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Sony To Encase Half the Star Wars: Galaxies Servers In Carbonite
Impy the Impiuos Imp writes "Sony is apparently merging out of existence half its Star Wars: Galaxies servers. In spite of a number of innovative features (three health bars, choreograph-able dancing, music you can coordinate between several players, 'your own R2 unit and 3PO,' programmable droids, and so on), a complete overhaul of the combat system, designed to simplify it and make it more action-oriented, actually drove away more people than it attracted. It soon thereafter retired to that great, Sony one-fee-for-all stable of aging and also-rans in the sky. Still on life support, it was preceded in death by Sony foster brother The Matrix Online."
I played the game at launch... and 3 life bars is about right. If your health, action, or mind bar went below 0 you died and had to reload your clone.
All 3 bars regenerated based on your stats, but you used action and mind points to perform specific actions... oh, those bars could also be damaged directly by other players (in PvP) or specific mobs.
Even better, you needed other players to get rid of any "permanent" damage you took to said bars, which filled part of those bars with black.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You don't release a game and then change everything about it.
You clearly haven't played Star Wars Galaxies. That thing was a fucking cultural black hole. It needed to be plugged before we lost something important.
But some of us liked playing Ben Kenobi, doing chores, fighting sand people every couple of weeks, you insensitive clod.
It's not so much blasphemy, as the title wasn't quite obviously a joke.
That is: It would have been amazing if someone had actually decided to go and encase those servers. That's the story I want to see.
As it is, they're probably not either -- probably simply being repurposed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The combat system in Star Wars: Galaxies was actually completely revamped twice. The first revamp, called the CU (Combat Upgrade) went over somewhat okay. It resolved a few of the problems that the original system had, and it held a lot of promise. There were two major problems with the CU, though... One, it was just as buggy and unfinished as the system it replaced, and two Sony made almost zero effort to finish, improve, or troubleshoot the CU. The result was that even after several years into the game's launch, the core gaming system was still plagued with bugs, imbalances, half-finished ideas, and an odd mix of non-aesthetically matching game systems. Sony "solution" to all this was to simply redo the entire combat system again, this time calling it the NGE (New Game Experience). The problem with the NGE, though, was that like the CU before it, it was buggy and unfinished. At was it this point that the mass exodus of players began. Sony had already proven twice in a row that they had zero ability to actually finish and troubleshoot a combat system, and a large chunk of the playerbase decided that the NGE would be no exception. Sony also did a terrible job managing the transition from each system to the next. As in any MMO, loot, achievements, and other acquired goals/recourses play a major role in defining a player's sense of accomplishment in the game. Prior to each revamp, Sony promised that all of a players loot and achievements would be converted to something of equal usefulness in the next system. This ultimately proved to be nothing but a lie. All manner of loot and quest rewards were transformed into junk. Many players literally had months of effort wiped away in a single day. And this happened not once, but twice! The downfall of Star Wars: Galaxies was predicted from the moment the NGE was first announced. Sony ignored their playerbase when the game was launched, they ignored them when they introduced the CU, and they ignored them when they launched the NGE. It should come as zero surprise to them that their now former playerbase decided to ignore them back.
To save other not-quite-geek-enoughs from googling:
Star Wars Galaxies (abbv. SWG) is a Star Wars themed MMORPG (online computer game) for Microsoft Windows developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies
(isn't this the job of the TFS?)
WD-40 is not for rust or lubrication, it's for loosening stuck bolts or parts. It's not a general purpose oil and will evaporate in short order. RTFC
Uhh, lubrication is for loosening stuck things :-)
WD-40 is actually a combination of an oil/grease and something that evaporates really quickly like an alcohol. You spray it on when it's really light, and then it evaporates, leaving a heavier greasy substance behind which will stay there. So you can use it for many lubrication jobs.
but in what other game could running out of mana kill you?
Star Ocean. Which is infuriating when you're at a low level and resurrection items are damned expensive, but not such a problem later in the game.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
> I don't have WOW experience, can you reframe this in terms of Eve Online?
Imagine you could now only be a specialist in frigates OR destroyers OR cruisers OR ... OR dreadnaughts.
And your drones all went away.
And you were a battlecruiser who had good DPS and good remote repair/shielding, and you logged in one day and found a popup that said, "Good DPS or good healer, pick one. Now."
So you picked DPS, but now you just had a handful of damage clickies, and the entire warp scrambler/webbing stuff was gone, and people just stood there and blasted at each other until only one side was left.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.