Excellent post friend Xix. Lowca misses you Tuocs/Dakkide
Tuocs! WooT! Great to see you again! Even if only to lament what we had. I miss Lowca too, but the old Lowca where we didn't have nearly enough room for all our factories and houses 'cause there were so many people and so many resources to store!
And, on-topic, see, this is what old SWG was all about...communities. The only game where we REALLY had our cities and communities, and everything was player-made. Nothing since has come close.
-- Xix "I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"
Lots were moaning about how buggy and unbalanced the game was, so Sony took away some professions and left 9 iconic professions, aswell as fixing the bugs.
1. Hologrind - Destroyed the game way before the CU. It was cristmas 2003 and the devs gave a holo to everyone, the game never recovered of the massive change that was. Almost everyone was after beeing jedi, so the armorsmith became a medic, the weaponsmith became a entertainer, the bountyhunter became a chef and the game became a joke. 2. The superman Clone Army There was also a time that everyone in the game had the same armor and the same buffs... Talk about variety. Armys of super mans dreesed in Composite would join in the major starports, get the GOD-mode on and could solo EVERYTHING in the game. Great fun and great chalenge in SWG. 3. The continuous leaving costumers. Most of the people think that the majoraty of costumers only left when the NGE hit, but they are wrong. Sure when NGE hit lots of people leave at the same time, but the game was losing costumers since day one, when the state of the game was so poor that lots of folks played the 1st month because was free and then gave the game some time.
I see theres people here that played from the begining, so they must remember the lots of critics that the game was having in the foruns, magazines, sites, etc... When they went for the NGE the population was already very different from lauch days, (I'm not saying that is was horrible, but very far from the best days of SWG) thats why SOE thought they had to do something as the game was already dieing a long time ago. 4. WoW came out. That explains for itself, although I played WoW for almost 2 years and LOTRO beta and now I'm playing SWG again, and for people that are a little tired of Elves and Dwarves its still the best option on the market.
Item #2 : I find this extremely hard to believe. I had characters on 2 servers (Corbantis and Naritus) and I remember both increasing in population until the CU and then it seemed only to even out. When NGE hit within a week, half of the population was gone.
Do you have a source to back up the highlighted sentence above??
Lots were moaning about how buggy and unbalanced the game was, so Sony took away some professions and left 9 iconic professions, aswell as fixing the bugs.
I was just browsing the homepage when I saw something about this and had to check out the thread; after reading a couple of the responses, I felt compelled to register just to toss my own two cents into the hat.
Wow... It's tough to imagine a question more loaded than "What exactly went wrong with SWG?"
The answer is that there is no one thing exactly that went wrong. Everything went wrong. However, most of the answers that I've read here have discussed only in-game issues. While these would prove to have a definite impact on reviews of the game and create an atmosphere that might make it daunting to new players, a great deal of what went wrong with SWG actually had little to do with Jedi versus all other professions, or unblalanced PvP or even delayed content/bug fixes.
In many ways SWG was crippled before it went live.
I'm pretty sure that there are few who would argue with the statement that SWG was the most ambitious MMORPG ever lauched at the time of it's release, and quite possibly still the most ambitious one ever. SWG attempted to be all things to all people: simple enough for players new to online gaming, yet deep enough to satisfy even the most experienced online vets. Therein lies one of the most basic problems: you can't be all things to all people. It just doesn't work. As the saying goes: you can't please all of the people all of the time. Trying to do exactly that is the surest way to fail. Just take a look at other successful MMORPGs out there right now and you'll find that not one of them is designed for everyone: these games are designed to do what they do, and do it well; but if they don't do what you want, then you'd better find a different game. So, while we can applaud the original goals, these goals were also the gaurantee of failure.
Along the lines of the above, you have to keep in mind that any MMORPG based on a pre-existing pop culture phenomenon (Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings) is likely to fail, or at least fail to live up to the promise of it's name. The games are based around the idea of "inserting" yourself into the universe of (insert Star Wars, etc here) and living out your own personal fantasy of what you would be like in that universe. The problem is that pretty much all fantasies are based upon inherent inequities and in an MMORPG everyone must be equal: the gamer's desire to truely fulfil the fantasy is in direct conflict with the game's need to ensure that equality of all. Star Trek Online might prove to the exception to this rule (since Star Trek is a fantasy based upon the idea of the triumph of equality through diversity), but the Star Wars Universe (and The Matrix , LOTOR, et al) is clearly based upon some being inherently more powerful than others (Jedi, then bounty hunters, then all the rest of us peons out there) and that makes it pretty much impossible to live out one's personal Star Wars fantasy when you can't be any better than anyone else.
Another big problem that SWG faced was that it was released at least six months too early by most of the beta testers' opinions. The reason behind this isn't as simple as the whole "because the guys running SOE and LA are boneheads" that keeps popping up either. The game came out after being significantly delayed, at least twice, from publicly advertised release dates: retailers like Best Buy, Walmart and Electronics Boutique were getting antsy and threatening to cancel, or at least heavily reduce, their orders for what they thought was just going to be a relatively small niche game anyway. Given the time and investment already put into developing the game, not having it available in Walmarts across America would have meant flushing away millions of dollars and several years of development time: it would have been DOA.
When you think about the amount of time that goes into the development of an MMORPG (anywhere from three to six years) the idea of a game that is released too early becomes a nightmare. Imagine trying to fix the breaks on your car while someone is driving it down the freeway and you realise the likelihood of actually balancing/fixing SWG short of taking the game offline for six months was pretty much next to nonexistant.
