable" due to SOE not releasing SWG subscriber numbers.[61][60] Posting on the official forums, Lorin Jameson (SOE Producer, Star Wars Galaxies, forum name "DeadMeat") has refuted the latest figure: "I think I am safe in saying the 50K number is vastly wrong."[62]
In October 2007, Primotechnology.com reported that; "It’s estimated that the game now has fewer than 100,000 subscribers and less than 20,000 active players.[63]
================================================
EQ:
Sale of in-game objects/real world economics
EverQuest has been the subject of various criticisms. One example involves the sale of in-game objects for real currency (often through eBay). The developers of EQ have always forbidden the practice and in January 2001 asked eBay to stop listing such auctions. For a time, such auctions were immediately removed, which changed market conditions and allowed a number of specialized auction sites to specialize in this new virtual economy.
Because items can be traded within the game and also because of illegal online trading on websites, virtual currency to real currency exchange rates have been calculated. The BBC reported that in 2002 work done by Edward Castronova showed that Everquest was the 77th richest country in the world, sandwiched between Russia and Bulgaria and its GDP per capita was higher than that of the People's Republic of China and India. By 2004, a follow-up analysis showed that the average GDP of each of the two million players was $2,000 (£1,087) which was approximately the same as the GDP of Namibia.[7][8] This is not something difficult to believe considering that in its prime, (around 2002) items such as a Blade of Carnage dropped from the Avatar of War could be sold for as much as $1000.
The East Commonlands tunnel was a commonly used area for trading. The original tunnel shown has since been replaced with a new layout and new graphics due to an extensive zone-wide update.
The East Commonlands tunnel was a commonly used area for trading. The original tunnel shown has since been replaced with a new layout and new graphics due to an extensive zone-wide update.
This led[citation needed] some gamers to start playing professionally, as after some hours of play they could earn income by selling off in-game items. Black Snow Interactive was founded as a company that created characters, leveled them to make them powerful, and then resold the characters. After some time, the firm moved to Mexico, as the salaries for Mexican players are far less. Other firms, such as the Gaming Open Market, specialized in exchanging money between games. A player could exchange a house in The Sims Online for EverQuest platinum pieces, depending solely on market laws of supply and demand.
Sony officially discourages the payment of real-world money for online goods, except on certain "Station Exchange" servers in EQ2, launched in July 2005. The program facilitates buying in-game items for real money from fellow players for a nominal fee. At this point this system only applies to select EverQuest II servers; none of the pre-Station Exchange EverQuest II or EverQuest servers are affected.[9]
While Sony's official stance on EverQuest is still against real market transactions, any real enforcement of this faded years ago. It is now common to encounter an account on its second or third owner, especially in the higher end game.[citation needed] Although any exchange of accounts between players is a violation of the End User License Agreement and theoretical grounds for the banning of an account, Sony turns a blind eye to all but the most public violations.[citation needed] (There have been a number of posts similar to "I just bought this account and do not know how to do X, Y, or Z," on the official Sony forums that have not resulted in punishment.)[citation needed]
Due to the difficulty in learning the role a specific class plays within a group, and of learning the best way to fulfill this role, individuals who purchase high level characters without prior playing experience are stereotypically sub-par to those who have developed characters normally. Referring to a character in EverQuest as an eBay character or to an individual as an "eBayer" are derogatory comments used to suggest both that an individual did not develop his own character and that he does not know how to play it.
The 14-day, no-credit-card-required trial accounts have produced a new set of problems in this area. Since the sellers of in-game items and platinum can create new accounts at will, without cost, the quantity of in-game spam from some sellers has become a widely discussed source of annoyance.
[edit] Intellectual property and role-playing
Another well-publicized incident from October 2000, usually referred to as the "Mystere incident", involved Verant banning a player for creating controversial fan fiction, causing outrage among Everquest players and sparking a major industry-wide debate about players' rights and the line between roleplaying and intellectual property infringement. The case was used by several academics in discussing such rights in the digital age[10].
Fans have created the open source server emulator EQEmu, allowing users to run their own servers with custom rules. Running such an emulator is a violation of EQ's end user license agreement and could result in a player being banned from Sony's EverQuest servers if caught doing so. It has not gained the same popularity as server emulators for Ultima Online.
