It was everyone leaving. Yes it's a paradox. Im sure if most people had stayed, and not threw they toys out of the pram, the game would be as good as it once was. Because the subscriptions are so low now, nothing is being invested in the game to make it great. People should have given them more chance instead of leaving after 24 hours.
I see everyone leaving as a step in the right direction and I would not give them a chance now if they paid me to come back. You can only screw your customers over so many times before you lose them and turn them into bitter enemies.
Originally posted by SioBabble Sorry, Charlie, but the NGE continues to suck. It's not worth paying anything to play this wretched excuse for a WoW ripoff that, in typical SOE fashion, failed to rip off the things that make WoW a success. Everyone left BECAUSE of the NGE. You cannot escape that fact.
I'd quote the other person who made the same mistake, but let's keep this simple.
Star Wars Galaxies predates World of Warcraft by approximately one year. The game was kinda fun and kinda good when it first came out (Holochron farming, anyone?). So calling it a WoW ripoff is like telling the Campbell's Soup company that they ripped-off Andy Warhol.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of the posters here. The problem is not that people left, people left because there was a problem. There continues to be a problem.
The NGE was a massive step in the wrong direction for SWG. It caused people to leave. It may not be the snow that crushed the village, but it is the cause of the avalanche.
Sorry, Charlie, but the NGE continues to suck. It's not worth paying anything to play this wretched excuse for a WoW ripoff that, in typical SOE fashion, failed to rip off the things that make WoW a success.
Everyone left BECAUSE of the NGE. You cannot escape that fact.
I'd quote the other person who made the same mistake, but let's keep this simple.
Star Wars Galaxies predates World of Warcraft by approximately one year. The game was kinda fun and kinda good when it first came out (Holochron farming, anyone?). So calling it a WoW ripoff is like telling the Campbell's Soup company that they ripped-off Andy Warhol.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of the posters here. The problem is not that people left, people left because there was a problem. There continues to be a problem.
Ah, but the CU and the NGE were both about making SWG more like WoW, in the hopes that some of WoW's humongus playerbase would be attracted to a WoW clone with Star Wars skin. In the process of doing so, they forgot to do the things that actually made WoW a success, because SOE doesn't do finished games, and they don't do polish.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
To me the NGE was the thing that ruined SWG. They could release a bug free NGE, and it would still failed for me. The big error is that they changed the game's gender. So, if you didn't like the new twitched based shoot Em' up style, you had only one thing to do. Quit.
It was everyone leaving. Yes it's a paradox. Im sure if most people had stayed, and not threw they toys out of the pram, the game would be as good as it once was. Because the subscriptions are so low now, nothing is being invested in the game to make it great. People should have given them more chance instead of leaving after 24 hours.
It's not a paradox. SOE and LEC misled people and took their money for things they had already planned to delete. They also deleted most of the professions people had worked on for years, and deleted much of the quest content people worked on for years. They negated all the work people put into unlocking jedi. They also removed a game with some bugs in it and replaced it with a game that had many more bugs in it. In the NGE you couldn't initially move or chat, and your combat functions didn't work. Heals healed enemies and resulted in the death of the healer. That's 4 core systems broken to the point of being unuseable. SOE and LEC then promised to fix many of the bugs and issues, many are still not fixed to this day.
People left the game as a direct result of this mistreatment. There's no paradox here. People were treated like garbage, they didn't like it, so they left.
Also, you ought to know. People didn't leave after 24 hours. Many stayed for months to try to work out solutions with SOE and LEC. They got more broken promises, and they finally left as well.
You may not be aware of this in life yet, but when you repeatedly mistreat people, they eventually avoid you. They are wise to do so.
Originally posted by Vrazule The CU and NGE were fiascos, there is no doubting that, but I have very little doubt that the game wouldn't have succeeded any better if they hadn't made those changes. It didn't have enough casual appeal to even outstrip EverQuest numbers, let alone ever reach second place after WoW. The game was too complex, too time consuming, too crafting oriented and riddled with all kinds of hardcore style time sinks in the form of battle wounds, battle fatigue, slow experience curve, high learning curve, general downtime and excessive travel requirements for quests, forcing the most popular iconic class to be rare, Jedi. These along with a myriad other things would have kept the game down in any shape or form.
that's the Smedley lie. The fact is, it had plenty of appeal to casual players, most people who played, and loved it, were casual players. The problem was mismanagement, broken quests, broken professions, and continually breaking promises.
Then, to cover that up, they blamed what you are saying and pulled the CU. It failed, because they were lying when they said the game didn't have casual appeal. They were trying to cover up their own mismanagement.
Then, when the CU failed to bring in more casual players, they lied again, and blamed the design again, and pulled the NGE. that failed epically, further proving they were lying when they said the game didn't have casual appeal, and THAT was why it didn't get the numbers.
All lies. The fact is had they fixed what was wrong, instead of reinventing the wheel to cover up for their mismanagement, the game would have broke one million subs. Instead, they lied, covered up, and covered their butts, and failed.
