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SOE CEO Responds To CBS Critiques
CBS's GameCore page continues to follow up with Star Wars Galaxies players on the aftermath of the NGE. Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley has gotten into the act, responding to criticisms leveled at the company in previous GameCore pieces. From the article: ""I'm bent about that one ... As a person, I have zero problem with criticism. I don't have any problem whatsoever with our customers complaining. I think it's perfectly legitimate, and I think it's perfectly legitimate for you guys to have a mailbag with hate mail from Star Wars Galaxies. But of all the mail, that's the one that bothered me because it's filled with a bunch of BS ... There has never been a release by Sony Online Entertainment that has been incomplete.
You chumps didn't even bill for EQ for the first month after "release", it was so fucked up.
Define: Incomplete
You know... Like it would be incomplete if say... A company came along and made a MMOG about Star Wars without including that space battles part... And maybe say patched it in maybe years as an expansion pack... Oh wait...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Since SOE stopped posting numbers, and many game companies followed suit, numbers are ambigious at best. Besides, you get a Station pass, and you are now in all games. So, I bet their EQ, SW:G, EQII, and Planetside numbers are all the same.
But, Smedley's contention that SOE didn't release an "incomplete" product is based on your definition of incomplete. I am sure SOE thinks that if they finished the code and got it out the door, it's complete. We players like to see the code go through a beta process, or a test server.
The inherent problem is that many in the player base of any game think they know what would be better than the developers and designers. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes they are just plain insane. More than 90% of the ideas suggested in various forums to the WoW developers were just plain horrible. 9% had a little merit, but wouldn't work for various reasons. Maybe 1% of them made good sense. But of that 1%, 5% of that small number fit in with what the designers/developers had in mind for the class/quest/feature. The rest was discarded.
SOE made changes to try and attract more players, without getting real feedback from its existing player base. The burnt both ends of the bridge, and are now on an island by themselves, throwing ropes to the sides trying to pull players back. This has been a fine example of a game company not knowing its existing playerbase's desires for the future of the game.
SW:G probably won't be consider a MMO in a year's time. There won't be massive numbers of players online.
Then again, it wasn't that great to begin with.
"For some reason or another, the gaming industry has grown used to the idea that a game can ship with some bugs and that this is somehow an excusable side effect of dealing with computer software," Silverman contends. If a CD doesn't play the last track, you go get your money back. If a DVD is missing a chapter, you go get your money back. If the display on your television doesn't work properly, you go get your money back. If a car company forgets -- I don't know, the seat belts, you go get your money back (assuming you were dumb enough to buy a car without seat belts in the first place). Moreover, if one particular company keeps releasing CDs or DVDs or TVs or cars with bugs in them, people start to avoid that company like the plague because they're releasing "incomplete" products.
Actually, more often then not, when someone releases a defective product (car, etc.), they issue a recall. Yes, this is so common, that there's a word for it. How many automotive recalls have there been? Many, to say the least. Frequently, a recall just means you bring your car back, and get whatever's broken in it fixed, and you go on with your life.
Software's even easier to fix. You don't even have to bring it back to the shop! Frequently, you can get it fixed for free, in under 5 minutes, without even getting out of your chair!
Concievably, software companys could increase their QA and/or development budgets by several orders of magnitude and iron out a few more bugs before release (or adopt a development method that avoids these sort of issues in the first place), but that cost would have to be passed on to the customer, and it wouldn't be cheap.
Yes, if a group becomes notorious for releasing unusable software, people will stop patronizing them. But a non-fatal bug here or there... who cares?
Back to the topic of writing bugless code, according to this article:
"When Neumann's group worked with NASA on software for the space shuttle, developers were so careful about bugs that they produced just three lines of code per day..."
Bugless code is very expensive. Anyone who claims all software should be flawless clearly has no idea what they're talking about.
The guy has lost it. They took a game that was succesful by the standards of the time of it's release that had 300K subs, and revamped it twice and lost tens of thousands of subs each time, the last one lost 100K subs.
They ignore the player in any SUBSTANTIVE way and wonder why they now have a game that should have at least a million subs and have 50,000
Arrogance.
Corporatism != Free Market
I've given this some thought, and my best guess as to the reason for Smed's comments are that he has some stock options or something that haven't vested yet, and he's trying his best to respond in the "best interests of shareholders", i.e., simply putting the best face possible that he can on it so that he stands a chance of getting some retirement money before the whole thing crashes to the ground.
...and regardless of how carefully SOE tries to deny and hide that they've not lost players in droves, it's very obvious that the most recent major changes to both games basically killed them by causing players to jump ship en mass, although SWG to a much greater degree. Their cities are ghost towns and only moderately populated at "peak" times. I suspect the only reason they've not formally had server merges is simply because that would give away the fact that they've managed to basically chase away most of the players of both games now.
I had active accounts on both EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies up until last month (when I finally got around to cancelling them). In virtually no way was SOE actually doing what they were supposed to be doing from a gamer's point of view. They were interested in selling a product and getting people's money--which is an entirely different goal from making a game (good or not). It's possible for a company to do both, as both Blizzard and Cryptic Studios have proven. I was also a long-time subscriber to the original EverQuest. Even by the low standards EQI set, SOE was practically just marking time and cashing checks while running EQII.
The entire time I played EQII, it seemed like maybe one or two bugs got fixed a month. For a game which was supposed to have lots of developers and coders working for it, their output was approximately what I would expect from having maybe three or four people working for them. They were very good at regularly releasing "expansions" for people to buy, tho'. The problem with this is that from a traditional gamer's standpoint, these were just regularly scheduled times when the GM could be bribed to give you more loot. Every single expansion SOE releases seems to increase the amount of loot per hour players get, so you either buy the expansion, or your character suffers a serious disadvantage to the people who did.
The expansions themselves were also full of serious bugs which never seemed to get fixed. The combat system in EQII was annoying at best, since it again boiled down to the most trivial form of tank in front, healers in the back, and everyone else gets to buff and cheer them on. The "upgrade" it recieved made it even more simplistic (and intolerable).
To Penny Arcade's credit, what they said about the EQII artwork is entirely correct. I'm sure they thought they were trying to create a photorealistic environment, but that's not quite reasonable to expect out of the engine, and the end result is that the world does look like a hackup of Bryce and Poser images.
Much the same thing went on with SWG. The released without actually having finished the game, and then had to turn around and do a major 'upgrade' to it. Their space combat expansion was basically just another bribery session. You could struggle to make money as a newbie in the desert, or spend half an hour flying around space and collect literally a week's worth of money all at once. The "combat upgrade" fixed one thing at the expense of losing nearly all of it's complexity. I suppose if the goal was to make existance on the planets of SWG as simplistic as their space combat, they did the right thing. However, neither I nor apparently many other people are willing to pay a monthly fee to pay something less challenging or complex than a shareware single-player shooter.
Basically, I think SOE got spoiled by having no real competition--then continued on that same path of being able to ignore the entire player base (95% of them are morons, but there's about 5% that must be listened to because they're right. SOE regularly ign