I would say that its not deliberate. Rather, it acts with the disregard that a company which assumes no matter what the majority will buy from their overall company would display. Has this helped them? No. Have they been caught in several scandals due to this disregard that its consumerbase views as disrespect? Yes.
They simply are not a model company for customer service and have yet to catch up to what several other companies are doing after learning the same lesson. See PC Mag's latest issue about big companies turning their reputation around with better customer service and focusing on customer satisfaction.
And that word "ignorant"... you need to breakdown the issue of what is causing the perceived disrespect before you go about adding that the view as ignorant. I reserve the word ignorant for such things as assuming your customerbase wouldn't notice rootkits...
$OE wouldn't intentionally disrespect its customers? They knew fully well that they would aliemate the playerbase when the NGE went live, and have admitted so. If throwing your playerbase away in favor of a mythical one (that never materialized) isn't disrespect, what is? Continued bad decisions and unwanted changes that are made based on non-customer input is respect? A company that truly values and respects their customers would not have the losses and bad reputation $OE continues to have to this day.
OK I have to comment in on this as I have 5 years of my life tied up in SWG. NGE was a slap in the face. It took what some of us folks who were actually holo-grind jedi, and that was not easy. Not to mention the other Jeid' folks who spent tons of hours getting xp for the village. And yanked all that away just to give the children all an new light saber without having to do nothing,
We went from a system to where you could mix and match over 64 different professions to 9. Thus taking a lot of custimazation away from folks.
The new combat system still suck.s.
The server population got so bad they had to do server merges. I admit i resubed up just to move my bunker and the wifes bunker over to a new server.
I keep hearing how great things are, but Honestly its not the game that I started with. The CU just about killed it and we all learned how to play again. However this new thing called the NGE is just really to bad, I would say about 80% of the player base left at that point, the ones that stayed are hard core and want Star Wars no matter what the cost.
Now to answer what some have said about SOE misrepresenting the facts. We were all sold the mustifar expansion. We started seeing tell tell signs that the game was fixing to go to console as there was a prima book being sold on amazon. We were told time after time for the devs for about 3 weeks that nothing was going on. Then all the sudden we heaar about the NGE and it was forced on us, right after buying the expansion for mustifar. So yes SOE lies, and they new what they were doing before hand.
Originally posted by someforumguy So you are basically agreeing with me. My examples were only to show that the OP's figures were a wild guess in the case of an unchanged preNGE SWG. SOE obviously lost money with NGE, but how much is just impossible to determine by only looking at SWG. And about the SOE disrespecting customers. You talk as if its deliberate. No commercial company scares customers away deliberately. It was just a very stupid mistake. Its ignorant to think in terms of respect when dealing with a commercial company.
Yes I agree there is a lot of speculation, some of it educated and some of it lacking information to lend credibility to it. It is possible to agree with the merits of someones idea, but at the same time think their conclusion is incorrect or misses some finer points. For example, seeing that the combat upgrade was actually increasing populations it is easier to believe that the game would have remained healthy if the NGE had not happened. While it is speculation all known evidence points to that as being the likely outcome as long as something major didn't change the game.
When you say it is ingorant to think soe behaves in a manner of purposeful disrespectful to their customers you would be wrong.
Here is a quote from the VP of SOE directly about how they "planned" the NGE.
John Blakely, SOE VP of Development, told the Post, "We knew we were going to sacrifice some players ... [but] as a Star Wars license, we should do a lot better than we have been doing."
Yes soe does in fact plan to do things that will screw their customers, because they are always looking at the potential revenue and not their customers best interests. The only mistake they made was speculating how many people they would lose. Soe made these changes without the slightest of input from their customers. That wasn't a mistake, just like it wasn't with station exchange, station cash or any number of their other money grabs they thrust unnannounced on the players. They simply do not take their customers opinions into account when doing these things and the do it intentionally. The NGE was not some accident that was a simple mistake. It was a deliberate and calculated change. It was done for the single fact that soe wanted more money and they thought the best way to do it was to redesign the entire game and market it to a completely different audience. Again, no accident and very deliberate.
When a company hides their actions from their customer base and factors in that those actions are going to SACRIFICE some of those customers, then yes it is a fact that they do these things deliberately and it is very disrespectful to their customers.
Trust me, if the nge was a raging success then you bet your ass soe would be running full steam to all their games to revamp them to some new formula. Only then people would say "its good business" or something equally rediculous that attempt to hide the treatment of players. The only reason people say it was a mistake was because it failed. That doesn't change the HOW of those actions at all.
