they blameing another company for there problems... ? with this WoW effect... when in the first place should of listened to the fan base of there own game, instead of going after the allmighty $ ...
Playing daoc and loving it totally.. have Played Eq,Eq2,WoW,Coh,Cov, and other.. which i have forgotten..
Originally posted by Celestian First off the guy that wrote this article doesn't even make the illusion of not being biased.
Second, you can't just say that because the subscribers dropped off was because of NGE. There are many reasons why the game lost folks and the biggest starts with a W and ends with the same.
Repeatedly saying the same thing over from the same people here doesn't make things a fact. SWG is an older game, people will stop playing it's happened to every single mmo to date.
I hated the game before, I like it now. I never posted repeatedly how much SoE was a horrible company because they didn't do what I wanted to. I quit EQ, DAoC, CoH and other games because of changes and just plan old tired of the same game. Yet, I don't fill up forums with how they screwed me over.
I'm sure I'll be in the minority on these forums simply because all the misfits that seem to think SoE is the devil incarnate live at mmorpg.com.
Cheers.
Actually your in the minority because you don't make any arguments. I was honestly hoping I wouldn't have to deal with your constant insults against everyone such as you do in the SWG forums. But to answer your charges:
I made no claim at being objective. This is an opinion editorial, not a straight journalism peice. In that opinion editorial, I advanced a theory, and sustained that with argumentation. Argumentation you ignored.
As far as the NGE being the sole problem, if you actually READ the editorial, I said they screwed up with the CU for the same reason, trying to make fundamental game design changes to appeal to a broader audience. I spent time on each.
All I ask is that you actually read the editorial before commenting on it, which it is evident you did not.
Originally posted by Mna_Grok Originally posted by iceman00 Originally posted by Mna_Grok Originally posted by DrChewbacca Originally posted by Mna_Grok I am honestly not sure why people are reading this article like it is a brand new business paradigm that will revolutionize MMORPGs.
The article can be summed up in two sentances:
1 - Don't piss off current customers in a bid to get new customers.
2 - (Potential) new customers are greatly influenced by the words of old customers. (both currently subscribed and not)
These are not new ideas. They form the basis of any business' relationship with it's customers.
Hey, thank you for your brilliant analysis. The article is not about these ideas being new. It's about a rather big company obviously ignoring these ideas that seems so basic for us normal customers. Including you. This is what's interesting there.
My comment was more aimed at all of the posters in the thread who are screaming "Great analysis" and stuff like that.
The editorial is not, IMO, a great analysis of what went wrong. It is a simple statement of what went wrong with SWG. SOE made a gamble and lost. That is all there is to it.
Now an in-depth analysis of why they decided to change the classes would be interesting. But this editorial, not really.
The reason they made the changes was because they reasoned the "silent majority" wanted things "simple" and "iconic." That's all part of the gamble. Hence that was covered. Or do I have to explicitly go after everything?
Never satisfied hehe.
I completely understand why Sony gambled. If it had worked and their subscriptions numbers had skyrocketed and they were beating WoW, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
I most likely would be. I'm a theorist, who focuses on the proccess as much as the result. But that's just me.
I long for the game that it once could have been. I started as a beta tester, and felt the potential that SWG had. Raph and his crew even in the beginning had the foot of near-sighted execs planted firmly on their backs ... but the potential was there.
I recall starting down the Jedi path, the endless hours of solo grinding in the wilds of Endor, of knowing that a death would undo days and days worth of work. All with the hope that Sony would eventually fix the game into one really worth playing. "delayed gratification" was like a mantra to me.
The saddest part for me is two-fold. I hung onto the pipe-dream way too long. I should have thrown in the towel long before I actually did. But what really amazes me that I actually miss the pre-cu days. And if the game was still in a pre-cu state, I would still be paying for a subscription and holding out in the vain hope that it might one day be fixed.
The bottom line, SOE had to work at alienating a die-hard fan like me to the point where I would give up on the hope. Unfortunatly, they did.
One of the problems from the very beginning was that while the rank and file game developers took an interest in fixing bugs and adding common sense features to flesh out the virtual world - those of us who interacted with them in and out of the game world could tell this and often see the results - the "executives" (cough) in charge of decision making had a completely disconnected agenda, a forced culture of "Fun"(TM) that focused on one or two desperately limited aspects of play to the virtual exclusion of everything else that had been built into the game. Sometimes it seemed as though the people calling the shots got bored with their own game far more quickly than the paying players did! A constant stream of distracting novelties appeared month after month, as if to keep THEM interested... while core game systems languished in the backwater.
The Battlegrounds were a great example. They were sort of broken in beta, got a little more broken after release, eventually stopped working all together, and then just sat there sad and abandoned for the next two years while people built cities around them and asked each other what the poles were for. Meanwhile the competing games were going nuts with PvP and racking up sales records. But SWG focused on a clumsy "Galactic Civil War" story arc and let the few existing player-driven PvP features get buggier and buggier and rot away.
It blows your mind to think of what SWG might have been if there had been a management consensus to fix, improve and just plain USE the features built into the game. Instead, they practically disowned their own game within a year of release. It's sad. And our buddy Koster is not blameless, not matter how philosophical he's acting about the whole thing now. He should have followed through or quit 18 months ago. He would have had some leverage then.
its really hard to say it better than this guy, in a way soe guys will understand.. since they seemed to ignore throngs of their fans warning them about this...
I just want to thank you for doing this editorial. This is all pretty similar to what most of us SWG refugees have been saying for months. It is definitely nice to see it all pulled together though.
Thanks,
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Excellent summary of what the nge was really about, its unfortunete sony hasn't yet learned their lesson, they keep chnging eq2 in the direction of wow to try to get a larger customer base... and they fail over and over and over.... and keep losing people it seems like (least our guild roster keeps getting smaller and most of our allied guilds too.) Its logical, but obviously not something htey really believe.
Ok, enough is enough dont you think? How long are you guys going to go on and on about how bad these changes were? Seems to me you are actually trying to wage a war against Sony and the Star Wars Galaxies game, relentlessly bad mouthing the game anywhere you can and whenever you can. I understand your frustration caused by the dramatic changes, i would have been frustrated and angry too but hey its been so long the changes have been made and you guys still going on and on about it, maybe its time to let it go and maybe get a life in the process. Give it a rest guys, the game is still great after the changes and no matter how much you ramble its not going to be changed back to the original form. I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time.
As I see it, it's not the changes as such, even if they were a turn for the worse in my eyes.
It's the way it was done.
Neither the CU nor the NGE would have been as badly recieved, if SOE had chosen to listen to their player base, instead of loudly declaring: We know what is Star Warsy! We know what it is that is best for our players! and then conveniently forget they have a test center, and that their players were actually very vocal on a lot of the changes they forced through.
It's a question of making the players happy. And the CU and the NGE did not make the majority of their players happy.
Funny thing is, they didn't seem to get the message from the CU, seeing as they pulled a very similar stunt on the NGE, completely blindsiding their player base...
People bought a game three years ago, expecting it to be the one they would still be playing today - expansions and patches included, of course, seeing as it is SOE... The NGE is not SWG. It's a completely new game. There's nothing left of SWG in NGE, except the scenario and the character creation/ cutomization.
And the fact these changes came about, in spite of the very loud protests of the majority of the players, is what made people angry enough to leave. Why should they pay for a game, where the developers take their money, and then go and do whatever they feel like?
"So I contend that the player stories will always be more powerful than the scripted stories that we try to tell the players."
i played SWG from the first possible moment and while it had bugs, all games tend to have bugs. SWG was the most complete game when it came to well rounded world. you had everything but then they had to mess it up. I say roll the game back to the original and beg for us to come back. Give me a few months for free and i'll come back. They should have left it alone and too often games start tampering with iots soul and loose their character.
SWG was the best game even if it was buggy. I really hated watching it slowly die and watch the city i had helped build slowly rot away. I for one would return to a classic server and give thema chance to fix the bugs. I never had as much fun with a nother game as i did with SWG if for no other reason then i grew up with the Star Wars movies. I liked the fact that we built our own cities and had our own stores. All the professions had interaction with others and the community was great. Ifthey did the game justice and did proper changes WoW would not have become what it did. Wow didnt offer half of what SWG offered.
Originally posted by kay226 Ok, enough is enough dont you think? How long are you guys going to go on and on about how bad these changes were? Seems to me you are actually trying to wage a war against Sony and the Star Wars Galaxies game, relentlessly bad mouthing the game anywhere you can and whenever you can. Thats exactly what we are doing.
I understand your frustration caused by the dramatic changes, i would have been frustrated and angry too but hey its been so long the changes have been made and you guys still going on and on about it, maybe its time to let it go and maybe get a life in the process. Give it a rest guys, the game is still great after the changes and no matter how much you ramble its not going to be changed back to the original form.The game sucks now, and who knows what might happen in the future. I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time. Too bad......
