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Lucasarts called the shots with SWG and SOE cares about their fans
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Erm they are well known bad expansions and mark a turning point of the game, everyone I know quit at then and that is why project 1999 was made and why it has lots of players.
That does not show that SOE ruined SWG more than LA did.
SOE had their own games to mess around with, instead of messing up a game owned by LA
Whatever they did with their other games, is no where close to as bad as what the NGE did to SWG. People have quit WOW following changes to that to, and the next expansion to WOW is causing ridicule for Blizzard with Pandas.
MMOs change, that is what they do. Most people like the changes, some people do not. With the NGE most people did not like the changes. SOE knew what they were doing, but LA did not.
As with Dan Rubenfields blog, he stated that they were running both codes in case the NGE would get pulled and not implemented but unfortuantely LA did not agree with SOE, and LA forced it through.
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Prove it. But wait, you can't. What we have is SOE people saying they did it(both the Rubenfeld and Freeman blog entries), and you, blaming some evil LA conspiracy that renders SOE blameless.
There are plenty of other admissions by SOE people that the NGE was their doing.
No.
While it is mostly likely that LA and SOE share blame for the decision, the abysmally inept EXECUTION of the NGE was entirely and 100% on SOE. LA personnel did not program one line of code, produce one patch, or design any of the changes that wrecked SWG.
Did LA people perhaps say: "Change the game up to get more subs..." ? Perhaps...
Did they say "Turn SWG into mess of crappy broken code and non-working game mechanics that everyone will quit overnight." ? No. That was all SOE. And they didn't mind if they lost all the SWG customers they DID have. That much is clear.
And perpetuating some deluded fairy tale of SOE's innocence is not going to change anything.
None of what you said there proves one bit that SOE is to blame. You just just choose to blame them instead of LA
Prove what? Dan states it clear as day in his blog. Where did he say that Smedley ordered him to change it? I do not see it.
Of course LA did not code it. It was all SOE, but directed to be done by LA. SOE were the developers. Julio Torres was the Producer.
Unless somewhere states that Smedley ordered the NGE, then it is obviously LA that ordered it.
It was a mess, and even if Bioware did it, it still would have been a mess, due to the short timeframe given by LA, and maybe even more so, as they are MMO noobs.
There is no conspiracy. LA got SOE to do it, plain and simple. SW is LA IP, EQ is SOEs IP. SOE just hosted SWG and modified and changed at LAs requests. There is no way that SOE would have changed SWG so drastically, it is not their IP to mess with, and LA would have sued them and shut down SWG straight after if it was SOEs doing.
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Actually, I do get it.
Lucas Arts owned the license.
SOE purchased (leased) use of the license to create an MMO based off the license.
SOE did ALL programming.
SOE did ALL development.
SOE made ALL changes.
Lucas Arts needed to give APPROVAL (approval is not ordering them to make something).
Do any of you work with licenses? I do. My company pays a fee and goes through various regulatory mandates to lease our licenses. If I'm working on a licensed project, I develop what I want, from beginning to end, and submit it for approval before I begin. Often I'll be asked to tweak something, but NEVER am I TOLD what my end product must be. I assure you...it is no different with LA/SOE.
Why on Earth do you think a license owner has the right to force the licensee to make something they don't want? That's not at all how these things work.
I agree with the first bit, but not so much with latter because LA have their own unique way of doing things.
When you lease a licence, do you have someone from that company temporarily work for your company? That is what happened with SWG, Julio Torres from LA came to work at SOE, and guided the actual SOE devs what to do (After NGE when it was realised a failure LA abandoned SWG and left SOE to it, where Deadmeat, Teesquared etc became Producers). You can not develop what you want, you must have some guidelines to work with and what the company wants otherwise you will be wasting their time, and no doubt get fired. If you were told to make SWG better, and came up with pre-CU, then you would have gotten fired, if you came up with something like WOW (like the NGE) you would have not gotten fired.
The biggest failure was that the NGE changed the game, and had code on top of code on top of code. No alterations of what LA wanted would have gone through smoothly, and even Bioware would have had trouble getting it to work. LA asked the impossible, SOE tried their best but the request was too big a job in a small time frame.
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Of course you do!
On a project where something is being built and approval in a timely manner is critical, you MUST have someone on site who can approve what you're doing on a day to day, moment to moment basis.
You obviously have no clue how much Julio needed to approve...
SWG was a MASSIVE undertaking. I assure you, Julio didn't have time to tell SOE what the fuck to do...he was too damn busy reviewing every design idea that every artist and every programmer was handing him daily. Those that he wasn't sure of, he'd shoot off to LA to approve...but a guy like Julio was probably quite capable of making 99% of the decisions, He had to approve fonts, spacing, use, design and placement of everything Star Wars related, dialogs, color schemes, color pallets, names, 3D models, weapons, sounds, buildings, world designs, animal placements, city placements, etc etc etc...
