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SWG Players - Comment on the Combat Upgrade
Since last week my inbox and submissions bin has been overflowing with complaints and rants about the Combat Upgrade put into Star Wars Galaxies last week. Players are speaking out all over the internet, and the media is responding. If you've had first hand interactions with the combat upgrade (either positive or negative) please leave a comment below describing your experiences with the changes, and pass on word of this thread to all the players you can. Think of this as a call for interview questions, because I'm going to formulate queries as best I can and see what sort of information I can get from the folks that I know at Sony Online. Here's your chance to be heard, folks. Use it well.
I'm far too lazy to actually post examples - So here's 3 pages on why. I will say that I'm surprised there's enough people who care that your mailbox is being "flooded" with complaints or anything at all.
schild
editor, f13.net
I'm a rifleman in the game and while I have been subscribed to SWG since one of the later betas, I really haven't played since shortly after the release of Jump To Lightspeed. (I've been playing "World of Warcraft".)
I was excited to hear about the combat upgrade to SWG, because I thought it might finally make the game playable to me. Since the devs have made some of the changes in the last few months that I have been asking for since beta (PvE galactic civil war for one) I thought this change might make me want to play the game and maybe even buy the latest expansion.
Lo and behold, none of my Rifleman special moves appears to work. I was killed by a green (easy) creature my first time out. I went to the boards and discovered a bunch of posts about how, once again, as they have in the past, SOE is beta testing their "improvements" to the game in live.
I've decided I don't need to play this game anymore, and I'll be deleting it from my hard drive, finally. Goodbye SWG Beta. I've been paying for you for far too long.
I played the CU on the test server when it first came out, and I can't believe they put it on live so quickly! What were they thinking?
When I played SWG, I got it just for jump to lightspeed. I wanted to be a pilot. But in the end I was disappointed by the gameplay I was hoping it would be similar to the x-wing/tie fighter games. The xp system was boring too, grinding away blowing up pirates. After blowing up 25 identical pirate ships in a row the game got old really fast. Content or different missions to keep it interesting was definetly needed. I can't believe I have to pay monthly on top of what the game and expansion cost just for the privelege to play. :(
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Their are issues that have issues for the CU. Every profession is broken is some way or form. Some items that were once coveted are now useless. Creatures became generic with different healths and skins. It was just a severe dumbing down of a system.
Esentially the players are unhappy that they now cannot use items they were once able to and all Customer service can do is shrug. Promises made to professions like Doctor were broken. Specifically since crafting was removed from DOC and moved to BE, the pre-reques for BE would be lowered so current Master DOCs could easily gain the medicine crafting of BE. They never changed that.
Master scout requires 35K of xp. The cap at 4444 scout is 25k, in other words no one can master. These are just a few examples of glareing problems with it. Each professional forum has lists and lists of game/profession breaking bugs.
They really screwed up this time. Not only was it rushed but also implemented 1 week before promised. No one wants to go back to the days of release when hot patches were placed every day.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!
First of all, let's get this out of the way: I think it sucks, and I cancelled my account today.
Okay.
After playing with the CU for a couple of days, I decided to hop onto another server and start a new character to see what the n00b experience would be like. I was surprised: for a new player, the CU is actually better than the old system was, or at least is its rough equivalent. With the addition of some Medic skills, the basic melee classes played just fine: as long as I could drop healing on myself, the combat itself went smoothly. I earned good amounts of experience and was able to progress.
On my veteran characters, the experience is entirely different. Like someone else here, I had a Master Rifleman. I was completely unable to kill anything at my own level--and since killing things at or near your own level is the only way to earn more than about 1 xp that was a problem. I also had a Teras Kasi Master, and while I was able to successfully defeat single mobs of the appropriate level, if I drew aggro from more than one creature, I was dead. In addition, the specials in Teras Kasi--an Elite-level profession--do LESS damage than the specials from the Brawler class--a Basic-level profession. This is unacceptable.
The game has slowed down, a lot. It now takes a HUGE amount of time to kill anything, on the order of several minutes. It would seem that to get anywhere, grouping is required, and some of us don't want to HAVE to find seven other players to gain experience. Medic skills--preferrably as much Doctor as you can manage--are essential to staying alive.
Jedi characters are screwed beyond belief. If you're progressing through the Jedi skills as a Master in any non-Jedi combat role, you're hosed: you will not be able to kill anything with your lightsaber. The aforementioned TKM is also a Jedi, and I can get in about a dozen hits before I run out of Force because I have exactly two skill boxes in Jedi, but I draw missions that are "appropriate" for my TKM level.
On the SWG forums, there's a lot of counter-bitching that people like me are leaving because we're no longer "uber." I'd just like to say that I never was uber (gah, I hate that word). I never had the best armor, or the best weapons, or the most money. What I did have was fun.
Awesome.
Ive been an swg player for almost a year, all i can say is the combat upgrade brought back the joy i first felt when playing this game all that time ago.
Astroturf...
seriously, you seem to be the only one with something nice to say about this 'upgrade.' Is astroturfing for SWG your main job?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
SWG-CU is the worst decision in the history of MMORPG's.
It has more bugs than a Beta... this was supposed to be a Combat Balance... however, it is the most unbalanced updates to date in SWG.
Horrid... 3 Thumbs down. Anyone thinking of playing a new game... give this game a definite PASS.
I have been playing SOE games since 1998 and have canceled my EQ, EQ2 and SWG accounts. I don't feel like paying to be an Alpha/Beta tester. This new "upgrade" is just a rushed system thrown on the customers to meet a marketing deadline before a movie hits the screens. I really am speechless with what is going on at Sony. The worst part is they won't even communicate with the players or acknowledge anything we say or ask.
How the new combat system plays
Just another picture of random protest
Sony claims that these protests disrupt server activity, but people run Player Events which draw ~200 people into one town and sony doesn't say a word, Hell, if they find out about it they send people to HELP, but when 100 people show up in a place that is DESIGNED to be a high capacity area like theed or CNet to complain about sony completly ignoring and in places silencing the player base, they start Suspending accounts, warping people to nasty places, and other fun "Punishments"
(Score:0, Interesting)
I have to say, I was looking forward to this Combat Upgrade. I've been playing SWG since day 1 and this has to be the worst i've seen happen to this game, it really is shitty. I thought at first people were just not welcoming a change, because people in general dont like change, but i was completely wrong...the old combat system was so much better, the new one is cheesy, boring, and combat has completely lost it's fun, I can't even play anymore and it's pretty hard to turn me away from one of my favorite games.
This CU is a perfect example of greed on the part of Sony and Lucas Arts, nothing more, nothing less. There is a great post on the SWG forums that summed this up perfectly, http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?b oard.id=cudiscussiontemp&message.id=25971
In the end it is only a game. I'm disappointed because of the friends I will no longer be playing with, but I'll also find a better way to spend my 60 bucks a month on something that is fun.
A unique game, with a skill-based system, that was admittedly full of quite a few bugs and faults was yanked and redesigned around the Everquest2 system, totally changing the entire gameplay, yet was released with massive bugs and problems in conversion.
It's a completely different game now, and many are not liking the change, as it totally removed the old elements of the game engine and replaced them with EQ2 using star wars graphics.
If you're considering this game - don't bother. Go play EQ2 or WoW or Guildwars, because those games play the same, but don't have the massive bugs and disenfranchised user base.
to those who say it brought back enjoyment to the game:
a. how did removing the many melee animations and replacing them with generic one punch or one kick animations bring any enjoyment?
b. to those who say groups are important again: they were always important, you just didn't know how to make friends before.
c. How is turning hundreds of medications that took me months upon months and hours upon hours to gather and make into useless nothings make the game better? How is wasting all my hard work making YOU happy??
d. How is a new found joy in your gaming experience when they tunred mine and alot of people's very expensive weapons into fly swatters?
e. how is it joy when they took my bio-engineer pets which took me months to accumulate and perfect into soemthing that forced me to delete them?
Bottom line is, anyone who likes this game, obviously played it very little before CU. They see CU as a different experience and new game. But to people who actually play the game, the CU destroyed their characters and hard work in many many ways.
The CU was promised to be a fast paced arcade type action with a more Star Warsy feel. They failed, it is a terribly slow paced game with a fantasy feel now, adding all those gawdy particle effects and implementing a root and nuke system of combat from EQ.
They also made a huge mistake with the icons, love them or hate them you still now have to stare at them, and not what you are fighting so you can always know when to use the next special.
Star Wars galaxies went from unique to hidesouly boring and common with the CU.
They try to mimmick WOW and EQ, but they do it all wrong, Star Wars wasn't meant to be a lvl game, and it shows! Because if you are a master in one skill, novice in another, you will have a supremely boring and tedious task to raise the novice skill to master. Trying to fight level 65 mobs with a novice skill just is not cutting it.
I can go on and on here, I haven't even scratched the surface, suffice to say I canceled my accoutn which was started on day one in 2003. SOE are the single worse mmorpg company to exsist, and that is saying alot cause I really hate OSI. Not only for the CU, but for their treatment of players. They are straight up liars. They are censors. They are unreasonable. They are cracked out of their gourds.
I am hoping I witnes the first cancelation of a popular MMORPG. I really want to see it fail, to send a message that there is a line Game companies can cross. Sure they can abuse us all they want, they can nerf us all they want, but if you are going to change the game into one that is completely different, make sure it is good!
My favorite quote by them is "Stay positive through the chaos" lol! Translation = Ignore the outcry and hope it all turns out ok!
Another one " There are only 50 outspoken people who hate the CU" LOL LIARS.
Another" " Don't force your dislike of the game on soemone who is just trying to express their opinion and who like it. You just dislike change." (paraphrase). LOL, chnage rocks, WHEN IT IS GOOD. Also, I'd like to note, that only people with positive opinions are allowed to express them, those with negative are banned no matte rhow gracious they are about it. So SOE are hypocrits as well.
Thats it for now.
The general dumbing-down of the game imposed by the C.U. makes you think they must want a greater appeal to console gamers. They basically destroyed the crafting, medical & entertainment professions, added cartoony EQ-ish special effects to combat, and removed the last hope that the once-promising potential of this game system will ever be realized. A huge number of the original, adult players had already left this project months ago, but the last holdouts who had hoped for a professional management team to take over look to be leaving now.
Makes FFXI look like a cake walk According to the new levels Im level 26 I was killed by a level 1 creature give me a break
I was a Master BountyHunter/Master carbineer after the upgrade they had to reinstall the the enitire game over again with an old back up copy and I lost 100,000's of exp by losing a ton of skills because they didn't back up the servers the night before the upgrade I believe it was over a week old.
They offered to give back to the chimera (spelling) server folks their skill boxes but not the folks on the Bloodfin servers so I'm pretty much screwed
I played for almost 48 hours straight at one point when I knew the upgrade was coming just to be ready for the learning curve and get as much EXP as I could before they released this upgrade. Because we all knew they were going to ax the exp gains in the new combat release.
I also unlocked everything required to make me "glowy" so if I wanted to I could become a Jedi but gee I lost at least 1 badge whith the re-install so I no longer qualify to become a Jedi.
To top it off SOE keeps deleting my posts in the Tech support forum about why I only have 1 frame per second even with all graphic settings set to lowest possible option I was running the game fine before this so called upgrade.
P4
3.3 ghz
4 gig ram
9800 pro rad
None of their fixes worked and I had turned off everything in background using MSCONFIG including firewalls and virus checkers. Tried not only most current drivers but also drivers that were older in fact I tried everyone I could get my hands on.
As it turns out many people are having this problem but SOE keeps deleting all their posts on the forum for some odd reason
PS I can play FFXI with all graphics maxed with no slow down to include the bitmap feature turned on.
I have tested the CU since it hit Beta and have been following the CU since publish 7. There are a number of unexpected problems with the implementation of the CU as it stands in Live (and how it developed in beta) that do not track with the available information given over the year since it was announced. The way the current implementation of the CU is made up has several glaring variances from the previously released info - in that there was one central item that I have identified has caused the majority of the imbalances and problems encountered with the CU. Putting a 'level' system on top of a skill based system. This was not in the original CU documentation released on 03/31/05, and data from public statements of sources inside the CU 'sandbox' scheme (without violating NDA) have confirmed that it was never discussed with them to the degree it was implemented. Herein I will list the worst issues reported about the CU and show that they are all tied directly to the 'level system' implementation that was added to the functional design of the CU. 1. Crafter Death - Crafters are 1 shotted by every aggro mob on every starter planet. The fragility of crafter characters at 'combat level' 1 is extreme. Surveying alone is impossible since spawns will appear under vehicles in motion and mobs will kill crafters in less than 2 seconds. The ability to at least run away has been removed - this makes crafters unable to function at a basic level. The 'level' system has a damage multiplier. You will see this in further points. This damage multiplier makes anything higher level than you equivalent to instant death. Five levels above you will always kill you. Again, this point will be repeated. Since crafters will not have any combat rating unless they become a hybrid and drop pure crafting, they will always take max damage. Furthermore, every animal will use the damage multiplier against a base value. There is no such thing, therefore, as a 'safe' enemy for crafters. This is the result of the 'level' system. Before, each mob had different resists and damage ranges. They had a "threat" level, which was based on how high their offensive and defensive values were. Under the old system, that was the basis of the /con result.
This threat level has NO relationship to the current 'combat level' system, no matter what the devs claim in the HOC chat.
The threat level was an EVALUATION of an existing mob.
A 'combat level' is a MODIFICATION of a base value mob "angry bag" put into whatever 'skin' is appropriate, i.e, a level 34 dune lizard is the same as a level 34 peko peko.
The new COMBAT LEVEL defines the offensive and defensive values - not the other way around.
This is an important distinction, and is critical to understanding the conclusion about the combat level system and why it was added to the CU at such a late date.
2. XP gains and lack of same: A significant number of people are finding odd results from attacking mobs slightly below their level and higher - as in getting little to no XP. The response of the devs is to have people focus on just fighting even leveled mobs.
The real question is: Why was the XP variance put in the CU in the first place?
XP gains or rates of gains was NEVER addressed as a concern in the Combat Upgrade. It did not affect combat in any way, shape, or form in PVP, nor were there "problems" about the flavor of combat that were caused by XP being gained by anything you defeated.
It was never an issue at all.
However, in 'level' based systems, the paradigm is that LEVEL DETERMINES XP AT ALL TIMES.
In a skill based system, mobs are worth what they are worth - period.
The XP dilemma is a byproduct of the introduction of the level based combat overlay - and that is it.
It offers NO positive effects to the pace of combat, the usability and distinction of all combat professions, the tactical nature of combat - in fact, it hinders advancement. It does nothing that the CU was written to do - at all. It has no purpose.
It has nothing to do with lessening the effects of overpowered b
The game as is has been ruined to the point of unplayable. All melee professions have been crippled to below normal newbie levels, things like Damage Over Time attacks that were supposed to be removed are now stronger, etc, etc.
And let's not get into the new interface that looks like a game my 5 year old would play and completely ruins the immersion into the Star Wars environment that used to be a huge draw for this game.
It is also obvious that this 'upgrade' was a major rip-off from EverquestII. Heck, I even have an XML configuration file from Everquest in my Launchpad folder!!!
On top of all the problems, the Product Support Reps have constantly belittled, lied to, and tried to silence the veteran game base at every turn. When a bad review or complaint was made they repeatedly deleted posts - in the worst 'Big Brother' display I have seen in quite some time - and we are they PAYING customers.
At this point nothing short of a complete roll-back to the system that 80%+ of us loved and an public apology will salvage my three accounts.
Here's hoping that this exposure will make it to the proper eyes and ears. I feel completely betrayed and quite honestly my excitement for the upcoming movie has now dwindled.
Disgruntled SWG User and Star Wars fan since 1977
One of the underlying precepts of the Star Wars universe is balance. I am penalized for seeking the same by creating a character that is a dancer/janitor with two slots for Jedi proficiencies. Not only can't I block or heal attacks against mental, but I am unable to pilot a ship -- despite the fact that Luke (a guy that tinkers with robots and farms sand) rises through the ranks to pilot his own X-Wing against the Death Star and defeat both Darth Vader and the Emperor!
The simple fact is that Jedis can do virtually anything in the movies, something completely lost on the game designers. I don't know for certain that Jedis can fly, but a little creative license would only help the gameplay there. Actually now that I think about it, every player should start as a Jedi.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to the fans.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
I have tried the CU upgrade and can tell you first hand this has destroyed the game. It is no longer SWG but EQ2 in sheeps clothing. You can no longer hunt solo, armor that you paid good money for is now junk and many things such as skill tapes which cost a fortune are no longer any good. Contary to what is being reported as Tiggs statement at the breakfast it is not true that only about 50 people are upset over the CU. If she did indeed say this then I will call her an outright liar! People are leaving the game in droves canceling their accounts because they can't play anymore. They made Entertainers, Doctor's and Craftsmen almost totally useless. They have been deleteing posts to the CU comment board because they don't want people seeing just how upset people are over this CU. I can honestly see SoE losing at least 25,000 if not more subscribers over this. They have lost over that many since January to March of this year (MMOGCHART.COM figures)how many more can they lose before the game is gone. George Lucas needs to step in and see how they have ruined his vision of SWG.
The idea of an upgrade to combat was something everyone wanted. Some tweaks to armor, chnges to buffing, some class changes to balance things out were all we were looking for. What's being forced on us is in no way, shape or form an "Upgrade".
The day testing began on the Test Servers(there was no closed alpha test. "Alpha" consisted of a handful of people being emailed some excel sheets), SOE placed a Poll on the forums asking for people to rate the CU. It was reset everyday, and sometimes after a patch was applied to the Test servers. Every single poll resulted in 65%-85% of the voters choosing the lowest possible rating. Everyday. Without Fail.
SOE's public stance was that the majority of players loved the CU and couldn't wait for it. Recently, at C3, the Community Relations Director for SWG stated that only 50 vocal people were against the CU.
We already knew these public statements by SOE were lies, which became painfully apparant the day the CU went live and the community responded.