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Originally posted by kay226 Ok, enough is enough dont you think? How long are you guys going to go on and on about how bad these changes were? Seems to me you are actually trying to wage a war against Sony and the Star Wars Galaxies game, relentlessly bad mouthing the game anywhere you can and whenever you can. I understand your frustration caused by the dramatic changes, i would have been frustrated and angry too but hey its been so long the changes have been made and you guys still going on and on about it, maybe its time to let it go and maybe get a life in the process. Give it a rest guys, the game is still great after the changes and no matter how much you ramble its not going to be changed back to the original form. I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time.
I get what you're saying but:
1) Don't read the posts if you know its not something you want to read.
2) People such as myself and especially Jedi, and although I loathe the class I understand their pain, have lost so much time, effort, and money in the SWG debacle. We are angry and this is the only voice we have, and we will use it.
Originally posted by kay226 Ok, enough is enough dont you think?
The only area where I'm pretty sure "enough is enough" is these ridiculous "enough is enough" posts.
How long are you guys going to go on and on about how bad these changes were?
I have an answer for you, are you ready? Exactly as long as we want, that's how long. If you don't like it, go make toast. Sony put in these horrible changes in a horrible way. They did so partly in the cynical calculation that eventually people would get tired of bi***ing about it, and then they would win. But they were wrong. Players who care about STAR WARS and about the great original game, and who know about MMORPG's and who spend money and talk in Forums and post reviews, will not stop complaining about this mess EVAH. They won't stop complaining no matter how many fanbois and hall monitors try to convince them it's old news. It's not old news, it's today's news, because if Sony hadn't screwed up, we'd be playing the better game TODAY and giving the competition a run for its money.
And yet we're realistic, we know Sony has imbibed way too much of the Kool-Aid to ever admit their mistakes or truly fix them. Holding them responsible in perpetuity helps make sure that the next great game won't make the same mistakes. It's work, but it's worth it. You can help, or you can step out of the way. The only thing you can't do is stop it.
I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time.
It's horrible isn't it! Let Sony know how you feel.
Hmm, interesting responses, i dunno what to think about you guys, you bitter guys. You seem to forget one little detail: this is a game, nothing more nothing less, and you can go on trolling every forum in the galaxy as long as you want, it wont change this fact. Like i said, i totally agree your frustration is justified, it sux to play a game for a long time then see it all changed to a version you dont wanna play anymore...but in the end...its just a game dammit...play something else...its what i do when a game pi**es me off too bad and to be honest most of them do :P...and yes im one of those ppl that never played swg before the changes (yeah ok start looking down on me now for this crime) and you know what? i enjoyed the game a lot, it offers more than most other mmorgs out there....my point? i dont see whats the point of this endless trolling thats my point, and i feel im free to say what i think...but no im not going to ramble about it months from now like you guys keep trolling for ages....yeah sure you're free to do so but quite frankly its getting pitiful, especially since i think you are right and soe was wrong, but by acting the way you do you come across more like bitter fanatics than anything else....just my opinion and i just felt like posting it here...sorry if i annoyed anyone, it was honestly not my intention.
What's annoying isn't the disagreement, what's annoying is assuming that people who post criticisms of what SOE did are all "bitter" or "don't understand it's a game" etc. Tommyrot. I can't speak for every CU/NGE critic but in general I assure you wer're not particularly "bitter," we know perfectly well it's a game, we do have lives, we do play other games, and so on and so forth. Those are rhetorical digressions from the central point: THEY MADE THE GAME WORSE. People can tap-dance figure eights around it all they want, but they made the game worse. Yes it's just a game: a game they made worse. Yes, it's uncomfortable being forced to look at that one fact, and it's much more fun to talk about every other thing in the world, about how people are supposedly bitter, about how you still see people in the game, about how SOE isn't changing it back, etc, etc, etc. But still: they made the game worse.
So then plan B, which we're seeing a lot more of nowadays for I guess obvious reasons, is to more or less ADMIT that they made they game worse - and then immediately rush to focus on "getting past it" etc. And if someone were putting a gun to my head and forcing me to play SWG every day or else, that would probably be my focus too. But in here, on external sites looking at the state of the game world, in articles that maybe future game designers will read, there's no hurry to "get past" SOE's mistakes. They're the thing worth focusing on. They're the thing worth learning from. So no, "enough is enough" won't cut it. Save that for the Sony forums where it's the gospel of necessity.
Originally posted by kay226I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time.
You know the obvious answer to that is... quit reading them?
When I started playing SWG (pre- CU) I was in love with it, truely addicted. Then the CU came, I was abit disappointed, but the core of the game still was relatively intact... so i was still enjoying it, slowely working toward jedi. then I finnish all my village quests (finally), buy Trials of Obi-Wan, then boom! suprise! 2 weeks later they hit us with a coomplete overhaul! my 6 months of jedi quests out the window and everything else i worked and PAID for! Believe me, I did try the NGE version, and as the rest of you, i was thouroughly disappointed. This editorial is dead on, I couldn't have said it better myself. Because of the way I feel screwed by Sony I dont buy any products from them anymore. I was excited about Vanguard till i found out Sony is taking it over. Now I won't even bother since now I know they care nothing of thier customers. Not gonna buy a game when I know everything I do in it will eventually just be erased and replaced. In my opinion.... screw sony. PS3 comming out? pfft. I used to buy every consol that came out.. not this time, i'll stick to the XBOX 360 and my PC, without any help from Sony products.
Sad but Soooo true!!! I hope some other company macks a new starwars mmo game they just dont lession to the commuity/Vets im a 3year player and i bet there alot more vets out there. I just wish SOE will just lession to us for once
Comments
Playing daoc and loving it totally..
have Played
Eq,Eq2,WoW,Coh,Cov,
and other..
which i have forgotten..
Actually your in the minority because you don't make any arguments. I was honestly hoping I wouldn't have to deal with your constant insults against everyone such as you do in the SWG forums. But to answer your charges:
I made no claim at being objective. This is an opinion editorial, not a straight journalism peice. In that opinion editorial, I advanced a theory, and sustained that with argumentation. Argumentation you ignored.
As far as the NGE being the sole problem, if you actually READ the editorial, I said they screwed up with the CU for the same reason, trying to make fundamental game design changes to appeal to a broader audience. I spent time on each.
All I ask is that you actually read the editorial before commenting on it, which it is evident you did not.
My comment was more aimed at all of the posters in the thread who are screaming "Great analysis" and stuff like that.
The editorial is not, IMO, a great analysis of what went wrong. It is a simple statement of what went wrong with SWG. SOE made a gamble and lost. That is all there is to it.
Now an in-depth analysis of why they decided to change the classes would be interesting. But this editorial, not really.
The reason they made the changes was because they reasoned the "silent majority" wanted things "simple" and "iconic." That's all part of the gamble. Hence that was covered. Or do I have to explicitly go after everything?
Never satisfied hehe.
I completely understand why Sony gambled. If it had worked and their subscriptions numbers had skyrocketed and they were beating WoW, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
I most likely would be. I'm a theorist, who focuses on the proccess as much as the result. But that's just me.
Very good read!
Funny thing, if SOE were to release Classic SWG servers they would go a long way in cleaning up their image and could make a lot of cash while at it.
Kinda makes you scratch your head.
I miss the good ol' days when nerds were actually intelligent.
I long for the game that it once could have been. I started as a beta tester, and felt the potential that SWG had. Raph and his crew even in the beginning had the foot of near-sighted execs planted firmly on their backs ... but the potential was there.
I recall starting down the Jedi path, the endless hours of solo grinding in the wilds of Endor, of knowing that a death would undo days and days worth of work. All with the hope that Sony would eventually fix the game into one really worth playing. "delayed gratification" was like a mantra to me.
The saddest part for me is two-fold. I hung onto the pipe-dream way too long. I should have thrown in the towel long before I actually did. But what really amazes me that I actually miss the pre-cu days. And if the game was still in a pre-cu state, I would still be paying for a subscription and holding out in the vain hope that it might one day be fixed.
The bottom line, SOE had to work at alienating a die-hard fan like me to the point where I would give up on the hope. Unfortunatly, they did.
Thodius
The Battlegrounds were a great example. They were sort of broken in beta, got a little more broken after release, eventually stopped working all together, and then just sat there sad and abandoned for the next two years while people built cities around them and asked each other what the poles were for. Meanwhile the competing games were going nuts with PvP and racking up sales records. But SWG focused on a clumsy "Galactic Civil War" story arc and let the few existing player-driven PvP features get buggier and buggier and rot away.
It blows your mind to think of what SWG might have been if there had been a management consensus to fix, improve and just plain USE the features built into the game. Instead, they practically disowned their own game within a year of release. It's sad. And our buddy Koster is not blameless, not matter how philosophical he's acting about the whole thing now. He should have followed through or quit 18 months ago. He would have had some leverage then.
Hear hear!
Pre-CU was unique in it self instead of a copy of some other MMO.
