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Do people still think SWG failed because people didn't want to be moisture farmers?
ArcAngel3
Member Posts: 2,931
I was surprised to see thoughts like this in an article written recently by an MMORPG.com staff person. I know people like Torres, McIntyre, maybe Smed said that the game was failing because it wasn't StarWarsy and Iconic enough, but do people still honestly believe that?
Have people not read all about bugs and issues at release? Did they miss the constant revamping of the game that seemed to alienate most of its players? Did they forget about the marketting of an expansion that had many of its features deleted or rendered useless only 2 weeks after people bought it? Did they miss the controversy over the addition of RMT, especially paying cash for a random chance to win performance ehnancing loot?
I can only hope that someone else at MMORPG.com has taken notice of these things. More importantly, I hope that LucasArts is aware of these things as they head towards the release of TOR. If its StarWarsy and iconic but just as broken as SWG, it's gonna do just as poorly imo; especially if they chuck out people's story progress a year or two into the game.
Here's hoping that the current decision makers don't think that depth and customization were the downfall of SWG.
Comments
What article was that?
TOR hands on preview resurrected the moisture former comment. This got me wondering just how many people swallowed the party line re. SWG. The party line was that the game wasn't StarWarsy and iconic enough. The claim was that people were unhappy because they were stuck playing the role of a moisture farmer.
First of all, people were unhappy because the game was broken and very incomplete. It went downhill from there with the revamps and misleading communication. Second, no one was stuck playing a moisture farmer. You could be a jedi, bounty-hunter, Imp, rebel, tie-fighter pilot, x-wing ace etc. etc. etc.. You could do dirty work for Jabba the Hutt, hijack imperial corvettes, fight tusken raiders and all kinds of other "starwarsy and iconic" things.
The party line originated, I believe, in a press release around NGE time that said that people want to be Luke Skywalker, not Uncle Owen. Why are the people who brought us the NGE considered to be MMO gurus? The thing was an epic catastrophe. That fact that their conclusions are still referred to as having any validity whatsoever frankly boggles my mind.
Personally, I loved being a "moisture farmer", hell, I made my first million creds milking Pickets on Dantoine.
Bugs and all, SWG, Pre-CU was 5 years ahaed of it's time.
Offer the same game today, bugs and all, and it could be a major contender. Not saying it's a WoW killer, but, it would do better then any game release since the NGE.
Fact!
Responding to this comment: "Originally posted by kb056: Personally, I loved being a "moisture farmer", hell, I made my first million creds milking Pickets on Dantoine."
Exactly. If you ask SWG players what one of the best features was, ever; probably many would say, "The skill system." Even the guy who created the NGE said it was a big mistake to flush that down the toilet, and yet people still quote NGE press releases as a valid source of insight about SWG.
Here's the quote from MMORPG.com staffer btw: "If the main Star Wars Galaxies complaint was "I wanted to be Luke or Han running around killing bad guys, not Uncle Owen farming moisture," they seem to have taken it to heart and all the classes we've seen seem to map to recognizable figures from the movies."
With respect, I don't think actual players of the game saw this as the main complaint. I think this comes from some very bad marketting research conducted by LucasArts or SOE. The very marketting research that suggested NGE was a good idea.
This is my take on the situation at any rate. I'd like to hear what other actual players of SWG think.
Meanwhile..Farmville is passing 50mil? 75mil? players and partying like fuc*ing rock stars. Still in beta btw. They thank the dumbasses who had a chance at tapping them and passed. Watch them try to go and make a farmville clone browser game now lol. Im almost positive there was a group of players 4 or 5 years ago saying these non combat interdependant social type things were the key to the masses. Expand on those to win, dont copy WOW!! For the love of God dont copy WOW!! Or maybe Im remembering wrong.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
SWG didn't fail because it wasn't starwarsy enough or because of bugs. It failed because 3 months into the game they patched over it with an entirely different game.