While the CU was still on the Test servers(TCs), those players who were actually testing posted detailed, comprehensive discussions to both the Test Center Forum and the In Testing - Dev forum. A large percentage of the bug reports were ignored. Many which detailed the reasons why SOE's attempt at importing a Level-based combat system into SWG's Skill-based character system was flawed were deleted without comment. Since going live, this Level-based system, has shown it's inherent flaw in SWG, and all further posts by players experiencing it for the first time get deleted from the SWG forums as well.
A day before the CU went live(a week earlier than it was supposed to, with all bugs intact), every single "official" bug thread on the In Testing - Dev forum was deleted. None of the bugs had been fixed, and the players/testers were basically told to do it all over again. However, posting any bugs which were originally posted in the deleted threads(and never fixed) resulted in more deletions, and some bans.
To be honest, it appears that SOE has no desire to hear about bugs, expecially those which show the basic design flaws in the CU, and no desire to fix said bugs.
Besides the Bugs, and broken Combat system, there are a number of other reason why players are so upset and cancelling.
The UI has been changed dramatically. It now resembles a Fantasy MMO more than anything else. Colorful hotbar Icons have replaced the funtional, datapad-like buttons. They don't resemble the actions they're supposed to represent, many of themlook like they were exported straight out of a fantasy game(horses for 'mounting' vehicles, archery arrows to represent range attacks, etc..). When asked if the players would have the option of using the old icons instead of the new ones at a recent Dev chat, we were told "no" without any reason why.
The other graphical changes further create the Fantasy-based atmosphere which has no place in a Sci-Fi game, particularily a Star Wars game. "Magical" particle effects now go off for every possible action in the game. Every basic punch shows a dazzling effect. Mounting and dismounting from a speederbike displays an effect. Medics(clerics?) wave a hand and a cloud of sparkly magical dust surrounds everyone for a PBAoE Heal. None of this was ever asked for by the players. Especially when the accompanying special effects result in FPS loss on a grand scale.
All Crafting professions and Entertainer professions have been decimated by the CU. There's no reason for anyone to master an Entertainer class as the lowest Novice can now give the same single buff as anyone of higher rank. RPing these entertainment classes is no longer as "fun" as it was prior to the CU since a change was put in to make the largest available group consist of 8 players(from 20). This means it's no longer possible to create a full band of musicians with accompanying dancers. What Nerfing the Entertainers had to do with "Upgrading" Combat, I'll never know.
Makes FFXI look like a cake walk According to the new levels Im level 26 I was killed by a level 1 creature give me a break
I was a Master BountyHunter/Master carbineer after the upgrade they had to reinstall the the enitire game over again with an old back up copy and I lost 100,000's of exp by losing a ton of skills because they didn't back up the servers the night before the upgrade I believe it was over a week old.
They offered to give back to the chimera (spelling) server folks their skill boxes but not the folks on the Bloodfin servers so I'm pretty much screwed
I played for almost 48 hours straight at one point when I knew the upgrade was coming just to be ready for the learning curve and get as much EXP as I could before they released this upgrade. Because we all knew they were going to ax the exp gains in the new combat release.
I also unlocked everything required to make me "glowy" so if I wanted to I could become a Jedi but gee I lost at least 1 badge whith the re-install so I no longer qualify to become a Jedi.
To top it off SOE keeps deleting my posts in the Tech support forum about why I only have 1 frame per second even with all graphic settings set to lowest possible option I was running the game fine before this so called upgrade.
P4
3.3 ghz
4 gig ram
9800 pro rad
None of their fixes worked and I had turned off everything in background using MSCONFIG including firewalls and virus checkers. Tried not only most current drivers but also drivers that were older in fact I tried everyone I could get my hands on.
As it turns out many people are having this problem but SOE keeps deleting all their posts on the forum for some odd reason
PS I can play FFXI with all graphics maxed with no slow down to include the bitmap feature turned on.
It's a horrible upgrade.. yes.. I agree with that with every bit of my being. However one of the worst things they have done so far is not respond to the community that is demanding results. Most responses from the community leaders have been vague and misdirectional. Some community leaders have even resulted in telling people to "stop it" in regards to posting negatively about the CU. Could this be because they are looking for new blood and don't want to scare potential customers away? Their horribly funny email was sent to most all subscribers with the quotes from an SOE employee no doubt. They brag on how great the CU is and how everyone loves it. I don't see them showing the whole truth here and post the comments from the majority of their subscribers. With the release of the new movie, their business plan is to replace cancelled subscribers with newbies that are still on a Star wars high. All I can request from everyone is to keep posting alive and keep the media broadcasting on what a joke this game is so that their business plans flops in their face. I am like most subscribers when I say I won't be happy till I know all the developers working on this CD (combat downgrade) are fired and working at the nearest fast food joint. I'll take fries with that!
The CU (Combat Upgrade) is one of many major upgrades I've lived through. Whenever a major revamp happens, there are invariable a lot of complaints as things change and some of peoples' favorite moves get nerfed:
Every major change in the game has caused a lot of complaining from the affected professions (except the droid revamp and the entertainer/chef changes). In some cases, like the CH and DE changes, the game play was radically altered. Combat Upgrade is having the same impact with the difference being it goes beyond a single profession.
My impression after playing CU for a couple of days is that it's a different mindset from the previous combat system, and that's what's causing a lot of the hard feelings.
In the previous system, you would choose a combat profession and your skills would be defined by that profession. So Pistoleer had special pistol moves, Rifleman had special rifle moves, etc. The weapons you were certified to use were also dependent on your profession and level. As a pistoleer I could not use any rifles without huge penalties, because I had no certification in rifles. Same was true of melee skills.
The CU has disassociated the combat professions from the weapons and skills one can use. Pistoleer now is essentially just a grouping of a certain type of combat skills. I can use any ranged weapon I'm certified for with those skills, be it a pistol or rifle or carbine. Weapon certification is now based on combat level, with only a few weapons reserved for master level skills. Fan shot used to be a pistol-only skill. I can now use fan shot with any ranged weapon. I've jokingly thought of getting sniper from the rifleman profession so I can do sniper shots with a pistol. I'd be limited by the pistol range but would have the special attack of higher accuracy and higher damage.
What this means is that my character is no longer a Pistoleer per se, just that I've chosen to learn the Pistoleer profession skills to use when I'm fighting. I can mix and match from multiple ranged weapon professions and create hybrid capabilities to apply when fighting.
The other big impact of the CU is that players can no longer act invincible, able to solo some of the biggest creatures like Krayt Dragons. This is a bitter pill to swallow for some of the "arcade" players who want to run around blasting everything. The CU now requires tactical awareness and decisions when fighting, not just queueing up your most powerful shot and keeping an eye on your health. Combat now takes active involvement from the player, and encounters aren't over in a minute or two like they used to be.
I think the CU is a positive step forward for the game. It certainly isn't any worse than the previous combat system, just different. There will no doubt be some patches in the coming weeks to adjust the balance but that's to be expected with changes this big.
I'm sure some players will be put off permanently by the CU, but the rest of us will adapt to it. Finally, I think the release of Episode III and the Rage of the Wookiees upgrade will bring a lot of new players to the game who will never have known the old system and they will have no problem with how combat works.
Here is a quote from Developer Blairs Blog, it was posted on the 16th of April 2005. Finally, it is worth repeating that even when Combat Upgrade goes "live" it is not finished - we will continue to refine and polish the experience for some months to come. So, please take comfort in the fact that we are listening and working hard to bring you a game that meets or exceeds your expectations - and we value your insights, passion for the game and your continued patronage. I am worried by this trend of game companites to push unfinished products on us to in essence beta test. I am sick of it and hope the SWG community sends a loud and clear message to SOE on this. The true problem with the CU was taking a unique skill based system that needed balancing and converting it to a level based system that is just as unbalanced. The developers just aren't listening to the testers, not listening to the community. It's gone from making a good game to making a quick buck. My final account is active until May 26th if I don't like what direction the game is moving by then I will not be renewing.
The truth is the majority of players asked for a revamp. The revamp they got is a new system.
The system takes a little time to get used to, and it works as well if not better than the old one.
You can still go solo hunting, group hunt or twiddle your fingers in a cantina and watch teh dancing girls.
Adapt to the new system, it is not going ot go away no matter how much people whine.
If there is a bug in the game, report it with the built in bug feature.
There are a few petitions out there, but till they actually set up a legit one... well mickey mouse and bugs bunny can sign them...
The developers are being presured by the management, so cut them some slack. As a new sytem, which was what I always expected from the details given on the revamp, there are going ot be lots of bugs for awhile. Help fix them and make the game work or not.
I have been playing for about 9 months. I started playing SWG because I liked the lack of the cookie cutter feel that many other games have implemented. if you are such and such, you can only do blank, blank and blank. SWG was different. You could mix and match to perfect a character that you liked. I got a character that I liked up to Master Pistoleer about two days before the CU went in. My experiences since then have all been negative. I can no longer hunt with my Master Pistoleer who was on her way to becoming a Jedi. Every time that I have tried taking a mission, I get killed. I got incapped by two savage humbabas, creatures that I would have easily killed before the CU. SOE is now saying that because I am a pistoleer I only have a set choice of armors (most of which are unavailable or quest related). Also for all that flavor in armor choices, I get really Ubese Tan or Ubese Brown. Wow, I have light blue composite that looked really nice before the CU. ::scratches head:: This is suppose to make me look different than which other Pistoleer?
First, I wish everyone would quit calling it the combat upgrade. It was not a combat upgrade but an obvious adoption of the engine from EQ2. Why make something when you already have something made? Except the EQ2 (which I played for a week and quit) is not what made SWG different. You cannot be a good crafter and a good combatant in SWG. You are one or the other. There are now artisans, chefs, tailors, etc who can't get from Point A to Point B to shop at merchants because the shop is surrounded by aggressive creatures and they have no armor.
Was a combat upgrade needed? No, the game need balanced! We didn't need or want a new game. Players told them this and they were ignored.
Was this handled well by marketing for SOE? No, this will be their worst nightmare. We were given originally about 5 hours warning on Bria and then after protests were held, we were given 24 hours before the upgrade went in. Boy, May 5th came faster on SOE's calendar than on mine. I show May 1st TOMORROW! If you were out of town or busy for a day, you were out of luck. I have played DAOC, Gemstone and many other online games and this was plain inconsiderate of SOE.
Was this ready to be put out? Considering that every time I use the shuttle I lose all my waypoints, I would say not. There are so many bugs, I wouldn't even want to start listing them. It goes from Docs to BEs to the combatant classes.
Have I considered cancelling my account? YES! Have I cancelled getting Rage of the Wookies? I am the biggest Obi-Wan fan and they could give me one of his lightsabers and not just a copy of his mount and I wouldn't buy it. If it is even half as buggy as this release, it is not worth the money.
My advice to potential new players: SOE is proving that the players are unimportant to the management and developers. They took a shortcut out and it is coming around to bite them. This is one time guys that the Java adage of use what is available and improve on it doesn't work. Give us a repaired SWG, not Everquest in Space.
It's the most horrendous thing they've ever done to the game. A Jedi who's deemed "combat level 78" cannot take out something deemed "combat level 40" without close to dying. BEFORE this "upgrade" the same creature could be taken down in 2 hits. I'm extremely disappointed, I only hope they can clean up after this enough to keep the game playable.
See you space cowboy...
Many of us that protest and dislike so many of the changes brought forth by the CU have been actively voicing our oppinions on the Test center since the CU started open testing. Of course we're written off as whiners, the simple fact of the matter is everyone felt the game needed improvements, and to be honest, the Galactic civil war changes, the loot changes, the spawn increases, all of those had me excited about where the game was going. Then I tried the CURB on the test center, WOW! 2 steps forward 5 steps back in my opinion. Many supporters of the CU claim its because we can no longer play in "god mode", but this is really a cop out to the actual intellectual debate that rises from this issue. In an attempt to summarize I will say that I personally don't mind the game being made harder, or players being made weaker how ever you want to slice it. What I don't approve of is completely gutting the mechanics of the entire game. Alternative solutions were viable, reducing the effectiveness of doctor and entertainer buffs, decreasing the effectiveness of armor, I personally feel adding stimpacks for mind damage and consumables to cure poisons and disease which require very little to no medic skills is all the game needed for balance, some of these things did make it into the game, but many more changes were made too. Such as removal of the combat queue, a game dynamic unique to swg, without the combat queue, swg has been reduced to button mashing, which in SOE's eyes means more tactical and faster paced, I will say in my play experience it is neither of those. In the original swg, all players had 3 health bars referred to as HAM(health, action, mind) if any of these reached 0 you were incapacitated and could be killed via a death blow from either npc, creatures, or other players. To coincide with this various classes had the ability to attack one specific pool, such as carbineers hitting action, pistoleers hitting health, riflemen hitting mind, the same goes for the melee skills. In the new system you only become incapped when your health reaches zero, while action and mind allow you to use special attacks (consider them a mana pool for all proffessions except jedi they use a force pool, which is borked at the moment as well). So targeted pool specific attacks are no longer effective as they once were....this is a very big example of "dumbing down" the game and making combat much less tactical. They have also added a root attack, this completely destroys any balance they may have been trying for. The game is also based on levels now rather than skills, so now, there are damage multipliers involved based on level, what this equates to is a removal of individuality, before players were able to dabble in several different skill lines to make unique characters with unique offensive and deffensive attributes granted deffensive stacking needed a bunch of balancing work, but this removed individualism from the game and is forcing everyone to go with cookie cutter proffessions, pro CURB supporters will say cookie cutter templates were already mainstay.....only in pvp, and that was more of a flavor of the month. Balance in an MMO is not a good idea, and to be honest will likely never exist. There will always be some template, some skill, some equipment that gives a player the edge over others, and thats the motivation, without it you may as well just play a game head to head with you pals and forget the subscription fees. There are many many many things about the CU that take away from the SWG I signed up to play, but these are just some of them off the top of my head. I am suspiscious that they have turned SWG into a button mashing fest in order to follow suit with EQ and release it for the gaming consoles, that might be a good question to ask, but I don't know that I would trust what SOE says anyway, they have a history of lieing even in the face of the truth. Good luck getting some info! Can't wait to see what they have to say, if they have anything other than the mindless blither they've been spewing forth so
I tried to be constructive in my criticism on the boards and to take a deeper look at WHY the CURB was not working for myself. I got some postive feedback from other players with it so I assume there are others who feel like I do. I agree. There can be little doubt amongst gamers that several varieties of player exist. Every player is unique, certainly, but it can be demonstrated with relative ease that the majority of players fit in somewhere within a matrix that is, for ease, broken down into a four axis grid of Interactive, Active, World, Player. This model has been comprehensively discussed and developed by Richard Bartle in his seminal essay "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDS and can be read online here: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm&e=9801/ I encourage everyone with an interest in understanding their gaming a little more deeply than "Log on, Kill, Log Out" to read over this document. I think with a greater understanding that there are multiple character types coming to MMORPG's with multiple expectations and needs, then the rhetoric behind "CU rawks vs CU sux" discussions could be moderated and more discussion could be had to steer the game to a compromise that everyone can live with might be had. In a nutshell, Mr Bartle identifies several player types in his essay; Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and killers, "One of the things that separates a really well-designed role playing game from a hack and slash through a single corridor is the concept of choice. Players need to be able to have choices, and those choices have to matter. A player should be able to pick and choose a course of action for his character from as wide a variety of possibilities as is feasible, and while some of these choices will be obviously stupid ones, there should not be only one option for becoming "heroic." Unfortunately, the nature of modern CRPG design seems to mandate that players kill stuff and rob it, due to the relative ease of focusing on combat only as a path of advancement, as well as the "monsteritis" syndrome that relegates all non-player characters to the role of "thing that sits around waiting for players to attack it." "The most elementary system for expanding the number of options open to a player is meaningful craft skills. This means artisan trades that players can explore that exist for some reason besides equipping "real" characters who go out to kill stuff. In a world where food is required by PC's and NPC's alike, agronomy and foraging could be important skills, as could hunting game. Indeed, a nomadic character who stays away from town would need these abilities, even if he supplements his rations by murdering other players for their salt pork and waybread. If food is not required, other skills would certainly be valuable, like leatherworking, ore refining, smithy, woodwork, bowyery... the classics, as it were. If the engine is sophisticated enough to track the construction of new buildings over time, carpentry and architecture take on new possibilities. Cartography, dowsing, herbalism, medicine, tinsmithy... trade skills can number in the hundreds easily, limited only by the complexities of code and the ability of developers to think outside of the norm when considering trade skills. "Some of the most rewarding aspects of playing an RPG for some players lies in the less quantifiable pursuits like diplomacy, the acquisition of a title, political influence, and inter-community trade. These are more difficult to simulate in a system relying on hard code, as by and large these are subjective skills, not measurable in terms of points. However, one can always start somewhere. The acquisition of titles like "Grand Master of the Four Flowers School of Swordsmanship" can be done through quests, say to prove one's worth in a contest of skill at the school, assuming one has spent enough time there to qualify for the test in the first place. This sort of contest is nice, because it doesn't confer anything but a tit
Title says it all..
e ws.asp?pf_id=220541&intDeptTab=2
/ B000067FDY/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/104-7186807-6655907?_e ncoding=UTF8&s=toys
Got banned from the SWG forums for one single post directing people here to read the article.
Anyway, players are fighting back by posting reviews to sites such as EBgames and Amazon
http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/editorial/reviews/revi
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews
I'm not sure what else can be said. We tried being constructive and giving feedback about what we liked/disliked during beta. (actually, I'd call that phase alpha... beta is in live now). They just ignored it all or gave replies like "only a small number of folks dislike the changes" and "that is not in the scope of the CU".
/con result.
Anyway, here's a short list of what kills me:
Dumbed down, slow, poorly animated combat.
Sound effects replaced with terrible alternatives (if Ben Burtt were to hear what they put in for effects they would probably be reverted ASAP).
Removal of interesting and diverse combat moves.
Removal of a one-of-a-kind skills based system.
