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Why I WON'T be subscribing to SWG
Camman321
Member Posts: 68
So I got my account to lvl 30 before I decided any further time spent into this game is a huge waste.
Complaints:
Game crashes. They happen all the time, for no apparent reason. My computer is fully capable of running that game client, as it is running AoC.
Combat: So I've got 2 or 3 different abilities and the main one is shooting a very weak gun, that does minor damage. Very boring
MOBS: Hmmm...you've health like every other game. Instead of SWG calling MANA, MANA, they call it Action Points. 80% of mobs I ran into had 2 abilites.
1. Draining Action points
2. Hitting me
That's it. That's the combat layout of SWG. I've found more creativity in the dump I laid in my yard, than I did in the combat system/log of SWG. The only damage it records is hit damage. That's apparenlty the only damage players do as well. Hit Hit Hit.
Unbalance: Mobs vs players is very unbalanced. Do not expect to be lvl 20, and expect to live through a multiple mob aggro. 2 lvl 18 or 19 mobs will down you quicker than you know. Which is funny, because most of the time you've no choice but to pull multiple mobs.
The strategy there is really try and kill one, then die. Wait 60 seconds, then pull the other one. Doing all this while the mobs are continuously draining your action for mass amounts.
MedicSetup: This has got to be by far the WORST HEALING CLASS IN ALL OF MMORPGS! The main medic heal has roughly a 10 second Cooldown, healing you for 600 HP, while you're sitting at around 4k HP. 0.o So soling, don't expect to heal more than ONCE per encounter!
I couldn't stand more of the game to find further abilites.
Social/community: While it seems the forums are booming with activity, ingame, no so much.
There is no region or general chat. The only chat you EVER see is if you're standing next to some one, guildchat, group or a tell. There's no trade chat, general chat, recruit chat, NOTHING! This is very lame and unexceptable for MMORPG.
You join a guild. But the only benefit of a guild is to talk to people. There is NO option fo a guildpage. You have no clue who's in your guild, you'd barely know your own guild name if it wasn't sitting above your head.
You can't check to see who's online. For recruitment, or if you want a group for quests, etc. The only way is ALREADY knowing people's names, and adding them to your friends list. Yes, I was suprised too that this game had a friends list.
Items: Item discription has to be one of the worst features. The information you receive is damage and dps. That's it.
Stats: So the stat layout looks like something you'd find in a browser based game. Considering stats are like the most important feature of your character, you'd think they woulda have put more time into them. All stats either do 1 of 2 things.
Increase your HP regen or or action regen. That's it. Oh my bad, one stat gives you a chance to hit for max on melee or range. There is no character sheet to see what's equipped, etc. You can only tell by seeing what's highlighted in your inventory.
For a MMO, the game hardly encourages community, grouping, social action. That's probably the worst feature.
You can't alter the UI without crashes, bugs, errors, etc. While most MMORPGs encourages UI MODs, and it's almost a given to be able to personalize your UI, not in SWG.
Altogether. It's a very sloppy game. While it may be a huge game, with more gamespace than you've seen in any other. It doesn't make up for the lack of...well...what I've posted above.
All in All, I think this MMO creation was aimed at attempting to lazily create a StarWars game, and collect money from StarWars fans. Than it was to take a Move Trilogy and a create a high quality MMO out of it.
Comments
Well if you never played SWG pre-cu then everything you have posted is spot on. If you were looking for a real open sandbox world that was set in the SW universe and let you be whatever you wanted to be, then this game fails miserably.
SWG died Nov.15 of '05. What's left now is a turd.
Well, I'm taking a risk of proving myself massively gullible, but here goes.
You do know that the current state of SWG is completely different than the game that existed at launch, right?
Or are you a vet and this is a large charade to stir up another flame thread?
If you've never heard of the CU or the NGE and this was truly your first experience with SWG, then you have walked unknowingly into possibly the most bitter, enduring feud between gamers and developers in MMO history.
If the latter.... as you were.
edit: As a vet myself, it's bitter sweet to hear what the game is now. It sucks beyond description that the only SW MMO has become such a steaming pile. But at the same time, SoE really deserves to have a crappy game no one will play.