Originally posted by CasualMaker Originally posted by Vrazule The CU and NGE were fiascos, there is no doubting that, but I have very little doubt that the game wouldn't have succeeded any better if they hadn't made those changes. It didn't have enough casual appeal to even outstrip EverQuest numbers, let alone ever reach second place after WoW. The game was too complex, too time consuming, too crafting oriented and riddled with all kinds of hardcore style time sinks in the form of battle wounds, battle fatigue, slow experience curve, high learning curve, general downtime and excessive travel requirements for quests, forcing the most popular iconic class to be rare, Jedi. These along with a myriad other things would have kept the game down in any shape or form.
Yo genius, it was a virtual world simulator. It did indeed take thought to play it well, but it was not very difficult. Not difficult, but not super-easy either: what you got out of it scaled with the effort you were willing to put into it. And the more they dumbed it down, the faster they lost players. It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
It was everyone leaving. Yes it's a paradox. Im sure if most people had stayed, and not threw they toys out of the pram, the game would be as good as it once was. Because the subscriptions are so low now, nothing is being invested in the game to make it great. People should have given them more chance instead of leaving after 24 hours.
I see everyone leaving as a step in the right direction and I would not give them a chance now if they paid me to come back. You can only screw your customers over so many times before you lose them and turn them into bitter enemies.
Sorry, Charlie, but the NGE continues to suck. It's not worth paying anything to play this wretched excuse for a WoW ripoff that, in typical SOE fashion, failed to rip off the things that make WoW a success.
Everyone left BECAUSE of the NGE. You cannot escape that fact.
I'd quote the other person who made the same mistake, but let's keep this simple.
Star Wars Galaxies predates World of Warcraft by approximately one year. The game was kinda fun and kinda good when it first came out (Holochron farming, anyone?). So calling it a WoW ripoff is like telling the Campbell's Soup company that they ripped-off Andy Warhol.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of the posters here. The problem is not that people left, people left because there was a problem. There continues to be a problem.
Nice logic there buddy...
SWG came out before WoW but when WoW came out and was a major success SWG was redesigned to play exactly like WoW -- It just failed.
Where do you think the "levels/classes" came from?
The CU and NGE were fiascos, there is no doubting that, but I have very little doubt that the game wouldn't have succeeded any better if they hadn't made those changes. It didn't have enough casual appeal to even outstrip EverQuest numbers, let alone ever reach second place after WoW. The game was too complex, too time consuming, too crafting oriented and riddled with all kinds of hardcore style time sinks in the form of battle wounds, battle fatigue, slow experience curve, high learning curve, general downtime and excessive travel requirements for quests, forcing the most popular iconic class to be rare, Jedi. These along with a myriad other things would have kept the game down in any shape or form.
Yo genius, it was a virtual world simulator. It did indeed take thought to play it well, but it was not very difficult. Not difficult, but not super-easy either: what you got out of it scaled with the effort you were willing to put into it. And the more they dumbed it down, the faster they lost players.
It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
I have absolutely no love for SOE, I no longer play any of their games. I also do not believe pree-cu and pre-nge was this wonderful game for casuals you claim it to be. I am a casual player and I did not enjoy the original game. If it was so popular, then why didn't the numbers tell us so. The game had been out only a few months and they were already bleeding subs. Even before WoW, we know there were a lot of casuals out there. We saw from EverQuest, that more than 2 million people tried the game and left. Why weren't they flocking to this eutopia that was original SWG? What did SWG get at it's height, somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 subs, that seems like the hardcore market to me, not the huge casual market.
Sandbox games are not casual. There were too many irritating systems in that game to appeal to most casuals and I was one of them.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
The CU and NGE were fiascos, there is no doubting that, but I have very little doubt that the game wouldn't have succeeded any better if they hadn't made those changes. It didn't have enough casual appeal to even outstrip EverQuest numbers, let alone ever reach second place after WoW. The game was too complex, too time consuming, too crafting oriented and riddled with all kinds of hardcore style time sinks in the form of battle wounds, battle fatigue, slow experience curve, high learning curve, general downtime and excessive travel requirements for quests, forcing the most popular iconic class to be rare, Jedi. These along with a myriad other things would have kept the game down in any shape or form.
Yo genius, it was a virtual world simulator. It did indeed take thought to play it well, but it was not very difficult. Not difficult, but not super-easy either: what you got out of it scaled with the effort you were willing to put into it. And the more they dumbed it down, the faster they lost players.
It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
I have absolutely no love for SOE, I no longer play any of their games. I also do not believe pree-cu and pre-nge was this wonderful game for casuals you claim it to be. I am a casual player and I did not enjoy the original game. If it was so popular, then why didn't the numbers tell us so. The game had been out only a few months and they were already bleeding subs. Even before WoW, we know there were a lot of casuals out there. We saw from EverQuest, that more than 2 million people tried the game and left. Why weren't they flocking to this eutopia that was original SWG? What did SWG get at it's height, somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 subs, that seems like the hardcore market to me, not the huge casual market.
