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Brief history of swg..
Can someone give me a brief history of this game. I did play it a month or 2 when it came out and remember how fun it was sitting around watching the dancers do their thing. That is pretty much the last time I payed much attention to the game as life moved forward. Anway, I hear bits and pieces about how a once great game is now a ghost town and am curious of the events that led up to the downfall of what I remember as being a popular game. Any info would be great...thx in advance.
Comments
Here's a little group of links I put together for this very purpose.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/189799
hope that helps
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The game was released late and unfinished, and full of bugs. We were promised that the unfinished content would be added soon, and our concerns were being addressed. The promised contents and addressing of concerns never materialized, for the most part. A quarterly storyline was initiated, and lasted three quarters, until development ceased to even consider content, for the most part, in favor of taking a sledgehammer to the game mechanics, when a screwdriver was required. The players were a bit slow to unlock their Jedi characters, and the developers got antsy, so we were given holocrons, with explicit instructions on what we needed to do to unlock Jedi, as the Life Day event. This resulted in the vast majority of the playerbase ceasing to play the game, and instead mindlessly grinding out professions in order to unlock Jedi.
In the aftermath of the Holocron holiday, more and more complaints about unblanaced PvP were appearing on the forums, as PvPers were trying whatever build was the flavor of the month. Unfortunately, the compliaints were mainly focused on 1 on 1 duels, and the dev team set about trying to balance the professions. This was done by ignoring most of what was causing the imbalance, and the fact that 1 on 1 duels should never be considered when attempting to balance professions that can be mixed and matches, and nerfing everything that wasn't causing the problems. This lead to the idea of a "Combat Update Rebalance", or CURB.
The CURB was being developed with the input of the playerbase, and focused on addressing the major problems the combat system had since the game was released. Things were progressing well, which lead the folks in charge to scrap the CURB and slap together the "Combat Upgrade", or CU, in about two weeks. The CU was based on WoW's combat system and introduced a level based system to the game. It also lead to the departure of a few key development team members, due to the way the CU was implemented.
The CU was horrible when released, and broke many game features. The development team focused on stringing along the playerbase with promises of content, whilt they focused on fixing the CU system. During this time the president of SOE, John Smedley, popped up on the official forums to say the 'CU was here to stay', in response to a growing number of posts about rumors of another revamp, and pleas by players to roll back the CU to the pre-CU system.
At one point, a rumor was posted by a player that described a brand new Star Wars MMO, that was supposed to replace SWG. The poster of the rumor was flamed by most of the posters, and even the folks from SOE claimed the new rumor was false. Soon, a new SWG box began popping up on retail sites called the "Starter Kit". The description of the new box was strangely similar to the rumored new MMO. When brought to the attention of the folks at SOE, they quickly claimed it was a false listing and that the description was likely from BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic game.
A few months later, the LucasArts producer of SWG posts a message on the OBoard explaining that it was decided that SWG needed a complete revamp, one that exactly matched the supposedly debunked rumored MMO meant to replace SWG. A new version of SWG was revealed, one that had a psuedo-FPS combat system, a horribly implemented on at that, and a class based character system that replaced the former profession system. The reasoning behind the changes was that MMO players are idiots and needed fewer choices to prevent being overwhelmed. The new system was called the "New Game Enhancement", or NGE. The NGE was an attempt to replace the existing playerbase with an entirely new playerbase, on that was thought to be larger, but turned out to not actually exist. WoW's success was a major catalyst, according to the president of SOE, John Smedley.
The NGE was poorly coded, poorly implemented, and, in the words of John Smedley, president of SOe, 'nowhere near fun'. The development team jumped right in to address these problems, mainly by ignoring them and focusing on screwing with other things. When the vast majority of the playerbase quit, they quickly chainged focus and decided what was needed was to add more content to the game, while ignoring the fact that everyone left because the core game was what had made SWG the single worst MMO on the market. Eventually, the playrbase continued to dwindle, so the dev team decided to focus on changes to improve the PvP aspect of the game. These changes included adding WoW's talent system and WoW's original Honor System, after the folks at Blizzard had decided their original Honor System wasn't very fun and needed to be replaced.
The new direction was so successful that the game continued to stagnate and eventually the lead designer and lead producer were promoted to leading the DCU team, even though their success didn't translate into an increase in subscriptions or a better reputation for the game. The new dev team leadership quickly set about doing the things the former lead designer had posted about on the OBoards, before he left, but likely after he knew about being promoted.
