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can SOE be trusted?
afk-guy
Member Posts: 15
November of 2005 is the day I grew to despise SOE. Thats when they implemented the NGE to Star Wars Galaxies which destroyed a once amazing game and its even more amazing community.
My newest blog entry ( link in my signature ) I write about those good times I had with my old SWG friends.
But me personally do not trust SOE even after all these years later. They did not listen to their community and destroyed what wasnt broken.
With the new DC Universe coming out can SOE be trusted with big titles such as that?
Please no flaming or nasty comments keep it civil.
My newest blog entry ( link in my signature ) I write about those good times I had with my old SWG friends.
But me personally do not trust SOE even after all these years later. They did not listen to their community and destroyed what wasnt broken.
With the new DC Universe coming out can SOE be trusted with big titles such as that?
Please no flaming or nasty comments keep it civil.
please follow and check out the ad's on my mmo blog
www.mmorpgtot.blogspot.com
thank you
Comments
Im sure SOE has learned from their infamous SWG incident..
Theyre a business after all and they want to keep the money rolling in.Im sure they'll be a little more cautious when it comes to drastic changes within one of their MMO's.
I've never been directly burned by them, but from what I hear, old school SWG is the kind of MMO I'd be playing nowadays. The old features sound very appealing, specially in the crafting department, but I can't experience them anymore. Shame.
by now people should allready know. no company can be trusted.
no, they can't be trusted.
"When it comes to GW2 any game is fair game"
Ugh..all this dogging on SOE...you realize a huge part of the decision was LucasArts right ? They're as much to blame, there was pressure due to a large exodus of players to WoW anyway, so they tried to emulate WoW thinking that would flip the switch and it'd be win-win.
It's not like SOE was like "DUUUUUDE...ya know what ? Let's spend an incredible amount of money and time to screw our customer base which is actually our source of income."
You can trust this about *any* company. You do not matter by yourself. You and you're 5,000,000 friends *do* matter. Companies will do whatever they can to maximize profit, if they piss a few people off in the process but make a net gain ? They won't care...look at Blizzard, they're probably one of the best examples of a cut-throat company that cares diddly shit for it's customers and watches number figures more then anyone else.
If you want a company that "cares" play some independant locally run game.
What does this have to do with anything? SOE cannot be trusted, regardless of what you feel or do not feel they did to swg.
"When it comes to GW2 any game is fair game"
I feel much the same. The only question I have is: With everyone who loved old SWG making thread after thread about how much they miss it, and with so many of us who didn't get to play it but who love crafting and unusual ways to progress, why hasn't a new MMO with complex and in depth crafting and neat professions like entertainers arisen from the ashes to snap up all those subs? Are we really so few in number? It doesn't seem so, from this site.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
You missed the entire second half of my post I think..
What people fail to realize is that SWG maxed out at like 300k subs...the game didn't do nearly as well as nostalgia makes people think. It had a dire lack of content, especially at high end, there were constant balance problems. Was it a fun game ? Yes, I loved it, and I miss it. But that format, was never as succesfull as EQ's or WoW's in the first place. Games that have tried to replicate it, MO, DF. Are underfunded and craptastic.
Reason why companies fail to remake it is because they aren't straight up copying it. Really give us an industrial/fantasy setting. Give us 20-40 classes, give us a set amount of points to spend on classes and break them up. Then add some variable resource mods for crafting, give us some placeable miners(and factories if it makes sense) houses with a limited amount.
Then presto chango, we got a new pre-cu game when you add some lore.
( I know nothing of whether aspects of this would be copyrighted or not so that may or may not work.
Either way 100-300k subs for a game like this I think would be an overall success.
It's not just SWG that SOE burned. Look at the history of every game they've touched. EQ1 was nerfed into oblivion after the Velios expansion. EQ2 floundered at the start, and was quickly and radically redesigned from the group-heavy game it was advertised to be, into a mostly solo game. Crafting went from a complex dependancy web with variable quality results, to a cookie-cutter whack-a-mole game. Vanguard.... well, that wasn't their fault, yet they nerfed it down quite a bit more than they needed to. SWG. Yeah, Lucas Arts may have forced them to make changes, but SOE decided the details and chose to ignore their playerbase. Pirates of the Burning Seas.... another game that started out promising and after SOE walked in, all the ideas just dried up and fell away.
