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Star Wars Galaxies: Julio Torres Producer's Letter
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
Yesterday, we brought you one of the two Star Wars: Galaxies February producer's letters. Today, we bring you the second. This one is from Julio Torres, the Producer from LucasArts.
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Greetings Everyone, Hope this letter finds you all well. Here we are roughly three months after unveiling some significant changes to Star Wars Galaxies geared towards delivering the ultimate immersive Star Wars experience. Though not all elements of the new direction were welcomed by all players with open arms, we still see that the majority (~80%) of players still in the game were playing before the changes were unveiled and implemented. We also continue to have more and more players enter the galaxy daily through the demo, almost 200,000 players to date. First, we'd like to thank everyone who has been posting their feedback and that we want to keep hearing from you in an effort to improve the game experience. We appreciate your passion and your involvement in the community. Towards the end of last year, the team made many of the changes, adjustments, and fixes you were asking for and we're going to continue to try and do this in an effort to improve Galaxies for current players as well as new players. Refining, Fixing, & Improving The Existing Game Our number-one priority is on improving the existing game. We are dedicating significant development resources to polish the existing experience. One of the biggest facets the new game enhancements got knocked for was that many elements were broken. Quests would break halfway-through or not trigger at all, quest NPC's and enemies wouldn't be where they were supposed-to, as well as other issues that literally made portions of the game unplayable or simply not fun to play. Our main goal of this top priority is to fix all existing issues to the highest standard of quality, not just-enough to where they are playable. There are a lot of annoying bugs out there and we want to knock em out for good! One of the key efforts of our focus on existing game improvement will be to give all publishes extensive time on Test Center so that you all can have time to evaluate and share your feedback with us so we can make any necessary adjustments before we push them to the live game. We certainly want to see as many new features and improvements to Galaxies as possible, but we're focusing on the quality over the quantity of features going-forward. As we mentioned, this will also include addressing the issues that already exist in the game. O ur approach is to make sure that as much attention is paid to addressing bugs as is to implementing new features. This approach will also affect the frequency of publishes this year. However, this does not mean we have reduced efforts to fix bugs and issues via hotfixes. We are confident our approach in terms of frequency of publishes will allow us to deliver better, cleaner, and more fun Star Wars content. The end result is that everything new and that is fixed in the game is going to undergo a lot more scrutiny, both internally and from the community. We know this will result in a much higher-quality experience for everyone. As I mentioned, our goals aren't limited to refining and fixing the existing game. In an effort to improve it as well, we are focusing heavily on giving players the opportunity to differentiate themselves within their chosen profession from others within the same profession. The first you will see of these efforts is in tomorrow's Publish 27 in which we are introducing new abilities to the Jedi profession. We plan to do the same for all nine of our iconic professions across the board. In addition to adding new abilities, we eventually will be introducing new skills for each profession to give players further opportunity to differentiate themselves. Look for information on these skills to be popping-up on the boards in the coming months. Remember, your feedback on these abilities and skills is essential to their successful implementation. Increasing Interaction With Community Community is an important part of the Star Wars Galaxies experience it is as important as the game's design itself. We're going to be listening to your feedback and posting much more about the issues and features that are important to everyone. Moving forward we will make sure we have a much stronger dev presence on the boards. Though we may not always be posting, we are always listening. As part of this effort, we'll be posting more details about upcoming features on the forums so we can get your feedback before any of these features are set in stone. We'll start by posting information, publishing the features to Test Center , and getting your feedback on how each of these features plays. We will then be able to more effectively polish the overall experience before anything makes it to the live game. As all things develop, we'll be letting everyone know what's going on with more frequent letters from the producers and other members of the development team in addition to our more frequent interaction with you all on the boards. Until next time may the Force be with you! |
For more on SWG, click here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Can I buy some of whatever he is smoking?
"SOME" players weren't happy? They are going to start listening? (A nice implicit acknowlegement that they weren't)
Etc. Etc.
"Stay with us and eventually we'll make the game acceptable" is what they are really saying.