However, all of the above could have been dealt with slowly over time. Despite the flaws that I and numerous others have mentioned, the game was in pretty healthy shape, at least from a business/subscriber perspective, and had achieved a fairly stable population that was somewhere around two hundred to two hundred-fifty thousand players. That number was well short of their desired goal, but still one of the largest games out there circa late 2003/early 2004.
But something happened that no one expected. World of Warcraft happened. And with the unprecidented numbers that WoW brought in, everyone realized that there was a huge untapped market out there for MMOs, and that the scale for judging success had been permanently altered. So something happened in the MMO market: other live games starting making changes to chase the success of WoW, like SWG's change to the CU and then to the NGE. The idea behind the NGE was to bring in console gamers who normally didn't care for PC games. It didn't work because somehow they didn't factor into account that console gamers want to use a joystick/keypad and not a keyboard, among the other more serious reasons, like the fact that this version of the game was also being released at least six months too early or the failure to launch mass market advertising to let anyone know this game was actually out there. (personal side note: how is it that the video game industry can annually generate roughly the same amount of revenue as the film industry, yet I never see a single video game advertisemtment while watching "Heroes" or "Lost" while I get bombarded with ads for "Fantastic Four" and "Pirates of the Carribean"? I might add that neither of which look half as cool as, say, LOTOR Online or CoV do to me.)
I'm sure that I could go on, but my mind is starting to wander a bit. But my point here is that you want to know that one reason that SWG went so wrong and the fact is there isn't any one single reason, in the game or out of the game, that can be pointed to and said "That's it! That's the reason why!"
"- When JTLS (expansion) came out too people were very disappointed and felt like it destroid the social game because it changed hw you went around from planet to planet without the 10 min wait. Also i remember lots of people quiting the game because the expansion was just crap and not what we wanted."
Hmm i personally think JTLS was one of the best x-packs ever... What no really IT WAS.
It was a differnet type of x-pack but it allowed you to keep playing SWG even if you were a bit tired of grinding for focus pearls or exp or pvp or whatever. Not only that but it was fun i mean it was a interactive tie fighter game in a mmorpg how can that not be great . It was also a fun way to make money for new characters. i Never understand why new character/low level toons make so much LESS money.
Still i understand some peoples dislike of it i mean it really did not add much to the orginial game... but is that required of a x-pack ... i personally thought it was a master piece, it filled out the SWG experience even more... because after all spacecraft battles where part of the starwars exp.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
1. Hologrind - Destroyed the game way before the CU. It was cristmas 2003 and the devs gave a holo to everyone, the game never recovered of the massive change that was. Almost everyone was after beeing jedi, so the armorsmith became a medic, the weaponsmith became a entertainer, the bountyhunter became a chef and the game became a joke. 2. The superman Clone Army There was also a time that everyone in the game had the same armor and the same buffs... Talk about variety. Armys of super mans dreesed in Composite would join in the major starports, get the GOD-mode on and could solo EVERYTHING in the game. Great fun and great chalenge in SWG. 3. The continuous leaving costumers. Most of the people think that the majoraty of costumers only left when the NGE hit, but they are wrong. Sure when NGE hit lots of people leave at the same time, but the game was losing costumers since day one, when the state of the game was so poor that lots of folks played the 1st month because was free and then gave the game some time.
I see theres people here that played from the begining, so they must remember the lots of critics that the game was having in the foruns, magazines, sites, etc... When they went for the NGE the population was already very different from lauch days, (I'm not saying that is was horrible, but very far from the best days of SWG) thats why SOE thought they had to do something as the game was already dieing a long time ago. 4. WoW came out. That explains for itself, although I played WoW for almost 2 years and LOTRO beta and now I'm playing SWG again, and for people that are a little tired of Elves and Dwarves its still the best option on the market.
Item #2 : I find this extremely hard to believe. I had characters on 2 servers (Corbantis and Naritus) and I remember both increasing in population until the CU and then it seemed only to even out. When NGE hit within a week, half of the population was gone.
Do you have a source to back up the highlighted sentence above??
I was there and I readed the foruns, talked to people ingame, etc. The only content in SWG was mission terminals that gave you destroy or deliver missions. Even that huge content was broken because lots of times you would get a waypoint to a empty place.
Many people wanted more that that, people wanted stuff to do ingame, but all we had was a great community (best community I have ever made part was the first months of SWG, almost brings a tear to my eyes) and thats why I loved those days even with the broken game I was playing.
Then the Holocrons came and even more people lost interest in the game, somepeople simply didnt want to go grind all day at force sensitives that droped holocrons, the gamers content was working before because people were around, whent the hologring hit the game never recovered the health it had. The cantinas that had been the heart of the game in my opinion where full of people AFK macroing their way to the profession the Holocron told them...
That was way before CU or NGE and the game started going downhill since then.
Well i think the only reason why SOE has failed to make SWG progress as good as WoW is, is because of poor planning and lack of customer service. I remember in the old days when on my server (tempest) i used to go on Dathomir hunting packs and then just hang out on the Mining outpost and talk to friends, help noobies etc; all that it gone, and i remember as if it was yesterday.
1st: Before the NGE Really excited about the new changes that Julio Torres mentioned on the forums, told everyone in guild and most ppl were like Omg and stuff but that was when we didnt know the truth behind it.
