CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail

Back in December of last year, the CBS News site did a feature printing some of the frustrated and confused emails sent by Star Wars Galaxies players. These individuals were all upset by the 'NGE', or New Game Enhancements, patched into the game by publisher Sony Online Entertainment. Evidently the feature was so popular they've gone back into the well, printing up a whole new batch of SWG-related frustrations. When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now. Second, Sony made a mistake. Warcry has some information that may reveal how big a mistake. They claim that a packet sniffer built into the SWG client made population numbers for the servers available to players. On a Friday night, at peak time, post-NGE Galaxies is apparently only drawing 10,400 players across all galaxy servers. This is basically 'some guy on a website' talk, so take this with a big grain of salt. It's sobering news, though, if true.

Comments

CBS gets SWG hatemail?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

FYI, IANAG but FWIW I think that CBS, in addition to NBC, WB, ABC, CNN, and TBS and the CBC ought to provide TMI rather than too little regarding MMOG, especially SWG and (OMG) NGE! I take issue, though, with TFA in that I don't think that it's such a BD when CBS and the WP are covering this. MMOGs are still for DSHs living ITPBs.

10,400 is a lot of players. And I certainly wouldn't want my packets sniffed. But, WTF? It's not like it's BB watching you, just a bunch of other DSHs ITPBs.

OMGWTFBBQLOL!

Re:CBS gets SWG hatemail?

[Leroy_Brown242]

Your acronym usage makes the baby jesus cry.

Re:CBS gets SWG hatemail?

[magictiger]

I can't resist... "In Soviet MMORPG, the WT Fs YOU!"

Re:CBS gets SWG hatemail?

[elrous0]

Yeah, but isn't that SOP for SOE regarding their NGE?

-Eric

Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[Vellmont]

I just don't understand why Sony didn't create a seperate world for people who wanted this "simplified SWG" or whatever you want to call it. Just have a frontend that connects you to a different server that has the patched version if that's the world you want to play in. Is it simply that Sony didn't want to maintain two branches?

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[HeavensBlade23]

Because maintaining two separate codebases is a lot more expensive than maintaining one.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[Skuld-Chan]

I can't speak of swg as it appears their customers are their very own beta testing group.

But in any normal project maintaining two code bases may not require two sets of engineering groups, but for any release requires two QA cycles which may require twice as many people. Not to mention twice as much training for technical support/customer service as they need to be aware of the two product types.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[MarkChovain]

Sony has been ruled to be used well into middle age instead of Google, trying to prove the non-existence of bugs. These guidelines as adopted by the recipients secretaries. (His, actually did the big picture and keep the battery packs, use them well). The first one free, which lets the casual shopper.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[SB5]

Actually many players have stated they were willing to play the old version of the game with no more development support. They liked that version of the game that much. But even I know that although it would have kept players on and playing, they would have moaned to fix it. Sony Online just decided to quit trying to fix both versions of the game before this new version they put out which is a complete 180 degrees from the game before.

And to be completely honest the game has been in a form of beta since release, and the newest version of the game the NGE(New Game Enhancement) as it is called. The game has had many bugs, some that resurface in patches later on. Probably for the first 1-2 years they did the feature creep. The Development staff seemed to be concerned with getting as much into the game as possible. They made many mistakes and made professions extremely unbalanced. They never seemed to have any guide, or leadership or plan on what they wanted and how they were going to do it.

The crafting system in game has yet to be beat. Although with the NGE that has been made useless. Before all the best items were made by crafters, now in game is pretty much a loot based economy.

I don't know anything about code bases and the like but I can understand why it would be difficult and probably require 2x as many people to keep both versions of the game active. Essentially, it would be like trying to maintain Dr. Mario, and Tetris, both similar games, but with Star Wars Galaxies, you have two different UIs, two different loot systems, two different crafting systems, two very different crafting systems, and two very different leveling/combat abilities/profession systems.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[masklinn]

Because they don't actually give a flying fuck about the customer. They decided that the customer was going to play simplified SWG period.

Notice that they managed to:

• Release a paid-for extension a week before releasing the NGE that basically made the whole extension worthless, pissing off 90% of their user base
• Release the NGE without any talk with the community and without so much as announcing it beforehand, pissing off 99% of their user base
• Make Jedis available as a base class (instead of the player having to work to become a jedi), pissing off every SW fan, and every player who'd spent the best of his 2 previous years trying to get his jedi lightsaber
• Ignore bug reports, pre and post NGE
• Ignore any and all requests to fix the shortcommings of the game and the instability (and basically impossibility to use) the last two extensions of the game.

Why would they maintain 2 code branches when they don't even maintain one in the first place?

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[Yst]

Some are saying it wouldn't be practicable, but it's essentially what Dark Age of Camelot did with player frustration over the introduction of the Trials of Atlantis expansion.

A "classic" server was introduced (quite a while subsequently, mind you), on which the expansion and its changes and additions were not present. It (Gareth) has maintained a sizable userbase throughout its existence so far and the experiment is for all intents and purposes a success. It maintains a separate ruleset and different game dynamic.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[voice_of_all_reason]

Because the coding staff stuck on whatever branch was discovered to be wildly unpopular would either get fired or quit. It would devastate morale.

"Hey, you crackers. Who wants to toil for the same wages and not even have the satisfaction of having your work noticed by anyone! Come on, who's in?"

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[Vo0k]

Following this reasoning, they shouldn't ever release WoW, Matrix Online etc. They are all separate codebases. Furthermore, there should be only one MMORPG ever made, by anyone.

Would it sprout into 100 different codebases, as long as each of them has userbase making given branch profitable, it's fine and should stay that way. If any branch is getting dry, either try to fix it, or cut it. But don't cut live branches.

Sony failed to understand that profitablity of games is strongly influenced by variety: I won't buy 15 boxes of Half-Life 2. I will buy one, and 14 other games. And someone else won't buy Half-Life 2 at all, but some will buy other games by Valve. Now what if I wanted to buy Half-Life 2, preordered it, and Valve would say they cancelled it, but here's Counter-Strike, have it and enjoy it. Now I don't feel appealed to the idea of battling terrorists in tiny areas, I want an immersive, dark single-user game. I don't care if Counter-Strike is good or bad, it's not what I asked for!
Sure I might buy both. Or I might not, but my neighbor would buy CS while never touching HL2. This or that way, profit from selling two boxes, not one goes to Valve. But now I'm pissed off and I discourage everyone I know from doing any business with Valve. For me it's crap.

Real quality of both games aside, the changes were way too big to call it "upgrade". It was total replacement of what the players paid for with something they didn't ask for. Would the new version draw a new user base or not, we won't know. But Sony killed a milk cow to make steaks without regard that the users were vegetarians. :P This was a good opportunity for codebase split, creating two separate codebases, at least one profitable. Instead they killed one profitable codebase and created one which was pulled rapidly down by the death of the previous one.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[BVis]

You make the assumption that Sony gives half a shit about employee morale. More likely, they didn't want to have to pay for the resources necessary to maintain both versions.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because a fork on a single codebase is so similar to an entirely different program written by an entirely different company.

Moderators should mod this down because it is nowhere near insightful if the entire thesis is based on a flawed premise.

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

[esampson]

Sony didn't release WoW or Matrix Online. Those were released by other people (Blizzard and Monolith, respectively).

As for trying to follow the theory that if it complicates matters there should only ever be a single MMO you are using the false logic of Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc. Just because there are multiple code bases that exist doesn't mean it doesn't take increased effort to maintain those extra code bases. Obviously it does, otherwise the number of people employed in the manufacturing and maintenance of MMOs would be roughly the same as it was when Everquest first shipped.