Sandbox games are not casual. There were too many irritating systems in that game to appeal to most casuals and I was one of them.
you seem to be mixing up casual players and idiots. SWG pre-cu was complex (to a certain level) but any smart casual player could play it without a problem,sure it might take longer. 300 000 subs back then was a fair amount and that was a success for an MMO back then. then came WoW, a game anyone and their grandmothers can play. it was just simple to start and it remained the same till the end. kill xp loot rince repeat. need a new weapon? kill xp loot. need a new armour, kill xp loot. need anything? kill xp loot. SWG you had to think and find yourself a weaponsmith for a weapon. a armoursmith for armour, chef for food, etc......
SWG pre-cu had a brilliant CONCEPT SYSTEM for gameplay. more "complete" and more "realistic for the SW universe" you would not kill a durni and get a tusken rifle. you would get durni hides or bones.
NGE changed the game to the CONCEPT system very similar (not to say identical) to the one of World of warcraft. thinking that they might go from 300 000 to 1 bazillion subs overnight. alas it was bug driven lagfest. and this is what i said right before i quit the NGE
SqualZell Madman "you know... if i want to play world of warcraft might as well play the real game instead of a cheap imitation in the starwars universe" and i went to WoW then quit that 2 months later due to the boredome of kill xp loot.
I don't think that's entirely true. MMOs tend to attract their main audience within the first few months of release. After that the trend is to have some people come on board and others leave, typically resulting in a slowly dwindling population. Often you wind up reaching a point of stability where you've just got your player base*.
In other words, "You got to dance with them what brung you." Even if the NGE resulted in a fantastic Star Wars game, most of the people who would come (or come back) have already found a new game, new friends, and a new community. Far better, I think, to have left SWG pre-CU and pre-NGE, perhaps with a server merge to cut losses if need be, and have released NGE-style SWG as a whole new game.
EDIT: Wanted to drop this in here...
Originally posted by Squal'Zell
SWG pre-cu was complex (to a certain level) but any smart casual player could play it without a problem,sure it might take longer. 300 000 subs back then was a fair amount and that was a success for an MMO back then.
This brings up the question, "why did they change the game so much?" I don't believe the management was so stupid that they thought a radical change would draw even more people in to a successful MMO. 300K may have been a fair amount for an MMO -- but this wasn't an MMO. This was a freakin' Star Wars MMO, one of the best possible IPs for geeky computer gamers like me (perhaps barring, as we later learned, the World of Warcraft IP). I'm sure the money invested in the game expected a return based on that IP, and I'd guess peaking at 275-300K subs (and probably dropping after that -- the 300K number comes from a statement in March 2004, before yearly subscribers had a chance to not renew) didn't offer a good enough return-on-investment.
The NGE has all the appearances of an act of desperation, something that seems highly risky (stupid) because the alternative of not doing anything seemed worse.
------------
* I understand there are some exceptions to this rule: EVE, Second Life, and perhaps even SWG (numbers are really, really hard to squeeze out of SOE) trend to a slow gain in members over time. I have a theory that sandbox games have different population cycles than linear games, but I haven't tried to research that.
This brings up the question, "why did they change the game so much?" I don't believe the management was so stupid that they thought a radical change would draw even more people in to a successful MMO. 300K may have been a fair amount for an MMO -- but this wasn't an MMO. This was a freakin' Star Wars MMO, one of the best possible IPs for geeky computer gamers like me (perhaps barring, as we later learned, the World of Warcraft IP). I'm sure the money invested in the game expected a return based on that IP, and I'd guess peaking at 275-300K subs (and probably dropping after that -- the 300K number comes from a statement in March 2004, before yearly subscribers had a chance to not renew) didn't offer a good enough return-on-investment. The NGE has all the appearances of an act of desperation, something that seems highly risky (stupid) because the alternative of not doing anything seemed worse. ------------
* I understand there are some exceptions to this rule: EVE, Second Life, and perhaps even SWG (numbers are really, really hard to squeeze out of SOE) trend to a slow gain in members over time. I have a theory that sandbox games have different population cycles than linear games, but I haven't tried to research that.
a..ha...what about just reading the boards and do what was suggested there ?
Or they even hadn't to monitor boards there were profession representants for just that job ....
Pulling the NGE was the least expected , the biggest risk , the most unasked thing to do.
What would a sane men do in such a case ? and what did they do ?
For example i was asking for surprise shot in RM skill tree to work properly. Did i asked for RM to be removed ?
-----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)
a..ha...what about just reading the boards and do what was suggested there ?
Or they even hadn't to monitor boards there were profession representants for just that job .... Pulling the NGE was the least expected , the biggest risk , the most unasked thing to do. What would a sane men do in such a case ? and what did they do ?
I agree -- the NGE was like betting your house on throwing boxcars. It backfired horribly. I'm surprised they even tried.
However, my guess is that the changes you're suggesting would've made the existing playerbase happy. That wasn't the point. The existing playerbase wasn't meeting SOE/LucasArts financial goals (in my semi-educated guess, based a bit on the Slashdot Smedley interview) so these changes were attempts to draw new players in. I just don't think MMOs work that way -- once they've hit the shelves, you can tweak and refine but you don't get "do-overs". You might get a slow increase of players after your initial launch (EVE Online), but that's about it.