2nd: Test Server When i finnally downloaded everything i need to check out the new CU, i logged on the the game, new interface looks cooler game running fine and seemed pretty good. I got up thru the first part of the tutorial until the Millenium Falcum bit, i was like ROFL when it was reported that i couldnt pass thru the MF and i was like ( are they gonna realease this?? i mean, even the tutorial is screwed up, gimme a break) after i finnally got thru to planetside along with 300 other players spamming about how much they hated the changes and stuff, and i was like really happy about them, i tested the new CU and was kind of impressed since im quite an FPS fan but i felt that somehow it didnt fit to the mmorpg background.
3rd: ! NGE ! I log in, only to find myself in the Dathomir Mining Outpost, by myself. It looked to me that the whole server population was cut in half, and half again; the only place where the server was living and fun was gone and was deserted... I find out that almost my whole guild quit, and i felt really bad, thinking that it was prolly a really recent server restart and i was the first one to log in but minutes passed and still noone. I log out, check the forums and find out that everything i worked for, my friends and guild familly was all gone just because someone thought it would be more starwarsy to destroy the only thing that made SWG fun and exciting.
Overall, those SOE self minded, non-sociable baboons who do not know enough about creating a fun and player-oriented game. The rules are these: If they do not give what the players want, the players give them. Which was massive subscription terminations and ended up screwing a game that i once called fun...
For me it all started going wrong when SWG tried to copy life.. I play to relax and have fun, NOT to grind..
1) Macroing was the worst damn thing EVER.. Everywhere I went there was someone macroing to grind exp, rather it was crafting, combat or entertainer
2) Crafting balance.. With unfair crafting designs you end up with a BS economy.. We won't even get into the problem SWG had early on with credit duping bugs that lead to 250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 credits into the game in a couple months.. LOL
3) Buffing was bugged 1/2 the time
4) Mission were bugged 2/3rd of the time
5) NO CONTENT worth a crap.. If you wanted more you had to PvP GCW If PvP wasn't your thing, welcome to boredom city..
6) Players Cities SUCKED
7) Combat balance issues.. This was caused by allowing people to cross train and create templates.. Hense you either have ONE class in the end, or you have balance issues.. HELLO..
75% of the Subscribers from the beginning QUIT before CU.. Our guild of 20 dissolved and disbanded at the release of CU.. Most quit and some stayed hoping it would get better...... In the end via emails.. ALL 20 left the game by the 1st anniversary.. BTW.. Our guild owners and officers were SWG beta testers.. I was there from Day 1, and I only lasted till CU.. I quit before NGE .. I had enough of the bs from the SWG devs..
The answer is that there is no one thing exactly that went wrong. Everything went wrong. However, most of the answers that I've read here have discussed only in-game issues. While these would prove to have a definite impact on reviews of the game and create an atmosphere that might make it daunting to new players, a great deal of what went wrong with SWG actually had little to do with Jedi versus all other professions, or unblalanced PvP or even delayed content/bug fixes. Well to be honest , all the vets knew what was wrong. It was them not listening to their customers. And also taking the game into a direction it wasn't supposed to go for a sandbox mmo. The problem was them focusing on PvP to much... which is why it lost its sandbox feel and got made to be more like WoW... Bad idea.
In many ways SWG was crippled before it went live.
Yes maybe. But i bet people still would have played due to the freedom. In fact, many of us overlooked the bugs to play out our sagas and hoping that they would slowly fix the game with bug fixes.
I'm pretty sure that there are few who would argue with the statement that SWG was the most ambitious MMORPG ever lauched at the time of it's release, and quite possibly still the most ambitious one ever.
I agree fully, had the gane been in my hands i would have changed it into a MMORPG with a FPS view. But that doesn't mean i would have focused on fighting, just making it more real. Any case.. moving on...
SWG attempted to be all things to all people: simple enough for players new to online gaming, yet deep enough to satisfy even the most experienced online vets. Yes, and it really did it well... untill the cu then the nge. Its a sandbox game for petes sake.. its supposed to.
Therein lies one of the most basic problems: you can't be all things to all people. Trying to do exactly that is the surest way to fail. Just take a look at other successful MMORPGs out there right now and you'll find that not one of them is designed for everyone: these games are designed to do what they do, and do it well; but if they don't do what you want, then you'd better find a different game. So, while we can applaud the original goals, these goals were also the gaurantee of failure. Heres where I respectfully disagree. Its because it was a sandbox mmo. Again... it wasn't failing till they started drastically making it like every other game out there. It was supposed to be DIFFERENT than other mmorpgs, not follow the same course. No, there isn't a guarantee of failure... thats only the view of those who support all games to be exactly the same. But enough said on that...
Along the lines of the above, you have to keep in mind that any MMORPG based on a pre-existing pop culture phenomenon (Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings) is likely to fail, or at least fail to live up to the promise of it's name. The games are based around the idea of "inserting" yourself into the universe of (insert Star Wars, etc here) and living out your own personal fantasy of what you would be like in that universe. The problem is that pretty much all fantasies are based upon inherent inequities and in an MMORPG everyone must be equal: the gamer's desire to truely fulfil the fantasy is in direct conflict with the game's need to ensure that equality of all.
But your not seeing the whole picture... "give the players props and they will put on a play." But its no longer that... in fact its far from it. People thought peter jackson was going to fail on his lord of the rings movie due to the thought everyone has that making a movie pretty close to books is impossible... but you know what.. he did it! And damn good! Because he dared to do it unlike any other person and poored his heart and soul into it. No my friend, they wouldn't have failed if they had just stuck to thier guns and fixed bugs and added content here and there. Instead of making it like every mmorpg out there.
Another big problem that SWG faced was that it was released at least six months too early by most of the beta testers' opinions. The reason behind this isn't as simple as the whole "because the guys running SOE and LA are boneheads" that keeps popping up either. The game came out after being significantly delayed, at least twice, from publicly advertised release dates: retailers like Best Buy, Walmart and Electronics Boutique were getting antsy and threatening to cancel, or at least heavily reduce, their orders for what they thought was just going to be a relatively small niche game anyway. Given the time and investment already put into developing the game, not having it available in Walmarts across America would have meant flushing away millions of dollars and several years of development time: it would have been DOA. Maybe, but after they released it would have been better if they listened to their loyal fans for bug fixes. Then all that uneasyness from the beta would have been put aside.
When you think about the amount of time that goes into the development of an MMORPG (anywhere from three to six years) the idea of a game that is released too early becomes a nightmare. Imagine trying to fix the breaks on your car while someone is driving it down the freeway and you realise the likelihood of actually balancing/fixing SWG short of taking the game offline for six months was pretty much next to nonexistant. Except for the fact that you cant have copies of cars, fix that flaw and then morph it into the old, like you can data. So... no.. im sorry... they could have listened to their loyal fans and fixed bugs, not give us what we don't want. Its easier than you think, trust me.
However, all of the above could have been dealt with slowly over time. Despite the flaws that I and numerous others have mentioned, the game was in pretty healthy shape, at least from a business/subscriber perspective, and had achieved a fairly stable population that was somewhere around two hundred to two hundred-fifty thousand players.
I agree with this. Subs were great. And truely if they had stuck to thier guns.. people fleeing to WoW would have came back, renewing the subs and probably bringing others with them.
That number was well short of their desired goal, but still one of the largest games out there circa late 2003/early 2004.
It doesn't matter, it was a niche game with a sandbox feel. And it was doing damn well for being a niche game. Again, had they stuck to their guns.. they would have a lot more than that now. Especially when people bright thier friends over from wow. But something happened that no one expected. World of Warcraft happened. And with the unprecidented numbers that WoW brought in, everyone realized that there was a huge untapped market out there for MMOs, and that the scale for judging success had been permanently altered. So something happened in the MMO market: other live games starting making changes to chase the success of WoW, like SWG's change to the CU and then to the NGE.
Unfortunately heres where they started *bleep*ing up badly. They alienated all of their players, destroyed thier sagas and their game as well... a very foolish move. "You don't bite the hand that feeds you." Everyone (the developers) wanted to be like wow due to thier success. But what they didn't realize is that they (blizzard) had alot of fans from bnet, wc3 fans, and mmo fans, and a well polished game to boot. Thats the only reason they were successful. Wow, in fact was just like everquest in many ways. They just added their flavor to it. So yeah, bad bad move to make SWG, a game that was totally different, like WoW, and alienating thier player base. But enough said on that as well...
The idea behind the NGE was to bring in console gamers who normally didn't care for PC games.
No, they just wanted a piece of wow's pie... thats all. The NGE is a mirror of alot of wow's gameplay.
(personal side note: how is it that the video game industry can annually generate roughly the same amount of revenue as the film industry, yet I never see a single video game advertisemtment while watching "Heroes" or "Lost" while I get bombarded with ads for "Fantastic Four" and "Pirates of the Carribean"? I might add that neither of which look half as cool as, say, LOTOR Online or CoV do to me.) Because they think a lot of gamers don't watch tv, which is true and false at the same time. (matters on the person really) They should have advertised SWG pre-cu. But now its too late. WoW gamers will come and try it and think, "its too much like wow was.. but a lot worse" instead of seeing the pre-cu and falling in love with it like many of us did. Again bad business moves.
I'm sure that I could go on, but my mind is starting to wander a bit. But my point here is that you want to know that one reason that SWG went so wrong and the fact is there isn't any one single reason, in the game or out of the game, that can be pointed to and said "That's it! That's the reason why!" Actually this is where I hardcore disagree with you. There is a reason, in fact theres a few. One is that they didn't listen to the loyal part of their player base. Two is that they tried to get some of WoW's subscriber base by copying them. Three is even after the sub numbers proving the fact that they did the wrong thing and smed admitting that they did wrong, they STILL won't bring back pre-cu.
But in an ironic twist some of the fans are bringing it back again And once again, SoE will be shown what fools they are for being so prideful and not using their thinker.
"Do not fret! Your captain is about to enter Valhalla!" - General Beatrix of Alexandria
"The acquisition of knowledge is of use to the intellect, for nothing can be loved or hated without first being known." - Leo da Vinci
I was just having this discussion with my brother today. When the came launched it was amazing.. so amazing.
Crafting professions, combat professions and even the entertainer professesion worked well.
everybody needed each other. I had crafter friends for gear, entertainers to rid me of battle fatigue, doctors to buff me and other combat classes to beat on or group up with.
it was fun. all the non combat professions had a purpose and they liked it . And the combat proffession would be of service to those non combat professions..
then they dropped jedi in and then all the balancing around jedi.. then JTLS then i said FU and walked away.
they ruined what was one of the most enjoyable mmos i had ever played.
player run economy and good synergy with combat and non combat professions.
player creatied cities were great too even though they never really got it right.. ti was a great idea.
I am still angry about it very angry. they had a gem . It would have beat WoW in the long run
I am still angry about it very angry. they had a gem . It would have beat WoW in the long run
You can't be serious since WOW was the reason combined with bugs and other techincal problems that SWG started to lose players. And you think SWG would beat WOW in long run? no body likes to ruin a perfectly profitable game but hard truth is that SWG was bleeding subs and SOE/LA made a last ditch effort to make SWG profitable by following more casual friendly approach but they went too over board with it. They tried and failed, time to get over i thinK.
I am still angry about it very angry. they had a gem . It would have beat WoW in the long run
You can't be serious since WOW was the reason combined with bugs and other techincal problems that SWG started to lose players. And you think SWG would beat WOW in long run? no body likes to ruin a perfectly profitable game but hard truth is that SWG was bleeding subs and SOE/LA made a last ditch effort to make SWG profitable by following more casual friendly approach but they went too over board with it. They tried and failed, time to get over i thinK.
I don't know if SWG would've ever beat WoW in any situation, but where would SWG & SOE be if SOE stuck to their guns and fixed and expanded upon the original Pre-CU vision of the game?
Outside the eventual CU and then the NGE driving everyone away, there were really 2 significant things that made people disgruntled in SWG:
1. "Lack of a space game in a Star Wars game" when SWG was released. The game was regularly roasted by reviews because of that very basic fact. Eventually partially resolved with JTL, but SOE didn't expand on JTL any further, and it seemed the engine couldn't handle big fights in space.
2. Longstanding Bugs. Basically SOE not fixing the game.
Now, let's imagine this. Where would SWG have gone if it remained faithful to its original vision and SOE resolved those 2 listed issues? Where would the game be if SOE expanded the game more on top of a more refined game?
If that was so, I would still be playing SWG and forking money every month to SOE. If that was so, I would never have been hopping along numerous MMORPGs after departing SWG, from 2005-2009, and experiencing some horrendous big name releases in the genre (AoC, WAR, STO, etc, I unfortunately dealt with most of them).
If... SOE just fixed the d*mn game, that would've been good reason enough to stay.
Edit to add: A healthy SWG would still be viable enough to exist in a WoW or maybe eventually SWTOR dominated MMORPG genre. SWG's gameplay is more old school and very, very different from WoW and later titles (EvE doesn't count as a "later" title, it came out in about '04). Different enough to have players of a different gaming taste still have their own "home."
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
I am still angry about it very angry. they had a gem . It would have beat WoW in the long run
You can't be serious since WOW was the reason combined with bugs and other techincal problems that SWG started to lose players. And you think SWG would beat WOW in long run? no body likes to ruin a perfectly profitable game but hard truth is that SWG was bleeding subs and SOE/LA made a last ditch effort to make SWG profitable by following more casual friendly approach but they went too over board with it. They tried and failed, time to get over i thinK.
I don't know if SWG would've ever beat WoW in any situation, but where would SWG & SOE be if SOE stuck to their guns and fixed and expanded upon the original Pre-CU vision of the game?
Outside the eventual CU and then the NGE driving everyone away, there were really 2 significant things that made people disgruntled in SWG:
1. "Lack of a space game in a Star Wars game" when SWG was released. The game was regularly roasted by reviews because of that very basic fact. Eventually partially resolved with JTL, but SOE didn't expand on JTL any further, and it seemed the engine couldn't handle big fights in space.
2. Longstanding Bugs. Basically SOE not fixing the game.
Now, let's imagine this. Where would SWG have gone if it remained faithful to its original vision and SOE resolved those 2 listed issues? Where would the game be if SOE expanded the game more on top of a more refined game?
If that was so, I would still be playing SWG and forking money every month to SOE. If that was so, I would never have been hopping along numerous MMORPGs after departing SWG, from 2005-2009, and experiencing some horrendous big name releases in the genre (AoC, WAR, STO, etc, I unfortunately dealt with most of them).
If... SOE just fixed the d*mn game, that would've been good reason enough to stay.
Edit to add: A healthy SWG would still be viable enough to exist in a WoW or maybe eventually SWTOR dominated MMORPG genre. SWG's gameplay is more old school and very, very different from WoW and later titles (EvE doesn't count as a "later" title, it came out in about '04). Different enough to have players of a different gaming taste still have their own "home."
I agree 100000000%. All people wanted was for SOE to just fix the damn bugs, fix the broken professions, and add content. But for some reason, that simple concept flew over SOE's collective heads. Oh well. Whatever. Game is finally dead now. None of it matters anymore.
I posted this in the other thread about this topic:
With the introduction of Jedi the focus of the game shifted from living in the galaxy of starwars to grinding out your jedi character.
To be competitive in PvP you had to be a Jedi because if you weren't Jedi you were the victim of a Jedi.
If you were fighting an elite mob the jedi would come up and steal it right from under you because they put out more DPS in seconds than your entire group could in minutes.
Jedi were gods that made "masters" of combat professions look like as if they were holding a sharped stick by the wrong end.
When Jedi became too numerous to count everybody (even those that didn't want to) was forced to either join the jedi or quit for the reasons I gave above.
So in the end you had jedi on one side and chefs, medics, entertainers, and mineral harvestors (the only professions that catered to jedi) on the other and that's all that was left of pre-CU SWG. SWG wasn't just bleeding subs - it was hemorrhaging fast and something needed to be done about it.
The combat rebalance was the cure, but instead they gave us the combat upgrade and before we were comfortable with it they dropped the NGE on us - it broke the spell this game had on many of us and that was the final bullet in the head that stopped the bleeding once and for all.
That was Publish 9, IIRC. That was when the Jedi started getting all the patch attention. That was the day Jedi came out of hiding to parade around and have duels in major cities, in front of Starports, right out in the open for all the Empire to see. When this patch hit, my heart for Star Wars canon sank.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
That was Publish 9, IIRC. That was when the Jedi started getting all the patch attention. That was the day Jedi came out of hiding to parade around and have duels in major cities, in front of Starports, right out in the open for all the Empire to see. When this patch hit, my heart for Star Wars canon sank.
Yep publish 9.
Here's the first real stab that ended in a bloodbath:
What really went wrong was that World of Warcraft launched and showed SOE/LA that the MMO market was potentially larger than they had thought, and that they wanted a larger part of it.
All of their efforts after that were to expand the reach of the game, instead of trying to fix/improve the game they already had. The cost was that they alienated most of their subscribers in the process.
You can cite specifics, but on the highest scale this is the genesis of all of their problems. If WoW only had 400,000 subscribers (like people thought SWG had at its height) I think SOE/LA would have tried to improve what they already had instead of trying to replace it in the middle of its run.
Comments
Tuocs! WooT! Great to see you again! Even if only to lament what we had. I miss Lowca too, but the old Lowca where we didn't have nearly enough room for all our factories and houses 'cause there were so many people and so many resources to store!
And, on-topic, see, this is what old SWG was all about...communities. The only game where we REALLY had our cities and communities, and everything was player-made. Nothing since has come close.
-- Xix
"I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"
Do you have a source to back up the highlighted sentence above??
Fixed the bugs lol
was in the game up to a few days ago lol
SOE knows what you like... You don't!
And don't forget... I am forcing you to read this!
I was just browsing the homepage when I saw something about this and had to check out the thread; after reading a couple of the responses, I felt compelled to register just to toss my own two cents into the hat.
Wow... It's tough to imagine a question more loaded than "What exactly went wrong with SWG?"
The answer is that there is no one thing exactly that went wrong. Everything went wrong. However, most of the answers that I've read here have discussed only in-game issues. While these would prove to have a definite impact on reviews of the game and create an atmosphere that might make it daunting to new players, a great deal of what went wrong with SWG actually had little to do with Jedi versus all other professions, or unblalanced PvP or even delayed content/bug fixes.
In many ways SWG was crippled before it went live.
I'm pretty sure that there are few who would argue with the statement that SWG was the most ambitious MMORPG ever lauched at the time of it's release, and quite possibly still the most ambitious one ever. SWG attempted to be all things to all people: simple enough for players new to online gaming, yet deep enough to satisfy even the most experienced online vets. Therein lies one of the most basic problems: you can't be all things to all people. It just doesn't work. As the saying goes: you can't please all of the people all of the time. Trying to do exactly that is the surest way to fail. Just take a look at other successful MMORPGs out there right now and you'll find that not one of them is designed for everyone: these games are designed to do what they do, and do it well; but if they don't do what you want, then you'd better find a different game. So, while we can applaud the original goals, these goals were also the gaurantee of failure.
Along the lines of the above, you have to keep in mind that any MMORPG based on a pre-existing pop culture phenomenon (Star Wars, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings) is likely to fail, or at least fail to live up to the promise of it's name. The games are based around the idea of "inserting" yourself into the universe of (insert Star Wars, etc here) and living out your own personal fantasy of what you would be like in that universe. The problem is that pretty much all fantasies are based upon inherent inequities and in an MMORPG everyone must be equal: the gamer's desire to truely fulfil the fantasy is in direct conflict with the game's need to ensure that equality of all. Star Trek Online might prove to the exception to this rule (since Star Trek is a fantasy based upon the idea of the triumph of equality through diversity), but the Star Wars Universe (and The Matrix , LOTOR, et al) is clearly based upon some being inherently more powerful than others (Jedi, then bounty hunters, then all the rest of us peons out there) and that makes it pretty much impossible to live out one's personal Star Wars fantasy when you can't be any better than anyone else.
Another big problem that SWG faced was that it was released at least six months too early by most of the beta testers' opinions. The reason behind this isn't as simple as the whole "because the guys running SOE and LA are boneheads" that keeps popping up either. The game came out after being significantly delayed, at least twice, from publicly advertised release dates: retailers like Best Buy, Walmart and Electronics Boutique were getting antsy and threatening to cancel, or at least heavily reduce, their orders for what they thought was just going to be a relatively small niche game anyway. Given the time and investment already put into developing the game, not having it available in Walmarts across America would have meant flushing away millions of dollars and several years of development time: it would have been DOA.
When you think about the amount of time that goes into the development of an MMORPG (anywhere from three to six years) the idea of a game that is released too early becomes a nightmare. Imagine trying to fix the breaks on your car while someone is driving it down the freeway and you realise the likelihood of actually balancing/fixing SWG short of taking the game offline for six months was pretty much next to nonexistant.
However, all of the above could have been dealt with slowly over time. Despite the flaws that I and numerous others have mentioned, the game was in pretty healthy shape, at least from a business/subscriber perspective, and had achieved a fairly stable population that was somewhere around two hundred to two hundred-fifty thousand players. That number was well short of their desired goal, but still one of the largest games out there circa late 2003/early 2004.
