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Star Wars Galaxies Users Restless Over Rebalancing

Posted by simoniker on from the indigestion-for-jabba dept.

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.

1 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. SWG, SOE, RPG combat and JtL by LondonLawyer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My take on SWG is that SOE have more or less accepted that JtL will be kill or cure and so want to concentrate on that before they do anything else.

    Seems like they failed to pull off the MMORPG cleanly and had to push it out the door to get some sort of return on their costs. Having spent a year trying to get that playable, it's getting to the stage where the Star Wars brand is no longer a sufficient selling point in the absence of good gameplay.

    By delaying their combat rebalance, SOE admittedly piss off subscribers but many of those were pretty pissed off already and have still stuck with SWG. Why? Basically they hope things will improve. If SOE push out the combat rebalance now and it's no good, they will disappoint again. If they wait, those subscribers are likely to hang on long enough to see what the improvements are like. They squeeze a few more months' worth of subs out of people and buy themselves time.

    I expect JtL to be indifferent to good and the combat rebalance to be indifferent to poor. I expect JtL will *far* overshadow the RPG combat rebalance. I don't think combat is a priority for SOE in the RPG and from the pre-launch forums I don't think it ever was. They'd rather have a more peaceful, manageable MMORPG world - essentially backstory to JtL. This way moisture farmers pay their subs to live quietly and those who want excitement will have to look for it in JtL.