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Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed Launches
If you already play the Massively Multiplayer Game Star Wars Galaxies, you're undoubtedly already aware that the Jump to Lightspeed space expansion officially launched today. For the rest of us, there are some details on the developer side regarding the ramp up to release available on the official site. Details on the experience of the new expansion is available at Gamespot and PC.IGN. More ... colourful analysis can be found on Grimwell's boards, and N3rfed has a post discussing the fact that the rest of the world has to wait until November 5th for their space-goodies.
Does the game not suck now?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How long between when SWG was originally launched until now?
I wanna know how long its been for SWG to become everything people EXPECTED out of the game before it was released.
Seriously... how long have people played this 'StarWars' game without the main element?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Due to a genius marketing decision by Activision, the European distributors, players in the Old World don't get to see the expansion until November 5th at the earliest. The latest date predicted is November 19th.
It's almost as if they WANT the players to move onto WoW.
I can understand that publishing all over the world on the same day is a little rough. While it would be nice to just download the software and pay the developers the fee, there are stores to keep happy. There has been so much bad press about this game, and the expansion. I don't understand most of it. The game is pretty decent, and lots of people have fun with it.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
OMFG! STAR WARS!
Enough already. Star Wars was good. Lucas made a good movie. Then Lucas killed his own project.
I wish I had the lyrics to the Ewok song though...
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
That'll teach me not to RTFA. Mark down with extreme prejudice, Slashboteers!
And everyone else, read that n3rfed link! Although it fails to mention that the European release date has been set at 29th October for the past few months. It was only 'rescheduled' yesterday.
If they'd known there would be delivery problems, then the very least they could have done was not lie to the customers about it.
If it's about combining the social thing with your gaming, there's gotta be a good MUD out there somewhere. MMORPGS are basically MUDs with chrome and a billing system.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
This is the expansion where you get the quest to prove that Chewbakka is really from Endor.
I have never played the original release of SWG. I'm not a big fan of the online RPGs. But I understand why they are so popular. I have a couple of questions about this though.
1) If the expansion allows you to move around in space, what the hell were people doing before this? Was the original game restricted to one planet?
2) If you bought the first, do you have to buy the upgrade? If you don't have the upgrade can you still play?
Bullshit. The loot system is good enough to support your ship needs except when you need the absolute BEST. At least in beta it was.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
Does it matter with World of Warcraft coming out?
As a hardcore Star Wars fan, I gave this game a year to become fun. I tried many of the different professions, I did their content based stuff. This game is just a boring, grinding treadmill. Just sit there all day killing stuff or using macros to repeat crafting.
The Jedi system was awful and clearly not well thought out. The new ship system is difficult to use without a joystick. This game really feels like EQ in space. The "Star Wars-y" feel isn't there. I was their target audience: a hardcore gamer who also is a Star Wars fan. Yet they failed miserably.
When WoW and EQ2 come out, they'll lose a ton of subscribers. Maybe then they'll finally try to figure out what went wrong, but it will be too late.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Star Wars spaceships supposedly go beyond the speed of light, thereby making this a rather silly marketing-induced name?
I'm not a big enough Star Wars geek to know this...
-- n
I've been playing SWG awhile, sometimes more than I probably should have been. The ground based game is pretty fun, although it can get a little repetitive.
My biggest complaints:
1) There aren't enough dungeons or cool things to do besides run around and kill stuff and hope for loot.
2) The path to becoming a Jedi takes a filthy, sick amount of time. You pretty much don't have a girlfriend, wife, friends, or job if you can sit there for the required amount of time to make it all the way to jedi.
I've played on the JTLS beta, and overall its pretty fun (but not very challenging). Once I figured out that you can target specific enemies by pressing the TAB key (this isn't immediately obvious), then it was a breeze to kill the enemy ships.
I'm probably going to cancel my account soon, the game just doesn't have much to offer me after 3 or 4 months of playing. I made millions upon millions of credits, I've had most of the cool loot, and it just gets boring after awhile. The only thing I haven't done is make it to jedi, and I'm not about to invest 200+ more hours in the game.
I think if you've been wanting to try out SWG, this is a good time to start. It's somewhat fun, but all the cliches about MMORPG's definitely apply. After my 3 month experiment, I just figured out that I play video games BECAUSE I'm antisocial - not because I want to be around people more often.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
... a little more polish on that turd!
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
The engine certainly looks beautiful. Would it be too much to ask them to take it and make another game in the X-Wing series?
Anyone want to bet this was a paid Slashvertisement?
SOE is taking out Huge ads for SWG:JTLS, and my bet is it will win tons of awards thanks to industry payola.
"Fortune, Fame, Mirror Vain, Gone Insane..... But The Memory Remains...
MMO user fees represent the ongoing costs of developing and operating a service, not "being charged to live." It costs a lot more to maintain and operate a MMO than to develop one.
Yes, you can still play. However, patching the servers to handle all the extra JtL content has overloaded them to the point where severe latency problems make the game nigh on unplayable. Delays of up to several minutes for chat and even simple actions such as looting corpses are now the norm.
The Customer Service Response to this server side performance issue has been to suggest that customers disable Pixel Shading.
I wouldn't find popping a fucking cap in the ass of some cocksucking dancing wookie, though. Or maybe I can pimp that bitch out to some fucking Star Wars fanboy. You know they'd fucking pay for that shit.
Man I love being a fucking adult. These vulgar games have no gadamnned effect on me whatsofuckingever.
--- Ban humanity.
It Rules, Ontinarri Roe, Master Artisan, no Imp Killa' in Space!
Eclipse
They haven't announced an official date.. According to my sources, open beta hit a snag when some of their hardware was more damaged by the tornado than they previously thought, but that won't impact release.
As for the *unofficial* date, they've distributed promotional materials to a variety of game purveyors indicating a Nov. 16 launch, BUT, such posters and promo gear have in the past been recalled before display at the last second, so, we'll see.
Suffice to say, the team is scrambling like mad.
I'll wait for the super-special-edition box set of the game to come out! This time my character gets to shoot first!
....sigh.
Hyuk! Hyuk! Hyuk!
As a beta tester, I can tell you right now, I don't know what the reviewers were smoking when they said this game was so cool. I'm sorry, but the fact that you can use a joystick does not impress me. The fact that it *looks* pretty does not impress me. The fact that I can't do anything of even the slightest importance in space *does* effect me. It makes me not want to enter space with my character, and thus I did not.
For those of you who purchased the Planetside "underground" expansion (you can tell what kind of an effect it had on me based upon the fact that I cannot remember its name) you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. JtL introduces a new area that everyone will enjoy for 48 hours, and then they'll go back to the real economy of the game.
Speaking of which, "2500+ buffs! 3.0 hours! 15k!".
I played the beta and was very impressed.
:)
:)
The times I ran into lag it turned out to be client-side.
the netcode is very impressive. I think the whole design of the SWG enterprise was based around scalability. Early in the beta I was flying towards the tatooine space station and I estimated that I was rendering around 100 spacecraft flying about the station (i have a screenshot, need to corraborate that)- the netcode "view distance" was then scaled down, since this undoubtedly caused processor lag (and the netcode was likely maxxed out), nevertheless I was very impressed by that many clients being rendered in realtime.
The graphics engine is great, it's huge. it's expansive. eventually they will make an FPS with it (planetside seems to use a scaled-down version of this engine). I bought this game for the graphics engine - sometimes I just turn off the lights - turn off the games HUD and zoom in to first-person view, just to suspend my disbelief and pretend that I am actually standing in coronet on corellia.
The sounds are wonderful as well
I'm not a big RPGer, but I've had lots of fun playing this game. Now, I AM a big simmer - so JTL is just wonderful
All in all I think this game is great. Of course, that's an opinion and as we all know, it's pointless to argue tastes.
"Ben?"
"You must go the the Dagobah System. There you will meet Master Yoda. But first you must buy the new Jump to Lightspeed Expansion Pack. Preorder it now and save! Be the first in line..."
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
It's good to see SOE sticks to their guns and follows the tried-and-true policy of "release now/fix later"...and in the case of SWG fix MUCH later.
And of course, this policy is in full effect as they are about to release EQ2 almost a full year before they really should. Yes folks, this game needs at least 6-12 more months of development before they unleash it...but why do that when you have plenty of people willing to pay a monthly fee to beta-test it for you!
Good luck to you all that try them...I wish you well.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Taxes?
Alright, to my understanding, the space aspect of SWG is like any other MMPORG but worse - to get better guns/ships/etc you have to gain experience. Ok, there's nothing wrong with that - if there were 1500 models of the Tie Fighter. Now correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the idea of being in a ship was that it took SKILL TO KILL THINGS and not time.
This is the downfall of any MMPORG that attempts a standard system for space flight. I want some schmuck that logs on with godly pilot skills to start killing people with their pretty super ships they spent weeks getting, but of course that'll never happen because then the long-term degenerates that spent 90% of their life getting ShieldXII SuperMart Booster Plus will whine.
The gaming community needs a massively online space spim where everyone has the same grades (but different styles) of ships and it actually takes piloting skills to be decent. I want descent or X-wing vs Tie Fighter with 500+ people - the day that happens is the day I become a truly happy gamer.
Instead of expending time, effort and energy on this game, why not work overtime, scrimp and save, and make smart investments, and with the proceeds hop onboard a real spaceflight - it looks likely they'll be available for $250,000 or so by 2010 or sooner.
Don't laugh - it's amazing what people "expend" on unproductive leisure activities, cigarettes, alchohol, and huge CD/DVD collections.
I played some of it while they were demoing over E3--alot of potential there.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
Board of Directors: How long before you can make the "Jump To Lightspeed"?
Developers: It'll take a few months to get the code from the navi-computer.
Marketing: Are you kidding? At the rate World of Warcraft is gaining??
Developers: Traveling through hyperspace ain't like coding dancers, boy! Without precise error-handling we could fly right through a release date or bounce too close to a complete rewrite and that'd end your little trip real quick, woudn't it?
Marketing: What's that flashing?
Developers: We're losing another thousand subscribers! Go strap yourselves in I'm going to have to delay the "Jump to Lightspeed"!
I think if you've been wanting to try out SWG, this is a good time to start. It's somewhat fun, but all the cliches about MMORPG's definitely apply.
..." Oh, really? As in "Dune"? Or in "The Matrix"? Or in "Lord of the Rings"? Or "A New Hope" (the original 1977 "Star Wars" movie)? Or ... make your own list.
How do you want to make a good Star Wars game without cliches??
Basically, I agree with you. But keep in mind that Star Wars games are a direct effect of Star Wars movies. For example, few days ago I saw The Phantom Menace with friends. This was actually the first time I watched Star Wars since I was a kid. And let me tell you, this was a one giant cliche! I mean, underwater cities? A city that covers a whole planet? Where've we seen those before?
Well, they may be cliches, but Lucas stole them fair and square, and served them back with loads of panache, so he's forgiven. On the other hand, there are other cliches that make you moan aloud. For example: "Hey, you guys, don't you mess with me because my mom is the Virgin Mary! (At least that's what she told her folks when she came home pregnant one day.) I guess you know what that makes ME, so everybody drop down and give me 20!" Oh lord... "I think maybe he is the CHOSEN ONE
It will stretch for light years. "He is too old to train to be a Jedi". - Uh, Yoda? You say 6 is too old, but Luke Skywalker will be a doable fixer-upper at 20? When do you recruit novices - ripping them from the breast, like the Psi Corps in "Babylon 5"? Does the Jedi Way require complete denial of normal childhood? An odd message for a kid flick! "Oh no! There's an unstoppable robot army! Of course all we have to do is pull a master switch and they'll all shut off!" This recalls blowing up the shield projector in "Return of the Jedi" (which is achieved entirely thanks to the wookie - neither Luke nor Leia makes any real difference in achieving the Rebel victory. Think about it!).
Or a computer virus shutting down all alien shields in "Independence Day". Or Obi-Wan dialing down the tractor beam. Or the hero in "Logan's Run" shooting one computer console and blowing up a city. And so on. Yeesh! Are villain equipment-designers really that bad in every off-Earth empire? In fairness, this cliche is endemic. Ever notice how, in "Star Trek", Kirk talked five different super-computers into self-destructing? If the universe really is like this, we Earthlings are gonna kick butt when we get out there! A good machine is one that has to be hammered into turning on for you (e.g. Anakin's speed-pod, his space fighter, the Millennium Falcon, C-3PO and so on). If it starts right up, it must be evil. Some might view the pod race as a rip-off copy of the speeder bike scene in "Return of the Jedi".
Actually, I found the charioteer imagery charming. Hey, a swooping chase scene past scary obstacles is always a good thing to throw into a whiz-bang sci-fi flick! Nevertheless, having a 6-year-old slave toss together a better pod than all the galaxy's technicians can create? (Those Tatooine slave schools must have a great curriculum!) Couldn't he have had help from an old but great engineer who retired to Tatooine for his health?
That cliche would have lent plausibility. Big animals try to eat whole spaceships, yum. Where've we seen that before? An apprentice Jedi - watching helplessly as his beloved master is slain in a sword fight by a Sith Lord - screams, "No!" Where've we seen that before? (Incidentally, the angry apprentice succeeds where his calm master failed - just as Luke Skywalker does better angry than when he was composed, in "Return of the Jedi". So much for Yoda's sage advice!) But enough wallowing in small stuff. Let's get down to the Grand Champion cliche of all: "Gee whillikers, R2, the folks out there sure are in a pickle. What's that, girl? Solve the whole plot by diving my tiny ship into the center of a big bad-ass one, and set off a chain reaction to blow it up from the inside while we run awa
Oh come on, it can't be that hard? The fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy was won in a simple game of Sabacc.
" Ship building will be a joke for anyone without millions of credits and or resources. The same goes for buying a ship."
That's what credit dupes are for! You didn't really think those were exploits did you?
At first, I hated it. I thought it was difficult to control and an utter bore. Then I poked around, and saw that many other people really enjoyed. So I thought I'd give it another chance.
