Who is really to blame here, SOE/LA or the players/longtime subscribers to some degree?
The game was not ready for release to begin with.
Can any longtime player name one single patch/hotfix/publish that did not in turn create more problems than it was intended to fix?
How long did it take to fix those problems?
How many bugs are still existant from launch? And how many more are continually introduced?
Professions were/are completely unbalanced since launch/CU/NGE.
Customer service is the worst I have ever experienced in any game.
The game never really felt like you were playing what a Star Wars game should be in my opinion.
Community Relations team is completely clueless, cannot say anything, lies or doesn't communicate at all. (It all went downhill when they hired Thunderheart IMO)
Expansions are released on top of a broken/beta game 3 times and introduce more bugs.
They ignore feedback/bug reports/suggestions/top 5 issues from their Test Server/Correspondents (which people volunteer for). Where is the QA?
Non-existant GCW.
Jedi (alpha class) take priorty over all others in the game with regards to fixes/Dev attention.
Non-existant end game (unless you count jedi which was all anyone had left to do. It is really Star Warsy having Jedi everywhere in the time period the game is set in.)
Basically no content added since launch (not including expansions which you have to pay for)
I could probably list alot more but I feel this is enough.
Would anyone like to tell me any of these points I have brought up are wrong.
Yet people continued and will still continue to pay for faulty SOE and other game company's products. If I was in charge of SOE/LA why wouldn't I completely revamp the game to attract a new playerbase and disregard my current players? Because I know I will have a large portion of them (IMO 90% of those who say they will quit/are quiting never actually do) still paying me every month for doing exactly what I have been doing to them for years? If this was any other industry would this be the case? Why is it viewed as acceptable in MMOs? Is it the players fault for continually paying for and accepting lower standards and business practices/ethics or the game companies for releasing faulty products? Why the sudden uproar from SWG players now when they have been paying for a beta quality product (or less in the NGE's case I have played the free trail) for 2.5 years? So who is really to blame?
But if you don't like the changes, just quit. Most of the people who complain about things, just stay in the game and whine on forums.
Remember it's their game, not yours. If they wanted to, they could make every single player turn into bunny rabbits, and collect eggs to earn yourself epic baskets.
Either post on their forums, send them a email, or even a real letter. And then cancel your account. Games are driven by money. If enough people quit to dent their profit. Then they MAY change it back. If enough people stay then guess what? They won't listen to whiners.
Originally posted by Bladin i hate to say it, because normally i don't. But if you don't like the changes, just quit. Most of the people who complain about things, just stay in the game and whine on forums. Remember it's their game, not yours. If they wanted to, they could make every single player turn into bunny rabbits, and collect eggs to earn yourself epic baskets. Either post on their forums, send them a email, or even a real letter. And then cancel your account. Games are driven by money. If enough people quit to dent their profit. Then they MAY change it back. If enough people stay then guess what? They won't listen to whiners.
I quit after I was able to play on the test servers. It was awful.
It's really not the point of the original post. I think everyone should quit SWG to make a statement to all devs that games can not be overhauled like this without player input. Your favorite game could have this coming if NGE survives and I am sure you will be pissed too.
Originally posted by En1Gma Anyways, they found that a totall revamp of an existing mmo is pretty much not worth it and unethical in the first place.
Nail on the head as usual Sir.
Its like buying a nice big chocolate cake then having the guy who sold it to you sneak into your house and swap it for a moldy cookie and not only that, leave a note telling you how the moldy cookie is actually better.
+-+-+-+-+-+ "MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol" http://purepwnage.com -+-+-+-+-+-+ "Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
Originally posted by En1Gma Anyways, they found that a totall revamp of an existing mmo is pretty much not worth it and unethical in the first place.
Nail on the head as usual Sir.
Its like buying a nice big chocolate cake then having the guy who sold it to you sneak into your house and swap it for a moldy cookie and not only that, leave a note telling you how the moldy cookie is actually better.
I'm not so sure they have learned their lesson. SOE has made 2 crappy MMOs in a row. Yes, EQ2 has made strides, but at release it was terrible. Proof of that lies in how radically they have changed the game. IMO, EQ really took a downturn with SoL. It got a lot worse after that. I'm not sure SOE knows what direction they want to go in. It seems obvious there is not a large audience that is interested in serious time investment MMOs. They seem to be learning this alarmingly slow for a big company.
I do hope they get their act together. With EQ2 they are doing a fantastic job. No one hated that game more than me at release. Now, though, I'm a subscriber again awaiting their next AP.
Agree with OP thank you, i also liked the editorial comment on is it ethical to do that to players.
When you take the out and out arrogance to the level soe did with this, it is time for players to look within themselves and ask the question, at what point is the game playable. Do i want to live through 5 more months of serious bug fixing that may or may not get addressed. Plus the most basic question, though they can, should they?
While laws do not necessairly govern internet offerings yet, perhaps we the community should as far as good and bad behavoir. Goodness knows mourning got slapped in the hand for it . Didn't matter if it was the ibill company that did it or they.
