WoW killed SWG. Beat it like a red headed step child.
In an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of players, Sony implemented the NGE, but that just made things worse.
No, people were leaving SWG because SOE was mis-managing the game. Instead of fixing bugs, and addressing issues, they were making things worse with every patch.
SWG was losing subs because of SOE, not through any real fault of the game itself.
The NGE wasn't designed as a way to "stop the hemorrhaging of players", it was designed to attract a whole NEW audience, at the cost of the current one. SOE figured they would attract SO many new players who enjoyed the kind of instant-gratification gaming that WoW and games like it delivered....that discarding it's current player base would be a worthwhile trade-off.
Back in 2003, SWG was on the top of my highly anticpated MMORPG list.. I found the idea of SWG simply awesome.. It was going to be my next awesome MMO fix after EQ lost it's flavor for me.. The game could have been legendary, but never did live up to my expectations at release.. Granted, I only played for about 3 weeks at launch, due to the game being broken and many of the great ideas were not close to being implemented...
I kinda wish I went back a year later when the game had much of what should have been implemented at launch.. But a year later I was playing EQ2, then switched to WoW in early 2005... After WoW became boring, I gave up on MMO's for a while and eventually found myself back in EQ2 a few more times.. Then played a bunch of bad rollercoaster MMO's like AoC and WAR which were just done so bad..
Anyway, to answer your question OP, yes I would play OLD SWG before and after WoW era If the game never went through with the NGE and If space combat among other awesome features were implemented in 2003...
Heck, even now I sometimes think of playing the game because tehre was just so much cool stuff I missed out on.. But then when common sense brings me back to reality, I simply think of how boring and a waste of time it would be to play a game that is on life support with like 10k subs left who are all gods in the game.. Not only that, I wouldn't forgive myself If I paid money for a product that the devs have even given up on..
It's a shame because I don't think TOR will be a very good sandbox MMORPG since Bioware stated it will be "story based" and pretty much most of the game will be like playing a over glorified platform rpg with some mmorpg elements... SWG had so much promise and potential but had poor dev and management team working on it...
Rallithon Oakthornn (Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
WoW killed SWG. Beat it like a red headed step child.
In an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of players, Sony implemented the NGE, but that just made things worse.
No, people were leaving SWG because SOE was mis-managing the game. Instead of fixing bugs, and addressing issues, they were making things worse with every patch.
SWG was losing subs because of SOE, not through any real fault of the game itself.
The NGE wasn't designed as a way to "stop the hemorrhaging of players", it was designed to attract a whole NEW audience, at the cost of the current one. SOE figured they would attract SO many new players who enjoyed the kind of instant-gratification gaming that WoW and games like it delivered....that discarding it's current player base would be a worthwhile trade-off.
Absolute EPIC friggin' FAIL.
No, he's right. Wow beat the crap out of SWG. I left when wow came out like so many others. I saw at least 4-5 big time swg guilds from sunrunner go to stormreaver, and that's but a small sample of all the people that left swg for wow. SOE probably lost at least 50% of their playerbase just on the first week wow launched. See, wow was smart. wow had a nice big old public beta and everyone saw how great that game was going to be before it was released. Therefore, people didn't leave swg for a game they didn't know anything about. They left swg because they knew wow was gonna kick ass cause they already played it.
Of course, most of those people left wow in even quicker time than swg once they realized just how shallow wow really was, but that's a different topic.
Your poll is stupid. Two fanatical viewpoints as a poll doesn't make any sense. SWG also held pretty steady population from release to two years after (which is when wow was released), so not only does your poll make no sense it's also ignorant of the facts.
I beta tested SWG and played for about 9 months after launch. There were a lot of cool things about it, and some hugely uncool things. On balance I liked it and would play original SWG again or a game similar to it, if they fixed a few things - the bogus path to Jedi by grinding professions being one of them.
No, I wouldn't. I bought SWG on release and moved from EQ to SWG. Played for a couple months and then went back to EQ. SWG could of been a great game, but it was riddled with bugs and performance issues. There is no denying it had some wonderful ideas, but all in all it was horrible at implementing those ideas.