I was a long time addict and I left shortly into CU, came back right at NGE to try it out and canceled for good.
Wumi Space - Bloodfin
P.S. I miss my old friends and foes..... even the hour long hunt for Krayts (which made the thrill of a kill so much more worth it)
Wumi - SWG - Bloodfin - Cancelled
Wumi - WoW - Eu-Kazzak - Cancelled
Bulldozer - Aion - Eu-Kahrun - Cancelled
Wumi - Rift - EU-Riptalon - Cancelled
I just want to thank you for doing this editorial. This is all pretty similar to what most of us SWG refugees have been saying for months. It is definitely nice to see it all pulled together though.
Thanks,
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Excellent summary of what the nge was really about, its unfortunete sony hasn't yet learned their lesson, they keep chnging eq2 in the direction of wow to try to get a larger customer base... and they fail over and over and over.... and keep losing people it seems like (least our guild roster keeps getting smaller and most of our allied guilds too.) Its logical, but obviously not something htey really believe.
Shadus
Well said! RIP SWG
I understand your frustration caused by the dramatic changes, i would have been frustrated and angry too but hey its been so long the changes have been made and you guys still going on and on about it, maybe its time to let it go and maybe get a life in the process. Give it a rest guys, the game is still great after the changes and no matter how much you ramble its not going to be changed back to the original form.
I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time.
As I see it, it's not the changes as such, even if they were a turn for the worse in my eyes.
It's the way it was done.
Neither the CU nor the NGE would have been as badly recieved, if SOE had chosen to listen to their player base, instead of loudly declaring: We know what is Star Warsy! We know what it is that is best for our players! and then conveniently forget they have a test center, and that their players were actually very vocal on a lot of the changes they forced through.
It's a question of making the players happy. And the CU and the NGE did not make the majority of their players happy.
Funny thing is, they didn't seem to get the message from the CU, seeing as they pulled a very similar stunt on the NGE, completely blindsiding their player base...
People bought a game three years ago, expecting it to be the one they would still be playing today - expansions and patches included, of course, seeing as it is SOE... The NGE is not SWG. It's a completely new game. There's nothing left of SWG in NGE, except the scenario and the character creation/ cutomization.
And the fact these changes came about, in spite of the very loud protests of the majority of the players, is what made people angry enough to leave. Why should they pay for a game, where the developers take their money, and then go and do whatever they feel like?
"So I contend that the player stories will always be more powerful than the scripted stories that we try to tell the players."
- Will Wright
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
1) Don't read the posts if you know its not something you want to read.
2) People such as myself and especially Jedi, and although I loathe the class I understand their pain, have lost so much time, effort, and money in the SWG debacle. We are angry and this is the only voice we have, and we will use it.
SWG RIP
moctodumegws
Can't WAIT!
And yet we're realistic, we know Sony has imbibed way too much of the Kool-Aid to ever admit their mistakes or truly fix them. Holding them responsible in perpetuity helps make sure that the next great game won't make the same mistakes. It's work, but it's worth it. You can help, or you can step out of the way. The only thing you can't do is stop it. It's horrible isn't it! Let Sony know how you feel.
What's annoying isn't the disagreement, what's annoying is assuming that people who post criticisms of what SOE did are all "bitter" or "don't understand it's a game" etc. Tommyrot. I can't speak for every CU/NGE critic but in general I assure you wer're not particularly "bitter," we know perfectly well it's a game, we do have lives, we do play other games, and so on and so forth. Those are rhetorical digressions from the central point: THEY MADE THE GAME WORSE. People can tap-dance figure eights around it all they want, but they made the game worse. Yes it's just a game: a game they made worse. Yes, it's uncomfortable being forced to look at that one fact, and it's much more fun to talk about every other thing in the world, about how people are supposedly bitter, about how you still see people in the game, about how SOE isn't changing it back, etc, etc, etc. But still: they made the game worse.
So then plan B, which we're seeing a lot more of nowadays for I guess obvious reasons, is to more or less ADMIT that they made they game worse - and then immediately rush to focus on "getting past it" etc. And if someone were putting a gun to my head and forcing me to play SWG every day or else, that would probably be my focus too. But in here, on external sites looking at the state of the game world, in articles that maybe future game designers will read, there's no hurry to "get past" SOE's mistakes. They're the thing worth focusing on. They're the thing worth learning from. So no, "enough is enough" won't cut it. Save that for the Sony forums where it's the gospel of necessity.
You know the obvious answer to that is... quit reading them?
Shadus