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Open Letter To Star Wars Players
Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley has posted an open letter to the Star Wars Galaxies Community, trying to start a constructive dialogue with the players. He discusses, honestly I think, many of the reasons behind the still much-maligned New Game Enhancements. From the post: "One last thing I'd like to discuss in this explanation is the business end of things. Many of you question the logic of the decision to do this NGE.. stating that many of the existing players will quit because we're changing the game so much. From our standpoint we have to look at the game for the long haul. EverQuest is will be 7 years old on March 16th. We HAVE to think that long-term. With the game the way it was we knew we would never be able to attract enough people to really keep SWG viable as a business." The players, they do not seem to be in the spirit of cooperation. Here's hoping something good comes out of it.
A few years ago SWG was a really fun game with lots of diversity, now that Jedi are running around everywhere and the game has lost every scense of what would actually be Star Wars, I am glad they are making a few changes.
Listen to your customers. Or maybe I'm just being naive.
\.
This letter is dated November 25, 2005. It's January 26, 2006. Do you see the problem here?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Maybe this should go in the "never too late to bash SOE dept.?"
AudioEfex
How do you attract players when existing players are jumping ship? Many players start a MMO because they have friends who are already playing. The point of a MMO is as much the community as it is the dev-created content. If you don't know anyone in the game, you could certainly make friends, but I think most people start because existing friends are already playing.
At one point, I would have recommended to anyone looking to start playing a MMO to take a look at SWG. It had player cities. It had huge planet maps nearly free of barriers (unlike games like EQ2 that have many cliff walls and other barriers). It had an innovative profession system where you could multiclass as much as you liked. It had problems and shortcomings, but the overall experience was positive, and I was lucky to be in some PAs (a.k.a. guilds) and cities that were mostly free of griefers and immature dolts.
Gradually, everything changed. They killed off my server of choice (Test Center). They killed off my professions of choice (Entertainer, Creature Handler, Melee Combat Professions). They turned combat from a community-supporting system where you could talk while fighting to yet another first-person shooter.
I didn't join because of the Star Wars universe. I didn't join because of the game's features. I joined because some friends played it and liked it. Only after I joined did I learn to appreciate its unique features that were then gradually taken away. At this point, I would not recommend that anyone join the game. It's not only the changes that they made but also the way they made them that changed my mind. (Example: announcing NGE changes right after an expansion ships, so that players would rush to buy the expansion. They offered refunds only after the massive outcry against that devious tactic.)
SOE, if you really think you can alienate your original fanbase and attract a new one, best of luck. But even if you are successful, what then? You will have a community of twitch gamers, focused entirely on combat, that don't understand what a unique idea SWG was.
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
"EverQuest is will be 7 years old"
Come'on, 'Editors' ! Edit!
Oh wait... that was Sony Online's CEO.
It says "Is will be" in the text, so it's all good.
I have freaks! I did something right...
It was buggy as all hell. There were impossibly hard, aggressive enemies waiting at the edge of the most peaceful cities. Peanalties for dying had to be suspended indefinitely, because everyone was dying all the time.
It's too late to redesign. You lost me and manyyears ago. Don't pretend this is an Everquest. Stick a fork in it... it's done.
Here are some tips for next time:
1) Beta testing, it's not just for consoles anymore.
2) Continuously pissing off people who pay monthly dues is a bad strategy. Listen to complaints, give thoughtful arguments for your position, and offer compromises.
3) Two Words: Gungan Hunts.
This was my first ever MMORPG, and oddly enough, it was the only one that had enough non combat things to do to keep me interested and allowed freedom of movement at an early stage. If it were polished, I might have stayed.
It's exactly what a guy would say attempting to get people to overlook the incredibly crappy decisions his company has made.
They HAVE made crappy decisions, that cannot be argued against. Either they made them with NGE, or they made them originally and the NGE was required to fix them. However you look at it, it is their fault.
The guy's entire statement reeks of insincere appeasement. They're upset to have removed creatures from the game and will be put back in soon? Then hold off on the NGE until they're ready! They have to plan for the long term? Sure, that explains why they pissed people off by giving them absolutely no warning and released a full, pay expansion a couple of days before NGE hit! They can't put up an unsupported server running the old game because someone might find an exploit? Surely they could just release security fixes for it and not introduce new content! The game wasn't working as a business before? It is not the job of players to be understanding of the corporate behemoths to which they've paid hundreds of dollars just to have much of their work pulled out from under them!
The problem is that, to its core, Star Wars Galaxies under NGE is a different game than Star Wars Galaxies. Even the words behind the acronym, "New Game Enhancements," seem calculated to get people to swallow a pill. They didn't "enhance" the game, they made a "new game" that just happens to use the resources and maps of the old one, and completely replaced the old game with it.
It seems to me that this is just about the most unforgivable thing a MMORPG company could do that isn't actually fraud. Maybe I misunderstand the situation, or my argument is faulty? I kind of hope it is, for Sony's sake. Someone, respond to me on this. Tell me how I'm wrong. I want to be wrong, dammit!
SWG *was* an awesome game.
The problem with SWG was the balance, bugs, and lack of fresh content. Certain classes had overpowering abilities that needed to be reduced. Bugs needed to be fixed. New content needed to be added.
Everybody wondered why these issues weren't being addressed. They were needed for the health of the game but they were being totally ignored.
Now we know why. Instead of fixing bugs, balancing, and creating new content, they were too busy writing a new overhaul. WTH? If they would have invested the time they spent in the Combat Upgrade (CU) overhaul and the NGE into addressing those issues, they would have never been in this situation.
Just think of how much time they spent in secret working on those two upgrades. All that time that could have been spent enhancing the game instead of rewriting it. Just stupid.
I quit after the first CU because of this. I tolerated the problems thinking they were working on fixes as they said they were, but then they come out with a revamp and a realized they squandered all that time. No thanks, I canceled.
SWG was pretty much a failure. It could and probably should have been the hottest game ever made. The whole SW franchise was getting a kick in the pants with new movies after over 20 years of nothing, yet still remained a huge fixture in people's minds. The only way this game could fail is if it sucked. Much like City of Heroes couldn't really fail. Who hasn't dreamed of playing a superhero as a kid?
Whoops! SWG failed. It was horrible at startup, being quite possibly the buggiest "gold release" I have ever seen. It was corrupt, as players were exploiting the crap out of it for a while. It was boring for a lot of people, with a common theme of people leaving the game being "I never thought it would be like THAT! It sucked!"
Everyone that I know that bothered to purchase it (after hearing the consistently bad reviews from beta testers, as well as the not-so-hot reviews from some game magazines) quit the game within the first 3 months, it was obvious that the game just wasn't that good. Sure, some people will like it. Some people will like a game, no matter how bad it is, or what it's theme is.
So, SoE realized it blew it, and then spent all this time trying to come up with a way to save what should have been the golden MMO game for the decade. They saw the PvP in WoW and other games being more "in your face, action packed" than what they offered, so they tried to throw the same type of thing at SWG.
The bottom line is, when a game is completely borked, a revamp isn't going to draw old customers back, or get you new ones. It is going to just piss off the few remaining players you had. And SoE did just that.
We HAVE to think that long-term.
I can assure you, good sir, that as a non-customer, nothing could have possibly cemented my resolve to never try for your services than such widespread and notable dissent among the current playerbase.
I just checked and I was able to log into the forums. I gave some thoughts about SWG then and now. Even though I have not had an account in over a year I was able to log in. I encourage former players to go in and vent or voice your concerns on that thread.
--Zonjai Nezba
well, to put it bluntly - everyone had different ideas of what we needed to fix.
Maybe you should've tried listening to the actual users?
But no, if you read carefully, this was, in the end, a business-driven decision.
Ick.
Believe it or not, the truly successful games -- I'm talking individual games here, not a series, not a genre, but a specific game... The truly successful ones are generally the ones made by the perfectionists, the people who (mostly) could care less whether the game is commercially viable, so long as it's done right.
Halo, Half-Life (and Half-Life 2), World of Warcraft... I could go on.
Let's take Half-Life 2. Dog was in that game twice, maybe three times, but how much time did they spend polishing that model, making it act the way it's supposed to, giving it the detail and the character it needed? God knows gamers would've bought just as many copies, at just the same price, if the scenes with Dog were completely left out, or even if Dog himself was less detailed, in order to free up developer time for another character.
But it wouldn't have been the same.
And the reason the game did work, sold as well as it did, got such great reviews, and so on, is because the entire team did the entire project the same way. The levels have personality, and the game is replayable and still fun and interesting even in the "HD Era" where the graphics are showing their age, because everywhere you go you find things with the same kind of creativity, attention to detail, and personality as Dog.
