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Star Wars Galaxies - 300,000 Subscribers, No Jedi... Yet
Thanks to IGN PC for their interview with the creators of PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, in which it's announced the title has "surpassed 300K registered accounts", despite what they describe as "some teething problems at the initial launch", and is still "...the fastest growing MMO ever - in the Western world at least." They say they're now trying to "get players away from mission terminals and directed towards more in-depth content", with new quests being designed and implemented in-game, and as for the question of becoming a Jedi, they confirm: "We've yet to see any Jedi in the game, though there are some players that are close to unlocking that Force-sensitive slot", and hint that "ancient historical artifacts known as Jedi holocrons" are part of the path to becoming a SWG Jedi.
...but you are not a Jedi yet...
Someday they'll release it for a platform I'll use... At which point, maybe I'll care.
I must admit, knowing the issues that the game had, I am sort of surprised that they are not, for lack of a better term, whoring out the 'You can be a Jedi!' or 'You can be a Sith!' aspect of the game just to sell copies. It adds some integrity to their vision of the Star Wars universe. Kudos.
In the starwars universe there are millions of worlds with billions of sentients, and yet even at its hight there seem to be approximately 100 jedi. So the density of jedi is not greater than 10^2 / 10^6 * 10^9 = one in ten trillion.
If even one player succeeds in becoming jedi, out of 300,000 players, it will mean there are 100,000,000 times as many Jedi as is realistic. An equivalent proportional error would be to say "the entire human population of the earth has flown into space on the space shuttle". Its not just wrong! Its insane!
Kinda hard to tell on SWG's official community how the real player reactions are given the fact that they closed the official forums off to the public. Before anyone takes this propaganda as a clear indicator they should run out to buy the game it's probably a good idea to take a gander at some fan-run forums for some real opinions on the good and bad of the game.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Yeah, but if the carrot wasn't there, why even bother trying? A universe with no Jedi wouldn't be Star Wars...
... to this problem is that people have to learn how to use the Schwartz. Just like Lone Star did in that movie that came out a few years back. You know, the one with Dark Helmet, etc. Oh, wait a sec....
all 3 of my roomemates play it and I have to say.. I think I would rather have them be crack heads. All lives they once had are now brushed aside for this game, and as for school work lets just say they are on the 8 year bachelors plan at the moment.
I dont know if its just me or do most people (students) who play this game have priority issures.
300,000 players and how many NPCs, creatures you kill, and stuff that "you don't see"?
Obviously MMORPGS rely on monthly fees as a stream of revenue so I wonder what sort of staying power this game will have? What will the user base be like in a year from now, when the novelty has worn off for a lot of players?
I also find it interesting that Blizzard recently axed 400,000 battle.net accounts for cheating
If Battle.net charged a MMORPG-type $10 monthly fees like SWG, then they would be throwing away $4 million a month in revenue (I realize that the user base for Blizzard games would not be nearly as large with monthly fees). But if a widespread exploit took hold of SWG and started ruining the game for others, would they have the guts to close thousands of accounts and throw away potentially millions of dollars a month to combat it?
Oh, now you're saying NPCs don't have the same chance to become Jedi as PCs? NPCs are people too, you insensitive clod!
Well, there's only one Emperor, so there's 100 times fewer emperors than jedi. Are you implying that it would be insane if there was a character (either PC or NPC) referred to as emperor in the game?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Put on the brakes there tiger.
If even one player succeeds in becoming jedi, out of 300,000 players, it will mean there are 100,000,000 times as many Jedi as is realistic.
No amount of Jedi is actually realistic partner. You do know that Star Wars is just some movies for kids and not actual history right? Yes its true. Also, there are no wizards or half-elfs either. With this new information I encourage you to do outside (yes, its alright, don't believe the FUD about the outside) and go fishing. Perhaps you will even catch a bullcarp.
Funny post, but fortunately a player character in any roleplaying game is assumed to be a hero worthy of being a main character in a fantasy/sci-fi novel.
ummm, wow. How did this get modded up...this guy scares me. Anyone who applies real world math to Star Wars in reference to a game based on Star Wars gets my vote for Over-the-Edge dork of the year. Your math, on top of being dorky, is also stupid. Just because some ratio exists from what ever orifice you pulled it out of, doesn't mean that one Jedi could not be in the first 300k. It's like assuming that once you hit a population of 10 trillion, then bam, that's when a Jedi appears...stupid. On top of that, you could even make bs arguments and say that certain worlds aren't implemented and those worlds have trillions of people with no Jedis and the game only implements places where Jeids appear. I don't know why I am arguing a point with you though....the true response to your post would be (and I am paraphrasing Triumph and his thoughts on Star Wars freaks): no one cares. It's a game based of a movie. They are not real...that's the nice thing about fantasy. People like you ruin games and make them in to something boring....if we had games the way you describe, there would be 1 Jedi, maybe 50 people who could fight well, and everyone else would go to a job 40 hours a week and have to run away from all conflict or die horribly.
In general, games with a "ton" of content do not see a lot of player generated content because the players are busy with the content already in the game. So does SWG have a ton of content or not?
Quote: "There is a ton of content in the game."
Quote: "We're seeing awesome player run events every day. They include large scale Player Versus Player Battles, player weddings, fishing tournaments, beauty pageants, Big Game Hunts, Raves, Newbie Orientations, Medic parties (where medics heal everyone for free), scavenger hunts, 10K runs, and much more."
Many SWG players have two or more accounts in the game, now - I, for, example have a combat character and a crafting character. Of course, I paid for the game twice, but that is my perogative.
That, and many many people have left the game for other things - they still have the year's worth of dues paid, but their accounts are inactive.
So, I would estimate that the actual subscriber count is closer to 250,000, and the Active subscriber count is more like 100,000.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
> Lots of people go to school for 7 years!
> Yeah, they're called *doctors*.
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
It's a game based on a fictional world. Two layers of unreality and distortion.
Don't get so worked up.
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Well when they realized no one would want to be Jediclorian Sith Toad (and other boring creatures), the probabilities go way up. BTW - The jediclorian sith toad does nothing but live in the swamps of the degoth systems, fishing for minats.
-Sean
Bravo. Awesome post. And what is even funnier is all the posts from the people who took you seriously and got offended. Made me laugh my head off.
Does anyone else agree that this game should have been based in the time period and gameplay that Kotor has? instead of this old trilogy wannabe? there are no ships and no jedis, is this really star wars ? I bet they are working on some kind of jedi system (and some vehicles I hope) this game has no chance of surviving long without them.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Becoming a Jedi in SWG is much like a Paladin obtaining the Soulfire in EQ in the first 6 months. IOW you can't because they haven't fully implemented the quest yet and damned if they'll admit to it and just keep spouting "some are close blah blah blah".
If even one player succeeds in becoming jedi, out of 300,000 players, it will mean there are 100,000,000 times as many Jedi as is realistic. An equivalent proportional error would be to say "the entire human population of the earth has flown into space on the space shuttle". Its not just wrong! Its insane!
And yet, in the movies, a similarly disproportionately high number of the characters were Jedi -- so what's the problem?
NO CARRIER
World of Warcraft
Final Fantasy XI
Horizons
Everquest 2
Therefore, they could expect to see a their user base peak by early 2004. Its my belief that a lot of people who switched to Star Wars Galaxies were from other online games, and considering that SWG could not be considered a breakthrough game, its safe to assume that the those people will move on to other games.
:-)
Now, since I am done with my feeble attempt at Karma Whoring, I am going back to find those damn jedi holocrons....
I mean, with people badly wanting to become a Jedi, and no one a Jedi yet, it's amazing that nobody on the development team posted anonymously on a forum how to become a Jedi. If only one person did such a thing, I think it would truly ruin the game.
..yes indeed you must go around collecting cubes to gain that inner strength needed to be a jedi..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Dude, half-elves are scientifically documented FACT. And you're the TROLL! Ha ha, Santa's going to give you nothing but COAL this year!
You assumptions are that the universe is populated only with player characters and that all 300,000 are playing on 1 server. Both wrong. The players represent only that small portion of the population who are adventurers. Most of the rest of the population you don't see because they are irrelevent to game play (Oh how I would cuss if I had to wait on my poor computer to render all those extra people in town).
I never liked "The Force", for me, the Star Wars universe was all about spaceships, lasers, robots and aliens.
I wanna crush some Rebel Scum under the booted heel of a badass Storm Trooper who actually gets shit done. Imagine being able to make a Trooper character who can hit the broad side of a barn.
Do they give the players a chance to be a part of the Rebel Alliance or the Imperials? Working my way up the Imperial ranks would be way cooler than the light/dark force garbage.
Also, I wanna kill Yoda in a game. He's been annoying for the past 20 years.
Rather than get ourselves into a big Mathematical conundrum, let's go with the easiest option.:
Jedi haven't been implemented in the game yet.
You know, somewhere out there, there is a guy who has done nothing at all since the game came out but play galaxies. And his goal the whole time was to be a Jedi. I'd be willing to bet money that the programmers got through with the glowing sword, tried to figure out whatever other powers the jedi should have, found them dificult/unbalancing/what have you, and left them out, to be coded another day.
There aren't any jedi yet, because you Can't be a jedi yet.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Yeah, and we only see like ten bounty hunters, a hundred stormtroopers, and five smugglers in the movies. Oh no! OUR UNIVERSE IS COMING TO AN END!
I guess collecting cubes are better than contracting some blood disease like the Mitochlorians or whatever that crap was in EP 1. They'd have players running around the game just trying to get STD's so they can become a Jedi.
Heh, I think I just created the MMO version of Leisure Suit Larry.
I think these people would disagree with you....or just alter your thoughts to fit their purposes with a wave of their hand.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
#define DORK 1
Of course, when dealing with division into and summation of infinitely many pieces of virtually zero size, one must resort to calculus. Then, one realizes that the conclusions stated are faulty.
I liked the idea of getting people away from the mission terms. Too Many mmorpg's have fallen out of the social aspect of the game and just mutated into power gaming.*side note* was there really a small man inside R2-D2?
I agree. I think they should only have the "force sensitive" character slot open for only a certain period of time. Once enough people reach jedi,..cut it off. Then being a jedi will be somthing more than just a sign that you've been playing the game a long time.
It's lies! All lies! All of it!
Adventure? HA! Excitement? Heh! A jedi craves not these things.
You need a girlfriend, bad.
Just to add to the iteration of geekiness, the reason that logic is faulty (at least one of the reasons) is that if you take an infintie number of planets, and some of them are inhabited, say, 1 out of ten, then you are multiplying an infinite number by a fraction, which also results in infinity. I would say that it's a smaller infinity, although mathematicians would probably disagree with me. (I seem to remember that one infinity being ten times as large as another infinity doesn't make it "larger," or something similar, although there are larger and smaller infinities)
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Not really, what struck me about the movies was how few jedi there were, not how many. As pointed out by the grandparent poster, there are thousands of planets with millions or billions of people on each of them, yet the galactic headquarters of the jedi has a hundred or less jedi in it.
However it is not suprising that a lot of the main characters are jedi given their nature. Normally a jedi is trained by one or more other jedi, and if one person has jedi powers the odds of a family member of theirs having jedi powers are a _lot_ higher. Therefore if you know one jedi (or are following around one jedi in the plot) you are quite likely to run into a lot more in a "six degrees of seperation" kind of way.
But as other people have said, this is all made up anyways. It doesn't matter if the game follows the movie exactly, unless they claim that their numbers are "realistic" in which case people are free to nitpick.
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Why don't I see anything about midichlorians?
shut up nerd.
The character, "MastahOfDaP00n", has been logged in an average of 21 hours a day, according to server log figures provided to us by Verant.
The player behind the character, Timmy Gravis, was interviewed by GameSpy earlier today, shortly after accomplishing his feat. However, GameSpy was unable to use the interview in an article, as - according to them - it consisted of nothing more than incoherent babbling and the occasional semi-understandable phrase such as "pwned j00 all! I a/\/\ j00r fathah!!!!111 Wh00da MaN? Say it, 'y0da man!!' Say it p30nz!"
Verant representatives could not be reached for further comment.
(karma whoring from the future)
NO JEDI!?!?!? That's IT! IT's KoToR and JK: Jedi Academy for me! No Jedi in a Star Wars game isn't Star Wars...................unless your either a X-Wing or a TIE Fighter pilot!
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
On the contrary...those players who started earliest are most likely to be the first to unlock their FS character slots. Once you cut off the availability of FS slots...any new players have zero chance of becoming jedi. How is this anything other than a sign that you've been playing the game a long time if you're a jedi?
I'm quite happy with what they have proposed to handle jedi characters. Anyone can have the slot open to create one, once they meet the (as yet unknown) conditions. However, they suffer perma-death (after a few deaths, to allow for network issues). And you don't start off as a full fledged jedi, you gotta work hard to get it. While the potential for 1000s of jedis will no doubt be there before too long...how many of these are going to progress to a level where there skills are actually any good?
It's not real?! In the words of a comic I heard on the radio...
"If you saw a vagina, a donut, and a mop in a line up, could you pick out the vagina?"
It's all FAKE. There never were any Jedi. It's all a movie. And now it's all a game. Deal.
The reason for the presence of mitochlorians is an obvious reference to the (believed) origins of mitochondria, chloroplasts etc (i.e. they used to be independant symbiotic internal bacteria, but now your cells and them require each other to function properly). There is nothing wrong with the basic idea of them being there, just what they do (e.g. Newton's 3rd law: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.").
Maybe I'm being too pie-in-the-sky, but it would be cool if as part of the quest to become a jedi, but nearing the end of the quest, there would be some GM involvement that would basically make completing it an individual thing. Either by coding NPCs to react a certain way based on the character's individual ID in the database, or actual GM intervention.
I'm on a chair.
Hey, don't make my collectible 12" tall IG-88 doll, worth $550 on eBay, come over there and kick your *ss!
GAAAAAAYYYYYY!!
True true. That does make sense. Maybe my proposidtion for cutting off the fs slot after a period of time was a little extreme, but, I just worry about once fs slot is unlocked, strategies for "getting to jedi the fastest" will be posted in forums and websites. What you said though makes sense. New people join the game every day. Where would the motivation be if jedi was impossible?
I started the game on the opening day, with a 3 month pre-paid subscription. The game looked cool and seemed to rock for about a week. Then the class called Creature Handlers started to take over the game. I exited the space shuttle in a town and met a guy with the two-story tall monster/pet. Its health and damage were worth 5 of my character and he had control over it. That was when it first came clear that this game might have some problems. The ideas that nearly every one in a Star Wars game would be running around using pets to kill things made me laugh. Well I went to the dark side and became a CH, and then was laughing even harder. You store your pets in a little palm computer you carry, and call them out when you need them All this time I thought I was playing Star Wars and actually I was play 'Pokemon is Space'. Well things got so bad on the Official Board that when I posted a message about a Pokemon Tournament, the auto filter on the board edited out the word Pokemon. I guess the dev just didn't like the fact that they made Pokemon in Space instead of Star Wars. I would be upset at them if I wasn't laughing at them. SWG is a great comical adventure in all the things not to do in game design. Lastly I noticed that only real reward for missions was cash, because if they rewarded armor or weapons, then the player with crafting character would scream they are worthless. So they have a game played with pets and are unable to give out any real rewards, not a ground breaking game design.
Every account thats ever been active.
Their servers are mostly empty compared to release. Everyone flocks around only a few major cities. You can go to most of the cities and see no one in them.
They've had no need to bring online any new servers lately.
They are using spintronics to come up with that 300K subscribers number. Probably about 1/2 of those don't have an active account. They are still living off of their pre-sales numbers which were hige because most people didn't know (or believe) that the game sucked so bad.
I don't believe EQ used the same spintronics to come up with their numbers. But I could be wrong here.
Come on now. Redundant? It's the first (and possibly only; I haven't read every post) mention in the comments for this story. Given how many people post "I welcome our new [whatever] overlords" and "I'd like to see a Beowulf cluster of those!" comments that aren't marked Redundant, I fail to see how this qualifies. Ah well, to each his own.
Now there's a compromise!
If Star Wars Kid can't get a character/cameo in episode 3, then maybe Lucas can get him a Jedi on SWG!
The whole Jedi thing is probably one of the few things SOE got anywhere close to right with this game. At least a jedi character could solo, most likely, and overcome the problems with the chaotic grouping and experience systems. But then why even try when you can just be an entertainer and get exp by being afk with your character in a tavern playing some choppy, glitched 6 second midi loop over and over?