This increased effort, however, is taken on by other companies rather than the original 'parent' company and does not result in a direct increase of the amount of effort the parent company must spend, though there may be indirect increases due to the new competition. Why do the other companies take on this burden? Possibly because they feel that the parent company is unlikely to give them a portion of the market revenue just because they ask nicely. This is the nature of competition.

So really your argument should be that if it were true that it takes an increase of effort to maintain two code bases that there should only be one MMO per company. Unfortunately that argument fails because it neglects to take into account diversification. Companies supporting only a single product are vulnerable should that product no longer become desirable. Additionally they are limited in market to only those people interested in that single product. Making multiple products (or code bases) allows the company to draw from a large pool of potential customers.

So following this logic Sony should have kept the old game and made an NGE game and the additional expense of maintaining two code bases could be written off to diversity, right? In theory, sure, but the problem is that if you have two products that draw from the same market pool you will end up with both of them 'cannibalizing' each other. Just because one code base will support and audience of X players doesn't mean two similar code bases will support an audience of 2X. Yes, the combined total will probably be larger than the single code base but it may not be large enough to justify the additional effort of the second code base, possible client frustration because of the confusion of a second code base (oh, I wanted to play SWG Classic) or the lowering of 'player density', something which is important for MMOs, because they are spread across two code bases.

You say that Sony should only cut a code base after it is 'dead'. Using that same logic you should probably drive your car until you wear holes in your tires. After all, until that moment you can still squeeze a few more miles out of them, can't you? Sure, there's some extra headaches with the fact that you have to be more careful driving on the bald tires, and when they finally do quit it will probably be at an inconvenient moment, but you're still saving money because you're not putting wear and tear on a new set of tires just yet, so they will be able to carry you that much further.

10,000 players is still quite a few

[HeavensBlade23]

10K is peanuts next to World of Warcraft or the original Everquest, but it's still quite a few. 10,000x$15=$150,000 a month in income, not counting income from boxed copies. Assuming Lucasarts is willing to let SOE continue running the game, they could continue running the game indefinitely by cutting the development team down to a skeleton crew and consolidating most of the servers. Of course, it's far more likely Lucasarts will see the game severely sagging and pull the plug entirely rather than let the brand get diluted by a bad player experience. Star Wars games usually aren't very good, but they're generally better than the SWG experience and don't charge monthly fees.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[Embedded2004]

It's 10k players at once. So if true that there is only 10k max at once, that's probably 50-100k players total.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[SB5]

The thing is they said they had a development staff of 70, and that SWG has always had the largest development staff of any Sony Online game(my guess is the problem lies there, they run a dev staff based on the way smaller dev teams run). Even a development staff of 5 would probably not be able to pay for servers, bandwidth, food, and places to live with 150k a month.

There are a few ratios that are standard in the industry, the 1/4 and 1/5 models are basically during primetime in game, 1/4 to 1/5 of the playerbase is going to be playing the game. So with a 10k figure that means roughly 40k-60k people are subscribing roughly, the extra 10k is just leeway. There is another ratio that is pretty standard, basically in non-primetime, depending on how far away from primetime it is, you should see roughly 1/10 of the playerbase.

At one time it was pretty much guessed that SWG had about 200k-300k subscriptions, its hard to tell because SOE has never released any numbers. Now those numbers are much much less. You could say that the amount of space in game has grown, and it has, but the amount of times you run into people has drastically decreased. Before you could probably be literally out in the middle of nowhere and expect to run into someone, or be at a dungeon or heavily camped spawn and expect to run into many people. This simply isn't the case anymore.

In MMORPG's 10k players across 26 servers is pathetic. You could get 10k players across 26 MUDs. Which although are multiplayer are not massively multiplayer.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[SB5]

I agree the most recent Star Wars games haven't been very good, but I know many people remember X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter, and TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance. You mention those games and their mouths drop, thinking about playing those again.

Lucasarts in recent times have seem to go from making good games to churning out money makers in my opinion. And by money makers I mean slapping Star Wars to every game they put out. I swear they are making so many Star Wars games based on the theory the more they produce the more money it will bring in and are just banking on the Star Wars name and hoping they get major hits every now and again.

Full Throttle was a pretty good game. Its sad to see Lucasarts go from putting out pretty fun games to just churning out Star Wars title after Star Wars title.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[dc29A]

It's 10k players at once. So if true that there is only 10k max at once, that's probably 50-100k players total.

I'd wager around 50k. EQ in it's prime had about 100k players online with about 550k total accounts. Still, for SWG these numbers are pathetic. SOE was given one of the biggest sci-fi franchises and didn't manage to capitalize on it.

There are many games without a franchise that are fairly popular: City of Heroes/Villains, DAoC, Second Life. I just don't understand how SOE and Lucas Arts could have messed up SWG so badly.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[Ayaress]

It may sound like a lot until you recognize the sheer cost of launching the game. Look back in the Slashdot archives a couple months - Blizzard took a loss of $30 million in 2004 and a profit of only $7 million or so in 2005 getting WoW going. That's still $23 million in the hole. Even the most popular MMORPGs take a few years to make back their initial investment. SWG has never been as big as EQ or WoW, and possibly still hasn't broken even, and if it did, it's not been a cash cow. Cost trimming, they might be able to make it profitable month-to-month, but not only remaining investment but also the loss of paid-for hardware being taken off the game to consolodate servers...

It'd be a bad idea for Lucas Arts to let the game run as it is. They should try to get control of the game away from SOE and give it to another company. Getting rid of the Sony name and going back to the old system would be an easy short-term measure that would probably take SWG back to even higher subscriber levels than they had just before the NGE was released.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[VGPowerlord]

Hear, hear!

I remember when LucasArts cancelled Sam and Max 2. I think they might release 1 or 2 non-SW titles a year, such as Mercenaries.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[Anonymous Coward]

How? SOE. That about covers it.

Re:10,000 players is still quite a few

[hurfy]

Dang, thats across 26 servers?!?

OUCH

So they feel as lonely as i do playing Asheron's Call ?
Like everyone else, we dont show pop now but a few hundred per server online.

poor jedi wanna-bes

SWG Is Doomed

[BondGamer]

Sony had the right idea, they had to revamp the game. But they took the wrong approach and instead has hastened SWG's death. No one is going to go play a game when all the current players are leaving and ranting how much it sucks. That is repelling all the potential players that Sony is expecting to replace all the players leaving. SWG has been such a disaster and it's fate is now sealed. The developers seem to actually be going in the right direction now but it is much to late and the plug will be pulled soon.

Re:SWG Is Doomed

[Banana Logic]

/agree with this. As an ex Eve & WoW player looking for a new game a few months back, I downloaded the free trial of SWG, and it was ok. Not great, but ok enough for me to think about giving them a month of subs to try the game for real. That was until I noticed the crapflood of abuse that was being directed at the NGE by existing players. Sure, they might just be a vocal minority, but it doesn't bode well for the community, and community is what makes these games, so rightly or wrongly I left SWG alone.

Let me ask you something

[aztektum]

"... Lucasarts will ...pull the plug entirely rather than let the brand get diluted by a bad player experience."

Have you seen Episode I? Yeah, he made TWO more! There is no concept of "pull the plug" to avoid a bad user experience.

Re:Let me ask you something

[HeavensBlade23]

We have only ourselves to blame for that. If we hadn't turned up to see Episode I to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars the prequels would have stopped there.

Re:Let me ask you something

[voice_of_all_reason]

You don't really believe that, do you?

This man made Howard the Duck for chrissake.

Re:Let me ask you something

[Anonymous Coward]

Howard the Duck was the best film he made.

Of course...

[Drakin]

SOE is working on getting things right again. I've got a feeling that it was LucasArts that pushed for the NGE to be released well ahead of schedual.

Take for instance the huge list of fixes/changes that are currently on SWG's test center. Most of those are getting positive feedback.

The only real issue I personally have with SWG currently is that the NGE was pushed out too soon, and that they really should have given a greater deal of warning.

Re:Of course...

[SB5]

The funny thing about the huge list of fixes/changes, many of them are just broke features that were broke when they pushed the NGE out the door.

I hate to say Sony and Lucasarts are to blame together on this one. Either Sony because they didn't want to lose their license to the game or Lucasarts for not taking the massive uproar that this has caused into account.

I do agree, there was no warning, and there should have been. And pushing something out things to soon has haunted the development process of Star Wars Galaxies since the day it was released.

I do like many of the systems that were in the game, especially before the Combat Upgrade earlier this year, they had a really nice combat system I thought, and a fun profession system. Plenty of systems needed work and more testing though then they actually received.

Re:Of course...

[Drakin]

I actually thought the combat system needed a revamp back before the first CU.

Some of the first CU's changes were good, although, again it was shoved out the door without near amount the testing that it should have gotten.

The current publish may be a nice change in how much testing it's getting, although we'll see if it continues. If it does, the game may be enjoyable again, although in differnt ways.

Re:Of course...

[SB5]

Yeah I don't think you will find anyone that will disagree that Pre-CU combat was the best. I did like the system though, locking on to a target allowing you to single out and play it sort of like a mud.

I agree it needed to a revamp, but what the players got in the CU wasn't exactly what they wanted either I don't think.

deary me sony

[know1]

i would bet a quid to a penny that those packets sniffers are able to send info to sony somehow.
rootkits, packet sniffers...dear me.
in related news sony announces the decision to change their name to
73|-| 50|\|Y 0|2P3|24710|\|

Biggest problem...

[TheNoxx]

is that Sony forgot to treat its game revamping as an optional expansion, but instead forced players to switch to new rules. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Sony making a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

OUR Sony? Making a MISTAKE? Say it ain't so!

"Sony made a mistake."

[Errandboy of Doom]

The mistakes happened long before the NGE. They were numerous. In fact, every design decision I can recall was tardy and poorly executed. That's why I left with most of the other players long ago.

Sounds like the NGE was a desparate gasp from a company that realized it was trying to support an unsustainable (read: crappy) product. Sounds like the NGE itself is evidence something has been systemically wrong for a long time.

Since the game has been so bad for so long, I'm not sure I can trust any reactions from those still playing. For all I know, maybe the NGE was a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, we'll never know, because it's too little too late for all of us who care about either a rewarding game experience or a minimally competent dev team.

Re:"Sony made a mistake."

[SB5]

I agree, I saw the many problems back Fall 2004 when development was essentially centered around 2-3 things.

Number 1 was that they wanted to fix the Jedi profession, which was a profession you unlocked by mastering 5 random and unknown professions of the 30+ professions. Jedi at this time were extremely powerful. The plans were to change the way to become a Jedi, they turned it into a quest that would take many weeks to complete. The other thing is they restructured the way the Jedi learn their skills. Now the problem here is they concentrated on fixing the Jedi for a very long time, and neglected the other professions in the game who still had many problems and issues that were not getting addressed. Smugglers not being able to smuggle anything was probably the funniest.

Number 2 was rushing Jump to Lightspeed, about half of the team working on Star Wars Galaxies was put on to rushing this game out, this was supposed to appeal to those that liked the old Star Wars flight sims and the new Star Wars games like Rogue Squadron. From what I can tell this seems to have lacked the dynamic content that was wanted, space was and still is pretty static.

Number 3 was the feature creep, new features would be added, and major bugs and issues would go unfixed for many months, if not a year or more.

When a profession got something that was two powerful or whatever, all that would happen is it would face a major nerf that made pretty much unusable. As one player described it in a longer post, they launched as an 747 and tried to change it into a F-16 midflight. It was a hobbled together mishmash of ideas and fixes. Things would break off, things would be patched on haphazardly with what could be little to no thought.

Even when they had plans for the Combat Upgrade, they decided to change that from what the players wanted to this new system that they were developing which was going to be completely different.

Re:"Sony made a mistake."

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never played SWG. My question is, did Sony not have a public test server of some sort to work through these problems?

I remember my time in UO (appx '99-00), and I clearly remember everyone having access to a Test Center shard where the new stuff would get dumped, and players rushing there to check it out. This was mutually beneficial, in that players who regularly participated on TC got to see the newest and greatest stuff, while OSI benefitted from having the "Bleeding Edgers" trying to figure out how to use it to break the system.

Yes, bugs got through, but I'm sure they captured tons of bugs before they hit the regular-play, public servers.

In a modern MMO, is this methodology dead, or was SWG just rushed-to-market on every front?

Re:"Sony made a mistake."

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree with this post more! From the dev team focusing too much on Jedi to crushing-blow style nerfs to rushing things (patches, hotfixes, expansions) out the door.

I happened to love the 'old game' style. Sure it was a little tough getting into, but it helped keep some of the less mature of the game playing crowd away. I loved the diversity of the game, what with 30+ professions and the crafting of many hundreds of items. In fact, the lack of *useful* and diverse crafting is among my biggest complaints about World of Warcraft.

Like many others however, the lack of fixes and non-crushing profession balancing caused my departure from the game even before the character levels were added (not too long after Jump to Lightspeed was released). I miss the character interaction and vast RP potential (something I feel is sorely lacking in WoW), but have long since moved on.

I toyed with the demo of SWG that came out with PC Gamer and have to say I won't be going back. I play MMORPG's for the RPG aspects, not because I want to play a first person shooter, that's why I have Call of Duty 2.

Re:"Sony made a mistake."

[radarjd]

By way of introduction, I started SWG in beta 2, and quit in December of 2004 to play WoW. I have no comment on the NGE, because I've never played it.

In my opinion, Jedi were the downfall of SWG. The problem is that if you have a class which should be more powerful than all others, you have to make it very very difficult to get, and you have to have a limit on how many can do it. The path to Jedi was atrocious from the beginning. Mastering classes? That's no path to Jedi. Questing? That's no path to Jedi either.

Jedi, imo, should have been chosen by GMs specially hired to make other Jedi. They should have been extremely rare, and hunted by other players. During beta, we debated to no end exactly how Jedi would work -- and none of us came up with the absolutely mindless system that ended up in the game.

I don't think Raph's wrong philosophically. Player created content is the way all MMOs ultimately have to go -- there's just no way for a company to keep up with the amount of content that hardcore players consume. I just think his execution on Jedi was assinine.

Re:"Sony made a mistake."

[Corbu Mulak]

They did have a test server, but SOE never listened to the people on it. They never listened to the people in the forums, they never listened to people in the normal game servers.

Every other major MMO has a decent bug catching rate, and some of them do have public test servers (WoW does, I think CoH might but I'm not sure). SOE just is a shitty company. Pure and simple.

No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Moraelin]

To put things into perspective, EA considered TSO a _flop_ when it stabilized at 100,000 subscribers. So 10,000 active subscribers is just dead. There were a couple of MUDs in the 90s which could boast more players than that.

Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development. We're talking a major commercial game, not someone's web-based exercise where making any money in a month is still great.

But I'm guessing they don't even make 150,000 USD a month. Two words: "station pass". If you're already paying for a Sony game, you can get access to all others for half the price of a game. If you already play two EQ games (e.g., Planetside and EQ/EQ2), you get SWG for free. Heck, Sony even offers in-game advantages for for getting a station pass even for a single game, such as getting extra moves (directly or via bundled mini-expansions), or extra character slots or whatever. So you could really play just one Sony game and incidentally get the others for free.

I know that first hand. The periods when I went back to SWG, only to find it a bigger mess and buggier to boot, were just that: I already had a station pass, SWG didn't cost anything extra (other than the download times for the patches) to try, so wth... sure, I'll give it another try.

So the question is how many of those 10,000 are just dropping by between rounds of their main SOE game (e.g., when their guildies aren't online in EQ), but don't actually pay a single buck to Sony for the privilege. It could be none, or it could be that SWG isn't actually making Sony _any_ income, or more probably somewhere in between.

Either way you want to slice it and look at it, it's a major fuck-up. Only 10k subscribers is MMO death anyway, but for a game based on the biggest franchise in history... there are no words to properly describe how big a fuck-up that is.

There were _millions_ of SW nerds who waited for SWG like it was the second coming of Obi Wa... err... the messiah. There were people who grew up with SW. People who put "Jedi" as their religion on census forms and _meant_ it. As Scott Kurtz aptly put it in a comic strip, there were people who said goodbye to their friends and family and never expected to leave the SW universe again. It was a franchise that made Warcraft or The Sims look like peanuts. (When was the last time you've heard someone debate Warcraft as passionately as "Han shot first"?)

And yet they fucked up. They were handed over the franchise and the fans on a silver platter, and they fucked up. There's no other way to put it.

Of course, I suspect that won't stop Raph Koster from giving even more interviews about how great a game designer he is, and spout various stuff like "a MMO doesn't have to be a good game, it's just a social framework" (then how come SWG never was much of either?) or "the biggest MMO success ever isn't WoW, it's Habbo Hotel." (Never mind that Habbo Hotel is a free game _and_ it still doesn't have the number of active subscribers that WoW has. We'll just redefine that as the new metric of success.) But I digress.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Just to put it in perspective, I play a MMORPG (sigh) that has about 1300 players. Total. It's quite alive, though there is only one server. I don't think the developers are strapped for cash either. The GMs are volunteers from the among the players I think... in return for GMing, they get snarky name signs. So it is certainly possible to run a MMORPG with 10000 players.

A tale in the desert in case anyone wants to check it out. Free clients, free trial period, $14 (I think) a month thereafter, linux, mac and windows supported. The graphics stink, but the community is delightful, and the crafting system(s) are something else. No violence, though.If you do decide to try it out, give me a chat if I'm online... I'm Cappu, expert cook, blacksmith and other stuff as time permits :)

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[BloodAngel_Au]

Between Ralph 'The customer makes the content' Koster & John Smeedley... SOE is rapidly getting a bad rep (getting ???), not only for SW:G, but with The Matrix Online, which they are keeping running to get the DC Comics MMO...

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[masklinn]

SOE started getting bad reputation when they took over EQ1 and started their trend of ignoring their customers (as far as SOE is concerned, the "customer" is nothing but a cash cow, stuff like customer service or game enjoyment don't exist in the SOE world but in marketroid speak), releasing half baked products or products not done at all, dumbing down the game in ways that had never been done before, basically telling the players to shut the fuck up, stop suggesting improvements and stop asking for bugfixes (because, you know, there is no way the players could know how the game should evolve even though whole communities managed to reach consensus on several issues), and trigger the "milk the suckers" mode (e.g. crank up the release frequency of $30-priced "extensions" from the original 1/year to 1/6 months to 1/3 months)

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Quarters]

Just to clarify, the article said 10,400 players active on the servers. In other words, 10,400 logged on at that moment.

The general rule of thumb is that at any point you can expect about 10% of the playerbase to be playing. So the 10,400 active number means SWG has ~104,000 players, give or take. While not outstanding, 104K is a decent number. Without knowing the cost of development, the size of the current team, and the costs for the hardware to run SWG there's no way to determine if 104K paying subscribers is enough to keep the game in the black, though.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[crimson30]

SOE started getting bad reputation when they took over EQ1 and started their trend of ignoring their customers (as far as SOE is concerned, the "customer" is nothing but a cash cow, stuff like customer service or game enjoyment don't exist in the SOE world but in marketroid speak), releasing half baked products or products not done at all, dumbing down the game in ways that had never been done before, basically telling the players to shut the fuck up, stop suggesting improvements and stop asking for bugfixes (because, you know, there is no way the players could know how the game should evolve even though whole communities managed to reach consensus on several issues), and trigger the "milk the suckers" mode (e.g. crank up the release frequency of $30-priced "extensions" from the original 1/year to 1/6 months to 1/3 months)

In a country full of idiots, that sounds like a lucrative way of doing business. Why go out of your way to make everyone happy when you can make most people happy for less?

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[F_Scentura]

"The GMs are volunteers from the among the players I think... in return for GMing, they get snarky name signs."

Thanks to the suit from jerky AOL volunteers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Online_Commun ity_Leaders_Program ), any MMORPG larger than yours (sorry) would have to pay at least minimum wage for GMing.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Sigma 7]

Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development.

That's about 1.8 million per year... (This is really higher, as this is only the peak usage at one given time. )

A full-time GM costing $3000 per month would only cost $36000 per year - 15 of thim would change the net profit to ~$1.2 million. A full-time developer costs around $150000 yearly, thus four would bring profits to 600 thousand.

Are misc server expenses really costing over $600 000 a month?

Even so, these peanuts are still profitable - and prevents profits from being sent to other companies. There's even still room to prevent stagnation.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[EsbenMoseHansen]

I don't see anything in that article you linked to about paying wages? Not that I would claim to know anything about american legislation.

Certainly, in this country, lots of similar arrangement exists without pay. The trick is accountability, as I understand: If you are not payed, you are free to do whatever you would like within the usual limits of the law.

Anyway, the GM'ers in this game mostly do stuff like like reset things that have gone into haywire. No P2P moderation is taking place, that is entirely up to the player population. Nor do the GM'ers get free subscription or similar... that would make it look too much like employment, I think.

Of course, in that game, no friends means that you loose. So that helps :)

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Anonymous Coward]

His name is "Raph" btw (no 'l')

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[F_Scentura]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Online#Commun ity_Leaders

Oops, they weren't required to pay wages, but the possibility was certainly enough to scare AOL and other companies away from volunteer administration.

"In 1999, Kelly Hallissey and Brian Williams, former Community Leaders and founders of an anti-AOL website filed a class action lawsuit against AOL citing violations of U.S. labor laws in its usage of CLs. The Department of Labor investigated but came to no conclusions, closing their investigation in 2001. In light of these events, AOL drastically began reducing the responsibilities and privileges of its volunteers in 2000."

Myself, I can certainly understand your points, I help administer a large webforum and have done free services for the good of the community for several years now.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[phlinn]

AFAIK, SWG was never covered by the station pass. It definitively was not covered when SWG first came out.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Hoarke42]

A full-time developer costs around $150000 yearly

Are you hiring?

Seriously though, I'm betting they aren't paying that much for all of their developers.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[VGPowerlord]

You're right, he meant Station Access, which covers The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest II, EverQuest, EverQuest Mac Edition, Planetside, Everquest Online Adventures, and the three Station Pass games.

Whether or not Station Access originally covered SWG is irrelevant, as the conversation is about how SWG is doing now.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Sigma 7]

Seriously though, I'm betting they aren't paying that much for all of their developers.

As you can tell, I'm overestimating - mainly because of previous cases where employers "forced" overtime without paying for it. (Standard mis-management stuff.)

Of course, you still can't hire some random programmer - a server on the scale of SWG cannot fail (or if it does, it must come back online as soon as possible.) This puts a limit on development as any inefficient coding is magnified by the sheer number of players.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[Moraelin]

You have to also realize that what you're paid and what you cost the company are very different things. Having a team of programmers involves not just their salaries, but also rent/taxes/whatever for the building, electricity costs, admin costs, maintenance costs, taxes (at least here a lot of stuff is paid 50/50 by the employee and the employer), management costs (you'll notice that even Linux involves some people at the top deciding what goes in and what stays out), etc, etc, etc.

For a lot of large companies, these costs can amplify a lot, because of the whole infrastructure and bureaucracy. E.g., I think I remember a study some time ago where a ballpoint pen at a large corporation could end up costing IIRC around 10 Euro. (Well, 20 DM back then.) Some cents for the pen, and the rest for the whole bureaucracy it goes through to get bought and distributed.

(And I might add: ironically, a lot of it in the name of cutting costs. There are hundreds of thousands spent in salaries on people whose job is to negotiate a better deal on pencils and save maybe a few thousands per year. Or to negotiate getting a cheap burger flipper instead of a skilled programmer, and actually cause the project to cost 3x as much after all the delays. Or as happened here once, to negotiate a 400k price, with a 50% discount, on a server that was listed in that exact configuration at 40k on the manufacturer's web site: if you measure people's job results in dollars discount got, they'll buy a 1000$ pen at 50% discount instead of a 1$ pen at no discount. But the investors love hearing about it anyway. But I digress.)

Basically when you hear numbers thrown around like "a programmer costs you 100k per year", don't expect that that's the programmer's salary.

Re:No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

[phlinn]

You're correct. I was at work at the time, and had to operate on memory. I would have bought SWG when it came out since I was using Station Access at the time, except that it was explicitly not included. Not sure when it got added.

Times. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now. Second, Sony made a mistake.

This story, and the dozens like it, tell me two things as well. First, that people are running like crazy from reality into the warm, waiting arms of entertainment. And Second, that times must be getting pretty rough if this is the case.

-FL

Re:Times. . .

[n0nsensical]

This isn't 1400 when everyone has to slave away in the fields all day to survive, you know.

Re:Times. . .

[daeley]

This isn't 1400 when everyone has to slave away in the fields all day to survive, you know.

I thought we were an autonomous collective!

Re:Times. . .

[StikyPad]

I think the point was that when we take that for granted, we've lost sight of what's really important. Panen et circenses.. give 'em what they want and they'll forget about what they need.

Sony better hope the SWG team ...

[jchenx]

... doesn't find it's way over the PS3 online platform group, if they Sony does intend on beating Xbox Live this console generation.

I know Sony's a large company, so I'm guessing SOE and the group responsible for console development is pretty far apart. Anyone know for sure?

Re:Sony better hope the SWG team ...

[BitterAndDrunk]

I do, but they'd fire me if I said anything!

Re:Sony better hope the SWG team ...

[VGPowerlord]

I do, but they'd fire me if I said anything!

Tiggs, is that you?

Compost Mainstream?

[pease1]

When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now.

Parent post is partly meaningless since neither of these media outlets are mainstream anymore. Free broadcast news ratings are a fraction of what they used to be and continue to drop, the Washington Compost's numbers have been dropping for years and will continue to drop (as are all hardcopy paper's numbers).

Perhaps this only a good sign in that both outlets might be starting to wake up and realize they've screwed the pooch, alienated a majority of possible readers/viewers and are starting to seek new audiences.

Impossible to fix

[SmallFurryCreature]

Oh sure there are the obvious bugs that everyone agrees on. The old vehicle repair bug where your costly repair disappeared between vehicle calls affected all players.

But the so called unbalanced proffesions problem is impossible to fix. Why?

Because nobody can agree on what it should be like instead.

Believe it or not but some players actually like the NGE. They hate the fact it is bugged but they like the basic idea. How can Sony possibly hope to satisfy these players while also keeping the fans of the old system happy. Let alone satisfying those players that want a different system all together?

SWG biggest failure is that it never really dared to say, we are X take it or leave it. Imagine if you tried to make a FPS sim and tried to satisfy all at once both the hardcore Operation Flashpoint players and say the Unreal Tournament players. Could it be done? No.

SWG was a 'complex' game. Well to some, personally I think that any person that considered SWG complex is the kind of person who needs a tutorial on lightswitches but that is just me. SWG was a game that might require you to read. Yeah, shocking isn't it?

Now apparently it is 'simpler'. The reason seems simple, they hope to appeal to that mythical gaming group called the casual player. The problem is that this group does not actually exist outside focus groups. Oh, NGE was tested ONLY on focus groups, with no existing players involved.

I could start a long rant about the idiocy of focus groups (first off, what kind of losers possibly have time to be in one?) but lets not. Lets just say that focus groups never ever work.

They didn't work for NGE. By trying to appeal to a gaming group that does exist SOE only managed to split the existing user group in to two camps. The first want the old system back and are upset to be forced onto a bugged system they don't want. The second group kinda likes the new system but is upset about the huge number of bugs.

Halfing your audience (making the totally wild speculation that it is a 50/50 distribution) is not a good move.

SWG NGE is currently a desperate move to copy WoW's success without actually doing any real development. The current system is just ewh. It reminds me of those over ambitious mods that try to take an existing engine were it was never meant to go.

The combat now tries to be a FPS but lacks collision detection and you can only shoot when you have the mouse over the target. Yeah, unlike EVERY FPS out there where you can shoot when you want. This makes melee totally unfun. If you think it is like Jedi Academy think again.

The proffesions now take a bit after Everquests rigid role model but with crafting being a seperate job. So is entertainer. Before you could mix match those jobs with other roles. Now your an entertainer/crafter and that is it. Nothing to do but dance dance dance baby. Oh yeah. In fact both proffesions are now next to useless.

SOE seems determined to take its games into the direction of the simple slash and hack korean games but getting it completly wrong. EQ2 too has had simplifications that ruin it. No more spirit shard and your character running insanely fast ruined it for me.

Personally I am on the look out for a MMORPG like game that dares to be complex. That dares the most daring of all moves and not try to be another FPS shooter because those sell so well.

I am 35, I got money to burn but I no longer like being in twitch games that require me to constantly be twirling around trying to keep a polygon under my mouse cursor.

DDO was a nasty shock. It feels more like playing some console fighter then playing D&D. Just having a die on the screen does not make it D&D.

Oh well, that is what you get for being a minority gamer.

Re:Impossible to fix

[festers]

"Personally I am on the look out for a MMORPG like game that dares to be complex."

The game you are asking for is EVE Online. I've played many MMORPGs and nothing compares to the complexity and depth that EVE offers. It's not a game for everyone, though, and it tends to be a "love it or hate it" affair. If you do give it a shot, (and it does have a free 14 day trial), make sure you seek out a good corporation (guild) to be involved with. While you can play solo for quite a lot, you'll miss out on 90% of the game's content if you aren't with a solid group of people.

