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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 laughed out loud at "three health bars". Thank you for making my day, Impy.
You don't release a game and then change everything about it. Add content and features, sure. But you never drastically change the game. People start to feel like they don't "know" the game and leave. You aren't going to attract new customers by touting something like "new improved attack system". They don't know about the old one so they can't judge how much better it is. And the people that don't like the changes will spread their opinions that it sucks.
Get it right before you release it or deal with the consequences.
Good job trying to be clever with the title and summary, but which is it!?!? "Encased in carbonite" or "out of existence?" Man, that's as bas as CNN anchor Kyra Phillips saying that a dancing Imperial stormtrooper looked like it needed some WD-40 the other day, as if stormtroopers are robots or something. Blasphemy. Now I'm angry.
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I have nothing against SW: Galaxies, but I'm glad to see it failing. If only because Sony owns it. I hope anything and everything that Sony touches fails miserably. They deserve it.
I disagree.
When I was a kid I enjoyed my Walkman, the Trinitron was great albeit a bit heavy. And EverQuest was quite spectacular for it's time.
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Sony is shutting down half the servers. One half, leaving approximately one other half. This is actually good for everybody. The remaining players will actually get to play with other people, the whole point of MMOs I'm told. In addition Sony gets to spend less money supporting the game which is good for them. Oh yeah, we get to rail on Galaxies. That's good too.
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.
Actually, that seems to be like exactly the kind of move that will drive players away, no matter how it's done.
See, it's not just whether the turning to FPS is well done or (as was the case) crap done. It's that it turns the game into a whole other genre than I signed for.
If I wanted to play a FPS, I would be playing one of the many FPS-es without an online fee. It's not like people were sitting going, "man, I'd so play a FPS, but I have no clue where to get one. If only Sony could turn one of their game into a FPS..."
Then there were changes like that to the skill system. Honestly, when you hear someone rant about how great the old SWG was, _the_ thing that invariably comes up is the skill system. There were a lot of people who basically put up with its many other sins, just because it was the only one which didn't force them into the mould of a pre-defined class.
So then Sony comes and throws exactly that away.
It doesn't really matter inside which framework you do something like that. It's going to piss people off.
Then there were the changes to the characters. Everyone had their own combination that they played because genuinely that was what they liked to play, and they had spent months tweaking them to exactly their taste, collecting gear, etc. Then suddenly that combination isn't even available any more. I'm not talking just "nerfed" or "changed", but, really, whatever combination you were playing, chances are there wasn't any close equivalent available after the NGE. For some, like animal handlers, there was nothing that even played similarly after the change.
For those without SWG experience: Imagine if Blizzard one day and said basically, "nah, hybrid and pet classes are now out, they're too complicated for you lot. And you've been bitching about specs and your guild making you respec since we first added raid dungeons, so we're throwing those out too. So from effective now, we'll only have the classes: fighter, archer, cleric and thief. (Which incidentally don't play like warrior, hunter, priest and rogue either.) With a fixed progression of a abilities. If you were playing a paladin or druid, sucks to be you, you get to choose one or the other, not be that jack of all trades crap."
"Oh, and what's that crap about being a warrior _and_ a blacksmith? Can't you just make up your mind? From now on, you can be a fighting class or you can be a trade class, not both. The traders won't even have a combat level, but we'll make all monsters ignore them."
Also imagine that it wasn't an April Fools post.
I'm willing to bet that three quarters of their population would cancel their subscription over such a drastic change. Which is what happened to SWG.
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If you've never experienced the rage of when someone picked up the phone and interrupted the 3 hour download of 1 porn pic, you haven't lived.
You can easily judge by telling this old joke:
"What do net addicts and navy pilots have in common? Both freak out when their display shows them NO CARRIER."
If they laugh, they're old enough.
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