bah. i would love to see what pre-cu was like everyone speaks so highly of it
Pre-cu through the eyes of a fellow veteran player:
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
very good read.
thanks.
man game sounded amazing..
the world was very group orintated unlike most mmorpg atm...and was player run...
Happy to share. You know, something happened last night that put this whole pre-cu thing into perspective for me in a new way. I'm Canadian, and I've played and watched hockey all my life. My Dad played hockey, my brother, my son and my daughter. Hockey is just a huge part of what makes life fun for all of us. Hockey night in Canada is a tradition. Every Saturday night, we tune in to watch our favourite team(s) play, even if they totally suck lol. And, every time we tune in, we hear the Hockey Night in Canada theme song.
Well, some corporate executive decided that Hockey Night in Canada needs to appeal to a broader audience. I'm like omg, I've heard this before. So, this businessman decides he'll change the song. He starts a survey to try to find out what new, hip tune is gonna bring the masses flocking to watch this show on Saturday night.
I'm telling you, if they pulled this song, something in a lot of Canadians would have died right there. It's just a melody, he might say, what's the big deal. Just some black dots on a page. The big deal is the meaning this song has for Canadians. It's not the black dots on the page, it's what it means to us on an emotional level that's at issue here.
Well, people went friggin apeshit over this proposed change. I can't overstate how strongly people reacted. If they made this change to Hockey Night in Canada, they were not going to get some new mysterious viewing audience, but they sure as hell would have lost the one they had.
This is very similar to what happened with the first version of the StarWars game. StarWars was a huge part of almost anyone's childhood who grew up in the 70's. Honestly, if you hadn't seen StarWars, people figured you needed some kind of intervention lol. This story captured our imagination and touched on family issues and spiritual issues like maybe nothing before. It was a phenomenon.
When people like this logged in to SWG pre-cu, man it was like stepping into a childhood dream. It was overwhelmingly amazing, even though it was in some ways broken and incomplete. That didn't matter, it was filled with meaning for us. It was like magic.
Then someone, who apparently didn't grasp any of what I've just explained, decided that this could and should just be stripped away and replaced with something else in an attempt to appeal to some new, larger (and fictional) audience. Well just like changing the hockey song would have, this had a tremendous negative emotional impact on current players.
Maybe that makes sense to some folks. If it doesn't, well I don't really know what else to say, maybe someday the lights will go on and you'll get this, maybe not.
Anyways, they just announced yesterday due to an overwhelming flood of feedback from hockey fans, that they're not changing the song. They're just going to redo the original one and clean it up digitally.
I was very relieved, and Hockey Night in Canada will continue to be enjoyed by millions of Canadians, hopefully for generations to come .
bah. i would love to see what pre-cu was like everyone speaks so highly of it
Pre-cu through the eyes of a fellow veteran player:
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
very good read.
thanks.
man game sounded amazing..
the world was very group orintated unlike most mmorpg atm...and was player run...
This hasnt changed. It is still group oriented. The main differences are two things:
1. PreCU had a profession system with a lot of diversity. While NGE is using the basic archetype classes like many other current MMOs. With the rock, paper, scissors idea where 1vs1 is imbalanced and team vs team is balanced.
2. Pre CU had barely premade content and NGE does.
Making your own content with groups of players is a moot point, because you could still do that in NGE or any MMO for that matter.
I would like to see preCU profession system combined with NGE PVE content. But I also realise that it wont happen and am able to move on.
Btw, there are more current MMO's which offer a lot of group oriented gameplay. They do however also offer soloable content. One thing doesnt have to exclude the other.
Edit: forgot to add. RP'ers love current SWG for the storytelling feature. It is very unique and gives more tools then ever to create your own group oriented content. To bad that I hate RP'ing myself
To really understand how big a change SWG went through, get SWGEmu and compare the two, you'll think "this isn't SWG, it's completely different!", it changed THAT much.
SOE (or LEC, or whoever the hell it was involved with the conspiracy of the NGE), must've thought that they'd gain a new wave of customers by changing the look and feel of the game. I remember Metallica deciding to change their genre from metal to alternative, almost every metalhead I know (myself included) then suddenly said "fuck Metallica", do you think Metallica recovered from that? No they didn't. Change is good, but a drastic change much like Metallica or the NGE aren't.
To really understand how big a change SWG went through, get SWGEmu and compare the two, you'll think "this isn't SWG, it's completely different!", it changed THAT much.
SOE (or LEC, or whoever the hell it was involved with the conspiracy of the NGE), must've thought that they'd gain a new wave of customers by changing the look and feel of the game. I remember Metallica deciding to change their genre from metal to alternative, almost every metalhead I know (myself included) then suddenly said "fuck Metallica", do you think Metallica recovered from that? No they didn't. Change is good, but a drastic change much like Metallica or the NGE aren't.
Well that touches on the same thing really. Some things have a significance to people, and if you change them, there are natural repercussions. There I shortened what was previously a fairly long rant lol
Pre-cu through the eyes of a fellow veteran player:
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
WOW. That was the most eloquent post I have ever completely agreed with in my entire life. The best man in my wedding and I started playing when it first came out… And to this day I’ll get a txt message in my phone…”remember how cool swg was?” There have been very few mmo’s or even non-mmo’s that have given the emersion level that swg gave us… RIP swg… May all who broke you have gotten fired and never work in game development again..
Everquest 1, Star wars galaxies, City of heroes/villains, Eve, Lord of the rings, Age of Conan
Wow this is real sad how delusional some people become. OP please ignore any posts on here that claim that SWG Pre-CU was a great game. Every aspect of the game was broken. If you could go back and pull up any of the old forums from pre-cu on gamefaqs or where ever you will see what people truly thought of the game. It was filled primarily with valid, negative opinions of the broken state of the game that lead to certain crafters monopolizing the economy and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken.
Even before the hologrind the only content in the game was standing in line at a starport waiting for a doctor to buff you so you could go fight the same monsters on Dantooine until you max your combat stats. It wasn't fun. Once people realized how to become jedi's it just made it worse with the hologrind that really killed SWG Pre-CU.
Sadly SWG NGE is a better game than it ever was before. Is it a good game? That is more of a reasonable debate but with the sheep mentality by most Vets you will find on this board you can never get a real discussion about that.
Here is a list of most of the flames I will receive for this response:
1. The game is too much like a wanna be WOW now so give me back the 32 broken classes that all wear composite armor.
2. There are too many Jedi's now, I just want to be a jedi since i hologrinded for it. You can stop letting other players make them now.
3.I had a lot of good experiences in the game...Valid point if it really had anything to do with the game play yet i have never heard any one give a response that had to do a with a cool feature that was well implimented in the game.
4. Finally they will result to complaining that the devs screwed them and that is why they are so bitter. It has been how many years....Get over it!
PS. i admit this game isn't that great, i left for the umpteenth time to go try out warhammer.
Wow this is real sad how delusional some people become. OP please ignore any posts on here that claim that SWG Pre-CU was a great game. Every aspect of the game was broken. If you could go back and pull up any of the old forums from pre-cu on gamefaqs or where ever you will see what people truly thought of the game. It was filled primarily with valid, negative opinions of the broken state of the game that lead to certain crafters monopolizing the economy and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken. Even before the hologrind the only content in the game was standing in line at a starport waiting for a doctor to buff you so you could go fight the same monsters on Dantooine until you max your combat stats. It wasn't fun. Once people realized how to become jedi's it just made it worse with the hologrind that really killed SWG Pre-CU. Sadly SWG NGE is a better game than it ever was before. Is it a good game? That is more of a reasonable debate but with the sheep mentality by most Vets you will find on this board you can never get a real discussion about that. Here is a list of most of the flames I will receive for this response: 1. The game is too much like a wanna be WOW now so give me back the 32 broken classes that all wear composite armor. 2. There are too many Jedi's now, I just want to be a jedi since i hologrinded for it. You can stop letting other players make them now. 3.I had a lot of good experiences in the game...Valid point if it really had anything to do with the game play yet i have never heard any one give a response that had to do a with a cool feature that was well implimented in the game. 4. Finally they will result to complaining that the devs screwed them and that is why they are so bitter. It has been how many years....Get over it!
PS. i admit this game isn't that great, i left for the umpteenth time to go try out warhammer.
And with all those problems it was still the best game I've ever played. With all those problems it had 250,000 players. If the NGE is a better game how come it has less than one tenth that number?
Um, I didn't do the Dantooine grind untill after CU. Was too easy to get skills up on Tatooine in the caves killing and looting npc's.
Pre-CU was broken quest lines and numerous bugs, but even in NGE many of the those same bugs came back to haunt them and after all the game revamps and updates, classes are still not balanced. Wasn't class balancing one of the major reasons for CU and eventually NGE? If only they had worked on fixing those bugs and broken content......
Um, I didn't do the Dantooine grind untill after CU. Was too easy to get skills up on Tatooine in the caves killing and looting npc's. Pre-CU was broken quest lines and numerous bugs, but even in NGE many of the those same bugs came back to haunt them and after all the game revamps and updates, classes are still not balanced. Wasn't class balancing one of the major reasons for CU and eventually NGE? If only they had worked on fixing those bugs and broken content......
Go to the Vreni Island cantina on Corellia.
The same quest NPCs that were broken five years ago are still broken.
Nothing has been done to review exisiting content for functionality. They can't be bothered to do so. Probably because they still do not have a mechanism to track and maintain all their current quest lines.
Shoddy management: the hallmark of SOE's gaming operation.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Wow this is real sad how delusional some people become. OP please ignore any posts on here that claim that SWG Pre-CU was a great game. Every aspect of the game was broken. If you could go back and pull up any of the old forums from pre-cu on gamefaqs or where ever you will see what people truly thought of the game. It was filled primarily with valid, negative opinions of the broken state of the game that lead to certain crafters monopolizing the economy and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken. Even before the hologrind the only content in the game was standing in line at a starport waiting for a doctor to buff you so you could go fight the same monsters on Dantooine until you max your combat stats. It wasn't fun. Once people realized how to become jedi's it just made it worse with the hologrind that really killed SWG Pre-CU. Sadly SWG NGE is a better game than it ever was before. Is it a good game? That is more of a reasonable debate but with the sheep mentality by most Vets you will find on this board you can never get a real discussion about that. Here is a list of most of the flames I will receive for this response: 1. The game is too much like a wanna be WOW now so give me back the 32 broken classes that all wear composite armor. 2. There are too many Jedi's now, I just want to be a jedi since i hologrinded for it. You can stop letting other players make them now. 3.I had a lot of good experiences in the game...Valid point if it really had anything to do with the game play yet i have never heard any one give a response that had to do a with a cool feature that was well implimented in the game. 4. Finally they will result to complaining that the devs screwed them and that is why they are so bitter. It has been how many years....Get over it!
PS. i admit this game isn't that great, i left for the umpteenth time to go try out warhammer.
The guy that posted the pre-cu story I quoted was Robbhood. As I read it, I see that this is an accurate account of his game experience. This is what it was like for him to play, and this is what it was like for me, and a few hundred thousand other people. We had a good time. I'm not sure why this bothers you.
Nowhere does Robb say that the game was perfect. We all know it wasn't. We asked for broken skills to be fixed, quests to be completed, and the armour/buff system to be adjusted.
Sadly instead of doing this and making our experience even more enjoyable, SOE saw fit to delete most of what we enjoyed and break the game even further.
As for telling people to get over it, you do realize we're answering a question here don't you?
Wow this is real sad how delusional some people become. OP please ignore any posts on here that claim that SWG Pre-CU was a great game. Every aspect of the game was broken. If you could go back and pull up any of the old forums from pre-cu on gamefaqs or where ever you will see what people truly thought of the game. It was filled primarily with valid, negative opinions of the broken state of the game that lead to certain crafters monopolizing the economy and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken. I mastered 11 combat professions during pre-CU and had fun doing it. None of them were 'broken'. Even before the hologrind the only content in the game was standing in line at a starport waiting for a doctor to buff you so you could go fight the same monsters on Dantooine until you max your combat stats. There was the Death Watch Bunker, the Corvette, 4 theme parks, and the Warren. There was more content than you give credit for. It wasn't fun. Myself and about 250k others seemed to enjoy it for the most part. Compared to roughly 25k-35k who may possibly enjoy it now. Once people realized how to become jedi's it just made it worse with the hologrind that really killed SWG Pre-CU. What really killed pre-CU was the CU/NGE. Sadly SWG NGE is a better game than it ever was before. Then where are all of the players? Is it a good game? That is more of a reasonable debate but with the sheep mentality by most Vets you will find on this board you can never get a real discussion about that. The same can be said about the fanboys. Here is a list of most of the flames I will receive for this response: 1. The game is too much like a wanna be WOW now so give me back the 32 broken classes that all wear composite armor. 2. There are too many Jedi's now, I just want to be a jedi since i hologrinded for it. You can stop letting other players make them now. 3.I had a lot of good experiences in the game...Valid point if it really had anything to do with the game play yet i have never heard any one give a response that had to do a with a cool feature that was well implimented in the game. 4. Finally they will result to complaining that the devs screwed them and that is why they are so bitter. It has been how many years....Get over it!
PS. i admit this game isn't that great, i left for the umpteenth time to go try out warhammer.
Wow this is real sad how delusional some people become. OP please ignore any posts on here that claim that SWG Pre-CU was a great game. Every aspect of the game was broken. If you could go back and pull up any of the old forums from pre-cu on gamefaqs or where ever you will see what people truly thought of the game. It was filled primarily with valid, negative opinions of the broken state of the game that lead to certain crafters monopolizing the economy and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken. I mastered 11 combat professions during pre-CU and had fun doing it. None of them were 'broken'. Even before the hologrind the only content in the game was standing in line at a starport waiting for a doctor to buff you so you could go fight the same monsters on Dantooine until you max your combat stats. There was the Death Watch Bunker, the Corvette, 4 theme parks, and the Warren. There was more content than you give credit for. It wasn't fun. Myself and about 250k others seemed to enjoy it for the most part. Compared to roughly 25k-35k who may possibly enjoy it now. Once people realized how to become jedi's it just made it worse with the hologrind that really killed SWG Pre-CU. What really killed pre-CU was the CU/NGE. Sadly SWG NGE is a better game than it ever was before. Then where are all of the players? Is it a good game? That is more of a reasonable debate but with the sheep mentality by most Vets you will find on this board you can never get a real discussion about that. The same can be said about the fanboys. Here is a list of most of the flames I will receive for this response: 1. The game is too much like a wanna be WOW now so give me back the 32 broken classes that all wear composite armor. 2. There are too many Jedi's now, I just want to be a jedi since i hologrinded for it. You can stop letting other players make them now. 3.I had a lot of good experiences in the game...Valid point if it really had anything to do with the game play yet i have never heard any one give a response that had to do a with a cool feature that was well implimented in the game. 4. Finally they will result to complaining that the devs screwed them and that is why they are so bitter. It has been how many years....Get over it!
PS. i admit this game isn't that great, i left for the umpteenth time to go try out warhammer.
Every profession had a skill or two in their tree that didn't work, but I would go as far as saying they were broken. The CU was supposed to fix and balance professions, and nobody was asking for a rewrite of the combat engine. That was the first failure.. reinventing instead of fixing the product that people bought and supported.
For argument sake.. the WoW forums 3-6 months after released were worse imo with complains and naysayers, but that game stay the course and ended up with how many million subscribers? Just before the NGE there was around 270k subscribers and growing, but it was abandoned for what? All they did was replace old lingering problems with new problems and new game issues... I don't think that anyone can honestly say that the state of the game has improved much over the past 5 years when compared to the potential everyone said it had at launch, and what everyone thought the game could become.
If you hated PRE-CU, then a sandbox game is most likely not the type of game for you, but I for one never ran out of things to do. There was such a broad specturm of spheres in the game that everyone could nitpick about something different because the game was that wide open and ready for expansion. The potential the game had was flushed for the CU, and then the NGE.. for the sake of marketing the IP to what was thought to be a broader consumer base... FAIL
That we miss pre-cu is not something we have made up recently. We who was there when they changed to CU know how we felt about it then, and how we expressed that, and what it resulted in. The only thing who have been made up is the rose tinted glass BS who have been popular to drag into the debate lately.
Pre-cu may have had its problems, no one have ever denied that, but we still loved that game for what it was. We lived with the bugs and the unbalanced stats, and wanted it fixed. Why do this always have to be explained?
The CU/NGE fails for many reasons. SWG was built around the pre-cu concept, where the galaxy should be a living world, where you could have a home, explore, live your own star wars saga. There was an idea behind shaping the game word the way they did, and the free mix and match skill system was a part of it. So was the idea of making players dependent on each other and to give them reasons to come together. They never made the planets "empty" because they were to lazy to fill it with hard designed areas a la WoW, they never gave the players the skill box system because they were to stupid to come up with a class/level system, and they never put in things like Battle Fatigue and shuttle wait time to ruin the fun for their players. It was needed parts of the concept the game was build around.
Swg was never designed to be like CUNGE, its the wrong foundation for that. They removed BF, AP, wounds, doctor buffs, shuttle wait, decay, etc - things that made people dependent of each other, and gave them reasons to visit a city and meet the rest of the players. And they wonder were all the players are now, why coronet is dead, when they have removed all those annoying things? Maybe because its boring to be a part of a world where you have no reason to see other people, and other people don´t have any reason to see you? Maybe because they can see that NGE is built on something it was not designed for?
and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken.
I really wish people would put some thought into the term "flavour of the month".
By definition that implies that it was a dynamic system where people were changing their template to adapt to fluidic circumstances.
BTW, if you're left with 3 classes that were "FOTM" templates what were people changing their templates to every month? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
That we miss pre-cu is not something we have made up recently. We who was there when they changed to CU know how we felt about it then, and how we expressed that, and what it resulted in. The only thing who have been made up is the rose tinted glass BS who have been popular to drag into the debate lately. Pre-cu may have had its problems, no one have ever denied that, but we still loved that game for what it was. We lived with the bugs and the unbalanced stats, and wanted it fixed. Why do this always have to be explained? The CU/NGE fails for many reasons. SWG was built around the pre-cu concept, where the galaxy should be a living world, where you could have a home, explore, live your own star wars saga. There was an idea behind shaping the game word the way they did, and the free mix and match skill system was a part of it. So was the idea of making players dependent on each other and to give them reasons to come together. They never made the planets "empty" because they were to lazy to fill it with hard designed areas a la WoW, they never gave the players the skill box system because they were to stupid to come up with a class/level system, and they never put in things like Battle Fatigue and shuttle wait time to ruin the fun for their players. It was needed parts of the concept the game was build around. Swg was never designed to be like CUNGE, its the wrong foundation for that. They removed BF, AP, wounds, doctor buffs, shuttle wait, decay, etc - things that made people dependent of each other, and gave them reasons to visit a city and meet the rest of the players. And they wonder were all the players are now, why coronet is dead, when they have removed all those annoying things? Maybe because its boring to be a part of a world where you have no reason to see other people, and other people don´t have any reason to see you? Maybe because they can see that NGE is built on something it was not designed for?
The people that started pushing the rose-tinted glasses idea were people that were trying to justify their decision to NGE the game.
Players said, "hey we liked our game and we want it back." SOE said, "no you didn't." Anyone else see the problem here??
If you want a glimpse of why this game's development has gone so badly, you really need look no further than this. This kind of thinking is at the core of a lot of the decisions that seem insane to people outside of SOE.
Within the walls of SOE, however, telling other people what they do and don't like (whether they agree or not) seems perfectly logical.
They assumed they knew better than we did what game we liked. That was behind the CU.
When that didn't work, they did the NGE for those who they thought would like it and would outnumber us.
Unfortunately the NGE "target audinece" proved to not exist at all. It numbers the current player base, which is 90%+ less than Pre-CU.
Pre-CU was flawed... But wonderful AND fixable. They never tried. Which is the tragedy, the attempt to fix it was called the CURB, it was abandoned at the last minute in favor of the CU which was hastily done.
That we miss pre-cu is not something we have made up recently. We who was there when they changed to CU know how we felt about it then, and how we expressed that, and what it resulted in. The only thing who have been made up is the rose tinted glass BS who have been popular to drag into the debate lately. Pre-cu may have had its problems, no one have ever denied that, but we still loved that game for what it was. We lived with the bugs and the unbalanced stats, and wanted it fixed. Why do this always have to be explained? The CU/NGE fails for many reasons. SWG was built around the pre-cu concept, where the galaxy should be a living world, where you could have a home, explore, live your own star wars saga. There was an idea behind shaping the game word the way they did, and the free mix and match skill system was a part of it. So was the idea of making players dependent on each other and to give them reasons to come together. They never made the planets "empty" because they were to lazy to fill it with hard designed areas a la WoW, they never gave the players the skill box system because they were to stupid to come up with a class/level system, and they never put in things like Battle Fatigue and shuttle wait time to ruin the fun for their players. It was needed parts of the concept the game was build around. Swg was never designed to be like CUNGE, its the wrong foundation for that. They removed BF, AP, wounds, doctor buffs, shuttle wait, decay, etc - things that made people dependent of each other, and gave them reasons to visit a city and meet the rest of the players. And they wonder were all the players are now, why coronet is dead, when they have removed all those annoying things? Maybe because its boring to be a part of a world where you have no reason to see other people, and other people don´t have any reason to see you? Maybe because they can see that NGE is built on something it was not designed for?
The people that started pushing the rose-tinted glasses idea were people that were trying to justify their decision to NGE the game.
Players said, "hey we liked our game and we want it back." SOE said, "no you didn't." Anyone else see the problem here??
If you want a glimpse of why this game's development has gone so badly, you really need look no further than this. This kind of thinking is at the core of a lot of the decisions that seem insane to people outside of SOE.
Within the walls of SOE, however, telling other people what they do and don't like (whether they agree or not) seems perfectly logical.
This reminds me of a little story from even before the CU came out.
I think it took place at one of the fan festivals. SOE/SWG devs were on a Q&A panel with the fans. Some way or another, players expressed how much fun it was chatting with each other at a Campsite out in the middle of nowhere, resting in between bouts of serious PvE mayhem (*). When the devs heard this, one of the devs was outwardly shocked and replied, "You were talking around a campfire... and it was fun?"
Why yes, yes it really was fun. The game mechanics and community made it fun.
The OLD SWG really brought out a sense of community among the players. No character could do everything, much less do them in an acceptable form of success. Everyone was needed. Combat types, Entertainers, Crafters, Resource Gatherers, etc.
(*) = I'll give a brief example of how these "campfire" get-togethers went. You'd get in a PUG, back in a time when such groups didn't have a bad name. Matter of fact, almost all my grouping in the old SWG were with PUGs. Anyways, you'd group up for a variety of reasons, but for this, Enranged Rancor Hunting Missioins on Dathomir. Everyone would get these missions, then you'd venture out as a group, and handle these missions 1 by 1. Once everyone's missions were done, you'd go back to the remote starport for more of them. Do them again. You'd do this so many times that the characters get worn down, and the actual players need to rest. Usually at least 1 player in the group has enough Scout ability to setup a campsite, usually nothing too fancy. Everyone would gather around the fire, the Entertainer in the group would dance or play an instrument. Some would take a small break. Everyone BS's with each other for a bit, but it wasn't surprising if the talk went on for a long time until someone remembers that we were supposed to be hunting lol
That was the atmosphere of the game. It was the same atmosphere that had boatloads of players in the Pre-CU/NGE days in the Cantinas, Medical Centers, etc. In-game Cantinas packed like real-life, successful nightclubs. You had actual players visiting and checking out their favorite Entertainers (actual players), meeting up buddies there and all that.
This was the atmosphere that SOE failed to even see, even after being told that, yes, we did like talking to each other at Cantinas... and around the Campfires.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken.
I really wish people would put some thought into the term "flavour of the month".
By definition that implies that it was a dynamic system where people were changing their template to adapt to fluidic circumstances.
BTW, if you're left with 3 classes that were "FOTM" templates what were people changing their templates to every month? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Was more like Flavor of the Publish as with each Pub they would try to balance the classes which meant nerfs to one and buffs to another so some players continously tweaked specs for the new "powerbuild" or Flavor of the Publish.
That we miss pre-cu is not something we have made up recently. We who was there when they changed to CU know how we felt about it then, and how we expressed that, and what it resulted in. The only thing who have been made up is the rose tinted glass BS who have been popular to drag into the debate lately. Pre-cu may have had its problems, no one have ever denied that, but we still loved that game for what it was. We lived with the bugs and the unbalanced stats, and wanted it fixed. Why do this always have to be explained? The CU/NGE fails for many reasons. SWG was built around the pre-cu concept, where the galaxy should be a living world, where you could have a home, explore, live your own star wars saga. There was an idea behind shaping the game word the way they did, and the free mix and match skill system was a part of it. So was the idea of making players dependent on each other and to give them reasons to come together. They never made the planets "empty" because they were to lazy to fill it with hard designed areas a la WoW, they never gave the players the skill box system because they were to stupid to come up with a class/level system, and they never put in things like Battle Fatigue and shuttle wait time to ruin the fun for their players. It was needed parts of the concept the game was build around. Swg was never designed to be like CUNGE, its the wrong foundation for that. They removed BF, AP, wounds, doctor buffs, shuttle wait, decay, etc - things that made people dependent of each other, and gave them reasons to visit a city and meet the rest of the players. And they wonder were all the players are now, why coronet is dead, when they have removed all those annoying things? Maybe because its boring to be a part of a world where you have no reason to see other people, and other people don´t have any reason to see you? Maybe because they can see that NGE is built on something it was not designed for?
The people that started pushing the rose-tinted glasses idea were people that were trying to justify their decision to NGE the game.
Players said, "hey we liked our game and we want it back." SOE said, "no you didn't." Anyone else see the problem here??
If you want a glimpse of why this game's development has gone so badly, you really need look no further than this. This kind of thinking is at the core of a lot of the decisions that seem insane to people outside of SOE.
Within the walls of SOE, however, telling other people what they do and don't like (whether they agree or not) seems perfectly logical.
This reminds me of a little story from even before the CU came out.
I think it took place at one of the fan festivals. SOE/SWG devs were on a Q&A panel with the fans. Some way or another, players expressed how much fun it was chatting with each other at a Campsite out in the middle of nowhere, resting in between bouts of serious PvE mayhem (*). When the devs heard this, one of the devs was outwardly shocked and replied, "You were talking around a campfire... and it was fun?"
Why yes, yes it really was fun. The game mechanics and community made it fun.
The OLD SWG really brought out a sense of community among the players. No character could do everything, much less do them in an acceptable form of success. Everyone was needed. Combat types, Entertainers, Crafters, Resource Gatherers, etc.
(*) = I'll give a brief example of how these "campfire" get-togethers went. You'd get in a PUG, back in a time when such groups didn't have a bad name. Matter of fact, almost all my grouping in the old SWG were with PUGs. Anyways, you'd group up for a variety of reasons, but for this, Enranged Rancor Hunting Missioins on Dathomir. Everyone would get these missions, then you'd venture out as a group, and handle these missions 1 by 1. Once everyone's missions were done, you'd go back to the remote starport for more of them. Do them again. You'd do this so many times that the characters get worn down, and the actual players need to rest. Usually at least 1 player in the group has enough Scout ability to setup a campsite, usually nothing too fancy. Everyone would gather around the fire, the Entertainer in the group would dance or play an instrument. Some would take a small break. Everyone BS's with each other for a bit, but it wasn't surprising if the talk went on for a long time until someone remembers that we were supposed to be hunting lol
That was the atmosphere of the game. It was the same atmosphere that had boatloads of players in the Pre-CU/NGE days in the Cantinas, Medical Centers, etc. In-game Cantinas packed like real-life, successful nightclubs. You had actual players visiting and checking out their favorite Entertainers (actual players), meeting up buddies there and all that.
This was the atmosphere that SOE failed to even see, even after being told that, yes, we did like talking to each other at Cantinas... and around the Campfires.
Reading your post made me sigh for days long forgotten.
I think it took place at one of the fan festivals. SOE/SWG devs were on a Q&A panel with the fans. Some way or another, players expressed how much fun it was chatting with each other at a Campsite out in the middle of nowhere, resting in between bouts of serious PvE mayhem (*). When the devs heard this, one of the devs was outwardly shocked and replied, "You were talking around a campfire... and it was fun?" Why yes, yes it really was fun. The game mechanics and community made it fun. The OLD SWG really brought out a sense of community among the players. No character could do everything, much less do them in an acceptable form of success. Everyone was needed. Combat types, Entertainers, Crafters, Resource Gatherers, etc. (*) = I'll give a brief example of how these "campfire" get-togethers went. You'd get in a PUG, back in a time when such groups didn't have a bad name. Matter of fact, almost all my grouping in the old SWG were with PUGs. Anyways, you'd group up for a variety of reasons, but for this, Enranged Rancor Hunting Missioins on Dathomir. Everyone would get these missions, then you'd venture out as a group, and handle these missions 1 by 1. Once everyone's missions were done, you'd go back to the remote starport for more of them. Do them again. You'd do this so many times that the characters get worn down, and the actual players need to rest. Usually at least 1 player in the group has enough Scout ability to setup a campsite, usually nothing too fancy. Everyone would gather around the fire, the Entertainer in the group would dance or play an instrument. Some would take a small break. Everyone BS's with each other for a bit, but it wasn't surprising if the talk went on for a long time until someone remembers that we were supposed to be hunting lol That was the atmosphere of the game. It was the same atmosphere that had boatloads of players in the Pre-CU/NGE days in the Cantinas, Medical Centers, etc. In-game Cantinas packed like real-life, successful nightclubs. You had actual players visiting and checking out their favorite Entertainers (actual players), meeting up buddies there and all that. This was the atmosphere that SOE failed to even see, even after being told that, yes, we did like talking to each other at Cantinas... and around the Campfires.