Combat is essentially down to ranged and melee.
No care at all in regards to items people have been using and enjoying for 2 years which they can no longer even equip.
Devastation of crafting, entertainer and doctor professions (probably the best crafting system of any mmorpg)
Dismal customer relations. Complete lack of concern for their player base.
Removing constructive criticism from the forums and banning those who posted it.
And the list goes on and on and on.
The following post from the forums is probably the best summary of what has happened. It is not rude, doesn't really flame anyone, and is dead on. I'm posting it since it may be deleted soon.
Written by "Handsnake"
I think that this should be here, as it bears on the subject of this forum. Please take the time to read all of the points as well as the conclusions. Keep responses civil, please.
I have tested the CU since it hit Beta and have been following the CU since publish 7. There are a number of unexpected problems with the implementation of the CU as it stands in Live (and how it developed in beta) that do not track with the available information given over the year since it was announced.
The way the current implementation of the CU is made up has several glaring variances from the previously released info - in that there was one central item that I have identified has caused the majority of the imbalances and problems encountered with the CU.
Putting a 'level' system on top of a skill based system.
This was not in the original CU documentation released on 03/31/05, and data from public statements of sources inside the CU 'sandbox' scheme (without violating NDA) have confirmed that it was never discussed with them to the degree it was implemented.
Herein I will list the worst issues reported about the CU and show that they are all tied directly to the 'level system' implementation that was added to the functional design of the CU.
1. Crafter Death - Crafters are 1 shotted by every aggro mob on every starter planet. The fragility of crafter characters at 'combat level' 1 is extreme. Surveying alone is impossible since spawns will appear under vehicles in motion and mobs will kill crafters in less than 2 seconds.
The ability to at least run away has been removed - this makes crafters unable to function at a basic level.
The 'level' system has a damage multiplier. You will see this in further points. This damage multiplier makes anything higher level than you equivalent to instant death. Five levels above you will always kill you. Again, this point will be repeated. Since crafters will not have any combat rating unless they become a hybrid and drop pure crafting, they will always take max damage.
Furthermore, every animal will use the damage multiplier against a base value. There is no such thing, therefore, as a 'safe' enemy for crafters.
This is the result of the 'level' system.
Before, each mob had different resists and damage ranges. They had a "threat" level, which was based on how high their offensive and defensive values were. Under the old system, that was the basis of the
This threat level has NO relationship to the current 'combat level' system, no matter what the devs claim in the HOC chat. The threat level was an EVALUA
I think I am one of the few players that REALY hates the CU that is REALY trying hard to like it. It has nothing to do (for me) with the fact that it is a new game, but in ways it does. If I wanted a new game, I think I would have gone out and bought a new game. If I wanted EQ, EQ2 or WoW I would have gone out and bought one of these games and I would be playing them instead of a sad attempt at a buggy, incomplete clone of one of them. The CU was NOT ready for launch. Things as simple as misplaced animations are still inherent in what has gone live... Example: Whatever the last particle effect is that crossed your screen, will show up every time you mount and dismount a vehicle. For those not familiar with SWG we have things called Waypoints that we can set to give us directions in the world, they provide a bookmark to specific locations from the place where our houses are, to vendors we like, right down to mission waypoints that are placed by the game when we accept a mission. These are stored in a list. Well... now the list empties itself from time to time and the only way to get it back is to either, relog or to take a shuttle back and forth between different places to get them to magically reappear. Oh, while Im on the subject of MAGIC... when the heck does a doctor in a sci-fi game cast spells? The particle effects are waaaay overboard, yet they took out all the animations that gave you a sense of the speed of combat. But wait, you dont need to see any animations... the new system makes you stare blankly at a toolbar of cartoony icons as a timer ticks down so you can perform another action. It's utterly rediculous. Oh, lets talk about rediculous. How about 1/3 of the special abilities either not working at all (as in no response server-side when you try to use them) or having nearly no effect (a master doctor healing 200 hp at a time with a 30 second timer and a max of 3k hit points). I mean cmon, docs are essentially clerics now, but minus just about all the abilities that other intelligably designed RPGs have included to give clerics a purpose. I'm sure this has been said before, but FYI: SWG was NEVER meant to be a level based game! It just doesnt work as one either. The only way I can describe the feeling is this... ever been into the UO emulators? Playing on player-run shards? You know the ones where they try to emulate EQ but you get the feeling something just isn't right? And though the ppl that run these servers are amateur programmers, they do a helluva good job to try to make the experience enjoyable. SOE decided that it doesnt have to be enjoyable, just look like it could be and feed us enough hipe to try to make us believe it's still a work in progress. Well guess what? If it isn't finished down to the point that all our avatars keep resizing themselves so that my wookie friend is now shorter than my human toon then I can give two you-know-whats as to your marketing deadline. Incomplete is incomplete. Noone should have to pay to playtest. Every time one of these game companies does this they see how far they can overstep the bounds of plain-ole improvements to the realm of utterly gamebreaking. They just figure their player base will bounce back and the players (their paying customers) will just live with it. This has gone way too far. Ok, another thing. If you look at the official boards, you'll see many ppl saying how very few of us disgruntled customers actually exist and that we are all whiners. Ok, thats the boards. Go in game to some hot spots and see how many ppl are actually there! Better yet, as proof positive, go out to some of the well-known vendor houses and see if they still exist! Coronet this morning at 11am (a place usually teaming with ppl on a Saturday morning) was utterly empty! Not so much as a barker in sight. There are over 30 places available for vendor houses outside of that city where well-known vendors once set up shop, all gone! Wether you want to see it or not, ppl are leaving this game by the hundreds. Whole player run cities are becoming ghost
I personally love the CU. I would have to say that the majority of people b*tching about it are the ones that have the over powered "I win" weapons or the Billionair Armoursmiths.
The CU finally brings back the joy of group hunting, balanced economy (DEs and Tailors acually matter now), and overall more fun combat system.
The ONLY problem I have, is that they released to the live servers MUCH to early. It still has game stopping bugs (Jedi Can't level). I believe the reason behind this, is that the new expansion, RotW needs the new CU to function, and they have already set a may 5th release date for that. But they really should have kept the CU on Test Center, at least until the major bugs were gone. Bu that is easily fixed, just cancel your account until its fixed, and you're not paying for a beta =P
All in all, the CU has great potential and will breath new life into a broken game... Just need to wait a month or so until they get it up to snuff.
I've been playing on and off since two days after launch and let me say that the game was a mess then. But now...I don't know what to say but SOE really screwed up big time. When I first tested the CU on test servers, I was dissapointed that I was going to have to level from 0 just to test it out, so I just waited until it went live. Well, I logged in yesterday for all of 10 minutes. That's how annoyed I was. I am a pistoleer and they completely changed our weapon certifications and moves - all of two or three remain. The new moves are even more dull than the old ones, although disarming shot actually disarms now. My only good weapons are unusable and I spent 2 minutes to kill a green con creature. The combat system had it's problems but this system far surpases the problems of the old. Makes me miss the way combat was. Oh well, finally I can stop playing this game permanently.
Apologies for replying to the first FP, (I'll post this as a regular reply as well, for double the downmods!) Although this is probably too introspectively geeky for the regular Slashdot community, I feel it best to explain what's been going on with the Europe-Chimaera server. (One of the most populated servers.) As SWG is very much a social game, I have found myself as both head of a guild and mayor of a Player City. This is a copy of a mail I sent to both my guildmates and citizens:
---
Greetings all!
Apologies for the impersonality of this mail, I'm sending it to both my guild and the citizens of Moonlight Valley. Need to cover a lot of people.
In short, Europe-Chimaera has fallen apart. The Combat Upgrade failed on our server, specifically the item conversion. So the entire server has been rolled back to an earlier backup and the conversion run again. And again. Rather than taking a backup of the database before running the conversion in the first place, they've instead rolled back to a substantially earlier version. From almost two weeks ago!
That's two weeks of gameplay lost, because some idiot didn't bother making a backup of the latest data. Even _I'M_ not that stupid, and I'm hardly the person to be speaking about data integrity. I don't believe there's been a disaster of this magnitude in the history of modern MMORPGs. (I'd like to be proven wrong here)
This has also occurred, to a lesser extent, on the Bloodfin server, although it's disheartening to learn that they were rolled back to a more recent backup than ourselves.
The upshot of this unprofessional behaviour is that all the pre-CU preparation we've done has been for naught. Resources; Money; XP; even new characters have been removed. For a game which eschews enjoyable content in favour of mindless grinding, this has been an unmitigated disaster. Current conservative estimates from this server alone put the number of accounts cancelled at over 400 - a substantial percentage of the population. This includes quite a few 'big names' as well, not just the whiners of the month. And it may include me as well...
Naturally, there have been posts on the SWG Forums related to this absolute shambles. And yes, a few from myself pointing out the shoddy way in which the customers (i.e. the company's main source of income) have been treated. Unsurprisingly enough, we've had postings deleted left right and centre. And several forum bannings, _myself included_. The overall attitude from me and many other recently banned folk is that it's a deplorable way to run a business, but that we're still sticking around. So it seems nearsighted to start antagonising the few members of the community who wish to remain.
Despite all the good wishes spewed forth at the start of the year by various interchangeable figureheads in the SoE hierarchy, this is a return to a draconian 'Us vs. Them' policy. Failing to realise that the community can only thrive with co-operation from both developer and consumer, these mass bannings only serve to drive another nail into the coffin.
So I'm left in the unenviable position of considering whether or not I should carry on feeding money into the SoE propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, and have hopefully garnered a reputation as being a reasonably well-balanced fair speaking member of the community. However, these have been trying circumstances for all of us. Undue pressure has been placed on all of us, with very little feedback or response from the developers. Steam has needed to be blown off by both sides. To have a Customer Service Representative treat the community's rightful indignation as a joke is a dangerous precedent.
Compensation has been offered, which is an insulting 4 x XP earned for a week. This is lip service at best, and an insult to the people who are still in the game. Given the current issues with earning experience, all this will do is return 4 XP for each creature killed, instead of 1. It is no compe
Apologies for replying to the first FP, (I'll post this as a regular reply as well, for double the downmods! Feel free to mark this as Redundant, but at least you've read it! :) )
Although this is probably too introspectively geeky for the regular Slashdot community, I feel it best to explain what's been going on with the Europe-Chimaera server. (One of the most populated servers.) As SWG is very much a social game, I have found myself as both head of a guild and mayor of a Player City. This is a copy of a mail I sent to both my guildmates and citizens:
---
Greetings all!
Apologies for the impersonality of this mail, I'm sending it to both my guild and the citizens of Moonlight Valley. Need to cover a lot of people.
In short, Europe-Chimaera has fallen apart. The Combat Upgrade failed on our server, specifically the item conversion. So the entire server has been rolled back to an earlier backup and the conversion run again. And again. Rather than taking a backup of the database before running the conversion in the first place, they've instead rolled back to a substantially earlier version. From almost two weeks ago!
That's two weeks of gameplay lost, because some idiot didn't bother making a backup of the latest data. Even _I'M_ not that stupid, and I'm hardly the person to be speaking about data integrity. I don't believe there's been a disaster of this magnitude in the history of modern MMORPGs. (I'd like to be proven wrong here)
This has also occurred, to a lesser extent, on the Bloodfin server, although it's disheartening to learn that they were rolled back to a more recent backup than ourselves.
The upshot of this unprofessional behaviour is that all the pre-CU preparation we've done has been for naught. Resources; Money; XP; even new characters have been removed. For a game which eschews enjoyable content in favour of mindless grinding, this has been an unmitigated disaster. Current conservative estimates from this server alone put the number of accounts cancelled at over 400 - a substantial percentage of the population. This includes quite a few 'big names' as well, not just the whiners of the month. And it may include me as well...
Naturally, there have been posts on the SWG Forums related to this absolute shambles. And yes, a few from myself pointing out the shoddy way in which the customers (i.e. the company's main source of income) have been treated. Unsurprisingly enough, we've had postings deleted left right and centre. And several forum bannings, _myself included_. The overall attitude from me and many other recently banned folk is that it's a deplorable way to run a business, but that we're still sticking around. So it seems nearsighted to start antagonising the few members of the community who wish to remain.
Despite all the good wishes spewed forth at the start of the year by various interchangeable figureheads in the SoE hierarchy, this is a return to a draconian 'Us vs. Them' policy. Failing to realise that the community can only thrive with co-operation from both developer and consumer, these mass bannings only serve to drive another nail into the coffin.
So I'm left in the unenviable position of considering whether or not I should carry on feeding money into the SoE propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, and have hopefully garnered a reputation as being a reasonably well-balanced fair speaking member of the community. However, these have been trying circumstances for all of us. Undue pressure has been placed on all of us, with very little feedback or response from the developers. Steam has needed to be blown off by both sides. To have a Customer Service Representative treat the community's rightful indignation as a joke is a dangerous precedent.
Compensation has been offered, which is an insulting 4 x XP earned for a week. This is lip service at best, and an insult to the people who are still in the game. Given the current issues with earning exp
Many of the ideas in the design of the CU are good ones. Armor, weapon, and class balance were sorely lacking before and needed serious re-balance. Unfortunately, the current system is not only not balanced but barely playable and obviously needed at least another month in test. Many bugs that were in test remained in live besides implementation problems that never got uncovered by the grossly inadequate testing.
I play 3 fully skilled ranged combat characters (CL80) on different servers. I had different professions on each. Before the CU, they were all playable in PvE even if weaker than melee templates. Melee was never my thing, so I was happy that ranged professions might come to be at the same level as melee. Since the CU, it's been my experience that to win a fight with an NPC that can give me XP (>71CL) I have to have Master Rifleman in my template. With other templates I tried, I was always killed by even one or two 72+ NPCs.
I'd expect SOE to do some tuning after implementation, unfortunately Thunderheart recently said that it was going to get tougher for CL80. It's already too tough for CL80. Solo or grouped with a Master Swordsman/Master Doctor it's already a struggle. Big groups appear to be the way for high level characters to succeed. This means the CU doesn't support nearly the variety of play-styles that pre-CU SWG did.
The long list of conversion problems, new bugs, inclusion of horrific cybernetics for dying on planets where the Cloning Facilities don't work, are all signs that the deadline was more important than a good transition. This coupled with official forum failures, downtimes, and CSR ticket breakdown, demonstrates a complete failure of customer service by SOE who continues to keep SWG going on the shear (although fading) resemblence to Star Wars and the dedication of Star Wars fans.
I really can't think of any questions for SOE the answers to which would matter to me. Their credibility is zero. I can only hope the game survives this and that it doesn't become even less playable than it is now. Currently it certainly looks like it turned out worse than it was before even though it really needed the improvements that the CU seemed to promise.
First off, let me say - I've been playing SWG since close to launch (SantosL of the Gorath Server). Second - this game has been a wasteland for some time now. I look at my friends list of several hundred players that I met, hunted with, PvP'd with, etc., and see maybe 10 active names still. I do agree that the Combat Revamp was rushed. I think they have come along very well with it since it was initially put onto the Test Servers, and in a few weeks will be great. The only major major issue still out there has to do with XP for higher levels (in other words, the Jedi), and with uneven damage by higher level mobs. These are BUGS, people seem to think this was done intentionally... get real. The other thing, is that entertainers and other non-combatants really got the shaft. Some professions are somewhat useless now, and need some serious love or at least a full respec of skills like the combat professions got. So, to my point: SWG was a broken game. Totally, utterly broken. A player in the old system could essentially recieve stat buffs from a doctor, put on a set of armor that mitigated roughly 80-90% of damage, and solo 99% of the game. This is not fun, and many many friends of mine have left because of the lack of things to do. PvP was even worse. Certain weapons held a damage type that was not mitigated by armor (though this has recently become less of an issue, which I won't delve into), and some professions could damage an unhealable pool on a character. So this means broken weapon type + broken damage type = wins the PvP. Then of course, you have looted weapons with Damage Over Time effects that begin to creep into PvP, which were commonplace before the Combat Revamp hit. And of course the jedi... but we won't go into that area. The game was not fun to play, let's be perfectly honest. I've done every profession out there on one character or another, have stupid jedi which I dislike greatly, and really only work as a Bounty Hunter for fun. Why is the Combat Revamp necessary? The combat system was so broken (look at a profession like Pistoleer that had 2 or 3 combat specials out of 15+ that actually WORKED), and needed a complete replacement. I do not agree with changing the non-combats (crafting in Armorsmith, and entertainers), but the combat system had to go. The CU is the best thing to happen to this game, and once these bugs are fixed, I don't see any reason not to play SWG now. As is now, PvP is a blast again, Jedi are somewhat balanced now, and things in PvE are somewhat difficult again (though not impossible). So, take a step back and look at the game, fellow SWG players. If you thought the old system was good, you need to really think things over.
take off every sig for great justice
There is a very good petition already started with alot of people. It just needs more influences to assist with getting SOE's attention http://www.swgpetition.com/
I was playing SWG very actively during last 25 days. bought the game on 2nd of April SWG+JTL for about 55 GBP. It was a blast I developed my character from noob to Teras Kasi Master/Master Brawler/Some Doc on the way there I've tried a few more professions such as dancer, musician, marksman, carbiner. All these professions were fun to play. What is more important there was a vibrant community in game. I've got a lot of help from vets. They helped a lot just because I was new to the game. And it was not just advise I've got from vets, they helped with equipment, someone even tipped me 1 million credits in game.
I've got some in game friends and I joined a guild. It fas fun. It was addictive. I felt in love with this game.
What is more important it was fun to communicate with these people and this environment. By 26th of April I developed my character to Force Sensitive level and started the village quests on my way to Jedi.
Effectively they let me play 25 days for my money. Is it not a classic example of bite and switch, glorified by an EULA? BTW they actually have admitted that it is a new game now. After update there is a window popped up saying something like 'Treat it as a new game'. Too bad we do not want a new game.
Everything has changed after the update. EVERYTHING!!!
It was an intelligent game where your success depends on how good you profession development strategy, how u equip yourself and there was a variety of possible approaches to archive your goals. Not anymore. Now it is like a 'watch this icon and push this button' game. No brain required.