Now, what's a market-driven game? Hmm... Hard to think of many, as they aren't memorable. Almost every movie game is, though, and it shows. Even the ones I like, such as the Matrix games, are driven more by marketing than anything else. Look at Enter the Matrix -- if you die, you have to reload the level. The things that the game is selling on get attention to detail -- things like the Kung-Fu system, Bullet Time, being set in The Matrix and interacting with the second movie -- but even the main character models look kind of shabby, and most of the environments just plain suck -- repetitive, boring, flat textures and room layouts. In Halo, at least there was the gameplay to back up a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is SOE, not Sony/BMG. There's a difference, although they are both tied to the umbrella Sony corporation.
This slashdot article would be more interesting if it had been posted within two months of the forum post it is about. It would also help if these topics haven't been covered by four other articles in the meantime.
What's funny is that after seeing this thread it reminded me that the last half-dozen times I've logged into SWG in the last year I haven't had any fun, nor any idea what's been going on. Every time I log in, everything has changed and it's a total mess. So I finally decided to cancel my subscription. It turns out my subscription is active, but my credit card expired in 2004! I guess things may be more grim than what SOE is claiming if they're letting two year old monthly accounts still remain active.
But what the hell, something has changed between now and then. All of us had the chance to play the free trial. Ex-players even got two weeks of free play on our old characters.
The old SWG is claimed by Smedley as being to complex, with to many proffesions for people to figure out and a combat system that was to complex and not action packed enough.
Overall it was felt that SWG was too complex a game.
So was this true? Depends I suppose. Who are you talking too? A person who is confused by patience or an ex F16 Fighting falcon player? There are people out there who find the manual for Diablo a real thick brick. Other people ain't happy until they know every detail of whatever virtual thing they control. Actually fuel mix ratios in a cessna at altitude X and temp Y nuts.
SWG has 34 proffesions but most of them were easy to grasp for someone with an IQ. How hard is it to figure out Medic, Sword master, Pistoleer. If you can't grasp that Medics heal, Sword masters fight with swords while pistoleers use pistols your IQ must be in the single digit range. In binary.
Perhaps it was the fact that you had Medics AND Combat Medics AND Doctors. Medic was the base proffersion from wich you could advance to Combat Medic and Doctor. Well yeah this is complex I guess. For a six year old. Most people playing the game seemed able to figure it out. Most, not everyone however. RTFM Syndrome reared its ugly head in SWG like everywhere else.
RTFM. You know what I mean with that don't you. If you are online you will come across countless people who ask inane questions they could easily answer themselves by reading the GODDAMN FUCKING MANUAL but wich they can't be arsed to do. On slashdot this is called "Read The Fuckin Article" where a poster ask a question that is answered in the article posted.
Simply put there will always be a group who is very focal screaming that it is to complex, I seen this in every game. You probably can't get much simpler then Quake and I seen people begging for help in there.
There is a group of people out there that will never be able to deal with anything wich requires them to read more then one word. Not because they lack the IQ but because they just can't be bothered.
Is this really a group you want to market a game too? You can do it offcourse, it certainly is a big group but you will alienate the group of players who can read a manual without throwing a hissy fit.
And that is SWG's NGE biggest failure. It took a game from the crowd that could read a manual and turned it into a simpleton game. How simple? Well so simple that instead of mixing your own character from various proffesions you now do not have any choice to make in your chars development. You just level up in the proffesion you chose at the start. Every level 60 jedi will have exactly the same skills. Yuck.
There are plenty of "dumb" MMORPG's out there. All the korean ones for a start. Perhaps the truth is that only the "dumb" MMORPG's can survive.
SWG was played by an audience that by and large liked to play a complex deep game where you had a large amount of freedom to play the way you wanted too.
The problem was that SOE never really managed it right. It shouldn't have launched until they had removed a lot of the bugs. This killed the game far more then it being considered to complex, but offcourse they cannot say this. Smedley blames all of SWG failure on complexity not on SOE releasing a bugged product on an audience fed up with buggie MMO games.