Those are meaningless statistics. 80% of what? 80% of 0 is still zero. 80% of 1,000,000 is 800,000. The percentage by itself means nothing.
His numbers can be interpreted in the following way. He says 80% of those playing were playing before NGE launched. Ok, but that doesn't mean that player numbers are increasing. Say there were 200,000 subscribers before NGE launched. Now let's say there are 100,000 subscribers with 80,000 of those who were subscribers pre NGE. That fits within his numbers, yet you still lost half your subs.
It's a way for him to spin bad news into seemingly good news. Instead, give us the number of paying subs before NGE launched and the number of paying subs after NGE launched. That will show wether everyone loves NGE has Sony and company claim, or whether there has been a mass exodus as seems to be with the widespread and consistent complaints all over the net (mmorpg.com, amazon.com, SWG forums, new magazine reviews, X-play, etc).
Also, it's great that 200,000 people have signed up for the FREE trial. How many of those have converted into paying customers? Again he is throwing out meaningless statistics.
They are sounding more and more like politicians over at SOE by the day.
~PD
www.TheChippedDagger.com My 90-day 2D Java MMORPG project
They that can give up essential liberty for temporary safetey deserve neither. -- Ben Franklin
If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door. -- Milton Berle
Greetings Everyone,
Hope this letter finds you all well. Here we are roughly three months after screwing Star Wars Galaxies geared towards delivering the average console experience. Though all elements of the new direction weren't welcomed by all players with open arms, we still see that 80%of players still in the game were playing before the changes were unveiled and implemented. This means after loosing hundreds of thousands of people we've only recouped 20% of the now crippled player base. We also continue to have more and more players enter the galaxy daily through the demo, almost 200,000 players to date, upon realising the game is essentially a bad port of WOW in space they return to their other MMORPGs.
First, we'd like to thank everyone who has been posting their feedback, the moderators are getting great overtime rates for all the shutting down of any complaint post. We want to keep hearing from you in an effort to shaft the game experience.
Towards the end of last year, the team grew bored of full time employment and decided the NGE was the best way to accelerate our way to unemployment.
Refining, Fixing, & Improving The Existing Game
Our number-one priority is on totally changing the existing game. We are dedicating significant development resources to make it like the next popular mmorpg that comes out. One of the biggest facets the new game enhancements got knocked for was that the game was utterly utterly dire. Quests would break halfway-through or not trigger at all, quest NPC's and enemies wouldn't be where they were supposed-to, as well as other issues that literally made portions of the game unplayable or simply not fun to play. Our main goal is to continue ignoring the playerbase and use your subs to pay for a addon pack, which will cost you even more. This will bring in a lot of annoying bugs and we want to really cock up the missions this time.
Damn ran out of time to finish it all, but I've fixed it the best i can
Give SWG to Blizzard~
You already FUBAR'd SWG, MXO, and EQ2. I mean did your modelers use fat ugly people as their pattern for the EQ2 models? Less arbitrary fine tuning to the character creation in exchange for decent models!
And the NGE, there are, or wait I mean were probably 100,000 posts of how people hated it so much at the station forums. I could literally refresh every second and there would be 5 more posts the day after NGE was released. I became a clone of every other Spy in the game. The only thing remained was the armor and clothing differences, oh but wait the Trader class was made un-playable. Thats ok I'll pay $15 a month for them to beta test their NGE, but actually I wont.
If you dont give SWG to Blizzard I would suggest rather than trying to make a deadline and producing crap, try to get it right from the beginning. Why not test the quest you just coded to make sure it works? Make sure you can drop it, and re-take it? Make sure you have to actually do something to get the XP? Game breaking exploits where you could reach cl 90 in 10 hours or so were pretty lame. Soloing Necrosis because he breaks every single time you fight him? Endless Banes Hearts = no economy. Right there is no economy anymore, sorry.
Good luck to this game. Although because of this game I will never touch another SOE game as long as I live.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
And the comedy award 2006 goes to Julio!
Seriously... I wasn't laughing too much until I got to the part where Julio says"
"Community is an important part of the Star Wars Galaxies experience it is as important as the game's design itself"
OMG that's halarious I couldn't help but laugh out loud...
Julio you keep trying to feed people this BS and let us know how it works for ya ok?
Trying to keep from joining in the general flame fest my big concern is this:
"O ur approach is to make sure that as much attention is paid to addressing bugs as is to implementing new features. "
No offense folks. But you should be putting more effort into fixing the bugs than into new content. The game has PLENTY of content. If you'd FIX all the broken content there would be nearly 2x the playable content that there is now. FIX what is broken before adding MORE. I swear, the entire community has been screaming this since *BETA*.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
Dear Don Julio,
You better start thinking in your professional future.
....SWG is done and if you keep telling this bunch of crap you wont find a job not even in a galaxy far, far away. 
Dont you realize the MMOs community is one strongest and very well informed community regardless the game they are playing???Every knows you are lying and we are really tired of it
I'm sick of SOEs bullshit. If they're doing so well, how come they keep sending out these "look at what we fixed" emails all the time? If they're doing so fantastic then they wouldn't be begging people who quit to come back. I've quit plenty of MMOs over the years and I've never gotten so much crap in my inbox begging me to return as I have from SOE since the NGE came out. Same with the producers letters to what's left of the community. When the game was going good, they would pop up... what, once every couple of months or so? Now they're popping up all the time.
What's sad is, I bought into all the hype just before the NGE came out. I quit after the combat upgrade fiasco and I was loath to return. But people kept saying how SOE is finally going to fix stuff and how great it's going to be... what a crock. I don't understand how anyone can be playing this now. It just boggles my mind. I made the same vow as a poster above, I'll never play another SOE game again. When the NGE first hit and my rage was at it's peak, I even swore off all Sony products, but I just don't have that much willpower.
100% agree with you!!!!
WOW Rocks! Just my 2 cents.....
Julio T sez "Though not all elements of the new direction were welcomed by all players with open arms,"
Can someone help me off the floor , I just laughed my ass off.
Unaware of the Jestor?
http://about.me/JestorRodo/
Friends enjoy his classic Vblog - https://www.facebook.com/GoodOldReliableNathan
Whatever Julio,
How about citing some statistics of what is happening now instead of giving 80% of 80% of 80%.
are you all stuck on that 80 number or what it never ever changes its always EIGHTY PERCENT! ! !
just don't buy a ps3, support Bill Gates or nintendo instead. the playstation is Sony's major money maker now days. I've played 10 or 20 different mmo's over the years and there is only 1 that i've ever loved and played for more than a year, it was SWG. Even as bad as it got with them blindly plowing ahead with new things i stuck around because i loved the world so much and had friends aplenty there. I knew something was desparately wrong when I could now solo a Krayte dragon. The closest amount of time i've played any other mmo was probably 6 months or so before I lost interest. SOE wanted to use the CU and NGE to fix star wars but all they really needed to do was fix the bugged quests and fix the issues that they currently had. Instead they bring in new stuff and bug more stuff to go along with the old bugs. They've never given a rats ass about what the community wanted. If anyone has played guild wars, now there are some devs that listen. If only Arena Net could get an opportunity to make a Star Wars mmo that would be great I know it. People have problems with NC soft but they seem to be rock solid to me.
SWG was a great and unique game until the CU in spring 2k5 but with the NGE it became totally ridiculous.
they cut the game just to add more cr4p and make it more conform to games like WoW but what they didn't get was the depth of their major opponent.
SOE/LA should have listened to that huge part of the community that wanted to either keep the old system or at least one or two server running a pre-CU/NGE combat system.
that way they would have kept numerous accounts even though pl would have had to start from scratch - at least i would have done so.
