Star Wars Galaxies - Patch Woes?

An anonymous reader writes "Now that Sony has restricted their Star Wars Galaxies forums to players only, it is unlikely that any non-players would know about the major problems happening with this game. The largest patch in several months was planned for release yesterday. A scheduled 4 hour downtime to install the patch turned into a 16+ hour downtime for most players, sparking a huge outrage in the SWG community. Sony's forums quickly became overloaded, and instead of responding to issues, the moderators went to work deleting as many complaint posts as they could. To make matters worse, once the servers did come back online, it seems that the patch has caused more problems than it has solved." Are complaints about SWG down to a vocal (unrepresentative?) minority, or is there a more general level of dissatisfaction with the game?

Comments

Deleted Posts?

[YomikoReadman]

I don't know where this guy got his information from, but I was on the Development tracker forum yesterday, and the only posts that were deleted from the patch error thread started by Q-3PO, Kevin O'Hara, were either flames or trolls. Each and everyone of the posts that were good, constructive criticisms, or a report of something that was a bug in nature without flaming was left up, and still is. As far as this patch being pretty borked, yea it is. However, SOE has been exceptionally open and apologetic about this, and the fans that have access to the site can get all of that from the announcement forum. For those that can't get in the forums, I'd recommend a fansite, such as for any of the info from the user-only forums, as they have posted a great deal of it.

Re:Deleted Posts?

[Crockerboy]

People crying about deleted posts on the SWG boards are usually not the brightest. The SWG boards have a peer moderation system sort of like here on slashdot

All new posts start at 1 star, and the default viewing level is 1 star. If you post a whine or other useless thread, you'll usually get peer moderated down to 0 starts so in affect it appears your "valuable contribution to the community" was deleted by a mod when in reality your fellow players have deemed your post worthless. Of course, you can read at 0 starts if you want to see the "OMG I AM QUITTING AND TAKING MY 300 GUILD MEMBERS WITH ME!!!!" posts.

Oh, I believe it's 1 star, might be two with the default threshold at two star as well..I stopped reading the official boards about 2 days after release because the people there made my brain bleed so I'm going by memory on the little details, but the system is as described..

Conspiracy

[Metal_Demon]

There has been big issues with the SW:G forums since the start. Perfectly valid posts in the GENERAL DISCUSSION area are getting closed left and right if they complain about bugs or the crappy CSRs or anything like that. They are obviously well aware that public knowledge of what is said in the forums would drastically hurt their game sales, thats why the blocked all non subscribers. The "monthly" updates that are supposed to be continuing the story content are happening far from monthly. It's been what 3 months now, and the first continuation of the original story just came out in that patch yesterday. At first, they were doing a great job, patching and what not, but now they are really slacking off. Once I get my hands on FFXI I'm not so sure I won't be dropping my account.

Yeah, that patch has some problems ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an active SWG player/addict, so I felt the pain of yesterday's patch as a user:

• Extended, and unexpected down-time.

  This is short-hand for, "the installation did not go very well". Most servers were up and down all day.

• Once the servers came up, it was hit-or-miss on whether you could connect

  This is short-hand for, "instead of people logging in as they get home (trickling in), they were all waiting impatiently for the server to come on-line. The instant it did, the entire player-base tried to log in." This is a problem - it says that the login servers are underpowered. However, this is not what most complaints on the boards are about.

• Game systems that I relied upon are not working the way I expected them to

  Armor appears to be non-functioning (which affects the Combat characters). Automated harvesters are acting strangely (which affects the non-combat characters). Bio Engineers can't sample without dying. All of these problems should have been detected in testing. Weapon damage appears to be broken.

  SoE blew it, here.

• Non-responsiveness from the developers

  Also known as, "Waaaaaah! Why aren't you talking to me! Waaaaah! Fix now! Waaaaah!"

I am going to address the last point. SHUT UP AND LET THEM DO THEIR JOB! It is patently obvious that things went wrong down SWG, way. The thing to remember is that their developers only have 24 hours in a day. If they spend any time at all talking to us (or posting on their forums), then they are not spending nearly enough time fixing the problems! Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara promised us a post-mortim, and we can hold him to that, but let's wait until *after* they get the things fixed.

Yes, most of us have paid money to play this game.

Yes, most of us wanted to play last night.

Yes, every single character type that I can think of in SWG got hammered by some kind of bug from this patch.

... but SoE has a good track record, when compared to companies like Blizzard.I fully expect daily patches from SoE until the problems are resolved. Has Blizzard even put patch 1.10 for Diablo II out on Battle.net, yet? What is it, now, 14 months?