The other outcome is though other companies profit from soe mis management, there are those that leave the mmo market never to return.
The other difference between cu 1 and two the servers are showing signs of being ghost towns. Which lends itself to the idea of this time they just went to far......
After all what good is goals when the game changes? What good is items when they become worthless time and time again? Where is the carrot to stay?
Despite the outcry from thier subscribers, and the mass exodus from SWG, they are still trying to make it work it seems. Completely ignoring thier player base/customers.
If you read it, all thier fixes have no eta, no description of the possible fix, and/or are "if approved"
Originally posted by Apache_ Despite the outcry from thier subscribers, and the mass exodus from SWG, they are still trying to make it work it seems. Completely ignoring thier player base/customers.
This is nothing new for SOE. I don't think I've ever played any game where the devs where as uninformed about what the players liked about thier game, as SWG.
The original post brought up a very important issue: The precedent being set by the NGE change. Even more than what has been done to veteran players (like myself), it is exactly this kind of precedent that is dangerous to all customers. As for "Game Experience may change during Online Play", maybe it's time for the courts to decide the difference between "Game Experience may change" and "This is a brand new game, and not the one the customer bought".
Further, extend this precedent to other subscription services, and you have an even wider application, potentially damaging to all online service. If all online services can put a disclaimer up-front protecting them from doing whatever they wish with their service regardless of the customer, then very shortly there will be no subscription services. Customers may be dumb, but you can only suck their wallets so long if they're not happy.
Further extension of this issue could even damage the venerable "We are not responsible for anything" disclaimer included with ALL software, and this is certainly something the industry would NOT want to see challenged. SOE/LA (I make no distinction as to which is at fault...the class action suit should involve them both) has opened up a can of worms here that could fundamantally affect the computer industry. Unfortunately, it's "just a game" -- nobody's died, nobody's been Enron'd -- so the chances of it being brought to court are slim. The precendent HAS been set already with SWG, and I'm afraid it will now be applied in more and more situations.
-- Xix "I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"
In the arrogance that is SOE and the SWG devs, especially Jeff Freeman, they probably didn't bother to make back ups so there is nothing to roll back to. SOE has such a lack of respect for their customers, they seem to have just assumed that the unwashed masses will follow like sheep, regardless of what they do. My husband still has time on his account and, even on Bria, the populations seem at an all time low. I guess they were wrong.
Did anyone see Jeff Freeman's blog? http://mythical.blogspot.com/2005/11/shenanigans.html He's removed it now so there's just a big emptty space and a little comment where it was. I think Mr. Smedco probably came down on him hard for that one. He also said that they made the NGE decision only two months before they did it, ruining SOE's claim that they had been working on it for nearly a year. That one is gone too. The big blog of Freeman's life, however, is already plastered all over the many intarwebs. Go Jeff!
Did anyone see Jeff Freeman's blog? http://mythical.blogspot.com/2005/11/shenanigans.html He's removed it now so there's just a big emptty space and a little comment where it was. I think Mr. Smedco probably came down on him hard for that one. He also said that they made the NGE decision only two months before they did it, ruining SOE's claim that they had been working on it for nearly a year. That one is gone too. The big blog of Freeman's life, however, is already plastered all over the many intarwebs. Go Jeff!
Thank you for the heads up. I found it and am saving it.
SWG was my first job in the game industry. I had played UO for a couple of years or so and knew Raph Koster in that internet sort of way: everyone that visited or posted on any message board anywhere on the internet knew Raph Koster.
Played EQ to level 35, got killed by the same frickin' sand giant three times in a row trying to recover my corpse two weeks after a bug caused me to lose all my gear before EQ CS had the tech to undelete items and man that was it for me.
So I made a "grey shard" using POL (written by Eric Swanson, who also works at SOE now how weird is that?) and did that for a few years.
Those were Good Times. Friday I'd post a "Wishlist" thread and people would reply with a hundred things they wanted added to the game. And Saturday and Sunday I'd add hundreds of things to the game. Production on a single small server is pretty nice. None of this "Oh, that'll take 2 months to deliver and will require two programmers, a designer and three artists."
A lot of .broadcast "Hey everyone, brace yourselves, I'm going to replace the magic system in 3 2 1"-sorts of moments. Frequently doing development on the server that people were actually playing on, while they are playing on it, and only using a local server for really significant changes.
In terms of administration, the people were a lot harder to manage than the game. Not just the players either, but the co-admin's: the folk that hosted the server, gm "staff", and whatnot. Janey emailed Raph describing a pretty ugly situation, and he'd responded with just some no-nonsense advice on how-to-run-a-mud, which she forwarded to me, and to which I replied, directly to him.
That led directly to establishing, in writing, just what exactly the scope of everyone's responsibilities were, what the rules were, how they would be enforced, and so on. Simple stuff, right? We had none of that and, duh, we ran into a lot of problems 'til we did.
This had nothing to do with his position in the game industry and everything to do with his experience with MUDs, and my lack of it, and his willingness to share info with a fellow enthusiast. Great learning experience, should I ever run a MUD again: Sony hires professionals to do that stuff.