SWG is dead meat the way it is now.
synchronized with other mmo's its just a sci-fi copy of any other game except for the fact that it got more bugs than a hunk of bantha poo-doo.
i go with the fellow who granted this year's comedy award to Julio
faster pussycat - kill kill kill
You know, I quit SWG last year after I was expected to pay to be a beta tester. I just don't get where SOE gets off in continuing this behavior. I've been kinda half a$$ following SWG out of a morbid interest, and it is very dissapointing to see that they continue to push these half finished "fixes" that break more things in the game than they fix, then expect people to tell them what's wrong when they should have completely tested it in the first place. I'll be more inclined to believe them when they publish actual numbers instead of meaningless percentages. This is why I'll never play any SOE MMOs. What I understand even less is why Lucas hasn't pulled the license!
Probably just another lie. 80% left. Thats alot of BS. Friend had prepaid 2 months just before NGE was announced. He played up until 1 month ago. He said the games pretty much dead and nobody likes it. I don't know why producers, politicians and lawyers get paid so much to lie to everyone when most know the bold face truth.
What a cough out...
Julio... you seriously need to find a new job...
SWG lost both my sister and me after the NGE(New Grade school Enhancements) was released. There was NOTHING wrong with the game BEFORE then!
What makes me even more angry, is that I helped beta test the very original SWG, before it even GOT to the public, a lot of the beta testers didn't see it coming and neither did I, perhaps we should've realized it when they didn't heed our warning and released the game anyway
Just like how they did NOT listen to the beta testers then
They didn't listen to those of us on Corbantis (One of a few servers who where granted special access to the NGE) we HATED the NGE and even posted feedback advising them NOT TO RELEASE IT
Instead they kill the corbantis test server, ban SEVERAL hundred players and even FIRE the employee that recommended our server... really pathetic
The only games of there's I play is PS and EQ2 (EQ2 because it's still very fun, PS because I enjoy it
)
Either way, I'm expecting SWG to completely die within a year or so, and it'll drop off the map like Earth and Beyond did (It still boggles my mind on WHY EA killed it, the game had a ton of subcriptions...)
87% of all facts are made up and 3/2 of all fractions are wrong...
John, it is over, the game is on the slow descent to hell, it is now the edsel of gaming, it is so far from what the game was supposed to be, let your personal pride go and admit it, the game is near dead.. hell watching a 95 yr old grand ma cross the street is more exciting than this game,,, and yes daikatana is even better than this now
This was taken from the SWG Forum.
Hello everyone,
I started playing Star Wars Galaxies around launch time, I loved the game all the way up until April 2005 and played every single day on a number of servers. I had many characters over that time, had a lot of adventures, a lot of fun, and made a lot of good friends.
I stopped playing in April 2005 because the "combat upgrade" went live. I had tested it every single day on Test Center up until its push to live, and after joining many others in those weeks begging Sony Online Entertainment to just wait a while at least, it went live in a broken and disappointing state. They had taken a game that already had a lot of fixable bugs and balance issues, and made it a hundred times worse, at which point it wasn't the same Star Wars Galaxies anymore and I decided that it was time for me to bow out and leave gracefully.
In November 2005 I was informed by a number of friends that a set of "new game enhancements" were coming to the game, and they promised me that it would make me want to come back and to stay. I was curious, so I decided to open my subscription again, and I played the "new game enhancements" for three months and a number of publishes, trying to keep and open mind, and praying that things would improve, but things obviously didn't improve "in publish 27..." and will probably not improve "...in the near future."
Well, as I said, I have played the "new game enhancements" for three months solid with an open mind. Many left on the first day, so I can give myself a pat on the back for trying it for a whole quarter of a year, but this NGE is just not good enough I'm affraid to say. Before I gracefully bow out of a game I loved, for the second time in a year, I would like to express my true feelings on the matter: -
Click Me!
This will no doubt be deleted, and I honestly don't care. I am living proof that Sony Online Entertainment have absolutely no idea of how to treat their customers, unless they are naeive new customers with wide eyes and a lot of cash (or have parents with a lot of cash.)
Sincerely yours,
Embracer Of Darkness.
Angry Veteran Of SWG.
The SWG Community wants SWG back to its original Combat System, we all want a Pre-CU Servers (Classic Server)
We been asking for this since CU beta.
The SWG Community wants SWG back to its original Combat System, we all want a Pre-CU Servers (Classic Server)
We been asking for this since CU beta.