My point was that the 300K subscriber figure, despite being quite impressive for MMOs in late 2003, probably didn't meet the financial goals for a Star Wars game, and I'm betting that the projections for the rest of 2004 and beyond were pretty grim as well. Otherwise the NGE wasn't just a dumb risk, but insane as well.
They were not willing to postpone gratification, and the result was they didn't get the gratification they anticipated.
It was obvious at launch that SWG was not fully ready. To this day there are countless POIs on every last one of the10 original worlds that have stories waiting to be told about them, but no content available to tell the story.
There are quests that were there at launch that were never completed. There are quests that were there at launch that are broken.
The game was unfinished when it launched. The devs were playing catchup constantly.
The biggest single problem though was management. Koster was kicked upstairs the hell out of the way right after launch, and no one replaced him as the person with a vision for the game, and frankly Koster's strength isn't in project management...he's a designer and a philosopher, he needed a strong right arm to do the project management part of the leader's role. They brought in Gordon Walton, SWG Tyrant for that, and he was getting results, until he walked away when confronted by the abandonment of the CURB and the first stage of the WoWification of SWG, the CU, that just had to launch in May 2005 in conjunction with the release of Ep III and it was known the CURB was being done right, not fast, and that didn't track with the Lucas Empire's timetables.
It's ironic that SWG was wrecked by the same mentality that Lucas bemoaned when he was pressured to get Star Wars out the door and into theaters by a specific date by the asshats in suits at Fox.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Nice logic there buddy... SWG came out before WoW but when WoW came out and was a major success SWG was redesigned to play exactly like WoW -- It just failed. Where do you think the "levels/classes" came from?
Not to get off topic, but the Level/Class concept came from EverQuest. They were thinking about the change soon after release when they saw some of the problems - as the system they had was being abused (specifically by the Holochron farmers).
I liked pre-CU SWG. But, as I used to call it back in those days, "The Sims in Space" wasn't enough for SWG. If they had just left things alone, fixed the bugs, and left the gameplay intact, they'd have a large subscriber base today.
As someone else said, $OE wanted a return on their investment NOW. And when you want something NOW, you inevitably screw yourself in the long term. Which is exactly what $OE did here.
I find it endlessly amusing that Sony fubarred so hard we're still talking about it years later.
It was everyone leaving. Yes it's a paradox. Im sure if most people had stayed, and not threw they toys out of the pram, the game would be as good as it once was. Because the subscriptions are so low now, nothing is being invested in the game to make it great. People should have given them more chance instead of leaving after 24 hours.
OMFG are you serious? People left becouse they where lied too. The game went from a groundbreaking game(Bugged and unpolished yes) to a total piece of untested alpha state crap.
Hauken Stormchaser I want pre-CU back Station.com : We got your game Yeah?, Well i want it back!!!
The game was in a downward spiral. It suffered from an abysmal launch (worse than Vanguard) and then stabalized. Then Jedi were discovered, and the game became about grinding for Jedi or being a bounty hunter. People left in droves, devs tried to save it, they messed up big time.
It was everyone leaving. Yes it's a paradox. Im sure if most people had stayed, and not threw they toys out of the pram, the game would be as good as it once was. Because the subscriptions are so low now, nothing is being invested in the game to make it great. People should have given them more chance instead of leaving after 24 hours.
Umm, yes it was the NGE and the CU that made most of us quit. They took and in depth skill based game and turned it into a level based, half baked game.
It was SOOOOO hard to stick around after the CU, it wasn't the same game that had captivated me. The NGE was the worst thing that has ever happened tot a game that I have played. But now WoW fills in the emptiness, not completely as I keep an eye open for the next time someone tries to MMORPG George's creation.
It was everyone leaving. Yes it's a paradox. Im sure if most people had stayed, and not threw they toys out of the pram, the game would be as good as it once was. Because the subscriptions are so low now, nothing is being invested in the game to make it great. People should have given them more chance instead of leaving after 24 hours.
Originally posted by Vrazule Originally posted by Fishermage
Originally posted by CasualMaker
Originally posted by Vrazule
The CU and NGE were fiascos, there is no doubting that, but I have very little doubt that the game wouldn't have succeeded any better if they hadn't made those changes. It didn't have enough casual appeal to even outstrip EverQuest numbers, let alone ever reach second place after WoW. The game was too complex, too time consuming, too crafting oriented and riddled with all kinds of hardcore style time sinks in the form of battle wounds, battle fatigue, slow experience curve, high learning curve, general downtime and excessive travel requirements for quests, forcing the most popular iconic class to be rare, Jedi. These along with a myriad other things would have kept the game down in any shape or form.
