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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.
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!
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?
AccountKiller
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.
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.
"... 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.
No sig for you!!
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.
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|\|
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.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
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.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This isn't 1400 when everyone has to slave away in the fields all day to survive, you know.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.