I built a new PC when I heard SWG was coming. I harrased every gamer I knew into playing this game at launch. I was the guy who never left his house, gained twenty pounds and breathed Star Wars Galaxies for a solid year plus, even pre-ordered the JtL expansion. I met a few interesting people early on and they started a guild. The guild grew happily through the first six months of the game, eventually reaching around 70 active members.
Then came the dual-edged sword of mounts and player cities. We were given the freedom to travel quickly, and at the same time encouraged (as you had to be 2km from an exisiting NPC city to have the option for a player city grow to "Level 5") to move out into the boonies. One more catch was that there was a cap on the number of cities per planet which was hit on most of the big planets within the first hour or two. We moved our group, many of them wailing and gnashing from a bustling area of trade north of Coronet on Corellia to Northwestern Dantooine.
It would be weeks before we had a shuttleport into our little enclave. We fought on, as we believed in the spirit of player cities, however flawed the implementation. We managed to grow our city and even have some solid amount of trade pass through the city. When our mayor quit the game for two months things quickly went into chaos as citizens "defualt voted" for the incumbent and we had to get players from other servers to trade citizenship in our city for citizenship in theirs just to oust an AFK mayor. Ultimately, we were given so little help for a system so inherently bugged and ill-conceived most of our guild of seventy left the game. A small group split from the guild and tried to build their own city on Lok which in the end failed, further splintering our little group.
At this point, approaching a year from launch a handful of us, tired of running a ghost town in the boonies, moved to Naboo into a 5 guild city which was most often a ghost town. We survived the summer of 04, hitting the one year mark with almost no plot movement and the "monthly story arcs" promised at launch solidly frozen in carbonite. The Galactic Civil War was also "on hold" as the battlefields where all sorts of fun supposedly could happen were turned off until the still-undelivered "GCW Revamp" happens.
Somewhere in the summer, we were told that a series of profession revamps would start happening and Player Correspondents would be flown into Austin to discuss a Combat Revamp. Jump To Lightspeed was originally touted as "a different dev team working on the side" which eventually became "the development staff is spread too thin with the launch of JtL to do any meaningful work on the core, live game." So off the Correspondents went and somewhere in there we were told that a major combat revamp would happen in the next 6-8 months including Alpha, and beta testing! At this point I, as a crafter-type, wasn't really interested in any of the proposed changes and in fact was still waiting on a Droid Engineer revamp that was half delivered a few months prior.
About this same time the insanity of the "new" Jedi unlocking system showed up. It replaced the grinding of professions with the grinding of jedi xp wherein before you needed a list of professions to unlock and now you need xp that was derived from your main xp at a variable conversion ratio somewhere between 1:3 and 1:10 (sorry if I'm remembering this wrong, I've tried to forget) depending upon the type of experience you were converting. I really didn't ever want to be a jedi in this time period of Starwars and I still don't so this was once again a massive amount of developer time going into something I wasn't overly interested in. I was only interested to see how a giant, player-run economy was about to change. I can't say I prefered the original jedi system as it didn't make any sense either, but what replaced it doesn't seem to have worked either.
I digress! To help get a feeling for what's been promised to players by the fall of 04, here's a document
There's an inherent contradiction here between the post and.sig that I'm going to point out for my own sanity's sake. I couldn't care less about SGI's stock (exactly how do you think one ends up with a "Moneyed corporation" without a pile of schills willing to give him or her money for a piece of paper that just might be worth something, if the corporation doesn't Enron the shareholders...) but the "productive citizens" you speak of are most often only slaves to the production and accumulation of the infitessimal products they produce. Moneyed corporations, many commanded by people who belong in criminal prisions, create an evironment that rewards the human who has little sense of soul, and is poor in their care of those without the ability to do "commercially viable" work. BEGIN General/. rant How many slashdot geeks are there who DO have a the barest sense of social responsibility? At least start learning what capitalism means before adhering to it so fervently. And if you look around the world, taxes vs. paltry services offered aren't too out of line. Imagine if you really were paying to help rehab the criminally charged, and dust off those surviving at the bottom of the heap. When do people stop saying, "if you got off your ass and to work you'd be fine?" and start addressing root causes? There is a ridiculous idea that everyday can't be about fufilling work, and that everybody sort of hates their job, and I think it just might kill hope in aging geeks across the board.
END RANT
I am interested in this thread as well, though I'm willing to make a little more of an asumption and say how long before the only difference between my ability to create 3D effects and the FX-house is the number of machines they have, and the amount of hard drive space? I have a friend who works for ILM, and his updates of what he's using, while very impressive, basically describe what I could do with a pile of startup capital and a team of similarly interested artists/computer scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/18/iphone-3g-connectivity-affecting-2-of-customers-software-fix-soon/
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/18/iphone-3g-connectivity-a ffecting-2-of-customers-software-fix-soon/
I built a new PC when I heard SWG was coming. I harrased every gamer I knew into playing this game at launch. I was the guy who never left his house, gained twenty pounds and breathed Star Wars Galaxies for a solid year plus, even pre-ordered the JtL expansion. I met a few interesting people early on and they started a guild. The guild grew happily through the first six months of the game, eventually reaching around 70 active members.
