Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars Galaxies Users Restless Over Rebalancing
Zonk writes "Last Thursday 'Thunderheart', the Community Manager on PC MMO Star Wars Galaxies' forums, dropped a bomb: the long awaited patch rebalancing combat within the game has been pushed off until after the Jump to Lightspeed expansion [which just announced 13 of its 15 spaceships] launches. Given that the JtL expansion is not due until this fall, this puts the combat rebalance somewhere around the beginning of next year. The playerbase has... not taken this well. The original thread on the official forums was locked at 64 pages - it was then picked up again in a thread already surpassing 50 pages. The players are rightly outraged, and the reaction has prompted a response from the Sony Online chain of command. It will be interesting to see how this turns out." Update: 07/21 15:52 GMT by S : There's an interview with producer Haden Blackman over at Game Informer which discusses the issue in more detail.
I grabbed the Fileplanet 14 day free trial and it was enough to convince me to purchase the game (only $29.99 these days). I'm about halfway through my 30 day free trial and the game is running a bit thin content-wise, although I have 'powered' my way through a lot of it. I would like to give the GCW/PvP a try, but as it currently stands, it pretty much consists of jedi/guild gank squads. Funny, I thought Lucas et al. were anal about continuity in the Star Wars universe... guess not! You've got fully declared (overt) Rebel Jedi walking the streets of Imperial controlled towns such as Theed and Bestine, showing off their sabers and force powers, with no opposition at all. This game is supposed to take place between Ep 4 and 5, btw.
I started my character June 29, and as of right now I've mastered a combat profession (TKA) and have around 2 million credits in the bank. Due to the combat inbalance, you can pull in around 500k-1mil credits every three hours doing "solo group" missions (that is to say, a bunch of people max out a group in order to gain access to ~35k reward destroy missions and go solo the missions for the full payout). I don't know anyone (aside from guilds) that currently group for the actual purpose of cooperative gameplay.
I played the beta, and for the buggy POS that it was, at LEAST there was some sense of community. People would form hunting parties and such on the high level planets. Now it's all about getting buffed by a master doctor for 3 hours and soloing (whether for credits or xp). The whole routine is wearing a bit thin, and I'm not sure I'll renew until JTL and/or they fix the combat balance problem.
Combat Medics are a huge problem, but it goes a lot deeper than that. Combat Medics are a problem because, while every other combat class has 75% chopped off their damage in PvP, CMs do not. They also inflict this unmitigated damage to an unhealable pool using area attacks. They can essentially end a battle before it starts.
The combat balance is essentially a gigantic nerf to all combat. In SWG, combat has become (aside from the CMs) all about spamming special attacks and who gets knocked down first. SOE's plan is to limit the number of special attacks that can be used, lower damage output, and slash resistances on armour.
*nods*
:-/
I'm massively unsurprised, as I've seen them do exactly the same thing before.
Planetside was due to have your fee paying for free content, fixes, and upgrades, but instead 95% of the effort appeared to be dumped into the (mediocre) Core Combat expansion, a for-fee upgrade.
No, not bitter, not bitter atall...
...who still play SWG. I quit in disgust about 6 months into it, when I noted that the game had, by and large, not really changed at all since it started. The clincher for me at the time was the latest "monthly" patch, which had been pushed back for the third straight month in a row. It became pretty clear at that point that SOE had no intention of ever making SWG any better.
Combat was seriously hosed since day 1 of that game -- that's the other part of why I quit. It's quite vindicating to see that not only is the game in the EXACT SAME STATE as it was when I quit half a year ago, but that SOE is still moving at the same glacial pace, promising the world and delivering it... tomorrow.
-E-