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The NGE was supposed to kill off the game..
metatronic
Member Posts: 329
I can't believe how no one can see this was all by design. Smedley still keeping his job after the NGE blunder.. Why do you think the NGE happened less than 6 months after the Combat Upgrade.. The CU was designed and intended to kill off the game's subscriber base so Lucas could pull the game from sony and allow Bioware to make a new one more like WoW. But where the CU failed the NGE succeeded. The game went from around 250k to 30k subscribers.. Now why would a company not revert back to the old style of game that many became addicted to playing? Its because they wanted SWG dead! So they could pull the plug easier with less friction and backlash with the game supporting less than 20k-30k users...
I think you guys petitioning is hilarious.. If any iteration of that game should be restored its the original CU we had that actually fixed many of the combat problems we had and they could have built onto an awesome system from there.. I bet that game would have grown immensely had they just held off and never did the NGE.. Many players left in droves for WoW and eq2 when they released that took a major chunck of the original games subscriber base. Those people would have come back at some point when they got bored of wow and eq2.. I mean, I didn't leave till the NGE and I was forced into playing eq2 because I really couldn't stand WoW beyond the 42nd level.. The combat was so monotonous and boring to the point it would put me to sleep.
Had SWG stuck with the CU and added in the theme park questing and dungeons/raids and rettained its awesome pvp battles, swg would still be thriving today.. I will admit though, the game by now would have needed a port over to a newer game engine supporting dx9.0c at least.. So in a way they do need swtor to come out for the newer engine but the 2 games are vastly different in play style.. I really don't think we will ever see a triple A sandbox mmo ever again and I don't consider eve to be in the same ball park since its all space sim crap.. I think the first company to come out with a triple A sandbox mmorpg with strong theme park elements such as raiding, quest hubs and group dungeons; that will be the game to take wow down in terms of subscribers.. Swtor won't compete with WoW's sub base and never will.. Bioware is not even in the same strata as Blizzard when it comes to making games. The new swtor game will unforunately be a single player-story driven, pay to play online co op game which is heavily derived from blizzards World of Warcraft. All because Lucas Arts wanted World of Warcraft's 10 million subscribers @ $15/month. Greed was and still is the driving factor behind all of this going back to the CU/NGE and why it was done in the first place. Most people with half a brain would of said "opps, we messed up, heres your CU back" after the NGE fiasco... But nothing happened! and no one lost their job... Ask yourself why..
Comments
Its a pretty out there thought but i do agree how the hell did $medley keep his job?????
um "yeah".
So instead of pulling the plug at any time which they could have done, they waited all these years to do it.
As far as Smedley losing his job, C level excecutives aren't hired and fired like Starbucks' Baristas.
There are contracts in place That define everything from compensation to exit strategies.
I'm sure only a few people know what his contract says as well as what pies he had his hand in.
Just because SWG failed on his watch doesn't mean that his job hinged on SWG succeeding or failing.
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Because he is a VERY smooth, and crafty suit. Types like that always have a fall back plan, and always make sure they can dump any blame on someone else. I seriously doubt that SOE set out to kill SWG. It was making them a LOT of money at the time.
I suspect it was the typical short sighted nonsense that one gets when one mixes Dev's with a God complex, with ones with a bad case of Ghostcrawler syndrome (WAY too much focus on spread sheets and data mining, rather than on what makes a game/class fun to play). Mix in a good dose of hubris, and that explains why they didn't roll it back. But thats all water under the bridge at this point.
why would they pull the plug when it was still making the money? They milked that community for as long as they could till LA said close it down our new swtor is coming out.
As far as smedley; if anyone had the power to fix the nge blunder it was him.. I think you missed my point when I said smedley kept his job.. it just adds credence to my therory that is was all by design.. The nge rolled out and smedley retained his job and did nothing to fix the problem. If I'm the head of sony corporate and smedley is just some peon below me, after what the NGE did, smedley would be working in the mail room or flipping burgers in the corporate cantina..Since he wasn't, that means he was told to kill off swg slowly by LA.. He was in on it from the begining and most likely bound by a Lucas Arts NDA to not release any information and to just kill off the game slowly by dec 2011..
Can you imagine the backlash right now if the game still had 200k players and they were told to close it down for TOR? There would be blood in the streets.. so what you have to do is kill off your population slowly leading up to tor's release but I think they mis-calculated on the NGE having such disastrous effects in the first 3 months after it was released. I really think they were just trying to quell the population a little bit over time but it didn't quite work out that way.. Now its just so much easier for them to shut the game down for ToR's release.
its all smoke and mirrors.
and what expansions LOL Trials of obi wan was the last real expansion and that was released weeks before the NGE to prop up box sales before the NGE exodous.. Yes released on purpose out of sheer greed because they fkn knew the NGE was abyssmal ! Get a clue buddy.. so wheres all this money they were supposedly throwing at a failing game? You wrong and very ignorant..
Everything else you mentoined about them wanting to do atmospheric flight etc was some guy basically modding the game and again it never happened so again, all smoke and mirrors.
don't be so coy acting like you know everything, you have no clue obviously since everything you jsut said was wrong and based upon a very narrow point of view with your inability to think beyond the box placed before you.
Lol this was fun to read.
All I have to say is rofl. The nge was how many years ago. I don't even think there was another Star Wars Game in the mix. The NGE been around since 2006, its 2011. Yea it did kill the game its been slowly over the past few years. But really the nge was done to give us SWTOR, heck KOTOR was not even out then.
Oh well it was good for a laugh.
I want to say someting constructive, just to show I have read this epic fail of a post..but all that comes to mind is ..Lol
Put your tinfoil hat back on and return to your underground nuclear bunker, and take your conspiracy theories with you.
"Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin' back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.
There's no place I can be,
Since I found Serenity.