Two key things you need to know if you're not enjoying JTL yet:
1. You can't just attack and win, or go straight after your opponent and win. You actually need to practice, think, and use some tactics. It's much harder to play than you might expect at first. You need to stay behind your opponents so they can't shoot back at you, and you need to match your speed to theirs. If a ship is in front of you shooting at you, you need to high tail it behind them immediately. This "actually needing to play" and having what buttons you push actually make a difference is a bit of a shock to most SWG players at first.
2. The design of the ship modules and ship crafting is incredible. It gets a lot more exciting when you get your first ship upgrade, which took me a couple of nights of play.
The first non-free ship you can use has something like 13 different components on it (guns, missles, armor front, armor rear, shields, engine, booster, etc.). But there's a mass limit on the ship that's fairly restrictive. So that leaves it up to the player to decide how he's going to outfit his ship. These choices are non-trivial, and very interesting.
For example, Initially I just threw whatever components into my ship that I could scare up. I was doing OK in battle, but began to suspect I could do better with a different configuration on my ship.
The way the ship crafting system works, you can use all kinds of different strategies in equiping your ship. For example, I really wanted some bigger guns on my ship, but the big guns put it way over the weight limit. I decided to build some shields for my ship that had strong defense in the back, weak defense in the front, and lower mass. I completely took the armor out of the ship, reasoning that hopefully my shields would hold long enough for me to quickly kill the enemy. I essentially gutted my ship to make room for a big fat fun. The strategy worked! I had a great time tinkering with my ship for hours on end, trying all kinds of different things.
The crafting system for the ships lends itself to all kinds of different cooperative strategies, too. For example, you can use blaster that eat through shields but are weaker against armor, or vice versa. You and your friends might get together with a couple of shield-eater ships to soften up the opponents, and group with one ship that specializes in destroying the armor after the shields are gone. And then have another guy with you who acts like a rodeo clown: he uses all the mass on his ship for shields and armor, and carries a light, slow engine and no guns. This guy would talk a lot of smack to draw enemy fire, and even though he wouldn't have much offensive cpability he'd be very difficult to kill.
The crafting system in SWG always had a lot of promise, but it's finally showing its original promise in JTL. Not only are there lots of ship components, but every one of them can be experimented in several meaningful ways. Most items in the game have only a couple of useful ways to experiment on them. In JTL, components have 5 or more ways to experiments, each of which will be useful for various situations.
This kind of complexity where equipment can be tailored to special strategies is going to make JTL a lot of fun. Perhaps this level of thinking isn't for everyone, but many people are going to have a great time with this-- even people that aren't just Star Wars nuts.
I have a friend who was in the beta. The things that turned me off are:
- TIE Fighters are pretty durable - they can take more than a few hits
- Because of the way the PvP system works, rebel starships (X-wings, A-wings, etc) and imperial starships (TIE fighters) can encounter each other without being hostile to each other - which is wierd given that it is the Star Wars universe...
- No control of the deflector shield system - you can't route all power to the front/rear shields as you can in X-Wing/TIE Fighter series of games - it's a feature that's also mentioned in the movies.
Yeah, I'm sure they're not taking your $15/month, pocketing $10 of it, and then pumping the remaining $5 into development of a new expansion for you to buy.
/. - I'm not which forum I did it in) and I was able to determine that $3 per month was a very liberal estimate (in the developer's favor) for the costs of keeping up an MMORPG system.
... $72/year ... much more reasonable than today's prices.
My point is: fine, it takes money to keep the servers up, to provide the bandwidth, make minor performance improvements, etc. But it doesn't take $15/month. I did an extensive cost analysis back before SWG came out because I thought the MMORPG costs were ridiculous (and I might have even posted it to
Double that number to allow for profits, and you've got $6/month
Well, that and how many mountain dews they can drink without having to go to the bathroom.
Hah! I read that and thought to myself, "Mountain dewbacks? Why do Jedi need to hunt those?" Augh, I'm playing too much.
With the JTL expansion traveling is much quicker since you can use your own ship and go directly to your destination without actually loading the "space" stuff. No more waiting for the shuttle to arrive, although the waiting is a realistic experience. Now every player will have their own personal shuttle. And if you use a multi-occupancy ship everyone in your group gets sucked along. One interesting thing, however, is that your ship must have light speed capabilities or you are unable to go to to another system.
Another note on traveling is your ship remains where you dock it. So if you use your ship to go to Mos Eisley, then take the public shuttle to Theed, you'll be unable to use your ship to travel because it's parked in Mos Eisley even though you still have the ship in your datapad as a posession. That's a very nice little detail.
Who cares what it looks like if the game is unplayable?
If I want only eye candy, I'll go see an IMAX movie.... or even better. I'll go out and look at some real scenery.