But it also opened a dialog between the two of us and I s'pose put my crazyass game design ideas on his radar.
Anyway, hadn't talked to Raph in a while (because, well, things had been running pretty smoothly) so one day I emailed him and asked how he'd been. He said if I sent him a resume then he could tell me what he was working on.
So I sent him a resume. And they flew me down to Austin to meet the whole SWG team and interview for a systems design position, which I didn't get. Heh.
Couple months later they flew me back again for a worldbuilding position, which I did get.
Within a few months or so I was scripting systems. Then within a couple years, lead content designer for JtL. Then a few months ago, "live lead systems designer". My titles were growing and growing!
As of last week or so, now it's "Lead Game Play Designer". A step backwards in terms of character-count, but not actually a demotion, or even that big a change in responsibilities.
Mind, we have a Creative Director and that isn't me, and a Lead Designer and that isn't me either. They're both my bosses, even though my title's longer. And there's a whole plethora of producers and executives and executive producers above that.
So don't get the crazy notion that I'm "in charge" here. "The Man" is a many-headed beast called Management. I just try to help it make good decisions. With regard to game mechanics, it even lets me decide, sometimes.
So a few months ago The Man comes along and says "What can we do to make this the most fun game it can possibly be?"
It was the lead designer who holed-up in his office for a few days and then said, "Hey, come look at this."
There's no way we can do that.
There's no way we should do that.
Man that's fun.
The Man will never let us get away with doing that.
We can't do it.
We shouldn't do it.
Oh man that is fun.
When an executive producer sees something that is impossible to do, but which is too fun not to do, he makes a noise like "Hoooooooooph".
My job was to be the guy to say, "Yes we can do that." I had to say this about forty times a day for two months. Lead Designer said it too, of course, but no one believed him, because he's crazy. Obviously.
And they would only believe me for a few minutes at a time.
It's frustrating to see the posts about Raph rolling over in his grave, crying himself to sleep, seeing all his design thrown out the window, etc. The notion seems to be that Raph's game is slow-paced, deliberate, social, "worldy", and in no case ever "fun" vs. this change which tosses-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Specifically, that 'removing the Raph' is what makes it fun.
First off, Star Wars Galaxies is already a whole lot of fun for a whole lot of people. And it was very successful.
And Fast Action Combat and the introduction of classes based on iconic Star Wars character archtypes doesn't toss-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Far from it.
The social elements of Galaxies' design remain, and for good reason. MMOs must be MMOs and not just big single-player games that everyone just happens to play all at once. We wouldn't have gotten things like player cities, entertainers and so on without Raph, and I wouldn't want Galaxies to be without them. Simply removing them wouldn't make the game more fun anyway.
There's a lot of cool in Galaxies. We're making all of it easier to see, easier to get to.
Honestly, I doubt I even have the capacity to design a game that is completely un-Raph like. Who do you think taught me this stuff? Over the course of years. Here's how you get X. Here's why you want X.
Yeh, I think I'm good 'nuff to see the 'why' and come up with 'Well if that's why, then we could do Z instead', but at that point it's a quibble over implementation detail, not design philosophy. I don't agree with Raph on every point about every thing, we're pretty much aligned in terms of high level game design.
For example 'Socialization requires downtime' is something Raph might say that I might not agree with. But 'MMO's require socialization, otherwise what's the point?' is not something we'd disagree about.
Many people have been influential in my personal development as a game designer and I've learned an awful lot on my own, but nothing and no other single person comes anywhere close the influence that Raph Koster has had on, in terms of game design from soup-to-nuts, what things I think about, if not in fact what I think about those things.
So I think these sorts of remarks are a little inaccurate, a tiny bit irksome, pretty unfair.
This Jeff Freeman guy sounds like a complete suck-up yes-man that is out of touch with what 'fun' is for a MMO is supposed to be... Save this post so that when the servers shut down for SWG that we can all throw feces at him... Believe me, it is gonna happen... A friend of mine logged to check out the latest debacle that is the NGE, he said not a soul was to be found... In the end, it wouldn't be the first time a SW game sucked, but it would be the first time something of this magnitude unfolded...
Originally posted by Zuel41 I am not sure how many of you are fans for SWG. If you have followed the news, SOE has totally revamped the game with very little input from the current player base. The New Game Enhancements (NGE) are, in my opinion, not very good, but that's not the point of this post. The NGE MUST be beaten back and SOE must roll back their code on their servers. If SOE wins this battle, you can bet that every other game out there with balance issues or any other problems, technical or otherwise, will feel free to pull this kind of trick with your favorite game. SOE is trying to set a precedent here, that they can radically change a game mid-stream regardless of what players (i.e. customers) think and feel. ALL MMORPG players need to be outraged and disgusted by this behavior. NGE should be a separate game, not an overhaul of an existing game. If your favorite game has some of these issue, and this goes through, you can bet that your devs will pull this on you. Lastly, those that write about and cover the gaming industry need to make a huge stink about this. Your credibility rests on this.