[edit] Addiction
The game is renowned and berated (by some psychologists specializing in computer addiction) for its addictive qualities. Many refer to it half-jokingly as "NeverRest" and "EverCrack" (a reference to crack cocaine).[11] EQ is very time-consuming for many people, and there have been some well-publicized suicides of EverQuest users, such as that of Shawn Woolley. Relationships broken because of obsessive playing resulted in the creation of an online support group called EverQuest Widows and sites like GamerWidow.com. An infamous rant titled "EQ: What You Really Get From An Online Game" appeared on Slashdot in 2002,[12] and brought this issue of EverQuest addiction to the forefront of many message boards across the Internet.[13]
[edit] '"EverQuest for Macintosh'" issues
For several years, '"Everquest for Macintosh'" subscribers lacked the ability to create posts on the official Sony '"EverQuest for Macintosh'" forums. Out-of-game discussions thus took root at another location that became an on-line source of information for technical issues as well as for the various gameplay and sociological aspects that are unique to '"EverQuest for Macintosh'".[14]
In May 2004, Woody Hearn of GU Comics called for all EverQuest gamers to boycott the Omens of War expansion in an effort to force SOE to address existing issues with the game rather than release another "quick-fire" expansion.[16] The call to boycott was rescinded after SOE held a summit to address player concerns, improve (internal and external) communication, and correct specific issues within the game
=================================
EQ II
Expansions and Adventure Packs
The Bloodline Chronicles-Adventure Pack March 21, 2005
The Splitpaw Saga-Adventure Pack June 28, 2005
Desert of Flames-Expansion-September 13, 2005
Kingdom of Sky-Expansion-February 21, 2006
The Fallen Dynasty-Adventure Pack June 14, 2006
Echoes of Faydwer-Expansion November 14, 2006
Rise of Kunark-Expansion November 13, 2007
In February 2005, EverQuest II began allowing players to place an order for pizza delivery from within the game, with a simple and easy command typed into the chat bar, "/pizza".[1] This promotion has since ended, but generated significant press for the game.
In June 2005, SOE introduced Station Exchange to EverQuest II. Station Exchange is an official auction system—only on designated servers—allowing real money to be transferred for in-game money, items or characters.
In March 2006, SOE announced that it would end its Chinese/Korean operations for EverQuest II, which were being supported in the region by Gamania. The beta period for the game in China/Korea ended on March 29, and on March 30, all Chinese/Korean accounts were moved to the US servers of the game.
Everquest II started out with a relatively complex crafting system – the best items in the game were intended (read: never implemented) to be made with components looted from the toughest mobs; final products were the end results of several subcombines; and crafters relied on characters of other professions for many of these subcombines (side note: this seems to be the model for Vanguard, except that crafters will be able to do much more within the system; build housing, boats, etc.). Problems arose when too many professions relied too heavily on only one, the Alchemist, and the Provisioner didn’t rely on anyone else.
So in typical SOE fashion, instead of getting the system to work as intended, it was merely dumbed down. If crafters scribed the appropriate recipe books, they could make all of their own subcomponents, eliminating the need for interdependence among crafters. The epic mobs’ ultra-rare tradeskill component drops were taken out of the loot tables and replaced with basic rare harvests, destroying any hope of the crafter’s dependence on the adventurer.
Finally, in the most recent Live Update, subcombines were entirely removed. Crafting, which was originally intended to be just as compelling an aspect of gameplay as adventuring, is dumbed down to a mini-game to be played when level 70 adventurers are locked out of all the good raid instances. Crafted items are already of a lesser quality than fairly common and easily obtained loot, and now the market will be flooded with mass-produced ‘mastercrafted’ merchandise. I won’t even try to explain the role of crafting on Station Exchange servers.
Most crafted items do serve a purpose in the game, however, no matter how poor the process is. Consumables, such as arrows, poisons, potions, and food/drink, are all essential to the economy; to a lesser extent, armor, spell scrolls, and weapons serve the same purpose, but they can all be permanently replaced with loot drops and quest rewards. The major flaw in this economic model with respect to the role of these items in the economy is that they can never be upgraded in the same tier by harder-to-make or rarer crafted items, in sharp contrast to raid loot.
============================================
Vanguard:
Gamespy awarded Vanguard the "Biggest Disappointment" award for 2007.[10] Vanguard also won the awards in the categories for "Least Fun", "Most Desolate" and "Lamest Launch" in the MMORPG.com MMOWTF Awards for the worst games of 2007.[11]
There have been numerous criticisms of the game by the game press and the fanbase.
* The game was released before it was ready, leading to:
* Content was low for high-level players, and spotty even in some lower-level areas. Much planned high level content was not included at launch.
* Large numbers of bugs and performance issues, which make gameplay difficult, and on some systems rendering the game virtually unplayable.
* At release, performance was poor on many systems, including some high-end configurations. For example there was no anti-aliasing, and anisotropic filtering support was buggy.
Honestly, you've got to respect the man's candor. Many criticisms may be laid at the feet of former Everquest Vision™ junkee and current Sigil Games Vision™ proselytizer Brad McQuaid but indirectness is not one of them. To be fair, I've poached a single sentence from one of a million forum posts by the guy, taken it out of context and placed it in italics to give it a weight beyond the scope of the original statement, so let's not pretend that this is some kind of mission statement on releasing the game. The thing is, having played Vanguard: Saga of Heroes whenever I could muster the fortitude over the past two weeks, Brad's post is a pretty salient commentary on the state of the game's release.
When in early February, a Vanguard review key wandered into my grasp I, as something of a Massively Multiplayer gaming addict, set out immediately with the intent of investing dozens of hours into its three-tiered gameplay structure to construct a fair and well-informed review of the title. I even joined with a colleague in what we termed a "blood oath" to achieve at the very least level 20 so that we had a clear impression of both the solo and grouping content of the game. What happened instead is that I kept finding excuses not to play a game that was mediocre at its best and flatly annoying most of the rest of the time.
My goal was to inform myself to a complete enough degree to write a review. This is not that review. That review will never exist, because I am simply not willing to force myself to play long enough to construct a fully realized impression of Norrath. No, wait. Norrath was Everquest. What's this place called again? Let me look it up, and I'll get back to you …
… Telon! Right, that's the place I've been avoiding.
Now, I'm going to stop fans of Vanguard right here, because I don't care about your vehement and impassioned emails. I honestly don't. First of all, as I mentioned this isn't a review, and I'm not pawning this off as a complete examination of the entire game, but more importantly I'm under no obligation to like Vanguard, and I'm not going to trot out the tired old conventions of picking out small and often insignificant things that don't suck to balance out against the overwhelming majority of things that do suck.
So, what's wrong with Vanguard? How long you got?
The engine seems tailor made for a Sony Online game – despite Sigil's years of work with Microsoft only to be unceremoniously, and maybe not mysteriously, dumped in 2006 – in that it:
1) Makes everything appear to be made of shiny plastic and,
2) Doesn't work
The landscapes feel lifeless, designed either as great open spaces where oddly shaped creatures wait to be slaughtered and harvested at the whim of the local constabulary, or equally often as tightly confined valleys between vertical cliffs of ridiculous proportions that look exactly like what I'd make with Maya if I wanted to try my hand at cliff making. Also, between these cliffs of insanity, are the same oddly shaped creatures, the slaughtering, and lazy constables. The quests come verbatim from The Big Book of MMOG Quests, and every phase of character development feels awkward. On any given swing of a sword a character might gain familiar skill increases for usual offensive and defensive attributes, but along with those one might receive upgrades in tactic recognition, spell recognition, perception, detection, light fandango tripping and smoothie making. Every conflict fills my chat bar with information that I don't really understand, and ultimately don't care about.
Much of Vanguard seems intentionally obtuse and as counter-intuitive as possible while at the same time wrapping itself in tired trappings that have been done far better. Judging an enemy's relative difficulty is itself a multi-layered exploration in cryptography. For example, a level 5 – 2 dot creature is actually less difficult than a level 4 – 3 dot creature. Do you know what that means? Well neither did I for about nine levels, and let me tell you it makes more than a marginal difference! Would it surprise you to know that, where at level 1 you hit creatures for the traditional handful of hit points, by level 6 you might have a critical hit for several hundred damage? Would it further surprise you to find that those hundreds of points of damage against a newbie mob won't do much serious damage, you know unless it's a level 6 – 1 dot. Obviously I'm talking about a level 4 – 4 dot or level 5 – 3 dot, which are clearly far more difficult that some 6-1!
Death is a fact of life for the early adventurer, and not just the kind of death that comes from hyper-fast respawns and wandering creatures several levels higher than you, but the really annoying death that can only be achieved by not understanding what the holy hell is going on. Fortunately characters are not "eligible" for death penalty for the first few levels. I put eligible in quotes because I was always struck on my many young deaths by not being eligible to be penalized by a game. I wondered if there were people at level 5 running around anxiously anticipating that glorious day when they, like their fathers before them, would be "eligible" for in-game punishment.
But, of course, adventuring, such as it's called, is only one of the spheres of Vanguard's three-sphere gameplay model. There is also Crafting and Diplomacy in which, theoretically, one could invest themselves entirely without paying much attention to improving their Bleeding From Puncture Wounds skill. Of the two spheres, Diplomacy most intrigued me with its collectible card style play.
In Diplomacy parleys you and your mob opponent both start with a pool of points. The first person to get rid of all their points wins the conversation. There is a marker that is moved by playing cards, and at the end of each turn whichever side of the board the marker is on gets rid of one of their points. If you, as the player, remove a point from your own pool then the conversation progresses.
Here are the problems:
1) Despite having names like Forceful Demand, Complimentary Comment or Obfuscating And Slightly Suggestive Imperative, the cards themselves do nothing to altar the static flow of conversations. Even as you play Angry Non-Sequiter, your side of the conversation may end up being conciliatory and diplomatic.