While I never really played SWG, I'd like to put in that that kind of thing is what I really liked about the early days of EQ, and about LOTRO recently (although I don't play LOTRO anymore for RL reasons).
In EQ2, you'd spend so long camping mobs, that you'd just fill the time with yakking. So we had the equivalent of the campfire sessions you're talking about forced upon us by the game. Interestingly, I remember that many times, we'd let the spawn go by if we were sufficiently into our conversation. It was as if playing the game was less fun than just being in game and hanging out.
In LOTRO recently, for the first time in a long time I saw people actually gathering together just to see each other and hang out. No raiding, no xps, just getting together to mess around and yak about everything and nothing. I expected my first guild party to be lame - little groups of friends all cliquing together, the usual e-peen jerking, and an early breakup by the "cool people" to go xp. Instead, we had all-inclusive events, mock fights, musicians and minstrels playing, people dancing to the music, and general screwing around was pretty much mandatory. I officially had a great time, and nobody got a lick of XPs during it lol.
Back on topic, I have a theory that working for SOE imposes some sort of mental disability on devs that targets the "fun perception" section of the brain. I can't otherwise explain how many games SOE has bought that were reasonably fun or had fun elements, but now are not fun to play due entirely to SOE devs' involvement.
I recall people saying, in the preCU period, that SWG was the world's most beautiful chat room.
They were being critical by saying it, but the social interaction of an MMORPG is a healthy chunk of the fun. You can slaughter pixels mindlessly in any number of stand alone single player, no 'Net connection needed games.
Doing it with other people, however, is a different experience. Doing it with a context to it (unlike say multiplayer DOOM) is even better.
For me (and my guildies) half the fun was taking the current context of the game and grafting lines from the movies into it. Like "Where is micbo today?" "She's on Dantooine. Dantooine". Or as you're about to get the attention of an enraged rancor, "I've got a bad feeling about this". The guy who aggroed some add Nightsisters yelling "It's not my fault!". Manuvering your X-WIng to make a run on the Corvette's gun #5 and saying in chat "This is where the fun begins".
Good times.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Pre-NGE SWG (late 2005), was the last extremely sociable MMORPG I ever played.
What I mean by that is that a serious group and social mentality existed in the old SWG.
* Solo-ing was perfectly fine and you can do a number of things on your own. But grouping was very frequent in all stages of your character's development. From the days of seeing a fellow newbie at 'Eisley and grouping with them, to having a full fledged, Full Template character doing PvE missions on Dathomir, to grouping up with buddies for PvP and killing Rebel Scum I had a strong solo mentality in SWG, but I simply couldn't stay away from the feel of being in a group.
* The game mechanics ensured you needed someone else. Not right away, but eventually you will. 2 major examples for combat types is Wounds and Fatigue. These wounds and fatigue aren't much, but after prolonged combat, it begins to adversely affect your character's abilities. Physical Wounds (Health & Action) can only be healed by players with Medic / Doctor skills inside a Medical Center. Mind "Wounds" & Fatigue can only be recovered by visiting a Cantina and watching / listening to actual player Entertainers. Because of this, there was a natural need to seek out Med Centers and Cantinas. You'd always find adventurers coming back and taking a break from their tasks. As you're getting patched up by a player Doc at the Med Center you'd BS with them for a bit. Same thing with Entertainers in the Cantinas.
* In the old days of SWG, the player community was very, very newbie friendly. It was not surprising to see veterans stop by and help out and give pointers to a struggling newbie. It got even better when the devs made Mos Eisley the mandatory starting area. It became another high traffic area. The newbie were running around with a fair number of vets passing by, and receiving help and advice from one was not out of the question. I'm not talking about getting free credits and gear. I'm talking about showing the basic in's and out's of Pre-CU gameplay, combat, wounds & fatigue, etc. Pre-CU SWG was a bit complicated, but the community helped you out when you started out. I myself helped many, many newbies out in Tatooine, mostly at 'Eisley. I would be decked out in Stormtrooper Armor on recruiting drives for players to just join the Empire. Not necessarily an Imperial guild, but just to promote the idea that you **could** join the Empire since many didn't know you could. I'd help out newbies in gameplay, especially the basics of combat. I'd like to think I helped promote the sense of being in a Star Wars world for the newbies by letting them see someone geared up in Stormtrooper Armor helping them out in their early days of the game. There were a select group of newbies I picked out for "tutoring" until I saw they were able to kick a** out in Dantooine, my testing ground to see if they know how to take care of themselves. Far enough to see them master their first Elite Profession. Heh, I actually enjoyed seeing those moments, seeing them celebrate... seeing them come from Noob Marksman clothing + CDEF Pistol, to a better armored player with a T21, confident in their combat skills.
All this without even touching the game economy & crafting system, where alot of people really made things work. **THAT** is a very long story in itself, how the old SWG economy actually worked well for most parts. All done by the players.
*** Edit to add: I also forgot to add that groups in Pre-CU/NGE SWG were long lasting. They weren't around for 1 hour or finishing a certain task then everyone disperses, oftenly without saying even a goodbye to each other. Not like practically all MMOs I have played after late 2005. Groups lasted a LONG time in SWG. They finish a task then oftenly moved on to something else that everyone wanted to do.
Very different from practically all other subsequent MMOs where people form and break groups without so much as a "Hi!" or even a "Bye!" on the very first sign of success or failure. It's something I utterly despise experiencing in MMORPGs these days.
And SioBabble, regarding Star Wars lines being spliced in by players in-game, it was fun to see the RP'ers do it. Like seeing Imperial & Rebel RP'ers at it. A good example I saw at Mos Eisley, in the Cantina. There was a RP'ing Rebel agent hiding out from patrolling Imperial players (a few Stormies, 1 player acting as an ST officer). The scene was that they checked her ID and figured her to be an undercover Rebel agent. The Rebel player pleads that she's just a freighter driver coming in from Corellia. But the Imperial officer replies back with, "You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor! Take her away!"
Another fun one was Imperial players frequently using "Rebel Scum" against opposing players. I guess some of them never watched or paid attention to the Original Trilogy, because they actually got mad about that lol! "Rebel Scum" is a staple from the original movies!
"You Rebel scum!"
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Comments
Pre-cu through the eyes of a fellow veteran player:
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
very good read.
thanks.
man game sounded amazing..
the world was very group orintated unlike most mmorpg atm...and was player run..
.
Happy to share. You know, something happened last night that put this whole pre-cu thing into perspective for me in a new way. I'm Canadian, and I've played and watched hockey all my life. My Dad played hockey, my brother, my son and my daughter. Hockey is just a huge part of what makes life fun for all of us. Hockey night in Canada is a tradition. Every Saturday night, we tune in to watch our favourite team(s) play, even if they totally suck lol. And, every time we tune in, we hear the Hockey Night in Canada theme song.
Well, some corporate executive decided that Hockey Night in Canada needs to appeal to a broader audience. I'm like omg, I've heard this before. So, this businessman decides he'll change the song. He starts a survey to try to find out what new, hip tune is gonna bring the masses flocking to watch this show on Saturday night.
