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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.
It might not have been owned by SoE (which was created later, I believe), but it was owned by Sony. How else do you explain the game's biggest city: Qeynos (Sonyeq)?
I would disagree. Has EQ gone downhill? Sure maybe people have come and gone, but the game itself is still good. Same with Everquest II. Same with Planetside. I haven't played Matrix Online so I can't comment. But SWG is really the only game that has had this kind of problem, that is, making it so bad that a good amount of people leave.
I've been playing PlanetSide since it was released, and a lot of the complaints about SWG sound very familiar. Frankly SOE seems very content to release buggy products and to release updates to those products that turn off large parts of their core subscriber base.
PlanetSide is perhaps the ultimate example of this. When the game first came out it was very buggy. I signed on in the first week that it was out but couldn't be compelled to recommend the game to any friends for a good 2-3 months after release because it was so flaky. Even then the person who joined up on my recommendation ended up leaving within a couple weeks because he couldn't get it to run stably on his system.
The next big screw up was the release of an expansion pack, Core Combat. This expansion pack brought minimal content and was fairly expensive. Most of the people I know who bought it when it was first released regretted it. It wasn't until the price dropped to like $10 that I could recommend it to people. $30 for a few new maps (which also has the effect of diluting the player concentrations), 3 new vehicles and 3 new weapons is rather overpriced.
Since that time, there's been a pretty steady decline in the population in the game. The final nail in the coffin was the release of BFR's, these big robots that are similar to what you'd see in Mechwarrior. It wasn't a terrible concept but they so radically altered the balance of the game that a lot of people abandoned ship.
Currently the game is decent. The pop levels are rather low, so while you'll find a battle anytime you log on, the quality of the battles has suffered a lot. Lots of 3-way stalemates happen now because there's no fun in the strategic approach of attacking empty continents. They are trying to get moe people by offering a try before you buy option where you can play as a lower level player for free. That might bring more people, or it might get exploited as people create temporary accounts to log on and grief people and cause disruptions.
It's a shame too, because the overal concept and play of the game is good. It's a really nice blend of strategy and action, but it's just been poorly managed by SOE.
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These SOE guys just trip out every time anyone criticizes them or their products. Did you see that SOE director of public communications or whatnot railing against Joystiq and Penny Arcade a couple weeks ago for holding the simple and very reasonable opinion that Everquest 2 is a very ugly game? It was one of the most unprofessional things I have ever seen an electronics company representative do.
Now we've got for the first time I'm aware of an SOE rep publicly commenting on something that almost everyone I know who has ever played SWG, especially the people who played the beta, has said over and over: SWG as a game was released incomplete and never really exactly finished. And what's the response from SOE? Shut up, if you think we make incomplete products you hate you. Basically.
I think it's really telling that SOE is awash in criticism, and their response to this is not to address the criticism or fix the problems they're being critisized for, but just to attack anyone who criticizes them. That technique might work for bloggers and political candidates, but it doesn't work when you're trying to sell a product. When you sell things, it isn't enough to be able to win internet arguments about whether or not your product is better. You actually have to make people like the product enough to buy it.
With the Star Wars fiasco was a complete lack of communication
Sony/Lucas Arts/Whoever did not communicate with the existing subscriber base to explain WTF was going to happen. And after they had done it, they still didn't communicate worth a shit.
People will stick around if you tell them "it will get better" or "we're taking your complaints into consideration". Sony didn't do that and got burned for it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Here's the text for those people at work that can visit /., but not fohguild.com:
h tml
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Smed
Registered User
Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 50
The new CBS story including the interview I did is now up here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/tech...in500397.s
For the record, it was done prior to my getting involved in this thread. One quote I gave the CBS interviewer had to do with us never releasing anything that wasn't done . Throughout this particular thread I've had you all (and here I will give Utnayan the credit) point out several times in the past where there were unfinished pieces of some of our expansions.
As I've double checked some of the specific instances he listed (and others as well) I think it's fair to say that there were indeed cases where stuff wasn't properly finished as it should have been. In other cases stuff was in fact completed, but bad loot was dropping.. or in some cases some progression stopping bugs.
I apologize for that.
We've got the process in place to make sure that doesn't happen again. My biggest beef all along with these issues is the idea that we would have done it on purpose. That has never been the case. We do take a great deal of pride in what we do, and as I've stated before in this thread we love making great online games. We need to always keep quality as our main priority when we're releasing content, and I think for the most part we do. I also know that as a company we've matured and our releases have gotten cleaner and cleaner. We're never going to be perfect, but we can and we will be better.
Smed
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John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment