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Regarding Starwars Galaxies
Mccoys
Member Posts: 1
First of all, let me introduce myself.
I was employed for the last 4 years by Sony Onlline Entertainment (SOE) and Lucasarts Entertainment Company (LEC) as a body coder for the MMO commonly known as StarWars Galaxies: An Empire Divided.
I will not give out my personal details due to recursive legal action that the above two corporations may take against me for writhing this post to you today. ( hence the false email i am using and name to make this thread)
Recently, Major changes have been made within this MMO that have sparked outrage and mass cancellations. However i bring news to you of some facts.
First of all, there have been rumors abound about the current subscriber base in the game. Upon myself leaving the company 1 week ago, the current subscriber base with active accounts was slightly over 175,000 subscribers. 32,000 of them being trial accounts.
Now comes the part that may or may not have legal issues for me.
There have been massive calls for a reversion of the current system to be changed to the original base system that was at launch. SOE have acknowledged this and explained the situation to LEC and projected the estimated subscriber base and revenue that would be generated if this did indeed happen.
However, LEC have basically ignored this request from SOE and informed them, that as their joint license and contract states, the game known as StarWars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, must be produced and developed according to the wishes of the license granter (LEC)
Recently though, there have been further developments on this front, and SOE have made some ground on attempting to produce a original system that includes all the current mini-publishes and major publishes.
For evidence of this, you can refer to the lead developers publish plan. This is to last 6 months approx.
The reason that there is no publish plan further ahead of this ( unlike during the previous combat systems) is that IF the current system on the live servers is not to the playerbases liking, a original base system will be made live. Evidence of this can be found by the upcoming house and structures purge on the servers. this is to make way for condensed server merges, with the remainder being "cleaned" and prepared for the new system.
Take the above information as you will.
Now on to a well known Emulator site regarding the above game.
Many of you have posted and replied to that site. SOE and LEC indeed know about this site, and are actively monitoring it.
I have read the updates section and i feel i must say something.
The main updates that the administrators have given to you are false. Here are my reasons for you to browse.
The most recent updates that have been made available there are incorrect.
The loading screen you see can easily be made and changed by anyone who has access to the .tre file that was included in the Jump to Lightspeed (JTL) major publish. All it is is a simple background that you can extract from the .tre file using a program known as insideSWG or SWGExplorer. You can then import it into a image editing program, edit it how you like, then recompile it back into the.tre file. Evidence of this is a lack of a full video going from login screen to main game on the Emulator site. All you see is a screenshot.
With reference to the "ingame zone" screenshots. these are again false. There is indeed a mod that replicates all aspects of the games original system User Interface. However if you look closely you will notice that there are no active "HAM" bars. this is because the code which we inserted into the core of the game is made to do this, thus making the mod useless and basically unuseable. You may also notice the small unobtainable experience information module in one of the screenshots This is a well known bug that occurs with an original system User interface Mod. This occurs because the mod links to coding within the client that has been commented out. therefore it was not able to be changed.
Well, take the above post however you see fit. My only purpose today was to update you on the game and future developments that SOE and LEC are desperate to keep hidden. Some of you may think that this post was made by a teenager with not much else to do. However i assure you in all honesty, that i was empoyed as stated above.
Comments
Even though this game has been squeezed of all topics on this forum and has been talked to death about, I still like to hear news as it was the best MMO I played back in the day.
You, sir, are a fraud.
could we please get correspondent writers and moderators, on the eve forum at mmorpg.com, who are well-versed on eve-online and aren't just passersby pushing buttons? pretty please?
meh, even if its fake I give em props for a thorough backstory with (what sounds like) details.
-- I need a nerf --
You worked for SOE ?
good
SOMEONE GET A ROPE
Nice try Smed.
Everyone hates you
While the purge system was something smeedly commented on a few months back the fact is i wouldn't put it past soe to try and get subscribers back just to take care of their houses , either by full pack up or pay more maintence in it. That does not mean after that check and see current game they keep their subscriptions up
If the 175 numbers are correct then according to Ralph in his explanation on his blog about defining users that would leave about 100 k unique users that do not log into the game regularly or have multiple accounts still.
Given back in Febuary when numbers were leaked about 10 k concurrent users again by other means would suggest about 40 k active subscriptions. That number of course would be flexable given that as publishes come people re up to see the changes and or improvments.
As far as by fall the idea of the "roll back" after the expertease system is implemented and the numbers still do not bounce back, again Soe brought back classic eq servers it would not be a strech for them to try one more time to give the game a jump start.
However it still goes back to the issue of here it is being 8 months after the release of nge and yet we still see on the main fourms folks listing excatly what they are having issues with and again the main issues being ignored. I.e. the summit not solving anything
Unless very basic game play is taken into consideration that just won't bring back the players .
Of course by fall and closer into last quarter of the year we should see other offerings out that may bring other offerings to the table for players to try.
Time passing does help with the anger, but even if they do bring back classic swg that will not solve the issues of what management did to the player base a few times will not easily be forgotten.
It can be true that SOE has 175k subscribers for SWG, but as you see 32k of them are trial and about 50k of them are station pass. So there are about 80k-90k real SWG subscribers and as we all know only %10 of them still log into game and play. Most of others only use their accounts to post on forums.
"There have been massive calls for a reversion of the current system
to be changed to the original base system that was at launch. SOE
have acknowledged this and explained the situation to LEC and
projected the estimated subscriber base and revenue that would be
generated if this did indeed happen.
However, LEC have basically ignored this request from SOE and
If this is true, then tons of people blamed SOE for nothing about "Bring Pre-CU back!"informed them, that as their joint license and contract states, the
game known as StarWars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, must be produced
and developed according to the wishes of the license granter (LEC)"
We knew boss was LEC but I personally never thought that they forced SOE to do all of those craps... Sad...
"IF the current system on the live servers is not to the playerbases liking, a original base system will be made live."
And I don't understand what you mean there. People actually hate the new system. This means current system on the live servers is not to the playerbases liking, right?
I don't mind about EMU yet, even if those pictures were true, there would still be tons of coding left... This is later than SOE's Pre-Cu server...
I call rubbish. All it does is takes the blame off of SOE and reinforces their numbers that are quite suspect.
Does SOE/LEC monitor these forums (we suspect Obraik, Squidi and pirrrg). Care to shed some light.
But otherwise.
- You worked there for 4 years.
- You left last week
- You were working on SWG as a coder
While we don't know who you are, this is completely accurate definition of who you are to SOE/LEC.
But with that in mind, why did you leave. I'm asking this seriously. Contract expired, better offer, project re-organization, project being cancelled, promotions?
Seriously though, 175k? Try 50k and more people might buy it next time.
A** Still Raw From Your Last SWG Subscription? Come join us at RLMMO.com
You believe the emu part, but don't believe the account numbers?
I have only one comment:
Why would a former coder post this kind of information on this forum? He has absolutly nothing to gain from this, only putting himself in a bad light in terms of future employment.
IF the info holds any truth... has LEC finally given in what are taking them so long to fire up servers and getting more cash?
"There are two kinds of spurs, my friend. Those that come in by the door; those that come in by the window"
I'll see soon enough.
QFE
Nice try though.
I'll start my own SWG... with Black Jack... and Hookers!!!
In fact, forget the SWG!!!!
Wow. Move over, akewlguy, I have a new prophet hero.
It's an interesting theory or rumor posted, OP, but I have two questions for you.
First, you mentioned a housing purge, but that doesn't necessarily solve the bigger issue of overlap regardless. Yet, you seem to believe it is. Even if SOE got rid of the inactive houses, there's still a high likelihood that there will be overlap. What about the ability to store houses and contents therein to the datapad? I would think, in database terms, that if multiple clusters were to be merged together, one cluster would be the host parent, able to retain the database in its current state, and other clusters' databases would be appended to the existing database. That could be made very easy (I presume) by forcing all characters on a source server to have their houses packed up for transition to a destination server.
Second, the stuff about the SWGEMU being "false" is also interesting -- but what makes you believe it's not just a programmatic error? Maybe the coders there robbed Peter to pay Paul and get themselves into the game world.
I am very interested to hear your responses.
[Edit: I'll also look into whether or not this post is accurate and OP is genuine.]
[Authenticity update]
I did a little mining and can say this much: last week, SOE posted two jobs for their Austin offices on the internet - one for an artist and another for a senior designer position. Regardless of whether or not this post is accurate, if the designer is indeed who I think it is, then it's yet another drastic drastic loss for SOE as a whole. I'm stopping here and posting accuracy rating of 45%/50%, since there's a chance it could just be an opportunist.
-- xpaladin
[MMOz]
AC1/2, AO, DAoC, EQ1/2, SoR, SWG, UO, WAR, WoW
.tre file is the extension, these would be referred to as Tree Files by the developers (a guess only), since that is what it stands for. From my experience, it's usual that internal naming convetions are completely different from the ones used in public.
And second.
In order to change the loading screen, you do not need to repack the tre file. You just put the modified file into the SWG folder. The SWG resource loading mechanism first looks there, and only if it doesn't find it, goes to look into the tre file. I'd imagine this is how patches are tested in dev environment. I know that's how I tested such systems.
Generation of tre files is tricky, since it requires complete regeneration of table of contents, and knowing content management systems, it's unlikely this would be done manually, especialy since pub 16 (or 15) introduced the common TOC system.
So the first thought that someone who has worked on core system for 4 years would be to just add it this way. Packaging is usually someone elses responsibility.
For an example of how the login screen text is stored, look at <swg_dir>/string/en/live_motd.stf. This is where that text is stored, without being packed into tre file.
Lastly, only a single image (planet based or generic) is used while loading. So video or no video makes no difference here.
The unobtainable experience amount was 1337. As in no one could be 1337. Get it now? It was obviously put in as a joke.
That was really the nail in the coffin for me regarding this guy's story. He didn't even get the 1337 reference so he came up with some lame excuse for it being there. The sad part would be if a coder that HAD worked for SOE for 4 years left a week ago. This fraud would probably have just gotten that person hit with a big law suit.
SWG Tempest: Cardo Dycen RIP
Eve: Cardoh Dycen
I support random drug testing for all SOE employees
-- xpaladin
[MMOz]
AC1/2, AO, DAoC, EQ1/2, SoR, SWG, UO, WAR, WoW
them, that as their joint license and contract states, the game known
as StarWars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, must be produced and developed
according to the wishes of the license granter (LEC)
Then you say that SOE will roll back if the game is not liked by the players...but It doesen't make sense as Lucasarts WANTS the opposite and it owns the license, so SOE will have a problem there. No sense at all or maybe I just understood wrong.