Face it, Julio only approved of how Star Wars material was being used. He was not the grand instigator of the fucking NGE nor the overlord of SOE.
If it was not for LA wanting the game to be "better", no one would have done anything. It was Julio who agreed to release the NGE in its unfinished state. What LA wanted was an impossible task to do
SOE are just victims of LAs desire to get SWG to WOW status.
If it was not for LA, SOE would have just fixed the bugs and added content.
I do not blame SOE at all, as Bioware (and any devs) would have been in the same position. SWTOR is a product written from the ground up and they had over 5 years to develop it. SOE had to change the game within a few months dumping code on top of code on top of code, bringing up more bugs.
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Ok TUX,
Then what were the roles of the LA employees with SWG like Jason Willig? What was Toby Mast role? How did Lynn Taylor, Chris Adams, Brian Deksnys, Cory Fulchiron, John Shields, Lester Siat, and John Carsey get credti for SWG? As a former senator you had to know Jaime Rupert or Amy Stojsavljevic, right?
I ask this to be clear what little role LA had in the influance of Pink Ewoks and NGE promotion. This is not an attack on you but the fair regaurd of both these companies.
This.
It is obvious a lot of people don't understand how licensing works. The reason that the big IP licenses cost so much, is that it allows the licensee to use the IP to SELL THEIR PRODUCT. SWG being SOE's product. (If the original IP holder had that much control, the license fees would be a LOT lower.)
The idea that the original IP owner "directs" how things are done and "demands" that this be done or games be done "this way not that way" is plain stupid.
What the original license holder does is approve / disapprove of the elements of a product, from the perspective of does that content fall in line with the history and use of the IP. That's it. (And with my own limited experience with licensed content, the original IP holder does not usually care much, and they say "that's fine".) And in the case of SWG: "Why are the checks bigger?".
They do NOT tell the licensee how to do their business, let alone "force" the licensee to do anything.
As if LA would tell authors how to write the novels or kids' toy makers to use silver wheels instead of black ones. Doesn't happen. But some of the people around here are obviously ignorant of how things work.
So long as the checks clear and nothing violates the IP agreement, the original IP holder stays out of it. They have their own business to run.
As to this bit, I guarantee it was to approve all that junky stuff because it was "low hanging fruit". Low effort development to a declining title in the name of "content". Also, it is clear that LA stopped caring about SWG a good while ago, when they started taking the much lower licensing fee in the post NGE time (was it late 2006 when they started waving most of it? I don't recall,,)
That the LA people approved of all the holidaycrap going in should demonstrate how little LA cared about SWG in the later years. Chocolate fountains and "trick or treating" in the SW universe? Really?
This ought to illustrate how much SOE had control of the (non)development of SWG by the end and not LA. (I don't recall seeing any flying pink ewoks or zombies in any of the movies that LA made, not even Ep1-3, /gag).
I understand fully.
That is not the case with SWG though, as Julio Torres was the one selling the NGE here and here
Julio Torres of LA, was more hands on to begin with, up until the NGE
LA, George Lucas, Lucasfilm etc are notoriously protective of their IP than any other company, and will sue any one not using their stuff properly. They are so pompous now, that they no longer want any outside companies developing their games.
The main point is that SOE did create the NGE, but LA told them to. IF LA did not tell them to make the game better, create the NGE, then SOE would have just fixed the bugs and added content.
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Who cares about flying pink Ewoks? Only those who want to try and bash SOE/SWG
These things never bothered me, and stopped me from enjoying the game, unlike the NGE.
It was the individual to choose whether to use them or steer clear from it all, and I would imagine that in the Star Wars universe there would be people (ordinary people, not heroic people) would dress up in these things, so it made the game more alive.
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In business, it is called "opportunity cost".
The time/money that SOE had people coding all the stupid flying pink ewoks and zombies and chololate fountains, could have been used fixing the lag and collsion detection problems and broken NGE combat. But instead they shoveled useless BS crap, that almost no one wanted, because it was easier than fixing what was broken.
This is just one of many examples.
And that is all on SOE, nothing to do with LA.
Is that simple enough for you?
SWG failed and was closed because of SOE's atrocious decison making. lack of vision, and terrible coding/game management more than another other factor(s) and 10X more than anything LA did or said.
How do you know this? Smedley has even said that working with different companies with different IPs is in fact very different.
Star Wars is not your ordinary IP.
early release and the NGE
these two things accounted for probably 95% of the game's failure. Neither of which were full SoE (or necessarily full LA) decisions
It was not possible to fix that stuff without rewriting the code, as NGE on CU on pre-CU stuffed the game up. It had all these changes because of LA. Fixing the game was not viable at that stage. SOE did what they could do, and did not do what they could not do.
SOE did not have terrible vision or terrible coding/game management, Bioware and any other dev would had the same problems, as the NGE was code on top of code on top of code on top of code on top of code on top of code
Therefore if LA or Julio Torres did not interefere, the game would have been OK. SWG failed and was closed because of LAs interference, and lack of vision, as all LA wanted was a MMO with success of WOW, which they had (although currently seems to be only briefly) with SWTOR.
SOE would not have cared one bit that SWG was not a WOW killer, they had their EQs to worry about.
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it was LA that spoke out in favor of the NGE - downplaying what SOE had created for launch
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html
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I think both SOE and LucasArts will be names that people will have issues with forever
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Have to say myself that i think SOE get a hard time..sometimes maybe deserved sometimes not..take Vanguard for instance..they took that game on ,and on release it was appalling..if it was not for SOE spending a lot of time on things ,putting them right it still would not be playable.
Even now when the population is so low the game is still running.if that was any other company i swear it would have been shut down..i do not see how its possible they are making money off vanguard atm,i maybe wrong..but i for one am glad SOE took it on,they made it playable and thanks to them i have had a great few years playing that game
I play EQ2 as well..another great game..i just dont get all the SOE bashing at all.just my pennies worth.
Now people will say they didnt add any content or not much to vanguard,but there is more than a few years in that game content wise on any char.
In the end i guess its down to what you want or what you expect from a game..everyone has a different opinion,personally i dont have a problem with soe except there lack of forthcoming information..its a case of when smed says 'watch this space'..well i,m watching and waiting..why dont they just tell people like they did with SWG
This actually pisses me off to read this. Q.E.D. Nadia
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Because it's fascinating to discuss how the largest IP in the history of humanity, failed as an MMO.
The fact that SOE and LA let SWG fail, baffles me!
SWG is a textbook of mistakes made DAILY and a refusal to understand so many things - like the importance of the license you hold, the audience you're targeting, the importance of listening to and understanding negative feedback as well as praise and the risks associated with greed...SWG is a blunder that should never have happened...yet...it did?! I find it utterly fascinating to discuss it...even with fanbois like Hipiap or Super, because they help me view it from another perspective.
I never said LA/LEC were not "on-board" with the changes, but it was SOE that was actually designing and making the changes, even driving the changes. From the famous Freeman blog/chat (full text over at www.mmofringe):
An almost complete change in upper management at the (SOE) studio-director level resulted in a few of us who had made the SWG that launched, had no input on the changes since then, suddenly empowered (ordered!) to change the game it had become.
Since we didn't like that game, and director-level management change was a very strong exec-level, "We do not either," we enthusiastically tackled the challenge of remaking it (Doing the NGE).
and
I was "team leading" a team of mostly me, and sometimes me and one other guy for most of the NGE's implementation: on the live team.
At times I was the only designer assigned to live, everyone else either on an expansion to the game, or the NGE.
and as an added bonus about SOE's corporate opinion of their customers, as is the original title of the thread:
To be clear: I never sought to cause players angst and drama. When I say I never thought about you, I mean I really just didn't think about you.
That was, I know, horrifically unprofessional anyway. I just don't want it to seem even worse than that.
I was operating under the assumption that you would leave soon regardless.
So, there we have it: Executives at SOE pushing forward the NGE (with LA approval, no doubt) to be done in SOE facilities by SOE people - i.e. the NGE was SOE's DOING, as they did it and very poorly. AND:
To the original title of this thread, No, SOE didn't give a crap about their existing players of SWG while the NGE was being done. The Rubenfeld quote echoes this point.
This is all from the SOE employees that were doing it at the time.
SOE Apologists may continue to howl at their regularly scheduled moon about LA conspiracies, the rest of us know better.
Obviously SOE dveloped the NGE, they were the developers for SWG, as Bioware is for SWTOR.
It was LA who wanted the NGE, they were the ones who wanted SWG to get better. If they just let SOE just continue with CU or pre-CU, it could have been awesome, but LA interfered and changed the game twice, and resulted in code upon code upon code upon code upon code upon code upon code upon code upon code upon code upon code, and it ended it up being a coding disaster. Not even the best developers could have fixed SWG. SOE could have fixed it but it meant rewriting the code from the ground up - not a viable solution.
I did not see anything in Rubenfields quote to say that they did not care about existing players. What I saw in it was SOE was trying not to get the NGE implented, but LA won out.
You are reading it all wrong. There is no conspiracies. It was all down to LA - plain and simple.
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SWTOR is another blunder on a different scale. There is simply not much variety in it to do. Nice to look at, just plain boring.
If they just keep adding Flashpoints and Operations to SWTOR, which is like DLC for consoles, and not enhancing it by adding in more systems, which gives the players enough content to mess around with daily and makes the monthly sub worth it, then it is going to be more dead than SWG in 8 years time.
SWTOR needs to be a social living breathing world which SWG still was on Dec 15th 2011. At the moment SWTOR is just like a single player game with onlin multiplayer options, with DLC added every 2 months - a rip off
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