Challenging the accepted story about SWG's historical population

smg77

One thing that both sides seem to always agree on is that the game was dying before the CU. After giving it some thought and talking about it with some old guildmates I don't really think the game was in such bad shape. I can only speak from my experiences on Intrepid since I never played on any of the other servers but what I saw happen was that a bunch of people left to play WoW and it *looked* like subs were dropping at an alarming rate.

What I (and others) then experienced was that most of the people who left to play WoW ended up coming back right before the CU hit. After playing a satisfyingly rich and complex game like SWG, WoW just seemed shallow to most people who tried it. At least in my guild and city we actually had a huge addition of people as old players returned with people they had met in WoW.

I have always believed that if SOE had just fixed the bugs in the old game and added content to the existing framework we would be in a golden age of SWG right now as more and more people are burning out on WoW and looking for something different. What I now suspect is that there was a split in the development team--some wanted to implement the original CURB and continue on with the existing game and then there was Freeman, Cao, etc who wanted to make the game into what they were comfortable with (combat levels, loot based economy, linear content). I think that split was what drove the changes to the game more than the actual population issues that people point to. When it all went to hell after the CU *then* the huge loss of subscriptions prompted the NGE but if the CU hadn't been put in when it did I bet the population would have stabilized and then grown.

fozzie22

I'd agree with you 100% that SWG took a massive hit when WOW came,just as you say though numbers where on thier way back up when the CU came along and reared its head

 

My server Farstar was deserted when WOW came along compared to what it had been a couple of months before,trouble was though as i see it people got very twitchy becuase of the slump in numbers and couldnt ride the storm without going wild with mainly unessacery changes.

 

If they'd used thier heads they could have fixed the game while the servers were quieter but no they insisted on throwing the baby out with the bathwater,i'm sure given a few months to mature even the CU would have been accepted by most of us as long as the bugs were fixed alongside it,it needed a steady head at this time but sadly as we all know they lost it big time and hey presto along came the NGE.

demented669

i played on Lowca server we had lots of people befor the Cu i was master Doc and was buffing alot of people every day then when the CU came along  there was  still  alot of people all over the place and i liked the CU couse it made pvp more fun befor Cu if you had best mind Dot item you would win most pvp fights anyway after when the NGE came on it just made the game into a star war version of wow going from 40+ classes to 9 was a kick in the teeth the real vets could not take so that is why the game is dying now if they would have just stayed with the CU things would not be as bad

Suvroc

Originally posted by smg77


One thing that both sides seem to always agree on is that the game was dying before the CU. After giving it some thought and talking about it with some old guildmates I don't really think the game was in such bad shape. I can only speak from my experiences on Intrepid since I never played on any of the other servers but what I saw happen was that a bunch of people left to play WoW and it *looked* like subs were dropping at an alarming rate.
What I (and others) then experienced was that most of the people who left to play WoW ended up coming back right before the CU hit. After playing a satisfyingly rich and complex game like SWG, WoW just seemed shallow to most people who tried it. At least in my guild and city we actually had a huge addition of people as old players returned with people they had met in WoW.

That's exactly the same experience I had on Lowca.

PreCU

I'm sure every game took a hit when WoW launched.

shirlnt

I also saw people coming back to SWG after trying WoW.  Plus the first advertisements I saw for SWG were around the time of CU so, along with the new movies coming out, people came into the game who had never experienced pre-cu.  If SOE had tweaked the game a little rather than what became the CU, the game probably would have been in a totally different place population wise.

Unknown

The CU was actually starting to take it's toll on Bloodfin the 2 months prior to the NGE.  Keep in mind that most people griped about the CU, no one loved it.  Ironically the CU is now more loved in hindsight (because it was far better than the NGE) than it was at the time.

I definitely was noticing fewer and fewer people on.  Bloodfin usually showed up as "light", generally only Bria showed up as "heavy".  This was also when people started transferring from the smaller servers, a whole guild from Kauri transferred to Bloodfin about 2.5 months before the NGE.

Now, this is nothing compared to how it is now.  When I last checked the NGE through a trial a couple months back, Bloodfin was called "heavy" but had nowhere near the number of people it had back in September `05 when it was classed as "light".

Ironically, the TOOW expansion, which everyone I played with LOVED as it was in the 3 weeks we had it (if you preordered you got in a week early) and thought that they'd finally started getting things right for a change.  It was difficult, it was fun...  THAT changed in a matter of days.

In summary, yes, the populations were declining.  But nothing like the absolute COLLAPSE that happened post NGE.  By January you could be the only person on a whole planet in prime time.  It's still that way today.

 

 

smg77

 

Originally posted by salvaje


The CU was actually starting to take it's toll on Bloodfin the 2 months prior to the NGE.  Keep in mind that most people griped about the CU, no one loved it.  Ironically the CU is now more loved in hindsight (because it was far better than the NGE) than it was at the time.
I definitely was noticing fewer and fewer people on.  Bloodfin usually showed up as "light", generally only Bria showed up as "heavy".  This was also when people started transferring from the smaller servers, a whole guild from Kauri transferred to Bloodfin about 2.5 months before the NGE.
Now, this is nothing compared to how it is now.  When I last checked the NGE through a trial a couple months back, Bloodfin was called "heavy" but had nowhere near the number of people it had back in September `05 when it was classed as "light".
Ironically, the TOOW expansion, which everyone I played with LOVED as it was in the 3 weeks we had it (if you preordered you got in a week early) and thought that they'd finally started getting things right for a change.  It was difficult, it was fun...  THAT changed in a matter of days.
In summary, yes, the populations were declining.  But nothing like the absolute COLLAPSE that happened post NGE.  By January you could be the only person on a whole planet in prime time.  It's still that way today.
 
 

I'm talking about the period of time from when WoW was released to right before the CU was brought live. One of the reasons Smed gave us for the scrapping of the original CURB and going with a level-based system was that the game was losing subscriptions at an alarming rate. My assertion is that the game wasn't in that much trouble and they should have stuck with the original CURB--most of the people that I knew who left to go to WoW were coming back in droves before the CU.

 

 

The NGE had nothing to do with trying to get more subscriptions--it's whole purpose was to dumb down the game enough that they could just have a small handful of devs working on it.

fyerwall

I think what happened is SOE jumped the gun. They saw WoW release and subscriptions leaving and figured WoW had all the stuff the players wanted. So instead of waiting it out to see what would happen, they did the whole 180 thing, thinking it was the right move and that those lost players would come back.

After that happened, the people who came back soon left because the game they remembered was totally erased. SOE kinda shot themselves in the foot and didn't want to sound like they made a mistake, so they left it as is.

What they should have done after a while was at least toss up 1 or 2 servers with the old game mechanics and see how popular it would have been (kinda like EQ's progression servers as an example) It couldn't have hurt them in the long run, and from there they could have gauged which system was more popular (without having to admit to making a mistake) But by then the dev team were probably all new greenshirts who never worked on the original, and any tools for that version of the game were probably tossed out.