If "old" SWG did come back it would obviously get some people back for nostalga(sp?) purposes. However, that would quickly wear off and everyone will realize the bugs and other design problems SWG had.
The ugly truth is, people expectations are considerably higher than back in the early 2000's. MMOs back then were expected to be buggy, and not perform perfectly. EQ set the stage for this, and SWG was a bit worse than everyone expected with bugs and very few bugs (except for the critical bugs dupes, crashes) were ever fixed.
WoW completely changed this expectation. I hate WoW, its cartoonish characters, its lore, and pretty much everything about it. Yet, I've played the MMO in the past. Why? because its gameplay and design is so flawless.
What I think everyone here is wanting and has been searching for the better part of a decade is a polished MMO that ISN'T WoW or WoW clone! Something that has fresh ideas like SWG and with the polish of WoW... I've been searching for this a very long time, and am about to give up hope. I've bought well over 10 MMOs post-WoW and have been disappointed with every one of them.
One day some company will make a great MMO with fresh ideas and tons of polish.... I just don't think i'll be alive to play it. (I'm 28 now)
What does WoW have to do with SWG? Is SWG a WoW clone now? Please please tell me people blame the CU and NGE on WoW. Please please....
Yes, SOE attempted to turn SWG into a wow clone with the nge. The CU was in motion well before wow was released so the cu not so much.
Actually WOW was released 6 months before CU took place....
The CURB was not the CU. The CURB - Combat Update and ReBalance - was in the works well before the release of WoW. Around January '05 there was a radical change of direction, and descriptions of the upcoming changes abruptly ceased; the Friday Features describing those changes have since vanished down SOE's memory hole. Late Feb'05 into March'05, we started to hear some of the features in the upcoming CU, and it resembled the CURB only in rough outline. The biggest and IMHO worst change of the CU was converting SWG into a level-based combat system. It didn't become the bog-standard class-and-level system (like everthing else on the market) until NGE.
So SWG was losing 10 000 subs a day huh? For how long?
It's easy to justify the changes made to SWG by taking those numbers at face value, but in reality you have to look more closely at the implications of SoE's claim. For example is SoE claiming it's 10K a day from June '03 to Nov '05? That would make it approximately 7 900 000 subs, which sounds highly unrealistic to me. Or was it 10K a day for the 2 weeks preceding the NGE making it a much more realistic 140K subs?
Lastly how can we even believe SoE when they made that claim of 10K a day? It's not like they didn't mislead people before.
What does WoW have to do with SWG? Is SWG a WoW clone now? Please please tell me people blame the CU and NGE on WoW. Please please....
Yes, SOE attempted to turn SWG into a wow clone with the nge. The CU was in motion well before wow was released so the cu not so much.
Actually WOW was released 6 months before CU took place....
The CURB was not the CU. The CURB - Combat Update and ReBalance - was in the works well before the release of WoW. Around January '05 there was a radical change of direction, and descriptions of the upcoming changes abruptly ceased; the Friday Features describing those changes have since vanished down SOE's memory hole. Late Feb'05 into March'05, we started to hear some of the features in the upcoming CU, and it resembled the CURB only in rough outline. The biggest and IMHO worst change of the CU was converting SWG into a level-based combat system. It didn't become the bog-standard class-and-level system (like everthing else on the market) until NGE.
CURB or as it was later called CU at the release (end of April 2005) is indeed the same thing. What you are reffering to is a period while it was on test server but official public servers were still running pre-CU SWG until April. I believe some may have left seeing how bad it was on the test server but majority started leaving after CU took place on public servers, in April.
EDIT*
Besides WOW was released in Novemebr 2004 so in any case before CU or CURB was introduced.
No game is perfect, we all know this, we all have experianced this. My actual job I am a Software Support Tech for the Largest LED Digital Display Company.(Trust me, far from a tech freak, I actually went to school for marketing, go figure) Dealing with new releases, upgrading customers software, there are always bugs found, people push things to a direction the software hasn't been tested (because we can't think of all things in a sitting). All customers have their OS set up differently, or different things installed we never thought would effect our software. But we take these bugs, find the cause, and make a fix, which sometimes, causes another bug. It is a never ending cycle.