Yo genius, it was a virtual world simulator. It did indeed take thought to play it well, but it was not very difficult. Not difficult, but not super-easy either: what you got out of it scaled with the effort you were willing to put into it. And the more they dumbed it down, the faster they lost players. It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong. The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well. the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that. Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have. One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
I have absolutely no love for SOE, I no longer play any of their games. I also do not believe pree-cu and pre-nge was this wonderful game for casuals you claim it to be. I am a casual player and I did not enjoy the original game. If it was so popular, then why didn't the numbers tell us so. The game had been out only a few months and they were already bleeding subs. Even before WoW, we know there were a lot of casuals out there. We saw from EverQuest, that more than 2 million people tried the game and left. Why weren't they flocking to this eutopia that was original SWG? What did SWG get at it's height, somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 subs, that seems like the hardcore market to me, not the huge casual market. Sandbox games are not casual. There were too many irritating systems in that game to appeal to most casuals and I was one of them. Obviously you didn't read my post; I explained why the game underperformed, and it had nothing to do with the lack of appeal to the casual player. I am a casual player, my wife was a casual player, and everyone I knew who played was a casual player, The game failed NOT because it cou;dn't attract the casual player, or the hardcore; it failed because Smedley mismanaged the game, broke too many promises, and didn't fix what was wrong.
Well, I already explained all this and you obviously didn't read it the first place, so obviously there is no reason to explain all this again.
I never said you were an SOE lover, never said you yourself were part of the SOE Horde, but you HAVE bought into, and are spreading, the SOE lie. To say "sandbox game are not casual" is the furtherance of that lie. Earth is a sandbox game and it is for all kinds of people, the casual and the hardcore. The beauty of "sandbox games" is that they are in fact for ever type of player in terms of amount of commitment. Do on;y hardcore children play in real sandboxes? Of course not. The same can be said for sandbox games. That is the beuty of the sandbox -- you get what you put into it -- the game is as casual or as hardcore as you are.
The problem was NOT in the sandbox design, but in the brokenness of the design and of the broken toys in that sandbox that were broken. But I've altready said as much already and you decided to read what you wanted to, and merely ignored it.
Go ahead, continue to believe the lie. So many others do. Those people also continue to fail.
Originally posted by SignusM The game was in a downward spiral. It suffered from an abysmal launch (worse than Vanguard) and then stabalized. Then Jedi were discovered, and the game became about grinding for Jedi or being a bounty hunter. People left in droves, devs tried to save it, they messed up big time.
Actually, the launch was far better than Vanguard, and customers quickly rose th between 250-300K players. It then began to very slowly die, and at the time of the CU, were about 250K players. That's far from a downward spiral.
People were slowly leaving for the reasons I stated above, but they didn't start leaving in droves until the NGE.
The DEVs didn't try to save it; they tried to cover up, shift blame, and didn't fix what was wrong with it (well, Smedley, not the DEVs per se, who did as they were told). It failed, as everyone who witnessed it predicted.
They misread what was wrong, just as you are doing, and as expected, failed.
more casuals didnt play because you needed a gig of ram to play it. Most people (casuals) had 256k ram and were using AOL on their dial-up connections at the time. SWG was unplayable to them..literally.
SWG was the most causual friendly game ever made. What other game could you master your professions and buy all your high-end pvp or pve gear in less than a week? What other game has half of its professions that are non-combat? What other game had professions that were totally social professions? When they laid out exactly how much you would need to unlock jedi after the village is when the game became not so casual friendly. Getting jedi was the anti-casual. Most of our new players quit after going to the village. The rest of the problems for casuals were solved with vehicles and player city shuttles..ya know the huge time sinks that casuals hate. My opinion.
See you in the dream.. The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
Comments
I see everyone leaving as a step in the right direction and I would not give them a chance now if they paid me to come back. You can only screw your customers over so many times before you lose them and turn them into bitter enemies.
I'd quote the other person who made the same mistake, but let's keep this simple.
Star Wars Galaxies predates World of Warcraft by approximately one year. The game was kinda fun and kinda good when it first came out (Holochron farming, anyone?). So calling it a WoW ripoff is like telling the Campbell's Soup company that they ripped-off Andy Warhol.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of the posters here. The problem is not that people left, people left because there was a problem. There continues to be a problem.
The chicken or the egg?
The NGE was a massive step in the wrong direction for SWG. It caused people to leave. It may not be the snow that crushed the village, but it is the cause of the avalanche.
I'd quote the other person who made the same mistake, but let's keep this simple.
Star Wars Galaxies predates World of Warcraft by approximately one year. The game was kinda fun and kinda good when it first came out (Holochron farming, anyone?). So calling it a WoW ripoff is like telling the Campbell's Soup company that they ripped-off Andy Warhol.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of the posters here. The problem is not that people left, people left because there was a problem. There continues to be a problem.
Ah, but the CU and the NGE were both about making SWG more like WoW, in the hopes that some of WoW's humongus playerbase would be attracted to a WoW clone with Star Wars skin. In the process of doing so, they forgot to do the things that actually made WoW a success, because SOE doesn't do finished games, and they don't do polish.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
To me the NGE was the thing that ruined SWG. They could release a bug free NGE, and it would still failed for me. The big error is that they changed the game's gender. So, if you didn't like the new twitched based shoot Em' up style, you had only one thing to do. Quit.
