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

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.