Now EVERYTHING depends on on only ONE thing. This is being the magic number above your head. Where it is PVP or PVE if your opponent has larger number he dies, otherwise you die. As simple as that. It is not really important anymore what profession you've got what equipment u have, it all about the magic number above your head. They call it the combat level.
Here is an example. One players is Teras Kasi Master (elite martial arts) + Master Brawler (starting me lee, but still combat prof) + Master Medic (starting doc) + 2 branches of Master Doc. This configuration now has the magic number 65. The opponent will be MasterMedic+MasterDoc+Teras Kasi Master, since Doc now is a combat profession this guy will have magic number 80. And I have tell you that 65 against 80 has no chances whatsoever. He will die in a few seconds without even scratching this new SuperPower.
It is so simple now all you need is two combat elite professions and that it it.
Virtually all professions became kind of the same, not matter what it take as long as you have to elites u r fine in combat.
Every support profession became obsolete overnight.
I am even not starting talking about long term effects of this CU on player run in game economy and all the mess ups during conversion which wiped out from player inventories billions of in game credit worth of equipment and supplies.
Too many things to mention, really I did not like anything in this game anymore. The worse change is that all my friends (not a single exception) who were online everyday during last 2 week of my gameplay, they are just not there anymore. And I understand why, I am not there too for the same reason. It is not fun anymore.
Just read what people are saying in reviews on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/ B000067FDY/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/104-4955190-1446347?_e ncoding=UTF8&s=videogames
about 150 new reviews in last 2 days, mostly extremely negative.
Note, if links to post in forums on sony website are broken it means that SOE has deleted that post. In last 2 days I have witnessed hundreds of great threads which were deleted.
Here are some experiences of a Bounty Hunter:
Combat is SLOW, boring (press one button over and over again), whole professions are now worthless (doctors), and it is NOT AT ALL Star Wars like!
The old AI has been ripped out and replaced with a "level system". Basically, everything higher level than you gets a damage multiplier based on the difference. And we are capped at level 80, while there are MANY monsters in game that aren't.
Not to mention my server (Bloodfin) got rolled back a week, causing lots of us to lose skills we frantically did before the sudden CU publish, and we aren't getting compensated.
And, anyone who DARES speak out on the CU gets banned from the forums. My main account username got a 14 day ban for a mildly critical post about customer service (or lack thereof).
Community relations? THERE ARE NONE. The Community Relations Director (Tiggs) rarely interacts with players, and forum bans anyone who disagrees with here.
I'm THROUGH with SWG, and I will never buy ANYTHING with the Sony brand name on it again. Even if they fix the game (months from now) most of us despise the game and Sony because of the horrid ABUSIVE customer service.
SWG is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Corporatism != Free Market
One guy who protested this CU mostrocity in game, was moved to space by SOE as punishment and his character spent there more than 24 hours, maybe he is still there. Note that it was a paying cutomer.
& tp=243526&poll_id=0&category_id=19&warned=y
b oard.id=cudiscussiontemp&message.id=15958
b oard.id=cudiscussiontemp&message.id=28888#M28888
see scrinshot:
http://www.imagedump.com/index.cgi?pick=setandget
and forum post (unless deleted by now)
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?
a comment from post above:
'The best part is that CSR's will log onto servers to move disgruntled players into space, but they're non-existant if someone is online and needs assistance.'
Customer relations Nazy/SOE style.
P.S. my character was silenced many times during protests too, luckily not so extreme, not that I care anymore anyway,
I have been playing Star Wars Galaxies since the beginning of December 2003, and I enjoyed my time in that game enough that I wound up with 5 accounts. I have just cancelled these accounts, one of them a (baby) jedi. There are so many things wrong with the Combat Upgrade, on so many levels, it's incredible that they pushed it through. The CU was released prematurely. SOE admitted in a letter to the community that it would go live with MAJOR bugs still in it, which would take months to iron out. Allready we have suffered rollbacks of up to 10 days. People are quitting by the hundreds. Despite what some people are claiming, the people who dislike the CU are not a 'vocal minoriy'. I lead a large guild on my home server, Bloodfin, and I have been saying farewell all week. People are extremely upset, because basically everything we worked for (for some players since beta) is being destroyed. The professions we loved to play, have been altered beyond recognition. Non-combat professions have been marginalised, resource requirements for crafters have (often dramatically) changed, weapons and armor changed beyond recognition. And the worst thing of all, is that the many thousands of post expressing concern or criticism about the CU, keep disappearing. People are getting banned from the forums for speaking out, our community profession representatives (the Correspondents) get fired when they dare speak against the CU. I signed the petition on www.swgpetition.com. I tested for many hours on testcenter, and I did not like what I saw. I took the exit poll, filled in the forum poll each day (only one vote possible per account, by the way, so no way to cheat with the 75%/80% saying they absolutely detested the CU). And STILL SOE claims we are all happy and that we are enjoying the CU. It simply is not true. I will repost here a brief (and incomplete) summary of problems people have expressed with the CU, and I hope it will give you some clarity on the matter. 1) the loss of system messages for xp and other events make it harder to gauge what you are doing 2) the effects added to special moves, mounting bikes etc. are distracting to the point of causing some people nausea and/or headaches and would fit better in a fantasy game then in SWG 3) Skill enhancing tapes are mostly rendered useless, meaning a lot of people's investments are lost 4) The output of damage versus the incoming damage ratio. 5) Loss of existing crates of items, which did not convert and will not be reimbursed 6) The icons, which are distracting and immersion breaking to a lot of people 7) The way in which there are now only 2 real combat professions, Melee and Ranged (every melee profession can use all melee weapons, every ranged profession can use all ranged weapons, as these are now combat level dependent, barring a handful of 'iconic' weapons. 8) the way in which doctors and cm's are turned into clerics and anticlerics (no physical medicines needed) is counter to the Science Fiction theme 9) clothing decays into rags in the course of just one fight 10) weapon certification changes mean it is actually a lot harder for people who are mid-levelling 11) the necessitating of grouping all the time means people who like to do things solo are basically told to take their money elsewhere (there are actually a LOT of people who like solo adventuring) 12) removing the combat role (mind buffing) from entertainers basically makes them feel useless 13) transformation of all non-combat professions in what the Tailor forum calls 'one-hit wonders' (anything and everything WILL kill you, since you are combat level 1) 14) the nerfing of several crafting professions (CM, Doc, Armorsmith, and to an extent Weaponsmith) into cookie-cutter professions 15) the complete marginalisation of anyone who does not have 2 elite combat professions 16) the level system itself, with damage output by critters depending on your combat level, which makes it so that anything that is a few levels above you is guaranteed to kill you. 17) the dumbing down of the combat system. In PVE, combat level is al
There were reports on the Europe-Chimaera board that innocent bystanders who were just in the vicinity were getting forcibly relocated too.
I'd post a link to the thread, but it's been deleted.
Little men with big erasers.
First, my background: I was a SWG subscriber from launch, after having joined at the beginning of beta 3, until the Jedi revamp, which went live in June 04. After mastering all 32 original professions to unlock my Jedi in May 04, I found the Jedi revamp completely intolerable, and I canceled my account on the day the revamp went live. I then renewed my subscription to try JtL in October 04 and have maintained it since, although this week, post-CU, was the first time I'd engaged in any sort of non-space activity since I canceled last June.
That said, my initial impression of the CU is that it is a good thing (will be a good thing, with a more complete balancing effort, and assuming that something is done about the Jedi, which have been completely overlooked and thus rendered utterly unplayable in large numbers by this patch) for the core game behind SWG but possibly a bad thing for what SWG has become. By that I mean that the CU has addressed many of flaws present in SWG's design since its release, but by this point in time, the only people still playing SWG were those who either had no objection to those flaws or who had made their peace with those flaws. In my opinion, the most glaring of these flaws included the presence of a few dramatically overpowered professions, most notably TKA and rifleman; the general overpowering of all professions so that very few PvE encounters were challenging to any character with at least one elite mastery; the rudimentary combat system, which consisted of little more than pressing a single hotkey, corresponding to the character's best attack, a dozen or so times and then waiting for either the target to drop dead or for those initial attacks to execute, so that more may be queued - this combat system was so primitive and one-dimensional that it is laughable to suggest it is even possible for it to have been dumbed down; the poorly considered HAM system, which led to some attacks (head shot, head hit, mind shot, eye shot, etc.) being considerably more powerful than others by simple virtue of being the only attacks which target the nearly-unhealable mind pool; the knockdown / dizzy combinations, which could effectively freeze characters in a supine position, thus subject to greatly increased damage taken, for extended lengths of time, and which applied equally to NPCs and creatures and so was in itself responsible for a great deal of the PvE imbalances; the wildly unbalanced doctor buffs, which made even new characters close to invincible and capable of a nearly endless series of special attacks, in addition to rendering meaningless for all the penalties for wearing armor; the wildly unbalanced and practically indefensible combat medic poisons and diseases; the irrationality of some combat professions requiring greater prerequisites than others, yet not being proportionally more powerful in return. All of these were glaring weaknesses in SWG to my eyes, yet many people continued to enjoy the game in spite of, perhaps because of, the presence of these elements, so it is understandable that these people would not like the overhaul of SWG as it stands.
My character was a level 54 master pikeman / master brawler / novice medic (in addition to master merchant) when I first logged in after the CU, and, after spending half an hour figuring out what all the new attacks were meant to do, I found combat to be immediately more interesting than under the old system, although more detail is needed, as some attacks meant to act as debuffs (leg hit, for example) aren't giving any feedback at all, so it's difficult to tell whether the debuff effect even took hold, not to mention what exactly the debuff did, if it did work. This could simply be the effect of having new abilities to try; whether combat remains interesting will hinge on how useful these debuffs and state changes prove to be, as if not, players will quickly return to pressing the same button repeatedly, which at least could conceivably be set as the auto-attack under the new system. With no armor, I found single targets in
Here is a post I came across just mere hours before it's deletion and the poster silenced,b oard.id=Bloodfin&message.id=462297)
... and it continues....
(Deleted link http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?
I realize that by posting this I am going to get banned, and that this post will be deleted, just as it happened to Fury and his post earlier today. So, all I ask is that people take the initiative on this information... and screen shot and and pass it on to the next person that is willing to take a ban for the good of the community and game. Please keep this post alive, so that as many people can see it, and more evidence can be documented on the degree the devs/moderators are willing to go to silence the out cry coming because of their actions or lack there of. Most important of all is to do as Fury said and make your mailings contructive and mature.
Pass the info along in game, and on forums. I will post this on every board possible in time increments until I am removed from the community.
Thank you!
Furybaka wrote:
I have spent a while today speaking with people from Lucas Arts and they have advised me to document all information possible regarding our opinions and how the player base as a majority is being ignored by the devs.
I have been asked to get to any and all players who feel that the dev team is not being truthful and are completely out of touch for what the game needs to contact Lucas Arts with constructive emails and US Mail. They seem to be very interested in the fact that whenever a player has spoken out against the CU that the posts are edited and usually deleted by CSRs. Apparently, the Armor Correspondent was demoted for speaking the truth about the CU and not the propaganda the devs force them to spew???
When I explained how the dev chat completely twisted the truth about the forum polls (where they stated they are getting more positive every day when they are getting more negative everyday in all actuality), they were very interested and wanted to know what the daily forums polls were indicating.
I am sending both an email and a postal letter to Lucas Arts in hopes that they will take an active role in monitoring what Sony is doing to their product and hopefully stop the fiasco that is taking place
Furybaka of Bloodfin
Emails to Lucas Arts should go to: Techsupp@LucasArts.com please make them CONSTRUCTIVE and professional)
Real Mail needs to be sent to: (They specifically requested that we send them to the generic address and not to a specific dept)
Lucas Arts
PO Box 10307
San Rafael, CA 94912
I have been a Star Wars fan since the early 90's
The point is Customer service is a big issue as well as the CU
In addition to all the comments above, SOE failed to make appropriate backups of the players database before they deployed the CU. Bloodfin server was originally supposed to be deployed on Monday the 25th. They announced on Monday that it wouldn't go until Tuesday the 26th. During this time, people were grinding like crazy to complete templates before the CU hit, as we all knew it would be very difficult to grind in the CU. SOE deploys, we have the CU for a day, then it crashes. They come back and tell us that they have to roll back to Monday the 25th. Essentially, everyone who advanced lost everything they did. Another server had to be rolled back to April 22nd. SOE's lame gift back for these issues is a week of 4x experience, which doesnt help as its near impossible to grind anything right now, and those of us who are templated, it does nothing for at all. I was banned along with many others for posting in the SOE forums, questioning their customer service practices as well as their lack of preparedness for this rollback. I have cancelled 11 accounts now. I have 1 active which is my extremely nerfed Jedi. Before rollback I had one hundred extra damage on my saber. Post rollback its been nerfed to almost a vibro knuckler. Jedi are now one of the worse classes to have. Frankly most of us think SOE is doing this on purpose to either abandon the game, its player base or for some other reason. At the moment, their actions are unfathomable.
Others have posted much of what is wrong with the new version, there's lots more wrong with it but I'm not going to beat a dead horse. To be fair there were some improvements, just not nearly as many or as significant as what got broken. What got broken was the entire game. Some though may still like the sound of the new system and consider buying it. They shouldn't. Star Wars Galaxies is no longer an MMORPG, now it's just an ORPG. Numbers were already down significantly because it's been out a few years and people move on to other games over time. Now they're on they're way towards 10% of peak subscribership with no sign that the death spiral of this once great game will slow down. It's no longer multiplayer as everyone is leaving turning player cities into ghost towns and the only thing massive is Sony's disgrace for destroying a once great game.
I have played on the Intrepid Server since Launch. I was part of the beta test.
The CU, in it's CURRENT form, has destroyed everything fun and challenging about the game. The CU has actually made MOST aspects of the game easier, if you have already mastered your professions, but made the rest of the game almost impossible if you are just starting out or not a combat class.
The CU is an example of sloppy coding written by irresponsible people. The sheer volume of collateral damage done to the game, in terms of bugs, proves that it was no where near ready for launch.
Anyone who has actually played the game, both before and after the CU, can plainly see this. The only people in favor of it are those that stand outside the starports PVPing, and never actually experience the game.
Ok, before this stupid upgrade, the game played rather nicely.... i thought so anyways.....things i didnt like were the fact that if soe actually talked to ANY star wars fan at ALL....they would find that nobody wants to play a dancer/ musician/ crafter/ wookie washing dishes to build points for his character....people played these things because they HAD to and had NO other choice. Another sad thing is that it took like 6 months of a senseless grind to get to play a jedi , but anyway, the main thing was that the game played and ran very well. The morons at soe said they beta tested this stupid combat downgrade and i feel the testers are either retarded....on crack....or have never played a game before in their life. 1...the combat is so slow it is boring as hell to watch....watching paint dry would be a more exciting experience to me. a noob would take 3 months to get to a master profession because the experience and fighting is so horribly slow.... 2...its extremely laggy and unplayable now, cant figure out why because there is hardly anyone on the server now after most everyone quit. 3...instead of balancing things like they should have( making a lower damage weapon do more damage....making a weak character have more defenses...etc...) they completely redo the ENTIRE combat and armor system and severely nerf EVERYTHING so a master of 3 professions trying to kill a lair takes half the night now for no experience or cash. 4...the new icons they have make you want to gouge your eyes out of your head because they are annoying. 5... buy world of warcraft or guild wars because this game is completely ruined now.
I think the comments that most poignantly express the issues with the Combat upgrade are as follows:
1. SWG is now virtually a new game. Those who have invested countless hours into their characters now feel that all that time was wasted. They are prevented from continuing in the same direction in many instances. They/we did not wish for a new game, or we would have quit playing and tried another one. SWG was a GREAT game.
2. The new icons are cartoonish, too large, and distracting. Sometimes simplicity is truly valuable. I enjoyed the minimalistic icons because they allowed me to focus on the graphic scenery which is phenomenal. The new icons crowd the screen and cannot be adjusted. It would be acceptable even if there were a game option installed where those who wish to use the old icons may do so.
3. Many attacks/moves were combined or changed, and often reduced a players attack abilities from 10 down to, in my case as a Teras Kasi Artist, about 5 or six. I enjoyed the variety of attacks I could use. This made each fight an original one, requiring strategy to use the most powerful combination of attacks without using up action and mind points. This number would have increased as I gained more XP, but...
4. The ability to gain XP was drastically changed so that solo groups and small groups are severely handicapped. I understand that some of this had to do with bugs and will be amended, but overall, the number of kills required to level is now nearly impossable to achieve by anyone who does not play 24-7.
5. Those us us who have spent a large amount of time over a period of months, and in my husband's case, years, to obtain certain armor and weapons are now unable to use them at all, or until they reach master...which, again, would take eons under the current system of gaining XP.
6. Finally, this upgrade was rushed, and not well planned. I understand that these upgrades were probably necessary for the release of the Rage of the Wookies which is coming shortly, but in that case, the Devs truly should have postponed the release of Rage in order to solidify and test the details of the upgrade. Why wouldn't a player switch to a new game rather than continue playing on and paying for what was basically a pre-beta version of another game?? I believe gamers would have been more forgiving of a time extension than this sudden change, and quality reduction. As far as our accounts were concerned, we cancelled our pre-orders immediately until we could see if the upgrade was going to be worth it. By rushing to release their product, they have basically ruined its appeal.
Please outsource this game in hands of a competent company which knows how to run a MMPRPG.
Do you ever start a letter without apologizing? You've apologized both on this post and the attached letter. The thing you're apologizing for here is stupid.
Relax and stop assuming everybody is angry at you for what you've done. Live a little.
And don't take the fact that this is a critical post as yet another reason to apologize.
SOE also "upgraded" the forum software on CU day. The forums have been bugged and stuff like everyone appearing to be in your guild and on your server, etc.
They just crashed.
Couple that with the fact that Bloodfin and Chimaera servers got hit with rollbacks because they DIDNT BOTHER TO DO A BACKUP before database conversion, and you know what one huge problem is at SOE...