--
Leemeg.
It's not a paradox. SOE and LEC misled people and took their money for things they had already planned to delete. They also deleted most of the professions people had worked on for years, and deleted much of the quest content people worked on for years. They negated all the work people put into unlocking jedi. They also removed a game with some bugs in it and replaced it with a game that had many more bugs in it. In the NGE you couldn't initially move or chat, and your combat functions didn't work. Heals healed enemies and resulted in the death of the healer. That's 4 core systems broken to the point of being unuseable. SOE and LEC then promised to fix many of the bugs and issues, many are still not fixed to this day.
People left the game as a direct result of this mistreatment. There's no paradox here. People were treated like garbage, they didn't like it, so they left.
Also, you ought to know. People didn't leave after 24 hours. Many stayed for months to try to work out solutions with SOE and LEC. They got more broken promises, and they finally left as well.
You may not be aware of this in life yet, but when you repeatedly mistreat people, they eventually avoid you. They are wise to do so.
that's the Smedley lie. The fact is, it had plenty of appeal to casual players, most people who played, and loved it, were casual players. The problem was mismanagement, broken quests, broken professions, and continually breaking promises.
Then, to cover that up, they blamed what you are saying and pulled the CU. It failed, because they were lying when they said the game didn't have casual appeal. They were trying to cover up their own mismanagement.
Then, when the CU failed to bring in more casual players, they lied again, and blamed the design again, and pulled the NGE. that failed epically, further proving they were lying when they said the game didn't have casual appeal, and THAT was why it didn't get the numbers.
All lies. The fact is had they fixed what was wrong, instead of reinventing the wheel to cover up for their mismanagement, the game would have broke one million subs. Instead, they lied, covered up, and covered their butts, and failed.
fishermage.blogspot.com
I don't think anyone has a right to speak of this game unless they played pre NGE.
It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
fishermage.blogspot.com
I see everyone leaving as a step in the right direction and I would not give them a chance now if they paid me to come back. You can only screw your customers over so many times before you lose them and turn them into bitter enemies.
Hi i agree with what Jax has said...
I'd quote the other person who made the same mistake, but let's keep this simple.
Star Wars Galaxies predates World of Warcraft by approximately one year. The game was kinda fun and kinda good when it first came out (Holochron farming, anyone?). So calling it a WoW ripoff is like telling the Campbell's Soup company that they ripped-off Andy Warhol.
Other than that, I agree with the rest of the posters here. The problem is not that people left, people left because there was a problem. There continues to be a problem.
Nice logic there buddy...
SWG came out before WoW but when WoW came out and was a major success SWG was redesigned to play exactly like WoW -- It just failed.
Where do you think the "levels/classes" came from?
Tecmo Bowl.
Yo genius, it was a virtual world simulator. It did indeed take thought to play it well, but it was not very difficult. Not difficult, but not super-easy either: what you got out of it scaled with the effort you were willing to put into it. And the more they dumbed it down, the faster they lost players.It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
I have absolutely no love for SOE, I no longer play any of their games. I also do not believe pree-cu and pre-nge was this wonderful game for casuals you claim it to be. I am a casual player and I did not enjoy the original game. If it was so popular, then why didn't the numbers tell us so. The game had been out only a few months and they were already bleeding subs. Even before WoW, we know there were a lot of casuals out there. We saw from EverQuest, that more than 2 million people tried the game and left. Why weren't they flocking to this eutopia that was original SWG? What did SWG get at it's height, somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 subs, that seems like the hardcore market to me, not the huge casual market.
Sandbox games are not casual. There were too many irritating systems in that game to appeal to most casuals and I was one of them.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
I have absolutely no love for SOE, I no longer play any of their games. I also do not believe pree-cu and pre-nge was this wonderful game for casuals you claim it to be. I am a casual player and I did not enjoy the original game. If it was so popular, then why didn't the numbers tell us so. The game had been out only a few months and they were already bleeding subs. Even before WoW, we know there were a lot of casuals out there. We saw from EverQuest, that more than 2 million people tried the game and left. Why weren't they flocking to this eutopia that was original SWG? What did SWG get at it's height, somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 subs, that seems like the hardcore market to me, not the huge casual market.
Sandbox games are not casual. There were too many irritating systems in that game to appeal to most casuals and I was one of them.
you seem to be mixing up casual players and idiots. SWG pre-cu was complex (to a certain level) but any smart casual player could play it without a problem,sure it might take longer. 300 000 subs back then was a fair amount and that was a success for an MMO back then. then came WoW, a game anyone and their grandmothers can play. it was just simple to start and it remained the same till the end. kill xp loot rince repeat. need a new weapon? kill xp loot. need a new armour, kill xp loot. need anything? kill xp loot. SWG you had to think and find yourself a weaponsmith for a weapon. a armoursmith for armour, chef for food, etc......SWG pre-cu had a brilliant CONCEPT SYSTEM for gameplay. more "complete" and more "realistic for the SW universe" you would not kill a durni and get a tusken rifle. you would get durni hides or bones.
