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How to Cure (or at least diminish) Vet Animus, a few proposals
iceman00
Member Posts: 1,363
In a previous post, I talked about a lot of the reasons why vets were so pissed off. Now, I want to suggest a few things SOE could do that would go a long way. There will always be those who are either so jaded by something, or just love to start fights that they will always bash SOE. (The former because of injustice, the latter just because he likes to fight.) Nor do I (being realistic) think SOE will do this. However there is at least a chance. Smedley and the devs have stated they want to reach out to the vets, do a real effort on bringing them back to this game. Here's one way they can do it.
1.) Apologize for your "mistake."
Smedley has admitted the NGE was a mistake. In whatever way is for the moment irrelevant. What happened with the NGE Smed admits was wrong. There's no longer any debating this. Yet if something is a mistake, you admit that what you did was wrong. The only logical conclusion is to apologize for committing that wrong. Otherwise, you are even more repugnant. At least before the admission, you were not admitting guilt, hence you had no need of atonement. Now you are admitting guilt, and without atonement, there is no chance at redemption.
This doesn't imply Smed needs to get on his knees before the vets and cry mea cupla, begging for their mercy and absolution. That's absurd. What Smedley can say is that:
"at the time, we thought the sweeping changes were the right thing to do, to reverse the trend in the game that was heading downhill. We were wrong, and I apologize to the veterans who cancelled as a result of this." For good measure, he can even throw in that one cannot "turn back the clock" and magically roll back to (insert favorite publish here).
2.) reach out to vets on how to improve the game.
Announce a real olive branch to vets. Announce that they wish to assemble a group of vets from the pre-cu days who are not with the game to offer advice on how to bring back vets. In order to prevent this from clashing with those currently enjoying the game (at least most the clashing) bring together those current players. Have them send an email with a ceertain word amount of why they belong on this panel.
3.)addition to this, offer those veterans willing to return a real free trial. None of this 14 day crap. Vets who can demonstrate they played before, and are willing to work extensively on offering suggestions once this trial has ended should be offered at least one month of free playing time, to really play the game and come up with proposals.
4.)Invite the vets to a seat at a table. After this free trial period has expired, announce a live IRC chat between Smedley, SOE Devs, and the players who went through this trial and those selected to discuss ways to improve the game. I don't care how much you need to control it by only allowing certain opinions, time limits and such, just find some public way to have this discussion. I'm sure MMORPG.com's chat room will be available. 
(end shameless promo for the site I have worked for lol)
That's four things mentioned, without making one change. I do think a good amount of vets would be willing to come forth (especially the intelligent articulate vets who want nothing but the best for SWG). Of course they will have to say your proposals are no gaurentees. But if they want to woo the vets back, they can start by LISTENING to them. Here's a great first step down that path I believe.
Comments
"If you want to bring the Vets back to the game, bring The Game back for the Vets."
'nuff said.
SWG? Pull the plug already!
Really no need to now, the game is on the upswing proving that the DEV's made the right move with the NGE.
While a formal apology would be nice, and asking for and ACTING ON the suggestions of vets, the one thing they can do to fix this is roll it back.
Which they have repeatedly said they will not do.
For one thing, to roll it back properly, they'd have to take away Jeedai as a starting profession. They'd only piss off all the post-NGE Jeedai if they did that. From my observation during my vet trial, a month ago, most new players want the glowstick, regardless of whether or not it's a dominating class. When I talked to these new players, and tried to explain some of the things that the game used to have, they were awestruck. Seriously. They were impressed when I pulled out my Savage Humbaba mount...imagine how they'd react to the rancor!
At this point, I'd gladly play an SWG 2 that was the pre CU game with some balancing issues addressed and I had to start out from scratch, tame and train all those pets again on my main, regrind my MD/MCM medical support alt toon #2 again, and rebuild my MBE/MChef alt toon #3 back up again.
And, I'd gladly start the quest for the glowstick from scratch and give up my Elder Jedi, provided that they built a rock-solid, bug free new path to the glowstick that they will NOT give hints to players on how to get it in order to give the marketdroids warm fuzzies. A system that is random for every player, that involves questing, involves mastery of professions, involves exploration, and involves rewarding RP as opposed to power gaming. That gives us Jedi who fit into the world, who are rarely seen, and who will not dare duel in front of the entrance to the starport in Theed for fear of permadeath in the form of Darth Vader making them one with the Force.
I want the virtual world back. I want the community that interdependency fostered.