Dude doesn't sound shrill to me, or embarassed. Also, why can you decide that the debate is over and you win? lol Sounds like a conflict of interest to me.
He makes a very straightforward case that SOE's bad management decisions cost them revenue. That's it, very simple, and very accurate.
They may try to recover this loss by laying off staff, using interns, spending next to nothing on development or QA. They may also try to recover it by getting people to do free marketting for them, and by fleecing people with their loot item gamble in the TCG.
All of this, however, is damage control. Why do they have to work so hard to cut costs, cut staff etc.? Because their poor management decisions lost them a substantial amount of revenue. This is revenue that was handed back to people with the expansion refund. This was revenue that even you told me was handed back to people in the form of subscription refunds. This was revenue that they would have earned if the game's reputation wasn't in the toilet.
His logic is fine, you just don't seem to want to acknowledge what he's actually saying. Ask anyone in management or accounting if driving away customers and reducing revenue is good for business. By your logic, Home Depot could lose most of their customers by being idiots, and then claim a victory by opening a lemonade stand and making a small profit.
ArchAngel, you are one of the more intelligent and original thinkers here. I'm surprised you do not see the OP is offering nothing new to this tired discussion, using incomplete, simplistic logic and lazy reasoning, to support a conclusion that is already codified in this venue. My goal was only to point out the weakness of the position in hopes he'll do some real thinking and add something new and original to strengthen his lacking argument. This is why SWG vets are increasingly viewed as whiny 12 year olds. But I guess lazy is perfectly acceptable as long as it results in more venom at SOE.
I highlighted in your post what I think is the salient point to be pursued. We can speculate until vampires return to the world about how much money SOE lost and never be able to settle anything. What should be shown is how the NGE damaged SOEs reputation and how that will affect them going forward. I've read posts were you begin those discussions. That's the avenue any honest, insightful person interested in the future of MMOs and preventing another NGE would take, not grabbing the same speculative numbers out of the air and running them through the 5th grade math machine. We've already done that.
Thx Tman, and thanks for the insight regarding subscription refunds way back when, if you remember ^_^. I think the reputation issue is important, and I honestly don't understand why SOE seems to abuse their rep so badly.
I also get what the OP is trying to convey, I think. While numbers can only be conjecture, and stir up controversy (which may make for an entertaining thread at least lol), the essence of his point seemed to be captured in the lemonade stand analogy. That's my attempt to paraphrase his meaning anyways . I think there' something to that, tbh, but wouldn't venture to put dollar values to the investment versus revenue columns in a monster organization like SOE. I just don't have access to all the complex interactions involved with that. Sometimes ignorance is bliss lol. I really wouldn't want to know all that; I think it would hurt my head :P.
You are kidding right? Really? Honestly? You don't think the NGE caused people to leave? I thought the mass exodus was common knowledge, are the fans trying to even cover that up now??? Only factual basis I need is that my server was as healthy as could be before the NGE, and just a few months after was a ghost town.
Every change causes people to leave MMOs. Even good ones. Good changes just bring in more people or bring more people back. It's more of a case that you have no evidence they wouldn't have left anyway. Or that more people wouldn't have left if there were no NGE or that SWG wouldn't have closed down entirely if there hadn't been an NGE. Basically you're pulling numbers out of your behind and making specific claims about them.You're firmly in "what if" territory and that's no place to be making hard calculations.
In my opinion SWG wasn't healthy before NGE. It was salvageable it wasn't healthy.
If you don't think SWG was healthy before the NGE then you are delusional from the aftermath of WoW. SWG had a very respectable number of subscribers for the pre-WoW era it was created in. In fact, even in the post-WoW era, how many pay to play games have consistently matched or bettered the 200k SWG had? WoW, Eve, Lineage I & II, .... ? Just because it doesn't have millions of subscribers doesn't mean it wasn't successful, and doesn't mean it isn't healthy.