No fuck duh! JTL is finally creating some twitch element in the game that was before just hitting the right buttons to perform some moves. However most people made a macro so their toon would do a certain sequence of attacks all the time optomized for their style of play.
JTL is different. It is far more based on your skill as a pilot. Two things limit your capabilties. The type of your hardware, dictating stuff like damage, speed, shield power. You also learn skills needed to things like shift your shields. But turning and keeping behind your enemy is purely based on your skills with a joystick.
Many people have complained that SWG had no twitch. Now people are complaining that JTL is twitch.
If you played any of the old Star Wars games like X-Wing, tie-fighter etc etc then you will find a lot of JTL awfully familiar except you now operate with larger planets in the background. They added some missions that are more complext then "fly to X kill Y fly back to Z" but nothing so far approaching the complexity of X-wing or its sequels.
All in all it ain't bad, just horribly bugged.
Do I recommended it? Absolutly not. If you still haven't been seduced by SWG then JTL won't do it either. I played an imperial in the beta and one of the early missions has you walking on the ground. So far space mission payout is also very low, although my ship was made out of superior looted equipment I think that will soon be adjusted meaning you will have to do ground stuff to get the cash. In the beta it would have been impossible to fly enough missions to pay for a new ship.
Personally I would stay away from the game. SWG can be fun but it is dying. The time when a new player could find a group hunt easily is gone. Wait to see if JTL attracts enough new players to become intresting again. It was fun when the 14-day trial got a load of new players who were not trapped into grinding boxes. The uptake was however very low. Many enjoyed the game itself but found that to many of the other players were to involved in a solo grind.
Fun can be had in SWG but with WoW so close, why should you bother to try to find it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
From your post it seems as if they make you be a tradeskiller just to fly a spaceship too. You know, I saw Han do repairs on the Falcon, but I don't remember him building it himself out of crap he ran around killing. I don't like tradeskills, and I never have. I tried playing SWG, but I didn't want to do any tradeskills, none, nada, zilch. The game is the absolute worst piece of garbage that has ever graced the earth minus the pretty graphics if you don't like grinding away at tradeskills to be a useful character.
:).
It's not a matter of "level of thinking." I enjoy ed DAOC where I had to use team tactics and coordination vs another team of high end players. I also enjoyed Everquest where we consistently tried to take down a bigger and badder mob with fewer people and interesting strategies. Heck I even enjoyed Shadowbane because it had the best balance of any game I've ever played, and building a community that could survive wars was a neat trick of learning the fine art of diplomacy vs aggression.
Trying to equate not liking SWG with not being at a high level of thinking is kind of like saying "If you don't like hitting yourself in the ear with a ball ping hammer your not smart." I mean really, SWG is the first game I've ever seen that actually put true automatic macroing in their game because it was so damn boring to actually be in front of the keyboard, and it took so little skill that a macro could do it. Sorry, but in my opinion if your game can be automated through a macro in any way, it needs to be improved.
p.s. Yes I know if you are bright you can macro a ton of games, but I stand by my comments in that those games do need improving where you can macro them
The gaming community needs a massively online space spim where everyone has the same grades (but different styles) of ships and it actually takes piloting skills to be decent. When I started with SWG, I was expecting Planetside-style combat, i.e. you buy a weapon to your taste, and your skill points increase the accuracy of your aim, but you still have to aim and fire the weapon yourself/
How disappointed I was to find that SWG, a game with guns rather than swords, still uses freaking dice rolls in what is essentially turn-based combat.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I was hoping to jump to Ludicrous speed.
This isn't my quote, but it seemed to sum up the game pretty well:
I don't know, Galaxies always seemed like the mmo for people who wanted to play those two guys in the background in mos eisley while obi wan and luke drove through on their speeder. The two shoveling bantha shit.
From the Shacknews forums
In EQ I played casters a lot, and rolled up a warrior just for the fun of tinkering with the equipment. (At the time, at least, equipment was a lot more important and there were more interesting options available to warriors.) It's fun to tinker with equipment, try different configurations, and go for the best stuff you can afford or swindle. That's not necessarily a crafting thing, and it's not necessarily a painful or boring thing.
You know the part where the IRS investigator orders you to produce all your paycheck stubs and receipts for the last seven years, and you have to look through every single piece of paper in your whole house? And when you finally get all those boxes of documents together, the IRS investigator tells you that he really investigating a totally different Tom Johnson?
Yeah, lots of endless tedious repetitious tasks that end up being done for no reason. Fun like that!
You can look this up on pages 26-27 of Developing Online Games.
Then of course you have bandwith charges, utility bills, server amortorization, rent, and of course the salaries that are paid to customer service and the technical support staff.
This doesn't neccessarily mean they are right of course. Even experts make errors, however given that they are pretty much showing their math and basing it off of practical experience unless you wish to publish your numbers I would have to suspect theirs are more accurate.