People are saying "It was so buggy, I wouldnt' go back" I am asking about the game in general, besides the bugs, besides the issues and not the NEW WOWified version, prior to the huge change they made to it, would you play it again? I am wondering, if the things you use to do, the things you enjoyed in the game, would you go back?
I learned from my experiance with games, I will never play when it release. AOC taught me this. Things are so buggy at the beginning, that it ruins the game. So I wait, I wait a few months for a game to at least get some much needed patches and fixes out, then I will try. At that point, I look past the bugs, and hope to have faith a game will improve more.
This is like AION, I didn't play until November some time, tested with a friends account, seemed fun, but I waited longer. I waited until about a month ago. I had fun to a degree, its not my type of game, I don't like being told where to go and what to kill, but thats me. Some people like this, I do not. To me, it seems brainless and gets old. So, I stopped playing. The game has amazing graphics, the character creation is awesome, the world is beautiful, sadly, I got board by lvl 20. I was soon just running around killing things, not doing quests, but knowing, I wouldn't get dittle because the game is designed to follow quests and direction. For those of you who love these games, thats awesome you found something you like, I just wish I could find something I like, and SWG was it, until it was ruined.
So now, I am just another lost MMO Soul like so many others out there.
One of my many Screen shots I found of SWG Thats my character supporting my Nightsister Bracer
Definite 100% Yes to the CU...I LOVED The CU version of SWG...A probable Yes to the Pre-CU though they would have to do something about the Hologrind...I thought that was pretty dumb...
I see lots of people, like myself compair games to SWG. Granted, it was my first MMO ever, made some great life long friends, but then in a blink of an eye, it was gone. All of it. Maybe it was the whole WOW era, or maybe my generation grew up?
I didn't mind you had one character per account, I was such a freak about the game, I had three active accounts to have three charaters on one server, and used my brothers account for one as well. I had my PVP girl, whom was a Riffelman/Doc, I had my Dancer/ID to give my guildies private buffs for PVP battles. I had my Tailor/Crafter on whom I played when I needed a break from PVP and wanted to make cash. I then had my TK/Fencer for my Jedi Hunter.
I liked the fact that, you could know almost all people on your server. At some point you either traded a valuable Item, or created something specifically for them. You may have even killed them in PVP when guilds would declair war on one another and then no matter where you were, you could be attacked at any moment. Or you may have been dancing, to buff them up.
I remember many times, just going out to farm Night Sisters with a few of my friends, to get the OH SO RARE Nightsister Bracer (Which I owned 2, because I am a girl and guys like to give gifts to girl gamers teehee) I remember running off on Naboo to find some AMAZING Place to put my house, to to have an awesome view of a waterfall. I also remember attending "In Game" weddings, was rare but some people really took the RPG serious and loved it.
I liked the fact that I could go to the Cantina and mingle and chat. This game wasn't about who could get to END GAME first, because there was no end game. You had so many combinations that you could be with skills. The options were endless. I had many friends who didn't combat at all, they just ran a store, designed clothes and outfits to wear around when you weren't pvping.
So, if there are any of you who are old SWGers, didn't mind the semi crappy graphics, but loved the game as it was, before the "WOW" craze happened, I would like to know.
I do however blaim the fail of the game on SOE. They took a perfectly good game, tried to make it theme park and ruined it. I think if they did a HUGE Rollback on that game, with a bit of fine tuning, maybe even a different type of server, they would get most if not more then the old subscribers they had before.
I just really want my SWG back
What a bullshit post. SWG when it was first released was more like WOW than it is in present form.
What do you mean by pre-WOW? WOW is an EQ clone with the same crappy combat that that game had. SWG was EQ in space. So both are the same old thing that EQ had done before.
SWG did not change when WOW came out.
SWG actually took a different direction with it's "upgrade".
You really need to understand a bit more about MMOs and there history over the last ten years.
The winter-summer of 2004 IMO was the best time in that game, pvp was very lively and happened everywhere (even just ouside the geo cave or ouside dath sci outpost or at the krayt graveyard, etc) There was so much going on back then, player cities grew and actually required some work to build (unlike today's low city standards) and player faction bases were harder to defend/attack.