SWG is dead, so there is not much point in talking about a rollback. They have completely lost the trust of their veteran players, who would have played basically forever, and I dont think very many of us would come back even if they did rollback. Bottom line is Lucas/Soe cant be trusted, and I for one will never play a game by either one ever again.
As far as beating them back, I agree completely and I think this is being done through the overwhelmingly negative reviews and comments you see all over the internet. Their servers are completely empty, and in the long run their sub. numbers will do all the beating back that will be necessary.
I would say that the MMO industry following this lead and destroying other games was a crazy idea, but then again I never would have believed it could happen to SWG, so who knows. I am pretty sure that if it happens you will see the end of this fledgling industry before it even has a chance to really take off. I know that personally, after my experience with SWG for the last 2.5 years, im seriously questioning whether or not I ever want to play another MMO. Of course, it doesnt help that ive tried several others over the last two weeks and been un-impressed by the cookie cutter, linear game play.
In an MMO you simply have to have some trust and belief that what you worked on yesterday has a pretty good chance of being there tomorrow. Otherwise, you might as well just player single player games. Trust is integral to the very foundation of the game.
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Theres nooo way SOE will take back this NGE, they made it so that gameplay will work better for PS3/Xbox 360 players when it comes to Online play.. or so i read that it is. Either way, this game is going down in the deep end and i dont have much hope for it. I love the people, love the roleplay, but i just cant do it anymore.
Whenever big business interferes with artist creation you have a problem.
It was a business decision that saw Horizons release too soon, look what happened. It was probably a business decision to cancel WISH and definately with EnB, release IRTH and Erose too soon, and even EQ2 was rushed out to beat WoW.
A few years ago Sony had that row with George Michael over his contract. Because they'd bought his old contract they assumed they owned him and expected him to produce music on schedule like a factory, churning out songs like product. They expected a minimum number of press appearances, signings, intervews, to promote his work; they wanted him to appear on videos, not for creative reasons but for product identification, even though he wanted to be more artistic, and less obvious.
Whatever you feel about GM it proves that big business cares little for the creative process or pushing back the boundaries and being fresh and innovative. SOE will just pump more of the same because the last batch sold so well.
The pop music industry has suffered from this, mmos will too.
Some of those business decisions are made on a "How much are we going to lose, and is there *any* way to save it?" factor. Certain games you have named were cancelled due to obvious technical flaws which would cost way too much money to fix. In one case the flaws were so broad it would have taken as many years and as much money to fix as it did up to that point. The investors decide it is time to cut their loses.
I do agree money, or lack of money, has the ability to make things happen we wouldn't like to see happen. I also agree, and have been witness to, investors forcing a hand that shouldn't have been forced. The industry, and the research regarding the industry are getting much better and investors are starting to become more informed. This shows in several products being developed. On the same side, developers are starting to understand more and more the business end of MMOGs. MMOG studios are more business than any other game studio. They are developing a service more than they are just developing a game. They have to learn, and are learning, this business has deadlines and constraints just like any other business. Set realistic goals and you won't run into the reacts you see later on in the lifecycle.
I don't agree SWG being changed is going to cause the MMO world to fall apart. MMOGs have been making changes to mechanics for a long time. This is a large change, agreed, but it is hardly new to make changes. SOE didn't create this bar, but they may have just set it.
I will say, my least favorite thing about the change so far is the new set of profession pictures. I have never been a fan of real life photos in an animated game.
Yup it's looking pretty bad for subscription numbers, a few nights back (Aus time) I was doing a fly by on all the planets with resources, and decide to also see who was on.
Well I didn't find the resource's I was looking for and the highest count I got was 5 players, with most planets having just me on them. There might have been 12 people including me on all those planets.
Maybe everyone was over on the 2 quest planets but the number still seem very light to me, at login all the servers where light.
Personally I think they should have waited until they at least got most of the bugs out of NGE, as at the moment it's pretty bad. And several classes have been give the royal treatment eg crafter's, CH all non-jedi melee.
I wish I had saved the post where Freeman stated they had only started working on the NGE two months before it was uploaded... just for posterity. (and the fact that Smed claimed they'd been actively working on it for nearly a year)
its really a load of bs what they pulled, i enjoyed the game until these changes. now, i will never play it again. i logged on a few days ago and saw a total of three other players, looked at the forums and the outcry of people cancelling 3-6 accounts each. if they dont roll it back, they would be retarded. i wont be playing it anymore, and i hope anyone else that still plays will cancels thier accounts and show them how much what they did sucks.
there seems to be a common theme with mmorpgs, wheres theres a turning point change which alienates customers. From what I have heard it happened in EQ, UO, AC2, SWG, DAoC and EQ2. What it sounds like they do is try to entice new customers but at the expense of alienating old customers, and SoE seems to be one of the biggest culprits for this. I'm just wondering how mmorpg companies will handle this in future knowing this, will they perhaps divide their servers so as to have multi-theme? I know a few mmorpgs have "classic" servers which seems to reflect this method.