But something happened that no one expected. World of Warcraft happened. And with the unprecidented numbers that WoW brought in, everyone realized that there was a huge untapped market out there for MMOs, and that the scale for judging success had been permanently altered. So something happened in the MMO market: other live games starting making changes to chase the success of WoW, like SWG's change to the CU and then to the NGE. The idea behind the NGE was to bring in console gamers who normally didn't care for PC games. It didn't work because somehow they didn't factor into account that console gamers want to use a joystick/keypad and not a keyboard, among the other more serious reasons, like the fact that this version of the game was also being released at least six months too early or the failure to launch mass market advertising to let anyone know this game was actually out there. (personal side note: how is it that the video game industry can annually generate roughly the same amount of revenue as the film industry, yet I never see a single video game advertisemtment while watching "Heroes" or "Lost" while I get bombarded with ads for "Fantastic Four" and "Pirates of the Carribean"? I might add that neither of which look half as cool as, say, LOTOR Online or CoV do to me.)
I'm sure that I could go on, but my mind is starting to wander a bit. But my point here is that you want to know that one reason that SWG went so wrong and the fact is there isn't any one single reason, in the game or out of the game, that can be pointed to and said "That's it! That's the reason why!"
Hmm i personally think JTLS was one of the best x-packs ever... What no really IT WAS.
It was a differnet type of x-pack but it allowed you to keep playing SWG even if you were a bit tired of grinding for focus pearls or exp or pvp or whatever. Not only that but it was fun i mean it was a interactive tie fighter game in a mmorpg how can that not be great
Still i understand some peoples dislike of it i mean it really did not add much to the orginial game... but is that required of a x-pack ... i personally thought it was a master piece, it filled out the SWG experience even more... because after all spacecraft battles where part of the starwars exp.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Do you have a source to back up the highlighted sentence above??
I was there and I readed the foruns, talked to people ingame, etc. The only content in SWG was mission terminals that gave you destroy or deliver missions. Even that huge content was broken because lots of times you would get a waypoint to a empty place.
Many people wanted more that that, people wanted stuff to do ingame, but all we had was a great community (best community I have ever made part was the first months of SWG, almost brings a tear to my eyes) and thats why I loved those days even with the broken game I was playing.
Then the Holocrons came and even more people lost interest in the game, somepeople simply didnt want to go grind all day at force sensitives that droped holocrons, the gamers content was working before because people were around, whent the hologring hit the game never recovered the health it had. The cantinas that had been the heart of the game in my opinion where full of people AFK macroing their way to the profession the Holocron told them...
That was way before CU or NGE and the game started going downhill since then.
1st: Before the NGE
Really excited about the new changes that Julio Torres mentioned on the forums, told everyone in guild and most ppl were like Omg and stuff but that was when we didnt know the truth behind it.
2nd: Test Server
When i finnally downloaded everything i need to check out the new CU, i logged on the the game, new interface looks cooler game running fine and seemed pretty good. I got up thru the first part of the tutorial until the Millenium Falcum bit, i was like ROFL when it was reported that i couldnt pass thru the MF and i was like ( are they gonna realease this?? i mean, even the tutorial is screwed up, gimme a break) after i finnally got thru to planetside along with 300 other players spamming about how much they hated the changes and stuff, and i was like really happy about them, i tested the new CU and was kind of impressed since im quite an FPS fan but i felt that somehow it didnt fit to the mmorpg background.
3rd: ! NGE !
I log in, only to find myself in the Dathomir Mining Outpost, by myself. It looked to me that the whole server population was cut in half, and half again; the only place where the server was living and fun was gone and was deserted...
I find out that almost my whole guild quit, and i felt really bad, thinking that it was prolly a really recent server restart and i was the first one to log in but minutes passed and still noone. I log out, check the forums and find out that everything i worked for, my friends and guild familly was all gone just because someone thought it would be more starwarsy to destroy the only thing that made SWG fun and exciting.
Overall, those SOE self minded, non-sociable baboons who do not know enough about creating a fun and player-oriented game. The rules are these: If they do not give what the players want, the players give them. Which was massive subscription terminations and ended up screwing a game that i once called fun...
1) Macroing was the worst damn thing EVER.. Everywhere I went there was someone macroing to grind exp, rather it was crafting, combat or entertainer
2) Crafting balance.. With unfair crafting designs you end up with a BS economy.. We won't even get into the problem SWG had early on with credit duping bugs that lead to 250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 credits into the game in a couple months.. LOL
3) Buffing was bugged 1/2 the time
4) Mission were bugged 2/3rd of the time
5) NO CONTENT worth a crap.. If you wanted more you had to PvP GCW
6) Players Cities SUCKED
7) Combat balance issues.. This was caused by allowing people to cross train and create templates.. Hense you either have ONE class in the end, or you have balance issues.. HELLO..
75% of the Subscribers from the beginning QUIT before CU.. Our guild of 20 dissolved and disbanded at the release of CU.. Most quit and some stayed hoping it would get better...... In the end via emails.. ALL 20 left the game by the 1st anniversary.. BTW.. Our guild owners and officers were SWG beta testers.. I was there from Day 1, and I only lasted till CU.. I quit before NGE .. I had enough of the bs from the SWG devs..
ROFL...all too true.
Much of this has to do with WoW envy.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
"Do not fret! Your captain is about to enter Valhalla!" - General Beatrix of Alexandria
"The acquisition of knowledge is of use to the intellect, for nothing can be loved or hated without first being known." - Leo da Vinci
I was just having this discussion with my brother today. When the came launched it was amazing.. so amazing.
