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.

Comments

Thank the force

[TheMotedOne]

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.

Re:Thank the force

[Rei]

Long term planning this is. But wise for the bottom line it is not. When seven years old your MMORPG is, have as many players you will not. Mmmmm? The path to the Dark Side -- stronger it is, you ask. No. Quicker. Easier.

Reconcile with your players you must.

A viable buisness plan..

[SpaceballsTheUserNam]

Listen to your customers. Or maybe I'm just being naive.

Re:A viable buisness plan..

[SB5]

I will admit they did seem to listen to the customers in a half-assed fashion, even PRE-CU... The problem was the understanding what the players were saying...

Players would have a problem with a profession, and then SoE would go and nerf it. Then they neglected professions (smuggler, commando), and not fix specials. And feature creep. Every month they would announce something new going into the game. I quit when I found out about cybernetics because many other bugs had gone on fixed and many other ingame systems and mechanics could use better polishing.

Re:A viable buisness plan..

[Syberghost]

The problem with "listen to your customers" is that there weren't enough of them to sustain the business. They were attempting (I leave the judgement as to whether they succeeded to others) to listen to their POTENTIAL customers about why they weren't buying.

Look at the date

[VGPowerlord]

This letter is dated November 25, 2005. It's January 26, 2006. Do you see the problem here?

Uh, the "Letter to the Community" is from 11/05

[AudioEfex]

Why is this being posted now? This "letter" was posted two months ago by Smed. It's right there, dated 11-25-05 in the link...

Maybe this should go in the "never too late to bash SOE dept.?"

AudioEfex

Re:Uh, the "Letter to the Community" is from 11/05

[Golias]

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.

Alienating and attracting players at once?

[CurbyKirby]

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.

Misrepresentations

[Solitude]

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.

In other words, "We made a failure worse"

[garylian]

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.

Oh really?

[voice_of_all_reason]

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.

Again?

[SmallFurryCreature]

For everyone wondering why the letter is from november and only on slashdot now, it isn't. It is a dupe.

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

Re:Again?

[Sage Gaspar]

"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.