Then came the dual-edged sword of mounts and player cities. We were given the freedom to travel quickly, and at the same time encouraged (as you had to be 2km from an exisiting NPC city to have the option for a player city grow to "Level 5") to move out into the boonies. One more catch was that there was a cap on the number of cities per planet which was hit on most of the big planets within the first hour or two. We moved our group, many of them wailing and gnashing from a bustling area of trade north of Coronet on Corellia to Northwestern Dantooine.
It would be weeks before we had a shuttleport into our little enclave. We fought on, as we believed in the spirit of player cities, however flawed the implementation. We managed to grow our city and even have some solid amount of trade pass through the city. When our mayor quit the game for two months things quickly went into chaos as citizens "defualt voted" for the incumbent and we had to get players from other servers to trade citizenship in our city for citizenship in theirs just to oust an AFK mayor. Ultimately, we were given so little help for a system so inherently bugged and ill-conceived most of our guild of seventy left the game. A small group split from the guild and tried to build their own city on Lok which in the end failed, further splintering our little group.
At this point, approaching a year from launch a handful of us, tired of running a ghost town in the boonies, moved to Naboo into a 5 guild city which was most often a ghost town. We survived the summer of 04, hitting the one year mark with almost no plot movement and the "monthly story arcs" promised at launch solidly frozen in carbonite. The Galactic Civil War was also "on hold" as the battlefields where all sorts of fun supposedly could happen were turned off until the still-undelivered "GCW Revamp" happens.
Somewhere in the summer, we were told that a series of profession revamps would start happening and Player Correspondents would be flown into Austin to discuss a Combat Revamp. Jump To Lightspeed was originally touted as "a different dev team working on the side" which eventually became "the development staff is spread too thin with the launch of JtL to do any meaningful work on the core, live game." So off the Correspondents went and somewhere in there we were told that a major combat revamp would happen in the next 6-8 months including Alpha, and beta testing! At this point I, as a crafter-type, wasn't really interested in any of the proposed changes and in fact was still waiting on a Droid Engineer revamp that was half delivered a few months prior.
About this same time the insanity of the "new" Jedi unlocking system showed up. It replaced the grinding of professions with the grinding of jedi xp wherein before you needed a list of professions to unlock and now you need xp that was derived from your main xp at a variable conversion ratio somewhere between 1:3 and 1:10 (sorry if I'm remembering this wrong, I've tried to forget) depending upon the type of experience you were converting. I really didn't ever want to be a jedi in this time period of Starwars and I still don't so this was once again a massive amount of developer time going into something I wasn't overly interested in. I was only interested to see how a giant, player-run economy was about to change. I can't say I prefered the original jedi system as it didn't make any sense either, but what replaced it doesn't seem to have worked either.
I digress! To help get a feeling for what's been promised to players by the fall of 04, here's a document
You cared enough to "enlighten" the "unspoken majority" with your flippant remark...
There's an inherent contradiction here between the post and .sig that I'm going to point out for my own sanity's sake. I couldn't care less about SGI's stock (exactly how do you think one ends up with a "Moneyed corporation" without a pile of schills willing to give him or her money for a piece of paper that just might be worth something, if the corporation doesn't Enron the shareholders...) but the "productive citizens" you speak of are most often only slaves to the production and accumulation of the infitessimal products they produce. Moneyed corporations, many commanded by people who belong in criminal prisions, create an evironment that rewards the human who has little sense of soul, and is poor in their care of those without the ability to do "commercially viable" work. /. rant
BEGIN General
How many slashdot geeks are there who DO have a the barest sense of social responsibility? At least start learning what capitalism means before adhering to it so fervently. And if you look around the world, taxes vs. paltry services offered aren't too out of line. Imagine if you really were paying to help rehab the criminally charged, and dust off those surviving at the bottom of the heap. When do people stop saying, "if you got off your ass and to work you'd be fine?" and start addressing root causes? There is a ridiculous idea that everyday can't be about fufilling work, and that everybody sort of hates their job, and I think it just might kill hope in aging geeks across the board. END RANT
I am interested in this thread as well, though I'm willing to make a little more of an asumption and say how long before the only difference between my ability to create 3D effects and the FX-house is the number of machines they have, and the amount of hard drive space? I have a friend who works for ILM, and his updates of what he's using, while very impressive, basically describe what I could do with a pile of startup capital and a team of similarly interested artists/computer scientists.