SWG was complex and deep enough to allow you to be your own character. Well up to midlevel anyway. Then all of a sudden everything started to crash. Why? The "highend" content. Mini expansions like the Death Watch Bunker and The Corvette (dungeons) were unplayable for a lot of proffesion mixes. Creature Tamers were out because pets cannot be summoned inside. Scout/Rangers trap skill did not work on
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm glad I didn't start playing SWG. I beta'd the game right before it shipped. There was no way it was ready. It was laggy and buggy from the get-go, and definatly in need of polishing before going gold. I decided at that time I wasn't go to play it at that time. Sure, maybe I would have bought and played it later, if it started getting decent reviews, but it never did. I had a buddy at work, which had SWG as his first game, tried so hard to like this game, now he calls it "a piece of shit.
Then something happened that made me really glad I hadn't started playing SWG; NGE. It would have pissed me off to no end had I worked hard to get a Jedi, crafting up, and developed a character or two, then have it gone in one sweep. That'd smooth piss me off.
Reading all different MMO boards, I see soooooo many SWG refugees. When I play WoW, I'll often see people asking to be contacted by former SWG players. SOE screwed up pretty good by messing with their current customer base in the name of future profits. SOE should have made NGE a whole new game, imho. That way, they could have kept their current customer base, and then had the dumbed down version for those without an IQ.
Heh, SOE screwed up pretty good indeed.
I managed to get my Wookie to Master Droid Engineer, with a rather successful shop right on the outskirts of a major city. I participated in the forums on a regular basis, and I believe I was rather well-respected there for my ideas on the profession.
After a while I grew tired of the game, particularly as it seemed that my chosen profession was being essentially ignored, although SOE provided a little lip-service. I actually stopped playing just before what was supposed to be a rather major upgrade to droid abilities, and felt a pang or three about that. This was perhaps 15 months ago.
Today, I went and checked out the 'Engineering Trader' forum. That's where folks who want to make droids these days hang out. You know what I found? Things are *worse* rather than better. The same old bugs, the same old uselessness, but now compounded by the simplification that led to *removing* functionality. I don't regret my decision to leave.
That's my $0.02, I'm sure it's worth less than that.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Was it redesigned to suit PS3 console customers and a younger audience base, sounds like it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Here lies SWG.
It started with fire and passion
Died alone and forgotten.
Left abandoned by the people who cared.
SWG had many ailments and health issues that made it's life difficult.
It's forsight was hindered making it unable to see far ahead
It lacked the hindisght to learn from the past
SWG had no sense of direction and ended up wandering in circles.
It was too rebelious and too different
SWG suffered from schitzophernia and never knew who or what it was at a given time
The poor soul had inhibitions to please everyone but failed by being too diverse
SWG's parents always listend to the dumbest in the crowed and tried to make SWG dumber like those voices crying out.
SWG aspired to be many things and in the end burned itself out by listening to it's misguided friends. It tried many things, but did them all poorly and without much thought. Sort of that same spontanious "hey we're all jumping off the bridge, let's go NOW!!" sort of action..
Let's lower our heads and tip our hats to a once great SWG that dwindled away cold, alone and forgotten.
SWG was a good friend when we met 2 years ago, but we grew apart as it he changed his ways and because dumber from the drugs habbit he formed.
Business would be fun if it weren't for customers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How about a sort of moderation system, where you can point out griefers through moderation? Anyone branded as a griefer from then on looks just like Jar Jar Binks. Any words he types as messages even get "Jar Jar ized". Meesa tinksa gooda idea?. Wacky hijinks and constant persecution ensues
I quit a couple of months after it launched, when I found that Holocron and the rest of the Devs had been lying to us. All through beta testing, they were promising this fantastic, dynamic, and unique for each character system where you could become force sensitive. I specifically asked Holo on the beta forum "It's not going to be something lame like having to master randomly chosen professions, is it?" and he told me no, that's not what it would be. Well, a few months into the live game when they finally started revealing info on the jedi, guess how you became one? Yep, you had to master a couple of professions randomly selected for you by the server. I cancelled my subscription that day and have never looked back. I don't appreciate being lied to and applaud the approaching death of SWG.
I was in the same boat as you. This was the first MMORPG I have ever played. I came in after the first CU changes. I was blown away by the game. It was a game which did not force you into combat. There was so much more to do.
I set up my own business of selling droids. I made a decent amount of money at it. I made some friends over the course of the game. We even started our own city. That was a lot of fun talking to people trying to get them to join the city. Running for mayor every two weeks. I was even building a website for our guild.