I'm telling you, if they pulled this song, something in a lot of Canadians would have died right there. It's just a melody, he might say, what's the big deal. Just some black dots on a page. The big deal is the meaning this song has for Canadians. It's not the black dots on the page, it's what it means to us on an emotional level that's at issue here.
Well, people went friggin apeshit over this proposed change. I can't overstate how strongly people reacted. If they made this change to Hockey Night in Canada, they were not going to get some new mysterious viewing audience, but they sure as hell would have lost the one they had.
This is very similar to what happened with the first version of the StarWars game. StarWars was a huge part of almost anyone's childhood who grew up in the 70's. Honestly, if you hadn't seen StarWars, people figured you needed some kind of intervention lol. This story captured our imagination and touched on family issues and spiritual issues like maybe nothing before. It was a phenomenon.
When people like this logged in to SWG pre-cu, man it was like stepping into a childhood dream. It was overwhelmingly amazing, even though it was in some ways broken and incomplete. That didn't matter, it was filled with meaning for us. It was like magic.
Then someone, who apparently didn't grasp any of what I've just explained, decided that this could and should just be stripped away and replaced with something else in an attempt to appeal to some new, larger (and fictional) audience. Well just like changing the hockey song would have, this had a tremendous negative emotional impact on current players.
Maybe that makes sense to some folks. If it doesn't, well I don't really know what else to say, maybe someday the lights will go on and you'll get this, maybe not.
Anyways, they just announced yesterday due to an overwhelming flood of feedback from hockey fans, that they're not changing the song. They're just going to redo the original one and clean it up digitally.
I was very relieved, and Hockey Night in Canada will continue to be enjoyed by millions of Canadians, hopefully for generations to come
.
P.S. I really like your avatar and sig lol.
Pre-cu through the eyes of a fellow veteran player:
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
very good read.
thanks.
man game sounded amazing..
the world was very group orintated unlike most mmorpg atm...and was player run..
.
This hasnt changed. It is still group oriented. The main differences are two things:
1. PreCU had a profession system with a lot of diversity. While NGE is using the basic archetype classes like many other current MMOs. With the rock, paper, scissors idea where 1vs1 is imbalanced and team vs team is balanced.
2. Pre CU had barely premade content and NGE does.
Making your own content with groups of players is a moot point, because you could still do that in NGE or any MMO for that matter.
I would like to see preCU profession system combined with NGE PVE content. But I also realise that it wont happen and am able to move on.
Btw, there are more current MMO's which offer a lot of group oriented gameplay. They do however also offer soloable content. One thing doesnt have to exclude the other.
Edit: forgot to add. RP'ers love current SWG for the storytelling feature. It is very unique and gives more tools then ever to create your own group oriented content. To bad that I hate RP'ing myself
To really understand how big a change SWG went through, get SWGEmu and compare the two, you'll think "this isn't SWG, it's completely different!", it changed THAT much.
SOE (or LEC, or whoever the hell it was involved with the conspiracy of the NGE), must've thought that they'd gain a new wave of customers by changing the look and feel of the game. I remember Metallica deciding to change their genre from metal to alternative, almost every metalhead I know (myself included) then suddenly said "fuck Metallica", do you think Metallica recovered from that? No they didn't. Change is good, but a drastic change much like Metallica or the NGE aren't.
Well that touches on the same thing really. Some things have a significance to people, and if you change them, there are natural repercussions. There I shortened what was previously a fairly long rant lol
One of my favorite games ever... Pre-cu..
Everquest 1, Star wars galaxies, City of heroes/villains, Eve, Lord of the rings, Age of Conan
Pre-cu through the eyes of a fellow veteran player:
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
WOW. That was the most eloquent post I have ever completely agreed with in my entire life. The best man in my wedding and I started playing when it first came out… And to this day I’ll get a txt message in my phone…”remember how cool swg was?” There have been very few mmo’s or even non-mmo’s that have given the emersion level that swg gave us… RIP swg… May all who broke you have gotten fired and never work in game development again..
Everquest 1, Star wars galaxies, City of heroes/villains, Eve, Lord of the rings, Age of Conan
Wow this is real sad how delusional some people become. OP please ignore any posts on here that claim that SWG Pre-CU was a great game. Every aspect of the game was broken. If you could go back and pull up any of the old forums from pre-cu on gamefaqs or where ever you will see what people truly thought of the game. It was filled primarily with valid, negative opinions of the broken state of the game that lead to certain crafters monopolizing the economy and FOTM classes being played by 90% of the players while the remaining 29 classes, that a previous poster was ignorant enough to call a good feature, were completely broken.
Even before the hologrind the only content in the game was standing in line at a starport waiting for a doctor to buff you so you could go fight the same monsters on Dantooine until you max your combat stats. It wasn't fun. Once people realized how to become jedi's it just made it worse with the hologrind that really killed SWG Pre-CU.
Sadly SWG NGE is a better game than it ever was before. Is it a good game? That is more of a reasonable debate but with the sheep mentality by most Vets you will find on this board you can never get a real discussion about that.
Here is a list of most of the flames I will receive for this response:
1. The game is too much like a wanna be WOW now so give me back the 32 broken classes that all wear composite armor.
2. There are too many Jedi's now, I just want to be a jedi since i hologrinded for it. You can stop letting other players make them now.
3.I had a lot of good experiences in the game...Valid point if it really had anything to do with the game play yet i have never heard any one give a response that had to do a with a cool feature that was well implimented in the game.
4. Finally they will result to complaining that the devs screwed them and that is why they are so bitter. It has been how many years....Get over it!
PS. i admit this game isn't that great, i left for the umpteenth time to go try out warhammer.
And with all those problems it was still the best game I've ever played. With all those problems it had 250,000 players. If the NGE is a better game how come it has less than one tenth that number?
Um, I didn't do the Dantooine grind untill after CU. Was too easy to get skills up on Tatooine in the caves killing and looting npc's.
Pre-CU was broken quest lines and numerous bugs, but even in NGE many of the those same bugs came back to haunt them and after all the game revamps and updates, classes are still not balanced. Wasn't class balancing one of the major reasons for CU and eventually NGE? If only they had worked on fixing those bugs and broken content......
Go to the Vreni Island cantina on Corellia.
The same quest NPCs that were broken five years ago are still broken.
Nothing has been done to review exisiting content for functionality. They can't be bothered to do so. Probably because they still do not have a mechanism to track and maintain all their current quest lines.
Shoddy management: the hallmark of SOE's gaming operation.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
The guy that posted the pre-cu story I quoted was Robbhood. As I read it, I see that this is an accurate account of his game experience. This is what it was like for him to play, and this is what it was like for me, and a few hundred thousand other people. We had a good time. I'm not sure why this bothers you.
Nowhere does Robb say that the game was perfect. We all know it wasn't. We asked for broken skills to be fixed, quests to be completed, and the armour/buff system to be adjusted.
Sadly instead of doing this and making our experience even more enjoyable, SOE saw fit to delete most of what we enjoyed and break the game even further.
As for telling people to get over it, you do realize we're answering a question here don't you?
Every profession had a skill or two in their tree that didn't work, but I would go as far as saying they were broken. The CU was supposed to fix and balance professions, and nobody was asking for a rewrite of the combat engine. That was the first failure.. reinventing instead of fixing the product that people bought and supported.