NGE changed the game to the CONCEPT system very similar (not to say identical) to the one of World of warcraft. thinking that they might go from 300 000 to 1 bazillion subs overnight. alas it was bug driven lagfest. and this is what i said right before i quit the NGE
SqualZell Madman "you know... if i want to play world of warcraft might as well play the real game instead of a cheap imitation in the starwars universe" and i went to WoW then quit that 2 months later due to the boredome of kill xp loot.
I don't think that's entirely true. MMOs tend to attract their main audience within the first few months of release. After that the trend is to have some people come on board and others leave, typically resulting in a slowly dwindling population. Often you wind up reaching a point of stability where you've just got your player base*.
In other words, "You got to dance with them what brung you." Even if the NGE resulted in a fantastic Star Wars game, most of the people who would come (or come back) have already found a new game, new friends, and a new community. Far better, I think, to have left SWG pre-CU and pre-NGE, perhaps with a server merge to cut losses if need be, and have released NGE-style SWG as a whole new game.
EDIT: Wanted to drop this in here...
Originally posted by Squal'Zell
SWG pre-cu was complex (to a certain level) but any smart casual player could play it without a problem,sure it might take longer. 300 000 subs back then was a fair amount and that was a success for an MMO back then.
This brings up the question, "why did they change the game so much?" I don't believe the management was so stupid that they thought a radical change would draw even more people in to a successful MMO. 300K may have been a fair amount for an MMO -- but this wasn't an MMO. This was a freakin' Star Wars MMO, one of the best possible IPs for geeky computer gamers like me (perhaps barring, as we later learned, the World of Warcraft IP). I'm sure the money invested in the game expected a return based on that IP, and I'd guess peaking at 275-300K subs (and probably dropping after that -- the 300K number comes from a statement in March 2004, before yearly subscribers had a chance to not renew) didn't offer a good enough return-on-investment.
The NGE has all the appearances of an act of desperation, something that seems highly risky (stupid) because the alternative of not doing anything seemed worse.
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* I understand there are some exceptions to this rule: EVE, Second Life, and perhaps even SWG (numbers are really, really hard to squeeze out of SOE) trend to a slow gain in members over time. I have a theory that sandbox games have different population cycles than linear games, but I haven't tried to research that.
a..ha...what about just reading the boards and do what was suggested there ?
Or they even hadn't to monitor boards there were profession representants for just that job ....
Pulling the NGE was the least expected , the biggest risk , the most unasked thing to do.
What would a sane men do in such a case ? and what did they do ?
For example i was asking for surprise shot in RM skill tree to work properly. Did i asked for RM to be removed ?
-----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)
However, my guess is that the changes you're suggesting would've made the existing playerbase happy. That wasn't the point. The existing playerbase wasn't meeting SOE/LucasArts financial goals (in my semi-educated guess, based a bit on the Slashdot Smedley interview) so these changes were attempts to draw new players in. I just don't think MMOs work that way -- once they've hit the shelves, you can tweak and refine but you don't get "do-overs". You might get a slow increase of players after your initial launch (EVE Online), but that's about it.
My point was that the 300K subscriber figure, despite being quite impressive for MMOs in late 2003, probably didn't meet the financial goals for a Star Wars game, and I'm betting that the projections for the rest of 2004 and beyond were pretty grim as well. Otherwise the NGE wasn't just a dumb risk, but insane as well.
...which is, I suppose, possible.
SWG released about six to nine months too soon.
Because management wanted ROI NOW!
They were not willing to postpone gratification, and the result was they didn't get the gratification they anticipated.
It was obvious at launch that SWG was not fully ready. To this day there are countless POIs on every last one of the10 original worlds that have stories waiting to be told about them, but no content available to tell the story.
There are quests that were there at launch that were never completed. There are quests that were there at launch that are broken.
The game was unfinished when it launched. The devs were playing catchup constantly.
The biggest single problem though was management. Koster was kicked upstairs the hell out of the way right after launch, and no one replaced him as the person with a vision for the game, and frankly Koster's strength isn't in project management...he's a designer and a philosopher, he needed a strong right arm to do the project management part of the leader's role. They brought in Gordon Walton, SWG Tyrant for that, and he was getting results, until he walked away when confronted by the abandonment of the CURB and the first stage of the WoWification of SWG, the CU, that just had to launch in May 2005 in conjunction with the release of Ep III and it was known the CURB was being done right, not fast, and that didn't track with the Lucas Empire's timetables.
It's ironic that SWG was wrecked by the same mentality that Lucas bemoaned when he was pressured to get Star Wars out the door and into theaters by a specific date by the asshats in suits at Fox.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Not to get off topic, but the Level/Class concept came from EverQuest. They were thinking about the change soon after release when they saw some of the problems - as the system they had was being abused (specifically by the Holochron farmers).