Yes very true my friend, I nearly crapped my pants when I saw SOE advertising Star War Galaxies on the Television the other day. I just couldn't get over the fact that they are trying to save this game that is nearly 4 years old now, instead of saving their latest blunder EQ2. But yes i Must agree a revamp of a game ussually 99% of the time equals the death of a game. I for one do not play, SWG, just not my type of game but i still feel for you guys that got toppled by the SOE giant, ex EQ2 Fanboi here, now 485$ richer from sellin that blasted account on ebay! =p sorry to the poor poor fool that suckumbed and bought my old EQ2 and the SOE empire. My deepest apologies for their redundantness, good luck saving your game bro.
You people need to keep in mind that SOE hosts SWG and provides CS for SWG, but it is Lucas Games who controls content and game direction. If you don't like the direction SWG is taking then you need to complain to Lucas Games, not SOE.
====================== It's just me, so open the door.
Originally posted by MMO_Munk Yes very true my friend, I nearly crapped my pants when I saw SOE advertising Star War Galaxies on the Television the other day. I just couldn't get over the fact that they are trying to save this game that is nearly 4 years old now, instead of saving their latest blunder EQ2. But yes i Must agree a revamp of a game ussually 99% of the time equals the death of a game. I for one do not play, SWG, just not my type of game but i still feel for you guys that got toppled by the SOE giant, ex EQ2 Fanboi here, now 485$ richer from sellin that blasted account on ebay! =p sorry to the poor poor fool that suckumbed and bought my old EQ2 and the SOE empire. My deepest apologies for their redundantness, good luck saving your game bro.
EQ2 doesn't need saving. It is doing just fine.
====================== It's just me, so open the door.
Comments
Who is really to blame here, SOE/LA or the players/longtime subscribers to some degree?
The game was not ready for release to begin with.
Can any longtime player name one single patch/hotfix/publish that did not in turn create more problems than it was intended to fix?
How long did it take to fix those problems?
How many bugs are still existant from launch? And how many more are continually introduced?
Professions were/are completely unbalanced since launch/CU/NGE.
Customer service is the worst I have ever experienced in any game.
The game never really felt like you were playing what a Star Wars game should be in my opinion.
Community Relations team is completely clueless, cannot say anything, lies or doesn't communicate at all. (It all went downhill when they hired Thunderheart IMO)
Expansions are released on top of a broken/beta game 3 times and introduce more bugs.
They ignore feedback/bug reports/suggestions/top 5 issues from their Test Server/Correspondents (which people volunteer for). Where is the QA?
Non-existant GCW.
Jedi (alpha class) take priorty over all others in the game with regards to fixes/Dev attention.
Non-existant end game (unless you count jedi which was all anyone had left to do. It is really Star Warsy having Jedi everywhere in the time period the game is set in.)
Basically no content added since launch (not including expansions which you have to pay for)
I could probably list alot more but I feel this is enough.
Would anyone like to tell me any of these points I have brought up are wrong.
Yet people continued and will still continue to pay for faulty SOE and other game company's products. If I was in charge of SOE/LA why wouldn't I completely revamp the game to attract a new playerbase and disregard my current players? Because I know I will have a large portion of them (IMO 90% of those who say they will quit/are quiting never actually do) still paying me every month for doing exactly what I have been doing to them for years? If this was any other industry would this be the case? Why is it viewed as acceptable in MMOs? Is it the players fault for continually paying for and accepting lower standards and business practices/ethics or the game companies for releasing faulty products? Why the sudden uproar from SWG players now when they have been paying for a beta quality product (or less in the NGE's case I have played the free trail) for 2.5 years? So who is really to blame?
i hate to say it, because normally i don't.
But if you don't like the changes, just quit. Most of the people who complain about things, just stay in the game and whine on forums.
Remember it's their game, not yours. If they wanted to, they could make every single player turn into bunny rabbits, and collect eggs to earn yourself epic baskets.
Either post on their forums, send them a email, or even a real letter. And then cancel your account. Games are driven by money. If enough people quit to dent their profit. Then they MAY change it back. If enough people stay then guess what? They won't listen to whiners.
I quit after I was able to play on the test servers. It was awful.
It's really not the point of the original post. I think everyone should quit SWG to make a statement to all devs that games can not be overhauled like this without player input. Your favorite game could have this coming if NGE survives and I am sure you will be pissed too.
Nail on the head as usual Sir.
Its like buying a nice big chocolate cake then having the guy who sold it to you sneak into your house and swap it for a moldy cookie and not only that, leave a note telling you how the moldy cookie is actually better.
+-+-+-+-+-+
"MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol"
http://purepwnage.com
-+-+-+-+-+-+
"Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
Nail on the head as usual Sir.
Its like buying a nice big chocolate cake then having the guy who sold it to you sneak into your house and swap it for a moldy cookie and not only that, leave a note telling you how the moldy cookie is actually better.