The new additions to the game included instanced dungeons that required a group to complete, and gave rewards for those who were willing to repeat them until they completed the full sets. They also included EQ2's collection system, which is a mindless grind to get certian rare drops by killing the same MOBs over and over. Unfortunately, considering the core game was left unchanged since it was declared 'nowhere near fun', nothing was actually done that had any chance of improving the game. The net result of the past, almost three years worth of, development is that they added more ways to engage in experienceing SWG current core game, which is just flat out awful, even more than before the changes. On top of that, they also nerfed everyone to make even the regular game take longer to do anything. I assume it is due to the fact that the folks at SOE hate gamers, and hate gamers who are Star Wars fans even more.
During the post NGE era, the folks from SOE regularly attacked, insulted, and degraded their players. The hostility from the folks at SOE fluxuates between being outright, and just slipped into otherwise begnin posts.
Basically, the history of SWG is one where the developers decided they knew better what the players wanted than the players themselves, but what the developers thought the players wanted was the opposite of what the players actually wanted. When the developers realized this, they decided to replace their current players with a new group of players who wanted what the developers wanted to give them. Unfortunately the number of players who wanted that was many times smaller than the players they already had.
which is why the players rebuilt the original game from scratch.
I remember back in 1999, folks kept asking me if I was stockpiling food. I always answered, "No, I'm stockpiling ammo and making a list of people who are stockpiling food"
Well...at least building it. But you are right.
It is something that is for the most part unheard of regarding MMOs and does help to state just how important this game is/was to the players.
"Suddenly, thousands of Trekies whose heads are full of facts of things like the stardate when the Cardassians farted on Deep Space nine are irrlelevant." - hardcoremoviecritic
[quote]Originally posted by Obee
...
Thanks for your detailed story, I always wondered why people were so angry at SWG, now I know.
Obee has given a pretty good recounting of what the heck happened with SWG.
A key thing that happened early on is the designer of SWG, Raph Koster, was kicked upstairs and out of the way only a couple of months after release. No one appeared to fill the leadership/vision vacuum that was created by his departure. Without some sort of vision of where the game was going, it floundered around with no direction at all...not even one of cleaning up the bugs and adding the content that was planned but never implemented. The developers got into a cycle of constantly nerfing and buffing and then nerfing again, and as Obee indicated, the whining of PvPers with a one on one duel perspective became all they concerned themselves with, because without Koster to guide them, they lost the vision of a group oriented PvP where the sum of the individuals, with many different skills, provided the balance. One on one confrontations can't be balanced without making everyone the same, and reducing combat victories to random chance, as in the flipping of a coin.
In addition, it appears that the idiots of LEC wanted Koster out of the way because the game just wasn't what they thought a Star Wars MMO should be...lots of mindless combat. Thnking combat is just not a Lucas strength, in either games or the movies. The catch is the game had to have more substance than the movies to be successful, and LEC was constantly trying to Jar-Jar the darn thing.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
here is a visual timeline of many of the events that occurred.
swg stratigraphic timeline
The most brief history of SWG is this:
In the beginning, during the Pre-CU the game was broken, missing a lot of things, but had vast potential.
Then the CU came out, was promised to do everything to fix everyone's concerns, cure cancer, yadda yadda, and was even more broken, had even more missing (and was the first deletion of content, ie: the FRS) and had less potential.
We were then promised the usual: fixes, content, etc. Instead they were sharpening a knife behind our backs called:
The NGE, which can be summed up as even more broken, missing more than half the game, and having absolutely NO potential. Worse, we were charged for an expansion convienently the day before the NGE announcement, that had much of it's content deleted. Somehow it never occured to management that people would object to this.
Post NGE has consisted of the developers adding junk to the NGE no one really wants, not fixing much of anything, and begging people to come back because anywhere between 75 and 90% of the pre-NGE player base left at or after the NGE. They continue to beg vets to come back, thinking that "shineys and trinkets" would somehow replace the 2/3rds of the game that we still see as missing. The rest is still plain broken.