I'd have to agree with that quote in a way. An iconic/starwarsy swg (done right) would be more popular than an uncle owen swg (done right). That said, they didn't do the uncle owen version right in many ways, and they obviously couldn't copy wow's popularity with their attempt at the iconic/starwarsy version.
There's no way that was the main complaint. Most players I know loved the game. At least until the crap started to hit the fan starting with the holocron grid for Jedi. It was steadily downhill after that.
The only marketing research they did was to look at the sub numbers of WoW and think how they could make SWG more like that so they could get more of the pie.
As to whom did that research, no one knows but Im sure SoE would blame LA, and LA would blame SoE.
Personally given the decisions made by SoE in some of their other games, I think the NGE wreaks of a brainchild of Smedley.
I will never touch another SoE game as long as that @$$ is at the helm.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
So basically, mmorpg.com hired yet another clueless wannabe "journalist" who doesn't even do basic research before writing their "article"?
Gee, I'm shocked.
Im pretty sure Smed said it on the O-boards, and Nancy McInrinse said it to the NY friggin times. I wanna say ol Julio said it as well.
www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html
Owned.
For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more "Star Wars-like," tying it more explicitly to the films.
"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts. "There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
As far as I am concerned SWG failed cause the nerf bat running rampant while the economy went to hell. If you weren't farming something to make credits then you were never going to buy anything cause missions just didn't pay enough for them to be worth while as a money making function. The constant we will nerf everything so you don't see the bugs got out of hand as well, it took more than 3 months for nge but it was pretty much not the same swg by the third month
The reason I feel swg failed to live up to its potential was that it didn't get the uncle Owen or the "iconic" aspects right. That and it was a convoluted bug filled mess.
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
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SWG failed, because soe rushed it to market long before it was ready and I mean long before it was ready. Then they immediately kicked out the one person who could actually make the game work and put a team of monkeys in charge of randomly changing major aspects of the game in desperate hopes that it would fix something, anything.
Every single game has has touched since their purchase of everquest from verant, has been a disaster of one form or another. Simply put, soe has no idea how to make good games and doesn't care enough about the customers to find out what is really wanted. They still act like they are the only choice in the market.
They can't even buy a good game and make it work anymore. /sadface vanguard.
And remember SOE swears the players asked for it, yet look at the highlights. Not one customer mentioned.
I had to farm moisture to make the cheapest spices in my now dead galaxy of Kauri. The farming was all part of the sandbox goodness of the Pre-CU of SWG. But please don't compare it to the Social game of Farmville on the social newtworks. An insect infestation is a farcry from an invasion of stormtroopers with plans to shut you down ( Yeah it happen to me - ah those were the days - for after that I started my revenge).
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SWG failed because they introduced iconic classes. Roleplayers want to play THEIR role and not the role of someone else like people want to live THEIR live and dont like to live the life of someone else.
The iconic classes was the last nail to the coffin of SWG. (unenjoyble mechanic changes and the change away from sandbox to become themepark was a game killer too)
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
The flawed logic with the "moisture farmer" comment is that nobody had to be that if they chose not to. There were plenty of fun combat classes that filled the "Star Warsy/Iconic" gameplay. What was wrong with offering alternative profs to those that wanted it?
Nah, the "moisture farmer" comment was a scape goat IMO. Otherwise why would SoE have left in the Trader professions?
The irony is, that if you play SWG you don''t get anymore of that "StarWarsy" feel than before the NGE. Everything in that respect is the same with the addition of one single straight line quest that takes you from one "iconic" location to another with no other quests added in. Its as if SWG devs had heard of the idea of quests in an MMO but didn't quite understand the idea of it. Content wise nothing changed with NGE, the locations you are now sent to where all in the game before. All SOE did in terms of content was put a guiding rope between them and added a "newbie experience". They took a game that was badly in need of content and overall direction in terms of development, and changed everything BUT adding content and left it STILL lacking the direction in development AND still has all the same old bugs and issues (lag, npcs shooting through walls, etc, etc). Of course they added a couple of planets in the expansions but if you run around SWG's original planets theres no difference in content. It's as if SWG was stuck in a timewarp for 5 years.