Previous played: SWG (pre-NGE), DAoC, CoH, Anarchy Online, DDO, Champions Online Beta, LOTRO, GW2, SWTOR
First experience of SWG. I don't know what there was 3 years ago. But I know what there is now, and what there is now is a very horrible game.
I'm just giving my opinion. The dislikes listed I highly doubt were better 3 years ago. But it's a really bad game, and I wouldn't even suggest it to the most hardcore StarWars fans.
As hard as it may be to believe, actually, yea. None of those things were problems 3 years ago.
It was always a big buggy, sure. A lot of games are. If they had just fixed the bugs, the game would have been solid.
But they scrapped the original game almost entirely. There were no levels, there were no pre-built classes chosen at creation. There were several damage and weapon types. The worlds and chat channels were full of life and conversation. Basically, it was the exact opposite of what it is now.
SoE thought they'd get more players if they changed the sandbox-style game into a WoWish level and class based advancement game. The premise itself sucked, but so did the implementation as you've had the pleasure of discovering.
Mass exodus ensued and former players have been waging a PR campaign against SoE ever since. SWG was the only SoE game I ever played, but I've heard they have a track record of sinking games. SWG was just the most drastic overhaul and most dramatic downturn.
Previous played: SWG (pre-NGE), DAoC, CoH, Anarchy Online, DDO, Champions Online Beta, LOTRO, GW2, SWTOR
You can't check to see who's online. For recruitment, or if you want a group for quests, etc. The only way is ALREADY knowing people's names, and adding them to your friends list. Yes, I was suprised too that this game had a friends list.
Not a single complaint you've listed about the NGE is inaccurate. With the exception of the 3 features quoted above, SWG as a game used to have everything else listed and so much more when I started playing it in Dec. 2003. The SWG Pre-CU days would be what so many of the game vets on here and other forums long to have back. And Im pretty certain that if SOE wasn't hell-bent on seemingly doing the opposite of what its community would like, they could have upgraded the chat server and implemented a guild list in one patch. But then again, that would leave SOE with roughly enough time for 20-25 patches to not screw up.
And even when it doesn't crash its still laggy as hell. EQ2 had better graphics and didn't lag half as much.
Sounds about right.
Wow, no offense but you must suck out loud or didn't set yourself up right. This game is easy, even with the increased difficulty they implemented a year ago. I'm guessing you weren't using your abilities right or didn't use the Talent, I mean EXPERTISE, system.
There are other chat channels, the default UI just doesn't display them. You have to create new chat tabs or change your chat options. Not really worth bothering for the most part because people seldom ever use extra chat channels. Some servers use channels and others don't, depends on where you are. You CAN see who is in your guild but you can only do it from the guild management terminal in the guild hall. When this game was designed, EQ1 was still the big thing and a lot of the social tools and options we find in WoW didn't exist back then and these concepts have been long and difficult in porting into the current SWG game.
Right on. Your stats matter little unless you can increase them by at least a 1000 but even then they give 1-5% gains. In the old game items were FAR more complex with several different stats that worked different depending on what you were fighting and what armor it had.
This was my biggest complaint when they changed the game into the living abortion it is today. Use to you gained quite a bit from grouping, now groups only hurt your progression.
The current devs can't figure out how to do it because the devs who made the current incarnation of the game sucked.
This is basically the same thing everyone I got to try out the NGE told me. They all made it about as far as you did. This game was once much better than what you saw, although it still had its problems. It used to deliver a much different experience than the current crop of bandwagon jumping games and shameless WoW-clones.
http://mmo-hell.blogspot.com/
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/rejad
As hard as it may be to believe, actually, yea. None of those things were problems 3 years ago.
It was always a big buggy, sure. A lot of games are. If they had just fixed the bugs, the game would have been solid.
But they scrapped the original game almost entirely. There were no levels, there were no pre-built classes chosen at creation. There were several damage and weapon types. The worlds and chat channels were full of life and conversation. Basically, it was the exact opposite of what it is now.
SoE thought they'd get more players if they changed the sandbox-style game into a WoWish level and class based advancement game. The premise itself sucked, but so did the implementation as you've had the pleasure of discovering.
Mass exodus ensued and former players have been waging a PR campaign against SoE ever since. SWG was the only SoE game I ever played, but I've heard they have a track record of sinking games. SWG was just the most drastic overhaul and most dramatic downturn.