I liked pre-CU SWG. But, as I used to call it back in those days, "The Sims in Space" wasn't enough for SWG. If they had just left things alone, fixed the bugs, and left the gameplay intact, they'd have a large subscriber base today.
As someone else said, $OE wanted a return on their investment NOW. And when you want something NOW, you inevitably screw yourself in the long term. Which is exactly what $OE did here.
I find it endlessly amusing that Sony fubarred so hard we're still talking about it years later.
Hauken Stormchaser
I want pre-CU back
Station.com : We got your game
Yeah?, Well i want it back!!!
The game was in a downward spiral. It suffered from an abysmal launch (worse than Vanguard) and then stabalized. Then Jedi were discovered, and the game became about grinding for Jedi or being a bounty hunter. People left in droves, devs tried to save it, they messed up big time.
Darkfall Travelogues!
Umm, yes it was the NGE and the CU that made most of us quit. They took and in depth skill based game and turned it into a level based, half baked game.
It was SOOOOO hard to stick around after the CU, it wasn't the same game that had captivated me. The NGE was the worst thing that has ever happened tot a game that I have played. But now WoW fills in the emptiness, not completely as I keep an eye open for the next time someone tries to MMORPG George's creation.
realizing the end is near eh?
It is very hard to undo the damage done by the SOE propoganda. Typical of "big lie" tactics; the more you repeat the lie, the more people believe it.
It still is simply not so. The game was LOVED by casual players. People left because it was mismanaged, and SOE kept nerfing things without fixing what was wrong.
The big lie here is asserted to protect Smedley, blame Koster, and SOE has been doing this since the CU. They have an unholy horde of believers to preach this false gospel on every forum as well.
the initial game underoerformed purely because of Smedley's mismanagement; the CU failed because it didn't address that mismanagement, the NGE failed because it also did not address that, the current game is failing because they are not addressing that.
Everything SOE touches since the NGE is underperforming because they have not addressed this one big problem they have.
One can make up all the excuses one wishes to, and the small but dedicated horde of SOE fans have many -- the simple thing is there is one common thread to all of the problems. That common thread has a name. The man called Smedley.
I have absolutely no love for SOE, I no longer play any of their games. I also do not believe pree-cu and pre-nge was this wonderful game for casuals you claim it to be. I am a casual player and I did not enjoy the original game. If it was so popular, then why didn't the numbers tell us so. The game had been out only a few months and they were already bleeding subs. Even before WoW, we know there were a lot of casuals out there. We saw from EverQuest, that more than 2 million people tried the game and left. Why weren't they flocking to this eutopia that was original SWG? What did SWG get at it's height, somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 subs, that seems like the hardcore market to me, not the huge casual market.
Sandbox games are not casual. There were too many irritating systems in that game to appeal to most casuals and I was one of them.
Obviously you didn't read my post; I explained why the game underperformed, and it had nothing to do with the lack of appeal to the casual player. I am a casual player, my wife was a casual player, and everyone I knew who played was a casual player, The game failed NOT because it cou;dn't attract the casual player, or the hardcore; it failed because Smedley mismanaged the game, broke too many promises, and didn't fix what was wrong.
Well, I already explained all this and you obviously didn't read it the first place, so obviously there is no reason to explain all this again.
I never said you were an SOE lover, never said you yourself were part of the SOE Horde, but you HAVE bought into, and are spreading, the SOE lie. To say "sandbox game are not casual" is the furtherance of that lie. Earth is a sandbox game and it is for all kinds of people, the casual and the hardcore. The beauty of "sandbox games" is that they are in fact for ever type of player in terms of amount of commitment. Do on;y hardcore children play in real sandboxes? Of course not. The same can be said for sandbox games. That is the beuty of the sandbox -- you get what you put into it -- the game is as casual or as hardcore as you are.
The problem was NOT in the sandbox design, but in the brokenness of the design and of the broken toys in that sandbox that were broken. But I've altready said as much already and you decided to read what you wanted to, and merely ignored it.
Go ahead, continue to believe the lie. So many others do. Those people also continue to fail.
fishermage.blogspot.com
People were slowly leaving for the reasons I stated above, but they didn't start leaving in droves until the NGE.
The DEVs didn't try to save it; they tried to cover up, shift blame, and didn't fix what was wrong with it (well, Smedley, not the DEVs per se, who did as they were told). It failed, as everyone who witnessed it predicted.
They misread what was wrong, just as you are doing, and as expected, failed.
fishermage.blogspot.com
more casuals didnt play because you needed a gig of ram to play it. Most people (casuals) had 256k ram and were using AOL on their dial-up connections at the time. SWG was unplayable to them..literally.
SWG was the most causual friendly game ever made. What other game could you master your professions and buy all your high-end pvp or pve gear in less than a week? What other game has half of its professions that are non-combat? What other game had professions that were totally social professions? When they laid out exactly how much you would need to unlock jedi after the village is when the game became not so casual friendly. Getting jedi was the anti-casual. Most of our new players quit after going to the village. The rest of the problems for casuals were solved with vehicles and player city shuttles..ya know the huge time sinks that casuals hate. My opinion.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.