I want to ride my dewback with my gurreck in tow again, set up a camp, and just sit back and enjoy the twin suns setting behind a sand dune on Tatooine again with my friends and some guy who was just wandering by.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Normally I would applaud this kind of opimism, but the reality is this.
The game is nearly 4 years old to the day. I wouldn't expect many new subscibers to join a game so far into it's lifecycle. The best SOE could expect is for past subscibers to come back, but as newer MMO's come out the likelihood of this happening is getting smaller and smaller.
It still amazes me how many people currently playing are "just going through the motions" now. One decent new MMO can really negatively affect SWG by luring them away to something fresh and exciting.
What good would a formal 'apology' do? It is just a word and coming from the lips of Smed & Co. it would ring hollow. Even a child learns early on that just saying "Sorry"doesn't always make things "Okay". Actions speak louder than words, and a classic server would go a long way in making amends to the vets that were horribly wronged by the NGE. It has been over 1 1/2 years since the NGE went live and there still is no classic servers. Time is the enemy, or in $OE's case, an ally. At this point, apology or not, I doubt classic servers will ever become reality or the alternate game sites really amount to anything truly playable.
I see that SWG is bringing in pre-NGE type elements, but they are not as good as the original elements. There needs to be big strides made in returning QUALITY pre-NGE aspects back to the game and maybe 'de-NGEing' much of it. Even with great effort, I doubt SWG will ever see an appreciable number of vets returning for more than an occasional peek at the game. The subscription numbers will remain dismally low, and that will always be a constant reminder to $OE of the NGE fiasco.
<mod edit>
Ummm, no....you do know that multiple servers are hitting "Heavy" now?
So I'm going back to crowded and vibrant starports.
I think he was refering to the 17 light and very light servers
<mod edit>
Ummm, no....you do know that multiple servers are hitting "Heavy" now?
So I'm going back to crowded and vibrant starports.
wow more then 2 servers are heavy.....bria and a euro server? what times are they full at? ...... i remember when the number of server at heavy was more then 2-3... you are right....... the devs are right!
/golfclap
look you can love swg mr. lover but that will never change how bad soe messed with us or the fact that they admitted sweeping changes where wrong. everytime i miss the "old days" when it was full / heavy I still see the words of the smed saying the vets will come back.... he is right we all want to go back... heck i am sure most of us re-sub'd to see our houses, art ride a swoop over some memories.... with the hope that maybe I can take this NGE and play since wow is a waste of time. So i spend 3 nights trying to play the nge... new toon and all. my server was empty, the starports had no life. towns where empty. the iconic game it was not the game for me.I want a pre-nge server and a noob melon and new toon starting out to grind on meatlumps and duri's..... until then...
Here's the thing: They've said a few times either by implication or once or twice directly that the NGE "was a mistake." But my concern here even if they apologize is, why do they think it was a mistake? It's a mistake to them because they lost subscribers and company rep. On the other hand, it was a mistake, by my lights, because what they did was unethical and inexcusable. That is, they think it was bad because it had a bad end. I think it's bad because, whatever the ends, the means were unacceptable. If we let them get away with "the end was bad so we apologize" then we are just as bad as they are, allowing the end to justify the means.
So, if they want to truly apologize, what they have to do is back up and say, "The end we were trying to achieve did not justify the unacceptable means we used to get there." These unacceptable means include (1) overtly and knowingly misleading people about the expansion to get them to buy it when they otherwise would not; (2) as part of that deception, purposely waiting until the day after everyone's CC account was charged to announce the massive upcoming change; (3) making all sorts of minor changes to the CU to purposely preserve the illusion that they were working on it and keep the NGE a secret; (4) refusing to even remotely consider that what the vet players were saying had some validity; (5) caring about the potential market more than the current fans.
They have never apologized for any of that (and I doubt they ever will). When they say they "made a mistake," I do not get the feeling that they thought any of those 5 things were, themselves, a mistake, but rather, they think that "something" they did with the NGE lost them subscriptions. I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts most of them have no idea why they got so hammered in the subscription/reputation department. Their closest answer seems to be that once they found out we wouldn't like it, they should've launched it more slowly or maybe on alternate servers or something. But they don't understand why we didn't like it. Yes some of that was them changing our old game, but the main factor was them utterly dismissing long-time, multi-year customers as irrelevant and thinking they could treat us any old crappy way they wanted and we'd still re-up our subs.