There have been cash generation exploits since day one. They've never ben able to get rid of them. Many of those huge stashes of cash are from knowing the right way to press the bank terminal button and jump or position yourself just right.
My apologies if this is redundant, but in the movies it seemed pretty damned easy to get blown to bits and killed - TIE Fighters, X-Wings, etc. In the movies where the life of people like Porkins isn't important, this isn't a biggie. However, if your Jedi character you've been paying tons of money and time to level up gets blown to smithereens by some kid, you're gonna be pissed. Is it hard to get killed in this expansion? Is it just an accepted risk? How do they balance the "X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter" dogfighter mentality versus the need to keep their long time players, um, playing?
Schnapple
I'm not planing on vacationing In San Andreas and jacking cars for fun: I don't like doing dangerous things for real.
As for being 'unproductive', how is spending $250,000 dollars (and all the resources that money implies) productive? You seem to have consumption and production confused.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
too bad I cant load the page in Safari i get caught in an infinite loop where it keep reloading...
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The game stunk. I think SWG's only chance now is to weave porn into the game somehow and maybe some adware popups.
We are supposed to be FIGHTING the trolls???? crap!!!
at least for a while. They're not gonna want any more competition for this than they already have....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
>There aren't enough dungeons or cool things to do besides run around and kill stuff and hope for loot.
All MUD-based games are like this. Essentially you are putting yourself in a Skinner box.
Repetition and the lack of "cool loot" is a feature not a bug. With so many players, there will never be rare loot you can get, and if there is someone who has been playing 23 hours a day is hoarding it. Running around and killing stuff is basically the design.
A lot of people complain about these things without realizing this is why these games are so addictive. There are simply more fun online games that dont demand all your time. The skinner-box is profitable for now, but even the implementations are weak. I played SWG for about two months and its like a generic space game with a few token star wars themes applied. The incentive is poor. Worse, they made the best character, the jedi, next to impossible to score. Compare that to all the Jedi fun you can have with Jedi Academy.
I like games that are challenging, take me away, let me be creative, let me horse around, etc. I have real life leveling to do and MUD-playing back in college did affect my grades and social life (or what was left of it). I'm really curious to see if the skinner-box profit model is going to last.
It ain't really all that massive. Perhaps it would have been if SOE had managed the 1 million subscribers they had aimed for, although how their hardware and software would have coped is beyond me. The few people that are playing are further devided over a dozen different server clusters meaning they will never meet each other. So if you start on a server you will play with perhaps a total of 1000 other players if your lucky. Or rather more accurate, 1000 other accounts. Many hardcore players operate more then one account. The number of total players must therefore be lower then what sony claims.
Is any of this important? Well yeah. SWG has a complex economy that is based on there being enough players to keep the economy balanced. Supply and demand and scale of economy. However because of the few number of players and SOE hopless balancing the player class of Image Designer can be very very very hard to find. Doctors are essential because they buff the stats and without them the fights become impossible very quickly. At times on my server the entire game grinds to a halt because no doctors are buffing the stats of players. This is ultimate the death of a lot of online games. To few people playing and to many advanced players so far ahead that many newbies are instantly turned off.
But lets say you persist. You now create a character on one of the servers hoping to find the server with the most fun community. Selecting sex is pure cosmetic but race is not. Sadly because of some stupid decisions by SOE (you will see a lot of these but nothing compared to your stupidity to pay them each and every month) humans are the best class. Armour was absent for along time for wookies making them useless in the thougher fights.
But you persist and choose a race. Now you gotta choose your starting job. Well actually don't bother. It costs 100 credits to train in a new job so any newbie can easily get basic training in every job out there (except politician I will come to this one). A smart newbie does this as early on it is really really helpfull to be able to help yourselve.
The early jobs are melee (hit things with a stick), ranger (shoot at things), medic (poke players with needles), artisan (make things to hit or shoot thing with), entertainer (stand in boring cantina listening to a 10 second music sample being played over and over again watching the same motion captured animation that is fun once twice or a hundreth times but wich you will have to watch a gazillion times) and finally scout (walk faster up hills and get resources from critters).
Well you can start as an artisan but artisan need resources to make things wich you don't have or any money to buy them with. There are crafting missions that pay you but they pay so low that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the most brafe.
So we are going to be involved in some way with combat. Choosing melee means you will be running after everything running away from you while shooting at you. Ranged means you will be trying to snipe things biting your arm off.
Your character has 3 main bars. Strenght, action and mind. They could have named them anything as strength does not make you stronger and action does not make you faster. The whole deal is that you have an X number of strenght but also a value Y indicating how much strenght something will cost and a value Z indicating how much strenght you recover. Same for action and mind. For instance when a medic heals someone he uses up a certain amount of mind points. How many exactly depends on how high Y is. If Z is high enough he will recover the lost points without the main bar ever dropping. If not then the act of constantly healing will slowly deplete the bar until you no longer can take an action.