The old faithful should just move on...

[kikensei]

The original incarnation of SWG was universally panned. All the game journals give it a thumbs down, and it had a poor subscriber rate. What we're seeing now is the work of the vocal minority who actually liked the original product. Unfortunately, their devotion doesn't make the game any more profitable. I really don't see the problem with a massive revamp of SWG. The game would have been cancelled if not for the retooling. The only other route would have been to scrap SWG entirely and try with a new incarnation.

Re:The old faithful should just move on...

[idlethought]

Ironically perhaps, by introducing this NGE to avoid scrap it and start again SOE may well have made at least the 'scrap it' part inevitable. A new SWG might be hard to justify based on their current success. Regardless of the value of the NGE they fouled up the introduction at the managerial, marketing and PR level in almost every concievable way. Then there are the three main changes that the NGE introduces: 1 - Manual aim combat: Actually is reasonably fun, interacts clumsily in with a large number of existing systems, but after a couple of months of live they've got most of them fixed. Not exactly challenging, and gets a bit dull after a while, but it's not terrible. 2 - Removal of vast amounts of indirect content: ie, all the complexity and interactions of the old class system. The result is easier to balance for them. It makes for a fairly bland and unoriginal gaming experience though. Kill stuff, level, get a few more HP and deal a little more damage. The heavily level-based balance doesn't really mesh with the old content either, so there are numerous dead-spots of XP. 3 - New Quests: These are ok, not as good as WoW, and are pretty dull to replay (there is effectively only one quest path in the game and it ends in the low 30's level wise). And you need an expansion to get to level 80, so you can buy an expansion to get to level 90, so you can.. er.. not much of an end game. On the positive side, the PA's and Player Cities that survived the great exodus are generally the stronger and more stable for it for now, and it looks like with the next publish the game will again achieve the level of quality it had before NGE. Which wasn't that high, but generally wasn't as truly poor as people say. At least not after they hot-fixed the major foul-ups in the publishes.

Re:The old faithful should just move on...

[WCMI92]

"The original incarnation of SWG was universally panned. All the game journals give it a thumbs down, and it had a poor subscriber rate. What we're seeing now is the work of the vocal minority who actually liked the original product. Unfortunately, their devotion doesn't make the game any more profitable. I really don't see the problem with a massive revamp of SWG. The game would have been cancelled if not for the retooling. The only other route would have been to scrap SWG entirely and try with a new incarnation."

I am sick of the "vocal minority" argument.

That "vocal minority" was enough to give the game 300K subs pre-CU

That "vocal minority" still amounted to 200K subs by the time of the NGE announcement (CU cost the game 100K subs).

That "vocal minority" apparently amounted to more than half those who were left at that time.

The "vocal minority" is actually the 50-70K that are REMAINING in the game now, who didn't leave out of disgust over the CU then the NGE in the past year.

There never was anything wrong with the original play system. What WAS wrong was the devs never did make an obvious path for those who were too dumb to "learn" the skill system. A tutorial and a directed set of quests could have done that. Indeed, that is what they HAVE done with the NGE, but for this system.

SOE/LEC have never listened to those who only gave them money. Pre-CU all we wanted them to do was fix the system we had and add content. CU all we wanted them to do was fix the system we had and add content. Their solution every time has been two rewrites of everything, the second far more radical than the first, and plunging the game back to beta quality (at best) twice in one year.

THAT is why SWG has lost subs and hasn't grown. Had they spent all the time, money, and resources refining and adding content (including noob content to teach them the system) to the original system, they have MISUSED their resources on rewriting it twice.

The result is they've managed to kill the game.

ever try Eve?

[BitterAndDrunk]

I've heard it's just what you're looking for. I couldn't get through the tutorial, myself; I require a little bit less of a learning curve for my online stuff.

Re:ever try Eve?

[AlexMax2742]

EVE essentially boils down to being a Trade Wars type game. If that floats your boat, great. If not, there are numerous problems with the game.

EVE had an 'automatic skill gainer'. Similar to how macroing in UO worked, except you didn't actually have to DO anything to gain the skill, it kind of gained by itself. The only problem is that unlike old UO, you can't have a max level charactor within a week...you know...in order to have fun. In EVE, if you know EXACTLY what you're doing, you can be flying a combat-ready ship within a day. It's the shittiest combat-ready ship, though, don't expect to be able to PvP unless you - again - know exactly what you're doing and pick and choose your targets. You're essentially stuck doing small time jobs until you can get into Battlecruisers, which can take MONTHS, assuming you know EXACTLY what you're doing. And trust me, the small time jobs suck. The PvE is absolutely terrible and tacked on, and even if you somehow get into a player run corperation at this point, you're pretty much stuck doing menial work.

There is also NOTHING else to do other than 'make money, make more money, repeat'. Exploration is nonexistant, there are very very few unique places to visit in EVE, almost all of the places look very similar to one another, and all of the interesting points are mapped out on your radar. Imagine plaing an MMORPG that was just an endless expanse of similar-looking-grasslands and you essentially had the entire continent mapped out with every single interesting point with a shiny red star over it, and every single point that WASN'T that red star was precisely flat, with no hills, trees, or ANYTHING. There is no place to simply idle and chit chat with other players...well, actually there is, but since you can't actually see anyone else while you're in a spaceport, it's essentially IRC. Not that anyone wants to talk to you, they're all too busy doing other things.

You're better off playing any numerous web-based trade wars based game. The only thing you're missing out on is PvP, which consists of you being ambushed and not being able to do anything about it, or you chasing after someone and not being able to kill them.because they've got 2 years on you and already have a dozen safespots made in the system and a lightining quick ship. Oh, the EVE fanboys will tell you about huge fleet battles. Those NEVER happen where you happen to be. And if you do somehow get in a huge corperation and participate with one, it consists of you being 30km away from all of the primary targets the squad leader calls, and you're stuck sitting there running between dead ships because you're still trying to fumble around with the interface and you're too far away from them all anyway. And then you get podded out of fucking nowhere. Yay, fun.

I gave this game multiple tries, as I had a bunch of friends who play the game. No more.

Re:ever try Eve?

[festers]

You sound like someone who didn't get hooked up with a good corp. That's a shame, because all of the complaints you listed become non-issues once you're doing things with a solid group of people on a regular basis. Even so, EVE isn't for everyone, so maybe it just wasnt your cup of tea.

Re:ever try Eve?

[TacNuke]

I was half tempted to try eve online....until now. For all that people yammer on about eve online, it sounds like the same old MMORPG grind, except its grind for money instead of xps/loot/quests. "WOOT lvl!!" or my fav "Ding!"

You have to join a coorporation (or whatever) in Eve online to be successfull??? Sounds like a guild to me from EQ/WOW or something. Thats ultimately the problem with MMORPGS anyway. Sure its fun with your friends, its just all the other idiots in the guild. Its the fact that you HAVE to join a guild just to level beyond a certain point. Thats why I dropped EQ and WOW and DAOC. Same old crap and now that SWG has become a FPS sounds like it sucks too. And don't get me started with DDO............

Oh well, back to CIV.

Re:ever try Eve?

[TiredGamer]

Psst, buddy. Over here. City of Heroes/Villains. Have cake and eat it too.

Re:ever try Eve?

[AlexMax2742]

It really sounds like MMORPG's aren't really for you, then. The thing is, group content, when DONE RIGHT, can be the best MMO experience you can have. Unfortuniatly, Everquest was the one that got closest to it, and all subsquent games in the genre have moved away from the harsh death penalities (which doesn't beat good habits into players) instead of making the group content in and of itself more managable.