Well I really didn't know that. I don't find it anything like WoW. You can compare what WoW has and what SWG to any MMO out there. All MMOs have simular characteristics. Like I said I don't know what it was three years ago, but it seems like it was a much better game. What it is now, amounts to a game that should be in a free beta mode!
Wow, no offense but you must suck out loud or didn't set yourself up right. This game is easy, even with the increased difficulty they implemented a year ago. I'm guessing you weren't using your abilities right or didn't use the Talent, I mean EXPERTISE, system.
Actually I decided to go back a few months after NGE just to see how much had changed, and if any of it was for the better. Within a couple of months, I could solo every MOB in the game and every instance except HK... That one took myself and a buddy to survive. I just went back in for the free trial period a couple weeks ago to (once again) see what had changed. They've either upped the MOB power (at least on MOBs with chevrons over their heads) disproportionately - or left so many armor holes that 6 rounds of attack from a Dark Jedi Master was taking out roughly 40-50% of my health and the next hit is a deathblow. This leads me to believe that:A) They're trying to make some existing content require social/group interaction, although good luck finding enough people on the sparsely populated server to do so... or
3 of the 40 days into my trial period, and the NGE was off my harddrive.
You didn't pick a class at character creation, just race and gender. There were skill trees and several different kinds of experience; like pistol exp, healing exp, hand-to-hand combat exp. When you had amassed enough of a specific kind of exp, you would "buy" a skill tree with it.
Let's say pistols. You run around and kill a bunch of stuff on the starter planets and get some Pistol exp. You'd buy Pistols I. That would give you more combat skills for your Pistol. Now you would do more than auto-fire, you could use more specific combat skills. You shoot more critters with your pistol and you move up the ranks all the way to Pistols IV. That opened up a whole Pistoleer tree. Now you could specialize in which exact styles of pistol combat, picking and choosing up the ranks in 4 subsets of Pistoleer.
There was a max number of these skill trees you could have in total, so that you couldn't master everything in the game all at the same time. But you also didn't have to go only Pistoleer. You could pick up some Combat Medic skills, too, and heal yourself in the field. Or you could grab some crafting skills and make your own weapons and armor. Plus, you could drop skill trees at anytime, too. Don't like pistols as much as you thought? Drop it and refocus on being a Docter or a Teras Kasi Master.
There was nothing about levels or classes. At the time, it was clear the New Game Enchancements (NGE) were an effort to appeal to players who were playing WoW that would be intimidated by an advancement system that had no linear, obvious path (or just outright handed you skills without any choice whatsoever). The game may not look like WoW, but the changes of the game's foundation systems are definitely more WoW'ish.
I'm playing LOTRO now, which is a lot like WoW in that regard itself. But LOTRO never had it any other way. SWG was a successful game as it was, but the devs wanted to hop on the WoW gravy train and thought that was the ticket to doubling their subscribers. They were wrong, lol.
Previous played: SWG (pre-NGE), DAoC, CoH, Anarchy Online, DDO, Champions Online Beta, LOTRO, GW2, SWTOR
Medics have only 2 traditional "attacks" at low level, as you gain levels other attacks become available to you, ones that attack the action pool of a target, one that hiots for 2000 damage and puts a bleed on, the gas cloud for a poison DOT attack and many others. The basic medic heal for AOE gets to 5000 healing and there is the bacta bomb that heals for 10,000 as well. In your expertise ( it starts with level 10 and you get a new point to spend every 2 levels you can customise your character to fit your playstyle. I personally like the combat medic options, you may like to be more of a support medic with better heals and buffs.
Until you hit level 22 (where can wear armor) it is best to get a entertainer buff that would increase your XP gain by 15% and get you 3750 kinetic and energy armor resists. You will find that with them you gain levels much faster and you can take on 2, 3 or 4 NPC's without much problem. The entertainer buffs last up to 5 1/2 hours so they really help.
The game will soon have general voice chat and grouping tools are about to be released shorty as well.
I'm shocked it took Gutboy so long to come in with his lies...
I'm also shocked Obraik hasn't done his best job to save his employer another subscription before the OP cancels...
Fanbois, gotta love em : )
You can sell them crap painted gold and they will cherish it to their grave.
Tecmo Bowl.
By the way, YES, SWG is most likely the most dreadful MMO on the market.
It does NOTHING well and a LOT poorly.
The developers are clueless, SOE and LEC just don't care anymore, and the new playerbase is a joke. There is not 1 single redeeming quality that makes this heap of dung worth playing, even for free.
Tecmo Bowl.
Chats....others may exist and need to be set up to see but there was a time they weren't needed (probably part of reason they still aren't in use today). Between guild, tells, and local one could hardly keep up with all the chatting anyway. And back to community, people knew where to find groups so there was no need for a "LFG" chat server or planet wide.
Groups....maximum of 20 people, no levels on players so noobs could be grouped with "completed template" with both benefitting from the grouping.
Guilds....served plenty of purpose back in the day if you had a good one. People needed other players back then even if just to get supplies (and there was decay so it wasn't "max my character, get what I need, set for life of game" but "crap, broken weapon/armor/speeder/....need to get it fixed/replaced" and hoping it didn't happen at a bad spot) or buffs/heals.
Basically, this game was VERY different back then. If you saw the bit with Koster and some other guy describing what the game would be like, you'd know a LOT of thought went into the game...so much that a crappy dev team can't compete with it (although a group of individuals who use to play the game....or a couple of groups...are trying...but that's something to be left out of these forums).
I find the voice chat part interesting.....
the grouping tools, your own player base that you do not listen to thinks its a farce. as they put it in the small servers all 25 know when they are playing the game on that server, and are listed in friends lol....
Open your eyes its not to late. then again who knows..
No reply is required as you wont, its not what you wat to hear lol ...........................
Honestly what good are grouping tools and voice chat on empty servers?
What's up with the healing mechanics in this game? It's terrible, you heal once then you gotta either tank or do as much damage as you can until the heal is ready again. I've never played any other MMO with extremely limited and long recharging heals per class, heals in most other MMOs are fast recarging and based on the amount of action or mana you have available but in SWG everything is based on action including heal and a lot of the abilities are extremely expensive on action.
Pretty much sums it up, 5-6 servers will get the use of the group tool, and voice will practically never get used due to Ventrilo or Teamspeak. When I played Tabula Rasa, NOBODY used the voice chat, and I know people that plays WoW and says nobody uses voice in that one either.
The voice chat will be in all SOE games shortly from what I read. And considering that the max group size is 8 and the fact that you really do need voice chat to do well in the new heroics it will help people that are not in guilds that have vent.
As far a healing goes in medic I have 4 different heals available to me at any one time all on different timers, it is hard to see what a medic can be when you have only seen 33% of the levels and abilitys you will have at max level.
Bet the voice part of the games will be some crappy program that $OE will charge you for lol....
when they changed the game into the living abortion it is today
That is the funniest thing I heard all day! The statement is sad but true
And in spite of all the doom and gloom promoted by the "vets" the game is still going, still getting regular updates.
I just finished playing for 5 hours tonight and I did not encounter any bugs, no npc's in trees or walls (except for a couple arsehats players that do that to avoid death in PvP), no problems with any of the 3 instances we did tonight (Tusken, ISD and Exar Kun). Pretty much as it always is.
Oh we all had fun as well, I think that is the point of playing a game.
Anyhow, I respect your opinion - just wanted to comment on some of the things you complained about. Not saying this game is flawless or particularly good, but some of the points you raised were not entirely valid.
That's one thing that's surprised me. When ever I go on TC, I see this happening quite a bit however it's very rare (not even a monthly thing) to see it happen on Chilastra during PvP and if it does, both factions tend to give that person crap. I guess it goes to show that each server has its own "charm", heh.
You should see that thread in the GPD section on SWG's forums, TC's dev event turned out to be a failure and Badgers' response was that the TC server is a "throw away" machine... Does that make any sense to anyone? How would you properly test software if it's being done on a "throw away" server, and to know that several hundred players from 25 servers are going to be on there all at once everytime a new patch gets put on TC?
There's more than enough lag on live servers with small scale pvp or "hot" zones, from what I read, TC had about 100+ in a single area, everyone complained about rubberbanding, losing connection, etc.
Anyways back on topic, there's no real reason to go back right now with ghost town servers since there's tons of people going to AoC for now and God knows if even half of them will return to SWG sooner or later which I doubt will happen if AoC is as good as I hear.