Weapon use deplets all bars but varies per weapon wich is used more. The smart people will have thought of something. The value of the main bar is of no imp
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Huh. Interesting, since Mulligan and Patrovsky estimate that most companies would lose half of your estimate simply on the credit card transfaction fees, credit card charge failures, expired cards, fraud, and free month. (Their estimate is 10% of what is being charged never reaches the company.)" lmao. If that really were true, it would apply to any company, right? There's nothing unique to someone developing MMORPGs when it comes to charging credit cards. So 1/2 of that number would be $1.50, 10% of the $15 they get. If your average small retail business lost 10% of their monthly revenue right off the bat, they would go under in a year. But that doesn't happen does it? No. In fact, over 80% of new businesses stay open for at least 2 years (check the US Census data). The estimates used by Mulligan and Patrovsky and probably including menial expenses used in other areas of the company. That, or they're inflating their numbers due to gaming studio woes (they're not exactly what we would call an "unbiased" source).
I think you nailed it.
I understand that you might feel that they are biased (though there is no reason for them to do so) and I have admitted their numbers may be flawed, but again I am giving you their numbers, which seem accurate even against your statement, and you have not given any in return.
There's a flaw in your analysis. You assume no significant ongoing development. MMOs these days put out significant changes and newly developed areas without releasing an expansion. The monthly fee has to cover those ongoing development costs.
For me, the math is more simple. I could easily complete one or two single-player games in a month. That's $50-$100 per month. At $15/mo, SWG is a bargin as long as it satisfies my gaming needs.
...it still sucks. It's just the ground game in space. Go from A to B, kill C. There's a great deal of potential, and the game COULD be truely great. Is it now? Let's just say I get more excited picking out socks.
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
You will have had the hologrind (if you don't know, count yourselve lucky.) We have the FS grind.
Sadly I am not as smart as you, I am still hooked. Whoever doubted the evercrack jokes, they are real. It is an adiction.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Actually, I was basing my statements on the fact that I am a retailer on the side, and I know how charging CCs work and how small business economics work. A base of 4% to 5% is ridiculous for anyone, even the smallest of companies just starting out. Just look around online for merchant accounts and you can see what the real costs are. The writers of that book are just plain lying to you.
And, I would hope that any company like Sony, Blizzard, etc, would be able to leverage their buying power to negotiate a much lower rate. In fact, my particular business would probably get the worst rate of any type of business based on the types of charging I am doing. My average charge is around $10 and my average monthly volume is less than $3000 a month. And, I only charge from online purchases (another factor that raises the rate, versus charging in a physical retail location). Even then, my total base rate is still only around 2.5% of the charge. Sony, etc could do bulk charging where they charge 100 people at a time, and their average charge would jump up to $1000. And they would probably do at least $150000 in sales a month (10,000 users). With those numbers, and the rest of Sony's, Blizzard's, etc buying power, I would be suprised if they couldn't negotiate a rate under 1%.
Look at the numbers yourself, research merchant accounts, you can see they're just straight out lying to you.
CCAvenue
The rates given there vary between a little over 5.5% and 7%, so it would seem there is at least some basis for Patrovsky and Mulligan's numbers. However I will also go on to say that researching other sites shows those numbers to be high.
Doing a bit more research I was able to find a rate as low as 1.59% plus $.20 which would render a charge of 2.88% by the time the charge is actually completed. Naturally I agree that SOE with its corporate muscle could push the rate down a bit more but I find it very hard to believe they would be able to get the actual rate down to less than 1%
So from my standpoint I think it is probably no more fair to say that Mulligan and Patrovsky are lying in their statement of 5% then it is to say that you are lying in your statement of less than 1%. Both parties have reasons for believing their numbers to be good, both of them are probably a bit off the mark, and in fact probably by close to the same multiple (around 2.5). I have noticed other numbers they have thrown out that I consider somewhat suspect but they are not so far off as to render their entire estimates invalid. This is why I have encouraged you to post your own numbers. They seem to provide a good Fermi approximation that equates to around a cost of $9 per customer per month to keep the game running, 3 times your estimate.
My suspicion is that the truth lies somewhere in between the two numbers, most likely in the range of $6-7 a month per customer. I believe that Mulligan and Patrovsky are using large numbers for credit card rates, salaries, rent, and equipment, shortening the lifespan of the equipment, and otherwise making their estimates high in a sort of 'worst case' scenario. You on the other hand are probably glossing over minor charges such as bandwidth and health care benefits that add up faster than you think and are coming up with a low estimate in a sort of 'best case' scenario.