I'm not so sure they have learned their lesson. SOE has made 2 crappy MMOs in a row. Yes, EQ2 has made strides, but at release it was terrible. Proof of that lies in how radically they have changed the game. IMO, EQ really took a downturn with SoL. It got a lot worse after that. I'm not sure SOE knows what direction they want to go in. It seems obvious there is not a large audience that is interested in serious time investment MMOs. They seem to be learning this alarmingly slow for a big company.
I do hope they get their act together. With EQ2 they are doing a fantastic job. No one hated that game more than me at release. Now, though, I'm a subscriber again awaiting their next AP.
Agree with OP thank you, i also liked the editorial comment on is it ethical to do that to players.
When you take the out and out arrogance to the level soe did with this, it is time for players to look within themselves and ask the question, at what point is the game playable. Do i want to live through 5 more months of serious bug fixing that may or may not get addressed.
Plus the most basic question, though they can, should they?
While laws do not necessairly govern internet offerings yet, perhaps we the community should as far as good and bad behavoir. Goodness knows mourning got slapped in the hand for it . Didn't matter if it was the ibill company that did it or they.
The other outcome is though other companies profit from soe mis management, there are those that leave the mmo market never to return.
The other difference between cu 1 and two the servers are showing signs of being ghost towns. Which lends itself to the idea of this time they just went to far......
After all what good is goals when the game changes? What good is items when they become worthless time and time again? Where is the carrot to stay?
Well if you havnt seen it here it is. They are going through with this NGE http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=143888
Despite the outcry from thier subscribers, and the mass exodus from SWG, they are still trying to make it work it seems. Completely ignoring thier player base/customers.
If you read it, all thier fixes have no eta, no description of the possible fix, and/or are "if approved"
Sad
The original post brought up a very important issue: The precedent being set by the NGE change. Even more than what has been done to veteran players (like myself), it is exactly this kind of precedent that is dangerous to all customers. As for "Game Experience may change during Online Play", maybe it's time for the courts to decide the difference between "Game Experience may change" and "This is a brand new game, and not the one the customer bought".
Further, extend this precedent to other subscription services, and you have an even wider application, potentially damaging to all online service. If all online services can put a disclaimer up-front protecting them from doing whatever they wish with their service regardless of the customer, then very shortly there will be no subscription services. Customers may be dumb, but you can only suck their wallets so long if they're not happy.
Further extension of this issue could even damage the venerable "We are not responsible for anything" disclaimer included with ALL software, and this is certainly something the industry would NOT want to see challenged. SOE/LA (I make no distinction as to which is at fault...the class action suit should involve them both) has opened up a can of worms here that could fundamantally affect the computer industry. Unfortunately, it's "just a game" -- nobody's died, nobody's been Enron'd -- so the chances of it being brought to court are slim. The precendent HAS been set already with SWG, and I'm afraid it will now be applied in more and more situations.
-- Xix
"I know what you're thinking: 'Why, oh WHY, didn't I take the BLUE pill?'"
In the arrogance that is SOE and the SWG devs, especially Jeff Freeman, they probably didn't bother to make back ups so there is nothing to roll back to.
SOE has such a lack of respect for their customers, they seem to have just assumed that the unwashed masses will follow like sheep, regardless of what they do. My husband still has time on his account and, even on Bria, the populations seem at an all time low. I guess they were wrong.
Did anyone see Jeff Freeman's blog? http://mythical.blogspot.com/2005/11/shenanigans.html He's removed it now so there's just a big emptty space and a little comment where it was. I think Mr. Smedco probably came down on him hard for that one. He also said that they made the NGE decision only two months before they did it, ruining SOE's claim that they had been working on it for nearly a year. That one is gone too. The big blog of Freeman's life, however, is already plastered all over the many intarwebs. Go Jeff!
SOE are full of knuckleheads. THey will drive SWG into the ground like they do everything else.
We get tons of SWG veterans to Eve Online every day.
Eve is just a better game and CCP is just a better company, plain and simple.
Thank you for the heads up. I found it and am saving it.
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Here is what he, Jeff Freeman, erased:
Friday, November 4
Shenanigans
SWG was my first job in the game industry. I had played UO for a couple of years or so and knew Raph Koster in that internet sort of way: everyone that visited or posted on any message board anywhere on the internet knew Raph Koster.Played EQ to level 35, got killed by the same frickin' sand giant three times in a row trying to recover my corpse two weeks after a bug caused me to lose all my gear before EQ CS had the tech to undelete items and man that was it for me.
So I made a "grey shard" using POL (written by Eric Swanson, who also works at SOE now how weird is that?) and did that for a few years.
Those were Good Times. Friday I'd post a "Wishlist" thread and people would reply with a hundred things they wanted added to the game. And Saturday and Sunday I'd add hundreds of things to the game. Production on a single small server is pretty nice. None of this "Oh, that'll take 2 months to deliver and will require two programmers, a designer and three artists."
A lot of .broadcast "Hey everyone, brace yourselves, I'm going to replace the magic system in 3 2 1"-sorts of moments. Frequently doing development on the server that people were actually playing on, while they are playing on it, and only using a local server for really significant changes.
In terms of administration, the people were a lot harder to manage than the game. Not just the players either, but the co-admin's: the folk that hosted the server, gm "staff", and whatnot. Janey emailed Raph describing a pretty ugly situation, and he'd responded with just some no-nonsense advice on how-to-run-a-mud, which she forwarded to me, and to which I replied, directly to him.
That led directly to establishing, in writing, just what exactly the scope of everyone's responsibilities were, what the rules were, how they would be enforced, and so on. Simple stuff, right? We had none of that and, duh, we ran into a lot of problems 'til we did.
This had nothing to do with his position in the game industry and everything to do with his experience with MUDs, and my lack of it, and his willingness to share info with a fellow enthusiast. Great learning experience, should I ever run a MUD again: Sony hires professionals to do that stuff.
But it also opened a dialog between the two of us and I s'pose put my crazyass game design ideas on his radar.
Anyway, hadn't talked to Raph in a while (because, well, things had been running pretty smoothly) so one day I emailed him and asked how he'd been. He said if I sent him a resume then he could tell me what he was working on.
So I sent him a resume. And they flew me down to Austin to meet the whole SWG team and interview for a systems design position, which I didn't get. Heh.
Couple months later they flew me back again for a worldbuilding position, which I did get.
Within a few months or so I was scripting systems. Then within a couple years, lead content designer for JtL. Then a few months ago, "live lead systems designer". My titles were growing and growing!
As of last week or so, now it's "Lead Game Play Designer". A step backwards in terms of character-count, but not actually a demotion, or even that big a change in responsibilities.
Mind, we have a Creative Director and that isn't me, and a Lead Designer and that isn't me either. They're both my bosses, even though my title's longer. And there's a whole plethora of producers and executives and executive producers above that.
So don't get the crazy notion that I'm "in charge" here. "The Man" is a many-headed beast called Management. I just try to help it make good decisions. With regard to game mechanics, it even lets me decide, sometimes.
So a few months ago The Man comes along and says "What can we do to make this the most fun game it can possibly be?"
It was the lead designer who holed-up in his office for a few days and then said, "Hey, come look at this."
There's no way we can do that.
There's no way we should do that.
Man that's fun.
The Man will never let us get away with doing that.
We can't do it.
We shouldn't do it.
Oh man that is fun.
When an executive producer sees something that is impossible to do, but which is too fun not to do, he makes a noise like "Hoooooooooph".
My job was to be the guy to say, "Yes we can do that." I had to say this about forty times a day for two months. Lead Designer said it too, of course, but no one believed him, because he's crazy. Obviously.
And they would only believe me for a few minutes at a time.
It's frustrating to see the posts about Raph rolling over in his grave, crying himself to sleep, seeing all his design thrown out the window, etc. The notion seems to be that Raph's game is slow-paced, deliberate, social, "worldy", and in no case ever "fun" vs. this change which tosses-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Specifically, that 'removing the Raph' is what makes it fun.
First off, Star Wars Galaxies is already a whole lot of fun for a whole lot of people. And it was very successful.
And Fast Action Combat and the introduction of classes based on iconic Star Wars character archtypes doesn't toss-out everything Koster-esque about Galaxies. Far from it.
The social elements of Galaxies' design remain, and for good reason. MMOs must be MMOs and not just big single-player games that everyone just happens to play all at once. We wouldn't have gotten things like player cities, entertainers and so on without Raph, and I wouldn't want Galaxies to be without them. Simply removing them wouldn't make the game more fun anyway.
There's a lot of cool in Galaxies. We're making all of it easier to see, easier to get to.
Honestly, I doubt I even have the capacity to design a game that is completely un-Raph like. Who do you think taught me this stuff? Over the course of years. Here's how you get X. Here's why you want X.
Yeh, I think I'm good 'nuff to see the 'why' and come up with 'Well if that's why, then we could do Z instead', but at that point it's a quibble over implementation detail, not design philosophy. I don't agree with Raph on every point about every thing, we're pretty much aligned in terms of high level game design.
For example 'Socialization requires downtime' is something Raph might say that I might not agree with. But 'MMO's require socialization, otherwise what's the point?' is not something we'd disagree about.
Many people have been influential in my personal development as a game designer and I've learned an awful lot on my own, but nothing and no other single person comes anywhere close the influence that Raph Koster has had on, in terms of game design from soup-to-nuts, what things I think about, if not in fact what I think about those things.
So I think these sorts of remarks are a little inaccurate, a tiny bit irksome, pretty unfair.
Shenanigans |
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SWG is dead, so there is not much point in talking about a rollback. They have completely lost the trust of their veteran players, who would have played basically forever, and I dont think very many of us would come back even if they did rollback. Bottom line is Lucas/Soe cant be trusted, and I for one will never play a game by either one ever again.
As far as beating them back, I agree completely and I think this is being done through the overwhelmingly negative reviews and comments you see all over the internet. Their servers are completely empty, and in the long run their sub. numbers will do all the beating back that will be necessary.