Lets do a little bit of math just for fun and see how much the NGE has really cost SOE over the years. THIS IS ONLY ESTIMATING LOST MONEY FROM SUBSCRIPTION INCOME ONLY Now, the magic number floating around is 200k subscribers at the time of the NGE. We will take a low ball estimate of 175k for the calculations sake(to account for loss of subscribers over time, ect) Now, 175k x $15 a month x 38 months(for the roughly 3 years since the NGE ) = $99,750,000 of subscription money over 3 years had the CU stayed in the game. Now, lets take a rather high estimation for the NGE population of 50k subscribers over the course of it's existence.(Judging by the fact that less than 1/4 of the old servers actually have a decent population, and the vets have been able to play for free for like half the year for the last 3 years, it's probably less then this but whatever). 50k x $15 x 38 months = $28,500,000.
Subtract $28,500,000 from $99,750,000 and....
The NGE has cost SOE a total of $71,250,000. Yes, according to my estimations, the NGE has cost SOE over 71 million dollars. An astonishing business move by Mr. Smedley. Well, that was fun.
It's a good thing Sony is a profitable company they can easily afford to miss such a large sum of money lost due to the complete utter drooling moron they hired as CEO for SOE oh wait...............
Comments
I would say that its not deliberate. Rather, it acts with the disregard that a company which assumes no matter what the majority will buy from their overall company would display. Has this helped them? No. Have they been caught in several scandals due to this disregard that its consumerbase views as disrespect? Yes.
They simply are not a model company for customer service and have yet to catch up to what several other companies are doing after learning the same lesson. See PC Mag's latest issue about big companies turning their reputation around with better customer service and focusing on customer satisfaction.
And that word "ignorant"... you need to breakdown the issue of what is causing the perceived disrespect before you go about adding that the view as ignorant. I reserve the word ignorant for such things as assuming your customerbase wouldn't notice rootkits...
$OE wouldn't intentionally disrespect its customers? They knew fully well that they would aliemate the playerbase when the NGE went live, and have admitted so. If throwing your playerbase away in favor of a mythical one (that never materialized) isn't disrespect, what is? Continued bad decisions and unwanted changes that are made based on non-customer input is respect? A company that truly values and respects their customers would not have the losses and bad reputation $OE continues to have to this day.
OK I have to comment in on this as I have 5 years of my life tied up in SWG. NGE was a slap in the face. It took what some of us folks who were actually holo-grind jedi, and that was not easy. Not to mention the other Jeid' folks who spent tons of hours getting xp for the village. And yanked all that away just to give the children all an new light saber without having to do nothing,
We went from a system to where you could mix and match over 64 different professions to 9. Thus taking a lot of custimazation away from folks.
The new combat system still suck.s.
The server population got so bad they had to do server merges. I admit i resubed up just to move my bunker and the wifes bunker over to a new server.
I keep hearing how great things are, but Honestly its not the game that I started with. The CU just about killed it and we all learned how to play again. However this new thing called the NGE is just really to bad, I would say about 80% of the player base left at that point, the ones that stayed are hard core and want Star Wars no matter what the cost.
Now to answer what some have said about SOE misrepresenting the facts. We were all sold the mustifar expansion. We started seeing tell tell signs that the game was fixing to go to console as there was a prima book being sold on amazon. We were told time after time for the devs for about 3 weeks that nothing was going on. Then all the sudden we heaar about the NGE and it was forced on us, right after buying the expansion for mustifar. So yes SOE lies, and they new what they were doing before hand.
Yes I agree there is a lot of speculation, some of it educated and some of it lacking information to lend credibility to it. It is possible to agree with the merits of someones idea, but at the same time think their conclusion is incorrect or misses some finer points. For example, seeing that the combat upgrade was actually increasing populations it is easier to believe that the game would have remained healthy if the NGE had not happened. While it is speculation all known evidence points to that as being the likely outcome as long as something major didn't change the game.
When you say it is ingorant to think soe behaves in a manner of purposeful disrespectful to their customers you would be wrong.
Here is a quote from the VP of SOE directly about how they "planned" the NGE.
John Blakely, SOE VP of Development, told the Post, "We knew we were going to sacrifice some players ... [but] as a Star Wars license, we should do a lot better than we have been doing."
www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_101/560-Blowing-Up-Galaxies.2
Yes soe does in fact plan to do things that will screw their customers, because they are always looking at the potential revenue and not their customers best interests. The only mistake they made was speculating how many people they would lose. Soe made these changes without the slightest of input from their customers. That wasn't a mistake, just like it wasn't with station exchange, station cash or any number of their other money grabs they thrust unnannounced on the players. They simply do not take their customers opinions into account when doing these things and the do it intentionally. The NGE was not some accident that was a simple mistake. It was a deliberate and calculated change. It was done for the single fact that soe wanted more money and they thought the best way to do it was to redesign the entire game and market it to a completely different audience. Again, no accident and very deliberate.
When a company hides their actions from their customer base and factors in that those actions are going to SACRIFICE some of those customers, then yes it is a fact that they do these things deliberately and it is very disrespectful to their customers.
Trust me, if the nge was a raging success then you bet your ass soe would be running full steam to all their games to revamp them to some new formula. Only then people would say "its good business" or something equally rediculous that attempt to hide the treatment of players. The only reason people say it was a mistake was because it failed. That doesn't change the HOW of those actions at all.
Dude doesn't sound shrill to me, or embarassed. Also, why can you decide that the debate is over and you win? lol Sounds like a conflict of interest to me.
He makes a very straightforward case that SOE's bad management decisions cost them revenue. That's it, very simple, and very accurate.
They may try to recover this loss by laying off staff, using interns, spending next to nothing on development or QA. They may also try to recover it by getting people to do free marketting for them, and by fleecing people with their loot item gamble in the TCG.
All of this, however, is damage control. Why do they have to work so hard to cut costs, cut staff etc.? Because their poor management decisions lost them a substantial amount of revenue. This is revenue that was handed back to people with the expansion refund. This was revenue that even you told me was handed back to people in the form of subscription refunds. This was revenue that they would have earned if the game's reputation wasn't in the toilet.
His logic is fine, you just don't seem to want to acknowledge what he's actually saying. Ask anyone in management or accounting if driving away customers and reducing revenue is good for business. By your logic, Home Depot could lose most of their customers by being idiots, and then claim a victory by opening a lemonade stand and making a small profit.
ArchAngel, you are one of the more intelligent and original thinkers here. I'm surprised you do not see the OP is offering nothing new to this tired discussion, using incomplete, simplistic logic and lazy reasoning, to support a conclusion that is already codified in this venue. My goal was only to point out the weakness of the position in hopes he'll do some real thinking and add something new and original to strengthen his lacking argument. This is why SWG vets are increasingly viewed as whiny 12 year olds. But I guess lazy is perfectly acceptable as long as it results in more venom at SOE.
I highlighted in your post what I think is the salient point to be pursued. We can speculate until vampires return to the world about how much money SOE lost and never be able to settle anything. What should be shown is how the NGE damaged SOEs reputation and how that will affect them going forward. I've read posts were you begin those discussions. That's the avenue any honest, insightful person interested in the future of MMOs and preventing another NGE would take, not grabbing the same speculative numbers out of the air and running them through the 5th grade math machine. We've already done that.
Thx Tman, and thanks for the insight regarding subscription refunds way back when, if you remember ^_^. I think the reputation issue is important, and I honestly don't understand why SOE seems to abuse their rep so badly.
I also get what the OP is trying to convey, I think. While numbers can only be conjecture, and stir up controversy (which may make for an entertaining thread at least lol), the essence of his point seemed to be captured in the lemonade stand analogy. That's my attempt to paraphrase his meaning anyways
. I think there' something to that, tbh, but wouldn't venture to put dollar values to the investment versus revenue columns in a monster organization like SOE. I just don't have access to all the complex interactions involved with that. Sometimes ignorance is bliss lol. I really wouldn't want to know all that; I think it would hurt my head :P.
Every change causes people to leave MMOs. Even good ones. Good changes just bring in more people or bring more people back. It's more of a case that you have no evidence they wouldn't have left anyway. Or that more people wouldn't have left if there were no NGE or that SWG wouldn't have closed down entirely if there hadn't been an NGE. Basically you're pulling numbers out of your behind and making specific claims about them.You're firmly in "what if" territory and that's no place to be making hard calculations.
In my opinion SWG wasn't healthy before NGE. It was salvageable it wasn't healthy.
If you don't think SWG was healthy before the NGE then you are delusional from the aftermath of WoW. SWG had a very respectable number of subscribers for the pre-WoW era it was created in. In fact, even in the post-WoW era, how many pay to play games have consistently matched or bettered the 200k SWG had? WoW, Eve, Lineage I & II, .... ? Just because it doesn't have millions of subscribers doesn't mean it wasn't successful, and doesn't mean it isn't healthy.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
Lol, Eve.
It's a good thing Sony is a profitable company they can easily afford to miss such a large sum of money lost due to the complete utter drooling moron they hired as CEO for SOE oh wait...............
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