SOE has made one thing perfectly clear. They do NOT care about long-term players. Their CEO believes that the future will be filled with millions of fresh faces who will buy their game, feed the microtransaction monkey for a few months, and wander off... and that's what they WANT. They make more cash getting a constant rollover of new customers, than by keeping subscriptions active. At least, that's their belief. See the recent EQ2x model for their idea of the future.
Is 300k subs really that bad? Especially if, say, half of those are retained over a period of several years? Seems like a lot of money making potential to me. Especially if new expansions bring people in at a steady rate. Example-Eve Online. Do games really cost so much to make now that the only way to profit is to garner millions of subs and keep them?
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
It's not a matter of the actual number itself, just that it was lower then the previous model set by EQ, and *much* lower then Wow's. WoW in a lot of ways destroyed the mmo universe as much as it helped, you have developers looking at that vast number of availible clientelle and realizing they're only getting a tiny percentage of it.
SOE is no worse then Blizzard, or Funcom or any other company. They all do the same things. If you have any particular hatred for one of those companies, it's probably because you were more personally affected then other people by that one company. Doesn't mean that they're terrible evil people.
I am beginning to think a lot of them do. $150 million budget for SWKOR? Nearly 100million for WAR? I would love some company insights on how much the companies actually take in from stuff.
How much do they really get for a copy that isn't sold from their own store? How many copies are they sending out?
How much is server cost on average for a full, 3/4, 1/2, 1/4 server each month. How much do you get from Timecard Subs?
How much is employees costing them each month?
These issues would be great from one of the staff to research so we can all better understand the business side of the game. After we get all that data we can find out what their breaking even point is, and their strickly profit plaer base is.
I have played several Sony MMOs and do not have a problem with them. I have also played several from different companies and would so so again. I have yet to find one company worse than all others. They all have flaws in one way or another but they all seem comparable to me right now.
"Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better." parrotpholk
I agree, that would make a great article, if any game company would tell mmorpg.com the straight numbers.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
I will not trust SOE until John Smedley's only decision reguards whether he should Super Size his Happy Meal.
You'd think, but no.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/rejad/102010/6806_EverQuest-Extended-SOE-Fails-Again
http://mmo-hell.blogspot.com/
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/rejad
No
Considering the head developer for NGE was summarily fired and Smedley has publically admitted it was a mistake (this was around the release of Vanguard, which he said they had learned not to do that with another game.) As for EQ2 Extended..it doesn't affect the sub game eq2 at all... not sure how that can be mentioned in the same sentence as NGE.
On an interesting side-note, what blizzard is doing with WoW is comparable to NGE, it's going to be interesting to see what happens. Rebuilding classes, changing the talent system, changing the way encounters work and the basic general principles of the game. It's going to be a fun expiriment to watch, see if it crashes and burns or if it's a success.
Oh but EQ2X does affect the sub game. The playerbase has been asking for server merges for some time now due to a dying population. Instead SOE opens up the new F2P server which the players from Live can transfer their characters to. Many have done just that in order to play on a populated server. The EX server is populated because free players being involved but also because they've shut down the 15 day free trial. If you want to try out EQ2 now, you play on the EX server. In esscense all the new players will be coming to the EX server, not the Live ones. No server merges plus many leaving for the EX server makes the Live population die faster and the remaning Live players will find moving to EX more attractive since that's where everyone else went.
And I would like to point out that a year for Live is about $144, whearas a year of EX with all the features you'd have in Live unlocked you pay about $200 per year.
http://mmo-hell.blogspot.com/
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/rejad
I have enjoyed SOE games in the past, including SWG, and EQ and PS. But I don't like SOE because they tried to screw with me on an account issue that had nothing to do with money or a specific MMO and that was enough for me to walk away.
I trust SOE every bit as much as I trust any other large corporation.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Omar Khayyam
They can be trusted to never create a worthwhile product, imo.
Name me one MMO in which at least some portion of the playerbase doesn't feel cheated by the developer.