2) Card Gameplay gets redundant. It's one thing to hit the millionth local bandit with a sword, but grinding a card game is a whole new level of hardcore that I'm just not prepared to explore.
3) Vanguard doesn't do a great job of drawing you into the stories. Names of places and people seem so equally unfamiliar as to be interchangeable, and proper nouns suffer from more apostrophes than an all-night marathon viewing of Conjunction Junction. I can only care for so long that the Jaa'bba'lly of F'za'nnnjj province want Kwagzatz of the Hoohanie dead, which is why they are hiring Zv'ii'tz of the K's'tt''ll clan to concoct a slow acting poison to be applied to Kwagzatz's F'oo'd', and it's your job to convince nine different people to give you the nine different components of the poison.
4) There's no real sense of advancement. Occasionally you get a new card, or some new piece of diplomatic clothing that grants you an extra green dot at the beginning of each parlay, but who cares?
Diplomacy is a clever idea that's not nearly engaging enough at lower levels to encourage the player to move forward. The Diplomacy game lacks the levels of nuance and strategy that make CCG games so addicting, and the actions of parley seems only barely related to what's transpiring in the game. It would be like giving your character all kinds of interesting combat skills, but every time you activate those skills you just swing your sword the same way.
But, so what? Right? Tired and redundant gameplay, barely interesting story, artificial environments populated with lame quests and an over population of sword fodder; I could be talking about any MMO on the market. The whole damn genre has run off the rails and become a parody of itself. Click the button and a gamer-treat rolls occasionally down the little pipe activating neurotransmitters in the brain that beg endlessly for more tiny little gamer-treats. So why pick on the little guy?
Fine, you want to know what really pisses me off about Vanguard; what voices me with the attitude that Sigil stole my lunch money? Vanguard sets a bad precedent for development and product release. In the months to launch Brad McQuaid made it very clear that regardless of whether Vanguard was actually ready for launch Sony, which had saved the game from cancellation following Microsoft's parting of ways, had set a firm timetable for retail, and come hell or high water the game only had enough money and time to reach that date. So, now that the game has released in its incomplete state, in a state that McQuaid himself describes as requiring patches, bug fixes and new feature implementation on par with a beta product, Sigil essentially comes to the consumer as the third investor in the process of the development cycle, and that is not just a terrible way of doing business, but an irresponsible step in the wrong direction for complicit consumers.
Let me put it bluntly, if a game is not ready for retail when the money runs out find another investor or shut the doors. We are customers, and the retail end of the industry is bad enough about not supporting incomplete or inoperable products without developers and publishers assuming we are investors in the development process. Your job as the industry is to create product, and then, and only then, we buy it.
So, what to say in capping off my thoughts on Vanguard. First, to you Vanguard faithful who, even now, are anxious to point out all the little things that make Vanguard great on which I completely missed the boat possibly because I'm just some World of Warcraft lamer who can't handle a man's MMO, go suck a sock. I don't care about the stuff I missed because the larger picture, the game itself that's supposed to facilitate my giving a crap about the exploration was barely functional, obtuse and uninspiring. To the guys who made Vanguard and for whatever reason maybe put themselves through reading this, I'm sorry to kick your baby down the stairs, but too many game writers these days are so busy tap dancing around offending someone in the industry that they've lost sight of telling consumers not to buy mediocre games. And, finally, to the reader who is wondering if Vanguard is worth playing, had I to do it all over again I sure wouldn't, and my copy was free.
I located all this info in 10 mins. That, in itself, Says something.
In short, you're a closed minded fanboy with nothing real to contribute to a discussion other than how right you are and how wrong everyone else is. People like you are why all the other posters in this forum have people to feel sorry for. Thanks for the entertainment. Troll.
So I'm a Fanboy and a Troll because I dont happen to hate SOE ? Sheesh hope you never run for President.
Oh and people that like to throw the word Fanboy and Troll around should check the mirror more than once in the morning ..
.... well, I thought it was funny.
Yes, SOE was a very nice logo to see on your screen, when you logged in to a MMO for abour four years ago.
And the SWG and Vangurd......the thing is that they did it. They #¤#"ed us over really bad and expected us to not care. Just smile and continue to play
Thats why we are mad. Remember that we, who played and loved SOE didnt ask for this to happend. They did it to them selves.
Hey its cool to be Mad but hate is a little more destructive than being just mad dontcha think ?
Lets be honest here where have I said that anyones opinions dont count for crap ? My goodness you people are real experts at twisting things round are'nt you.
.... well, I thought it was funny.
Yeah well sorry but I'm only human not perfect only nearly perfect
Lol I wondered when one of you would show up, dont like what people have to say so you all you can do is call them a Troll... Oh dear.
Well its time for Bed now so goodnight everyone and thankyou all for reading and responding to my post ..