I had a lot of fun with the game. I was also heavily evolved on the forms. I made ideas known that I had thought of as well as others. It was fun while it lasted. Then the NGE came out and I just quit. The economy had collapsed on my server. There was no more point to play.
I blame all of the problems that I have with the new NGE on the development team. They did not communicate with the players at all. Not once did I see a reply in the forms from the developers. All we saw were deleted messages witch said bad things about the game. I believe there should be some sort of trust between the developers and paying players, and they destroyed that trust a long time ago.
i tired the NGE and even started a new toon on the wonderhome server. what i found out was that not only was everything that i liked about the game (different professions and junk) were gone but the lag had gotten worse. the game make me want to punch my computer monitor becasue i would be stuck walking into a wall for two minutes. I then even went out and purchesed a lower latancey DDR 400 2gig RAM (becasue the support guy told me my 1gig of regular wasnt cutting it and that was cause of the lag! lol) well i have been wanting a 2giger any ways so i shelled out the money for it and you guessed it the game showed no difference (even with the graphics settings all the way down and the sounds turned off!) by far SWG was the biggest waist of money that i have ever spent on a game. I am going to go back to playing Final Fantasy XI and City of Heroes now. CoH/CoV is cool, but also loosing its appeal.
Let me start by saying that I was a long time dedicated fan of SWG, one of the first Jedi on my server in the old system. To this day, the experience of playing SWG in the first year was one of my best MMO experiences ever.
Sony's blunders with SOE are obvious in origin. The marketing team is making the decisions, instead of people with a passion for the game.
SWG was beautifully complex, had a great economy, and a lot of diversity, which was a major draw for many players including myself. But the marketing team thinks its too complicated. So, they destroy all the depth and wonder, and there goes a percentage of the player base.
The marketing team recognizes that everyone wants to be a Jedi. So they make it possible for everyone to become a Jedi by following a few simple steps. And, since there will be so many jedi, they'll have to be made essentially balanced with other classes. Suddenly jedi are running around everywhere that can't kill most other professions. Another percentage sliced off the playerbase.
It seems that every step of the way, the Marketing Committe decides the direction for the game to head, and its always the wrong one.
Sony... If you want to save the game, fire the marketing staff, and hire some people that care about the game.
Take a clue from EvE (www.eve-online.com) one of the most complex, slow paced, and long-term games out there. They have been increasing usership since launch steadily without fail. Why? The devlopers care about the game. they're not watering it down for stupid players that can't figure it out. They've made something that has passion and it's obvious to everyone.
I'd post this on your own stupid forum SOE, but you refuse to alow me to log in. Apparently you dont want the input from past subscribers.
That is the Slashdot teaser handline we are waiting for. Look at the 118,000 plus pissed off customers responding to Smeds thread. Not to mention the ones not allow to post because they were already banned ( A blessing since their lose was not as great as the 2 year plus veterans of the game having the game taken away from them and asked to play the new kiddie car version aka NGE).
Smed and his council of dread at SOE have been high and mighty until the had their asses handed to them by Blizzards WoW. Last year at time , I was requesting a reconsideration for a game ban for alleged forum misuse while I was into my 3rd week of WoW, I warned them that I was playing a competitive product but Bruce and Grava to not care. I even took to Andy Zaffron who kindly took my phone call on my game ban for forum misuse and stood behind his co-workers. I am not suprised . If you listen to Law in Virtual Worlds on http://www.nyls.edu/pages/3903.asp Mr Zaffron can be quoted to say concerning the EULA ( that and the TOS are altered numerous times to fit their needs) " IF you do not like our EULA , go play some other game".
With the recent mismanagement of SWG and the flipflop on selling vitual goods with the Station Exchange, Customers are now playing other games and SOE has NOone but themselves to blame.
I played a LOT to figure out a very complex, very cool game. There were games within the game. And, I played a lot because it was Star Wars. In fact, that's probably why most players started playing the game, even if not much other than the scenery and life forms were like the movies. Once my friends left, I kept playing. After all, I made a lot of new friends in the game. Once most of my new friends left with the first "Upgrade", I stayed on. By then, my character had become "me". But, when the "Enhancement" came, that's when the problem came in. Suddenly, I was practically a noob in the game I spent over 3000 hours playing.
Sony, I want my life back. Wait, I got it back by quitting your game. Thanks!
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Not even clOOOOOOOOse.
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam