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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.
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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.
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 never understood people who think of their character levels as "accomplishments" that they had to work for, as if having a high two-digit number next to the word "Level:" on your character profile indicates anything other than an abundance of recent free time to click on cartoon pictures of monsters.
Did you enjoy playing the game up to that point? If so, you're not really losing anything important when your character is re-writen/nerfed/deleted/whatever. If you didnt' enjoy playing, then you were a fool to spend all that time on it, because your "accomplishment" is utterly meaningless outside of the animated chat-room your character resides in.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.