Well, if I could find the forum where I posted my numbers, I would show them to you, but I can't. Perhaps this sounds convenient for my argument, and maybe it is, but that's the fact. I was extremely liberal with my numbers and padded most of them an extra 100%, most technical people in the forum also agreed with my numbers based on their experience as IT managers, system operators, etc.
... closer to $0.02 or $0.03 per transaction. Which would make the rate 1.79% for $0.03 on $15.
Those CCAvenue people are out of their mind for retail business, perhaps they are customized for some specialty sector. If not, I'm surprised that they are even in business.
Your 2.88% number doesn't take into account bulk charging as I mentioned above. Basically, you collect all of your charges for the day and actually charge them all together at the end of the day as a bulk charge. You still check that funds are available at the point of sale, but you don't complete the transaction until you've collected all the charges for the day. (Many gas stations do this when you pre-pay at the pump, and that's why you'll notice a hold on your card for mybe $100 for 2 weeks after the fill-up even though it only cost $25.39 or whatever.) Then, you can use a bulk charge rate instead of the $0.20 rate and the effective charge-per-transaction is much less
And if someone is offering an UP-FRONT rate to just ANYONE of 1.59%, what makes you think they won't cut that in half for someone willing to do millions of dollars in business with them? Sorry, but you're being a bit naive here. My total base rate runs around 2.5% and I am an ant compared to Sony or Blizzard, etc. Common sense begs you to believe that the price any of them pay is AT LEAST less than half of what I pay.
As for the notion that Sony can get the credit card companies to give them a rate that is less than half the rate you can get I will have to remain skeptical on that without better information. The reason for this is because I to have been a store owner and I know that we paid roughly 50% of the list price to our distributors for the items taht we sold (books). I also know that they paid roughly 50% of what they charged us to the publishers. In general the markup for any item is roughly 100%, and yes, this is a gross generalization and I am sure there are specific incidents where it is not the case but it is extensive enough for my use. There are always cases of luxury goods and new services where the rate will be higher until new competition causes the market to adjust but credit cards are so prevalent in society that I doubt they fall into either of those camps.
If we assume that the credit card companies have a 150% markup on the 2.5% that they charge you, which is a very good rate, we find that the credit card companies need about 1% of the finance charges just for survival. Giving Sony half your rate means that the profit margin for the credit card company has just dropped from 150% to 25%, so rather than only half the applicable profits the credit card companies are making one sixth the applicable profits.
Will a credit card company slash its profits this badly for a company with around half a million customers? Probably not, because those really aren't big numbers for them. While most companies do not post the number of customers they have we can make some quick Fermi calculations based on quarterly earnings.
Walmart, which I admit is a big company, reported sales of about $75 billion in the first quarter of 2004. If we assume that the average sale is $50 then we end up with a total of nearly half a billion sales per month, 3 orders of magnitude higher than SOE. Now in a case like that you might get the credit card companies willing to cut their profits that severely but I doubt they would regard a company like SOE as big enough to do something like that.
Keep in mind, the credit card companies, merchant account companies, and merchant account banks are all completely different entities. I wrote up a summary (leaving out a few details) of how this works here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125307&cid=105 04929
... $833k/month which is nothing for them), and some hardware and property costs (rent, power, etc). Their business is almost a pure profit business. Where they lose money is in other financial endeavors ... making loans to people who default, bad investments, etc.
" Yes, I recognize that the bulk charge would be considerably lower than the individual charge of $.20. However, the credit card companies will realize the same thing and will adjust their rates. the 1.59% rate is based around the fact that the credit card company knows it will be getting an additional $.20."
The companies know about bulk pricing, it isn't a secret. In fact, they created the bulk pricing system as an alternative for certain types of retailers. They aren't going to "realize" anything and adjust their rates. People have been bulk charging for the last 15 years (perhaps even more).
As well, this is not a product being offered, so your notions of mark-up don't apply in the same way as they would apply to a book. The companies actually pay next-to-nothing per credit card transaction. That's why they charge as a percentage of your sale. Let's say you do a $5 sale and your rate is 3%, you pay $0.15 for that transaction. Now, let's say you do a $500 sale and your rate is 1.5%, you pay $7.50 for that transaction. The banks, CC companies, and merchant companies don't care how much the transaction is - it's all the same work for them. The amount of money to be handled is just a variable passed along with the CC info. The fact that they charge one person $0.15 for a service and another person $7.50 for the same exact service should be proof enough that their cost of doing business is practically nothing. Even if all you did were $1 transactions, you could still get a rate of 4% or 5% with no transaction fee. That's $0.04 or $0.05 per transaction, and everyone is still making a profit - the merchant account provider, the merchant account bank, the CC company, the middle man, everyone.
All they have to pay for is some bandwidth each month (CC info is extremely small, no more than 100 bytes required to store all the info), a tech support and management crew (largest cost here: say 100 people @ $100k/year = $10mil/year