Crafting professions, combat professions and even the entertainer professesion worked well.
everybody needed each other. I had crafter friends for gear, entertainers to rid me of battle fatigue, doctors to buff me and other combat classes to beat on or group up with.
it was fun. all the non combat professions had a purpose and they liked it . And the combat proffession would be of service to those non combat professions..
then they dropped jedi in and then all the balancing around jedi.. then JTLS then i said FU and walked away.
they ruined what was one of the most enjoyable mmos i had ever played.
player run economy and good synergy with combat and non combat professions.
player creatied cities were great too even though they never really got it right.. ti was a great idea.
I am still angry about it very angry. they had a gem . It would have beat WoW in the long run
You can't be serious since WOW was the reason combined with bugs and other techincal problems that SWG started to lose players. And you think SWG would beat WOW in long run? no body likes to ruin a perfectly profitable game but hard truth is that SWG was bleeding subs and SOE/LA made a last ditch effort to make SWG profitable by following more casual friendly approach but they went too over board with it. They tried and failed, time to get over i thinK.
I don't know if SWG would've ever beat WoW in any situation, but where would SWG & SOE be if SOE stuck to their guns and fixed and expanded upon the original Pre-CU vision of the game?
Outside the eventual CU and then the NGE driving everyone away, there were really 2 significant things that made people disgruntled in SWG:
1. "Lack of a space game in a Star Wars game" when SWG was released. The game was regularly roasted by reviews because of that very basic fact. Eventually partially resolved with JTL, but SOE didn't expand on JTL any further, and it seemed the engine couldn't handle big fights in space.
2. Longstanding Bugs. Basically SOE not fixing the game.
Now, let's imagine this. Where would SWG have gone if it remained faithful to its original vision and SOE resolved those 2 listed issues? Where would the game be if SOE expanded the game more on top of a more refined game?
If that was so, I would still be playing SWG and forking money every month to SOE. If that was so, I would never have been hopping along numerous MMORPGs after departing SWG, from 2005-2009, and experiencing some horrendous big name releases in the genre (AoC, WAR, STO, etc, I unfortunately dealt with most of them).
If... SOE just fixed the d*mn game, that would've been good reason enough to stay.
Edit to add: A healthy SWG would still be viable enough to exist in a WoW or maybe eventually SWTOR dominated MMORPG genre. SWG's gameplay is more old school and very, very different from WoW and later titles (EvE doesn't count as a "later" title, it came out in about '04). Different enough to have players of a different gaming taste still have their own "home."
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
I agree 100000000%. All people wanted was for SOE to just fix the damn bugs, fix the broken professions, and add content. But for some reason, that simple concept flew over SOE's collective heads. Oh well. Whatever. Game is finally dead now. None of it matters anymore.
I posted this in the other thread about this topic:
With the introduction of Jedi the focus of the game shifted from living in the galaxy of starwars to grinding out your jedi character.
To be competitive in PvP you had to be a Jedi because if you weren't Jedi you were the victim of a Jedi.
If you were fighting an elite mob the jedi would come up and steal it right from under you because they put out more DPS in seconds than your entire group could in minutes.
Jedi were gods that made "masters" of combat professions look like as if they were holding a sharped stick by the wrong end.
When Jedi became too numerous to count everybody (even those that didn't want to) was forced to either join the jedi or quit for the reasons I gave above.
So in the end you had jedi on one side and chefs, medics, entertainers, and mineral harvestors (the only professions that catered to jedi) on the other and that's all that was left of pre-CU SWG. SWG wasn't just bleeding subs - it was hemorrhaging fast and something needed to be done about it.
The combat rebalance was the cure, but instead they gave us the combat upgrade and before we were comfortable with it they dropped the NGE on us - it broke the spell this game had on many of us and that was the final bullet in the head that stopped the bleeding once and for all.
That was Publish 9, IIRC. That was when the Jedi started getting all the patch attention. That was the day Jedi came out of hiding to parade around and have duels in major cities, in front of Starports, right out in the open for all the Empire to see. When this patch hit, my heart for Star Wars canon sank.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
... or not. :P
It simply wasn't good enough at anything over and above the pure act of crafting.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
Yep publish 9.
Here's the first real stab that ended in a bloodbath:
http://swg.wikia.com/wiki/Publish_9_Notes_for_29_June_04
Almost 10 months later April 27th 2005 the CU was dropped on us.
Then on Nov 15th the NGE and game over.
Almost a year later the CU hit.
What really went wrong was that World of Warcraft launched and showed SOE/LA that the MMO market was potentially larger than they had thought, and that they wanted a larger part of it.
All of their efforts after that were to expand the reach of the game, instead of trying to fix/improve the game they already had. The cost was that they alienated most of their subscribers in the process.
You can cite specifics, but on the highest scale this is the genesis of all of their problems. If WoW only had 400,000 subscribers (like people thought SWG had at its height) I think SOE/LA would have tried to improve what they already had instead of trying to replace it in the middle of its run.
Yep.
Tecmo Bowl.
DJMTOTT is correct.
LA/LEC and SOE saw the explosion of "1m+ subscribers" and 2m and 3m and 4m Numbers that WoW was Bragging about.
And they forgot that Star Wars is a Niche Market and nothing like the Nerd Draw to Fantasy genre games.
MMO History: 2528 days in SW:G