THEY DONT HAVE COMPETENT IT PEOPLE!
Corporatism != Free Market
Since SOE has forced us to beta test their new game. I think it is not that bad and we all should send them invoices for services rendered as beta testers. My rate is 50$/hour. Thank you.
All SOE has done is put in the EQ2 Code so they can get rid of special coders, many upon many of errors bugs ingame are straight out EQ2 Errors, they say EQ2 ON THEM. This is SOEs way of saving money, making the eq, WoW, etc. players happy, people will play this game, 12 year olds, for those of us who have been playing this game for over a year with multiple accounts are straight out canceling. This game is simply not Star Wars Galaxies, I have no desire in the least to play. They have dumbed this game down beyond belief and the Combat Upgrade, or Combat Downgrade as it should be called is plainly B.S. No one who has been playing this game for more then a month can truly say they like this unless they have active EQ accounts who are trying out SWG now and again. Remove the CU or lose your game. That is all I have to say to SOE.
This is something some people I was chatting with the other day told me... Gets nuked from the forums every time it's posted.
When you cancel because of the Combat Downgrade, call your credit card company and ask that the charge for your last month be reversed.
It will cost Sony $35 for each person who does it.
Corporatism != Free Market
If a player's just starting out, its good. If you're a vet, you're pretty much starting over as a n00b anyways. What I'd really like to know, is why SOE refuses to listen to the player base. There have been countless posts on the official forums from players voicing their issues with the system, there is a petittion at http://www.swgpetittion.com/ with over 12000 signutures asking why this was pushed. I for one have tried it, let me share my experiences. My main is a Master Doc/Master Teras Kasi, I'll deal with each one seperatly. The last time I actually gained XP on Doc was, 15 minutes before the server came down. No more working FS Senses on this character. With TK, last time I gained was 25 minutes before server down. Now, I personally enjoy soloing when ever I can, hence the template, in order to even think about continuing to effectively solo, I have to respec to ranged. Personally, not interested, I went MD/TKM for the up close combat, if I had been interested in ranged, I would gone Carbine in the first place. Aside from that though, lets look at the communication, the last post from a dev in the CU forums, that I see at least, was late on the 27th of April. The only thing I have noticed from SOE staff since then, is that posts critical of, or out right condeming the CU being deleted.
No im not going there yet. I still have a few of the 656 friends that was on my friends list left in the game. As i stated in my email to SOE, i will be the last one of them to hit the cancel button, but hit it I will when they are all gone. Ive played this game since August, 2003. While it has always been buggy as heck, after this week it is gone. Its not the game that we all came to know and love in one form or the other. Musicians/Dancers cant be watched. Doctors cant heal/buff like before, and im not talking bout the uber buffs 2900+ 3.5+hours, im talking bout the simple ones, 2200-2500 2.5 hours, im talking bout healing health and action black bars that you were booted out of the game with the day they started this downgrade. Fencers now have a knockdown skill (yippee) except it doesnt last as long as it takes for you to be able to hit with the next skill. Crafters are whacked out, some are learning the new skills, while others who had millions of credits worth of weapons, powerups, meds, etc left on their vendors that didnt switch over have no clue. Think thats the biggest problem with this downgrade, is that they didnt even see fit to upgrade their own holo-cran (in game manual) to tell us how to use all of this junk. It took me almost 2 hours the first day we could log in to even be able to move, because due to the new system i had used up 2 many skill points that just 2 days before i had extra ones to play with. Many have lost houses, millions in credits, stuff that we had been collecting to start a VET Museum up. We have lost waypoints, and cant even find harvestors that were placed the day of the downgrade. Yeah this game is now way different. Oh, yeah and SOE has out of the goodness of their hearts offered to double xp this next week for those of us that has stayed in apprectiation. YAY!!!! That means that i will get 2 xp for everything i kill instead of the 1 that i get now. Yes i would like it back the way it was, even with the bugs that it had, and the inbalance at least we could play it, we knew what we were doing, unlike the people that pushed this downgrade out way to early.
This is awful. When SOE says fast comat it is the complete opposite, it's slower than a snail. The CU icons look as though they hired a 3 year old on crack to draw them. Getting XP is horrific and not enjoyable, I had more fun throwing rocks at a pole. The NPC's kill everyone and getting the XP sux since if you are a vet like me and can hardly find anything at your level and end up fighitng something weaker r stronger than you, you will most likly get 0 xp. The person who made this CU should be fired and everyone else on the CU team too. It's nothning like WoW or EQ2... its worst. Everything about this CU Sux and if SOE were smart... they'll get rid of this because if they don't many gaming magazines and shows will review this... it will get the lowest score ever and people wont buy it. So they better give us the old system. So in conclusion, if you are thinking of buying SWG... DON'T or else you'll end up making SOE think that thier CU is actually good and not what it really is.
me and my wife had 6 accounts played for a year and beta tested the game. The changes where never asked for, the dumbing down of the game is horable, all my accounts and not only canceled but deleted.
server: Bloodfin
http://www.nexusguild.org/
I've been with SWG since it launched and followed the early betas before launch. I've also taken part in the JTL Beta and recently been invited to Rage of the Wookies Beta which is not looking good so far. I'm 40 and been online gaming for about 8 years. Something one must firmly understand about SWG to grasp the scope of this. Nothing is created, bought or sold without players. You can't buy a gun unless a crafter player crafted one. You can't buy armour unless a crafter player made some. You can't buff your health unless a doc buffs you with buff packs a crafter made! Oh and all items take perminant damage and decay over time. Character Growth: SWG was fairly balanced. There was something for all levels to kill to gain advancement and well practiced techniques to grind up to useful professions where you could start to have fun. Start out killing Ragtag bafoons, then go to the Storm Trooper spawn and kill there for a day or so and before you know it you have a viable character you can go fight with. Now you could begin you 111,000,000 grind towards Jedi intitiate which would take no less then 10 weeks. Crafters and other service professions could also master a defensive profession to keep fend off attackers as they collected resources from their harvesters or searched for new sources of resources to craft with. All creatures had a "Fixed" nature. They where a certain toughness, certain health and did a certain damage. These stats never changed. They even gave a certain amount of XP. Since CU all creatures an players are centered around a Combat Level. The highest character level I've seen or heard about is level 80. Hunting 1 point below your level means 10% less XP but now the creatures damage to you scales with their level. So you can roll missions at a mission termminal and get missions at or near your level and although they're the exact creatures a novice might hunt with the same stats, they do damage at a level comparable to yours regardless of your ability to take the damage. Thats fine for mission terminals but these creatures also spawn randomly in the wild and they're everywhere. Since CU I saw a pack of Huurton Howlers which used to be well below me, at level 182 in the wild. This should be instant death for ANY single player out on his own or even a small group. Crafters and docs cannot continue their professions. So, weapon production slowed now, Armour production the same. Doc buffs are now useless if you can even find a doctor to buff you! Fighting unbuffed was unheard of, now it's you have no choice. Combat: PVP is reportedly more fun but Player vs environment is awful and this is where grinding to grow your character is done. Previously you had 3 major stats (Health, Action & Mind) with 2 supporting stats each for a regen rate and a reduction rate for damage or usage. Force was the only stat that didn't have associated secondaries. You would buff your stats up and start hunting. With a reasonable buff it was fairly easy for a master to manage his stats while fighting multiples although it was also easy to die if you werent careful. When buffed you could stay in the fight as long as the enemy and echange blows hit for hit until one of you died. But an enemy could attack your weaker stat kije your mind and focus damage on that area which in the case of mind, couldnt be healed up with a heal stim. Loss of any major stat meant incapacitation and usually death. Since CU, you have 1 health stat with no sub stats. Stats are assigned to you rather then you deciding how they lay out and your stats grow as your skill grows making even harder for low combat level characters. Action and mind are drained at a dramatic rate for each attack you use. A master Jedi can barely perform 4 moves before hes out of action and the creatures are now hitting once per second. Since theres no crafters and docs have no good buff packs to buff your regen rates, your pretty much toast. Were you used to take on 5 critters at once before, 1 is a challenge now and the nest will spawn 2 to 4. Creature damage has increased dramat
My uber character which i spent a year on grinding had the best of weapons the best of armor, all the nicest gear. I was the fastest most powerful rifleman on the server.
Then post revamp i come back totally nerfed.
Its like Sony nerfed the entire game into non existance. The interface is terrible. Combat is awful. There is no experience unless you are grouped. Soloing is out. High end content is out such as geno caves, deathwatch bunker etc.
The game sucks now. I want my money back and I want my 60525025 hours i spent grinding and wasting time with SOE back.
Im cancelling my account.
The end.
Just stared writing and ended up with this, lol.
Background:
The CU was first mentioned in November 2003 by SOE. Back then it was called the Combat Balance. They called for a three phase plan to balance combat. Phase 1 (creature balancing) went live in December 2003. Phases 2 and 3 never happened. For the next 15 months 70-80% of all combat issues were answered with "we will take care of that in the Combat Balance". In the meantime, the game grew more and more out of balance as players made better and better equipment, SOE introduced very unbalanced loot weapons, and players just got better at it. In the beginning of 2005, SOE announced that it was now called the Combat Upgrade and it was coming in the next couple months. An Alpha program was setup whereby a limited number of players selected by the various profession correspondents (also players) would get to test the CU and help SOE adjust it. Everyone else could apply to Beta test it.
What happened:
The Alpha players were never allowed to test. Period. There are rumors they saw design documents that looked nothing like what eventually went live. Closed Beta was tossed out and replaced with public testing on the TC servers. SOE announced that the CU would go live on May 5th, the same day as the Rage of The Wookies expansion.
The Issues:
CU was moved to live a week early on April 27th. It clearly was not ready for production deployment. Even the most ardent SOE defenders will concede this. Two server upgrades were botched so bad that those servers have been rolled back to a point several days before the conversion to the CU (one of them over a week). People playing on those servers lost days of xp, loot, etc.. I think the clearest example of how ready it wasn't is the fact that SOE has patched 2 (3 by Sunday May 1st) times since CU live. SOE is a for profit enterprise, and they are not going to pay that kind of overtime unless they know things are really screwed up and they are in danger of losing a substantial portion of their player base. There are countless bugs that were duly noted on TC but were allowed to go live anyway. This is has been SOEs pattern since launch two years ago. They ask players to test on the TC environment, and then ignore their bug reports with a will fix it later mentality.
What was delivered as the CU was lightyears beyond what was ever asked for. To date, SOE refuses to explain why instead of fixing the game, they decided to completely re-write the combat system. Speculation has centered on a) re-use of the EQ2 code base to save money and development hours b) making the game look like every other MMORPG out there to make inroads into their customer base, or c) dumbing the game down so that it can be ported to a console (SOE has denied this one, but various retail sites are currently showing it as coming this summer).
Specific Game Issues:
All MOBs and players are now level based. Max player level is 80. How hard the MOB hits you is based on your level vs it's. Anything more than 3-5 levels above you is going to murder you in short order. Pure Crafters are level 1 and are not allowed to wear armor. Thus they are in serious jeopardy anywhere outside a town. Where they are required to get to get resources to craft. When this issue was pointed out to SOE there response was hire player bodyguards or wear an energy damage shield. When it was pointed out to SOE that all creatures do Kinetic damage and due to server lag will spawn right on top of you and attack inside of 2 seconds (thus killing said poor little crafter), they had no response. They still have not addressed the issue.
The aforementioned level system is making it next to impossible to grind a reasonable amount of xp. Anything that is more than 10 levels less than you gives 1 xp (effectively zero). NPCs at your level are next to impossible to defeat. MOBs at your level take minutes to kill and then you get to wait around for minutes more healing. Masters boxes now cost 1 Million XP.
ORIGINALLY POSTED BY "AschMhaRhee" ON APRIL 5th (note that the font in game has actually been changed so they at least fixed one thing she asked for)
I would like to preface this post with some of my real life professional credits so that you don't think that i'm approaching this from a smack talking 15 year old script kiddie perspective. I have been and in many cases still am a:
-Senior Graphic Designer
-Brand/Continuity Designer/Director
-UI Designer
-Information Architect
-Senior Game Tester/Game Team Director
-Game Designer/Developer/Programmer
-Game Content Designer/Director
-Content Manager/Director
-Technical Support Staff/Director
-Customer Service Staff/Director
-Technical Writer/Documentation Specialist/Senior Editor
So, that being said....
High Points:
... TBD
Low Points:
New Icons: We did not ask for our beautiful realistic game to be turned into the "My Little Pony - Disco Edition". This is one of several show stoppers for me. Not only did you put these new icons in a game where they have no business being (they are 100% genre-inappropriate not to mention unclear and distracting).. but you force us to rely on staring at them to function. Why are you punishing us? I would have fired you if you were on my staff. SOLUTION: Here's a thought.. put the old icons.. no wait.. the whole old interface back in so we can test COMBAT. that's what we're supposed to be testing, right? Isnt' this the Combat Upgrade? If you insist that we need these new animated icons.. please take the old icons and give them a color treated state instead of these new noisy ones. This could be simply accomplished by adding a sharp contrasting color to the outer rim of the icon while it is in state and a fade of a lighter color to indicate the timer... but the timers on the icons are a bad idea anyway... see the section on the combat que for more.
New Font: This bulky crowded font is ruining the immersion of the game and it is very hard to read around. With this new font, I can't read spatial bubbles or other items in the game that are necessary to be legible in order to play effectively. The old font was perfectly chosen by someone who understood UI Design and usability. SOLUTION: Put the old font back.. no wait.. put the whole old interface back so we can test COMBAT.
New HAM system/look: I've died now several times because there is no contrast on the ham bar when i'm losing health. The old ham bar is much better as even peripheral vision the stark white indicating damage gives some sort of cue that something is amiss. The eye catching white bit allows me to focus on what's happening in the middle of my screen and only when the sharp contrast of the white showing catches my eye do I need to stop looking at the breathtaking action/scenery and look at the interface. (this is what a good UI designer strives for, btw: an interface that is unnoticed except when needed). Also, If I were even slightly visually impaired , I can imagine that I would likely find the lack of contrast to be unplayable. If you are color blind (1 in 5 men in the world are btw) and you can not see the color red.. you can not see 2 colors of red... you only see whatever color it appears as to you and that is generally seen as a single color unless there is some serious contrast. The contrast is really really important. That's why Stop Signs are Red and White.. if they were Red and Red half the population wouldnt be able to read them. SOLUTION: Put the old one back.. are you sensing a pattern here? I am.
Lack of Combat Que: Ok so i'm not sure who said we didnt want a combat que anymore but here's my experience with the new game. This actually sums up my entire combat experience wi
This post from SOE's forums was originally posted by "Handsnake".
/con result.
I believe it gives excellent insight into not just what is broken in the new version of Galaxies, but also why:
I think that this should be here, as it bears on the subject of this forum.
Please take the time to read all of the points as well as the conclusions. Keep responses civil, please.
I have tested the CU since it hit Beta and have been following the CU since publish 7.
There are a number of unexpected problems with the implementation of the CU as it stands in Live (and how it developed in beta) that do not track with the available information given over the year since it was announced.
The way the current implementation of the CU is made up has several glaring variances from the previously released info - in that there was one central item that I have identified has caused the majority of the imbalances and problems encountered with the CU.
Putting a 'level' system on top of a skill based system.
This was not in the original CU documentation released on 03/31/05, and data from public statements of sources inside the CU 'sandbox' scheme (without violating NDA) have confirmed that it was never discussed with them to the degree it was implemented.
Herein I will list the worst issues reported about the CU and show that they are all tied directly to the 'level system' implementation that was added to the functional design of the CU.
1. Crafter Death - Crafters are 1 shotted by every aggro mob on every starter planet. The fragility of crafter characters at 'combat level' 1 is extreme. Surveying alone is impossible since spawns will appear under vehicles in motion and mobs will kill crafters in less than 2 seconds.
The ability to at least run away has been removed - this makes crafters unable to function at a basic level.
The 'level' system has a damage multiplier. You will see this in further points. This damage multiplier makes anything higher level than you equivalent to instant death. Five levels above you will always kill you. Again, this point will be repeated.
Since crafters will not have any combat rating unless they become a hybrid and drop pure crafting, they will always take max damage.
Furthermore, every animal will use the damage multiplier against a base value. There is no such thing, therefore, as a 'safe' enemy for crafters.
This is the result of the 'level' system.
Before, each mob had different resists and damage ranges. They had a "threat" level, which was based on how high their offensive and defensive values were. Under the old system, that was the basis of the
This threat level has NO relationship to the current 'combat level' system, no matter what the devs claim in the HOC chat.
The threat level was an EVALUATION of an existing mob.
A 'combat level' is a MODIFICATION of a base value mob "angry bag" put into whatever 'skin' is appropriate, i.e, a level 34 dune lizard is the same as a level 34 peko peko.
The new COMBAT LEVEL defines the offensive and defensive values - not the other way around.
This is an important distinction, and is critical to understanding the conclusion about the combat level system and why it was added to the CU at such a late date.
2. XP gains and lack of same: A significant number of people are finding odd results from attacking mobs slightly below their level and higher - as in getting little to no XP. The response of the devs is to have people focus on just fighting even leveled mobs.
The real question is: Why was the XP variance put in the CU in the first place?
XP gains or rates of gains was NEVER addressed as a concern in the Combat Upgrade. It did not affect combat in any way, shape, or form in PVP, nor were there "problems" about the flavor of combat that were caused by XP being gained by anything you defeated.
It was never an issue at all.
However, in 'level' based systems, the paradigm is that LEVEL DETERMINES
I've been playing on the Tempest server for 2 years. I've had 2 accounts that whole time and I have unbelievably loved the game.
Sure, it had it's flaws and bugs but it's appeal was that it was unique. The combat, skill trees and crafting were different than anything out there.
Things need to be balanced though. Nobody denies that. What SOE has done is not balance. It is a complete replacement of the current system and it screws long time customers over. I would say that abotu 75% of everything I own in game is now garbage. That is alot of wasted time.
I don't know what happened at SOE that could get the CU to be changed like this but I think that some head of the company came along and said "WoW is the most popular MMO out there. Make our game like it NOW"
Anyone who has played WoW knows that it is not the combat that makes WoW fun. It is the Content and Polish of the game. 2 things that SWG lacked (and even more so now)
If you check out http://www.swgpetition.com/ you will see that 12 thousand people have signed it. Factoring in trolls and people with more than 1 account, I would guess that 15 thousand people have cancelled. That's alot of monthly income for a company.
It is just idiotic that SOE has treated their customers this way. We've been telling them for 2 years about what is wrong with the game and they have decided to just go in the other direction.
SOE even had an "alpha team" of players and correspondents that were setup to help them figure out what the biggest problems were and how to fix them. Basically a bunch of brainstorming between the Devs and Users. 2 months ago they shut that all down and went with the current CU. It was a major slap in the face to the correspondants that were trying to help. The Devs ask for all this input and then severed all ties. Most of the correspondants quit after that. And when I say most, I mean 90%.
I won't get into the CU too much but it is a completely new system. You get to "respec" your character and your items were automatically converted. The respec is full of bugs and takes a good pre-CU character and turns them into a gimp. Uber legendary items have been converted into garbage that a novice craftsman can make better versions of. I have never been big on loot and items but I know of ALOT of people that spent millions on items that are not worthless.
What else? Combat is now boring as hell. And bugs... oh, so many bugs.
Here is an analogy of what has happened. Say you bought a tire from a company. It's just a tire and does the job. You let the company know what can be better about the tire; you spend hours with them in meetings and on the phone explaining that maybe the tred needs to change a bit. 2 months later the tire company send you a square tire. What are you supposed to do with a square tire?
SOE, this is not how you treat customers. Idiots.
I suggest packing up and moving on to a company that cares more about the game than the money. I recommend Turbine. They are making D&D online, and Middle Earth Online. They have an Asheron's Call 2 expansion pack coming out on May 4. If you want to read about it, here's the homepage. http://ac2.turbinegames.com/ It also is having upgrades to some major game systems, but player testers have generally shown approval for the changes.
Everybody knows this. The game is a horrible failure and a disgrace to the Star Wars franchise.
But what do I care...
Bye bye Chilly. This CU killed the game. And as usual, the game went "live" full of bugs. So no use TRY the game even.
It's basically a completely new game. SOE made a huge mistake, unless their intentions are to cancel their contract with LucasArts. Gameplay is slow and boring, and you have to stare at the toolbar the entire time. My guild has made jokes that the CU should be called "SWG: Toolbar" where the most exciting action happens in your toolbar. And now everyone is running around in padded armor and bone armor instead of composite armor. SWG is truly becoming "an empire divided" with the majority of the "empire" running with their hands in their back pockets to make sure their wallets are still there. Way to go, SOE! You ruined a great game!
I tested the combat upgrade throughout its testing and found it to be very unbalanced and boring. Sony Online Entertainment continued to ignore 80% of us who were tell them this. Their Director of Customer Relations was quoted as saying that the people who were complaining were those who had exceptional weapons or wanted to solo Kray Dragons. On none of my 3 characters did I have exceptional weapons and only hunted dragons a couple of times and only in a group.
Starwars Galaxies was unique init combat system and style of play (both fighting and crafting) and it all suited the genre. Yes it needed a lot of tuning to sort out some of the anomalies that developed over time (many caused by SOE themselves - they introduced exceptional weapons, they made buffs as strong as they were, they made it so the only armour to have was composite).
Now SWG is an 'also ran' amongst games and with the fiasco concerning a failed upgrade on the Chimaera galaxy, and they hadn't taken a backup! so we returned to 2 weeks earlier. This just shouts of total incompetence. What was worse was they announced the roll back and didn't respond to the hundreds of concerns customers were raising for over 12 hours.
To me the Combat Upgrade has ruined a game that was unique by making it the same as every other.
The most important thing in this game is our posessions, our virtual property. Posessions are so important, that they even get sold on ebay for hundreds of dollars. However, much of our property after the upgrade is no worthless. Our exceptional weapons have basically been averaged and turned into junk all in the name of balance. Our armor is no different than anyone elses, Armorsmiths cannot even customize their armor like they did, their experimentation was dumbed down (don't ask me why they did that). I had a doctor with resources I have been collecting since day one, I cannot even craft with him, I have a different role now, and all my resources are worthless. Everything that I own is no longer special. I have spent countless hours becoming the best rifleman on the server I play at (tarquinas). I had special clothing that enabled me to be powerful, more powerful than the next rifleman, and now all this clothing is all worthless. My weapon I spent millions on is worthless, and nothing special. The game where I felt special and loved to play, well I am no longer special, and I no longer love playing either. I could get used to the new game, I really could, if the people weren't leaving. This game is pushing everyone out. My best friend in the game is quitting, damn you sony! She is an armorsmith, and so upset all her resources are worthless. That was all she did in this game! Why did they have to nerf her? They didn't ever listen to any constructive posts, they were all deleted! More than anything, I was paying attention to the chef, armorsmith, entertainers, and doctor forums rather than my own rifleman forum. I just was so damn upset what they were doing to the crafters (making resource requirements unimaginable, making them so weak, making their crafting so dumb a monkey could do and taking away their individuality as crafters). How could Sony just ignore the exit polls and in game forum polls which always topped 75% dissatisfaction in the game? And to top it all out, they released it with so many bugs, with so many issues not addressed. I hate you SOE for taking the game away that I loved. At least give us back some normal servers, and sell this upgrade that we can buy if we want to play it. I DO NOT WANT TO PLAY SWG2, I want my old game back. SOE, do you want to balance the combat in this game? That is so easy damn! Just balance what we had, don't rewrite everything! So pistoleers are too weak? Well give them a better weapon or upgrade their moves, but rewrite our HAM system and the whole game just to balance it? It is not needed. Even giving them some weapons with armor piercing would have balanced this game. That is so simple. Give a pistoleer a gun with armor piercing and some high damage and it would be balanced. Not all this patch and nerfs to crafters and everything else, it is not all needed. RIP Arakon from Tarquinas
I have just witnessed deleting of another thread in CU forums. I read first page, when clicked on the link to the second it said that the thread is deleted.
What the thread was about?
People from different servers were just counting how many people are online in the most popular places on different servers. Shall I add that it was kind of deserted everywhere. With like 5% or less of usuall population for the place/time comparing to original SWG.
I have not seen anything which was against the 'comunity guidelines', People were just counting players in game and stating that their server is dead.
Way to go SOE. Don't you have any more important things to do? Like starting dialog with your player community also known as loyal customers?. Deleting threads in forum will not make reports of your accountants look any better. I'll tell you that. Actually the more threads you delete the worse the accounting reports will be. And no matter how many forum threads you delete the checkbook will still need to be balanced. And it is rather wery likely that it will be balanced by significant reduction of funds available for your salaries. It is time to think about a career change, is it not?
You have commited multiply genocide in Star Wars Galaxies and you know that. Darth Vaider is an innocent baby in comparison with SOE. Your naive attempts to destroy evidence of your crimes is laughable.
You perhaps hope for influx of new players so that you can rip them off too. Go read amazon.com
What is the main reason 85% of the players bought this game? Because you can live Star Wars, not another Norrath. The game was great, ive been playing for more then a year on 2 different accounts now, but as of tomorrow, im cancelling both. Ive stood by SOEs decisions in the past, but this time its a no-show! The CURB is the worst thing that ever happened to it, combat is broken, level system is in place (dwarf nunas are even lvl 10!) armor certifications? I can run around here in plate armor if I want without any certifications! And those stupid cartoony buttons? I mean, where has the Star Wars feeling gone? I think SOE switched some devs from EQ to SWG to "Bring back some subscribers" But honestly, I think they will lose more then they will gain from it...
And RoTw?? I dont think it will save it (and im in Beta, so)...
SWG, it was fun while it lasted, but now its dead.
Let me explain a bit
SOE promised that we would have a combat systen that was Faster, More Tactical, and FAIR to all. What we got was Slower, mind numbing play which totally excluded a large portion of the population. Crafters, Entertainers and Hybrids of the above professios have been utterly destroyed. People who have spent hours upon end honing their skills and making their players the best they could be, are no afraid to leave their in-game houses or cities because if they do, they DIE just trying to do the things that HAVE to be done to do their professions. And instead of addressing these concerns, SOE's official stance and reply to them is basically "Hire Bodyguards."
There are also others who play the game at differentiating times that used to solo because they never are on at the same time as most of their friends ingame to group up and do things together. Now grouping is MANDATORY if you are to survive in the world. This is WRONG. People should be able to play however they wish and enjoy the game, but sony's stance is forced grouping to do the smallest things in the game. It's sad really.
Example:
Before CU:
Could go out and make money without worry of getting mobbed and killed by EVERYTHING ingame. Grinding was tedious and money was slow coming but you HAD to do it to be able to survive in the world, the economy of the game was out of hand and people had to have millions upon millions of credits to survive. Maintenance fees for properties were high and the small amount of storage versus the lot and maintenance usage was disproportionate and made it where you had to have several houses, factories, and such just to be able to hold the thousands of items you could acquire.
After CU:
Cannot go out and make money without grouping so you don't die constantly. Grinding is MORE tedious and money is very slow now because the lairs are spawning 3 to 5 times the old spawns, the economy of the game is STILL of hand and people have to have the same amount of credits to survive. Maintenance fees for properties ate still high and the small amount of storage versus the lot and maintenance usage is still disproportionate. AND, on top of this all, the Crafters can't get the required resources to make the things we need ingame, most are droppint those skills just to survive and soon our ability to have player crafted items will be gone. Then the laws of supply and demand will go up exponentially. What used to cost us hundreds of thousands of credits to have; Armor,homes, the things we need every day; will now cost into the millions of credits. Armor has been changed to a degree of the fact that it takes upwards to 3 times the resources it used to and most of the new ones are NAMED, which meant they are from certain planets with a certain type and category to them. MOST are from planets that a crafter CANNOT go to now as they would be one shotted in 2 seconds flat from landing.
I realize that this rant has gone on for way topo long, but this is just a small part of the reasons the Combat Upgrade should have been treated in a better manner. This coupled with the fact that it wasn't wanted by 80% of the players polled, was pushed to live too early with so many bugs in it it surpasses the original in it's unreadiness to be released, and is only a tactic to push veterans away and draw the eyes of a field of adoloescents who haven't even considered a game like SWG a viable prospect because it was NOT like WOW or Everquest. But most of all, it is a thin veil covering SOE's innate greed to profit off of a group of people who will buy this game
Thrak When All Else Fails, Get a Bigger Hammer
Questions for SOE:
Why were there bugs pushed to live that were noted in test?
Why is balance in PvE so off between professions?
Why did you not make good on your promise that equipment that was in the top 10% of stats maximum before-CU would be converted to be in the top 10% of new ranges after CU?
Why didn't you make food conversions more like their old bonus types instead of completely mixing them up making player stocks a very expensive junk collection?
How are players supposed to buy the new sets of everything new needed like foods, armor and weapons if you didn't have time to make vendor browsing of item stats work?
well after waiting for nearly a week i have yet to see anything worth PAYING FOR. If SOE wants to let me PLAY FOR FREE TO BETA TEST then ill be happy to help fix their mess. ..save yourself...
but untill that happens ill stay away.. and you should too.. I give you fair warning as a friend save your money
For those who don't like it, I fully understand. Whenever a game does a drastic shift like this, especially to a new system full of bugs, this is not only expected but perfectly reasonable.
But, I like it. I don't agree with, what appears to be the majority here. I had numerous problems with the SWG experience before the CU and, aside from lower populations now, I actually like the game quite well now.
Firstly, I just had wwwwaaayyyy too many problems with the old system. I couldn't stand the fact that I could never wear armor I owned without being buffed. The convoluted HAM system was terrible, giving you NINE bars full of wounds to worry about. When most Doctors concentrate on giving buffs for cash instead of healing wounds, there is just not much you can do. With the new system, you only have to worry about one bar - as it should be.
As you gain Mastery of a level, instead of relying on Doctor Buffs, I can just go out and kill things. I can raid an Imperial Base (and get no XP for it, but as a Master Rifleman, I don't NEED XP anymore, so what's the point?) if I want. PvP is much more balanced, as well. The old system where you kept the same number of Hitpoints at every stage of your development did NOT work! You are going to face harder level enemies, ones that can wipe you out - as your character develops. Your character needs the natural stat boost to handle those.
Secondly, that people are getting 1xp per kill and are getting killed by lower level mobs is something that can be fixed. Difficulty levels are just numbers which can be adjusted. If I got wiped out on my first night out (which I didn't), I'd have moved on and killed other things. I really don't care to kill another huurton howler again, so I don't really care if I get 1xp for killing one or not.
Finally, Star Wars Galaxies was ALWAYS a level-based game. It always had the name "EQ in Space." Whether you were a "Novice Whatever" or a "Master Guru", you were placed on tiers and given missions based on difficulty. The level system has been divided into numbers now to make it so that, as a "Master Whatever" I can actually get a reasonable stat boost which allows me to stand toe-to-toe with a group of Stormtroopers (which are "combat level 25" to my "combat level 80") and mow them down in the movies - as it should be!
To be fair, I never saw what others saw in the old system. The old system was too focused on characters soloing. And, in a big expansive world like SWG with 8 planets to cover, it dwindles down the population considerably. I'd rather find groups in this game, myself.
It seemed that everyone in this game was motivated by "Hunting." That's a community issue that caused this game to be called "EQ in Space" to begin with.
I don't understand what motivates "Let's go hunting!" in games, because it's always the same thing every time out. I'd rather the game focus more on the GCW and the actual Star Wars elements instead of "Let's go and hunt beasts!" which, to me, seemed to be the focus of most of the players.
Getting Krayt tissues, organic tissues for buffs, etc. That just never worked for me. I cancelled three times last year, and only recently returned because of changes to the GCW system.
I don't want to hunt beasts. I want to bring down the Empire. The focus of this game has chanced to allow me to fight hordes of Stormtroopers, wear whatever armor I want (depending on my profession - as it should be. Marines should wear heavy armor, support should wear light armor), allows me to bypass creatures which I'm really sick of fighting to begin with, and now that I'm a Combat Level 80 with nothing else to grind, I can focus on PVP without worrying about getting buffed, dying, losing the buff, and having to run and get re-buffed. I just get up and move on.
My only problem now with the game is all of these people quitting left and right, because now that I finally found a way to enjoy this game, I may not have anyone to enjoy it with. Maybe server consolidation could help this game, though.
I'm sorry, but I like this game.
Well lets see. Bazaar vendors aren't working. I can't wear armor I have paid for. My CH character can't tame pets anymore. The pets I have already are reduced to uselessness. The quest I have been working on can longer be completed. All but 2 other players from my guild have quit. All memebers of my guild were long time vets. The GUI bounces around whenever channel in. Most learned skills, scematics, ect... for my character that I have had for 15 months now are gone. I can't heal my character during combat. If your a BE you can no longer produce buffed pets that are usable, players can get the same pets by taming thier own. Docs can't wear protective armor, can't fire quality weapons. Even BHs can't use basic rifles lol. Oh and by the way, and no surprise, there hasn't been any tech support. Big suprise huh? I feel that SOE and SWG should have a class action suit filed for breach of contract, and larceny after trust. So at least we players can recoup the money invested. Also file with the federal trade commission to have the game reclassified to NC 17+, since now the entire game centers on killing, and violence. Before you could excel in non combat professions, not anymore. And with up to 60% of the current players quitting its going to be real interesting to see how long to the game completely folds. Sad really. Up till now I liked the game, I never got bored, but if the only way to play it is to be a killer, I'll save my money and play Doom 3, or Halflife 2 off line and not have pay to play. And get the same satifaction.
First of all it's more of a downgrade than an upgrade. No-one asked for this. Stars Wars Galaxies went from being a FUN game to something that is quite frustrating and not fun at all. As a Jedi Padwan, something that took me six months to achieve if I go to a mission terminal and select a mission that is two levels below me it will take me 20 minutes to kill a creature spawned on that mission. ( let alone complete the mission by killing everything there. ) For that 20 minutes effort I get 367 xp. At that rate it would take me a DECADE or real time ( at least) too master Jedi. Not really my idea of fun. Cheers.
I played SWG for about 5 months last year. It had its good and bad points. I thought the atmosphere was amazing, and the game was more open-ended than anything since UO (especially in the way a non-combat guy could be as viable in-game as a combat guy). The bad points - the game was buggy, each patch seemed to take one step forward and one step back, prebuilt cities were empty, buffs killed team play, the HAM system was unbalanced, etc., were all fixable. A lot of people were counting on the Combat Upgrade as a sort of magic bullet that will fix the game and turn it into the type of game it could be. The devs, too, were responding to virtually every negative point about the game with "wait for the combat upgrade". But now, this? Jeez, I really dont think SOE knows what theyre doing. If all this is true, theyve utterly killed a game that had more potential than any other MMO out there. I was planning on revisiting the game after the combat upgrade... but no. Ill just stick to WOW.
Need an example of how poorly this was planned. The end game profession is Jedi. Under this new CU it will take a normal player 7.5 years to reach it. Here is the link to the Jedi Forum post with the math.
b oard.id=jedi&message.id=857257
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?
Tired of being told to be patient and that they will fix it. SOE gets paid to be patient and fix things. They can run 5 test servers and HAD an alpha testing team at one point. Instead, the kill alpha, offer a lip service beta test to which many posts were ignored (let us not even cover the polls) and then push this pos onto Live ADMITTING that it was far from complete. Sad part is that I am not even a Jedi but can understand the outcries. I am a master ranger, a profession that has been broken since the game was released. Each update added things that made us more meaningless unless you wanted harvest. Areas of the game that were supposed to be fixed was a balance of current system, broken professions and our biggest complaint - lack of content. Sadly SOE and their Dev team have tried a media spin on it. Only 50 of us were upset, petitions were dupe named ploys, polls were corrupted and so on. Never once did they ask us if this should be taken live. With 80% hating it during the "beta", they knew what the answer was. Just like the response in the Dev Chat about allowing us an options on buttons - "No."
The CU is really bad but does have some good things. Here's what i think:
Pros:
- Better balance of defenses in profs.
- New weapons.
- Programming moves in combat (only one move that is repeated, nice touch, but prefer combat queue)
Sorry but that's all i like.
Cons:
- Armor is still the same. Yeah they are tied to profs now but that is pretty lame. They should've just added some customization options in the crafting process to make it more unique, in terms of effectivenes, resist types and in design. Pre-CU the resists were a percentage that was prevented from every hit that was dealt to you. Now it's a number and i have no clue what they mean. Why make this more complicated? Also, the resists were drastically lowered, but why introduce armor mitigation? That takes us back to square 1.
- Buffs have been nerfed too badly. Docs and entertainers no longer like to play the game anymore, because they have become useless.
- Chef foods have been nerfed too. Many foods were really great pre-CU but are only so-so now and i don't see a reason to use them really or for chefs to make them. They paid top credit to obtain all the resources needed to craft them and it was all for nothing.
- Combat is boring. The cooldown timers are unrealistic and take away the pace of the fights. Also due to hindrance i can barely even move making me a sitting duck. Really, if Stormtroopers and Jango Fett can run in the movies in full armor, why can't i? Moves are also way too generic and you can use them with any weapon, taking away the diversity in weapons/profs.
- Crafters are a huge part of the game and they have been nerfed heavily. Schems have been changed so different resources are needed and in larger quantities. On top of that many items have also been nerfed so badly there's no more sense in making them.
- Graphics were great and are now far from Star Wars-like. All the effects are cartoony, much too fantasy/magic orientated and unrealistic. The first time i saw this on the testcenter i thought i was seeing things because i was tired, but alas it was really there. HAM windows are also looking very amateuristically and oversized and people have too much stuff above their heads. I do not have to see everyone's HAM. If i want to i'll just select them. Font is lousy too and much harder to read. It's too small and looks "flat".
- Groups are too small. It is not fun to have a guild hunt and only allow 6 people to come with you. Sure you can make 2 groups but it is way too hard to communicate that way and takes away a lot of fun and precious time. Not fun either if you wanna go up in a ship and be restricted to 6 people. That won't fill your Sorosuub. 20 People groups were fine.
- HAM was changed so it is now one health and 2 ability pools. On top of that you no longer have the ability to change the stats, thus making it very hard to do your prof. Some might require more action or mind to function and you could change that. No longer an option unfortunately. On top of that combat is a lot more boring now, since there's only one bar you can hit. Yeah there was the mindpool that was a bit weakish, but that's what chefs make Aitha or Blue milk for, to heal your mind.
- Jump To Lightspeed has changed too. Graphics at least. All allied ships now have a recticle around them, which just fills up the screen without it being needed. Why would i care about seeing them when they are lightyears away? Also, you now see an extra box around everything you select and it moves along with the direction arrow. A bit too much in my humble opinion. Really disappointed by this, since the last time someone asked, it was mentioned JTL would not be changed in any way.
- Medical XP for doctors and medics are only granted in the field. This is a bad move and makes the grind a very long and annoying journey. It's also very silly not to grant XP in med centers and camps. If you want them to heal instead of just buffing most of the time give them a bonus or some n
NO COMBAT UPGRADE FOR STAR WARS GALAXIES!!! http://www.swg
This very much sounds like the Dev's were screwing around trying to develop some fantasy game. Got told to upgrade SWG on limited time/money, and rather than working, took what they had and threw it in.
Now they're in the crapper, so are frantically trying to play clean-up to hide it from the upper management.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
I've played a number of level-based MMORPGs, was never really happy with any of them. It's the skill-based games I like, like UO and SWG. However, with this recent SWG combat upgrade, they've changed the game at a fundamental level from skill-based to level-based, with a token veneer of skill choices. The game now feels like EQ2 with different skins. Quite simply, if I had wanted to play a game like EQ/EQ2, I would not have switched from those games to SWG.
"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." --Harlan Ellison
banzai51 said:
"Since things are balance on the lower level one has to wonder if they did it to push out the experienced players."
If that's true, it's backfiring - I've only been playing SWG for a few months, and I've canceled because of this "combat upgrade"... and I hear I'm not the only new player quiting.
"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." --Harlan Ellison
I built a new PC when I heard SWG was coming. I harrased every gamer I knew into playing this game at launch. I was the guy who never left his house, gained twenty pounds and breathed Star Wars Galaxies for a solid year plus, even pre-ordered the JtL expansion. I met a few interesting people early on and they started a guild. The guild grew happily through the first six months of the game, eventually reaching around 70 active members.
Then came the dual-edged sword of mounts and player cities. We were given the freedom to travel quickly, and at the same time encouraged (as you had to be 2km from an exisiting NPC city to have the option for a player city grow to "Level 5") to move out into the boonies. One more catch was that there was a cap on the number of cities per planet which was hit on most of the big planets within the first hour or two. We moved our group, many of them wailing and gnashing from a bustling area of trade north of Coronet on Corellia to Northwestern Dantooine.
It would be weeks before we had a shuttleport into our little enclave. We fought on, as we believed in the spirit of player cities, however flawed the implementation. We managed to grow our city and even have some solid amount of trade pass through the city. When our mayor quit the game for two months things quickly went into chaos as citizens "defualt voted" for the incumbent and we had to get players from other servers to trade citizenship in our city for citizenship in theirs just to oust an AFK mayor. Ultimately, we were given so little help for a system so inherently bugged and ill-conceived most of our guild of seventy left the game. A small group split from the guild and tried to build their own city on Lok which in the end failed, further splintering our little group.
At this point, approaching a year from launch a handful of us, tired of running a ghost town in the boonies, moved to Naboo into a 5 guild city which was most often a ghost town. We survived the summer of 04, hitting the one year mark with almost no plot movement and the "monthly story arcs" promised at launch solidly frozen in carbonite. The Galactic Civil War was also "on hold" as the battlefields where all sorts of fun supposedly could happen were turned off until the still-undelivered "GCW Revamp" happens.
Somewhere in the summer, we were told that a series of profession revamps would start happening and Player Correspondents would be flown into Austin to discuss a Combat Revamp. Jump To Lightspeed was originally touted as "a different dev team working on the side" which eventually became "the development staff is spread too thin with the launch of JtL to do any meaningful work on the core, live game." So off the Correspondents went and somewhere in there we were told that a major combat revamp would happen in the next 6-8 months including Alpha, and beta testing! At this point I, as a crafter-type, wasn't really interested in any of the proposed changes and in fact was still waiting on a Droid Engineer revamp that was half delivered a few months prior.
About this same time the insanity of the "new" Jedi unlocking system showed up. It replaced the grinding of professions with the grinding of jedi xp wherein before you needed a list of professions to unlock and now you need xp that was derived from your main xp at a variable conversion ratio somewhere between 1:3 and 1:10 (sorry if I'm remembering this wrong, I've tried to forget) depending upon the type of experience you were converting. I really didn't ever want to be a jedi in this time period of Starwars and I still don't so this was once again a massive amount of developer time going into something I wasn't overly interested in. I was only interested to see how a giant, player-run economy was about to change. I can't say I prefered the original jedi system as it didn't make any sense either, but what replaced it doesn't seem to have worked either.
I digress! To help get a feeling for what's been promised to players by the fall of 04, here's a document
Thanks for the comprehensive post. I have several friends that are ex-SWG (as am I) and they were making noises about "trying out" SWG again. Seems that absolutely nothing has changed since I signed up all that time ago. Exactly the same things happened then as well. (deleted posts, class balance issues, broken classes etc) Just recently I bought a Sony net-MD mini disc. They had decided to retard the functionality on it so you cannot actually upload music recorded from the mic. (even though it is implied all through the advertising and manuals) What they meant by "upload" was delete file from player and reenable the file that was always on your computer, but hidden. Their community response was the same as here. Personally, I will never buy another Sony product ever again...congrats Sony.
1) Lack of Quality of Online Service:
Firstly, SOE_SWG does not seem to have a corporate policy on deploying well tested software. The fact it can repeatedly over 2 years release patches and now this upgrade that not only have many defects, but also have obvious and fundamental imbalances in its design, is very concerning. The SOE_SWG business unit does not seem to appreciate they are providing a pre-paid online subscription service. That kind of business requires close to 24x7 availability, adequate ommunication of schedule, and content that is supposed to match the published rules and advertised features. Players who are dealing with this poor release have already paid to do so -- there is no compensation for downtime or for extra time required with their accounts from imbalances. A few weeks into the EQ2 launch this Oct. when a substantial outage occurred, John Smedley updated that community and provided 1 week free game time. Since SWG's launch, Smedley has never once communicated directly to the SWG community (probably because of the equivocal ownership by LucasArts) and there has been no communication from anyone at SOE_SWG on when they will resolve the current series of game breaking problems. Players are left with the feeling that SOE_SWG is more interested in launching its paid expansion next week than worrying about the current quality of service. That essentially SOE_SWG will resolve current defects and allow for a prolongued analysis and series of patches to maybe correct imbalances at SOE's convenience. This is very odd to me, that a business based on pre-paid subscriptions would not make an effort to ensure its customers were well informed and reasonably confident so they would continue to renew. If the game is unplayable now (as I feel it is for me), why would I renew? What confidence and incentive do I have that things will get better?
My general point is that AOL, MSN, Earthlink, NCSoft, Mythic, Blizzard... any other provider I'm experienced with that sells access and online content has never allowed for any upgrade I know of without good availability or compensation (of some kind), good documentation of the changes and schedule, good turnaround in correcting reported defects by their members and imbalances. This is singularly the opposite experience many players currently feel with SOE_SWG.
2) Lack of Customer Support Materials:
The second area that really concerns me is the lack of any HELP File or clear supporting documentation. There are no descriptions with accompanying visual explanation of any of the new combat features or changes in the game content. No flash tutorials, no image overview, just text descriptions that discuss what is intended to be implemented. Only today (April 30) was listed in the forums the links for several pages that only textually outline how some of the new combat occurs. But there is still no comprehensive list and descriptions for what any of the new craftable items do (like medical enhancers). The in-game HELP only contains one poorly worded and formatted paragraph that ignores several key features and has no mention of any of the new content.
When I called SOE support asking for a HELP overview, the CSR referred me to the forums to check players posts. To me this is ridiculous and unrealistic, since those boards are now filled with angry protests and complaints. After another expensive call to California from the East Coast, I was told again to review other players descriptions in the forums. I don't think it's reasonable for players to spend their personal time combing through rants to find someone's opinion of how the game now works -- players don't opera
My forum account was locked out for "trolling" - my posts were far from trolling, I can tell you that much.
But what is interesting is that I can't login to the forums using my other 2 accounts. I can view the forums, but when I login as my alt I just get brought back to the forums main page. I have tried logging in from 3 different locations so I have ruled out a block on my IP. Also, I tried creating a new station and had the same problem - so I know it isn't tied to my real e-mail address.
So the question is - Why is this happening? It seems awefully convenient for the forums login to break while all this stuff about the CU is going on. It is certainly making it appear as if there are less people complaining about the CU in their forums.
There are many posts I would like to give feedback on, but of course, I'm such a troll! LOL
The only trolls in the forums are those who administer them.
ya i got some questions i asked some of them to a csr and he threttend to ban me
/get rid of starwars galacys
why did soe go ahed with the cu publish when 82% in ther own poll in ther own forum sed that it was no fun compared to the reg game
why is soe ignoring there players
is it true that 70% of the players have canlced ther accounts
how many players are left vr how many players wer thare 3 weeks befor the cu pub started
when will soe merg the servers or when will thay roll back the the game to befor the cu
why are all neg posts even bug reps that are written profesonly and in a civalise manner getting deleted
has any of the dev team acculy played the game for good week 3 hours a day befor an after teh cu
are you trying to end
thats a fue questions my guild has come up with so far ile post more as thay come.
eadthem akip intrepid server swg
ast guild leader of
I used to be a pistoleer and a creature handler with some medic skills and a little bit of artisan. That is what I loved so much about Starwars Galaxies, the freedom this game gave to people. Because you could do a bit of everything, I never got bored. There was something for everybody, you could solo, you could group, nothing was forced. Sadly though, I've seen Starwars Galaxies go downhill. First there was the introduction of the holocrons, over half the population was grinding instead of playing. Second came the playercities, the normal cities are no longer filled with people, it seems like a dead game. And now there is the infamous CU, it feels like a final deathblow. Starwars Galaxies really was the best game ever for me, but now it's just like any other online game. - Keira
Fucking christ, hit the enter key every few sentences. We call that the "paragraph".
No returns? Why stop there? Why not increase your typing speed by up to 40% by leaving out the fucking spaces too?
.The'level'systemhasadamagemultiplier.Youwillseeth isinfurtherpoints.Thisdamagemultipliermakesanythin ghigherlevelthanyouequivalenttoinstantdeath.Fivele velsaboveyouwillalwayskillyou.Again,thispointwillb erepeated.Sincecrafterswillnothaveanycombatratingu nlesstheybecomeahybridanddroppurecrafting,theywill alwaystakemaxdamage.Furthermore,everyanimalwilluse thedamagemultiplieragainstabasevalue.Thereisnosuch thing,therefore,asa'safe'enemyforcrafters.Thisisth eresultofthe'level'system.Before,eachmobhaddiffere ntresistsanddamageranges.Theyhada"threat"level,whi chwasbasedonhowhightheiroffensiveanddefensivevalue swere.Undertheoldsystem,thatwasthebasisofthe/conre sult.ThisthreatlevelhasNOrelationshiptothecurrent' combatlevel'system,nomatterwhatthedevsclaimintheHO Cchat.ThethreatlevelwasanEVALUATIONofanexistingmob .A'combatlevel'isaMODIFICATIONofabasevaluemob"angr ybag"putintowhatever'skin'isappropriate,i.e,alevel 34dunelizardisthesameasalevel34pekopeko.ThenewCOMB ATLEVELdefinestheoffensiveanddefensivevalues-notth eotherwayaround.Thisisanimportantdistinction,andis criticaltounderstandingtheconclusionaboutthecombat levelsystemandwhyitwasaddedtotheCUatsuchalatedate. 2.XPgainsandlackofsame:Asignificantnumberofpeoplea refindingoddresultsfromattackingmobsslightlybelowt heirlevelandhigher-asingettinglittletonoXP.Theresp onseofthedevsistohavepeoplefocusonjustfightingeven leveledmobs.Therealquestionis:WhywastheXPvariancep utintheCUinthefirstplace?XPgainsorratesofgainswasN EVERaddressedasaconcernintheCombatUpgrade.Itdidnot affectcombatinanyway,shape,orforminPVP,norwerether e"problems"abouttheflavorofcombatthatwerecausedbyX P
Here you go:
IhavetestedtheCUsinceithitBetaandhavebeenfoll owing theCUsincepublish7.Thereareanumberofunexpectedprob lemswiththeimplementationoftheCUasitstandsinLive(a ndhowitdevelopedinbeta)thatdonottrackwiththeavaila bleinformationgivenovertheyearsinceitwasannounced. ThewaythecurrentimplementationoftheCUismadeuphasse veralglaringvariancesfromthepreviouslyreleasedinfo -inthattherewasonecentralitemthatIhaveidentifiedha scausedthemajorityoftheimbalancesandproblemsencoun teredwiththeCU.Puttinga'level'systemontopofaskillb asedsystem.ThiswasnotintheoriginalCUdocumentationr eleasedon03/31/05,anddatafrompublicstatementsofsou rcesinsidetheCU'sandbox'scheme(withoutviolatingNDA )haveconfirmedthatitwasneverdiscussedwiththemtothe degreeitwasimplemented.HereinIwilllisttheworstissu esreportedabouttheCUandshowthattheyarealltieddirec tlytothe'levelsystem'implementationthatwasaddedtot hefunctionaldesignoftheCU.1.CrafterDeath-Craftersa re1shottedbyeveryaggromoboneverystarterplanet.Thef ragilityofcraftercharactersat'combatlevel'1isextre me.Surveyingaloneisimpossiblesincespawnswillappear undervehiclesinmotionandmobswillkillcraftersinless than2seconds.Theabilitytoatleastrunawayhasbeenremo ved-thismakescraftersunabletofunctionatabasiclevel
- Waypoints dissapearing from the datapad
- On a few servers all characters are the same height
- The XP messages say things like "You earn 1050 points of type 12 experience" instead of naming the type of xp, like scouting.
There's tons more, but I'm not going to type any more because it isn't worth my time. Basicly if you were thinking of coming back to the game to try out the Combat upgrade, don't bother. It isn't worth your time and money.When Star Wars Galaxies was in concept, design, programming and in beta testing I distinctly remember devs and everyone else concerned in making this game that it was not going to be level based at all, that apealed to me and the fact that it had more then just combat in it with the artisan and entertainer professions, and that it was suppose to be different from EVERQUEST, what a dumb game, the Combat Upgrade does have some highlights to it, like the warm up and cool down for special moves and such, and the interface that i have heard about sounds like its a bunch of CR#POLA, its Star Wars the data-pad interface fit the game perfectly with the icons before the Combat Upgrade, and also from what I hear is they are basically beta testing the Combat Upgrade LIVE, thats not what people pay for, when I get home i plan to go in and see if SOE has actually ruined it from what I grew to love from way before when it was in development.
If SOE has ruined Star Wars Galaxies I would like to put a call out to all those who play, anyone who works at SOE and disagree with the conversion to a level based system, to join forces and either get SOE to go back and remove the Combat Upgrade(quite possibly downgrade) or to open source the Galaxies code, so we can remove it ourselves, and make a competing Galaxies to our likeing that SOE has no control over, we should also try to contact Lucas and or Lucasarts to get them more involved and throw a fit over this "Upgrade" as i have yet to see what it is but I have a feeling that it is bad from what I have read. Also on side note, I have been told by a friend that the upgrade has made it nearly impossible to get Factional Armor, that is not ok with me.
So here are my questions:
I was skeptical at first, but after giving it a try and adapting to the new system, i have discovered that the game as a whole is more fun.
PvE is more involved, since it takes more than one person to kill the toughest of opponents. Everyone has a role to play. People need to adjust. my guild has done this and has learned how to kill even the Level 500 Jedi Sentinels outside the Enclaves http://trunten.com/level500.jpg
PVP is much more entertaining now since it doesnt simply mean jamming your Knockdown, landing a dizzy and aiming for the mind damage pool anymore.
Many people who were bashing the CU before now realize that it hasn't warrented as much attention that it's been getting. Yes it was buggy when it was on TEST CENTER (where bugs are found and fixed...go figure). But now that it's on Live, its not that bad. Yes there is still work to be done with balance, and some bug fixes that still exist, but it's coming along fine.
In addition to all the great questions and points made in this thread, here is another worth asking... Why were all of the original sound effects removed and replace with dull replicas? This may not be as important as some of the other questions we have, but when added on top of everything they messed with in the CU it becomes very important.
Sound is so much of the Star Wars experience. In fact, sound is in fact a HUGE part of any experience. I find it hard to believe that some designer at SOE feels they can make better sound effect than Mr. Ben Burtt has. In fact, if I was Mr. Burtt I would be offended by the sound effects in the game now.
Blasters sound nothing like they do in the movies. Melee weapons have 1 or 2 effects now mainly consisting of "boof" and "poof". They no longer have that metal-on-metal "ching" which adds so much to the experience.
During testing, the devs stated that sound effects were not finished yet. Before the CU went into beta (aka live) they said that the real effects were added. I fail to hear any difference.
This is yet ANOTHER question "why change something that is just fine?" I would like the developers to give us 3 VALID reasons for this change. This just blows my mind... not that the entire situation hasn't already done that.
Have the developers even seen, err... heard these movies? Have they?
SOE has consistently mismanaged the SWG project, and delivered deplorable communication and customer service to the player/customer community. From a player relations standpoint, they delete threads and posts by players, myself included many times, that disagree with the direction they are taking with the game. The threads have been constructive, non-inflammatory, and in detail demonstrate the issues with the existing game, the dissatisfaction with changing the game, and in detail how the existing game could be remedied. Most of these types of threads are deleted. If we persist in creating threads of this nature, our forums rights are temporarily banned for anywhere from two days to a week, for "trolling" (what they at SOE call, "inciting trouble," by disagreeing with their direction and design.) I have cancelled 5 accounts; xzerov, verdin, bluedestiny, bubbleup, reddestinycc. I have been a veteran 2003 customer, and have worked the game daily... daily... since that time. I have earned a jedi account, attained jetpacks and just about every other fun high-end content, and have just played the heck out of the game from the beginning. I had accumulated millions of quality crafting resources, being a medical crafter of grand repute, and having applied my own labor, passion, and sweat to the MMORPG game environment with gusto. SOE was supposed to give us game enhancements, combat balance enhancements. Instead, what they sprung on us out of the blue, against the stated feedback of the community Correspondents, is a "Combat Upgrade" (so-called by SOE) that is really a New SWG entirely. My two years of daily work, resources, effort, is being destroyed. In the New SWG, I can no longer craft items as a Doctor, and the items that were crafted are being eliminated from the game entirely. My role and reason for existing, my business, my everything, is being destroyed. Half a dozen non-combat professions are being made obsolete and their roles are destroyed. All of the combat professions are redone from scratch, completely foreign to what we have played for the last two years. The interface has changed, the commands have changed, the look and sounds have changed, its a new game with a new learning curve, and we have to start over building our role in the new environment. Instead of a so-called "Combat Upgrade" our game is being destroyed and a new game is being slipped in from nowhere. We did not ask for a new game, or to have our MMORPG roles and efforts be destroyed, to start from scratch with an all new game. SOE can not be trusted. We worked hard over the last two years to build guilds, to build businesses, to build roles, reputations, customers, to gather and harvest and mine millions of units of resources, to pay millions of units of credits for other brokered resources - now worthless - would have been better off keeping the credits rather than have all that blood, sweat, and passion representing two years of work thrown in the garbage. Why would I ever, having loved a crafting profession, ever trust SOE to respect my daily work and not throw away my value, role, and resources again in the future? Why would I ever put effort into the roles in the game when SOE just wasted and destroyed everything I have worked for, for years!? I cannot fathom how SOE has remained in charge of the SWG project, given their disrespectful, power-mad rule over the forums, given their deplorable communication with the community (the positive and enthusiastic Jon Hanna, SOE's recent Community Relations Rep, lasted less than 90 days after being put into a position of being squeezed between performing for the community and being put into an untenable position by a hardline and non-responsive SOE - you can find Mr. Hanna representing Middle Earth Online now), given their dismal project management all the way back to the game-breaking introduction of the Jedi hologrind that brought the game to a halt as everyone stopped playing their roles to grind 32 professions in order to unlock a Jedi character, to the Jedi revamp that was supposed to (via the
I am no game-design-specialist and feel very cheated by SOE to help them searching bugs in their crappy CU when there is no documentation how it should work.I simply often dont know if its a bug or a new feature.(seem to be millions of bugs).Bugs are that massive that it is ridiculous to expect from paying gamers to announce them. Some examples: -Armor seems not to work properly -Moves dont work properly -Balancing...well one hit killed with 30k damage?(your health is 3k) -Missions vanish -Cant listen to entertainers -Players cannot levelup in their profession because e.g.65k exp is required and they are capped at 50k ....could go on and on
My Question:How should i know how it is intended to be?? You put it online without knowing that yourself!!!
Even the ones who like the CU say mantralike"there will be some hotfixes"..."some"will not be enough!
and no,i do not like that levelbased system,its feeling like a number and simplifying a former complex system for a new kiddie-generation.
(and no ,i never was "uber" and i nearly never played solo before this CU)
Combat is faster paced than most other MMOGs. Failed - Unless all other games are really slow, or use a very similar combat system *cough*EQ2*cough*.
Combat is not as fast as an "action" game. Passed - Congratulations, you hit the mark with this one! Although it is very reminiscent of trying to win the 1500m in Summer Games.
Combat has bursts of faster paced action. Passed - Burst running from creatures two levels higher than yourself can be considered fast paced action.
Combat pacing still allows for basic chatting and command communication. Failed - Miserably...
The average even PvP fight should last 1-3 minutes. No Comment
Combat is tactical in nature Failed - Combat is far less tactical. No longer do you need to choose the right weapon for the job for best effect, just the one with highest DPS. There are far fewer different ablities granted, meaning less tactics to be employed during a fight.
There is no all around "best" action Failed - Root!
Different situations offer different ideal actions with which to respond Passed - Occasionally you don't have to run. Once in a while the action doesn't involve a rez pack. Sometimes your selected action will activate first time.
Actions can have specific counter, combo and recovery actions Semi-Passed - Recovery options are very useful.
Powerful or unique actions cannot be repeatedly "spammed" Passed - Instead you spam the powerful action, followed by a basic action, then the powerful action again... and repeat.
Actions can only be used a limited amount of times during a specific short period Passed - Usually due to the fact you are incapped by that point, or the action breaks and you hit it repeatedly shouting in frustration at the screen (well the toolbar, you don't really get to look at the screen).
Different professions have different ideal ranges Passed - But then we had this anyway. Unfortunately in the old system we had to actually take the time to check that range on our weapons and then read the accuracy meter next to the mob... this was obviously deemed to tough a task for us. This also explains why when 66m away from a target you get an out of range message instead of a distance, as we are obviously not able to work out for ourselves we are out of range.
Terrain has a meaningful impact on combat Passed - Finally! Welcome to the world of computer games in the 21st Century.
Movement and position have a meaningful impact on combat Passed - If prone and a rifleman your actions will likely not work. If one meter away from a target with a melee weapon you will often get the message +out of range+. If melee and in PvP expect not to move much at all once Rooted.
Gear choice has impact on speed of motion and actions Passed - A pistol will slow you down, a Power hammer won't.
Single shot PvP kills of unwounded characters is never possible Passed - It now takes two.
Professions have specific skill sets that define specific combat roles and abilities Failed - Professions have minimal skill sets, their combat roles consist of spamming their best moves (alternating with a low cost move) with their highest DPS weapon and hoping a doc is available for healing.
Profession abilities have minimal overlap to ensure distinct combat roles Passed - So distinct that it's almost worthless trying to do something by yourself.
Profession abilities can be combined to create more unique or specialized combat roles Failed - Not if you have already mastered one profession and are trying to grind you
Before the CU, all players had the folowing complains
1-Monster too easy to kill
2-Monsters had no variety that is, you kill the same 3 or 4 kind of monster uncountable times.
3-PVP unbalanced since the launching where always a super combo would win 99% of the duels (last como was combat medic + anything else that could leave you standing while the poison would eat the mind bar of the target)
4-Grouping makes you get less xp and less money.
5-No variety of armors, where everybody would have a 90% damage reduction composite armor weared off.
Now, after the CU, everthing changed
1-Monster are not easy to kill anymore thanks the level system (that was there since the beginning and it is not eq style)
2-Now, everytime you get a destroy mission for monsters, the monster will spawn with the same level that you have, so geting mission in a low level planet that will spawn monster of that planet, will have your level, so now, you can fight ALL monsters of the game anytime.
3-PVP is balanced, there is no more "the best combo pvp" taht makes you win all the time, now you have tatics, action bar, roots, snares, paralyses, knockdows, dizzies, stuns and more, everytime you try a new combo, you will find out that is a usable combo in PVP or PVE.
4-Grouping makes you get more xp and more money!
5-There is a plenty of kind of armor to you pick one and be diferent in the crowd.
IMHO, cu fixed swg, and nothing wil change that, you guys are crying and should stop.
I respect who didnt liked the game, and for them i would advice to try play cu before scream that the CU made swg a bad game
For those who tryed and did not liked, there is uncountable other mmorpg that they maybe can like and change swg for.
First off, mind you this post was deleted because "it was not constructive". heh. SURE.
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"I am female, 37 years old, have been playing Star Wars Galaxies since the beginning of December 2003, and enjoyed my time in that game enough that I wound up with 5 accounts. I have just cancelled these accounts, one of them a (baby) jedi. There are so many things wrong with the Combat Upgrade, on so many levels, it's incredible that they pushed it through. The CU was released prematurely. SOE admitted in a letter to the community that it would go live with MAJOR bugs still in it, which would take months to iron out. Allready we have suffered rollbacks of up to 10 days. People are quitting by the hundreds.
Despite what some people are claiming, the people who dislike the CU are not a 'vocal minoriy'. I lead a large guild on my home server, Bloodfin, and I have been saying farewell all week. People are extremely upset, because basically everything we worked for (for some players since beta) is being destroyed. The professions we loved to play, have been altered beyond recognition. Non-combat professions have been marginalised, resource requirements for crafters have (often dramatically) changed, weapons and armor changed beyond recognition.
And the worst thing of all, is that the many thousands of post expressing concern or criticism about the CU, keep disappearing. People are getting banned from the forums for speaking out, our community profession representatives (the Correspondents) get fired when they dare speak against the CU. I signed the petition on www.swgpetition.com. I tested for many hours on testcenter, and I did not like what I saw. I took the exit poll, filled in the forum poll each day (only one vote possible per account, by the way, so no way to cheat with the 75%/80% saying they absolutely detested the CU). And STILL SOE claims we are all happy and that we are enjoying the CU. It simply is not true. I will repost here a brief (and incomplete) summary of problems people have expressed with the CU, and I hope it will give you some clarity on the matter.
1) the loss of system messages for xp and other events make it harder to gauge what you are doing
2) the effects added to special moves, mounting bikes etc. are distracting to the point of causing some people nausea and/or headaches and would fit better in a fantasy game then in SWG
3) Skill enhancing tapes are mostly rendered useless, meaning a lot of people's investments are lost
4) The removal of the combat queue, added to the 'warm up/cool down' system implemented, makes combat extremely unclear. You have to keep watching your toolbar to see when you can do something again, a complete immersion breaker, that further adds to the tremendous slowdown combat has taken
5) Loss of existing crates of items, which did not convert and will not be reimbursed
6) The icons, which are distracting and immersion breaking to a lot of people, and which are LITERALLY unreadable for color blind people.
7) The way in which there are now only 2 real combat professions, Melee and Ranged (every melee profession can use all melee weapons, every ranged profession can use all ranged weapons, as these are now combat level dependent, barring a handful of 'iconic' weapons.
8) the way in which doctors and cm's are turned into clerics and anticlerics (no physical medicines needed) is counter to the Science Fiction theme
9) clothing decays into rags in the course of just one fight
10) weapon certification changes mean it is actually a lot harder for people who are mid-levelling. Trying to retemplate into another type of combat (melee -> ranged) has become insanely difficult. This also affects the jedi, who do not fit in either of those classes.
11) the necessitating of grouping all the time means people who like to do things solo are basically told to take their money elsewhere (there are actually a LOT of people who like solo adventuring)
12) removing th
I have to say I was looking forward to the upgrade more than the average Joe. But, since logging in... I find that it's so completely different that it's no longer worth playing.
You are now FORCED to play in groups... which leave us RPers who want to have a lone character left flapping in the breeze. I can no longer gain experience... or level up... and everything about the new upgrade makes me shudder!
Boo to SOE! I've since cancelled my account after 2 years and multiple Beta tests (original SWG and JtL) and will not return until something is done about this!
Suddenly like 15000 miserable former star wars galaxies fans screaming out in agony.
(This was posted on SOE boards and offers a very well thought out critique of the system)
/con result.
Please take the time to read all of the points as well as the conclusions. Keep responses civil, please.
I have tested the CU since it hit Beta and have been following the CU since publish 7.
There are a number of unexpected problems with the implementation of the CU as it stands in Live (and how it developed in beta) that do not track with the available information given over the year since it was announced.
The way the current implementation of the CU is made up has several glaring variances from the previously released info - in that there was one central item that I have identified has caused the majority of the imbalances and problems encountered with the CU.
Putting a 'level' system on top of a skill based system.
This was not in the original CU documentation released on 03/31/05, and data from public statements of sources inside the CU 'sandbox' scheme (without violating NDA) have confirmed that it was never discussed with them to the degree it was implemented.
Herein I will list the worst issues reported about the CU and show that they are all tied directly to the 'level system' implementation that was added to the functional design of the CU.
1. Crafter Death - Crafters are 1 shotted by every aggro mob on every starter planet. The fragility of crafter characters at 'combat level' 1 is extreme. Surveying alone is impossible since spawns will appear under vehicles in motion and mobs will kill crafters in less than 2 seconds.
The ability to at least run away has been removed - this makes crafters unable to function at a basic level.
The 'level' system has a damage multiplier. You will see this in further points. This damage multiplier makes anything higher level than you equivalent to instant death. Five levels above you will always kill you. Again, this point will be repeated.
Since crafters will not have any combat rating unless they become a hybrid and drop pure crafting, they will always take max damage.
Furthermore, every animal will use the damage multiplier against a base value. There is no such thing, therefore, as a 'safe' enemy for crafters.
This is the result of the 'level' system.
Before, each mob had different resists and damage ranges. They had a "threat" level, which was based on how high their offensive and defensive values were. Under the old system, that was the basis of the
This threat level has NO relationship to the current 'combat level' system, no matter what the devs claim in the HOC chat.
The threat level was an EVALUATION of an existing mob.
A 'combat level' is a MODIFICATION of a base value mob "angry bag" put into whatever 'skin' is appropriate, i.e, a level 34 dune lizard is the same as a level 34 peko peko.
The new COMBAT LEVEL defines the offensive and defensive values - not the other way around.
This is an important distinction, and is critical to understanding the conclusion about the combat level system and why it was added to the CU at such a late date.
2. XP gains and lack of same: A significant number of people are finding odd results from attacking mobs slightly below their level and higher - as in getting little to no XP. The response of the devs is to have people focus on just fighting even leveled mobs.
The real question is: Why was the XP variance put in the CU in the first place?
XP gains or rates of gains was NEVER addressed as a concern in the Combat Upgrade. It did not affect combat in any way, shape, or form in PVP, nor were there "problems" about the flavor of combat that were caused by XP being gained by anything you defeated.
It was never an issue at all.
However, in 'level' based systems, the paradigm is that LEVEL DETERMINES XP AT ALL TIMES.
In a skill based system, mobs are worth what they are worth - period.
The XP dilemma is a byproduct of the introduction of the level based co
What surprises me, is that people still buy games made by verant / SOE. Its the same people running the show, and they've always pulled crap like this. Terrible balancing acts, Mass bannings of people for reasons ranging from having their game ruined to reporting someone hacking their account. These people have always had it out for the players, and they enjoy watching you squirm under their thumbs, while they light up cubans with 20 dollar bills. They must put some type of brainwashing waves in all their games that make people stay to play them. From the sounds of it, SOE spends all their time making the game unenjoyable to begin with. The only serious evidence is what I see in other MMOs, when an everquest player joins. Usually the conversation goes like this. "This game sucks because its not everquest." this is immediatly followed by, "This game sucks because it does not have the following features in everquest" . The logic behind it is a quandry for the ages, yes. Im not saying everyone is like that, its just that I run into THAT argument in every MMO thats come out since then that Ive played. Yes, including Matrix online. I have one cracked up theory to send to you. You see the latest news about a new EQ2 expansion? Well, lets say that the company doesnt want to waste anymore resources on SWG, and instead wanna push everyone over to EQ2. Lets also say they're bound under contract to keep SWG running until there is lack of player interest? So whats the best way to have a reason to shut down a game one doesnt want anymore? drive away all the players! And then they'll all come over and play eQ with our newest expansion of stuff which will be nerfed or people will be banned for in the near future. I just pray that, if thats the case, most people would of learned their lesson by now.