For argument sake.. the WoW forums 3-6 months after released were worse imo with complains and naysayers, but that game stay the course and ended up with how many million subscribers? Just before the NGE there was around 270k subscribers and growing, but it was abandoned for what? All they did was replace old lingering problems with new problems and new game issues... I don't think that anyone can honestly say that the state of the game has improved much over the past 5 years when compared to the potential everyone said it had at launch, and what everyone thought the game could become.
If you hated PRE-CU, then a sandbox game is most likely not the type of game for you, but I for one never ran out of things to do. There was such a broad specturm of spheres in the game that everyone could nitpick about something different because the game was that wide open and ready for expansion. The potential the game had was flushed for the CU, and then the NGE.. for the sake of marketing the IP to what was thought to be a broader consumer base... FAIL
That we miss pre-cu is not something we have made up recently. We who was there when they changed to CU know how we felt about it then, and how we expressed that, and what it resulted in. The only thing who have been made up is the rose tinted glass BS who have been popular to drag into the debate lately.
Pre-cu may have had its problems, no one have ever denied that, but we still loved that game for what it was. We lived with the bugs and the unbalanced stats, and wanted it fixed. Why do this always have to be explained?
The CU/NGE fails for many reasons. SWG was built around the pre-cu concept, where the galaxy should be a living world, where you could have a home, explore, live your own star wars saga. There was an idea behind shaping the game word the way they did, and the free mix and match skill system was a part of it. So was the idea of making players dependent on each other and to give them reasons to come together. They never made the planets "empty" because they were to lazy to fill it with hard designed areas a la WoW, they never gave the players the skill box system because they were to stupid to come up with a class/level system, and they never put in things like Battle Fatigue and shuttle wait time to ruin the fun for their players. It was needed parts of the concept the game was build around.
Swg was never designed to be like CUNGE, its the wrong foundation for that. They removed BF, AP, wounds, doctor buffs, shuttle wait, decay, etc - things that made people dependent of each other, and gave them reasons to visit a city and meet the rest of the players. And they wonder were all the players are now, why coronet is dead, when they have removed all those annoying things? Maybe because its boring to be a part of a world where you have no reason to see other people, and other people don´t have any reason to see you? Maybe because they can see that NGE is built on something it was not designed for?
I really wish people would put some thought into the term "flavour of the month".
By definition that implies that it was a dynamic system where people were changing their template to adapt to fluidic circumstances.
BTW, if you're left with 3 classes that were "FOTM" templates what were people changing their templates to every month? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
The people that started pushing the rose-tinted glasses idea were people that were trying to justify their decision to NGE the game.
Players said, "hey we liked our game and we want it back." SOE said, "no you didn't." Anyone else see the problem here??
If you want a glimpse of why this game's development has gone so badly, you really need look no further than this. This kind of thinking is at the core of a lot of the decisions that seem insane to people outside of SOE.
Within the walls of SOE, however, telling other people what they do and don't like (whether they agree or not) seems perfectly logical.
They assumed they knew better than we did what game we liked. That was behind the CU.
When that didn't work, they did the NGE for those who they thought would like it and would outnumber us.
Unfortunately the NGE "target audinece" proved to not exist at all. It numbers the current player base, which is 90%+ less than Pre-CU.
Pre-CU was flawed... But wonderful AND fixable. They never tried. Which is the tragedy, the attempt to fix it was called the CURB, it was abandoned at the last minute in favor of the CU which was hastily done.
The people that started pushing the rose-tinted glasses idea were people that were trying to justify their decision to NGE the game.
Players said, "hey we liked our game and we want it back." SOE said, "no you didn't." Anyone else see the problem here??
If you want a glimpse of why this game's development has gone so badly, you really need look no further than this. This kind of thinking is at the core of a lot of the decisions that seem insane to people outside of SOE.
Within the walls of SOE, however, telling other people what they do and don't like (whether they agree or not) seems perfectly logical.
This reminds me of a little story from even before the CU came out.
I think it took place at one of the fan festivals. SOE/SWG devs were on a Q&A panel with the fans. Some way or another, players expressed how much fun it was chatting with each other at a Campsite out in the middle of nowhere, resting in between bouts of serious PvE mayhem (*). When the devs heard this, one of the devs was outwardly shocked and replied, "You were talking around a campfire... and it was fun?"
Why yes, yes it really was fun. The game mechanics and community made it fun.
The OLD SWG really brought out a sense of community among the players. No character could do everything, much less do them in an acceptable form of success. Everyone was needed. Combat types, Entertainers, Crafters, Resource Gatherers, etc.
(*) = I'll give a brief example of how these "campfire" get-togethers went. You'd get in a PUG, back in a time when such groups didn't have a bad name. Matter of fact, almost all my grouping in the old SWG were with PUGs. Anyways, you'd group up for a variety of reasons, but for this, Enranged Rancor Hunting Missioins on Dathomir. Everyone would get these missions, then you'd venture out as a group, and handle these missions 1 by 1. Once everyone's missions were done, you'd go back to the remote starport for more of them. Do them again. You'd do this so many times that the characters get worn down, and the actual players need to rest. Usually at least 1 player in the group has enough Scout ability to setup a campsite, usually nothing too fancy. Everyone would gather around the fire, the Entertainer in the group would dance or play an instrument. Some would take a small break. Everyone BS's with each other for a bit, but it wasn't surprising if the talk went on for a long time until someone remembers that we were supposed to be hunting lol
That was the atmosphere of the game. It was the same atmosphere that had boatloads of players in the Pre-CU/NGE days in the Cantinas, Medical Centers, etc. In-game Cantinas packed like real-life, successful nightclubs. You had actual players visiting and checking out their favorite Entertainers (actual players), meeting up buddies there and all that.
This was the atmosphere that SOE failed to even see, even after being told that, yes, we did like talking to each other at Cantinas... and around the Campfires.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
I really wish people would put some thought into the term "flavour of the month".
By definition that implies that it was a dynamic system where people were changing their template to adapt to fluidic circumstances.
BTW, if you're left with 3 classes that were "FOTM" templates what were people changing their templates to every month? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Was more like Flavor of the Publish as with each Pub they would try to balance the classes which meant nerfs to one and buffs to another so some players continously tweaked specs for the new "powerbuild" or Flavor of the Publish.
The people that started pushing the rose-tinted glasses idea were people that were trying to justify their decision to NGE the game.
Players said, "hey we liked our game and we want it back." SOE said, "no you didn't." Anyone else see the problem here??
If you want a glimpse of why this game's development has gone so badly, you really need look no further than this. This kind of thinking is at the core of a lot of the decisions that seem insane to people outside of SOE.
Within the walls of SOE, however, telling other people what they do and don't like (whether they agree or not) seems perfectly logical.
This reminds me of a little story from even before the CU came out.
I think it took place at one of the fan festivals. SOE/SWG devs were on a Q&A panel with the fans. Some way or another, players expressed how much fun it was chatting with each other at a Campsite out in the middle of nowhere, resting in between bouts of serious PvE mayhem (*). When the devs heard this, one of the devs was outwardly shocked and replied, "You were talking around a campfire... and it was fun?"
Why yes, yes it really was fun. The game mechanics and community made it fun.
The OLD SWG really brought out a sense of community among the players. No character could do everything, much less do them in an acceptable form of success. Everyone was needed. Combat types, Entertainers, Crafters, Resource Gatherers, etc.
(*) = I'll give a brief example of how these "campfire" get-togethers went. You'd get in a PUG, back in a time when such groups didn't have a bad name. Matter of fact, almost all my grouping in the old SWG were with PUGs. Anyways, you'd group up for a variety of reasons, but for this, Enranged Rancor Hunting Missioins on Dathomir. Everyone would get these missions, then you'd venture out as a group, and handle these missions 1 by 1. Once everyone's missions were done, you'd go back to the remote starport for more of them. Do them again. You'd do this so many times that the characters get worn down, and the actual players need to rest. Usually at least 1 player in the group has enough Scout ability to setup a campsite, usually nothing too fancy. Everyone would gather around the fire, the Entertainer in the group would dance or play an instrument. Some would take a small break. Everyone BS's with each other for a bit, but it wasn't surprising if the talk went on for a long time until someone remembers that we were supposed to be hunting lol
That was the atmosphere of the game. It was the same atmosphere that had boatloads of players in the Pre-CU/NGE days in the Cantinas, Medical Centers, etc. In-game Cantinas packed like real-life, successful nightclubs. You had actual players visiting and checking out their favorite Entertainers (actual players), meeting up buddies there and all that.
This was the atmosphere that SOE failed to even see, even after being told that, yes, we did like talking to each other at Cantinas... and around the Campfires.
Reading your post made me sigh for days long forgotten.
While I never really played SWG, I'd like to put in that that kind of thing is what I really liked about the early days of EQ, and about LOTRO recently (although I don't play LOTRO anymore for RL reasons).
In EQ2, you'd spend so long camping mobs, that you'd just fill the time with yakking. So we had the equivalent of the campfire sessions you're talking about forced upon us by the game. Interestingly, I remember that many times, we'd let the spawn go by if we were sufficiently into our conversation. It was as if playing the game was less fun than just being in game and hanging out.
In LOTRO recently, for the first time in a long time I saw people actually gathering together just to see each other and hang out. No raiding, no xps, just getting together to mess around and yak about everything and nothing. I expected my first guild party to be lame - little groups of friends all cliquing together, the usual e-peen jerking, and an early breakup by the "cool people" to go xp. Instead, we had all-inclusive events, mock fights, musicians and minstrels playing, people dancing to the music, and general screwing around was pretty much mandatory. I officially had a great time, and nobody got a lick of XPs during it lol.
Back on topic, I have a theory that working for SOE imposes some sort of mental disability on devs that targets the "fun perception" section of the brain. I can't otherwise explain how many games SOE has bought that were reasonably fun or had fun elements, but now are not fun to play due entirely to SOE devs' involvement.
I recall people saying, in the preCU period, that SWG was the world's most beautiful chat room.
They were being critical by saying it, but the social interaction of an MMORPG is a healthy chunk of the fun. You can slaughter pixels mindlessly in any number of stand alone single player, no 'Net connection needed games.
Doing it with other people, however, is a different experience. Doing it with a context to it (unlike say multiplayer DOOM) is even better.
For me (and my guildies) half the fun was taking the current context of the game and grafting lines from the movies into it. Like "Where is micbo today?" "She's on Dantooine. Dantooine". Or as you're about to get the attention of an enraged rancor, "I've got a bad feeling about this". The guy who aggroed some add Nightsisters yelling "It's not my fault!". Manuvering your X-WIng to make a run on the Corvette's gun #5 and saying in chat "This is where the fun begins".
Good times.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Pre-NGE SWG (late 2005), was the last extremely sociable MMORPG I ever played.
What I mean by that is that a serious group and social mentality existed in the old SWG.
* Solo-ing was perfectly fine and you can do a number of things on your own. But grouping was very frequent in all stages of your character's development. From the days of seeing a fellow newbie at 'Eisley and grouping with them, to having a full fledged, Full Template character doing PvE missions on Dathomir, to grouping up with buddies for PvP and killing Rebel Scum
I had a strong solo mentality in SWG, but I simply couldn't stay away from the feel of being in a group.
* The game mechanics ensured you needed someone else. Not right away, but eventually you will. 2 major examples for combat types is Wounds and Fatigue. These wounds and fatigue aren't much, but after prolonged combat, it begins to adversely affect your character's abilities. Physical Wounds (Health & Action) can only be healed by players with Medic / Doctor skills inside a Medical Center. Mind "Wounds" & Fatigue can only be recovered by visiting a Cantina and watching / listening to actual player Entertainers. Because of this, there was a natural need to seek out Med Centers and Cantinas. You'd always find adventurers coming back and taking a break from their tasks. As you're getting patched up by a player Doc at the Med Center you'd BS with them for a bit. Same thing with Entertainers in the Cantinas.
* In the old days of SWG, the player community was very, very newbie friendly. It was not surprising to see veterans stop by and help out and give pointers to a struggling newbie. It got even better when the devs made Mos Eisley the mandatory starting area. It became another high traffic area. The newbie were running around with a fair number of vets passing by, and receiving help and advice from one was not out of the question. I'm not talking about getting free credits and gear. I'm talking about showing the basic in's and out's of Pre-CU gameplay, combat, wounds & fatigue, etc. Pre-CU SWG was a bit complicated, but the community helped you out when you started out. I myself helped many, many newbies out in Tatooine, mostly at 'Eisley. I would be decked out in Stormtrooper Armor on recruiting drives for players to just join the Empire. Not necessarily an Imperial guild, but just to promote the idea that you **could** join the Empire since many didn't know you could. I'd help out newbies in gameplay, especially the basics of combat. I'd like to think I helped promote the sense of being in a Star Wars world for the newbies by letting them see someone geared up in Stormtrooper Armor helping them out in their early days of the game. There were a select group of newbies I picked out for "tutoring" until I saw they were able to kick a** out in Dantooine, my testing ground to see if they know how to take care of themselves. Far enough to see them master their first Elite Profession. Heh, I actually enjoyed seeing those moments, seeing them celebrate... seeing them come from Noob Marksman clothing + CDEF Pistol, to a better armored player with a T21, confident in their combat skills.
All this without even touching the game economy & crafting system, where alot of people really made things work. **THAT** is a very long story in itself, how the old SWG economy actually worked well for most parts. All done by the players.
*** Edit to add: I also forgot to add that groups in Pre-CU/NGE SWG were long lasting. They weren't around for 1 hour or finishing a certain task then everyone disperses, oftenly without saying even a goodbye to each other. Not like practically all MMOs I have played after late 2005. Groups lasted a LONG time in SWG. They finish a task then oftenly moved on to something else that everyone wanted to do.
Very different from practically all other subsequent MMOs where people form and break groups without so much as a "Hi!" or even a "Bye!" on the very first sign of success or failure. It's something I utterly despise experiencing in MMORPGs these days.
And SioBabble, regarding Star Wars lines being spliced in by players in-game, it was fun to see the RP'ers do it. Like seeing Imperial & Rebel RP'ers at it. A good example I saw at Mos Eisley, in the Cantina. There was a RP'ing Rebel agent hiding out from patrolling Imperial players (a few Stormies, 1 player acting as an ST officer). The scene was that they checked her ID and figured her to be an undercover Rebel agent. The Rebel player pleads that she's just a freighter driver coming in from Corellia. But the Imperial officer replies back with, "You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor! Take her away!"
Another fun one was Imperial players frequently using "Rebel Scum" against opposing players. I guess some of them never watched or paid attention to the Original Trilogy, because they actually got mad about that lol! "Rebel Scum" is a staple from the original movies!
"You Rebel scum!"
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Can be explained easily...
Pre-CU was a "True gamers Haven". It offered anything you ever wanted without the time/dedication and senseless nonesense other games require.
Pre-cu was so cool we are still crying about it 3 years later.