However, if you really miss SOME things about MMORPG's, then here are some alternatives that you might like...

Shards of Dalaya
A free Everquest server that is hosted in another country, preventing Sony from shutting it down. It has much accelerated XP gain, and the world is smaller, so your chances of meeting other players is much increased, making LFG much less painful. http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/ is where you should go to take a look.

Ultima Online: Redemption
A free UO server, which is fantastic if you never played UO back in the 'golden era' of UO. You will need to learn how to macro, but out of the MMO's I've played so far, that was the one that kept my interest the longest. http://www.uoredemption.com/ for this one.

Guild Wars
Not really an MMORPG, but the PvE is pretty fun, and the storyline progression is obvious once you get to post-searing (just do the co-op missions), and the fact that NPC party members can fill in for missing roles, even all other party members, is a neat fact. Couple that with a FANTASTIC PvP system, and incredably responsive developers, and you've got yourself a winner. Only problem is that a good portion of the game is instanced, so you dont see many other players outside of towns.

Neverwinter Nights
Now, this isn't really an MMORPG, but it's really damned close when you're playing on servers that support running logins. Almost all of the servers use content that is created by the player, and while they kinda sorta do look alike (because of the tile-based nature of the level creation), there is still tons of room for creativity. There is a server for everyone here. Like PvP? There's a few servers dedicated to creating a max level charactor from scratch. with some of the imbalances of 3e D&D taken into account. Like PvE? There are plenty of servers with vast amounts of dungeon crawling content, either solo-able or able to be handled in groups? Like crafting? Some servers have a fully fleshed out crafting system. Like socializing or IC roleplaying? There are plenty of servers with that avalable too. Best of all, since the servers are smaller, you get to know people a lot quicker, and run-in's with DM's and GM's are a lot more common, or you might even get caught up in a DM-run world event. I've played on many servers in this game, but this is the game that has almost always had a place on my hard drive since I purchased it (I can't remember when, but it was before the platinum pack came out, so I had to buy Gold and then Hordes of the Underdark seporately). Highly recomended, the only complaint I have with it is that the linux port is really half-assed when it comes to organizing its files, but the fact that it even HAS a linux port puts it above the other three games on this list.

Re:ever try Eve?

[TacNuke]

Cool, thanks for the input. Really got soured on the EQ/WOW grind. (I really HATED the guild I was in in EQ) I'm gravitating towards either Guild Wars or CoV..... Know any good servers on Guild Wars?

I am sooo glad I didn't choose SWG

[Anonymous Coward]

About this time last year, I was considering trying, for the 1st time ever, an online game. I was 5 in '77 and am a Star Wars diehard. I seriously considered trying out SWG. But, WoW had so much good press that I went with it instead. I really feel like I dodged a bullet on that one.

Sadly, I quit WoW 2 weeks ago because of real life time constraints, but I enjoyed playing it immensely.

And, no, you can't have my stuff. I vendored the BoPs and gave the gold to a buddy. ;)

Re:I am sooo glad I didn't choose SWG

[Anonymous Coward]

SWG was my first foray into MMORPGs. Several friends and family (brother, cousins, aunt) tried to get me to play EQ1 and it just didn't interest me at all. My brother told me about SWG, I read up on it and then preordered. The only reason I did was because I wanted to play in a Star Wars universe. It brought back the appeal X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, XvT, etc had for me. They tagged it as making your own story.

The problem was, it was never Star Wars. It was overrun by people who were MMORPG veterns and wanted to shape the game into their version of EQ in space, or something similar. The most prevalent professions were Swordsmen, Fencers and Combat Medics (mixed with rifleman). Ummm, wth? Some of the most iconic Star Wars professions were broken from the start and just never fixed (Pistoleer, Smuggler).

Some fun stuff was added where you could sneak around a Corellian Corvette and not have to fight anything. You just had to be careful. They fixed it so you had to fight your way through, not just if you got caught. So much for the whole Death Star thing... just fight the entire time.

The best quote ever from the SWG forums was:

"You Star Wars fans are ruining this game".

That summed it up - people who didn't care about Star Wars at all tried everything to make it non-Star Wars. They just wanted another backdrop to hack n slash as opposed to laser fights. They wanted everybody to run around in armor (EVERYBODY had a full set of 'composite' armor in the game, there were no restrictions on it al all, even the entertainers had a set to hunt with). Basically, they didn't want SWG to be Star Wars at all.

You didn't miss anything.

Right idea, wrong way to do it.

[JavaLord]

SWG was a failure, and with it's licence it should have had the success world of warcraft had. I can't tell you how many WoW players I run into that never played a warcraft game before, but picked up WoW and loved it. SWG was the other side of the coin, everyone loved the star wars movies (or at least the first 3) and had played other star wars games before....It was just that star wars galaxies SUCKED at launch. Leveling was long and boring. At least in WoW from levels 1-30 you feel like you accomplish everything when you log in, and you are moving tward a goal, and you can make visible progress (a new weapon/higher level) with about an hour of playtime a night. SWG at launch was this random crapshoot at trying to figure out how to become a Jedi. In SWG you had to grind reputation points just to pvp, and it never really seemed like there was a 'war' going on. It was often said that it lacked both the 'stars' and the 'wars'. While everyone wanted to be a Jedi or bounty hunter, many were stuck being cantina dancers, or random soldiers with pistols. This was quite a letdown.

It was obvious from about 6 months in that SWG wasn't living up to the hype, and that most players just didn't think it was a good game. Sony did what they could, adding the 'stars' in the expansion pack. Finally they realized that people wanted to live out the roles on screen in game. It was way too late by then, and the NGE just ended up pissing off the small playerbase they had.

They should have kept SWG as it was, and started developing a new MMO, with a new name and the star wars licence. They should have shot for the twitch based gameplay, to the point of possibly recreating "Jedi-Knight 2" fps like mechanics while on the ground and Tie-Fighter/Xwing fighter mechanics while in space along with MMO type rewards for repeat gameplay.

Trying to fix SWG as it stands now is a waste, nobody is going to run back to it, most people are busy playing WoW. These people aren't any hidden demographic either, a lot of them are ex FPS players that were just waiting for a popular MMO with a decent pvp system.

Any starwars MMO should be based on war, and player vs player conflict. Not cantina dancing, or sightseeing in a virtual star wars disney land.

some numbers

[sinner6]

10,400 divided by 25 servers mean 416 people per server.

I was 423 in the queue on Wow last sunday.

Eve hit "23,178 simultaneous users on a single server" according to a clipping from another slashdot article.

$150,000 is the cost of a mid-entry level software engineer.

Anything else I missed?

Re:some numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

even online still doesnt have as many subscribers as SWG even now long after the NGE.
so you missed that one.

also you guys need to point more of the blame on Lucas. Lucas was the one that wanted the changes, Lucas was the one that determined the ridiculously short time table. Lucas was the one that picked what changes they wanted.

cause guess what, Lucas owns the star wars, not SOE. They tell SOE to jump and SOE says how high?

of course lucas isnt going to come forward and take any credit for there rather rash decisions cause that would make them look like idiots. so they let the blame fall on SOE
which couldnt do anything but say, ok whatever you want, its your IP. *sigh*.

everyone knew it was a bad idea, but its way lucas wanted. after all they looked at it like
hey we have a 10 million player fan base, and you only have UO like numbers. something is wrong we need to fix it.

of course it needed to be fixed, SWG was a failure. couple hundred thousand subs(guess) maybe, for a star wars game? doh, thats a failure guys. so lucas is looking at it like we need to get the other few million star wars fans to play the game and they arent going to play a UO like game with star wars art. and you know what, they are right, did they handle it well, of course not.

as for eve, neat game, finally hit 100k subs, congratulations soon youll have as many subs as UO.