But you can't take the sky from me... "
I'm sure they did shut it down in anticipation on stor - it makes sense. i would too. i would suspect a lot of people playing the old game would jump ship to the new one anyway. i would after half a decade of playing the other one. why does it have to be a conspiracy. it's business.
What the NGE was supposed to do was bring us Jedi Knight online. That's what LA wanted, I think, all along. This reflects Lucas' own preoccupation with shiny things in the movies in place of storytelling. SWG was about telling a story...yours...set in the SW universe. LA just didn't get into that. They wanted "fast paced Starwarsy action!", you know, like Jedi Knight, Jedi Academy, and KOTOR.
SOE's approach was "we'll make it like WoW, but with lightsabers!"...that will do the trick! In concept, yes. But SOE fails at execution, and LA is so used to puting out a box of bantha poodoo with "Star Wars" on the box and seeing it sell that when confronted with a gaming audience they had no experience with, they got burned, and burned bad...because their expectations were unrealistic about the MMO market and because, let's be upfront about this, SWG classic was a much more complicated game than WoW is even now. Much more difficult to balance, to provision resources for, to debug, to even render on the screen...just look at how "primitive" WoW's graphics presentation is compared to SWGs...much less choice in how your avatar looks, for starters. WoW's success has a lot to do with that simplicity of presentation and game play, which allowed them to concentrate on polish, content, and ease of play. SWG classic had a very steep learning curve, much steeper than WoW's ever was, and furthermore the original SWG didn't have anywhere near the tutorial quallity on the initial space station that you've got in any of WoW's starter areas.
The NGE was supposed to save the game. The concept might have worked, but the execution was abysmal. Furthermore, SOE basically took a .50 cal to the existing player base in the way they rolled out the NGE. Why play a terrible clone of WoW with light sabers when you can play the real thing that works and has enchants that make your swords glow?
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
That's the stupidest thing I've ever read.
So I started to walk into the water. I won't lie to you boys...I was terrified. But I pressed on, and as I made my way past the breakers, a strange calm came over me. I don't know if it was divine intervention or the kinship of all living things, but I tell you, Jerry, at that moment ... I was a marine biologist.
Haha that was awesome. Yep. . what had bioware created at that time?
Lets look at all the awesome Lucas Arts games. . . now exclude the adventure games and other things that were not Star Wars. . there were a few good ones but they are certainly not known for making great games. More fails than successes. Also at the time that SOE was developing SWG didn't they have Ralph Koster from UO as well as many of the Everquest team members. And then SOE decides to can a game to help Lucas Arts make money with someone else when they were still making money?
Then there was the fact that WoW was doing well and they were leaked adds about a SWG coming to Playstation just before the NGE launched.
No. . I think they were honestly trying to make the game better and failed.
I do agree about the petition thing though. . first petition Lucas Arts. not SOE. . second.. it is a done deal.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Conspiracy theory at its finest!
When I said conspiracy theory, I was referring to the OP.
SOE's attempt to compete for WOW's players base would have succeeded if they had not of created the CU or NGE. SWG was inline to rival WoW as is, but someone got the bright idea to make the game as easy to play as wow so that wow's fan base would come over and play. "FAIL."
I don't know if anyone has payed any attention to this: WOW's players base will always try a new game, but will always return back. If you want WoW's player base, don't make a game that has what they already have. It has to be new and different.
uh "no". If SWG was the financial dynamo that they wanted they wouldn't have changed it. You actually think they changed the game so it could die a slow death for years until they could decide on a completely different company to make a different game?
I don't buy it.
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Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
The REAL John Smedly?
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
It wasn't so much that the various professions were difficult to learn, it's that you didn't have any hints on what they could do or how they worked, at least in the original SWG.
There was a very short "this is how you move, this is how you shoot" tutorial on a space station, then you were handed a melon and a blaster, and you were delivered to a planet..."you're on your own, kid. This is where the fun begins!" That was pretty much it, entirely. If you were new to the MMO genre, that's pretty bare bones.
WoW feeds you information on the character selection screen that SWG classic never did...information on the classes, what they do, what the racial specials are, etc. SWG, at least at first, did not do that. That's what made the learning curve steep. That's what accessiblity is all about.
I remember helping out new players with learning how healing worked...something you didn't learn on the space station. You had three status bars that could be depleted in two different ways: temporary wounds that would recover over time, and "black bars" that needed the attention of a medic or an entertainer to be healed up that limited the size of your stat pools until you had them healed by a player with the ablity to heal them. Medical centers and cantinas became social hot spots as the result of this, which fostered community.
LEARNING how to do all the various things took a lot of time. Once you had that down, yeah, it was very straightforward in a lot of ways. But you had to discover that for yourself, or through another player. Or by...and this is the tough one...reading the manual. Because you didn't get an ingame tutorial that explained all this.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
And people say UO vets are crazy.... LOL
Yeah........no
Remember Old School Ultima Online
Boy did you join SWG late. When the game was out before CU, there was NO spacestation. You created a character, picked a planet and POP, you were there in a city... No tutorial at all. You went about learning how to play via THE COMMUNITY (which contrary to what a community had become after WoW was very helpful).
Actually, I was in beta3 and played from launch on.
There was a space station, but the entire experience lasted about five minutes, then you were kicked down to the planet with your melon and a blaster.
Then you started learning to actually play the game from other players, which, of course, is something you can't do in WoW, because if you ask noobie questions, you'll get back smartass answers.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Thats because in WoW its basically explained how to do something with no question asked. There is no need for someone to ask questions due to the games simple controls.
I don't care about innovation I care about fun.
the good old days.. when all you had was a maroj melon, a survival knife and a tent.. players needed to rely on each other.. the fact that we could teach each other skills was a huge bonus too..