Now, this is partly our fault, because we HAD been loyal to the game through a lot of BS. The rangers and BEs can tell you about this. Skill boxes that had no skills... skills that didn't work... recipe ingredients that never existed... uncraftable camo kits... etc... They stuck with it and were loyal, and I'm not really faulting that. After all I stuck with it through all sorts of Entertainer problems. But SOE took from this "No matter what we pull these idiot players still have 3 accounts each and keep paying us so we can do no wrong."
Of course what they did not count on was that it was not Star Wars that we were loyal to (the only thing, literally, that stayed the same from launch to NGE is the Star Wars theme, however corrupted and mis-handled), but the original game system, with all its flaws. But again, by sticking through the CU, which should have been unacceptable to most of us, and all the problems for months and years, they just thought they could keep messing with us.
This does not excuse their behavior... I am not blaming the victim. But, when they decided to do the 5 unethical and unacceptable things I mentioned above, if anyone raised objections, I'm sure that they said, "Don't worry, these players live to be abused. Look how we've treated them so far. We've got them hooked." And it is that attitude ("Don't worry, even though what we are doing is wrong the players will let us") that they need to be sorry for. That's the part that was unethical. Making a mistake is a mistake, and is not, by itself, unethical. Knowing you are doing wrong, doing evil, and doing it anyway just because you think you can, that is unethical.
So, if SOE wants me to change my tune about SWG, they not only need to apologize, for "making mistakes", but they need to be entirely specific and repentant about the reasons why these were mistakes. In short they would need to release an official statement that says something like this:
"We did purposely trick people into buying an expansion using false advertising, and we apologize for that. We knew you would all hate the NGE, and that is why we waited to announce it until we charged your CCs for the expansion, and we are sorry we did that. It was wrong. We even tried to deceive you further by making irrelevant changes to the CU that we knew would be over-written by the NGE, and for that we apologize. It was unethical. We tossed aside everything our loyal customers said and did, every suggestion they made, because we did not value them as highly as we valued the idea of all those people not playing the game. We listened to people who didn't play rather than who did. That was wrong, because our current players had been loyal to us, and we should have repaid that loyalty in kind. We are sorry. For all these things we apologize. We understand why what we did was wrong, and will never do any of those things again."
That would be a real apology with some teeth.
Of course, we will never get it. But... if they just say, "We're sorry we rolled out the NGE the way they did," that means nothing to me. It means not that they are sorry about what they did to us, but about what the NGE did to them.
As a final note, Ice, I know you know all these things, and I 'm not posting this to argue but to add my own thoughts... I'm expanding on what I think "they need to apologize" has got to mean. Just "we made a mistake, sorry" ain't gonna cut it with me, or a lot of vets. What they did was not "a mistake" -- it was willful set of malicious, dirty tricks designed to scoop in money and disregard customer loyalty, time, effort, etc. It was on purpose, in other words. They only view it as a mistake because it failed, not because it was wrong. And until that changes we have gotten nowhere.
C
It's not happening though, not now, not ever. Too much perceived risk. SOE has abandoned the vets of old, under the possibly-correct assumption that there's no hope of reconciliation. They're focused on the current game and current players, as they should be. Admittedly, it's nice to see that the current dev team learned that communication is a good thing, but even so, that's clearly not enough to ward off the animus of old.
-- xpaladin
[MMOz]
AC1/2, AO, DAoC, EQ1/2, SoR, SWG, UO, WAR, WoW
If smedly was dying on a rock and he needed a drink of water, i would piss in his mouth.
They killed something that to many they will nvr get back, that feeling of playing a game and your immaginary friend dissapears.
MY FRIEND DISPAREAED when i started swg , but now he is back since the CU.
SCREW SOE AND ANYONE WHO HAS EVER WORKED OR EVEN BEEN AUQIATINTED WITH ANYONE THEIR.
SOE IS A TERROIST and Terroistss should not be negoatied with, ONLY BOMBED TILL THEY DYE
WORD LIFE LAWL SAUCE
Great work Chessack!
You articulated clearly and concisely exactly what I wanted to for quite some time but never found the right way to state this.
Thanks for that
Watch out Ice, I think this guy is after your job.
Anyway, there is only one way to 'diminsh' the amount of SOE hate over the swg clusterf*ck. And that is the abashedly release a pre-cu version of the game. No apology. No free trials. Just a robust skill progression system, dynamic pvp, and a less-than-perfect but certainly adequate jedi experience.
Until that happens there can be no peace.
Go back to your starport of 3.....