Re:some numbers

[swisener]

Where do I send my resume?

Re:some numbers

[sinner6]

There is a difference between cost and salary. Cost includes the persons workstation, including software licenses, health insurance, a few weeks of vacation, 11 to 15 holidays, Social Security tax ... That of course doesn't include the IT department, janatorial staff, buildling maitnance, accounting, shipping department, and random secretarial staff.

summary of comments

[Zorikin]

Doom ... doom ... doom. Go home now!

More proof SWG is going down

[Tyger]

I run a sort of SWG fan site. Not that I play anymore, but people find the site useful so I keep it running.

Before the NGE, I saw around 1200 unique hits a week. It never went more than 200 away from that, for the nearly two years I had been running it up to that point.

As soon as NGE was announced that started dropping. Now it's somewhere between 300-500 unique hits a week.

SWG failed long before the NGE

[Daggon]

SWG has been a comedy of errors for the begining. Remeber the first month, how heavy weapons weren't even avaible? And then when they were they did less damage than common blasters? Or then after that they horribly overbowered the weapons? Or how for a long while a support class (combat medic) was king of all pvp? Or how low lever armor was completely useless and was more detrimental than helpful? Or how they strangely then decided that all melee weapon classes should be comically overpowered despite the original "don't bring a knife to a gun fight" statements? Or how they never actaully did any reasearch into how high quality materials could affect the crafting of armor and doctor buffs and make players virtually invincible? Or how their attempts at "high level content" was to make places filled with ultra-mega-super driods that took 20 people 10 minutes to kill one? Or how they completely caved in and removed jedi perma-death despite saying they wouldn't? Or how they had to COMPLETELY rethink the combat system, admitting it was broken and non-sensicle? The only thing SWG has ever had going for it can be summed up in two words "Star Wars." Thats it, everything since then has been a joke, LA has completely failed on this project, constantly making a bad game worse and worse and worse.

Re:SWG failed long before the NGE

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree I used to play this game often, and honestly even with it's flaws I enjoyed it then the whole NGE thing just was crapped on us. I don't care how they package it, mold it, or perfume it is was basically a way to make a PC game a console FPS. They need to pull the plug on an Experiment gone horribly wrong and refund money to thier playerbase. Which I know will never happen. Not one more SOE product will I purchase...ever. R I P SWG

Re:SWG failed long before the NGE

[sakshale]

I only survived SWG three months after the original release, but since I'm one of those with a Station Access pass I drop in every now and then to see what is up. So, I dropped in last night, created a new character on a new server, and started the tutorial.

All I could think of was that I was in a single player game, designed to be no challenge and trivial to beat. I was walking by "agro" mobs without being attacked and killing red-cons without taking any damage!

Not exactly a good re-introduction. It made EQ2 look challenging.

People just don't get it.

[X86Daddy]

Sony is meeting it's goals admirably: piss off and piss on everyone and everything they can. Sell rootkit audio CDs, kill off the cool robots, destroy SWG, fight for ultra-invasive DRM in the next DVD standard.

If you see Sony do something cool or valuable for its customers or humans at large, then something's off and it's time to be afraid. I remember when Sony meant "great quality product." I feel like such a geezer. I'm expecting them to ruin Sony-Ericsson phones any time now. :-(

Because making them happy pays?

[Moraelin]

Look at Blizzard games, WoW included. It has been pointed out before that Blizzard hasn't really innovated much. Diablo was just a scrolling arcade game (a la Contra or Gauntlet), Warcraft was a Dune 2 rip-off, and WoW has borrowed most of its elements from other games before it (e.g., the PvP theme had already been made mainstream by the likes of Dark Age Of Camelot and Anarchy Online). So what was Blizzard's secret mojo? Quality (including not just the lack of bugs, but also a good interface, smooth learning curve, and great balance) and generally giving customers what they wanted.

Last I've heard some numbers WoW was at about 10 times the number of subscribers of the original EQ at its peak, even farther ahead of EQ2, and it had outgunned some other games by as much as 50 to 60 times.

So maybe, just maybe, making the customer happy pays off, you know? No, that doesn't mean bending over backwards each time someone whines that his level 1 priest should get the mages' level 50 spell. But it means that those "idiots" are entitled to have some fun, and decisions should be at least partially based on "well, what do most customers want?" Turns out that most of us are happy just with quality and balance.

Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre. In fact, "EQ" became _the_ name in the MMO arena, stealing the spotlight completely from the genre's creators. It's no mean feat. It's like stealing the 3D FPS spotlight completely from Id. _That_ big a feat. Not to mention from the ones with the big franchise. "Ultima" was a major franchise for every gamer, while "Everquest" originally meant nothing to anyone.

What was EQ's secret mojo? Giving the customers a lot of the stuff they wanted, and which Origin refused to give them. (E.g., the fact that Origin finally grudgingly gave its players a gank-free facet was only to stop the exodus to games, like EQ or AC, which gave non-PK'ers just that: a place where you won't be ganked on sight and repeatedly as soon as you step outside the town. That was just one of the many little things that people wanted, and EQ delivered, while Origin was blatantly ignoring its customers.)

So maybe, just maybe, quality does matter. Maybe, just maybe, even "in a country full of idiots", those "idiots" can still cancel their accounts and go to another game they find more fun. And maybe, just maybe, 2x the investment in quality can get you 10x more revenue. Just something for this industry to ponder.

Re:Because making them happy pays?

[StikyPad]

Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre.

Except Legends of Kesmai was around before UO, so it's hard to back up a claim that UO invented anything. MUDs have been around for almost 30 years.. slapping a graphical interface on one was just an eventuality. UO didn't invent the graphical interface, nor were they the first to use it for a MUD. At best, they popularized the genre. EQ was the first of its kind to go 3D, and while that too may have been just another eventuality, at least they hold the distinction of being the first.

Today's update hides server pop numbers

[WCMI92]

www.nrepguild.com/light.jpg

SS taken of the galaxy population screen just a few minutes ago.

CoH/CoV

[snuf23]

I admit, I do really like CoH/CoV - BUT keep in mind it's very much a combat oriented game. There isn't a whole lot else to do in the game. Now they have outdoor PVE combat, instanced mission PVE combat, PVP arena combat, PVP and PVP zones (hero vs villain and free for all).
I spent about 10 months playing City of Heroes and picked up City of Villains last Christmas. I have to say CoV seems to be a smaller game with less zones and less variety in the zones. The missions have a bit more variety and they are expanding on it with the next update.
I like to group in MMOs but I also like to have some solo options. CoH/CoV is SORT of solo-friendly. The different archetypes (classes) can't all solo well. With City of Heroes, I gave up on my Blaster around lvl 35 because soloing was just too tough. I ended up taking a Controller to lvl 50 (the cap). The Controller was EXTREMELY hard to solo with at lower levels but became an excellent soloing class later in the game. For City of Villains I would say Masterminds have excellent soloing capability.
Having played other MMOs, I can say that CoH/CoV is much simpler than most and is pretty repetitive. If you enjoy the combat and costumes though, you are likely to have a good time with it for awhile.