You're welcome, but that wasn't the detailed version. That is about as brief as the story can be told, and it still missed several important points, such as the last expansion being released just two days before the NGE changed were announced, with the intention of making one last cash grab from people they knew would never have purchased the expansion had they know the NGE was coming. It was an instance of outright fraud, which caused SOE to offer refunds for the expansion, until they were overwhelmed with people wanting refunds and cut off the refund offer.
In a perfect world, a company that does business, and treats their customers, in the way SOE does, would quickly go out of business. Unfortunately the world is not perfect, and there are enough people who are willing to pay for the priveledge of being treated like crap so they can play SOE's long list of mediocre to outright crap quality games, to keep SOE chugging along, churning out the next great failure in the MMO industry.
You're welcome, but that wasn't the detailed version. That is about as brief as the story can be told, and it still missed several important points, such as the last expansion being released just two days before the NGE changed were announced, with the intention of making one last cash grab from people they knew would never have purchased the expansion had they know the NGE was coming. It was an instance of outright fraud, which caused SOE to offer refunds for the expansion, until they were overwhelmed with people wanting refunds and cut off the refund offer.
In a perfect world, a company that does business, and treats their customers, in the way SOE does, would quickly go out of business. Unfortunately the world is not perfect, and there are enough people who are willing to pay for the priveledge of being treated like crap so they can play SOE's long list of mediocre to outright crap quality games, to keep SOE chugging along, churning out the next great failure in the MMO industry.
That sums it up very nicely. Unfortunately there are currently no consumer laws to help protect players from such methods by MMO companies. Players are not seen as having any ownership in their investments to online games as they are considered entertainment media and the EULAs protect the industries, not the players. The only recourse that players have is to protest via cancelled subscriptions such as what happened with the NGE fiasco. But, mass protest did nothing to resolve the issue with SOE, it only helped games like WoW increase their own player base.
actually, there is another solution....the one that seems to be working quite well for those who are aware of it.
A game made by players, for players.
Screw the corporations with their sales charts, and demographic marketing, who are after the big $.
A free game, open source, based off the best that any MMO has ever been...pre-CU.
This is the game I will be playing.
I remember back in 1999, folks kept asking me if I was stockpiling food. I always answered, "No, I'm stockpiling ammo and making a list of people who are stockpiling food"
You're welcome, but that wasn't the detailed version. That is about as brief as the story can be told, and it still missed several important points, such as the last expansion being released just two days before the NGE changed were announced, with the intention of making one last cash grab from people they knew would never have purchased the expansion had they know the NGE was coming. It was an instance of outright fraud, which caused SOE to offer refunds for the expansion, until they were overwhelmed with people wanting refunds and cut off the refund offer.
In a perfect world, a company that does business, and treats their customers, in the way SOE does, would quickly go out of business. Unfortunately the world is not perfect, and there are enough people who are willing to pay for the priveledge of being treated like crap so they can play SOE's long list of mediocre to outright crap quality games, to keep SOE chugging along, churning out the next great failure in the MMO industry.
That sums it up very nicely. Unfortunately there are currently no consumer laws to help protect players from such methods by MMO companies. Players are not seen as having any ownership in their investments to online games as they are considered entertainment media and the EULAs protect the industries, not the players. The only recourse that players have is to protest via cancelled subscriptions such as what happened with the NGE fiasco. But, mass protest did nothing to resolve the issue with SOE, it only helped games like WoW increase their own player base.
I think it is very unfortunate that the folks who had paid for the long term subscriptions (thee monts/six month/a year), didn't start a class action suit against SOE to recover the remainder of the subscriptions after the NGE announcement. It was an opportunity to to take a large step for customer rights, as far as MMOs are concerned. At the very least, I would bet that SOE would have settled and paid refunds for remaining time, since losing such a case would have done major damage to both their EULA and ToS. It could have settled the debate of whether subscribers are paying for access to the game servers, or to play the game itself.
two more important factors to mention on why we vets hate SOE.
1.) The expansion for Mustafar - This expansion was sold to the players for $30. Two days after it launched SOE announced the NGE changes. These changes would go live in 2 weeks. Naturally the community was outraged because we were all duped into buying an expansion for a game that would radically change in 2 weeks.
Features for this expansion were taken out or never implemented. An example - We bought the expansion because of the promise of a new creature handler necklace (allowing you to tame higher level creatures). 2 weeks after launch Creature Handler profession wouldnt even exist anymore.
2.) The lying - SOE flat out lied to us repeatedly. They lied about the expansion, they lied about the previous revamp. Subscription money is meant to pay for adding content and fixing the MMO you're paying for. Yet SOE took that money and developed an entirely new game in secret and lied about the whole affair.
Here is but a small list of the Lies SOE has told us over the years....
1. SWG wont launch until its ready - SOE repeatedly told us this game wont launch until its ready to go. This early on was to include space, JTL wasnt ever supposed to be an expansion. Lets also not forget key components not included at launch like player cities, vehicles, and jedi. As a beta player, I still remember the notice in beta forum that the game was going gold in 2 weeks. Everyone agreed it was a huge mistake but SOE ignored us.
2. Jedi - We all know that jedi was NEVER possible at launch. Yet SOE made post after post dangling that carrot and offering encouragement. They told us to get married, explore every world, build a home, etc. It made some think that jedi was some random amazing quest to be discovered. Soon though we learned the truth when SOE patched in several .tre files with obvious jedi implications 5 months after launch. Then the day after a patch several unlocked all at once.
3. Rebel Theme Park - Sorta ties into # 1 as it wasnt ready either. However SOE repeatedly lied about the theme park. If you recall, it was broken after Han's quests. Han tells us to seek out Lt. Lance on Dantooine, but there isnt any Lt. Lance anywhere. SOE tells us its working as intended despite nobody having found Lt. Lance after months and month of looking (my guild personally had several major expedition searches done over many weekends looking for him). Suddenly we learn the truth after a patch...Han now tells us to seek out Ackbar on Dantooine and the once empty abandoned rebel base now has several rebel nps in there. My guild who had followed the game for years in development was soooo pissed off they immediately disbanded and quit.
4. two part lie -
A. The Combat upgrade (curb) was top priority - Remember how SOE told us over and over again that the CURB was its number 1 focus. It would be first to get completed over the JTL expansion.
B. There were two separate teams working on JTL and the CURB.
We later learn both are lies. JTL gets pushed over the combat fixes AND we find out the CURB team has been merged with the JTL team. Whats really insulting is SOE goes on a PR campaign and tells the public that we players demanded JTL first. Another fat lie as every poll posted strongly stated we wanted the CURB first.
5. Combat Revamp - whatever you want to call it, this was meant as a reward for the vets who stayed around and played a broken game. Talk about a slap in the face when SOE announces the CU...a system as the devs told me at Celebration 3 was meant to "have a more broad appeal". This was SOE's 1st attempt at screwing over its current community for the wow crowd. All the promised fixes never happened. The armorsmith rep quit and was banned after he started a massive protest over changes they never asked for. In fact the CU brings in many more bugs than it fixes and never balanced anything.
6. The CU is here to stay - Smedley comes and makes his first post on swg forums asking for calm and patience. He states that in 6 months the cu will be working as intended so give them time to make things right. FAT LIE...during that time the NGE is either in design stages or already being worked on.
7. FRS - CU disables the end-game for jedi, our force ranking system. SOE tells us its being worked on. Later they state its al most done and just awaits final approval from LA. Of course we learn there wont ever be a FRS system and the nerfs we've been getting oover the past 6 months were done on purpose to weaken jedi into a regular class. For me personally, this is one of the more disgusting lies as it was obviously done to keep us jedi players paying.
8. Jabba Palace disappears - The last patch before the NGE garbage makes Jabba's palace completely disappear. SOE acts surprised and promises a fix is coming..another fat lie as we learn why after the nge hits. Jabba's palace was taken out to implement th new nge quests.
9. village breaks - Same patch breaks the village and the old man stops visiting people. SOE again lies to cover its tracks and tells us its being looked at. Of course it was just a cover for the nge.
10. Expansion - SOE presells an expansion with several promised features. One desired item is a creature handler necklace that will allow for the taming of higher lvl pets. Im not sure if that necklace was ever found but it didnt matter because 1 stinkin day after the nge launched Torres of LA announces the revamp of the game and removal of over 24 professions.
11. starter kit - SOE tells us the starter kit is an eroneous listing and will be removed. They deny the rumors of impending changes.
12. SOE tells us fixes will be faster. SOE says the whole reason behind the nge was to make balancing the game easier and would allow for faster publish fixes. In fact, it has slowed the game down to a crawl as publishes now seem to come every 4 months as opposed to almost monthly before the nge.
13. smuggler revamp - this one could have its own page on broken promises and lies.
14. Capitol ships - a dev at a fanfest shows the players capitol ships he has been working on. Later on SOE tells (months and months later) that it was just a dev fooling around with his laptop and this was never being considered. Of course SOE could have tol the players this months earlier rather than ignore the posts asking for more information. To flyboys, the capitol ship dream was their FRS system...ie end-game content they so very much wanted. It didnt hurt SOE to once again lie a little and let people keep paying while they waited for features that would never ever happen.
15. profession revamps - ranger comes to my mind foremost because my alt was a master ranger for years. It was painful to see rangers slowly dwindling in numbers as the profession remained broken forever. I still recall one of the camo kits (i think it was for Lok) required a type of meat to contruct, only problem was that meat didnt even exist ! And the final tease, SOE says ranger is the next revamp coming in the next publish...oops the next publish turned out to be the NGE.
Then there were the professions that got sorely needed revamps weeks before the nge hit. Why did SOE even bother to revamp squad leader if they were going to turn around and remove the profession entirely a few weeks later ? Maybe it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.
16. Broken quests - How many times did SOE tell us a fix was in the works and it either never came or it took a year to do. And even when they finally did fix something like the Hermit quests, they turn right around and re-break them weeks later. My personal pet peeve for broken quests was the ones at the gungan sacred place. It pissed me off that not only were the quests incomplete, one of the npc's chat bubble was blank ! How tough would it have been to code in some simple words ? These quests were broken in beta, remained busted through launch right up to the nge.
The NGE broke several old quests as well. When I tried the 21 day free trial I started the krayt skull quests, some of my favorites with a great storyline. I got to the last part where I needed to talk to Darklighter only to my surprise he has no chat option. The NGE is 1 year old and Im assuming this quest remains broken, pathetic.
17. 6 month promises - Smedley has repeatedly made the 6 month promise for fixes. His very 1st post following the CU debacle asked the players to give SOE 6 months to get things fully working. He then makes the same promise after the NGE launches, needing 6 more months. Ironically, the post after nge is almost identical to the cu one (asking for time to fix things) and yet somehow the gullible desperate players buy into it AGAIN. Later SOE promises major revamps to each profession each coming within a month or two o each other. Later after MONTHS of no publishes and silence (the swg forums were literally rioting), SOE announces yet ANOTHER series of profession revamps. Typically, the pathetic player base thanks SOE devs in posts for answering their concerns. A year into the NGE, it remains broken, unfinished, with no end in site.
18. Item Conversion - Recall that the players were very concerned over losing their gear with the coming CU. We were repeatedly told that everything would convert properly. If you had an exceptional weapon with amazing stats, it would convert to an equal type of weapon for the CU. They were full of crap though and not only did our exceptional weapons and armor NOT convert properly, in many cases we now couldnt even equip them anymore !!!
CA's and AA's didnt convert because SOE took out several stats like dizzy, knockdown, the poison and disease resists, etc. Players that spent years and millions of credits to collect were overnight ruined. The final insult in classic SOE fashion, SOE adds in melee def and ranged def clothing that tailors can craft. They didnt even bother to take into account the thousands of players who spent their credits by the millions to get these things as ca/aa drops. A +12 melee def tape would possibly sell for 15-20 million, 1 day after the cu and a player now can buy a shirt with +17 melee AND ranged defense !!! So much for really being concerned with ca/aa conversions.
RIS Armor - Not only did the conversion for this armor become crap, it also got very common. I and some friends of mine were the few around who had even had any ris armor. Before the revamps, RIS armor was something one could try and get as a trophy to their hard work and dedication. Plus it took real skill to get. You had to know where the components dropped. You had to know spawn rates. You had to know where to find the giant dune kimos. You had to find addon components like shards to boost the completed armor's stats. In essence, it was a lot of hard work for players that yet again was totally tossed out the door. My ris helmet once had offers of 15 million credits, suddenly its for sale on vendors for 15k bleh.
BE Tissues - nge takes out bio-engineers and their tissues that make chef foods better. Now something that was once extremely common is the rarest most sought after item by crafters. And since food is a consumable, eventually there will be no more bio tissues around.
The theme here of course is SOE didnt give a damn about how their revamps would hurt or help their CURRENT community. I seriously doubt based on the evidence that they even looked at the changes, much less tried to ensure the conversion wouldnt screw us.
19. pearl drops - sometime into the cu pearl drops got really messed up. At first, over a weekend flawless and premium pearls are dropping like crazy and not just off krayts. Soon SOE hotpatches a "fix" in to correct whatever they were trying to fix before and the pearls stop dropping. Now premiums and flawless dont drop anymore. SOE responds to player concerns by telling them its working as intended. Later they admit there "might" be a problem but there were other things more important to fix. SOE lies and promises its being looked into.
According to my source, the pearl drops were broken or gated on purpose. This was done to remove the elite power items so jedi could be better balanced for the nge. I hear sometime after the nge the premium pearls were added back in but flawless never came back.
20. Gating content - According to a source who wrote a letter to CBS newsbag, SOE purposely gates its content to finish it. In other words, SOE breaks something to hide the fact that it remains unfinished. Why would SOE do this ? Well according to this person, it was done to basically use player subscription fees to pay for the finished development of that content. This source reported that this was done repeatedly for EQ1 expansions. Devs would then lie on the forums claiming that a fix was being worked on when in fact it was busted on purpose.
This of course is outrageous but not unexpected by SOE. To take subscriber money and finish something that the money from the expansion was already supposed to have paid for is unforgivable. Smedley responded on some other site he posts on that this was a fabrication and SOE had (allow me to quote) never once released an unfinished product to the public LOL. This same person later admits the nge is unfinished...oh and the CU is unfinished...my oh my how the lies grow.
It was Tiggs. She kept repeating the claim until about a week before the announcement. She also claimed that the retail sites had been contacted by SOE to correct the listings. As the community manager for the game, she was right out front in the lying to the customers department during the run-up to the NGE. It is the main reason I get annoyed by all the folks who seem to want to lionize her for somehow standing up for the players, even though she did no such thing.
It was Tiggs. She kept repeating the claim until about a week before the announcement. She also claimed that the retail sites had been contacted by SOE to correct the listings. As the community manager for the game, she was right out front in the lying to the customers department during the run-up to the NGE. It is the main reason I get annoyed by all the folks who seem to want to lionize her for somehow standing up for the players, even though she did no such thing.
you can't really demonize her either. It was her job and she probably didn't know how far SOE was going to push her. And she left with the launch of NGE which may or may not be an expression of her disdain for what SOE made her do in order to provide for her family.
Also, I haven't heard any complaining about her in any of her subsequent jobs as far as being a bold faced liar, so it might just be a symptom of SOE in this case.
OMG I remember that, I thought that was one of the stupidest coverups the devs did, wasn't it Thunderheart that said it was a mistaken listing?
It was Tiggs. She kept repeating the claim until about a week before the announcement. She also claimed that the retail sites had been contacted by SOE to correct the listings. As the community manager for the game, she was right out front in the lying to the customers department during the run-up to the NGE. It is the main reason I get annoyed by all the folks who seem to want to lionize her for somehow standing up for the players, even though she did no such thing.
you can't really demonize her either. It was her job and she probably didn't know how far SOE was going to push her. And she left with the launch of NGE which may or may not be an expression of her disdain for what SOE made her do in order to provide for her family.
Also, I haven't heard any complaining about her in any of her subsequent jobs as far as being a bold faced liar, so it might just be a symptom of SOE in this case.
I think that it was a little of both. Its like being a presidential spokesperson, you are told what to say but you have to be a good liar to pull it off.
This is a very nice little visual aid. It outlines every publish/chapter/patch of hte game with dates.
Very handy reference.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
OMG I remember that, I thought that was one of the stupidest coverups the devs did, wasn't it Thunderheart that said it was a mistaken listing?
It was Tiggs. She kept repeating the claim until about a week before the announcement. She also claimed that the retail sites had been contacted by SOE to correct the listings. As the community manager for the game, she was right out front in the lying to the customers department during the run-up to the NGE. It is the main reason I get annoyed by all the folks who seem to want to lionize her for somehow standing up for the players, even though she did no such thing.
you can't really demonize her either. It was her job and she probably didn't know how far SOE was going to push her. And she left with the launch of NGE which may or may not be an expression of her disdain for what SOE made her do in order to provide for her family.
Also, I haven't heard any complaining about her in any of her subsequent jobs as far as being a bold faced liar, so it might just be a symptom of SOE in this case.
I get what you're saying, but my point is that many folks have tried to turn her into something she wasn't. She didn't stand up for the players in any public way, and there is no indication that she did anything other than follow the company line non-publicly. The jist seems to be that since she was fired by SOE (she didn't leave voluntarily, which she mentioned on her blog), that she somehow mush have taken a stand on the players behalf. That just didn't happen, and has been mainly based on a post by a player that has been falsely attributed to her.
She was in the trenches with the rest of the folks at SOE when the NGE rumors started floating around. I don't think she has worked for any company that was attempting to do something underhanded to their customers since leaving SOE, so we can't really judge why she did the things she did at SOE by how she did her job at other companies later on.
My basic point was that she was the primary person pushing the Starter Kit being a false listing and that the other rumors of the NGE were outrageous falsehoods. I am not deamonizing her, I'm just pointing out that she gets a lot of adulation for doing something she didn't do.
It was Tiggs. She kept repeating the claim until about a week before the announcement. She also claimed that the retail sites had been contacted by SOE to correct the listings. As the community manager for the game, she was right out front in the lying to the customers department during the run-up to the NGE. It is the main reason I get annoyed by all the folks who seem to want to lionize her for somehow standing up for the players, even though she did no such thing.
you can't really demonize her either. It was her job and she probably didn't know how far SOE was going to push her. And she left with the launch of NGE which may or may not be an expression of her disdain for what SOE made her do in order to provide for her family.
Also, I haven't heard any complaining about her in any of her subsequent jobs as far as being a bold faced liar, so it might just be a symptom of SOE in this case.
I get what you're saying, but my point is that many folks have tried to turn her into something she wasn't. She didn't stand up for the players in any public way, and there is no indication that she did anything other than follow the company line non-publicly. The jist seems to be that since she was fired by SOE (she didn't leave voluntarily, which she mentioned on her blog), that she somehow mush have taken a stand on the players behalf. That just didn't happen, and has been mainly based on a post by a player that has been falsely attributed to her.
She was in the trenches with the rest of the folks at SOE when the NGE rumors started floating around. I don't think she has worked for any company that was attempting to do something underhanded to their customers since leaving SOE, so we can't really judge why she did the things she did at SOE by how she did her job at other companies later on.
My basic point was that she was the primary person pushing the Starter Kit being a false listing and that the other rumors of the NGE were outrageous falsehoods. I am not deamonizing her, I'm just pointing out that she gets a lot of adulation for doing something she didn't do.
I know what you mean and I agree. I just hope people don't judge her by what she was most likely forced to say. I don't have any bad memories of her otherwise during swg and I had the opportunity to chat with her during lotro alpha and she was really nice and helpful.
Tiggs was ok, at least she actually played..yes it's true she did nothing but some people like to jockhang on a company or the workers therin. she pissed me off a few times, she was no hero that's for sure.
here is a video which is mostly true. The ending tries to fluff the game up though.
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/38466.html
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
I had a very interesting experience today, and was going to start a thread on it, but I think it fits in perfectly here.
I'm a college professor, and two of my students were talking about MMO's. I chimed in saying, "I'm looking forward to the Star Trek game."
One student thought I said "StarWars game." He then began to explain the entire history of SWG from launch until present. He wanted to spare me a bad experience. I can't help thinking, "it's too late for me my son." lol.
Anyways, I found this to be an interesting experience. Here was a nice kid, with no corporate interest, and no reason to spin anything. He wasn't trying to talk me into playing his game either. He just told me the truth from his perspective about a nasty MMO. His story matches the chronology that Obee shared.
If you add Obee's list of events, and Admriker's list of lies, and the stuff about the expansion, you have a really good idea of why people avoid this mess.
What I find interesting is that the usual band of fanbois and viral marketers can't find fault with anything in either list.
It was Tiggs. She kept repeating the claim until about a week before the announcement. She also claimed that the retail sites had been contacted by SOE to correct the listings. As the community manager for the game, she was right out front in the lying to the customers department during the run-up to the NGE. It is the main reason I get annoyed by all the folks who seem to want to lionize her for somehow standing up for the players, even though she did no such thing.
Tiggs didn't know anything about the NGE, that's the reason why she kept locking and saying "stop spreading false rumors" on the NGE leak threads, she left very promptly when the NGE went live.