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Star Wars Galaxies Forums Turn Player-Only
mwbay writes "A note from the Star Wars Galaxies Forums indicates that starting today, SOE will be hiding the PC MMORPG's forums from the non-paying public. Raph Koster submitted this response [on the now-inaccessible forums]: 'It isn't really that we have anything to hide. We spend a lot of time on the
boards here talking to you, and I don't think we have been shy about confronting
controversial issues... But yeah, publicity is at the heart of it. The heart of the matter is
will a game's Internet forums ever be a source of
positive publicity post-launch? And I'd suggest to you that the answer is
no... Someone who isn't a player has no idea exactly how widespread a given issue is.' It is certainly well within SOE's rights to do what they want with their boards, but isn't this a bit extreme?"
At Simutronics, we chose to open up our formerly subscriber-only forums to the world, even knowing that the subjects that receive much traffic and attention in forums, nowadays, tends to be complaints or acerbicly worded suggestions, in large majority.
If I was on the fence about Galaxies and went to the forums to check things out about it, I would definatly not buy it after reading them. Then again, I'm about to cancel anyway, I don't recommend it. Wait for World of Warcraft.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
they're utter, total complete nazis.
i remember i was in the digital cantina, a place where many come to rest and revive wounds and form hunting parties and such, and a player by the name of "Stud," yeah, Stud, was doing a provocative dance for another male player and blowing kisses (theres actually a command to blow a kiss to a certain player).
after this, he used a bug in the game to simulate willingful participation of sodomy.
there is no collision detection detection in the game for players, so if for example you ran up to a friend and continued to run instead of stopping in front of him, your player would literally run through your friend, the models can intersect without any problems.
well we were in the cantina, and obviously there are seats there, sitting being an option....
you select the seat, bring up the options menu associated with that item, and select "Sit." simple concept...
simple innocent function of the game.
not when you consider the ability to merge with players due to the lack of collision detection. the first guy whom "Stud" was blowing kisses to had been sitting in a chair near Stud. after his dance he took advantage of this 'merge ability' and sat in the same chair as the player he was hitting on. i think you know what im getting it.
there was no mistake about it or the intentions of thoes two players, they were simulating anal sex.
so, naturally, i made a few comments.
so what if i do? they're doing it in a public place (yes there are actual private homes in the game and you can lock other players from entering), its not only common sense but common practice to accept and understand the consequences.
things got rough, lots of pro-gay rights and anti-gay rhetoric were spurted, it got pretty brutal. afterwords, though i went on my way, let it go, and continued my search for beryllium copper so i could pick myself up one of thoes sweet composite armor suites.
next day, my login doesnt work. servers were up, not knowing where else to turn i opened my email with the intent of filing an inquiry, and notice an email from somthing like 'customerrellations@swg.com.'
in it was an enclosed, trite and painfuly succinct message informing me that my account had been suspended for 5 days.
lots of arguments to be made here, but my point is that they're nazis.
which they are.
I read about EQ-style time sinks, lots of walking. Content like lore and quests sounded rather sparse. Aside from humans and wookies, most of the races sounded like "random guy from the cantina" -- not gungans or jawas or things like that which would at least be recognizable as a Star Wars creature. No spaceships, though supposedly they're coming in a future expansion. Lots of going out to hunt random creatures to build up one's character.
It sounded like something that a lot of people were enjoying, but not really very "Star Wars"-ish in terms of the roleplay possibilities, and not something for me. By reading over the boards, I was able to determine before having to buy anything that I would be dissatisfied with this title, based on my own tastes and expectations.
You might look at this and think, "Sony lost a sale because you read the boards, closing them is a good move". But it's not. Sure, if I had bought the game and hated it, they might have made $50 more, but I would have been much more wary of buying anything from them in the future. After being burned, Sony would have a much higher burden of convincing me to buy their product next time around, and in the long run would lose much more money than they made.
As a game reviewer, I always check message boards dealing with a game I'm reviewing, mainly for reports on technical difficulties. So far I've been lucky, and most of the games I've played were very stable. However, sometimes (most recently with Republic: The Revolution), there is a widespread technical problem that's significant enough for me to take notice and mention it in my review. Over the course of my reviewing career I've nocised some interesting patterns:
1. The smaller the company the more positive the board. While this is not always the case, very often games from small publishers receive more praise. In addition, the developers tend to follow these boards more closely and are ready to answer any question or solve problems. Especially the Dramcatcher/Adventure Company and JoWooD boards are great examples of how game forums can have positive spin. In fact, as long as the developers sound helpful, I tend to buy games with known technical problems, because I'm confident that I'll be helped.
2. Scam and deception works, too. Remember Command & Conquer: Renegade? It was not a perfect game. In fact, it was piss-poor, deserving a fraction of sales it ultimatelly achieved. The reason for such high sales was that EA was censoring out all posts that mentioned technical and gameplay problems. Those who recognized this practice were booted off the forums, and those who came to check other players' reactions found only positive posts. SW:G falls into this category. While not as deceptive as EA, SOE is still trying to create the impression that the game is better than it really is. Most likely, the strategy will work.
Personally, I decided I wasn't interested when the developers said that being a Jedi was going to be next to impossible. Now, I understand why they did this. It's tough to have a universe where everyones a Jedi, and there's a risk that that would've happened. But... Jedi are a pretty big thing in the Star Wars universe, and they're what everyone wants to be. No one's going to pay $15 a month to be a baker or a dancer. Add to that the fact that so far there are no spaceships to fly around in (Yes, I know they're supposed to be added in later; but they're asking me to pay them now, not later), and you have very little Star Wars in your Star Wars game, as quite a bit of the movies are Jedi and people flying around in spaceships! As a result, I think the game is a tough sell, and the people running the forums are sensing that, and are getting worried. Hence the desire to eliminate bad PR.
Just got banned for posting in the SWG forums linking this article.
I posted the link, they locked it saying I was repoting. I checked, noone else has posted about article. I included my own view at the bottom.
I post saying there was none. I am locked, they say they want only "one thread" on the topic. Still no threads on the fact that slashdot is running an article on our community.
I repost without my own viewpoint (thinking this was the problem). Just the link, and my reasons for doing this and why I think they misunderstood me.
I am banned. Oh well.
Life goes on...and on....and on...
it's probably to hide the huge number of issues they are having with the game. stuff like serious known dupe bugs that never got addressed since beta, their inability to fix factories until 2 months after the game was released (all crafters suffered unacceptably low rates of production, the reason for paying dearly for a factory in the first place), their "solution" to their weak database was by making small houses hold 20 items when a player can hold 100, and many, many other instances of their lack of thought on game issues and an ugly lack of finess with programming. most seriously of all, the complete lack of customer service.
customer service tickets (same as petitions in EQ)that go unread for weeks at a time. then, they have the gall to wipe clean all existing customer service tickets. and even after that, tickets take weeks to get a computerized response and they STILL get deleted with out any human input on their end. if you think waiting for GM response in EQ was bad, it's heaven compared to what you get in SWG.
and when i try to address the issue on their forums, their devs will idly chat with one poster about whether he addressed one poster correctly as sir or maam, while utterly ignoring the issues just raised in several another posts, on the very same thread. when i asked several hours later, no response, i asked again the next day, and they gave me a warning. all this, was done w/o a single swear word from the customers' side.
the contempt for their customer base is appallingly disgusting. add to the fact that their customer service is non-existant, anyone would know that hiding it would be the best thing they can hope to do.
my name is aiyia on the intrepid server, though i will not be renewing my subscription.
I disagree. Reviews of the game in magazines, tv, or other forms of media are going to give a more objective overall review of the game, as opposed to forum dedicated to a discussion of the game.
The forum could be detrimental to their marketing in that only the most vocal forumites make their views clear, and in many cases, these views tend to be impassioned and sometimes irrational.
Actually, Simu's forums may have been part of the impetus for Sony's opposite decision.
Some members of Sony's Planetside team, including the head programmer, used to work at Simutronics. A subset of that group could only be described as "disgruntled"-- they have bitter personal gripes with the management at Simu, for reasons that seemed totally insignificant to me. Those one or two people have pushed to do everything as differently from Simutronics as possible, since the project started. If Simu had open forums, said persons wanted forums to be either closed or nonexistent.
The producers of Planetside overrode that decision by making a compromise. The agreement reached was to use the forums to generate buzz, up until the game reached a certain "critical mass" of subscribers. At that point they would restrict the forums to players only, in order to minimize negative word-of-mouth. (For instance, it's bad when an upset ex-player mouths off and convinces others to cancel their subscriptions.)
When word of this idea got to the Galaxies team, they decided it would be a good idea for them too. But because they have the Star Wars name, they decided they have better a built-in draw, and therefore don't need as big a community to be self-sustaining.
Apparently Galaxies has hit their "critical mass" of subscribers, and it's time to close those forums. The Planetside forums are still open either because someone changed his mind, or because they just haven't reached the triggering point yet.
Disclaimer: I used to work on the Planetside team for Verant, which is now SOE. That was way back when the game was still being called "Tanarus 2," so I don't have direct personal knowledge of recent developments, but I know all the people involved and I still talk to some of the team members. I'm posting as AC because I'm still covered under my unbelievably strict NDA.
There have also been posts from people trying to get the game working with WineX. SOE have actually posted this is a violation of the AUP (and you can have your account canceled if you try it)
This is because the head Planetside programmer, John Ratcliff, has a very low opinion of non-Windows users. His view is that all Linux users are code thieves and software pirates, because anyone who uses a free operating system is unwilling to pay for any other software either. (As near as I can remember those were his exact words.)
That's it for the important bit of this post.
About the CTF thing: there are technical reasons they want to stop battles from being centered around bases. If you have huge bunches of players all fighting over a fixed location (the base), they all can interact, so they all need to constantly update each other's positions. That can cause a drop in the framerate and the network update interval for some users, making their clients sluggish and putting them at a disadvantage.
Word came down from on high that they needed something to make people fight "on the move," to prevent them from clumping so much. CTF was the only decent idea they had, and it got an extra boost in the developers' minds because it had originally been planned as the primary game mode. (That was back when the working title was "Tanarus 2.")
On source control: they use Visual Source Safe, which never works quite right. The problems are compounded by lack of programmer discipline. The system is configured to allow only one person to edit a file at a time, but some of the developers (coughRATCLIFFcough) are impatient and override that setting, causing them to step on each other's toes and overwrite each other's patches.
Personally, I've tried 3 different MMO games over the last couple of years, and would never try another one without looking over the forums a couple of times (over a week or so) to get an idea of how the response is to complaints, and how severe any complaints may be. Sure, forums tend to be filled with more complainers than anything else, and that should be taken into account. However, if there's no public access to the forums most players will be posting on, then you have to depend on forums available for the game elsewhere, which are much more likely to reflect poorly on the game than the official forums.
-PainKilleR-[CE]