So in the end, SWG even failed to accomplish their goal of trying to get the "StarWarsy" feel back into SWG. To get that feeling the devs need to do more than just place down SW buildings and have tie fighters flying over your head.
The funny thing is that I believe that they are finally getting around to adding GCW aspects into the game. I suppose the small amount of players who are still enjoying the game will finally get to see the very things people were screaming for in SWG's "prime" 4 - 5 years ago, such as Imperial attacks on a rebel player city with AT-AT's.
Such a shame that this concept was wasted.
Top 10 Most Misused Words in MMO's
All bugs and unfinished content aside, SWG went downhill when they patched in the hologrind.
As far as the comment made by the MMORPG staff in his article, I read it as an unfortunate statement from someone who either doesn't know what he is talking about (unlikely); is one of those who is part of the instant gratification bunch who speaks for himself; or most probable is simply trying to please bioware in his article at the expense of a dead game like swg.
I could not agree more, nor could I have said it so well. Great post ArcAngel3.
I'm sorry but yes the game was fun and that has to be what you are confusing with ahead of it's time. How can a game released with the number of bugs and lies this game has possibly be ahead of it's time. Again there is nothing wrong with you thinking the game was loads of fun especially as one of the best AAA titles to offer a person freedom to actually engage fully in the game without combat but ahead of it's time?
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
yeah, the guy was obviously believing the lies that SOE and LA believed, that led to them killing the game we all loved.
This was part of Smed's "blame Koster" strategy. He couldn't accept that the blame rested on his bad managerial shoulders, so he needed a scapegoat. Koster was perfect for that purpose.
After they then tried the NGE, and it failed miserably, he shifted gears and blamed the "vocal minority." Then, when that failed, he blames "communication."
Smedley is VERY good at shifting blame and getting his cronies to repeat the memes he creates. None of them were true; however.
The initial game failed because it was released in a sorry state, core bugs were never fixed -- promised content never added. Then came WoW.
Sadly, the writer of the MMORPG article is obviously ignorant of what went down and is just repeating what he was told by the folks at LA.
fishermage.blogspot.com
asking a today mmo company to think of the depth and complex of pre-cu swg would couse brain melt down
all we get is non depth games I can get these mmo games on a xbox or ps3
You want loot? Go kill some npcs, you wanna visit hades? come find ME, and dont forget to bring coins for the ferryman,
And remember SOE swears the players asked for it, yet look at the highlights. Not one customer mentioned.
Bingo. One of the lead devs on NGE said that SOE ran focus groups that involved no actual players of the game. What kind of focus group is that? Pretty skewed I'd say.
Also, someone posted on here saying he was in a focus group that was shown select portions of the NGE immediately before it went live. He said they had major concerns, and that they liked some of what they were shown and told.
Apparently their major concerns were overlooked. They certainly weren't mentioned. Also, I don't know how much of the NGE they were actually shown.
On top of that, one of the lead devs said that he was playing around on his PC with the new combat system. One of the suits saw it and made a happy noise. That's the market research on that one.
Furthermore, when Helios pointed out that pets got in the way of the new targetting reticule, Rubenfield responded, "cut 'em." Later we were told that these kinds of massive changes (delete creature handler) were in response to careful research and player feedback.
There ain't a shovel big enough for that load imo. Judging from actual player responses so far, I think the moisture farmer explanation for SWG's poor performance belongs in the same pile.
That quote is as depressing now as it was when she said it.
Played (more than a month): SWG, Second Life, Tabula Rasa, Lineage 2, Everquest 2, EvE, MxO, Ryzom.
Tried: WoW, Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, Everquest, WWII Online, Planetside
Beta: Lotro, Tabula Rasa, WAR.