Ummm, no....you do know that multiple servers are hitting "Heavy" now?
So I'm going back to crowded and vibrant starports.
You're only lieing to yourself friend.I agree that the odds of a 4 year old game attracting a large amount of new players is unlikely. However, with all that has been said, written, scream, and suggested about pre-cu over the last two years the only games that may not try it would be the ones that actually played pre-cu.
I do not meant to imply that the was anything wrpong with pre-cu or that those players would not comeback because they didn't like the game. Most players who would not come back because of SOE.
With every bit of negative press that has been putout about the NGE there was always something talking about how great pre-cu was. In other MMOs that I have played since the NGE when talking to players that had not played pre-cu most said they wished they had and/or they would give it a try if pre-cu ever came back. If SOE was to put in time fixing bugs and adding content to the pre-cu code, then run it on servers with minimal lag not only would they attract a large customer base but they would be able to keep those customers playing.
Could a re-release of pre-cu match the numbers of WOW? Not likely. But it could attract a player base that would surpass any other MMO out there. Negative press for the NGE was/is free advertisement for pre-cu!
I don't claim to be right, I'm just posting.
Go back to your starport of 3.....
Ummm, no....you do know that multiple servers are hitting "Heavy" now?
So I'm going back to crowded and vibrant starports.
By multiple he means 2 and by heavy he means the new heavy number and by crowded and vibrant he means the group of players known as "Nobody", "Plays", "THENGE" and their guildies "Empty" and "Servers"
Those 5 guys pwn nubs at the Naboo, Corellian, Lok, Dathomir, Dantoonie outposts all day. Whenever I try swg now they are always hanging we are always chilling together there.
Now that I am done kidding around. Seriously, they need to fix crafting and decay for anyone to take seriously SOE's committment to fixing the game. If they don't do as a veteran I see no way I can just go back knowing the game is loot based.
Chessack has very eloquenty laid out what shape the apology needs to take.
SOE and LA are not really sorry for what they did, they're sorry they got caught, in that they eviscerated their revenue stream by their actions.
That having been said, yeah, this is a year and a half old game running on an at least four year old platform/engine, with Yoda only knows how much code detrius from previous versions still hanging on.
A fresh start is needed, but to be honest I don't think LA or SOE are worthy of Raph Koster's vision, which is really quite brilliant in theory, even if the execution was less than that. My point of view from when I was in beta on was that the potential was always there in SWG, even if in execution it fell short. The CU, and later the NGE, trashed the potential by denying the virtual world, denying the sandbox, and falling back to level systems and directed content.
The virtual world and the sandbox are what made SWG so addicting to me, because that's what fostered the community that kept me there despite the bugs and imbalances and lack of prefab content.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
The game has been in decline since publish 9, it took steeper dives during the CU and the NGE. There may be days when old servers like Bloodfin and Bria are busy, but it's nothing like it was before JTL came out. Instead of being spread out and hugely populated in multiple areas, they all gather in Mos Eisley only. It used to be like this in many more cities. Anyone who says the game has picked back up to the levels of pre-pub 10 days needs to have their head checked. The game is so old no mater what they do they will continue to lose more players than they gain. Even with vet returns, they are so minimal that they don't even show up on the SWG customer flow charts over a one year span. They come back for one or two months, accomplish what they wanted to accomplish, then leave again. New player retention is even iffier. Say 10 out of 100 players actually purchase the game after the trial, even fewer stay for any length of time (6+ months).
All MMOs reach a peak of concurrent subscriptions and then decline from there. Even WoW has reached it peak, I expect in 3 years the game will start to bleed off customers at an increasing rate more noticeable than it is currently. The biggest thing that WoW has that SWG didn’t is quality; the lack of quality is what killed SWG early in the game. Nothing has changed much really.
pre-CU was a great game, badly executed.
CU was a bad game, badly executed.
NGE when it came out was a bad game, badly executed.
By reports now, a lot of bugs and problems may have been fixed, so I'll allow that now, NGE is a bad game well executed. Even if that's the case, only one version of the game was ever well designed. And without that base, it sort of doesn't matter how well executed their design is... If the design is poor, all the execution in the world can't save ya.
C
Tillamook has a really good point about Pub 9 being the beginning of the end; when the original Jedi system, with permadeath, was set aside, it had multiple consequences for the game. One of them was to make Jedi with some power as common as dirt, which in turn injected Jedi into the view of everyone in PvP and destroy the idea that you were refighting the battles of Hoth and Endor, you know, the stuff from the movies that the game was based on.
A point I made several times on the official boards was that the game was dealing with something of a Star Wars "generation gap" in terms of the audience. You had older players who got into Star Wars with the original trilogy, which was not focused exclusively on guys with glowsticks. Then you had the next generation of fans, who were all glowsticks all the time, like in the prequels. The game was set in the world of the former group, but the bulk of the audience was in the latter group. Focusing on the latter group is what the marketing guys did, and the latter group also intersects, at least in terms of age group, with the prime market for the 800 pound gorilla of MMOs, the gorilla that Smedley is insanely jealous of.
So, viola, you've got the CU and the NGE, both desperately trying to catch WoW's lightening in an SOE bottle.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Clearly you have no idea what it was once like. Even if the current populations doubled, it wouldn't be enough to consider it an upswing. There are a few returning to see how thigns are going....many because of the promise of the building purge...a move that was delayed. yeah, that's going to win over the few returning vets.Wow! Can't you just FEEL the love??
I never made it to the CU. I left because the bugs were horrible and ruined the game for me. I play these games to have fun and all SWG did was make me angry. SOE is NEVER going to apologize for anything. They are NOT going to try and bring the vets back. I would almost bet a paycheck that they don't even offer a 14 free trial for old accounts. The only people left playing this game are people who haven't learned the truth yet and the true die hard fans who will put up with anything.
There is hope though. Let's hope that the rumor of BioWare doing a KOTOR MMORG are true. If they do it right, much the way that Blizzard handled the release of WoW, then SWG will be reduced to nothing. SOE is reeping what they have sewn in SWG. Serves them right.
The bugs have always been bad and will continue to be bad. Note the misspelling of the word "enhancing" in that cool onscreen message from the CU that you see in my sig. Not a game breaking one but its a good example.
One thing that has struck me and has stayed with me since beta was an announcement by QPO in beta for the testers to locate nonsensical prose strings and report them, because they looked "unprofessional".
Yet, after the game went live, they still were showing up all over the place.
Now, I realize that they've got a lot of code out there to review.
But the lack of professional pride I saw manifested in the game through misspellings and bad prose strings that were out there for players to see told me that something was not quite right in Austin; that morale might be a bit suspect amongst the developers, perhaps in part because there was so much that needed to be done and not enough to do it. "Polishing" the game became a chore because there were so few hands to help with it.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
The NGE was NOT the right move. They needed to fix the game they started with, not try to make a completely new one.
I don't know how many years of development there originally was for SWG; I am going to guess 1-2 years. The developers took ALL that time, and ALL that money that was spent making the game and completely fucking trashed it.
SOE changed the game for themselves, not for their players. When you take a game of 32 professions, skill based and then dumb it down into 9 professions (not even skill based on the day the NGE came out), you're not going to get a very good result.
It doesn't surprise me that SOE falls into the 2/3 of the world that doesn't have common sense. All it's going to take to destroy SWG for good is another Star Wars MMORPG. We can only hope that BIoware has one in the works. But we won't know until they announce what the new game is.
Whoever said the NGE was well executed is a complete noob. I'm sorry dude, but when you don't announce a complete change to the entire game system to your players and just spring it on them, (right after a new expansion was released), that is horrible execution. The only reason the NGE is getting praise now is because Sony has added in pre-NGE features, like auto-targeting, which didn't exist in the initial release of the NGE. Beast Master is another pre-NGE aspect that has been added in. The more this game goes on, the more you're going to see it become pre-NGE again, because that was a great game. Its just taken SOE longer than usual to realize that game worked, and no one wants a World of Warcraft clone.
Now the initial Combat Upgrade, was a good execution. It was in the works for quite some time as was a much needed change to the game; AND they advertised it. They should've stuck with that, as it was the modified version of the previous system. As much as I can remember, the CU didn't change that much from it's previous state. The 32 professions were still there and some enhancements were made, armor mainly: certifications and new armor added in if I'm not mistaken. They made a hell of a lot of changes to the professions as well. They cut down the skill points needed to master Bounty Hunter, and they threw in Bacta Infusion for Doctors. They also upgraded the special ability icons, they made them a lot more colorful. And although it was a small thing, it streamlined the game slightly. I believe the combat speed was also increased a small percentage, which made it that much more fun.
So if anyone out there thinks the NGE was in fact better than the CU, you are horribly mistaken and you need go back and examine the meat and potatoes of both systems.