Slashdot Mirror
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.
Maybe this should go in the "never too late to bash SOE dept.?"
AudioEfex
"It started perhaps with the Composite armour. This armour was so though that it made all other armour useless. But it carried a huge penalty, so they introduced doc buffs to counter them but made those so powerfull that people turned into one man armies able to solo almost everything. So high end dungeons added had enemies so though that had 100% resist on every attack except one, wich had a 90% resist. From there it just went to hell.
If only they had never added that super armour. We would possibly now have a game that was open ended and they could have spent all the time fixing the actuall bugs instead of constantly trying to balance a bad desicision.
Tips to anyother game developers. Do not introduce a piece of equipment that is so leet that it instantly makes everything else worthless."
This, my friends, is a concise summary of why SWG failed. Devs did not, never, ever, think about what would happen if someone managed to make top-end gear or a min-max template. Hell, they made it possible to make a max-max template. And they had absolutely no idea which nerfs were appropriate.
The poster above outlined the composite armor/doc buffs thing. Players were able to wear this 90% resistance armor and build a template to max out defensive mods, which meant that literally I could sit there firing at the player for an hour and not do any damage. This went on for untold amounts of time. And one week they accidentally bugged it so that one attack in two profession lines, called Scatter hits, ignored these defenses. They weren't overpowered, it just meant that with me, having maxed out accuracy and eating accuracy food, at optimal range, laying prone, I could eventually kill one of these stackers. What happened? Fix went in for *that* bug a week later. There are untold amounts of imbalances like this which went unfixed for untold amounts of time while the devs implemented (boring) race tracks and dungeons that were useless to anyone but the maxers.
Also, the effects of these buffs on the game. Since they buffed everything instead of nerfing players, it suddenly became that you couldn't do anything without doctor buffs, entertainer buffs, and food. This is a lengthy ass process. Imagine you enter PvP and five minutes later die, which is not unreasonable. You now face something like fifteen or thirty minutes of healing, rebuffing, waiting for your stomach to empty so you can eat more food, getting back your entertainer buffs, etc. Fighting without these became impossible in PvP.
And, finally, PvP. Supposedly one of the core focuses of the game, the Galactic Civil War. And PvP a year or two in was essentially what it was when it started -- you could build faction bases, but they served no purpose except for you to defend. So you spent a ton of time grinding and grinding to build up enough faction to buy a big faction base so that you could defend it. And people did it, because there was no other PvP content.