There was so much to do back then, practically nothing to do now.
Originally posted by Saorlan SWG did not change when WOW came out. SWG actually took a different direction with it's "upgrade". You really need to understand a bit more about MMOs and there history over the last ten years.
Depends on how you look at it, SWG's population dropped noticeably when WoW came out, JTL came out less than a month after WoW with added emotes, image designer changes, 2 new races, building maintenance cost reduction, etc. To a degree, yes SWG changed.
What a bullshit post. SWG when it was first released was more like WOW than it is in present form.
What do you mean by pre-WOW? WOW is an EQ clone with the same crappy combat that that game had. SWG was EQ in space. So both are the same old thing that EQ had done before.
SWG did not change when WOW came out.
SWG actually took a different direction with it's "upgrade".
You really need to understand a bit more about MMOs and there history over the last ten years.
The CURB was not the CU. The CURB - Combat Update and ReBalance - was in the works well before the release of WoW. Around January '05 there was a radical change of direction, and descriptions of the upcoming changes abruptly ceased; the Friday Features describing those changes have since vanished down SOE's memory hole. Late Feb'05 into March'05, we started to hear some of the features in the upcoming CU, and it resembled the CURB only in rough outline. The biggest and IMHO worst change of the CU was converting SWG into a level-based combat system. It didn't become the bog-standard class-and-level system (like everthing else on the market) until NGE.
CURB or as it was later called CU at the release (end of April 2005) is indeed the same thing. What you are reffering to is a period while it was on test server but official public servers were still running pre-CU SWG until April. I believe some may have left seeing how bad it was on the test server but majority started leaving after CU took place on public servers, in April.
EDIT*
Besides WOW was released in Novemebr 2004 so in any case before CU or CURB was introduced.
No, NOT talking about when the CU was on the test server. (Frequently-seen reaction: "Oh god, PLEASE tell me this is an April Fools Day joke!!") The terminology used by the devs morphed over time, from CURB to CU; in general usage, CU is what we actually got while CURB is used to refer to the earlier plans. When I speak of the CURB, I am speaking of the Friday Features from late '04 thru mid-Jan'05. (As I noted, SOE has wiped those from the official archives in an effort at rewriting history. "Oceana is at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.") The changes described in those FFs were refinements and modifications of the original pre-CU combat system. Then someone, probably the suits, decided that SWG was to be radically altered to bring it more in line with all the other MMOs on the market. The CURB designs were quickly hacked into the CU mess that hit the test server. The rapid, massive evolution of buggy and broken systems that CU underwent on the TC make it clear just what a quick hack that version really was.
I enjoyed SWG and it was also my first mmo but I think alot of these nostalgia posts overlook some things like how incredibly buggy the game was and while I didn't learn the fun of having alts until after I played SWG I rather prefer the ability to make alternates on the same server. I also think SWG could have done with some good old fashioned questing too in addition to the generic "job" terminals that existed everywhere. Star Wars is a rich universe that should have easily been able to incorporAte some engaging quests along with the sandbox elements. That also would have made pulling the wool over peoples eyes a bit easier to handle I think, in my entire SWG play time I pushed for one single goal (since it was designed so that it wasn't easy to do more than one thing) and that was to become a CH and the inherent flaw was that once they NGE'd the game it literally made everything you did prior worthless, there were no memories of engaging quest lines or the like just the months of work you put into acheiving a class that they eliminated in the blink of an eye (though I must admit I actually quit SWG before they got rid of CH).
There were some good things about the original SWG but I am not willing to say that themepark mmo's killed it nor am I willing to say that the design of SWG was better than that of themepark mmo's it was certainly different and for alot of us I know it was new but I think things we saw (like bugs they could never get rid of) really helped push them to NGE the game, I don't know what it was but in hindsight I can say for certain in the entire year plus I played it is questionable how well the people who developed that game new the code to that game but in the end I think they made the same mistake everyone makes devs and the community and that is thinking that a sandbox and themepark mmo can't be blended seamlessly.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
No, NOT talking about when the CU was on the test server. (Frequently-seen reaction: "Oh god, PLEASE tell me this is an April Fools Day joke!!") The terminology used by the devs morphed over time, from CURB to CU; in general usage, CU is what we actually got while CURB is used to refer to the earlier plans. When I speak of the CURB, I am speaking of the Friday Features from late '04 thru mid-Jan'05. (As I noted, SOE has wiped those from the official archives in an effort at rewriting history. "Oceana is at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.") The changes described in those FFs were refinements and modifications of the original pre-CU combat system. Then someone, probably the suits, decided that SWG was to be radically altered to bring it more in line with all the other MMOs on the market. The CURB designs were quickly hacked into the CU mess that hit the test server. The rapid, massive evolution of buggy and broken systems that CU underwent on the TC make it clear just what a quick hack that version really was.
Oh I see. Ok in that case you are right. It was a long time ago so some things have erased from memory. I remember when they introduced colorish manga hair styles which were total turn off for me even though I stayed until CU (unless I mixed that too and it was also a part of CU? lol). There were some nice improvements in CURB but some things I didn't like.
Originally posted by jaxsundane
I enjoyed SWG and it was also my first mmo but I think alot of these nostalgia posts overlook some things like how incredibly buggy the game was...
While indeed it was buggy to some extent (not unplayable though), SWG had this something that would completely drag you in. SW music was so well handeled in the game that I could say it was one of the major reason for this. In addition, with so many things to do and almost unlimited possibilities for role play I never felt "Ok what now?" Never heard the term 'endgame' back then as it simply didn't exist - or it just took you very long time to get there. I know I never did. Needless to say, I have never ever had such a pleasing experience in any other MMO ever after.
Also, if you look at it from one point of view, bugs (which should be fixed ASAP) actually don't take part in the game's concept and such unique concept of old SWG was extremely entertaining for many of us. Too bad no other MMO ever tried to be SWG clone
...but in the end I think they made the same mistake everyone makes devs and the community and that is thinking that a sandbox and themepark mmo can't be blended seamlessly.
What a bullshit post. SWG when it was first released was more like WOW than it is in present form.
What do you mean by pre-WOW? WOW is an EQ clone with the same crappy combat that that game had. SWG was EQ in space. So both are the same old thing that EQ had done before.
SWG did not change when WOW came out.
SWG actually took a different direction with it's "upgrade".
You really need to understand a bit more about MMOs and there history over the last ten years.
Hmmm. I played both from release for about two years each, and I can't think of much anything in swg that was remotely close to wow, minus playing an avatar behind a computer of course. Few to no quests, mission terminals, no direction (i was so utterly lost at the beginning), housing/guild halls, much more detailed crafting with experimentation, resource qualities, skill based system, auction house up to 6k credits max, completely different harvesting system, automated harvesting, macro system, queue based combat system that could use macros, much larger group size, group-based classes (e.g. squad leader), etc etc etc.
Can you tell me just one thing even remotely like wow when swg was released? please, cure me of my ignorance, because I think you're completely and utterly full of it. To quote you..."What a bullshit post".
the CURB, or CU, tbh, the version that was on the test servers initially wasnt the same version that was released into the game, it may well have been in response to 'other games' that were live at that time, but it wasnt that well liked by the players, and was the start of the games decline, introducing levels into a game that was supposed to be skill based wasnt really a good move anyway, although the basic infrastructure was still there, imo, the NGE just was the final nail in SWG's coffin.. taking away the players freedom to choose their own playstyle and career paths was completely daft imo, it was one of the games strongest points and they trashed it... but, if they released the game again, Pre-Cu era, hell, if they released the game without Jedi unlocked or unlockable, then i would return to SWG, not just instead of WoW, but maybe even at the expense of Eve... but its not going to happen, SOE doesnt have the capability to resurrect that game from the ashes....
Comments
No, people were leaving SWG because SOE was mis-managing the game. Instead of fixing bugs, and addressing issues, they were making things worse with every patch.
SWG was losing subs because of SOE, not through any real fault of the game itself.
The NGE wasn't designed as a way to "stop the hemorrhaging of players", it was designed to attract a whole NEW audience, at the cost of the current one. SOE figured they would attract SO many new players who enjoyed the kind of instant-gratification gaming that WoW and games like it delivered....that discarding it's current player base would be a worthwhile trade-off.
Absolute EPIC friggin' FAIL.
Back in 2003, SWG was on the top of my highly anticpated MMORPG list.. I found the idea of SWG simply awesome.. It was going to be my next awesome MMO fix after EQ lost it's flavor for me.. The game could have been legendary, but never did live up to my expectations at release.. Granted, I only played for about 3 weeks at launch, due to the game being broken and many of the great ideas were not close to being implemented...
I kinda wish I went back a year later when the game had much of what should have been implemented at launch.. But a year later I was playing EQ2, then switched to WoW in early 2005... After WoW became boring, I gave up on MMO's for a while and eventually found myself back in EQ2 a few more times.. Then played a bunch of bad rollercoaster MMO's like AoC and WAR which were just done so bad..
Anyway, to answer your question OP, yes I would play OLD SWG before and after WoW era If the game never went through with the NGE and If space combat among other awesome features were implemented in 2003...
Heck, even now I sometimes think of playing the game because tehre was just so much cool stuff I missed out on.. But then when common sense brings me back to reality, I simply think of how boring and a waste of time it would be to play a game that is on life support with like 10k subs left who are all gods in the game.. Not only that, I wouldn't forgive myself If I paid money for a product that the devs have even given up on..
It's a shame because I don't think TOR will be a very good sandbox MMORPG since Bioware stated it will be "story based" and pretty much most of the game will be like playing a over glorified platform rpg with some mmorpg elements... SWG had so much promise and potential but had poor dev and management team working on it...
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
No, he's right. Wow beat the crap out of SWG. I left when wow came out like so many others. I saw at least 4-5 big time swg guilds from sunrunner go to stormreaver, and that's but a small sample of all the people that left swg for wow. SOE probably lost at least 50% of their playerbase just on the first week wow launched. See, wow was smart. wow had a nice big old public beta and everyone saw how great that game was going to be before it was released. Therefore, people didn't leave swg for a game they didn't know anything about. They left swg because they knew wow was gonna kick ass cause they already played it.
Of course, most of those people left wow in even quicker time than swg once they realized just how shallow wow really was, but that's a different topic.
Your poll is stupid. Two fanatical viewpoints as a poll doesn't make any sense. SWG also held pretty steady population from release to two years after (which is when wow was released), so not only does your poll make no sense it's also ignorant of the facts.
What does WoW have to do with SWG? Is SWG a WoW clone now? Please please tell me people blame the CU and NGE on WoW. Please please....
Yes, SOE attempted to turn SWG into a wow clone with the nge. The CU was in motion well before wow was released so the cu not so much.
Actually WOW was released 6 months before CU took place....
yeah
No, I wouldn't. I bought SWG on release and moved from EQ to SWG. Played for a couple months and then went back to EQ. SWG could of been a great game, but it was riddled with bugs and performance issues. There is no denying it had some wonderful ideas, but all in all it was horrible at implementing those ideas.
If "old" SWG did come back it would obviously get some people back for nostalga(sp?) purposes. However, that would quickly wear off and everyone will realize the bugs and other design problems SWG had.
The ugly truth is, people expectations are considerably higher than back in the early 2000's. MMOs back then were expected to be buggy, and not perform perfectly. EQ set the stage for this, and SWG was a bit worse than everyone expected with bugs and very few bugs (except for the critical bugs dupes, crashes) were ever fixed.
WoW completely changed this expectation. I hate WoW, its cartoonish characters, its lore, and pretty much everything about it. Yet, I've played the MMO in the past. Why? because its gameplay and design is so flawless.
What I think everyone here is wanting and has been searching for the better part of a decade is a polished MMO that ISN'T WoW or WoW clone! Something that has fresh ideas like SWG and with the polish of WoW... I've been searching for this a very long time, and am about to give up hope. I've bought well over 10 MMOs post-WoW and have been disappointed with every one of them.
One day some company will make a great MMO with fresh ideas and tons of polish.... I just don't think i'll be alive to play it. (I'm 28 now)
The CURB was not the CU. The CURB - Combat Update and ReBalance - was in the works well before the release of WoW. Around January '05 there was a radical change of direction, and descriptions of the upcoming changes abruptly ceased; the Friday Features describing those changes have since vanished down SOE's memory hole. Late Feb'05 into March'05, we started to hear some of the features in the upcoming CU, and it resembled the CURB only in rough outline. The biggest and IMHO worst change of the CU was converting SWG into a level-based combat system. It didn't become the bog-standard class-and-level system (like everthing else on the market) until NGE.
Yes.
Bugs and all.
It's the only SOE game I would put up with over long periods of time, and that in and of itself says plenty.
If they fixed the horrible Jedi system, and the urban sprawl, yes.
So SWG was losing 10 000 subs a day huh? For how long?
It's easy to justify the changes made to SWG by taking those numbers at face value, but in reality you have to look more closely at the implications of SoE's claim. For example is SoE claiming it's 10K a day from June '03 to Nov '05? That would make it approximately 7 900 000 subs, which sounds highly unrealistic to me. Or was it 10K a day for the 2 weeks preceding the NGE making it a much more realistic 140K subs?
Lastly how can we even believe SoE when they made that claim of 10K a day? It's not like they didn't mislead people before.
CURB or as it was later called CU at the release (end of April 2005) is indeed the same thing. What you are reffering to is a period while it was on test server but official public servers were still running pre-CU SWG until April. I believe some may have left seeing how bad it was on the test server but majority started leaving after CU took place on public servers, in April.
EDIT*
Besides WOW was released in Novemebr 2004 so in any case before CU or CURB was introduced.
No game is perfect, we all know this, we all have experianced this. My actual job I am a Software Support Tech for the Largest LED Digital Display Company.(Trust me, far from a tech freak, I actually went to school for marketing, go figure) Dealing with new releases, upgrading customers software, there are always bugs found, people push things to a direction the software hasn't been tested (because we can't think of all things in a sitting). All customers have their OS set up differently, or different things installed we never thought would effect our software. But we take these bugs, find the cause, and make a fix, which sometimes, causes another bug. It is a never ending cycle.
People are saying "It was so buggy, I wouldnt' go back" I am asking about the game in general, besides the bugs, besides the issues and not the NEW WOWified version, prior to the huge change they made to it, would you play it again? I am wondering, if the things you use to do, the things you enjoyed in the game, would you go back?
I learned from my experiance with games, I will never play when it release. AOC taught me this. Things are so buggy at the beginning, that it ruins the game. So I wait, I wait a few months for a game to at least get some much needed patches and fixes out, then I will try. At that point, I look past the bugs, and hope to have faith a game will improve more.
This is like AION, I didn't play until November some time, tested with a friends account, seemed fun, but I waited longer. I waited until about a month ago. I had fun to a degree, its not my type of game, I don't like being told where to go and what to kill, but thats me. Some people like this, I do not. To me, it seems brainless and gets old. So, I stopped playing. The game has amazing graphics, the character creation is awesome, the world is beautiful, sadly, I got board by lvl 20. I was soon just running around killing things, not doing quests, but knowing, I wouldn't get dittle because the game is designed to follow quests and direction. For those of you who love these games, thats awesome you found something you like, I just wish I could find something I like, and SWG was it, until it was ruined.
So now, I am just another lost MMO Soul like so many others out there.
One of my many Screen shots I found of SWG
Thats my character supporting my Nightsister Bracer 
~*`*~ Vixen ~*`*~
They did and somehow they made it worse.
What a bullshit post. SWG when it was first released was more like WOW than it is in present form.
What do you mean by pre-WOW? WOW is an EQ clone with the same crappy combat that that game had. SWG was EQ in space. So both are the same old thing that EQ had done before.
SWG did not change when WOW came out.
SWG actually took a different direction with it's "upgrade".
You really need to understand a bit more about MMOs and there history over the last ten years.
The winter-summer of 2004 IMO was the best time in that game, pvp was very lively and happened everywhere (even just ouside the geo cave or ouside dath sci outpost or at the krayt graveyard, etc) There was so much going on back then, player cities grew and actually required some work to build (unlike today's low city standards) and player faction bases were harder to defend/attack.
There was so much to do back then, practically nothing to do now.
Is this a sarcastic post?
No, NOT talking about when the CU was on the test server. (Frequently-seen reaction: "Oh god, PLEASE tell me this is an April Fools Day joke!!") The terminology used by the devs morphed over time, from CURB to CU; in general usage, CU is what we actually got while CURB is used to refer to the earlier plans. When I speak of the CURB, I am speaking of the Friday Features from late '04 thru mid-Jan'05. (As I noted, SOE has wiped those from the official archives in an effort at rewriting history. "Oceana is at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.") The changes described in those FFs were refinements and modifications of the original pre-CU combat system. Then someone, probably the suits, decided that SWG was to be radically altered to bring it more in line with all the other MMOs on the market. The CURB designs were quickly hacked into the CU mess that hit the test server. The rapid, massive evolution of buggy and broken systems that CU underwent on the TC make it clear just what a quick hack that version really was.
I enjoyed SWG and it was also my first mmo but I think alot of these nostalgia posts overlook some things like how incredibly buggy the game was and while I didn't learn the fun of having alts until after I played SWG I rather prefer the ability to make alternates on the same server. I also think SWG could have done with some good old fashioned questing too in addition to the generic "job" terminals that existed everywhere. Star Wars is a rich universe that should have easily been able to incorporAte some engaging quests along with the sandbox elements. That also would have made pulling the wool over peoples eyes a bit easier to handle I think, in my entire SWG play time I pushed for one single goal (since it was designed so that it wasn't easy to do more than one thing) and that was to become a CH and the inherent flaw was that once they NGE'd the game it literally made everything you did prior worthless, there were no memories of engaging quest lines or the like just the months of work you put into acheiving a class that they eliminated in the blink of an eye (though I must admit I actually quit SWG before they got rid of CH).
There were some good things about the original SWG but I am not willing to say that themepark mmo's killed it nor am I willing to say that the design of SWG was better than that of themepark mmo's it was certainly different and for alot of us I know it was new but I think things we saw (like bugs they could never get rid of) really helped push them to NGE the game, I don't know what it was but in hindsight I can say for certain in the entire year plus I played it is questionable how well the people who developed that game new the code to that game but in the end I think they made the same mistake everyone makes devs and the community and that is thinking that a sandbox and themepark mmo can't be blended seamlessly.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Oh I see. Ok in that case you are right. It was a long time ago so some things have erased from memory. I remember when they introduced colorish manga hair styles which were total turn off for me even though I stayed until CU (unless I mixed that too and it was also a part of CU? lol). There were some nice improvements in CURB but some things I didn't like.
Hmmm. I played both from release for about two years each, and I can't think of much anything in swg that was remotely close to wow, minus playing an avatar behind a computer of course. Few to no quests, mission terminals, no direction (i was so utterly lost at the beginning), housing/guild halls, much more detailed crafting with experimentation, resource qualities, skill based system, auction house up to 6k credits max, completely different harvesting system, automated harvesting, macro system, queue based combat system that could use macros, much larger group size, group-based classes (e.g. squad leader), etc etc etc.
Can you tell me just one thing even remotely like wow when swg was released? please, cure me of my ignorance, because I think you're completely and utterly full of it. To quote you..."What a bullshit post".
the CURB, or CU, tbh, the version that was on the test servers initially wasnt the same version that was released into the game, it may well have been in response to 'other games' that were live at that time, but it wasnt that well liked by the players, and was the start of the games decline, introducing levels into a game that was supposed to be skill based wasnt really a good move anyway, although the basic infrastructure was still there, imo, the NGE just was the final nail in SWG's coffin.. taking away the players freedom to choose their own playstyle and career paths was completely daft imo, it was one of the games strongest points and they trashed it... but, if they released the game again, Pre-Cu era, hell, if they released the game without Jedi unlocked or unlockable, then i would return to SWG, not just instead of WoW, but maybe even at the expense of Eve... but its not going to happen, SOE doesnt have the capability to resurrect that game from the ashes....