I would say that the MMO industry following this lead and destroying other games was a crazy idea, but then again I never would have believed it could happen to SWG, so who knows. I am pretty sure that if it happens you will see the end of this fledgling industry before it even has a chance to really take off. I know that personally, after my experience with SWG for the last 2.5 years, im seriously questioning whether or not I ever want to play another MMO. Of course, it doesnt help that ive tried several others over the last two weeks and been un-impressed by the cookie cutter, linear game play.
In an MMO you simply have to have some trust and belief that what you worked on yesterday has a pretty good chance of being there tomorrow. Otherwise, you might as well just player single player games. Trust is integral to the very foundation of the game.
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Theres nooo way SOE will take back this NGE, they made it so that gameplay will work better for PS3/Xbox 360 players when it comes to Online play.. or so i read that it is. Either way, this game is going down in the deep end and i dont have much hope for it. I love the people, love the roleplay, but i just cant do it anymore.
...And RF Online looks better.. : )
yay
Whenever big business interferes with artist creation you have a problem.
It was a business decision that saw Horizons release too soon, look what happened. It was probably a business decision to cancel WISH and definately with EnB, release IRTH and Erose too soon, and even EQ2 was rushed out to beat WoW.
A few years ago Sony had that row with George Michael over his contract. Because they'd bought his old contract they assumed they owned him and expected him to produce music on schedule like a factory, churning out songs like product. They expected a minimum number of press appearances, signings, intervews, to promote his work; they wanted him to appear on videos, not for creative reasons but for product identification, even though he wanted to be more artistic, and less obvious.
Whatever you feel about GM it proves that big business cares little for the creative process or pushing back the boundaries and being fresh and innovative. SOE will just pump more of the same because the last batch sold so well.
The pop music industry has suffered from this, mmos will too.
Some of those business decisions are made on a "How much are we going to lose, and is there *any* way to save it?" factor. Certain games you have named were cancelled due to obvious technical flaws which would cost way too much money to fix. In one case the flaws were so broad it would have taken as many years and as much money to fix as it did up to that point. The investors decide it is time to cut their loses.
I do agree money, or lack of money, has the ability to make things happen we wouldn't like to see happen. I also agree, and have been witness to, investors forcing a hand that shouldn't have been forced. The industry, and the research regarding the industry are getting much better and investors are starting to become more informed. This shows in several products being developed. On the same side, developers are starting to understand more and more the business end of MMOGs. MMOG studios are more business than any other game studio. They are developing a service more than they are just developing a game. They have to learn, and are learning, this business has deadlines and constraints just like any other business. Set realistic goals and you won't run into the reacts you see later on in the lifecycle.
I don't agree SWG being changed is going to cause the MMO world to fall apart. MMOGs have been making changes to mechanics for a long time. This is a large change, agreed, but it is hardly new to make changes. SOE didn't create this bar, but they may have just set it.
I will say, my least favorite thing about the change so far is the new set of profession pictures. I have never been a fan of real life photos in an animated game.
Fadinaway
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http://www.playerbasesolutions.com
Yup it's looking pretty bad for subscription numbers, a few nights back (Aus time) I was doing a fly by on all the planets with resources, and decide to also see who was on.
Well I didn't find the resource's I was looking for and the highest count I got was 5 players, with most planets having just me on them. There might have been 12 people including me on all those planets.
Maybe everyone was over on the 2 quest planets but the number still seem very light to me, at login all the servers where light.
Personally I think they should have waited until they at least got most of the bugs out of NGE, as at the moment it's pretty bad. And several classes have been give the royal treatment eg crafter's, CH all non-jedi melee.
I wish I had saved the post where Freeman stated they had only started working on the NGE two months before it was uploaded... just for posterity. (and the fact that Smed claimed they'd been actively working on it for nearly a year)
its really a load of bs what they pulled, i enjoyed the game until these changes. now, i will never play it again. i logged on a few days ago and saw a total of three other players, looked at the forums and the outcry of people cancelling 3-6 accounts each. if they dont roll it back, they would be retarded. i wont be playing it anymore, and i hope anyone else that still plays will cancels thier accounts and show them how much what they did sucks.
there seems to be a common theme with mmorpgs, wheres theres a turning point change which alienates customers. From what I have heard it happened in EQ, UO, AC2, SWG, DAoC and EQ2.
What it sounds like they do is try to entice new customers but at the expense of alienating old customers, and SoE seems to be one of the biggest culprits for this. I'm just wondering how mmorpg companies will handle this in future knowing this, will they perhaps divide their servers so as to have multi-theme? I know a few mmorpgs have "classic" servers which seems to reflect this method.
You people need to keep in mind that SOE hosts SWG and provides CS for SWG, but it is Lucas Games who controls content and game direction. If you don't like the direction SWG is taking then you need to complain to Lucas Games, not SOE.
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It's just me, so open the door.
EQ2 doesn't need saving. It is doing just fine.
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It's just me, so open the door.