Failed MMOs: Star Wars Galaxies vs. Star Trek Online

[Captain.Hunter]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

[terranova3y2]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game

The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom

[knightofhyrule730]

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game

The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom

exactly. it also didn't help that for the 2 or 3 years i spent in the game the same bugs were in existence from day 1 to my last log-out.

there was also poor balance between some of the melee classes vs ranged classes. i saw way too many 1 hit KOs from TK artists and almost none from riflemen. in addition, with the OPness of Comp Armor, combined with the more OPness of doctor buffs it really became a boring game. i once saw a Comp+Buffd Commando take on 40 people in Anchorhead and not lose a point of health.

yeahhhh....

[thefrayl]

Aside from the in depth pros and cons of SWG's gameplay, I personally just found it to be a very ugly and boring game that ran and looked awful no matter what kind of a system you played it on. It was a HUGE disappointment to me, and it still is.

[knightofhyrule730]

i enjoyed the cities. they all looked pretty good. but once you left them, the environments did look pretty bad...

though i did enjoy going from a worthless artisian to one of the most successful armorsmiths on the server :P

[terranova3y2]

Aside from the in depth pros and cons of SWG's gameplay, I personally just found it to be a very ugly and boring game that ran and looked awful no matter what kind of a system you played it on. It was a HUGE disappointment to me, and it still is.


Yeah I agree, I didn't really get far into it myself but I found tatooines city (Mos Eisley?) way too convuluted and then once you got out into the desert it was really bland.

Theres one thing I think Cryptic need to pay attention to especially on the ground. If it looks boring and bland, its not going to be popular.

[SovWell]

STAR WARS GALAXIES FAILED FROM THE START....

I was in all beta testing phases of SWG, and all of us beta testers tried and pleaded with them not to release it soo early. We all classified it as BETA FOUR, since we already went through 3 phases of Beta. JUMP TO LIGHTSPEED expansion pack was to be the offical game released. Then they changed the coding after that and it went down hill. SWG never really made it.

STO will not be that way I hope. Wait untill its finsihed, it will be the best!

[Riodan]

First off, Star Wars Galaxies continues to be one of the best MMO games on the market. Why would I say this? It's true. Myself, several of my guild/clanmates, have all been playing the MMO games out there, and ultimately, we've returned to SWG until something "new" (cough STO) is launched into Beta. SWG even now, offers a tremendous game world to live in, player housing, highly entertaining space combat, and a wide variety of trade skills and other things that make the game dominant. While the current SWG is severely lacking from that of the original, even a partial SWG still puts the other MMOs to shame.

Second, I think Cryptic is probably a leg up on this discussion, there was very few game developers, publishers, etc, that didn't take a great interest in learning from SOE's mistakes with Star Wars Galaxies, the massive injection of their subscribing customers was a sure giveaway that SOE had made a crucial error in judgement. What Sony Online Entertainment and Lucasarts did to the community that supported SWG was and still is unacceptable and unforgivable in my opinion. They hid the fact they were planning a complete redesign of the game, kept tossing out false hope to the community in regards to fixes to the game and additional content for each of the 32 professions, and ultimately suckered hundreds of thousands of people to buy an expansion to the game that within under a month (if memory serves me a week), was made completely irrelevant as the game was suddenly turned from an MMO into some warped and bug ridden first person shooter.

I don't think we need to point out the obvious or pull out the dead horse for a few more whacks, SOE made huge mistakes and while the state of the current SWG isn't completely horrible, it just isn't the game the "paying" subscribers wanted or loved.

[Kriss]

Because Sony had its hands on it.....that's all that needs to be said.

[Hagon]

SOE and Lucas Arts misjudged what most people liked and wanted in their games, and didn't realize that making a fun game to play was what was most important above everything else.

They listened to the absolute wrong Star Wars fans and segment of the community following the game's development, which led them to adhere to "canon" too much at release, and thinking players would be satisfied with mostly just having the environments there to occupy, assist in creating their own stories, and socialize.

They released a Star Wars game without having Jedi easily playable (that will always be one of the biggest blunders made in this genre) because Jedi weren't supposed to be common in the time the game was set. In the end most didn't care if they were supposed to be common or not. They wanted to play them because to most people Jedi was synonymous with Star Wars. They still are, no matter what the "cononites" want to spout.

They released the game with too many convoluted and useless classes with too many convoluted and useless ways people could spec them (many offered with the intention of them being for people that just wanted to hang around yammering and not do much else).

They released the game with too little content, and what was there was mostly grind oriented.

The combat mechanics were awful.

SWG at release wasn't complicated. It was just boring and catered too much to a segment of play style preference that simply wasn't there in enough numbers to carry a game (and is even less of a factor in today's market). Especially not a game that had every right to be expected to dominate the market.

[TechDragon]

There were a couple of REALLY GOOD posts describing the pitfalls and outright bad design mistakes that Star Wars Galaxies made a little while ago.

Where the heck are LordDave or Hagon or Flatfingers or The.Grand.Nagus when you need them?


Edit: Oh, there he is. Hagon was so quick he pre-empted my call for his assistance!

[MagnusTyrel]

The game failed becuse all the Fanboys couldnt get there I win button Jedi easily...

[Thibor]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

1) Lack of content was part of it. Early episodes were so light in content that most players were blowing through it in one to two days. And the mission stations got old fast with the same repeated missions.

2) Lack of feeling like a hero. SOE seemed to focus on "a day in the life" in the SW universe vs. actually providing content that makes you feel like Luke, Solo, Vader, etc. And seemingly now, the only people left in the game are those content RPing " a day in the life."

3) Iconic class seemingly impossible to unlock with any sort of certainty. Jedi/Sith characters were such a HUGE focus in the movies and the game made it akin to kinding a needle in a haystack where the haystack is the size of Mt. Everest.

4) Crafting system ... the cool and the fubar. Very indepth crafting system with varied results based on quality of mats used, etc made it a crafters dream. Coupled with the ability to set up your house as a vendor shop and RPing crafters were really digging it. However, the process involved in creating anything was so click intensive as to be near carpal tunnel inducing.

5) Lack of easy replayability. One character per server per account. Made it a total pain in the backside to explore the different facets of the game and keep playing with the same group of people without resetting your only character on that server. Unless you wanted to buy a second acct ... greedy SOE.

7) All the iconic space battles and how much space flight/combat was in the initial release? Yeah ... big fat goose egg. Fail.

8) Sizeable planets ... filled with mostly nothing. There were few exciting points of interest and most landscapes were dotted with harvesters intermixed with the occassional player house or less frequent player town/city.

That's off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

[AllahMode]

Age of Conan's failure DWARFS the failure of SWG.

AoC was the biggest failure on earth I have ever seen.

A bigger failure than people who go into tiger cages and get eaten.

[Saladin_Class]

If they would have left it alone, stayed with the original concept. NOT gone after the 12-22 year old WoW demographic.

SWG would still be on the top of the leader board today. They were not happy with the older players, they wanted it all.

Now they have nothing.

and so do we

[Rosebud]

I can't speak from experience, but there are things that I see as a negative from the outside looking in. Of course, as a non-player these views may be wrong, but they are all gathered from trusted sources, be they magazines or friends that have played.

The biggest negative was that the game was set, at least initially, in a time frame that occurred somewhere during episodes #4-6. That, to me, gave off a certain vibe of inevitability. We saw the movies. We know what happens. And we also know that we didn't do it. I can't verify this, but I am guessing there was no "Blow up the Death Star" mission where we could fly an X- or Y-Wing and try to blow up the Death Star as it closed in on the rebel base on Yavin IV.

Star Trek avoids this by taking place in the future of the television shows and movies. We are free to write our own stories (even though the nature of an MMO means that several of us may all have many of the same chapters).
The setting is the backdrop, not the characters. A time travel mission may enable us to run into James T. Kirk (and seriously, if I can encounter any captain, this is the guy. I hate Star Trek and time travel as a rule, but if I can meet Kirk... :cool: ), but James T. Kirk isn't being thrown out as a selling point.

The second problem Star Wars had was the Jedi issue. People wanted to play Jedi, but Sony decided that Jedi would require a large commitment of time. This turned off the casual player. So Sony changed things, and that turned off the hard core player.

I don't know if anything is comparable here. You don't have to unlock Vulcans, and they aren't going to be Supermen in the game, anyway. It may take some time to unlock some of the largest starships, but everyone will have a starship. It's not like you are going to have to graduate from the academy (Kobayashi Maru scenario and all) before you can be a captain.

Anyway, those are just two things that most stood out to me.

[deerang]

SWG is a perfect example of an MMO held to ransom by it's very own community.

[CaptainCow]

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game

The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom

Very well put.

This choice has to be made at the beginning. Not after gamers have worked hard to attain a certain status, in this case Jedi. Then basically remove how hard this was so many others attain it within weeks.

Also, those who were Jedi pre-NGE were still more powerful due to the robes so that annoyed the new players.

Basically SOE managed to annoy both sets of players.

rather like the Labour party in 1968 with the HOL reform, however I really shouldn't be discussing examinatino topics now :D haha

[Arakim]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

I tried to tell them, but it would be like a guy walking up to you on the street and saying, "Don't go to work today."

They made SW:G between EP IV and V I think. Basically, the story was already written, all the cool parts were played by other people, and oh yeah ALL THE SUPER PEOPLE WERE NPC's!

By the time they started rectifying, it was too late.

It's sad, they had an awesome leveling concept (medic action got you medic xp, combat got you combat xp), but the time period sucked because everyone knew what happened next; VI.

People want to be the stars, or at least pretend they are. People want the cool powers, or to shun them to show how cool we are.

People don't want to be background players.

The other thing with Star Wars, I called it the river that was two miles wide and three feet deep. You could make incredibly well rounded characters, but it felt like you couldn't really go deeper into the class. Not sure how to explain it.

[Curak]

I have to agree with a lot of the comments here,i have played swg for 4years now and i still do but the only reason i do is because of the many good friends that i have made there. Now i am ready for a change and this is the game that i have been waiting for and i am glad to say that many of those mates will be coming here too. Soe has had a lot of years to try to get to grips with making swg a class game and have just turned it into an expensive form of msn so cryptic please please take me out of there and bring me happy gaming experiance again :D

[-Rufus-]

Didn't they have like half a million subscribers before WoW came out? Which would make it a huge success in terms of subscriber numbers, cause WoW is an anomaly in the MMO market, not the norm. So don't be dissappointed when STO only reaches somewhere between 500k to 1 mill players ... that would be HUGE.

[HappyCat]

SWG's game mechanics arent ideal for pvp/e combat lovers. Its more of a RP game nowadays, which is what I, and some 100 others play it for. It is pretty dead for pvp and maybe (i dont really know) space. I dont think SWG being part of a franchise has anything to do with its failure.
I doubt STO will fall into the same problems, it seems to be about space and strategic combat. Its not even combat specific - unless your a Mr. Grumpy Klingon. Its about exploration, discovery and strategy. Hopefully it'll work out. But we dont know yet, and its too early to complain.

[JoJimGregory]

STAR WARS GALAXIES FAILED FROM THE START....

I was in all beta testing phases of SWG, and all of us beta testers tried and pleaded with them not to release it soo early. We all classified it as BETA FOUR, since we already went through 3 phases of Beta. JUMP TO LIGHTSPEED expansion pack was to be the offical game released. Then they changed the coding after that and it went down hill. SWG never really made it.

STO will not be that way I hope. Wait untill its finsihed, it will be the best!

Woohoo, so was I (in Beta 1).

And, quoted for truth.

[jakeeyes]

Why did SWG fail? Poor decisions. Why won't STO? Good decisions.

Without repeating what everyone has already said in too much depth there are two main reasons SWG failed

You couldn't start as a Jedi. Cool idea on paper, very difficult for the masses to enjoy in-game.
Galaxies was not finished at release. Due to the demands of a MMO community and the ongoing updates required, many of the unfinished aspects at launch remained unfinished. (I could NEVER smuggle...)

...And STO will succeed for two reasons

You start as a Captain. Controversial topic, I know, but being (for example) a Chief Engineer is a cool idea on paper...
It's done when it's done. The mantra, and a proven fact as well...just look at Champions!

[Rgoodfel]

Because Sony had its hands on it.....that's all that needs to be said.

I think this person has the right reason to why it failed.

[Hagon]

If they would have left it alone, stayed with the original concept. NOT gone after the 12-22 year old WoW demographic.

SWG would still be on the top of the leader board today. They were not happy with the older players, they wanted it all.

Now they have nothing.

and so do weThat is simply untrue. The game faied out of the gate. It was a financial disaster as far as SOE and LA was concerned. It had lost @ 700 to 800K people right off the bat. People that were interested in the game, bought the box, and didn't subscribe after giving it a try. It then was losing @ 10 000 subscribers a month. If they would have left it alone they would have been turning out the lights within a year, and given the nutjob raging at the changes and bandwagon exodus of the game by the basement dwellers that was the result, it almost was shut down anyway. In the end it was the changes they made and a restructuring of how SOE marketed and handled the subscriptions to all their games that saved it.

[Recluse]

The reason SWG failed so miserably was this:

1. Within a month of release everyone on the game knew they were beta testing the game. The game was A ABSOLUTE BUG FEST. There were so many broken things with the game it was crazy.

2. Players who tried to become something that was useful in the game (due massive damage to actually take on harder content) found them selves NUKE NERFED like hell. Players who were more casual who couldn't sit at the game for 12 hours straight each day (sometimes much more) found themselves drastically behind the curve because as soon as they hit the levels they wanted to be at for being able to pvp/pve they found themselves nerfed like crazy, and then it was pointless to play as other power levelers had moved on to something else.

3. GRIND FEST. You could actually set up a program inside the game and then walk away from the game and be at a much higher level. It was a mindless grind.


The game was not imaginative, and everyone was trying to become a jedi, which is what Star Wars is mostly about. I think the KOTOR type game that Lucas Arts has coming out in a while (the MMO one not a sequel) is going to do much better.

The game that SWG came out as and what it became became TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THINGS. I don't think STO will fail if they release a game that is working at release, and that actually allows players to play, instead of nerfing them all down to nothing. WoW is more of a success because instead of nerfing they actually boosted up other classes to make them the same level as the other. SWG tried for a socialistic/communistic approach to gaming...the more you do the more mediocre you become.

[USS_Parallax]

SWG was grind grind grind. Also I wanted to be a Jedi. I actually agree with the way they gave Jedi to everyone.

[Lhooq]

First off, I loved the CH class. It was totally fun.

One thing I didn't like about SWG was that I hardly saw the same people. There were so many places for people to go that I rarely ran into the same people from day to day.

That being said, I hope this is not the case with STO. I'd like to see the same people here and there, I'd like to feel a sense of community without having to come to the Forums, not that I don't like them; I am the type of player that frequents less the forums when a game is actually live.

Anyways, that's my two credits, no sense restating what others have said.

[USS_Parallax]

One thing I didn't like about SWG was that I hardly saw the same people. There were so many places for people to go that I rarely ran into the same people from day to day.


That wasn't too much of a problem towards the beginning. Then everybody left and no n00bs came so 95% of the people were max level leaving the tween zones neigh-abandoned.

[jagerbolt]

I had more fun just playing music and talking in the cantina as an entertainer than actually going out and killing things.

Shooting with a pistol at a Butterfly and getting killed by it is just...ugh. :mad: And then repeating the same mission over and over in the endless grind. /zzzz

Thankfully I don't think STO will be anything like SWG other than it being set in a sci fi universe.

[Kade]

I loved SWG. I was in the beta and played pretty much through till the NGE. SWG itself wasn't a failure. The dev team was the failure for the most part. If they had made efforts to fix the bugs that were there instead of plotting behind the scenes to radically change the game into what the NGE is now, they'd still have over 200,000 subscriptions and a solid game. Yes, not everyone would have liked it, but show me a game that everyone does. I know that I would still be there playing if the NGE had never happened. But, it did, and as a result I won't touch anything SOE does moving forward. *shrug* That's business. ;)

The above stated, from what I have read about Cryptic they aren't beset with the mentality that SOE fosters. I don't see them making the same mistakes with STO. STO will be what it is from the start and only be refined and build upon moving forward, not haphazardly torn down and, in frankenstein fashion, carelessly molded into something far from what it was born. Sure, Cryptic "could" do that and make me eat my words, but I just don't see it happening.

[valariacat]

I played SWG for several years, and was one of the 'odd' people who really loved it, but I was not playing to be a jedi. What I really loved about it was the innovative character developement system. The skill tree system was awesome, and being able to constantly change and re-adjust your character hugely increased replayability for me. I also loved the crafting system, the idea that if you worked at it you could make items better than average is fun for me. But I do have to admit the bugs drove me insane at times, and once the NGE completely changed my character, I was done.


Shalirra the Wookie :)

[pulley1fan]

Everyone who started playing SWG wanted to either be a Jedi or a Bounty Hunter, when they found out that stuff had to be unlocked... they quit.

[Kade]

Everyone who started playing SWG wanted to either be a Jedi or a Bounty Hunter, when they found out that stuff had to be unlocked... they quit.

100% not true. I neither went for Jedi nor did I play a bounty hunter, though my wife did. I had 3 accounts: A Doctor(my main), a Creature Handler and a Commando. I also had over 10 real life friends playing who, in the majority, never went for either of those, and I also interacted with hundreds of people who had no interest in those. The draw for them...for us, was that you could live in the SW universe, with the GCW going on in the background, and make your own story within the conflict. I, for example, was a neutral Doctor who sold medical supplies to either side.

[DanSeale]

1) Lack of content was part of it. Early episodes were so light in content that most players were blowing through it in one to two days. And the mission stations got old fast with the same repeated missions.

2) Lack of feeling like a hero. SOE seemed to focus on "a day in the life" in the SW universe vs. actually providing content that makes you feel like Luke, Solo, Vader, etc. And seemingly now, the only people left in the game are those content RPing " a day in the life."

3) Iconic class seemingly impossible to unlock with any sort of certainty. Jedi/Sith characters were such a HUGE focus in the movies and the game made it akin to kinding a needle in a haystack where the haystack is the size of Mt. Everest.

4) Crafting system ... the cool and the fubar. Very indepth crafting system with varied results based on quality of mats used, etc made it a crafters dream. Coupled with the ability to set up your house as a vendor shop and RPing crafters were really digging it. However, the process involved in creating anything was so click intensive as to be near carpal tunnel inducing.

5) Lack of easy replayability. One character per server per account. Made it a total pain in the backside to explore the different facets of the game and keep playing with the same group of people without resetting your only character on that server. Unless you wanted to buy a second acct ... greedy SOE.

7) All the iconic space battles and how much space flight/combat was in the initial release? Yeah ... big fat goose egg. Fail.

8) Sizeable planets ... filled with mostly nothing. There were few exciting points of interest and most landscapes were dotted with harvesters intermixed with the occassional player house or less frequent player town/city.

That's off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

There are a number of reasons ... but if you look closely most of them fall more in to this post here. (BTW.. very well done) ..

Also a couple of observations:

1. STO : even if we start out as a "captain" this does not neccessarrily give us ALL rank and ALL previleges (if ya catch my drift) ... This only give a player the means to get started.

The same thing could have been done with the "Jedi" ... even as a Jedi does not mean you are the best .. nor a "master" (just my opinion)

2. STO : should have a better balance between PvP and PvE as well as more content in both.

There is a lot more that STO will do differently .. just a couple of points off the top of my head.

[OddjobXL]

"My SWG experience was probably an atypical one. I started off in beta with a slew of not only players but player associations hell bent on starting a player city. Those were happy times. Two things SWG got right at the time were wilderness and crafting. Roleplaying a colonist-refugee, as were most of us, was an astoundingly good fit at first. Dangerous creatures with believable AI, scattered resources of with a slew of assorted traits and all of us helping each other out in a world where there was nothing useful on the bazaar for quite a while. We bootstrapped. We barnraised. We ultimately did it. They still talk about Vagabond's Rest on Starsider.

Eventually, though, what other folks were noticing eventually effected us as well. There was no Star Wars to be found. Where was The Empire? Where were the Jedi (or, alternately, why should Jedi be in the game in the Rebellion Era)? Where were the space ships? Where's the adventure? Why is everyone using pikes and battleaxes and wearing the same armor which we never saw in the movies?

We really started losing players due to lack of Star Warsiness as many of us were roleplayers, or Star Wars fans, looking for that experience.

In time there were Jedi. Be careful what you wish for. Because it was such an arduous grind only powergamers looking for PvP advantage, for the most part, managed to pull it off. If you see Ben Kenobi on the road kill him. Or he'll kill you. And then tea-bag you while pointing out, constructively, your newbness. No, somehow this doesn't seem like the Jedi I remember from the films.

Space, and starships, strode in proudly with Jump to Lightspeed. I have to admit I was blown away. SWG could have done much worse than following a space sim model. Multiplayer ships in particular had folks cheering. It was really a dream come true. Sadly, one does tend to wake up. There was no real content in space after grinding through the initial set of missions. PvP-RPers and space simmers on Starsider, using typical roleplayer ingenuity, designed and ran PvP scenarios which were popular and the idea migrated to other servers as well. But PvE was lacking. Multiplayer ships were pointless. They were a weak link in PvP as well. Worse, there was no cargo, no passngers, no trade lanes and certainly no contraband or Imperial blockades to run. In space, nobody can hear you yawn.

At that point, though, the damage had been done. Casual gamers thought SWG was freakish and certainly not about Star Wars. The Star Wars fan community was in open revolt. PvPers were running amok and completely dominating the forums with their usual set of complaints ("Make everyone PvP - it's called Star WARS!") and internectine battles about who and what should be nerfed. Roleplayers, the ones who'd already formed strong communities, weathered this as best they could and created their own alternate realities and improvised systems. Kosterites, those who did find aspects of the original game design fascinating despite its delinkage from Star Wars, also hung in. There was, in fact, more than a little overlap with the last two categories. Crafters, entertainers, politicians, pilots and beastmasters tended to be well represented in the roleplaying community.

But SWG was in trouble because of its failure to convey the setting even before NGE hit. The NGE hit the Kosterites and the few post-WoW PvPers pretty hard. We won't dwell on this. Everyone knows the story. SWG is slowly recovering, a little at least, but it's not Star Wars. It's su generis now. A weird thing with some great features, alot of bad ideas, and an eclectic but loyal player base.

So what to expect from Star Trek Online?"

Read more here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/OddjobXL/032009/3463_Strange-New-World-A-SWG-Vet-Contemplates-STO

[Silverspar]

If they would have left it alone, stayed with the original concept. NOT gone after the 12-22 year old WoW demographic.

SWG would still be on the top of the leader board today. They were not happy with the older players, they wanted it all.

Now they have nothing.

and so do we

I love this mentality, especialyl considering the average age of the MMO gamer is 25 to 40.

[SenshiBat]

The obvious pun would be to say they were going for
"The Generations" of SW fans as its been out there this long.. long

hardly misleading grannies into buying a Card for paying for the start up.. when you look at Top-ups for Cellphones. I mean how could you possibly have pooched a IP like SW... Content removing content and
letting everyone be a JEdi and not pay their dues.. for one..

Log in patch find whats gone..
worst case model for continuing a community.. Here's some castor oil you'll like it..

Yes, To the age issue almost a requirement to pay for the MO Fee.. when its tied to a direct withdrawal from an account CC.. all it takes for younger gamers to feel the pain is a simple fuel price increase of 50% and the discretionary income is risking money going out before money comes in.

[DocSavag]

"My SWG experience was probably an atypical one. I started off in beta with a slew of not only players but player associations hell bent on starting a player city. Those were happy times. Two things SWG got right at the time were wilderness and crafting. Roleplaying a colonist-refugee, as were most of us, was an astoundingly good fit at first. Dangerous creatures with believable AI, scattered resources of with a slew of assorted traits and all of us helping each other out in a world where there was nothing useful on the bazaar for quite a while. We bootstrapped. We barnraised. We ultimately did it. They still talk about Vagabond's Rest on Starsider.


My experience on SWG (from the same server btw) is a little different. I am not a role player by nature. I don't really have the patience for it. I do however like being in character and I like feeling like the gaming world around me is real which is what I felt in those early days on Starsider.

I was involved in the early Bestine-Anchorhead wars which were nightly pvp fights mostly centered around the cantina in Anchorhead where afterwards (because of the "mind damage" that had to be healed over time by entertainers) everyone ended up after the fighting.

I was a merchant by trade and managed to make a contact in the weaponsmith community with a crafter who had no time or inclination to run a shop. I sold her weapons on consigment for months. I made a lot of in game money. I founded a city on a plateau of the Tatooine Desert. I died in pvp alot (I suck at it mostly :D) It was the best gaming experience I've ever had and nothing before or since even comes close to living up to it.

The combat system was always complex and troublesome. The flavor of the month was whatever min/max build was the best this month due to the changes with the latest build as the development team tried in vain to balance thngs for both pvp and pve. I liked the skills based system, it allowed me to be both a fighter (rifleman) and a merchant and the mayor of a modest city.

While the truth is that the game had already started to shed accounts badly, my little corner of the world was still feeling ok. My friends were still playing we were still having fun playing up to 4 hours a night. Then, the Jedi Grind Began.

THe early Jedi System allowed you to unlock a second character slot by completing certain professions. You could get help learning the first couple of professions to master but the rest (I think it was four at the time and it got expanded to more after that to try to stem the tide of Jedi on the servers) you just had to grind through professions one after the other to unlock your slot. Half the server was doing this it seemed at times. You could never find a good group because all your friends were grinding a profession (if the were doing the crafting or entertainng professions at the time they were sitting in one place for days on end by themselves). The games economy suffered as there were either no crafters to craft things or so many crafting that the market was flooded with cheap junk. The resource market was dominated during this time by jedi-wannabes buying up all the cheap resources they could find to do their grinding. I refused to do this myself because of the way the system was designed but soon enough there were Jedi running around everywhere and the game I loved was forever shifted on its axis.

Later they changed the system for Jedi and moved them all to the no man's land of Dathomir and fictional village. I eventually gave into this system on one of the 6 accounts that I personaly had at the time and eventually got my Jedi slot. I have fond memories of the night I did my completion quest to unlock the slot with whatever friends I could grab for the occasion and barely finishing it successfully.

Then came the weeks of grinding in gropus of Jedi and looking over your shoulder hoping you were the target of a Bounty hunter. I finished my Jedi character a few days before the NGE announcement.

Behind the scenes I had been a player correspondent for SOE and had worked to try to fix the issues the players had with the game. We previewed a "CU2" in the months before NGE was announced but it was nothing like what they eventually came up with. They were still trying to find a way to balance things and make the game fun again without scrapping the entire system.

I talked to a system designer the night the NGE went to testing. A bunch of us from the correspondent and former correspondent ranks gathered in a chat room and talked to him. He painted a bleak picture of a game already on life support and a desperate last ditch effort to change everything and save it. I guess in the end they did save it for it endures still today after years of the NGE, but in the process they lowered the very expectations that were driving the changes in the first place.

I never lost my interest in the game itself. The I learned to play the new NGE version, I learned to play the tweaked NGE version that came a little after that. The problem was that my wife and I were one of the few who were still around. All the friends we played with were moving on and it was quiet. Too quiet to keep logging in every night. I still play the game from time to time, usually after some new publish that creates a new shiny thing I want to test or play with. (Collections, Epic Battles, new housing etc)

I'm not sure I can give Cryptic advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of SWG because the game over all worked for me, but I was one of the few. The combat system and the mission systems were flawed from day one. Later they moved to a more scripted mission system but I don't think it works well in their environment. The Jedi are a plague on SWG though and they always were even as I succumbed to the allure of joining their ranks it was a cancer on the game that made it less than it could have been.

[Hagon]

"My SWG experience was probably an atypical one. I started off in beta with a slew of not only players but player associations hell bent on starting a player city. Those were happy times. Two things SWG got right at the time were wilderness and crafting. Roleplaying a colonist-refugee, as were most of us, was an astoundingly good fit at first. Dangerous creatures with believable AI, scattered resources of with a slew of assorted traits and all of us helping each other out in a world where there was nothing useful on the bazaar for quite a while. We bootstrapped. We barnraised. We ultimately did it. They still talk about Vagabond's Rest on Starsider.

Eventually, though, what other folks were noticing eventually effected us as well. There was no Star Wars to be found. Where was The Empire? Where were the Jedi (or, alternately, why should Jedi be in the game in the Rebellion Era)? Where were the space ships? Where's the adventure? Why is everyone using pikes and battleaxes and wearing the same armor which we never saw in the movies?

We really started losing players due to lack of Star Warsiness as many of us were roleplayers, or Star Wars fans, looking for that experience.

In time there were Jedi. Be careful what you wish for. Because it was such an arduous grind only powergamers looking for PvP advantage, for the most part, managed to pull it off. If you see Ben Kenobi on the road kill him. Or he'll kill you. And then tea-bag you while pointing out, constructively, your newbness. No, somehow this doesn't seem like the Jedi I remember from the films.

Space, and starships, strode in proudly with Jump to Lightspeed. I have to admit I was blown away. SWG could have done much worse than following a space sim model. Multiplayer ships in particular had folks cheering. It was really a dream come true. Sadly, one does tend to wake up. There was no real content in space after grinding through the initial set of missions. PvP-RPers and space simmers on Starsider, using typical roleplayer ingenuity, designed and ran PvP scenarios which were popular and the idea migrated to other servers as well. But PvE was lacking. Multiplayer ships were pointless. They were a weak link in PvP as well. Worse, there was no cargo, no passngers, no trade lanes and certainly no contraband or Imperial blockades to run. In space, nobody can hear you yawn.

At that point, though, the damage had been done. Casual gamers thought SWG was freakish and certainly not about Star Wars. The Star Wars fan community was in open revolt. PvPers were running amok and completely dominating the forums with their usual set of complaints ("Make everyone PvP - it's called Star WARS!") and internectine battles about who and what should be nerfed. Roleplayers, the ones who'd already formed strong communities, weathered this as best they could and created their own alternate realities and improvised systems. Kosterites, those who did find aspects of the original game design fascinating despite its delinkage from Star Wars, also hung in. There was, in fact, more than a little overlap with the last two categories. Crafters, entertainers, politicians, pilots and beastmasters tended to be well represented in the roleplaying community.

But SWG was in trouble because of its failure to convey the setting even before NGE hit. The NGE hit the Kosterites and the few post-WoW PvPers pretty hard. We won't dwell on this. Everyone knows the story. SWG is slowly recovering, a little at least, but it's not Star Wars. It's su generis now. A weird thing with some great features, alot of bad ideas, and an eclectic but loyal player base.

So what to expect from Star Trek Online?"

Read more here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/OddjobXL/032009/3463_Strange-New-World-A-SWG-Vet-Contemplates-STOOnce again we're treated to the revisionist history of SWG written from the fantasy created in someone's mind, and from the perspective of someone who's preferences are those of a tiny niche that really had no bearing on anything regarding the game.

Pretty much none of this is valid for the vast majority of people that were around back then. It's part of the "story" that some have been trying to re-write for years, but the truth simply flies in the face of it.

[knightofhyrule730]

See, i guess im weird. I didn't want to be a jedi. I was perfectly happy being an armorsmith/weponsmith

[Silverspar]

See, i guess im weird. I didn't want to be a jedi. I was perfectly happy being an armorsmith/weponsmith

Funny thing is, fi you offer a strong crafting element in a game, youw ill have a larger community. I love to be a crafter, and I hope Star Trek Online will offer such crafting elements for people who just want to craft.

[Vixo]

You know...there are things about SWG that really work and it's a shame that a bunch of bad PR overshadowed that. SWG has the deepest RP options of any MMO in my opinion. You can sit in chairs. there is the Storytelling stuff...persistent housing. I really hope STO gets at least minor emotes and the ability to sit in chairs and interact with the world.

[Meehile]

First off, Star Wars Galaxies continues to be one of the best MMO games on the market. Why would I say this? It's true. Myself, several of my guild/clanmates, have all been playing the MMO games out there, and ultimately, we've returned to SWG until something "new" (cough STO) is launched into Beta. SWG even now, offers a tremendous game world to live in, player housing, highly entertaining space combat, and a wide variety of trade skills and other things that make the game dominant. While the current SWG is severely lacking from that of the original, even a partial SWG still puts the other MMOs to shame.

Second, I think Cryptic is probably a leg up on this discussion, there was very few game developers, publishers, etc, that didn't take a great interest in learning from SOE's mistakes with Star Wars Galaxies, the massive injection of their subscribing customers was a sure giveaway that SOE had made a crucial error in judgement. What Sony Online Entertainment and Lucasarts did to the community that supported SWG was and still is unacceptable and unforgivable in my opinion. They hid the fact they were planning a complete redesign of the game, kept tossing out false hope to the community in regards to fixes to the game and additional content for each of the 32 professions, and ultimately suckered hundreds of thousands of people to buy an expansion to the game that within under a month (if memory serves me a week), was made completely irrelevant as the game was suddenly turned from an MMO into some warped and bug ridden first person shooter.

I don't think we need to point out the obvious or pull out the dead horse for a few more whacks, SOE made huge mistakes and while the state of the current SWG isn't completely horrible, it just isn't the game the "paying" subscribers wanted or loved.

I agree with you. People claiming the game failed or was doomed are forgetting the fact that game is nearly 6 years old, yet still has a subscriber base on par with Warhammer which is less than a year old.

After I got bored with Warcraft last year I went on a sampling free trial tour of nearly every MMO with any kind of hype behind it, and SWG was the only one that was a good enough game that I decided to subscribe.

The game suffers from a lot myths such as it being a grind fest. Its not. I got to level 50 just doing the legacy chain. I got to 60 just by doing the 10 daily terminal missions, and I still get a level per day in less than an hour doing them. I will easily get to 80 doing the quests on the non legacy quest worlds, and the Mustafar the rest of the way. So far, nothing in game has been as grindy as some of the stuff in Warcraft. Anyone who grinded up old school reps in Warcraft will know what I mean there.

[Tomcatt]

Maybe this is off topic, but I see a considerable amount of referencing the crafting system in SWG (Never got into that aspect of the game) and the one in WoW (not really that great). Several posts have stated they'd like to see a good crafting system implemented in the game. My question about that is simple: What would you craft in STO? What in the game - sticking with the lore - would you possibly be able to create.

This isn't a troll, but I've thought about it and I can't come up with anything. I understand people want a crafting system - that's fine, but for what?

[DocSavag]

Maybe this is off topic, but I see a considerable amount of referencing the crafting system in SWG (Never got into that aspect of the game) and the one in WoW (not really that great). Several posts have stated they'd like to see a good crafting system implemented in the game. My question about that is simple: What would you craft in STO? What in the game - sticking with the lore - would you possibly be able to create.

This isn't a troll, but I've thought about it and I can't come up with anything. I understand people want a crafting system - that's fine, but for what?

The most obvious answer would be ship improvements. Powerups if you will to the ships systems to make it faster, or more maneuverable, or the weapons systems more powerful. The lack of personal ship interiors at launch limits you a little but assuming that feature will be added later then you have all sorts of possibilites of crafting items.

[Silverspar]

Maybe this is off topic, but I see a considerable amount of referencing the crafting system in SWG (Never got into that aspect of the game) and the one in WoW (not really that great). Several posts have stated they'd like to see a good crafting system implemented in the game. My question about that is simple: What would you craft in STO? What in the game - sticking with the lore - would you possibly be able to create.

This isn't a troll, but I've thought about it and I can't come up with anything. I understand people want a crafting system - that's fine, but for what?

Quite a bit actually. In every good MMO, the crafting community is the glue that really holds the game together, otherwise it's just another kiddie chat room. The crafters create all the neat gadgets and actually make a flowing economy, agian otherwise you just end up with what's in WoW.

The premise is already there in Star Trek, hopefully the devs will embellish upon it. Research and Development of resources materials and schematics fo alien technology found or devices created, forming a stable and growing economy. Of course, the only way that part will survive is if Cryptic also implements a decay on most of the equipment, which I would not mind in the least. I think permanently destroyable equipment (not to be confuse diwth starships) would be a very healthy thing for the crafter sout there.

Some people don't want to level, they don't want to explore, they don't want to fight. Some people just want to sit back and make things for other people.

[Hagon]

I agree with you. People claiming the game failed or was doomed are forgetting the fact that game is nearly 6 years old, yet still has a subscriber base on par with Warhammer which is less than a year old.

After I got bored with Warcraft last year I went on a sampling free trial tour of nearly every MMO with any kind of hype behind it, and SWG was the only one that was a good enough game that I decided to subscribe.

The game suffers from a lot myths such as it being a grind fest. Its not. I got to level 50 just doing the legacy chain. I got to 60 just by doing the 10 daily terminal missions, and I still get a level per day in less than an hour doing them. I will easily get to 80 doing the quests on the non legacy quest worlds, and the Mustafar the rest of the way. So far, nothing in game has been as grindy as some of the stuff in Warcraft. Anyone who grinded up old school reps in Warcraft will know what I mean there.It does not have a subscription base on par with Warhammer. Not even remotely close, and the only reason it's still going is because of SOE's ability to carry dead weight due to the Station Pass. That it was a failure isn't up for debate. When the company that made the game, and the devs that made it, say it was a failure, then it was a failure, and both have said it. Many many times.

You're trying to talk about the game as it is now, which is not what we're talking about. Though the game that it is now really doesn't deserve to be there. That it is still there is a credit to SOE, along with a bunch of other games that don't deserve to be there but are because of them. Yet all we see on forums is people trashing SOE.

They made mistakes, and some were just totally boneheaded (not having Jedi easily playable for instance), but many were honest mistakes. At the time the game was released there was still a misconception that RPers, "immersionists", an others that were happy just hanging around in a game, could still carry one. The failure of SWG was clear evidence that they couldn't. Not even close. Which is even more relevant today.

They bought into the rhetoric from within the community following the game's development and ignored what the people in the market were saying. The sad part is that still today development houses (the most recent examples are WAR and AoC) are making that same stupid mistake.

[Colm]

Well maybe SWG was a failed game, I don't know.
But I still played it for a long time, a lot longer than I played WoW, and many of my friends still play it.
There were a lots of things to do there, from PvP to PvE, on the planets or in space combat, and finishing off with some RP at the cantina.
I quit playing coz I got sick of the graphics, but the game was cool, anyway IMO.

[DanSeale]

There are a number of reasons ... but if you look closely most of them fall more in to this post here. (BTW.. very well done) ..

Also a couple of observations:

1. STO : even if we start out as a "captain" this does not neccessarrily give us ALL rank and ALL previleges (if ya catch my drift) ... This only give a player the means to get started.

The same thing could have been done with the "Jedi" ... even as a Jedi does not mean you are the best .. nor a "master" (just my opinion)

2. STO : should have a better balance between PvP and PvE as well as more content in both.

There is a lot more that STO will do differently .. just a couple of points off the top of my head.

to add to the list:

3. STO will do better if it pays more attention to detail both in the graphics, and contient. Even if the game takes 6 months longer that what some of us think it should .... better contient with less bugs is always a plus. ( I personally think it will be released by Christmas of this year... if not certainly by the following June)
4. STO can do better if has considerably less bugs when released
5. STO can do better if it avoids countless hours with mindless grinding. Even WoW has less griding in many of the lower level areas compared to what it use to. (They still have a lot .. but compared to what it use to be ... it's much less.)
6. STO can also do much better by keeping both PvP and PvE in balance both in ship to ship combat and away missions. From what they have told us so far ... this should not be an issue.

[Arokh72]

to add to the list:

3. STO will do better if it pays more attention to detail both in the graphics, and contient. Even if the game takes 6 months longer that what some of us think it should .... better contient with less bugs is always a plus. ( I personally think it will be released by Christmas of this year... if not certainly by the following June)
4. STO can do better if has considerably less bugs when released
5. STO can do better if it avoids countless hours with mindless grinding. Even WoW has less griding in many of the lower level areas compared to what it use to. (They still have a lot .. but compared to what it use to be ... it's much less.)
6. STO can also do much better by keeping both PvP and PvE in balance both in ship to ship combat and away missions. From what they have told us so far ... this should not be an issue.

I must agree with the delayed yet polished release aspect. Despite my gameplay issues with LoTRO, as far as bugs e.t.c are concerned it is one of the tidiest and best releases I know of. Pretty much everything was in place and there were no real character balance issues, quest issues or even general gameplay and graphic issues. Even the minor grind it had was reasonable with all mobs dropping what they should at a realistic rate (most WoW players know of the snoutless and liverless boars or skulless humans).

[cocoa-jin]

Horrible modeled professions...too restrictive, too specialized and alienated, resulted in making some profession that should not have been stand alone, instead they should have been made into skill sets to be incorporated into a few, broader and flexible professions.

Lack of meaningful content for several professions(smugglers, snipers, etc)

Buffs perverted the class/profession dynamics and marginalized the challenge of PvE.

The "de-classification" of the path to Jedi, and more importantly, the design model for the path to Jedi(grinding through 10 professions and the acquistion of Holycrons[spelling]) essentially marginalized the whole of the game in the hurried rush to acquire a Jedi character....they should have left them out, or just made Jedi excessivly difficult to play with massive penalties(including massive re-spawn cool down times)in order to keep them hidden.

[-Brett-]

SWG's focus was all wrong. They wanted the player characters to be the average joes of the Star Wars universe. The people who worried more about their car payments, house payments and insurance than restoring freedom to the galaxy/crushing the rebel scum. Probably to avoid players "upstaging" Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, et al.

When the average person thinks of the Star Wars universe, they don't think of running a shop on Corellia, or a peaceful little village by a lake on Naboo. They think of action and adventure, and SWG provided very little.

Looks like STO is at least aiming in the right direction. The player characters will be the Kirks and Picards, not the guys waiting tables at Quarks.

[Silverspar]

SWG's focus was all wrong. They wanted the player characters to be the average joes of the Star Wars universe. The people who worried more about their car payments, house payments and insurance than restoring freedom to the galaxy/crushing the rebel scum. Probably to avoid players "upstaging" Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, et al.

When the average person thinks of the Star Wars universe, they don't think of running a shop on Corellia, or a peaceful little village by a lake on Naboo. They think of action and adventure, and SWG provided very little.

Looks like STO is at least aiming in the right direction. The player characters will be the Kirks and Picards, not the guys waiting tables at Quarks.

Think that's a wrong belief. In fact I know it's wrong. I am sure if you did a poll, you would find a lot of people who would want to be Quark. Not everyone wants to be the hero of the world, in fact I would wager many don't. They look at an MMO as an escape.

Current generation MMOs have relegated crafting to the point of it being a cosmic joke on most levels, and that's sad, because crafters back in the day were just as important as your tank or support toon is today.

[Nathor]

Star wars galaxies was a nice game to play back before the CU and NGE upgrades.

Big plusses in my book were the player housing, freedom in skillsets and not having to raid a specific encounter to get top offt he line gear. Beeing dependent on a crafter to get your gear crafted for you from looted items was a big part off the fun for me.

There is nothing more that i hate more atm then the mindnumbing kill boss X and get shiny epic Y completely finished.

I just hope ST:O does this differently.
Using your quarter as your own player house, beeing able to respecialise without having to recreate your character, and i hope their loot system requires some reverse engineering or something else then just get shield Generator A from recently destroyed ship A and just slap it on immediatly and go on my merry way.

[Hagon]

Think that's a wrong belief. In fact I know it's wrong. I am sure if you did a poll, you would find a lot of people who would want to be Quark. Not everyone wants to be the hero of the world, in fact I would wager many don't. They look at an MMO as an escape.

Current generation MMOs have relegated crafting to the point of it being a cosmic joke on most levels, and that's sad, because crafters back in the day were just as important as your tank or support toon is today.Sometimes I read things on this forum that just leave me shaking my head in disbelief that people actually believe that kind of hokum.

Sore SOME want to just live a mundane life in these games, but the numbers of them are minuscule in comparison to the amount of people that want actual fun, exciting, and challenging game play. Because, well, they think of it as a game, not an alternate life.

Brett summed it up accurately and succinctly. SWG catered to those "alternate life" people far too much and payed the price. In spades. Thankfully most developers have at least learnt that lesson from it.

[Silverspar]

Sometimes I read things on this forum that just leave me shaking my head in disbelief that people actually believe that kind of hokum.

Sore SOME want to just live a mundane life in these games, but the numbers of them are minuscule in comparison to the amount of people that want actual fun, exciting, and challenging game play. Because, well, they think of it as a game, not an alternate life.

Brett summed it up accurately and succinctly. SWG catered to those "alternate life" people far too much and payed the price. In spades. Thankfully most developers have at least learnt that lesson from it.

And I shake my head in disbelief at people who have an intolerance for what others want to do. Believe it or not, the crafter community is much larger than the PvP community ever has been in MMOs. SWG didn't fail because it catered to crafting, it failed because they completely gutted and revamped a systeme veryone was use to after several years of playing that way.

[Rivaris]

in my eyes sto already is way ahead because if sony was developing the game i would not even have signed up on the forums.

[babanathie]

Sometimes I read things on this forum that just leave me shaking my head in disbelief that people actually believe that kind of hokum.

Sore SOME want to just live a mundane life in these games, but the numbers of them are minuscule in comparison to the amount of people that want actual fun, exciting, and challenging game play. Because, well, they think of it as a game, not an alternate life.

Brett summed it up accurately and succinctly. SWG catered to those "alternate life" people far too much and payed the price. In spades. Thankfully most developers have at least learnt that lesson from it.

Much like Eve, SWG had its core of loyal (and rabid) followers. That is a fact, and this may be one of the few times that I actually go on record that firmly. Yes, SWG was considered a niche game by the MMO community at large, but that does not change the fact that it had its proponents. SWG (in its chosen incarnations - in other words, I'm not going to get into an argument over how SWG should have been developed- ) ultimately failed because LA and Sony decided to disregard the community that they inadvertently catered to. While many people (probably including you) feel that Sony has the right to do whatever they want to their game (which they do), the manner they did it in destroyed Sony's reputation in the industry.

When you put out an expansion to expand the powers of class x (beastmaster in this case) and then make an announcement a couple of days after the expansions release that class x (beastmaster still) will be dropped from the game completely, your player base will feel betrayed (and they probably were betrayed in reality). When players pointed out one of the main reasons for buying the expansion involved getting new powers for their class x characters, Sony's response was "tough, you signed the EULA". Reportedly, only after the words "class action lawsuit" (which was supposedly the only legal method around the EULA agreement everyone signed) was used by enough people, Sony retracted its stance and offered refunds to the community at large.

While the NGE was bad enough, there are enough ex-SWG players that question the ethics of Sony. Sure, most latch on the NGE as the catalyst, but Sony (and probably LA) are to blame for their failure. While SWG's numbers were nowhere close to WoW's numbers, they were reportedly good enough to make money.

But back on topic, people who enjoy crafting exist; whether you want to believe they exist or not. I think its ironic that your stating that they don't exist to a company that ended up going back into their flagship game (CoH/V) at the time to add crafting because of demand from the player base.

[Silverspar]

Much like Eve, SWG had its core of loyal (and rabid) followers. That is a fact, and this may be one of the few times that I actually go on record that firmly. Yes, SWG was considered a niche game by the MMO community at large, but that does not change the fact that it had its proponents. SWG (in its chosen incarnations - in other words, I'm not going to get into an argument over how SWG should have been developed- ) ultimately failed because LA and Sony decided to disregard the community that they inadvertently catered to. While many people (probably including you) feel that Sony has the right to do whatever they want to their game (which they do), the manner they did it in destroyed Sony's reputation in the industry.

When you put out an expansion to expand the powers of class x (beastmaster in this case) and then make an announcement a couple of days after the expansions release that class x (beastmaster still) will be dropped from the game completely, your player base will feel betrayed (and they probably were betrayed in reality). When players pointed out one of the main reasons for buying the expansion involved getting new powers for their class x characters, Sony's response was "tough, you signed the EULA". Reportedly, only after the words "class action lawsuit" (which was supposedly the only legal method around the EULA agreement everyone signed) was used by enough people, Sony retracted its stance and offered refunds to the community at large.

While the NGE was bad enough, there are enough ex-SWG players that question the ethics of Sony. Sure, most latch on the NGE as the catalyst, but Sony (and probably LA) are to blame for their failure. While SWG's numbers were nowhere close to WoW's numbers, they were reportedly good enough to make money.

But back on topic, people who enjoy crafting exist; whether you want to believe they exist or not. I think its ironic that your stating that they don't exist to a company that ended up going back into their flagship game (CoH/V) at the time to add crafting because of demand from the player base.

Too many people look at WoW, which WoW is unfortuantely too much of a abberrant product in the sea of MMOs. SWG had roughly 300k subscriptions, which before WoW, was outstanding subscription numbers. SWG never failed before then, but ever since WoW, people ahve been burrying their heads in teh snad, and unless the numbers produced are WoW level (frankly, an impossible pipe dream) then it's a failure, which is a laugh, in and of itself.

[Hagon]

And I shake my head in disbelief at people who have an intolerance for what others want to do. Believe it or not, the crafter community is much larger than the PvP community ever has been in MMOs. SWG didn't fail because it catered to crafting, it failed because they completely gutted and revamped a systeme veryone was use to after several years of playing that way.What the heck does PvP have to do with the discussion?

Anyway, I don't disagree that a lot like to craft, heck I like to craft, but only a comparatively tiny handful ONLY wants to craft or have that be their primary focus. Providing a good crafting system is one thing. Catering too much to a small group and doing so to the detriment of fun, exciting, and challenging game play is just foolish.

By the way, the game was deemed a failure within a few months after release by the 600 000 to 800 000 people that bought the box and didn't bother to subscribe after they tried it, the developers that created the game, and the company that payed those developers to make it.

[Silverspar]

What the heck does PvP have to do with the discussion?

Anyway, I don't disagree that a lot like to craft, heck I like to craft, but only a comparatively tiny handful ONLY wants to craft or have that be their primary focus. Providing a good crafting system is one thing. Catering too much to a small group and doing so to the detriment of fun, exciting, and challenging game play is just foolish.

By the way, the game was deemed a failure within a few months after release by the 600 000 to 800 000 people that bought the box and didn't bother to subscribe after they tried it, the developers that created the game, and the company that payed those developers to make it.

Funny considering everything till then said it was a huge success, and oh yea, I think the largest sale SWG had was also 400,000 to 500,000 not 600,000 to 800,000. The subscription numbers were quoted regularly on UO.com by the fanbois so I know it never sold that much.

And more people than you think actually enjoy just sitting there and crafting. It's not a small minority that do actually.

[edit]

In fact, according to this (http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html) SWG never peaked past 300,000. Which also, at it's time, was considered a huge success in the MMO world, since the only other MMO that went past that was Everquest, until Final Fnatasy XI came overseas.

Then about a year later, WoW hit and the entire curve was destroyed and everyone keeps looking at WoW as some sort of yardstick measure of success and declaring something is a failure because it doesn't hit 1,000,000 subs.

[Hagon]

Much like Eve, SWG had its core of loyal (and rabid) followers. That is a fact, and this may be one of the few times that I actually go on record that firmly. Yes, SWG was considered a niche game by the MMO community at large, but that does not change the fact that it had its proponents. SWG (in its chosen incarnations - in other words, I'm not going to get into an argument over how SWG should have been developed- ) ultimately failed because LA and Sony decided to disregard the community that they inadvertently catered to. While many people (probably including you) feel that Sony has the right to do whatever they want to their game (which they do), the manner they did it in destroyed Sony's reputation in the industry.

When you put out an expansion to expand the powers of class x (beastmaster in this case) and then make an announcement a couple of days after the expansions release that class x (beastmaster still) will be dropped from the game completely, your player base will feel betrayed (and they probably were betrayed in reality). When players pointed out one of the main reasons for buying the expansion involved getting new powers for their class x characters, Sony's response was "tough, you signed the EULA". Reportedly, only after the words "class action lawsuit" (which was supposedly the only legal method around the EULA agreement everyone signed) was used by enough people, Sony retracted its stance and offered refunds to the community at large.

While the NGE was bad enough, there are enough ex-SWG players that question the ethics of Sony. Sure, most latch on the NGE as the catalyst, but Sony (and probably LA) are to blame for their failure. While SWG's numbers were nowhere close to WoW's numbers, they were reportedly good enough to make money.

But back on topic, people who enjoy crafting exist; whether you want to believe they exist or not. I think its ironic that your stating that they don't exist to a company that ended up going back into their flagship game (CoH/V) at the time to add crafting because of demand from the player base.Changing the game didn't destroy SOE's reputation in the industry. Releasing the game that they did harmed it's reputation in the industry, and destroyed it with the @100 000 that nerd raged and left the game after the changes. That 100 000 isn't the industry, no matter how much noise a lot of them have made on various mmo related forums since.

The changes they made were needed, and they were the correct ones to make. They knew that they were going to lose a certain amount of a certain type, but they anticipated getting more of the 600 to 800k people that had originally bought the box back and attracting others.

As alluded to by D. Rubenfield

So we were given the directive to make Galaxies better.

Not just make Galaxies better, but make it successful. Not the 200k
subs it had, but really successful. The idea was that we had the most
valuable IP in the entire world, and we ****** it up to the point of
having 200k subs.

And yes, all 200k of you were important, but 200k means nothing in the
scheme of things.

...

So, when the NGE push came along, we were asked to reimagine the game.

Not just small changes, but rebuild it.

And it was needed. When we were asked, we were bleeding subscribers.

If I remember correctly, somewhere around 10k a month. LOSING 10,000
subs a month.


Note - I think our subs were closer to 160-180 than 200k. It was a bad financial situation no matter how you look at it.



Unfortunately they ran up against a black hole of a game that wasn't letting many out of it's gravitational pull. People were playing WoW. A lot of people were playing WoW, and despite what the prognosticators were all saying at the time, not many were leaving it very quick. In other words there wasn't many to come back or to attract. If you look at every other MMO on the market at the time you'll see that they all had a drastic drop in subs. So in the end in regards to the changes thay made, they were a victim of bad timing really. If it weren't for WoW every indication was (and still is) that it would have rebounded. As evidenced by how well WoW did by offering players what they wanted. As opposed to offering a tiny niche what they wanted to the detriment of offering what most wanted. Which is the mistake they made with the game in the first place.

[Hagon]

Funny considering everything till then said it was a huge success, and oh yea, I think the largest sale SWG had was also 400,000 to 500,000 not 600,000 to 800,000. The subscription numbers were quoted regularly on UO.com by the fanbois so I know it never sold that much.

And more people than you think actually enjoy just sitting there and crafting. It's not a small minority that do actually.

[edit]

In fact, according to this (http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html) SWG never peaked past 300,000. Which also, at it's time, was considered a huge success in the MMO world, since the only other MMO that went past that was Everquest, until Final Fnatasy XI came overseas.

Then about a year later, WoW hit and the entire curve was destroyed and everyone keeps looking at WoW as some sort of yardstick measure of success and declaring something is a failure because it doesn't hit 1,000,000 subs.They sold over a million copies of the game, and less than 250 to 270K subscribed after trying the game. That is failure encapsulated.. That number was down to 200K within a very short time, and it was losing 10K players a month when they pulled the trigger on making drastic changes. If the game was a success they wouldn't have made the changes. :rolleyes:

[babanathie]

What the heck does PvP have to do with the discussion?

Anyway, I don't disagree that a lot like to craft, heck I like to craft, but only a comparatively tiny handful ONLY wants to craft or have that be their primary focus. Providing a good crafting system is one thing. Catering too much to a small group and doing so to the detriment of fun, exciting, and challenging game play is just foolish.

By the way, the game was deemed a failure within a few months after release by the 600 000 to 800 000 people that bought the box and didn't bother to subscribe after they tried it, the developers that created the game, and the company that payed those developers to make it.

Back when I cared about SWG, my sources put the subscription numbers for SWG at 200k to 300k. 200k was the cut off for a successful MMO back then. AoC sold a million copies and retaining 400k would have made that game successful by today's standards. A 50% to 60% drop from sales to subscription is about par the industry. So 800k sales with 300k subscriptions (62% drop) is not anything an experienced MMO developer will lose too much sleep over. Those are industry standards.

Yes, SWG underperformed; however, it still put up numbers that alot of companies would have killed for.

I don't see how SWG's crafting community detracted from the "combat" community in a way that was foolish. While I'm aware of some basic flaws within SWG's crafting system, those flaws in themselves are examples of bad design than over catering to a particular player base. You'll have to elaborate on that one if you could.

[Silverspar]

They sold over a million copies of the game, and less than 250 to 270K subscribed after trying the game. That is failure encapsulated.. That number was down to 200K within a very short time, and it was losing 10K players a month when they pulled the trigger on making drastic changes. If the game was a success they wouldn't have made the changes. :rolleyes:

Obviously you didn't read the chart then. If they sold a milion copies fo the game it would of been recorded as such asn the sbuscriptions would of actually been reflected by that as Bruce is quite eager to write things like that down. Finally, the subs held out at 300k for a year, then dropped to 250k corresponding to WoWs release, and then had it's massive drop off right around the NGE release.

Next time stop making up numbers whne the charts right in front of you.

[edit]

Also, I decided to go dumpster diving into the SWG archives looking for box sales since they would of undoubtedly mentioned that, but the only thing I could find was on the 28th of August, 2003 here (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/news_archive.vm?id=58247&month=082003) talking about how the subscrptions in SWg hit 275,000 after 2 months, which was big news back then.

[Sumdian]

I downloaded the trial last year and as soon as i loged in my pc almost died from all the spammers so i loged out and uninstalled it and have never been back

[babanathie]

Unfortunately they ran up against a black hole of a game that wasn't letting many out of it's gravitational pull. People were playing WoW. A lot of people were playing WoW, and despite what the prognosticators were all saying at the time, not many were leaving it very quick. In other words there wasn't many to come back or to attract. If you look at every other MMO on the market at the time you'll see that they all had a drastic drop in subs. So in the end in regards to the changes thay made, they were a victim of bad timing really. If it weren't for WoW every indication was (and still is) that it would have rebounded. As evidenced by how well WoW did by offering players what they wanted. As opposed to offering a tiny niche what they wanted to the detriment of offering what most wanted. Which is the mistake they made with the game in the first place.

Yeah, misleading their then current playerbase into buying an expansion that they had already planned on eliminating from the game did nothing to their reputation. I was there and I watched the whole damn thing unfold with absolute disbelief. Whether the game needed a reboot is a moot point, I'm stating that the preceived unethical actions on SOE's part damaged their reputation. Hell, when you have EQ2 players asking ex-SWG players (on a public MMO forum) to let go and shut up because it's hurting EQ2 subscriptions... You know, I don't think discussing this with you is at all constructive.

[Hagon]

Obviously you didn't read the chart then. If they sold a milion copies fo the game it would of been recorded as such asn the sbuscriptions would of actually been reflected by that as Bruce is quite eager to write things like that down. Finally, the subs held out at 300k for a year, then dropped to 250k corresponding to WoWs release, and then had it's massive drop off right around the NGE release.

Next time stop making up numbers whne the charts right in front of you.I'd suggest reading through that site before you post so smugly and spew your childish insults. I'm very familiar with it, and the person that created it. He says himself that the numbers for any SOE related game are complete estimations based off of game sales and some other criteria. SOE doesn't release subscription numbers to the public.

The only numbers that were ever "officially" released by SOE was that the game sold over a million boxes. The other numbers are garnered from what some SEO employees and ex-employees have said over the years (one example of which I posted already, but there's plenty more from plenty of other people too).

I'll take the word of people that were there and actually saw the internal data. Thanks anyway.

[Silverspar]

I'd suggest reading through that site before you post so smugly and spew your childish insults. I'm very familiar with it, and the person that created it. He says himself that the numbers for any SOE related game are complete estimations based off of game sales and some other criteria. SOE doesn't release subscription numbers to the public.

The only numbers that were ever "officially" released by SOE was that the game sold over a million boxes. The other numbers are garnered from what some SEO employees and ex-employees have said over the years (one example of which I posted already, but there's plenty more from plenty of other people too).

I'll take the word of people that were there and actually saw the internal data. Thanks anyway.

Might want to try again, because I actually psoted the one thing up there. I did go dumpster diving through their archives.

And I found the article in reference to 1,000,000 units sold, something that is 2 years after the launch of the game, and the point again, after WoW launched. Not exactly surprising considering the number of Star Wars collectors who will colelct something jsut because it had Star Wars on the box.

[MillsUK]

They made the changes because people were leaving to play WoW, that is true. However in making the changes they lost 50% of their hard core player base who didn't like WoW type MMO's.

The sandbox type SWG offered on it's release drew alot of players away from popular MMO's at the time like EQ, DAoC, Anarchy. For the most part, SWG was a good game. The thing the devs got wrong was lack of bug fixes and lack of content after 3-4 months once everyone had realised that if you wanted to PVP you made a TKA. If you wanted to make easy enough money you faction pointed an at-at and grinded missions. A very small minority grinded holo's and the rest crafted, for the most part.

It became to easy to solo. It was only after about 8 months did they decide to fix a krayt dragon bug on Tat that enabled you to trap it in an imperial base and shoot it for 30 mins from range till death. Not to mention the numerous bugs in quests, pets/vehicles, classes (BE and BH spring to mind) and at the time what seemed like a total lack of communication between them and the players base at the time.

With the release of JTL came less honking at the devs as people had new content to explore. A few months later the complaints were back as people got bored. Even then, people considered it a better game than most MMO's. The CU came in and with it, if i remember correctly a change in Jedi, the Jedi Village for example. Then NGE came in, alienated, along with the CU alot of their niche player base. If they'd kept the game as it was i have no doubt they have 100k+ more subscribers than they currently do.

Also, from what i remember of the time, only a handful of people wanted to be a Jedi and agreed that the system was flawed. But not flawed in the length and difficulty, just the system(holo grinding) for getting it. Alot of us wanted to be commando's, pistoleers, swordsman, fencers, BH, crafters, pikeman, rifleman, doctors etc, we wanted to play in the SWG universe. Believe it or not everyone back then didn't want a twinked Jedi. In the 6 months or so, on FarStar anyway, when the first Jedi started to emerge (one of the first being Woodman in TDR) he actually got wtf pwned by TKA's in PVP as even though he was a Jedi Knight, he had no knockdown def, their in one of the biggest annoyances of the time, TKA constant knockdowns.

I don't normally get invovled in this kind of discussion as im a relative noob around here but im hearing some of the slating going on of early SWG by people who like to think they know everything. My experience with 12+ rl friends who played and one of the biggest guilds/alliances on my server told a very different story and many, many, many of the SWG vets ive talked to since agreed with me about my perception of how it used to be.

Peace.

[babanathie]

I'd suggest reading through that site before you post so smugly and spew your childish insults. I'm very familiar with it, and the person that created it. He says himself that the numbers for any SOE related game are complete estimations based off of game sales and some other criteria. SOE doesn't release subscription numbers to the public.

The only numbers that were ever "officially" released by SOE was that the game sold over a million boxes. The other numbers are garnered from what some SEO employees and ex-employees have said over the years (one example of which I posted already, but there's plenty more from plenty of other people too).

I'll take the word of people that were there and actually saw the internal data. Thanks anyway.

Lie number one: here (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/news_archive.vm?id=58247&month=082003)

From their official site, they did release subscription numbers. However, let's say they didn't. You quoted an individual that probably needs a job in the industry after the SWG fiasco. Yeah, that's a reputable source.

[Hagon]

Yeah, misleading their then current playerbase into buying an expansion that they had already planned on eliminating from the game did nothing to their reputation. I was there and I watched the whole damn thing unfold with absolute disbelief. Whether the game needed a reboot is a moot point, I'm stating that the preceived unethical actions on SOE's part damaged their reputation. Hell, when you have EQ2 players asking ex-SWG players (on a public MMO forum) to let go and shut up because it's hurting EQ2 subscriptions... You know, I don't think discussing this with you is at all constructive.Well I don't imagine someone posting actual facts as opposed to personal anecdotes clouded by personal bias seems productive to you, no.

Might want to try again, because I actually psoted the one thing up there. I did go dumpster diving through their archives.Lucas Arts isn't SOE, and that shows what I was saying was accurate. It's comical how some companies can put a positive spin on anything depending on how it's worded though isn't it? "reached 275 000 subscribers". When in actual fact it ENDED UP WITH 275 000 subscribers (maybe) and was in the process of losing 10K subscribers a month.

[Silverspar]

Lie number one: here (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/news_archive.vm?id=58247&month=082003)

From their official site, they did release subscription numbers. However, let's say they didn't. You quoted an individual that probably needs a job in the industry after the SWG fiasco. Yeah, that's a reputable source.

Lie number Two: here (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/star-wars-galaxies-sales-top-a-million-units)

This article is 2 years and 2 months after the release of Star Wars Galaxy and nearly a year after the release of World of Warcraft, and htis article clearly states that Sony jsut hit the 1,000,000 units mark for sales.

[Hagon]

Lie number one: here (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/news_archive.vm?id=58247&month=082003)

From their official site, they did release subscription numbers. However, let's say they didn't. You quoted an individual that probably needs a job in the industry after the SWG fiasco. Yeah, that's a reputable source.Again, Lucas Arts isn't SOE.

[babanathie]

Edit. Edit. Edit.

[Silverspar]

Quote Silverspar's post. I didn't post that and think your tactics of discrediting me with another's person's post is morally questionable.

Wasn't discreditting was adding to your's but if youw ant to take it that way, so be it.

[babanathie]

Wasn't discreditting was adding to your's but if youw ant to take it that way, so be it.

Sorry, I apologize. Feeding trolls has taken its toll on my tonight.

[Hagon]

Lie number Two: here (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/star-wars-galaxies-sales-top-a-million-units)

This article is 2 years and 2 months after the release of Star Wars Galaxy and nearly a year after the release of World of Warcraft, and htis article clearly states that Sony jsut hit the 1,000,000 units mark for sales.Keep looking (this is funny watching a couple of delusional people finally taking the time to get some facts) and you'll see quotes from John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, admitting that they had reached the 1 million sales mark shortly after release but hadn't sold a significant number since, but in his mind that press release wasn't a lie. It just put a more positive spin on the disaster what with the timing perception and all.

[Silverspar]

Keep looking (this is funny watching a couple of delusional people finally taking the time to get some facts) and you'll see quotes from John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, admitting that they had reached the 1 million sales mark shortly after release but hadn't sold a significant number since, but in his mind that release wasn't a lie.

I already looked. So far the only one being delusional is you. But then agian you've lways been delusional. Do keep making up statstics without proof Hagon.

[Hagon]

Sorry, I apologize. Feeding trolls has taken its toll on my tonight.Yes, once again we see the STO forum wannabe intelligentsia saying that anyone disagreeing with them must be a troll.

[Hagon]

I already looked. So far the only one being delusional is you. But then agian you've lways been delusional. Do keep making up statstics without proof Hagon.The only one here that's offered any accurate facts substantiated by people that were actually working on the game at the time is me, so .......

[babanathie]

Keep looking (this is funny watching a couple of delusional people finally taking the time to get some facts) and you'll see quotes from John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, admitting that they had reached the 1 million sales mark shortly after release but hadn't sold a significant number since, but in his mind that press release wasn't a lie. It just put a more positive spin on the disaster what with the timing perception and all.

You know, this discussion is (as I stated in an earlier post) not productive; especially to the topic as outlined in the OP, which could be construed as a violation of the CoC as is calling people delusional (i.e. personal attacks or a troll on my part). So, I'm not going to discuss it as is at this point.

[starbuck1771]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?


Sorry to tell you but if compairing games to the sucsess of WoW determins what fails, then Guess what? STO will fail as well.

The reason WoW is so sucsessful is:
Anyone can play it if they have a pc from the past decade.
Graphics are not top end so more people can play it.
The developers have a great imagination.
Blizzard owns Wow therefore cutting out any 3rd parties.
Blizzard goes all in when developing a game.
Ease of controls so that even the handycaped can play it.

You put that all together and look at the way Cryptic is doing things and you can tell STO will never be as big as WoW. Jack Emerts statements at the 2008 las vegas convention were mosty false no matter what people say.

[Hagon]

You know, this discussion is (as I stated in an earlier post) not productive; especially to the topic as outlined in the OP, which could be construed as a violation of the CoC as is calling people delusional (i.e. personal attacks or a troll on my part). So, I'm not going to discuss it as is at this point.Well then you tell me what word you'd use to describe people that adamantly maintain a belief in something when all accurate facts show that they are completely wrong.

[babanathie]

Well then you tell me what word you'd use to describe people that adamantly maintain a belief in something when all accurate facts show that they are completely wrong.

You know, bowing out of an argument because of CoC and attempting to bait them after they bow out is not in good taste and could be construed as taunting under article 14 of the Code of Conduct.

[Silverspar]

Well then you tell me what word you'd use to describe people that adamantly maintain a belief in something when all accurate facts show that they are completely wrong.

I'm still waiting for you to provide the facts. So far it's you wailing and nashing in the face of the facts.

[Hagon]

I'm still waiting for you to provide the facts. So far it's you wailing and nashing in the face of the facts.I did provide you with one example of the facts, from someone that was there and had access to the internal metrics. You chose to completely ignore it and go with someone's guesstimate and a press release from Lucas Arts put out virtually years after the big SWG fail smoke had long long since cleared.

[Silverspar]

I did provide you with one example of the facts, from someone that was there and had access to the internal metrics. You chose to completely ignore it and go with someone's guesstimate and a press release from Lucas Arts put out virtually years after the big SWG fail smoke had long long since cleared.

No, I didn't. You provided hear say, which I actually tried finding your mystical facts, which are not there. I also went and looked up every source you claimed, nothig coroborates you.

[Mike_Hawk]

SWG was one of the better games til the C.U.R.B.

It was ruined & made to be like WoW & other MMOs. Which made alot of people that fell in love w/a unique game(like myself) stop playing it.
SWG was my 1st MMO & I have yet to find one that gives me the feel of not being a run of the mill game.
I'm hoping STO is the game to do it.
I played CoH/CoV & Cryptic made that game unplayable too. But I'm willing to give them another shot. Although if SOE was doing this game I wouldn't even consider it. I will never play another SOE game. PERIOD.

SWGs immersion was one of a kind, & made you feel like you were in that universe. The very military & disciplined atmosphere of StarFleet is something I've very excited to explore. With all of it's protocol & procedure.
So I'm waiting very impatiently for this one.

[DocSavag]

What the heck does PvP have to do with the discussion?

Anyway, I don't disagree that a lot like to craft, heck I like to craft, but only a comparatively tiny handful ONLY wants to craft or have that be their primary focus. Providing a good crafting system is one thing. Catering too much to a small group and doing so to the detriment of fun, exciting, and challenging game play is just foolish.

By the way, the game was deemed a failure within a few months after release by the 600 000 to 800 000 people that bought the box and didn't bother to subscribe after they tried it, the developers that created the game, and the company that payed those developers to make it.

The failure was related to the strict adhearance to the sandbox style of game design, but it wasn't becuase that was there. It failed because they spent so much itme with that design that they lost sight of the things that make a game fun for a lot of people. The fact that SWG is one of the best MMO avenues for RP evern built isn't the issue, the issue that was about all it was in the begining. The lack of a questing system for PVE the unbalanced combat system for PVP, the over reliance on other players which early on was a plus quickly turned into a detriment when subscription numbers fell because you couldn't find people to heal you after battles or to make the things you needed.

Crafting, the tools for Roleplay are all fine things and things that made SWG real for a lot of people. They aren't enough to make a successfull major MMO in today's market but I don't think the existance of them harms games at all. I think SWG's failure was in not balancing that better with the rest of the game.

All of the talk about numbers and dates is not relevent. Anyone who says the game failed because of NGE or the CU are just not remembering very well or weren't there in the first place. The game was in trouble far before either of those events. I can't speak to the factual nature of what the numbers were post launch. I can only talk about what I saw in game and talked about with designers on the forums and off. The numbers aren't the story. The story is behind the numbers. What was missing from the game? The answer isn't "Jedi" the answer is quest systems, story, balanced combat etc. I suspect SWG would have done far better initially if they had started with they system they have now, but it was far too late when they put the NGE in to do anything but dissapoint their exiting playerbase.

[JoJimGregory]

In the simplest of terms, which applies to just about any failed MMO, the Frustration Factor beat out the Fun Dividend.

[OddjobXL]

IThey made mistakes, and some were just totally boneheaded (not having Jedi easily playable for instance), but many were honest mistakes. At the time the game was released there was still a misconception that RPers, "immersionists", an others that were happy just hanging around in a game, could still carry one. The failure of SWG was clear evidence that they couldn't. Not even close. Which is even more relevant today.

They bought into the rhetoric from within the community following the game's development and ignored what the people in the market were saying. The sad part is that still today development houses (the most recent examples are WAR and AoC) are making that same stupid mistake.

I think you're the one touting the revisionist history. First of all, Jedi are easily playable now. *looks around* Where are all the players rushing in to play Jedi?

The fact is they hardly listened to the players at all about anything during beta. This whole design was the product of Koster designing a game based on Koster's ideas. The only change they made based on player input was the decision to go from a PvE design to a PvP one because very bombastic, very determined, very fervent people in the forums lobbied like hell for it to be in and had very big guilds backing them up (unlike here where it's mostly phantom fleets made up of Flying Dutchmen which are the product of one man's imagination).

They sure as hell didn't listen to people who wanted Star Wars in the game. People are funny in that they come to some interesting ideas about "common knowledge." You and I actually agree on a few. The notion SWG was fine before the NGE is one of these flawed assumptions many people seem to embrace which is absolutely wrong.

A rational man looking at SWG, and I actually argued with these people at first because in the beginning many of Kosters ideas were working well with what we were trying to do, would say "Where's the adventure? Where are the lightsabers? Where are the starships? Where is the Empire? Who am I supposed to be rebelling against if there isn't an Empire out there oppressing something?"

I kept saying, well, they're just laying the ground work. This is the plumbing. The Star Wars part will come. Have faith. Isn't what we've seen so far cool? Imagine what's around the corner! It was crazy immersive on one level but they were right to say it wasn't Star Wars. And after a few corners were turned it was pretty clear Star Wars was in some galaxy far, far, away hanging out with Godot. Most players who came for it stopped waiting.

We might even agree that more accessible Jedi would have been a key feature in SWG along with space and a believable, moviesque, GCW environment. The problem is how to implement them in a way that makes sense. I know this doesn't matter to you a whit but take my word for it it matters to people who care about the meaning of Star Wars just as many of the things you mock in the STO forums matter to people who genuinely care about Star Trek.

They eventually did castrate and disembowel the design with the NGE but it could never be Star Wars really. Why? No Empire. Why no Empire? "PvP Must Be Balanced" coupled with "One Set Of Content For Both Sides." So we never had any chance to be a rebel fighting the good fight against The Empire whether one was a Jedi or not. And that's what most people always wanted.

To put on the shoes of the heroes and if not recreate their adventures at least have experiences remotely reminiscent of the movies. It's why the damn logo is on the box and why most people are picking that box up.

And don't tell me PvP GCW is Star Wars either. Go to Restuss. Hang out at the Starports where the load-gankers once thrived. This is not Star Wars. This is not the glorious rebellion anyone was looking for.

It wasn't before the NGE. It still isn't after.

[deerang]

The fact is they hardly listened to the players at all about anything during beta. .

It was around that time i hopped off the beta. Nothing was getting done, bug's still remained and it became more and more obvious that SOE where going to release the game broken. As such i felt worthless as a beta tester ( as did many ).

[dieuwe10]

The trick is to listen to the beta testers. If they don't like it and think it's not ready, then why would other people? I think the trick to STO is that you feel like you're in Starfleet, have a duty to protect your crew, and being able to do what Kirk and Picard did. If they get that right the game won't have a problem.

From everything I've heard, I don't think Cryptic will make the same mistakes.

[Sarile]

I left because the game released was nothing more than an upgraded beta that you paid for. So much of what was promised was not implemented at the time of the games release. I didn't want to pay to play a beta game that was marketed as retail.

Live Long and Prosper

[CalonLan]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?


OK let me start by saying the Original SWG Pre-CU was the best RPG system I've ever played, down to the sheer diversity of the character development, there was no right or wrong way to build your toon.

Where did it go wrong? Cardinal rule No.1 of MMO's ....you must be 18 years+ to hold a credit card.
SOE/LA forgot that the majority of Star Wars fans were probably there to see the first movie, the original system was created for a mature player.

So the game got dumbed down with its combat upgrade.

Then 2 weeks after introducing a new expansion, with no prior warning, they change the game entirely, remove two thirds of the original professions and start every remaining profession from one build with little or no option to optimise/customise a toon.

Unsurprisingly two thirds (estimate) of the remaining playing base quit immediately.

2 years pass without the addition of any meaningful new game content with a dev team intent only on winning back the people that had left the game and not concentrating on the players they had. Didn't work...

Dev team significantly reduced due to lack of income.

New content arrives, it is initially challenging but loses its shelf life quickly and in a lot of cases becomes monotonous.

New content fails to arrive quick enough to keep vet players playing.
......

I hope Cryptic learn from this. Star Trek is one of the oldest franchises out there. The game needs to cater for those who watched TOS as well as Voyager and Enterprise. It also needs to be challenging enough to keep players interested.

I am hoping that STO will tick all boxes.

[DanSeale]

I think you're the one touting the revisionist history. First of all, Jedi are easily playable now. *looks around* Where are all the players rushing in to play Jedi?

The fact is they hardly listened to the players at all about anything during beta. This whole design was the product of Koster designing a game based on Koster's ideas. The only change they made based on player input was the decision to go from a PvE design to a PvP one because very bombastic, very determined, very fervent people in the forums lobbied like hell for it to be in and had very big guilds backing them up (unlike here where it's mostly phantom fleets made up of Flying Dutchmen which are the product of one man's imagination).

They sure as hell didn't listen to people who wanted Star Wars in the game. People are funny in that they come to some interesting ideas about "common knowledge." You and I actually agree on a few. The notion SWG was fine before the NGE is one of these flawed assumptions many people seem to embrace which is absolutely wrong.

A rational man looking at SWG, and I actually argued with these people at first because in the beginning many of Kosters ideas were working well with what we were trying to do, would say "Where's the adventure? Where are the lightsabers? Where are the starships? Where is the Empire? Who am I supposed to be rebelling against if there isn't an Empire out there oppressing something?"

I kept saying, well, they're just laying the ground work. This is the plumbing. The Star Wars part will come. Have faith. Isn't what we've seen so far cool? Imagine what's around the corner! It was crazy immersive on one level but they were right to say it wasn't Star Wars. And after a few corners were turned it was pretty clear Star Wars was in some galaxy far, far, away hanging out with Godot. Most players who came for it stopped waiting.

We might even agree that more accessible Jedi would have been a key feature in SWG along with space and a believable, moviesque, GCW environment. The problem is how to implement them in a way that makes sense. I know this doesn't matter to you a whit but take my word for it it matters to people who care about the meaning of Star Wars just as many of the things you mock in the STO forums matter to people who genuinely care about Star Trek.

They eventually did castrate and disembowel the design with the NGE but it could never be Star Wars really. Why? No Empire. Why no Empire? "PvP Must Be Balanced" coupled with "One Set Of Content For Both Sides." So we never had any chance to be a rebel fighting the good fight against The Empire whether one was a Jedi or not. And that's what most people always wanted.

To put on the shoes of the heroes and if not recreate their adventures at least have experiences remotely reminiscent of the movies. It's why the damn logo is on the box and why most people are picking that box up.

And don't tell me PvP GCW is Star Wars either. Go to Restuss. Hang out at the Starports where the load-gankers once thrived. This is not Star Wars. This is not the glorious rebellion anyone was looking for.

It wasn't before the NGE. It still isn't after.

Aside from countless bugs that were not being addressed before release .. stop and think about it. How frustrating was it for people to not be able to function as a key player ? Not neccessarilly a hero .. but even as a part of the Empire? How many true leaders are there in the Empire ? 2 ? 3? 6? 50 ?

The same questions might be asked of the those who wanted to be Jedi. Although there is a lot more opportunity for expansion in that area .. the opposition was considerably more limited.

IMHO you wont find that problem with STO. There is a lot more room for two or three entire factions AT LEAST ! Within that structure there is also plenty of room for "leaders" .. those who choose not to lead .. and litterally MANY oher opportunities for STO to be able to be successful.

However, dividing ourself at this point trying to make it seem as though STO will fail if it becomes a place for "care bears" .. and other name dropping ideals that some how suggest that unless a much more agressive PvP or even making the game so easy that a 6 year old could walk through it with ease is not helping the DEV team (or anyone else for that matter) .. resolve things that can move the game forward.

We need contient ! good contient ! lots of contient ..

surely there are better ways to help develope it.

[Azurit]

I have played 2 years of Star Wars Galaxies. I realy liked the game, and although I played 4 years of WoW after SWG I think SWG was a far superior game and it had for sure a better player community. Compared to it wow is too featureless, things like crafting are not so interessting etc..

I could tell alot why I quit swg and what bothered me. I just could not understand how the devs could make one bad decision after another and always have stupid arguments in the forums. I will illustrate this with 1 example. One of the professions was called Creature Handler (it was not my main, I have tried a lot of them in the 2 years, Artisan things like architect, doctor, comando, tka, bounty hunter even master ranger). So there was a time when Creature Handler was to overpowered, almost everyone was CH. Then they nerfed it. And I would say it was okay for a year or so. Then for unknown reasons the nerfed it again and nerfed it. So a lot of peoples respeced and take something usefull. And then the decided to cut the profession Creature Handler out of the game with the argument... ... no one plays it. So it went from best profession to worst, was then cut because no one wanted to play it anymore. But the reason for this was not that no one wanted it, it was just that no one did play it due to the random unbalancing the devs did.

And that is just one story. Others are - nerfs where always retroactive, buffs never. So for example if you where shipwright and had a lot of x-wings in stock, they decided to nerf x-wings - all your olds got the new - bad - stats. If they decided in next patch - x-wings need to get better, only new crafted ones are better, your old ones become useless and unsellable. No matter how much you invested. What I hated about this was that the devs always had a stupid technical explanation for this. Which in most cases was just a lie.

So when I quit, I still liked the game, but I hated the devs, what they did in patches, what they said to the community as explaination. I just did not want to invest any more time in a game where it was not sure what - somewhat random - complete change will come next. In an mmo you can invest a lot of time, but you don't want it to be completly useless after a patch. And with SWG I more and more got the feeling that this ist what happens. Btw: Somehow wow is going in the same direction at the moment, no matter what you try to achieve, a few patches latter you can get it with half, or even less effort. In my opinion this is not a good atitude, for me this takes out a lot of motivations. With friends we even joke if we should play the wow add ons from now on with 1 delay. So buy the 3. when the 4. is released ;)

[Locrano]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

LoL, there are plenty of things that make a game make or break. I'm a gaming student and believe me it's not easy making something appealing.

I've not played Star Wars Galaxies but I did follow its developments prior to release and from what I heard (Which may or may not be true) there are a few things which I would consider fundamental flaws to that game (Well at least at that time). Simply having a massive branding like Star Wars doesn't equate success.

It was said that becoming a Jedi was the hardest thing ever! Although realistically if we follow the Star Wars saga it is true that only a handful of people are attuned to the force.. but.. this is a game. Simply put people WANT to be Jedi Knights and stuff. When you take that away, well...

At least Star Trek Online's allowing everyone to own their Starships, that much is settled lol. Though it's not everything, it's definitely a start. Star Wars' new game The Old Republic (Based on Knights of The Old Republic series which were awesome!) seem to be going the right way, Massive lightsaber battlefields sounds like fun. Just as fun as a massive fleet battle in Star Trek.

[badsmashngrab]

I've asked this question a hundred times. I think it comes down to the developers ability to provide content consistant with the expectations of the players. Not to mention finding a way to keep that content new and fresh all the time. I think this is something blizzard has done a good job with in WOW. They always find a way to keep the junkies comming back for more. It is also important to keep close to cannon as much as possible to keep your core community engaged. Especially in games like Star Wars and STO who have historical followers of such a deep level.

[ZebOswalt]

Ok the good the bad the Ugly SWG>

I look back and some of it was better than Wow. SWG Was meeh to start with then got good…then went to WTF? At the time I left. Any way I didn’t start at Beta. I wasn’t an MMOer till my cousin who was into the game was telling me I should play. Ok it was a chance to hang with my Cousin again and play an MMO. I looked at the classes etc at this point you could start as a jedI so I did. (When I got to Wow Jedis were pretty much the same as Shams. Only people didn‘t expect Jedis to sit back and just heal as they ran into battles against way to many people. But, moving on.) I made my Dosh jedI and joined the rebs. That’s one of the things I liked more about SWG than WOW, you could be any species on either side. Also since it was real time I could stand back with a rifle and shot storm troopers that were red. I would have hated it had I played when the game was still in the FF way of doing things. Getting your speeder was a lot easier than in Wow with Mounts. Find a few parts and you had one. Could even paint it. Though you had to dismount when attacked to fight back. Liked in Wow how you auto dismounted when you fought back. Not sure if the AT St mount would let you fight back. I never got that. Also by the time I got there and had the star ship etc. Intestling I got some tie fighter guns for my ship and the starter guns were better.

The experimental starter ship was way cool. Never got that in Wow. The character creation at start gave you more options for the characters look. Hated that I could never use the cool armor as a jedI, but I made a commando later. Liked that Harson ford did the voice for the tutorial. And if that wasn’t Anthony Danels it was a good impression. Same with the Vader. I liked the station. Hoth was ok, but I was glad when I got to Naboo. Also the Comando was a much better class than the JedI to me. Over all the healing and the sight addition for the jedI were the powers I used most. I got a lot more out of the commando. And better armor. It was funny my Twillic Commando was a lot better than my Dosh JedI. The missions wer ok. To bad their were no dallies. The light thing on the ships was a pain when you were close enough to find them. Though being able to track stuff was a lot better than in Wow. Though the fact that you had no skill points to use as you want was a pain. The added new pointless secion points were pointless and a waste of time. The dragons were to high a lvl t be on Hotrh espechely with the numbers. I liked that if you didn’t join spechel forces you could avoid PVP. Then getting sniped at a distance for ione shot kill was annoying. The raising your ship lvls was a pain for me any way. I’m terrible at flight sims. I never did get my Y wing. Wow was better on point system for character and powers. And more exactable to the average gamer for system rec. Granted I have a much better com now and high speed so not positive. But, heck if Pirets of the Caraben didn’t have the weapon lvl crap it would have been great. Characters looked cool and easy use on most systems. But, SWG became crap. Espeachely when their were the people on boards who would have every thing changed just for change sake. I gave up on Wow cause to many of the classes that worked for me got nerfed. SWG after all the expansions was pretty good till it got revised into something it shouldn’t have been turned into. Me I like when you get a charter some points and can build stats as you like. 1 point each stat. And SWG gave you no stats save the boosts. Which could work for your captain and then you can get stats from a few possible options for your crew or set stats for them. So the average player won’t be bored just at creation. They probly should have advertised Han solo’s voice for their adds like Pirates did with Jack sparrow leading you threw the tutorial. You knew from the cermatals the voice was gonna be in the game.

That game was killed by oh you have mastered this weapon so you can’t use it to lvl said toon….huh? Wow gave your NPCs more help with friendly NPCs. As well as your character could get stuff easier. The bars in SWG ware fun just walking in them. I never played an imp some imp players got a bit either to in character or were just grouchy for no reason. It was like dude lighten up it’s a game. I also liked in Wow that no matter what youy kept your cities. I got bord having to go back and reclaimed ancer head. Though it was fun helping take the imp city. And watching people scramble over their to take it back. Then right after they left take it back. And go lvling. Granted when I played Horde on Wow had the same probs with Allies. As for SWO if they take thje good ideas from what they have done in their other games elevate what doesn’t work. And make evaluated disions on what worked for other games and what didn’t. So far it looks like STO will be a great game. Hopefully it won't take me long to get from the miranda to the Exlesior class ship.

[Hagon]

No, I didn't. You provided hear say, which I actually tried finding your mystical facts, which are not there. I also went and looked up every source you claimed, nothig coroborates you.Yes, a lead designer of the game giving the numbers is hearsay, while some random Joe guessing at them, and a press release from a totally separate company fudging the time frame so as to put a more positive spin on a disaster are fact. :rolleyes:

I think you're the one touting the revisionist history. First of all, Jedi are easily playable now. *looks around* Where are all the players rushing in to play Jedi?

The fact is they hardly listened to the players at all about anything during beta. This whole design was the product of Koster designing a game based on Koster's ideas. The only change they made based on player input was the decision to go from a PvE design to a PvP one because very bombastic, very determined, very fervent people in the forums lobbied like hell for it to be in and had very big guilds backing them up (unlike here where it's mostly phantom fleets made up of Flying Dutchmen which are the product of one man's imagination).

They sure as hell didn't listen to people who wanted Star Wars in the game. People are funny in that they come to some interesting ideas about "common knowledge." You and I actually agree on a few. The notion SWG was fine before the NGE is one of these flawed assumptions many people seem to embrace which is absolutely wrong.

A rational man looking at SWG, and I actually argued with these people at first because in the beginning many of Kosters ideas were working well with what we were trying to do, would say "Where's the adventure? Where are the lightsabers? Where are the starships? Where is the Empire? Who am I supposed to be rebelling against if there isn't an Empire out there oppressing something?"

I kept saying, well, they're just laying the ground work. This is the plumbing. The Star Wars part will come. Have faith. Isn't what we've seen so far cool? Imagine what's around the corner! It was crazy immersive on one level but they were right to say it wasn't Star Wars. And after a few corners were turned it was pretty clear Star Wars was in some galaxy far, far, away hanging out with Godot. Most players who came for it stopped waiting.

We might even agree that more accessible Jedi would have been a key feature in SWG along with space and a believable, moviesque, GCW environment. The problem is how to implement them in a way that makes sense. I know this doesn't matter to you a whit but take my word for it it matters to people who care about the meaning of Star Wars just as many of the things you mock in the STO forums matter to people who genuinely care about Star Trek.

They eventually did castrate and disembowel the design with the NGE but it could never be Star Wars really. Why? No Empire. Why no Empire? "PvP Must Be Balanced" coupled with "One Set Of Content For Both Sides." So we never had any chance to be a rebel fighting the good fight against The Empire whether one was a Jedi or not. And that's what most people always wanted.

To put on the shoes of the heroes and if not recreate their adventures at least have experiences remotely reminiscent of the movies. It's why the damn logo is on the box and why most people are picking that box up.

And don't tell me PvP GCW is Star Wars either. Go to Restuss. Hang out at the Starports where the load-gankers once thrived. This is not Star Wars. This is not the glorious rebellion anyone was looking for.

It wasn't before the NGE. It still isn't after.It always come back to the same thing woth you, and that same thing was simply not there. There were no "PvPers" around back then. Certainly not enough to mention, and they had no bearing on any decisions that were made, and none of the decisions made had much, if anything, to do with PvP.

The truth is that back then they did listen to the yammering fools following the game's development (the same type as many following this game's development) telling them combat mechanics, mission/quest development, nurturing conflict, offering story lines that made each player feel like a hero, etc weren't important. Those people telling them all that was important was creating an accurate Star Wars environment for players to exist in where they could make up their own stories and such. So they released a game where really all there was to do besides go out and grind till one's eyes bled, and what too many ended up doing, was stand around in cantinas scratching each other's back stories.

[lefty1117]

Steep learning curve, tedious gameplay mechanics, lack of action. Those things killed it. I'm sorry, but you think Star Wars and you think of shooting tie fighters, or racing on speeders, or gun fights, or, yes, jedi.

The NGE is what the game should have been at launch. They could have had NGE style gameplay and classes but maintained the crafting and harvesting complexitiy (which is basically where the game is now).

The fact of the matter is, the larger demographic of MMO players are casual fans out of school who have jobs, wives, kids, etc., and not tons of time to be waiting in buff lines or standing around for 10 minutes for a shuttle. They want to maximize their fun, their progress, for that hour a night they get to play. WoW, which came out 6 months later, had that instant gratification. Also, it was way more polished and ran better on PCs at the time. It was really a no brainer where the casual crowd would ultimately go.

I think the most important thing for STO is that it comes out with the right game design from day 1. SWG has proved that there are no do-overs. You cannot spend your dev time post launch changing and fixing game systems; that time should be spent putting together new content to keep the playerbase interested and subscribed. Blizzard understood this.

I played SWG from beta 3 and while I did like the sand boxiness of it, it wasn't long before I became frustrated by the poor performance, lack of direction (there was barely a quest log when it launched!), and too much "down time" between spurts of action. I played the game as long as I did only because it was Star Wars.

[DocSavag]

It always come back to the same thing woth you, and that same thing was simply not there. There were no "PvPers" around back then. Certainly not enough to mention, and they had no bearing on any decisions that were made, and none of the decisions made had much, if anything, to do with PvP.

The truth is that back then they did listen to the yammering fools following the game's development (the same type as many following this game's development) telling them combat mechanics, mission/quest development, nurturing conflict, offering story lines that made each player feel like a hero, etc weren't important. Those people telling them all that was important was creating an accurate Star Wars environment for players to exist in where they could make up their own stories and such. So they released a game where really all there was to do besides go out and grind till one's eyes bled, and what too many ended up doing, was stand around in cantinas scratching each other's back stories.

Here is the crazy part. There were tons of quests and missions in the game. The problem was that the design of the game left it for the players to discover them. I remember having this argument with some of the designers who listed a huge list of quests that were in the game at launch. The problem is that you didn't know it unless you spent your day looking for them. Now, that is exciting for some players. I might even be one of them, but for the majority of the players they don't want to go find all the content they want a little boost, they want someone to point them in the right direction. Ironically the NGE started linking all that together in a storyline structure. That of course was far too late to save the game.

The problem again isn't that they developed a rich Star Wars environment where you could make up your own stories. The problem is that they spent so much time doing that they did almost nothing else. However it wasn't just about time, because it took the game failing before they ever got a clue about what needed to be done in the first place.

So keeping in the theme of the post the lesson here isn't "screw the roleplayers" it is "don't forget the fun" don't get so wrapped up in the environment (which is important) that you forget to make the game intersting and fun to play. So far I haven't seen evidence of that. I hear about exploration and dynamic environments but I also hear about scripted missions. I'm hopeful that STO can suceed where SWG failed: to create a rich futuristic environment AND a fun and challenging game.

[sblack]

Aside from the in depth pros and cons of SWG's gameplay, I personally just found it to be a very ugly and boring game that ran and looked awful no matter what kind of a system you played it on. It was a HUGE disappointment to me, and it still is.

^this

I just thought the quality of the gameplay was aweful. I never felt fully in control of my character. i didn't like the way the world looked sometimes. All the actual quests I tried to do weren't in place or were broken when it launched, or were so mind numbingly boring I didn't try to do them. The best way to level was to get "dynamic" missions to kill some poor giant birds home, lol.

Ohter aspects were intriguing and I had friends that got into it: the profession advancement system, the player made cities, the dance halls and other non-combat gameplay options, crafting was awesome for those into that, some of the PvP was interesting.

But overall, the game just didn't "work". I found myself not having any motivation to go places except to see what they loked like. Spent far too long wondering around planets going from player made city to city once that was out. They needed to have some development growth control in that regard.

So in summary. Star Trek has to:

1) Finish a lot of the content of the game before releasing.

2) Have a combat/gameplay engine that is fun and polished.

3) Make the game "work" by integrating the different aspects of the game in a seemless, consistent way.

4) Appeal to hardcore and casual, PvE and PvP, exploration and acheivement, aspects of the game simultaneously.

[OddjobXL]

Here is the crazy part. There were tons of quests and missions in the game. The problem was that the design of the game left it for the players to discover them.

The problem again isn't that they developed a rich Star Wars environment where you could make up your own stories. The problem is that they spent so much time doing that they did almost nothing else. However it wasn't just about time, because it took the game failing before they ever got a clue about what needed to be done in the first place.

I think you and I have very different ideas of what a Star Wars environment is. If Star Wars are trackless wastes and spookily unpopulated cities (most NPC cities outside of Eisley and Coronet and, later, player cities too) and quests centering around renegade Mandalorians or Dathomir Witches or Meatlumps and Swoop Gangs and a thousand minor factions nobody's ever heard of, sure, there was Star Wars. If poison gas spewing medics, long lines for doctors in Starports(!) or magic food that gives you super powers, and battle-axe wielding, chef's hat wearing, Imperial Wookiee Jedi were Star Wars, there was Star Wars.

But to most people Star Wars, the original trilogy SWG was based on, was about heroes fighting against an Evil Empire. It was about lightsabers, starships, gunslingers and taking on a malicious Dark Lord and his innumerable faceless minions (and they were faceless to make a point - one which sailed clear over the Koster Dome and the PvP patrol). Star Wars was about the climactic battle between Good and Evil (tm). It was about action and adventure and beating the odds. Where was any of that really?

It did not exist.

So keeping in the theme of the post the lesson here isn't "screw the roleplayers" it is "don't forget the fun" don't get so wrapped up in the environment (which is important) that you forget to make the game intersting and fun to play. So far I haven't seen evidence of that. I hear about exploration and dynamic environments but I also hear about scripted missions. I'm hopeful that STO can suceed where SWG failed: to create a rich futuristic environment AND a fun and challenging game.

To some extent you and I, and even Hagon, may be talking about the same thing. There was too much fussing in the details and a very poor framing of the main themes or big picture that really define the setting. That would have made it more "fun".

Hagon and I definitely have a difference of opinion over the place of PvP in STO but we both see that the Jedi were essential to the setting in SWG. There's a huge amount more to it than that of course. Just as important as the Jedi (properly realized or managed) would have been so is the Empire. PvP just can't handle these themes at least as it's currently practiced. Anyone playing a Jedi will tend to play them to maximum combat efficiency or chose the class for whatever raw combat advantages it offers. They certainly wouldn't feel constrained to behave like a Jedi because, well, PvPer.

So how do you reconcile Jedi that help build an immersive experience for all players with the needs and wants of those who just wanna wail onna newb?

Same with the factional divide between Imperial and Rebel. In the actual setting the Empire stands for very specific things and none of them are, at least in the Star Wars universe, good (IRL I've seen many conservatives, including a popular columnist, try to argue that the Empire were misunderstood good guys but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish - in Star Wars, they ain't. Period.) How well can players really represent The Empire and act as a stand-in for it to create the right feel for other players? They generally can't and shouldn't be asked to.

LoTRO had the right idea. Let people who want to play orcs do so in a PvP setting but put it somewhere out of sight (or out on the frontier in STO terms) so it doesn't disrupt the experience for everyone else. Let the devs create and control the dark forces of Middle Earth in the PvE design so they fill the narrative role they need to fill.

[Vuk]

Technology will be a big factor . I believe tying this game to console tech maybe a mistake , especially given that X-box will have a new version in a year or two? Flexiblity is a must for the engine as well a stability . These are issues that concern me currently. The other issues are game feel , Star Wars was totally devoid of the Star Wars feel. It may have developed later in the game , but if you 're going to have an MMO that features a War atmosphere to it you'd better deliver. This intermixing and intermingling of factions when you feel like , was crap. If this is going to be a entertaining MMO , you'll need to play to the strenghts of the brand you're using . STO won't be high in PvP , but it needs to be entirely enjoyable and mean something , otherwise you lose the effect and effort players put into it. You'll have all the fillers that all MMO's have , but I'd concentrate more on Dilpo than crafting . In STO diplo should carry more impact . The biggest reason a MMO will succeed or fail , comes down to how you respond to the community and how fast you fix issues . Responding to player petitions , fixing bugs and updating content on a regular basis ( every 4 mo is a good interval) is a formula for success.

[Hagon]

I think you and I have very different ideas of what a Star Wars environment is. If Star Wars are trackless wastes and spookily unpopulated cities (most NPC cities outside of Eisley and Coronet and, later, player cities too) and quests centering around renegade Mandalorians or Dathomir Witches or Meatlumps and Swoop Gangs and a thousand minor factions nobody's ever heard of, sure, there was Star Wars. If poison gas spewing medics, long lines for doctors in Starports(!) or magic food that gives you super powers, and battle-axe wielding, chef's hat wearing, Imperial Wookiee Jedi were Star Wars, there was Star Wars.Well in truth, no one really knew what the entire "Star Wars" environment meant, and SOE simply followed LA's lead in that department. In fact unfortunately they had to. It was the IP's owner that decided what kind of "Star Wars" environment would be depicted in the game. So if LA said it was accurate, it was accurate. Let's also not keep going down the path of revising history. The majority of the community following the game back then fully and enthusiastically supported the emphasis on the mundane (although no one said it that way. That's just my way to describe it).

But to most people Star Wars, the original trilogy SWG was based on, was about heroes fighting against an Evil Empire. It was about lightsabers, starships, gunslingers and taking on a malicious Dark Lord and his innumerable faceless minions (and they were faceless to make a point - one which sailed clear over the Koster Dome and the PvP patrol). Star Wars was about the climactic battle between Good and Evil (tm). It was about action and adventure and beating the odds. Where was any of that really?

It did not exist.Agreed, and credit to you to know enough to mix a bit of truth into the fantasy you've created regarding what happened back then.



To some extent you and I, and even Hagon, may be talking about the same thing. There was too much fussing in the details and a very poor framing of the main themes or big picture that really define the setting. That would have made it more "fun".

Hagon and I definitely have a difference of opinion over the place of PvP in STO but we both see that the Jedi were essential to the setting in SWG. There's a huge amount more to it than that of course. Just as important as the Jedi (properly realized or managed) would have been so is the Empire. PvP just can't handle these themes at least as it's currently practiced. Anyone playing a Jedi will tend to play them to maximum combat efficiency or chose the class for whatever raw combat advantages it offers. They certainly wouldn't feel constrained to behave like a Jedi because, well, PvPer.

So how do you reconcile Jedi that help build an immersive experience for all players with the needs and wants of those who just wanna wail onna newb?That someone would play their Jedi as a PvPer might should have absolutely no bearing on how you would play yours, so I don't see your point. Having people that didn't "play their jedi as" anything other than a toon they're manipulating in the game (which is how the vast majority of people play any of their characters in any game) has no bearing on your playing pretend with one.

LoTRO had the right idea. Let people who want to play orcs do so in a PvP setting but put it somewhere out of sight (or out on the frontier in STO terms) so it doesn't disrupt the experience for everyone else. Let the devs create and control the dark forces of Middle Earth in the PvE design so they fill the narrative role they need to fill.It would seem that the developers of LotRO have fully recognized the folly of not giving PvP it's due in the game, and will be taking steps to rectify that.

Eurogamer: Are you planning to expand PVP as the war expands, across more of the land?

Jeffrey Steefel: I want to be careful not to be too definitive in this answer, but that's definitely, philosophically and from a high-level design perspective, what we talk about all the time lately - which is, you get across the Misty Mountains and that's where you're really getting to the martial part of Middle Earth, from Helm's Deep to Minas Tirith to the Ents marching on Isengard, war is always there. More will crop up once across the Misties.

[Tribbler]

They took a core system and changed it around so much that everything and I mean everything was revamped.

An MMO gamer wants additions to the core, not changes to the core IMHO.

[takiwa]

OK Dang lost the 6 paragraphs of my original post, thanks computer...

SWG failure.
1. Engine was not developed well, fleshed out, or capable enough to do the things that SWG touted on its box. The devs said many times that the backbone of SWG was what made it so hard to work with push content upgrades/updates and the like. What that tells a player like me is, the engine sucked. One of the things that SWG should have had was thousands of planets, after all the content from the books, and movies alone provided many destinations. This was distinctly lacking.

2. Complexity, SWG as an intro to an MMORPG was complex enough to scare new players away. Even with the tutorial which was added in later, it still took a fairly long time to know the games in and out.

3. Game was released before it was ready, and pressure brought to bear from corporate. While I understand that money is fundamental to the game and SWG had both budget overruns and deadline launch failures, the game was not ready and should not have been released. It caused alot of sour opinions to new players when they got into a newly released game and entire professions were gutted, not working, not working correctly, and this was still the case 8 months into the game.

4. Content was never completed to the extent that it should have been because of the other factors listed above. This lead to a real lack of upper level content, and to players getting bored and leaving a broken game. One might consider smuggling a major thing in the SWG universe, both ground and space based, and indeed there was a smuggler profession, unfortunately they didn't smuggle. In fact even the missions added much after the fact 4.5 years after game release, the smuggling stunk, you would carry packages through the middle of nowhere and 3 ubertroops (NPC's) would gank you. Hows that for smuggling fun. Again I chalk this up to a game engine illequiped to deal with such differing concepts.

5. SWG though it had some extremely high system requirements, didn't do enough to stay on the cutting edge of graphics and sound quality. Eve has done (to my knowledge) the best of any game at staying current, from the graphics (client side), server upgrades (she runs 64 bit), audio updates, and content increases. In fact I will say more on this topic, the space community in SWG had been asking for a graphics update for years, and even ssome content upgrades, they got 2 content additions in 4 years, 1 of which was in a pay for expansion. However a member of the modding community completed a complete revamp of the graphics included for the space side portion of the game, using less space and better quality graphics, He working in spare time with a few others got the thing released in less than 6 months testing and all. Now I am forced to ask why didn't SOE/SWG dev team do this on there own, it should have taken much less than 6 monthes and would have been a major improvement for an aspect of the game.

6. Origniality was not only curtailed, it was reversed by subsequent developement teams. The longer I played SWG the more it felt like I was learning to play Everquest II. In the early days of SWG everything was crafter based, and slowly it became loot based. This along with the NGE2 gutting of profession developement, and the graphical redo of the UI (to make it more WOW like). The problem was a new producer thought in dollars and sense and not in terms of the game itself, his thoughts were, WoW has 120 million subscriptions we should be more like them and people will play our game. The problem was that people left in droves when the first complete change happened in SWG since it didn't work, and then after about the third one the lack of player population set the stage for other issues. The bottom line here is, The orignal game has issues, broken professions, lack of content, and the like and that is why people were leaving the game, instead of fixing those issues they... made a tutorial, gutted the choice ability for template creation of your character, created a huge number of colored icons, like 350 or so, that you couldn't tell the use for, and released dungeons, and loot, that was excedingly rare, and screwed up the economy, while allowing macros to be used to level, and play combat aspects of the game, and failing to address lack of content and abilities of the engine itself.

7. When I began playing SWG it was really neat, a new feature was being released every month, and content was arriving in droves, this lead to the profession tweeks or vamps or revamps, and an ever growing circle of fix on and then fix the next to make it competitive.

8. Jedi and the way that they were implemented killed SWG. Everytime I say this there is an instant outcry. Now lets examine some things.

a. SWG was supposed to give you your own experience inside the Star wars Galaxy, some people took this to mean that you would get Jedi.

b. The game originally had no ability (mechanic) for Jedi to be attained, instead there were certain tell tales, and the Developers could look at people who had flagged these tell tales. Once done, it was supposed to be a training system very much from the book series or to a lesser extent the movies, how Luke is trained is glossed over between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

c. The reality was people complaining about the box saying Jedi would be attainable how come I can't choose to be one blah blah blah. The pproblem here is folks you're in a MMO, a super player character can not exist, MMO's are all about roles being fulfilled, not the omnifunctional character. Soloing in an MMO is discouraged, and so creating a character class that by all rights should be able to do just about anything... didn't make sense, it made even less sense when you saw how powerful those original Jedi were, though the mechanic had a way of dealing with those characters, Perma-Death. Well as everyone is so fond of pointing out...
thats my elecctons there
how dare you kill them
I worked x # of hours to get here how can you kill my Jedi
I was griefed/ganked with my uber Jedi blah blah blah
The bottom line was in a box down to players the perma death portion of Jedi was removed, afterwards, Jedi was the most powerful character in the game, with very little reason not to use them. Then SOE swung the NERF bat again and NGE3 came to level all playing ffields forever, and make the game as WoW like as possible, They lost even more players, did a terrible job at switching over, nerfed a powerful character(some might consider the jedi to be the ultimate in Leet gear) and killed off half of the previously available professions while at the same time condensing the crafting professions down to 3 total professions, do more with less people, that was the motto, but the economy had been dead for almost a year before this change happened on some servers because the populations were too low to self sustain, and players had long ago learned to start more acccounts and do everything themselves. Again not what's supposed to be going on in an MMO, the first M is Massive the second is Multiplayer.

In short if you want to look at why SWG failed, look at Sony Corporate first, SWG management second, the players influence third, and The developement team fourth.

So far from what I am seeing STO is already much better equiped to deal with these issues, though there will need to be some focus.
A great many people want to play as independants, I think that should be allowed within constraints, like I could be a hauler or miner and be considered a Federation auxilliary force. Romulans are another that people really want opened up to them, though I am nut sure what the draw of the romulans is, many people here want that added in. My impression is that STO devs don't want the complexity at this point of three two fron wars, federation against klingons and romulans, Klingons against romulans and federation etc. It is hard enough to get people really involved with a war or sides of a conflict as it is without further muddying the waters and adding more bad guys on diffferent side to the conflict. How STO deals with these issues is what will make or break STO. Cryptic is saying a great many things about that can be added later in the game, people are watching these comments and right or wrong treating them like gospel, this might have an effect on perception later on in game.
Takiwa

[Hagon]

They took a core system and changed it around so much that everything and I mean everything was revamped.

An MMO gamer wants additions to the core, not changes to the core IMHO.Again, the game that was changed was the failed version. It didn't fail after the changes. It just failed a little more.

[Federationrulz]

Space, and starships, strode in proudly with Jump to Lightspeed. I have to admit I was blown away. SWG could have done much worse than following a space sim model. Multiplayer ships in particular had folks cheering. It was really a dream come true. Sadly, one does tend to wake up. There was no real content in space after grinding through the initial set of missions. PvP-RPers and space simmers on Starsider, using typical roleplayer ingenuity, designed and ran PvP scenarios which were popular and the idea migrated to other servers as well. But PvE was lacking. Multiplayer ships were pointless. They were a weak link in PvP as well. Worse, there was no cargo, no passngers, no trade lanes and certainly no contraband or Imperial blockades to run. In space, nobody can hear you yawn.


Read more here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/OddjobXL/032009/3463_Strange-New-World-A-SWG-Vet-Contemplates-STO

I have to say, the space was the best part for me. You could hide in Nebulas, go through asteroid fields, and go into hyperspace! A few other noobs and I would become PvP available and wait for tier 5 imperial ships to cross near the asteroid field. We would fly out, fight, and get owned by the higher level enemy. Very fun. I only had two issues: Asteroid fields are supposed to be dangerous. They just stayed in place until a ship knocked into them, causing no damage. Landing on the space stations would have been nice, even if they were just more boring versions of Tansarri Point Station. Oh well.

[Awarkle]

the issue i had with the pvp combat in space was this

the ETA starfighter, once you got one you didnt need ANY other ship , also once you worked out that you could have all the different control commands from the three different tiers it meant you could over charge your weapons then dump it to your shields, and if you had a fast enough capacitor and decent weapons you didnt even have to consider shield recharge.

The other issue was the hit box for these ships was stupid it was impossible half the time to hit them. also if you knew what you were doing you could get some pretty kick as weapons from reverse engineering (i was starship engineer) and it made a massive difference.

in the end once you worked out where to grind up the different factions you could do the entire tier 1 to 4 sections of pilot in about 2 days if you took your time. and it basically involved finding someone with a pob and parking it right next to a certain spawn in point and just lining up your guns and sticking the fire button down then going afk for 3 hours :P

i enjoyed jump to lightspeed and i enjoyed some of the missions although i will say the corvette mission was pretty hard unless you knew how to do it or had friends after that it was pretty easy.

and mining in the mining ship was just retarded it was easier to mine in an xwing.

[Silverspar]

and mining in the mining ship was just retarded it was easier to mine in an xwingAh, sounds like EvE then. Easier to mine in a cruiser than a mining ship :rolleyes: Why, cause I can stick more mining lasers on, and you outfit and skill right, your cruiser can have almsot as much cargo space as a miner, with a higher top speed than the miner.

[DanSeale]

Takiwa:

This is a sort of "Readers Digest version" of the story:

1. The game failed to deliver what it promised.
2. Once it did deliver there were issues.
3. To further compound the problem there were bugs that were release at the outset that took entirely too long to solve.
4. In the quest to "reset" the Jedi issues there were other important items that were swept aside or totally nerfed causing further up roar with those who happened to be affected the most. IMHO the Jedi issue was a really big one .. and how the Jedi fits in still seems a bit awkward (but that's just me). PvP teams must be balanced as well as PvE .. Swinging the pendilum from one extreme to the other can be trouble if it is not handled properly.

(BTW... WoW has had its share of issues on this subject as well. Contrary to popular opinion)

The game still exists. There are some aspects that are good .. some not so good.

All in all a GOOD leson to learn regarding marketing and releasing a quality product with as few bugs as possible.

You can always add more contient and people will continue to play as long as the pitfalls of SWG are avoided.

[Vuk]

Takiwa:

This is a sort of "Readers Digest version" of the story:

1. The game failed to deliver what it promised.
2. Once it did deliver there were issues.
3. To further compound the problem there were bugs that were release at the outset that took entirely too long to solve.
4. In the quest to "reset" the Jedi issues there were other important items that were swept aside or totally nerfed causing further up roar with those who happened to be affected the most. IMHO the Jedi issue was a really big one .. and how the Jedi fits in still seems a bit awkward (but that's just me). PvP teams must be balanced as well as PvE .. Swinging the pendilum from one extreme to the other can be trouble if it is not handled properly.

(BTW... WoW has had its share of issues on this subject as well. Contrary to popular opinion)

The game still exists. There are some aspects that are good .. some not so good.

All in all a GOOD leson to learn regarding marketing and releasing a quality product with as few bugs as possible.

You can always add more contient and people will continue to play as long as the pitfalls of SWG are avoided.

People have to remember that the fanbase asked ( more like demanded Jedi's in game ) for Jedi's . They never planned for , nor wanted them in game . They did it to molify the masses , once they did, it opened a whole pandoras box they couldn't close or recover from . Moral of the story is you have to to stick to your original plan , if you say you're not going to do something stick with that instinct . The player base isn't always right and just because they ask for it doesn't mean they should get it . Especially if it'll compromise game play and all the other outstanding issues had not been resolved.

[babanathie]

Takiwa:

This is a sort of "Readers Digest version" of the story:

1. The game failed to deliver what it promised.
2. Once it did deliver there were issues.
3. To further compound the problem there were bugs that were release at the outset that took entirely too long to solve.
4. In the quest to "reset" the Jedi issues there were other important items that were swept aside or totally nerfed causing further up roar with those who happened to be affected the most. IMHO the Jedi issue was a really big one .. and how the Jedi fits in still seems a bit awkward (but that's just me). PvP teams must be balanced as well as PvE .. Swinging the pendilum from one extreme to the other can be trouble if it is not handled properly.

(BTW... WoW has had its share of issues on this subject as well. Contrary to popular opinion)

The game still exists. There are some aspects that are good .. some not so good.

All in all a GOOD leson to learn regarding marketing and releasing a quality product with as few bugs as possible.

You can always add more contient and people will continue to play as long as the pitfalls of SWG are avoided.

Another point that people miss alot; is to handle yourself (as a company) in an ethical manner (at least in how your customers preceive you). There was a huge backlash that hit alot harder because the customer precieved unethical behavior on the company's part.

[thefreshjedi]

exactly. it also didn't help that for the 2 or 3 years i spent in the game the same bugs were in existence from day 1 to my last log-out...
...

QFT, not to mention that the NGE released a whole new set of bugs which compromized the rest of the experience.

It's a shame really. SWG could have been the next big thing. A perfect example to other MMO's out there of what NOT TO DO.


-avery

[Mike_Hawk]

From some of the almost novel like responses, people obviously have a lot of issues with SWG. My opinion, if you didnt play the game when you couldn't roll a jedi out of the gate. You never really played that game. I unlocked 2 jedi on 1 server & had a 3rd account for crafting. Not that I feel like I am a different player, just that given jedi & earning jedi are 2 different things. Before they made Tera Kasi the uber profession it turned out to be. I was Rifleman/TK for years. Creature Handler/Commando/Pistoleer, all uber professions that got nerfed. JTLS made the game a tad more immersive with the ability to come & go as you please. Who can forget the TEN(10) minute waiting perioids for shutles off world? Oi Vei comes to mind.
I never unlocked a jedi thru their little village. Thought it was a waste of time & gated you from going to far, too fast. The people that finally did I'm sure were ****ed when they let you roll a jedi. LOL now they know how we felt when you just had to become force sensitive to goto the village. How retarded.
I'm not sure what pitfalls will be coming from STO, I'm hoping very few. Beta or not I will be playing this game barring any unforseen problems or whatever.

I'm curious to know if any of you ever played City of Heroes/City of Villians? It is a cryptic game & was nerfed & re-nerfed many times. I'm curious if any of those DEVs have made it over to this game. Since alot of the original DEVs of CoH/CoV left for other projects that are now gone *cough*Tabula Rasa*cough* or should I say .... failed?

[OddjobXL]

Here's a more recent interview with more details, Hagon:

Eurogamer: Is Monster Play the limit of what you're going to do with PVP, and playing the dark side?

Jeffrey Steefel: What you see in Monster Play is the tip of the iceberg. Now that we're moving across the Misty Mountains into the place where war is really happening in Middle-Earth, it opens up a lot of possibilities. One can imagine that by the time you get to Minas Tirith, you want battles to be happening there, and you don't want it to be an army of NPCs against a bunch of players, you want players to be able to battle against each other.

But, it's really important that players know that at the end of the day we believe that this is a world game, a PVE game, the best of its kind. We're not going to do anything to destroy that in any way. The story is always going to be predominant. But I think there's a way to weave the two together when we get to the more martial parts of middle earth. Also, the launch in Asia exposes us to a lot of players who really, really, really love Monster Play and want more of it.

I think it's pretty clear they're going to do something to expand into a new market but they also know, full well, which side their bread is buttered on.

[wootage]

They ham-fisted fantasy role-playing classes into a freewheeling, swashbuckling, massive battle-between-good-and-evil sci-fi universe, and tried to sell it to people who wanted to role-play and run n'gun with blasters and fighters and fleets of ships and Jedi zooming around. Etc.

It took me 1 hour (after I finished messing with the pretty good character creator) to figure out that SOE had executed the game in the most moronic, anti-Star Wars way possible.

You want to see an MMO that will be Star Wars? Bioware's upcoming Star Wars The Old Republic. Even though they don't have run'n gun fights (which is how it SHOULD be dangit), they're still making it to FEEL like you're in Star Wars.

[DanSeale]

People have to remember that the fanbase asked ( more like demanded Jedi's in game ) for Jedi's . They never planned for , nor wanted them in game . They did it to molify the masses , once they did, it opened a whole pandoras box they couldn't close or recover from . Moral of the story is you have to to stick to your original plan , if you say you're not going to do something stick with that instinct . The player base isn't always right and just because they ask for it doesn't mean they should get it . Especially if it'll compromise game play and all the other outstanding issues had not been resolved.

I agree ... by opening this box .. it also presented other "balance issues" (just my opinion).

A better course of action might have been to add Jedi at a later time AFTER other issues had resolved first. The introduction might have also been handled differently as well. (again ... just my opinion).

[DocSavag]

They ham-fisted fantasy role-playing classes into a freewheeling, swashbuckling, massive battle-between-good-and-evil sci-fi universe, and tried to sell it to people who wanted to role-play and run n'gun with blasters and fighters and fleets of ships and Jedi zooming around. Etc.

It took me 1 hour (after I finished messing with the pretty good character creator) to figure out that SOE had executed the game in the most moronic, anti-Star Wars way possible.

You want to see an MMO that will be Star Wars? Bioware's upcoming Star Wars The Old Republic. Even though they don't have run'n gun fights (which is how it SHOULD be dangit), they're still making it to FEEL like you're in Star Wars.

I really don't know how its "Star Wars" nothing about that game will have anything to do with the Star Wars Universe that most fans know anything about. The only thing it really has is lots of Jedi and Sith runnng around. All of the familiar storylines are missing. I am not saying it won't be successful but it won't be the ultimate Star Wars game set so far before any of the films.

Don't get me wrong..I actually like the KOTOR games and I'm looking forward to the MMO but I'm not sure its any more Star Warsy than SOE's product.

[Hagon]

Here's a more recent interview with more details, Hagon:



I think it's pretty clear they're going to do something to expand into a new market but they also know, full well, which side their bread is buttered on.If by which side their bread is buttered means that they want to continue to be an also ran in the market after showing such great promise, then I'm sure they'll have no problem maintaining their standing. I also wouldn't buy into them paying some of their existing player base some lip service too much. I think the writing is on the wall that in the future most of their work is going to be put into developing the PvP side of things. At least for quite awhile anyway. They know the mistake they made initially.

[mook42]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?


they are useing a new game engine.and it will be nouthing like SWG:)

[OddjobXL]

If by which side their bread is buttered means that they want to continue to be an also ran in the market after showing such great promise, then I'm sure they'll have no problem maintaining their standing. I also wouldn't buy into them paying some of their existing player base some lip service too much. I think the writing is on the wall that in the future most of their work is going to be put into developing the PvP side of things. At least for quite awhile anyway. They know the mistake they made initially.

And you think I live in a fantasy world.

[Loekii]

I agree ... by opening this box .. it also presented other "balance issues" (just my opinion).

A better course of action might have been to add Jedi at a later time AFTER other issues had resolved first. The introduction might have also been handled differently as well. (again ... just my opinion).

I hated that they made player Jedi. It really made a mess of things.

Had they simply stuck with the Canon, and made a Star Wars game of Rebels battling the Empire, bounty hunters and smugglers (aka TESB and ROTJ), it would have been a much better game.

The main reason I hated the game after beta testing from Shuttle number 1, was the lack of Starwarsiness. It didn't feel like Star Wars. Heck KotoR felt more like Star Wars, and it was an entirely different point in time and did not have the films backing it.

They tried to do far too much. Make a melee class, by nerfing ranged, make dancers and entertainers, make giant empty worlds and make fake buildings you could not enter.

Hopefully, STO will stick with their idea of Episodes, and focus on Star Trek quality.

[Saladin_Class]

Thats OK, the EMU folks are making it the way it should have been made.

[CalonLan]

LoTRO had the right idea. Let people who want to play orcs do so in a PvP setting but put it somewhere out of sight (or out on the frontier in STO terms) so it doesn't disrupt the experience for everyone else. Let the devs create and control the dark forces of Middle Earth in the PvE design so they fill the narrative role they need to fill.

Yeah this is what I like about LotRO, I'm an occasional PvPer and this suits me.

Unfortunately the downfall of SWG has much to do with players, its unfair to blame the dev team entirely. The game became what it is because of player whinges and gripes and the "I want, I want." for very little effort brigade. The vocal minority often got their way, leading to FotM professions and who stacks the most buffs wins.

A lot of hardcore PvPers would see enforced PvP in SWG but could never answer the question "Why should I give up my game play to provide you with content?"

I'm not bitter about the way SWG turned out, just disappointed at what could have been a really decent MMO never reached its potential and IMO never will.

[Tribbler]

Again, the game that was changed was the failed version. It didn't fail after the changes. It just failed a little more.

Having actually played after the "Big Nerf" for almost 3 years, the biggest gripe was the severity of the change.

They took a long grindfest to reach Jedi Class that several thousand were involved in and erased it completely when they added Jedi to the Starter Class.

Agreed that they changed the failed version-but they should have completely started a new MMO instead of making a jigsaw puzzle out of the first Star Wars Galaxies. Too many of the disgruntled ("pre-nge" as it was called) remained to complain and make the game experience for the new players terrible.

These people that grinded to Jedi were the elite of the pre-nge. They were revered and honored because of the complexity and hardship they had to endure to reach Jedi. They worked extremely hard, above everyone else and went through alot for months and some a full year to reach this status, and then ZAP---all gone.

So they remained to curse to me when I arrived at Tattoine as a Jedi and within a few months=equal what took them a year to accomplish.

Oh yes, I can see why there was so much hatred to SWG.

They did it with forced PVP in Restuss and so much focus on PVP play that Guilds that were once united (both Rebel and Imperial) and helpful to others, became divided. The elite weapons and armor had to be acheived by playing PVP

Then, they did it again with Chapter 8. They made a game where everyone was understanding the game and was in my opinion, the majority were really comfortable and happy, and forced everyone to solo grind for the elite weapons and armor.

They were always flip-flopping the main focus of everyone instead of gently increasing values.

The majority of the players were lvl 90's and had most of the best gear already, so if something new came out, there were a thousand players waiting to get in the instance and lagging was horrendous.

Many problems with SOE's thought processes.

[metl]

And yet even with SWG's flaws, it keeps luring me back. I've played off and on since the launch and it is still my favorite mmo. It's at a state now where it has became my default. As far as gameplay, it's similiar to WoW now, which makes it similar to almost every other mmo, so if I want to play that type, I log in to SWG. I would rather play WoW-SWG than WoW.

[DocSavag]

And yet even with SWG's flaws, it keeps luring me back. I've played off and on since the launch and it is still my favorite mmo. It's at a state now where it has became my default. As far as gameplay, it's similiar to WoW now, which makes it similar to almost every other mmo, so if I want to play that type, I log in to SWG. I would rather play WoW-SWG than WoW.

I agree. I end up going back and playing for a few days every time there is a new publish. I would play more if more of my friends played the game still. I still enjoy the game with all its flaws.

[Tribbler]

I agree. I end up going back and playing for a few days every time there is a new publish. I would play more if more of my friends played the game still. I still enjoy the game with all its flaws.

Don't get me wrong, SWG is a good game for an MMO and very complex. But no continuity, and geared to spastic, wall bumping type of people who enjoy bruises.

Not for me any longer, I work in that environment and I do not wish to play in that environment.

I like relaxed "I know what I need to do" type of games and not "guess I have to start from scratch.... AGAIN!!!" type of games.

[DanSeale]

I hated that they made player Jedi. It really made a mess of things.

Had they simply stuck with the Canon, and made a Star Wars game of Rebels battling the Empire, bounty hunters and smugglers (aka TESB and ROTJ), it would have been a much better game.

The main reason I hated the game after beta testing from Shuttle number 1, was the lack of Starwarsiness. It didn't feel like Star Wars. Heck KotoR felt more like Star Wars, and it was an entirely different point in time and did not have the films backing it.

They tried to do far too much. Make a melee class, by nerfing ranged, make dancers and entertainers, make giant empty worlds and make fake buildings you could not enter.

Hopefully, STO will stick with their idea of Episodes, and focus on Star Trek quality.

IMHO it was not so much they "missed canon" as the lack of addressing issues that were "glaring" .. before taking the next steps.

Then the huge nerf swings .. almost like one exteme to the other.

A lot of folks see this differnetly .. just the same. Those folks who are developers have no doubt been able to digest all of this and make better sense of it that the public at large.

Why?

They ARE developers .. they tend to see things differently than we do. They see the same issues ... but digest the information and draw their own conclusions.

I do believe that as long as we are lookiing at issues (not just rants ) .. then some good information can be pulled out of this.

(Just my own thoughts ... )

[Captain.Hunter]

To me the biggest reason it failed is, despite all the packaging and marketing, it really wasn't Star Wars.

Right from the git go, it felt like a generic MMO with some Stormtroopers tossed in here and there. It never felt like the setting I had seen in the movies where an insignificant band of rebels was fighting it out with an evil omnipresent Empire.

As someone had said earlier, how do you go from a rich narrative as shown in the movies and Expanded Universe material, to having a character standing outside a nearly empty city for hours trying to kill butterflys with a gun that is less effective than a punch? How in any way is that Star Wars?

In addition, it seemed like the dev team went out of their way to actually exclude Star Wars content. The players kept asking for Star Wars items to get included in the game and yet got things like composite armor which made everyone look like Robocop. Do you know that, to this day, over 5 years after release, they STILL haven't included a proper Rebel flight helmet in the game - you know like the one Luke Skywalker (and other Rebel pilots) wore through 3 movies? It is the absolute poster child for what was wrong with this game.

I sure hope the folks at Cryptic don't make the same mistakes of complacency and egoism. From what I've seen so far, its looking very good, but then again so did SWG (amazing how all screenshots for SWG included iconic content, yet in-game there was very little). So please Cryptic, learn from the hard earned lessons of SWG - give us the game we want: a fun, engaging environment which actually feels like part of the Star Trek multiverse. Do that and you will have a wildly succesful game on your hands!

[Vuk]

Don't get me wrong, SWG is a good game for an MMO and very complex. But no continuity, and geared to spastic, wall bumping type of people who enjoy bruises..


Blue helmets and bumpers usually work best for those as well as special transportation. :D

[Tribbler]

Blue helmets and bumpers usually work best for those as well as special transportation. :D

Yes, and they are not handed out when you sign on.

[Krakkken]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

As a former 5 year plus player of swg I can say that that game wasnt complicated. It was complex and a steeper learning curve than most games but complicated only came out of the mouths of people who only played it for a month. As in all games the numbers start good and then leak players over time. What made the final death blow was Julio Torres, Nancy McCyntire, and Lucas arts getting greedy and wanting to make a wow copy against all the players wishes. Dont blame the game pre cu and nge because the game wouldnt have been strong numbers overall but would be in the better shape than the 15k out of 300k player base thats left. Bioware is in for a very rude shock when they release their kotor mmo version of the game. They are arrogantly saying that it is the next wow killer. The same statments that warhammer and aoc had made previous to theire restructuring and sorting key personel. They have yet to recover from that. All games plane out and then gain and loose by updates. SWG original design was meant for niche players from the start. No levels, robust skill trees, and the ability to mimic yourself from real life in the game was the real draw. When they NGE'd the game into a very weak wow copy is when they lost the "complex" players by the thousands literaly overnight. Pig headed devs at soe and lucas arts refused to listen to an ever growing unhappy player base and the rest is mmo history. If SWG lasts to the end of this year it will be an outright miricle. The original game was an outright masterpeice, the failure of that game was the people who ran the game, not the players who voted with their wallets.

[babanathie]

As a former 5 year plus player of swg I can say that that game wasnt complicated. It was complex and a steeper learning curve than most games but complicated only came out of the mouths of people who only played it for a month. As in all games the numbers start good and then leak players over time. What made the final death blow was Julio Torres, Nancy McCyntire, and Lucas arts getting greedy and wanting to make a wow copy against all the players wishes. Dont blame the game pre cu and nge because the game wouldnt have been strong numbers overall but would be in the better shape than the 15k out of 300k player base thats left. Bioware is in for a very rude shock when they release their kotor mmo version of the game. They are arrogantly saying that it is the next wow killer. The same statments that warhammer and aoc had made previous to theire restructuring and sorting key personel. They have yet to recover from that. All games plane out and then gain and loose by updates. SWG original design was meant for niche players from the start. No levels, robust skill trees, and the ability to mimic yourself from real life in the game was the real draw. When they NGE'd the game into a very weak wow copy is when they lost the "complex" players by the thousands literaly overnight. Pig headed devs at soe and lucas arts refused to listen to an ever growing unhappy player base and the rest is mmo history. If SWG lasts to the end of this year it will be an outright miricle. The original game was an outright masterpeice, the failure of that game was the people who ran the game, not the players who voted with their wallets.

It was a success by industry standards, but honestly, a Star Wars MMO should have been the first WoW before there was WoW. I'm not talking gameplay, but it's such a recognizable IP that it should have taken the MMO market like WoW did when it was release. That says alot for the IP.

As for Bioware being in for a rude wake up, I don't think that is necessarily true. AoC sold a million copies. While it only held onto a fraction of those sales as a subscriptions, the fact that they sold a million copies indicates that the industry is ready for another WoW phenomenon. So, if Bioware can market themselves for a million sales which has recently occurred in the MMO industry, they could potentially rival WoW overnight. The key is to not only make the sales but keep them. That means a polished product that does not alienate its player base. Bioware has a good reputation in the gaming industry, and its possible that they could create something special.

The same thing goes for Cryptic too. They could potentially market a million sales for Star Trek. It's possible; Star Trek after all is a very recognizable IP that has spawned six series and eleven movies. The key right now for any chance of repeating Blizzard's success is to put together a complete game without any glaring issues.

[Hagon]

As a former 5 year plus player of swg I can say that that game wasnt complicated. It was complex and a steeper learning curve than most games but complicated only came out of the mouths of people who only played it for a month. As in all games the numbers start good and then leak players over time. What made the final death blow was Julio Torres, Nancy McCyntire, and Lucas arts getting greedy and wanting to make a wow copy against all the players wishes. Dont blame the game pre cu and nge because the game wouldnt have been strong numbers overall but would be in the better shape than the 15k out of 300k player base thats left. The game lost between 600 to 800K players in the first month. That's people that bought the game but didn't like it enough to subscribe. It was then losing @10K players a month after that.

That wasn't a leak. That was a flood and nothing stopping the flow.

The game was a failure in the state it was released, and the changes that were made had nothing to do with WoW. The plans for the changes were in the works before WoW ever came out.

The only effect WoW had on things was that those people that they thought they would attract back happened to be playing WoW. Which most people were back then, and they simply weren't about to leave it.

They knew they were going to lose the raging nerds, but they'd banked on them being a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers they'd get back and the people that word of mouth about the changes would attract. They took a gamble and it didn't pay off. It wasn't a totally wild gamble either. People forget that back then no one really knew that WoW would be as dominant a game for as long as it has been. In fact most prognosticators were sounding WoW's death knell not long after it was released. Saying the numbers would soon drop off dramatically. You know those people. Those same ones that keep telling us that what most mmo players REALLY want is just "sandboxes" created with ample RP tools so that people can make up their own stories. Ya....... those guys...... :rolleyes:

[Vuk]

The game lost between 600 to 800K players in the first month. That's people that bought the game but didn't like it enough to subscribe. It was then losing @10K players a month after that.

That wasn't a leak. That was a flood and nothing stopping the flow.

The game was a failure in the state it was released, and the changes that were made had nothing to do with WoW. The plans for the changes were in the works before WoW ever came out.

The only effect WoW had on things was that those people that they thought they would attract back happened to be playing WoW. Which most people were back then, and they simply weren't about to leave it.

They knew they were going to lose the raging nerds, but they'd banked on them being a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers they'd get back and the people that word of mouth about the changes would attract. They took a gamble and it didn't pay off. It wasn't a totally wild gamble either. People forget that back then no one really knew that WoW would be as dominant a game for as long as it has been. In fact most prognosticators were sounding WoW's death knell not long after it was released. Saying the numbers would soon drop off dramatically. You know those people. Those same ones that keep telling us that what most mmo players REALLY want is just environments created with ample RP tools so that people can make up their own stories. Ya....... those guys...... :rolleyes:

To be fair , I played a year and a half after release . God only knows why in retrospect . The really issues they lost people was the incredible lag that took months to resolve and the continueous issue crossing server borders . Once they ironed that out , it was playable . Unforunately WoW was released a couple of months laters and was easily playable , hence the population shifted from unplayable to playable. People were not willing to wait for them to fix that aspect . I think it took almost 6 mo before they fixed to a level that was actually playable. The frustration level was huge. Customer service Initially sucked really hard. I actually vowed never to play another SOE game after that , and didn't until Vanguard . They've greatly improved customer service , the bright spot in that experience.

[Tegerian]

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

Overcomplicated mechanics, monotonous gameplay, released before it was ready and SOE's refusal to listen to the testers during beta or the players following release. I think because they believed the Star Wars fans would play no matter what they adopted a "it's our way or the highway" mentality and a great many folks chose the highway, much to SOE's and Lucas's chagrin.

I am just speaking of my personal experiences as a Beta tester and later as a player before I finally gave up, I'm sure others will have other ideas.

[Tribbler]

Overcomplicated mechanics, monotonous gameplay, released before it was ready and SOE's refusal to listen to the testers during beta or the players following release. I think because they believed the Star Wars fans would play no matter what they adopted a "it's our way or the highway" mentality and a great many folks chose the highway, much to SOE's and Lucas's chagrin.

I am just speaking of my personal experiences as a Beta tester and later as a player before I finally gave up, I'm sure others will have other ideas.

I agree, this is a classic example of "too much dollars and too few sense":D

That was a tribble quote btw, anyone saying it after this point will pay me one bar of latinum.

[-Rufus-]

Bioware is in for a very rude shock when they release their kotor mmo version of the game. They are arrogantly saying that it is the next wow killer. The same statments that warhammer and aoc had made previous to theire restructuring and sorting key personel.

The only people labelling an MMO as the next WoW killer are overeager fans of that new MMO and mostly players who are frustrated with WoW. I have yet to see a company state they wanna beat WoW, let alone BioWare. Why anybody would be that foolish is another matter ... Right now I doubt anybody but Blizzard themselves can recreate the success WoW is experiencing.

It was a success by industry standards, but honestly, a Star Wars MMO should have been the first WoW before there was WoW. I'm not talking gameplay, but it's such a recognizable IP that it should have taken the MMO market like WoW did when it was release. That says alot for the IP.

Well, I am a Star Wars fan also and when I heard that a SW MMO would be coming out I was excited. But when they launched in the summer of 2003, all you heard was how much of a bug fest it was and the lag was intolerable ... so I didn't play it, never have actually (outside of one 14 day trial couple of years ago). Its not the IP that drove me off or failed to suck me in, it was the game itself. WoW on the other hand ran pretty smoothly compared to other games, and it was and still is one heck of a simple game.

[KL0k]

Overcomplicated mechanics, monotonous gameplay, released before it was ready and SOE's refusal to listen to the testers during beta or the players following release. I think because they believed the Star Wars fans would play no matter what they adopted a "it's our way or the highway" mentality and a great many folks chose the highway, much to SOE's and Lucas's chagrin.

I am just speaking of my personal experiences as a Beta tester and later as a player before I finally gave up, I'm sure others will have other ideas.

change the SWG to MxO and you have the same result.
SOE is a misleading, incompetent bunch of [insert the flame of your choice]
and i will never ever buy a game of them again.

[babanathie]

The only people labelling an MMO as the next WoW killer are overeager fans of that new MMO and mostly players who are frustrated with WoW. I have yet to see a company state they wanna beat WoW, let alone BioWare. Why anybody would be that foolish is another matter ... Right now I doubt anybody but Blizzard themselves can recreate the success WoW is experiencing.



Well, I am a Star Wars fan also and when I heard that a SW MMO would be coming out I was excited. But when they launched in the summer of 2003, all you heard was how much of a bug fest it was and the lag was intolerable ... so I didn't play it, never have actually (outside of one 14 day trial couple of years ago). Its not the IP that drove me off or failed to suck me in, it was the game itself. WoW on the other hand ran pretty smoothly compared to other games, and it was and still is one heck of a simple game.

I guess I should simplify my point. The MMO community is ready for a WoW killer. It's up to a company to develop a game that has a recognizable IP, has good gameplay and is relatively free of bugs (or major turn offs). When a piece of crap can sell one million copies in the first few months of release like AoC did, it serves as an indicator that another company can walk in and create an amazing success.

SWG should have been the WoW of the industry. Obviously, it failed to capture the market due to bad gameplay mechanics (unbalanced professions among a ton of other issues) and outright bugs. Although it held its own for awhile, it should have done better. Obviously, its solution after making its initial mistakes were far worse (from a business and to some an ethical standpoint) was far, far worse.

[metl]

SWG WAS the WoW of the industry at the time. I think some of you forget which one came out first. What was SWG's competition at the time? Ultima Online and Everquest. Compared to either, I preferred SWG even with it's bugs, and still do. I was on Dial-up and only lagged occasionally in the starport and cantina. Ultima and Everquest were horrendous with lag.
SWG was met with criticism, but overall even after bleeding off many of it's initial subscribers, was a big contender. I remember when the servers swelled with new life after JTL and then again after the CU. Had they left it at the CU, I think it would have gave WoW a good run. Instead, they scrambled to make a WoW clone in hopes of turning subscribers, but what they failed to consider was if everybody wanted a WoW type game, they would play WoW.

[Kinjiru]

Had they left it at the CU, I think it would have gave WoW a good run.

I couldn't disagree more. The game (pre CU, CU or NGE) just didn't meet anyone's expectations or hopes. It was losing subs from the first month when it went gold, and it never stopped. Hagon is absolutely correct in his above statement. SOE was losing subscriptions in a flood.

The main issue, beyond every technical problem, story issue, quest bug, snadbox vs. directed gameplay... was nothing more than the developers simply didn't "get" Star Wars as an MMO game.

They tried to complete a very ambitious project and failed, miserably. I know, I was there in Closed Beta. It was in a word: boring as hell. (okay, that was three words.) I stuck with it far longer than a lot of people... but I'm an optimist.

JTL added a new dimension, one that I enjoyed for a while, but again, they really didn't "get" it. I feel qualified to say this because I aced nine squadrons by the time I canceled for the last time.

Now, from what I've read from the various posts from Cryptic, seen in the assorted video interviews; I *think* that Cryptic does "get" it, with regard to Star Trek. I certainly hope so. But if I'm wrong, time will tell, won't it? :)

[Flatfingers]

I couldn't disagree more. The game (pre CU, CU or NGE) just didn't meet anyone's expectations or hopes. It was losing subs from the first month when it went gold, and it never stopped.

A fair assessment, I think, would have to include two additional observations:

1. No big game ever meets anyone's expectations or hopes.

2. All big games tend to shed subscribers after the first month when the shine has worn off.

If those are the standards of "failure," then virtually every MMORPG ever published has been a failure.

Maybe a different standard would be more helpful in deciding what allows a game to reasonably be considered a success on either a commercial or an artistic front.

Even SWG, which apparently lost between 600 to 800 billion subscribers in the first month (if its loudest detractors are to be believed), could be considered successful in several areas:

1. It retained hundreds of thousands of subscribers for many months. These numbers would not only have paid back SWG's development costs, they would later have provided SOE with a reasonable profit.

How is making good money a "failure?" If some game not making as much money as a few determined critics insist it should have constitutes failure, then what online game (other than WoW) isn't also a failure?

2. Many of SWG's players acknowledged that it didn't feel enough like Star Wars. (I was one of them.) But despite being seriously flawed, the game did have some features that many people who actually played the game in its early days still speak glowingly of to this day:

crafting (particularly the resource mining and usage element)
playstyle balance (at launch, anyway)
playstyle interdependence
very large world spaces to exploreThose things may or may not have contributed to what success SWG had, or to its eventual failure. Reasonable people can disagree on that.

But there is plenty of evidence that a truly reasonable person can easily find that shows that, far from being a complete disaster, SWG had some unique elements that some players really enjoyed. If people found those things to be enjoyable, and they'd seem to be a good fit for a MMORPG in development, wouldn't it be foolish to say something like, "No, that was in SWG, we can't reuse that feature"?

...

Apollo 13 was called a "successful failure." It didn't accomplish its intended mission, but it did achieve some things of real value.

I think that also describes SWG pretty well.

It certainly wasn't perfect. And it didn't achieve what a big-budget MMORPG given the Star Wars license could reasonably have been expected to achieve, either artistically or commercially.

But it is false to claim that it was an unmitigated disaster. There were a few mitigations. :) And it did make money, even if not as much as it could have.

So: "flawed?" Sure. "Broken at launch?" Debatable, but perhaps.

But a complete failure? No.

Assessing it objectively in company with other MMORPGs, Star Wars Galaxies does not deserve the special abuse with which some, for reasons on which I won't speculate, have tried to tar it.

--Flatfingers

[babanathie]

A fair assessment, I think, would have to include two additional observations:

1. No big game ever meets anyone's expectations or hopes.

2. All big games tend to shed subscribers after the first month when the shine has worn off.

If those are the standards of "failure," then virtually every MMORPG ever published has been a failure.

Maybe a different standard would be more helpful in deciding what allows a game to reasonably be considered a success on either a commercial or an artistic front.

Even SWG, which apparently lost between 600 to 800 billion subscribers in the first month (if its loudest detractors are to be believed), could be considered successful in several areas:

1. It retained hundreds of thousands of subscribers for many months. These numbers would not only have paid back SWG's development costs, they would later have provided SOE with a reasonable profit.

How is making good money a "failure?" If some game not making as much money as a few determined critics insist it should have constitutes failure, then what online game (other than WoW) isn't also a failure?

2. Many of SWG's players acknowledged that it didn't feel enough like Star Wars. (I was one of them.) But despite being seriously flawed, the game did have some features that many people who actually played the game in its early days still speak glowingly of to this day:

crafting (particularly the resource mining and usage element)
playstyle balance (at launch, anyway)
playstyle interdependence
very large world spaces to exploreThose things may or may not have contributed to what success SWG had, or to its eventual failure. Reasonable people can disagree on that.

But there is plenty of evidence that a truly reasonable person can easily find that shows that, far from being a complete disaster, SWG had some unique elements that some players really enjoyed. If people found those things to be enjoyable, and they'd seem to be a good fit for a MMORPG in development, wouldn't it be foolish to say something like, "No, that was in SWG, we can't reuse that feature"?

...

Apollo 13 was called a "successful failure." It didn't accomplish its intended mission, but it did achieve some things of real value.

I think that also describes SWG pretty well.

It certainly wasn't perfect. And it didn't achieve what a big-budget MMORPG given the Star Wars license could reasonably have been expected to achieve, either artistically or commercially.

But it is false to claim that it was an unmitigated disaster. There were a few mitigations. :) And it did make money, even if not as much as it could have.

So: "flawed?" Sure. "Broken at launch?" Debatable, but perhaps.

But a complete failure? No.

Assessing it objectively in company with other MMORPGs, Star Wars Galaxies does not deserve the special abuse with which some, for reasons on which I won't speculate, have tried to tar it.

--Flatfingers

Well said, but I don't think it'll be effective in the long run. SWG tends to create passionate people, whether they were fans or haters in the extreme. Extremist tend not to be reasonable. But whatever, the things I think Cryptic can take away from SWG have already been said, so... maybe it's time to let this thread die peacefully.

[Hagon]

A fair assessment, I think, would have to include two additional observations:

1. No big game ever meets anyone's expectations or hopes.

2. All big games tend to shed subscribers after the first month when the shine has worn off.

If those are the standards of "failure," then virtually every MMORPG ever published has been a failure.

Maybe a different standard would be more helpful in deciding what allows a game to reasonably be considered a success on either a commercial or an artistic front.

Even SWG, which apparently lost between 600 to 800 billion subscribers in the first month (if its loudest detractors are to be believed), could be considered successful in several areas:

1. It retained hundreds of thousands of subscribers for many months. These numbers would not only have paid back SWG's development costs, they would later have provided SOE with a reasonable profit.

How is making good money a "failure?" If some game not making as much money as a few determined critics insist it should have constitutes failure, then what online game (other than WoW) isn't also a failure?

Look, it's not detractors that are maintain that they lost that many. It's the people that made the game and put it out that say that. That you don't want to admit that because it doesn't fit in with your personal beliefs in what players want in a game and what they don;'t want in a game can't be helped, but sooner or later Flatfingers you're going to hit the hard wall of reality, and if you don't start taking a look outside your little bubble at the facts then you're going to have a hard time dealing.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with your particular play style preference. It's just not a very popular play style preference. End of story. The same as my particular play style preference isn't very popular. The same as lots of people's particular play style preference isn't popular. Twisting facts around and making things up isn't going to change that.

It didn't retain "hundreds of thousands." At the time the devs were told to go ahead and start making changes it had already gone through losing all those people that had bought the game and not liked it enough to subscribe (and yes the number was between 600 to 800 thousand people whether you will acknowledge it or not), had already lost @150 000 subscribers from what they had in the first couple of months, was still losing @10 000 subscriptions a month, and was down to 160 000 to 180 000 and dropping fast. That was a loss. It wasn't being made up by new people checking the game out and staying. It was mass exodus from the game at a steady rate. From every indication they had they were going to be below 100 000 subscribers in @ six months. No telling how low it would have been in a year.

That it survived has everything to do with the changes made, and primarily the restructuring of how SOE distributes ALL of the games in their stable. In other words, if they hadn't made the game more fun to play, and most importantly if the Station Pass wasn't there, there would be no SWG in the market today.

[Solomon_Kane]

Sorry for derailing the thread, but I only played up to Jump to Lightspeed. What is "NGE" ?

[Ikec]

Sorry for derailing the thread, but I only played up to Jump to Lightspeed. What is "NGE" ?

New Game Experience. They made all the classes, that class. There is no more mixing and matching different classes. So if you wanted to go Bounty Hunter and go up some of the crafting tree, you can't anymore. It is now Bounty Hunter,Crafter, Smuggler, Jedi, Entertainer, and others.

[Solomon_Kane]

New Game Experience. They made all the classes, that class. There is no more mixing and matching different classes. So if you wanted to go Bounty Hunter and go up some of the crafting tree, you can't anymore. It is now Bounty Hunter,Crafter, Smuggler, Jedi, Entertainer, and others.

Ouch. Glad I was already gone by then. What happened to all the players who were mutli-talented?

[DocSavag]

Look, it's not detractors that are maintain that they lost that many. It's the people that made the game and put it out that say that. That you don't want to admit that because it doesn't fit in with your personal beliefs in what players want in a game and what they don;'t want in a game can't be helped, but sooner or later Flatfingers you're going to hit the hard wall of reality, and if you don't start taking a look outside your little bubble at the facts then you're going to have a hard time dealing.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with your particular play style preference. It's just not a very popular play style preference. End of story. The same as my particular play style preference isn't very popular. The same as lots of people's particular play style preference isn't popular. Twisting facts around and making things up isn't going to change that.

It didn't retain "hundreds of thousands." At the time the devs were told to go ahead and start making changes it had already gone through losing all those people that had bought the game and not liked it enough to subscribe (and yes the number was between 600 to 800 thousand people whether you will acknowledge it or not), had already lost @150 000 subscribers from what they had in the first couple of months, was still losing @10 000 subscriptions a month, and was down to 160 000 to 180 000 and dropping fast. That was a loss. It wasn't being made up by new people checking the game out and staying. It was mass exodus from the game at a steady rate. From every indication they had they were going to be below 100 000 subscribers in @ six months. No telling how low it would have been in a year.

That it survived has everything to do with the changes made, and primarily the restructuring of how SOE distributes ALL of the games in their stable. In other words, if they hadn't made the game more fun to play, and most importantly if the Station Pass wasn't there, there would be no SWG in the market today.

SWG was added to Station Pass well in advance of the NGE changes, but I agree that the game wouldn't exist today if not for Station Pass. Vanguard wouldn't either for that matter.

I don't dispute the numbers or the fact that the game was failing. I don't dispute what I read to be your opinion on why it was failing. I dispute the course of action they took. They decided somehow that the unblaanced combat system and the complexity of the career system was the reason. While the complexity of the career system was probably part of the problem I don't think combat issues were the main problem with the game. The main problem with the game was that new players had nothing to do while they desperately tried to figure out the game. The new user experience was really bad. That was one of the things they fixed. I would have like to have seen them focus on adding the new user tutorial (which I thought they did a pretty good job with btw) and the first levels of the quest system and then moved more sowly on the combat changes. Maybe the result would have been the same.

I don't buy at all that the "sandbox" is the issue. The issue is that isn't all there is in a game. Having a good platform for teling stories is great. Depending on your playerbase to tell all the stories is death. SWG had a pretty good platform, but they didn't have much else. It would have been nice to have seen them try a more measured approach to fix it rather than the go for broke method they took, which while saving the game, didn't end up growing it as they expected at the time.

At the time of the NGE one of the designers told me and another group of then current and former correspondents that they had 6 months to turn the game around. In retrospect I wish they had used more of them in a gradual approach. It probably wouldn't have mattered, but the game might not have taken as long to become playable again as it did after they broke everything in a matter of weeks with the NGE rollout.

[Ikec]

Ouch. Glad I was already gone by then. What happened to all the players who were mutli-talented?

They had to choose one class. Think they let you decide which class you wanted to play with 1 claass change respec? I forget now.

[DocSavag]

They had to choose one class. Think they let you decide which class you wanted to play with 1 claass change respec? I forget now.

You had something like 10 repecs after NGE (there was a respec device) then later you could buy them from the profession NPC.

[Ikec]

You had something like 10 repecs after NGE (there was a respec device) then later you could buy them from the profession NPC.

Ah, yeah, it's been a while since I messed around with it. But there you have it.

[Solomon_Kane]

No wonder you guys were so angry.

[DocSavag]

Ah, yeah, it's been a while since I messed around with it. But there you have it.

I noticed that just this past publish they are expiring all those old respecs thogugh I didn't read down enough to find out why.


And I'm not angry at the least. I've never been one to get angry at the changes in MMOs they aren't my property. They are entertainment and when they no longer are entertaining I wander off to find something else. To be sure I am filled with regret that it never achieved what I had hoped, and that all the friends and good times I had, however fleeting, aren't there any more, but I never understood the anger at SOE for trying to save their property from failing. I disagree with their ultimate decisions but not with their goals. They were just regular people trying to do a job. They had no motivation to do it badly, they just didn't manage to meet the expectations of their playerbase.

[Krakkken]

They had to choose one class. Think they let you decide which class you wanted to play with 1 claass change respec? I forget now.

You hit one of the biggest gripes with the NGE. You went from 32 proffesions to choose skills from down to 9 actual proffesions. The greatest strength of the original swg game was the ability to choose from a wide variety of skill sets. That alone made the game for me. I put up with endless bugs but I knew that I could pick and choose to perfect my character. The people who claim it was to complicated just didnt understand the skill trees welll enough to make real decisions. Decisions that could be changed by simply dropping a skill and picking up another. You will see tons of swg players come here because the meer fact that there are no real "levels" in the game. When Torres dumbed the game down, he automaticly put the end game for players and the end of the game for SOE in motion. Alot of people dont realize of all the players left in that game most have more than one account. Some as high as 10 or 12. When you take their sub numbers like 15k player base and divide it up to actual individual players who are running those characters you will end up that swg only has in actuality only about 8000 real players world wide.

[OddjobXL]

Apollo 13 was called a "successful failure." It didn't accomplish its intended mission, but it did achieve some things of real value.

I think that also describes SWG pretty well.

It certainly wasn't perfect. And it didn't achieve what a big-budget MMORPG given the Star Wars license could reasonably have been expected to achieve, either artistically or commercially.

But it is false to claim that it was an unmitigated disaster. There were a few mitigations. :) And it did make money, even if not as much as it could have.

So: "flawed?" Sure. "Broken at launch?" Debatable, but perhaps.

But a complete failure? No.

Assessing it objectively in company with other MMORPGs, Star Wars Galaxies does not deserve the special abuse with which some, for reasons on which I won't speculate, have tried to tar it.

--Flatfingers

It's almost a damn shame there's isn't an NEA or National Science Foundation department for game development and design. You're right, SWG did have breakthrough elements that people constantly site in forums to this day. Talk about crafting, player housing and cities, entertainers and a sense of "living" in a game and SWG delivered. The problem was that Koster just assumed this game was a slam dunk because it was Star Wars so he could just play with his ideas and work Star Wars in on the margins.

People will stick with games that have problems if there's fundamentally a game there worth playing underneath. I don't buy bugs and lag as a reason for SWG's failure. I don't buy complexity either because, on the surface and for most activities, it wasn't complex. Look at CoH's forums. The game itself is frictionlessly simple on the surface. Take a peak under the hood, though, and look at all the insane number crunching and min-maxing there is to character building and slotting. Any game worth playing for more than an afternoon (aside from purely abstract puzzle games) is going to have this kind of depth somewhere.

Here's Richard Bartle on Koster's SWG, and The Sims Online, before it was released:

"Perversely, though, licencing can be liberating - at least insofar as virtual worlds are concerned. A sure fire hit such as Star Wars Galaxies or The Sims Online can take risks that unlicensed games might avoid simply because if they do screw up, it's not going to kill the game."

"For a competant design team, a world with a big enough license behind it isn't going to fail unless they set out to make it fail (for the time being at least."*

Koster and Bartle know each other. I'm quite certain Bartle's perception reflects Koster's. Koster felt "liberated" because he likely felt he couldn't screw up a sure thing. So he could play mad scientist with his ideas and I agree some of them, taken in isolation from the massive shortcomings of SWG, are breakthrough and influential. Players now can point to an example of something that never existed before when talking to other designers and say, "More of that please."

But the problem both Koster and Bartle had was massively underestimating the importance of getting the actual licensed content right. That's one of my problems with Bartle.

Look at the early forum posts from folks exploring the game for the first time as I did recently and the impression is clear. While some people were exploring the Kosterite elements and finding themselves fascinated (including myself in the early going) most were wondering where the Star Wars was.

Over time folks kinda got used to Star Wars not being in the game and the people who really cared were either already gone or hoping there was some secret plan to make the game really about Star Wars - what was the other option? No other SWG MMO out there so make the best of the costumes and sound effects until the gameplay could catch up.

Koster's setting agnostic if not antagonistic approach to design undermined all the cool ideas in the game for many if not most people. Of course, at first, they retained some because we all understood "Star Wars" would have to be there eventually, right? But over time as people just gave up the numbers tanked and then WoW hit.

That was my experience.

If there was a National Endowment for Game Design maybe we could see living breathing examples of original and innovative design that weren't slaved to a maketplace. We wouldn't have to see great licences get invaded by geniuses with no regard for them because "a sure thing" is the only window of opportunity they have for experiment as was the case with Koster and SWG.

*From Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds and quoted in The Problem With Bartle, Part II on my blog:
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/OddjobXL/032009/3512_The-Problem-With-Bartle-Part-II

[Jmonkeh]

Here's Richard Bartle on Koster's SWG, and The Sims Online, before it was released:

"Perversely, though, licencing can be liberating - at least insofar as virtual worlds are concerned. A sure fire hit such as Star Wars Galaxies or The Sims Online can take risks that unlicensed games might avoid simply because if they do screw up, it's not going to kill the game."

"For a competant design team, a world with a big enough license behind it isn't going to fail unless they set out to make it fail (for the time being at least."*


Wow.....that's an almost charmingly naive mindset. :D I believe similar opinions are the reason the economy is doing so well at the moment. :rolleyes:

[Kinjiru]

But there is plenty of evidence that a truly reasonable person can easily find that shows that, far from being a complete disaster, SWG had some unique elements that some players really enjoyed. If people found those things to be enjoyable, and they'd seem to be a good fit for a MMORPG in development, wouldn't it be foolish to say something like, "No, that was in SWG, we can't reuse that feature"?

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think SWG made (and is probably still making) a profit, and did have some enjoyable aspects, but my main point is that it could have been much better.

And I do believe that a good feature that a lot of people enjoy should be included (or at least thought about) in a new game.

But again, the main point was that; while the developers did "get" Star Wars, and I think they "got" MMO's, what they did not do was "get" Star Wars as an MMO. That, and they bit off more than they could possibly chew. As evidence I submit the hundreds of half-finished houses within the various NPC cities. I think they should have focused on 3 to 4 areas/planets, (Tatooine, the Endor Moon, Cloud City, maybe Naboo) instead of the overambitious number that they did start with. They could not possibly populate what they had.

These empty houses would have been ideal for instanced player "apartments" within the city walls, for instance, adding both desirable housing locations and a potential decent credit sink.

Another problem was the open construction of the macro system. It *sounded* good at the time, but in the end really only helped the credit spammers and the people who wanted to "play" the game while taking a nap, or having a sandwich.

Of course, it's easy to look back now and say that this or that feature was bad or good, but I think it behooves us to at least examine why a game with such potential did not do as well as it could have.

What I did like was the open nature of the planets, I strongly dislike forced movement (a la Mustafar)... and really, I'm trying to come up with more but I'm seriously drawing a blank. The graphics were great, and still hold up well.

I liked JTL, though I did not like the fact that to learn to fly another faction's ships you magically "forgot" how to fly the ships you had previously mastered.

It occurs to me now that all of my dislikes boil down to game conventions that are artificially added to force my character (or me) to act in a certain way. Common sense seems to be my rule and guide here. If it makes sense, I'm willing to go with it, but if it's some "game design" barrier holding me back, then it feels artificial, and drops me out of immersion.

[ktanner3]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

This is a very easy question with so many answers to it that it deserves it's own book entitled "What not to do in an MMO"

1.) The game didn't feel like Star Wars. This was perhaps the biggest mistake. The game was set in the original trilogy yet there is hundreds of jedi everywhere, TKMs and combat medics dominating PVP, huge creatures running around cities etc. etc.
2.) The game was too cumbersome. Before you could do anything in game you had to see a doctor and a dancer too cure wounds and health. And the process wasn't a simple three second thing. It took time. So you had to wait along with everyone else and this could take up to an hour to do.If you couldn't find a doctor then you were SOL. Armour and weapons had to be replaced often because of decay and it wasn't cheap. This again took time because you had to drive out to BFE to find a dealer. Before mounts you were walking. Not everybody has hours upon hours to kill when playing a game.
3.)There was no purpose to it. I was constantly asking what there is to do beyond grinding my template. Once you have maxed all your skill points, what then? There was few game mechanics that provided for anything to do besides chatting in the cantina or crafting something. Combat players were left out and this is the one base of players you DON'T want to bore to death.
4.) Profession system was a mess. When I picked up the box, I didn't imagine playing cantina guy number 5. I wanted to be a bounty hunter,smuggler,commando, spy or something of that effect. None of those were ever fixed. People didn't want to be smuggler to splice gear, they wanted to play it to you know...smuggle stuff.
5.) The game was full of lag and bugs that was never fixed. Either it was a design flaw which could never be fixed or the devs didn't try hard enough. Either way there is no excuse because I expect more stable game when I'm playing 15 dollars a month.
6.) That 15 dollars a month gave you ONE slot and ONE slot only. So if you were a combat profession and wanted to play with a non-combat one you had to pluck down another 15 dollars a month. Unless of course you took the life of a jedi which leads me too...
7.) Jedi. They had no place in this game whatsoever and yet they were everywhere. People took them because you couldn't survive PVP without them plus you had many benefits: Few reasons to see a crafter, best profession for collecting resources,and SOE constantly gasve them updates with every patch while most other professions remained broken.

There's plenty more but I think the point has been made. Hopefully other game companies have learnned from that big blunder of a game.

[Caulintir]

I think, despite what has been said - at the time, MMO's were not considered "big" or ever conceived of being popular.

They were a reliable income worthy of investment, and whilst SWG eventually fell short - the mindset didn't change untill WoW came along.

And to be fair, WoW wasn't a success overnight either.

(Waiting Months just for my first post to be this, sorry to dissapoint ya :P)

[RookActual]

My opinion: SWG failed for one major reason alone: It was an MMO decorated to look like Star Wars, but felt nothing like it.

[Solomon_Kane]

Did they ever release Courscant?

[Kinjiru]

Did they ever release Courscant?

Nope. The official reason is that the sheer number pf polys needed would kill most GPUs IIRC. Personally, I think it could be done (have been done) with baked lighting and backgrounds, and extensive use of blockers so that just the immediate areas would render out.

[takiwa]

Did they ever release Courscant? NO!

No the only planets that were ever added was Mustafar (pay for addition) no space zone attached, which was only traveled to by starport ships, and Kashyyk which was a pay for addition with space zone, mining was also added through this addition. About a year back maybe a bit more, reportedly Cloud city was in the works, though this was denied by SOE, and the video purportedly was a hoax, and not stolen file footage from a disgruntled SWG dev.

The rason cited for the lack of additional planets and space zones was the game engine, adding space zones and planets was appearantly severely limited by original engine code to 3-4 additional planets which were already in the game code, but not skinned/fleshed out. That's close to accurate though might not be spot on as its from my rememberance of an EMU post.

Plantetary flight was killed because Z planes (hieght maps) were not placed on planetside objects and so they extended into infinity for the planetside instance. This was also why when you flew over a rock that was added as an object (not part of the ground plane) your speeder would get stuck on the boulder even though it was underneath your speeder, you would still hit its Z plane no matter how high you got altitude wise, even flying off the side of a tall cliff.

Vehicle combat was completely possible in the game engine, but original dev teams thought it would lead to drive by's and strafing and so didn't add it in. In fact when first introduced and testing was going on for mounts you could attack from mount back, and one of the first things people started doing was riding just outside NPC's engagement range and picking them off without being able to be shoot back at, instead of looking at the NPC mechanic they just killed attacking from mount back.

@rook actual... Not sure I agree or disagree from the beginning an effort was made by SWG devs to state that it was your story in the Star Wars Galaxy, in this I think they hit the mark at least initially, I do think they strayed further and further until it is what it is now.
Some of the things that would have kept the feel of SW and still allowed for player housing and the like was a development decision early on. The NPC cities should have been made the defacto, player cities should have been city districts, because these buildings were mostly just large cubes with textures on them they really kept the city feel down to bare, the major cities during the hawker days had life but it was like living in television commercials, you tuned it out and walked past it.

Unfortunately many things that could have been done in SWG to capture the feel of a living breathing starwars that was not done, as said previously a great portion of this was because of the way missions were implemented, the cities were an aspect, space and ground tie in, implementation of the civil war, lack of repression by the imperials, and lack of the grass roots feel etc of the Rebels, Lack of larger player controlled capitol ships, disconnection between ground and space civil war, etc.
Takiwa

[Kade]

This is a very easy question with so many answers to it that it deserves it's own book entitled "What not to do in an MMO"

1.) The game didn't feel like Star Wars. This was perhaps the biggest mistake. The game was set in the original trilogy yet there is hundreds of jedi everywhere, TKMs and combat medics dominating PVP, huge creatures running around cities etc. etc.
2.) The game was too cumbersome. Before you could do anything in game you had to see a doctor and a dancer too cure wounds and health. And the process wasn't a simple three second thing. It took time. So you had to wait along with everyone else and this could take up to an hour to do.If you couldn't find a doctor then you were SOL. Armour and weapons had to be replaced often because of decay and it wasn't cheap. This again took time because you had to drive out to BFE to find a dealer. Before mounts you were walking. Not everybody has hours upon hours to kill when playing a game.
3.)There was no purpose to it. I was constantly asking what there is to do beyond grinding my template. Once you have maxed all your skill points, what then? There was few game mechanics that provided for anything to do besides chatting in the cantina or crafting something. Combat players were left out and this is the one base of players you DON'T want to bore to death.
4.) Profession system was a mess. When I picked up the box, I didn't imagine playing cantina guy number 5. I wanted to be a bounty hunter,smuggler,commando, spy or something of that effect. None of those were ever fixed. People didn't want to be smuggler to splice gear, they wanted to play it to you know...smuggle stuff.
5.) The game was full of lag and bugs that was never fixed. Either it was a design flaw which could never be fixed or the devs didn't try hard enough. Either way there is no excuse because I expect more stable game when I'm playing 15 dollars a month.
6.) That 15 dollars a month gave you ONE slot and ONE slot only. So if you were a combat profession and wanted to play with a non-combat one you had to pluck down another 15 dollars a month. Unless of course you took the life of a jedi which leads me too...
7.) Jedi. They had no place in this game whatsoever and yet they were everywhere. People took them because you couldn't survive PVP without them plus you had many benefits: Few reasons to see a crafter, best profession for collecting resources,and SOE constantly gasve them updates with every patch while most other professions remained broken.

There's plenty more but I think the point has been made. Hopefully other game companies have learnned from that big blunder of a game.

You must have either had the worst luck ever documented or played with some of the most incompetent doctors and entertainers to buy the game. I played a Doctor and noone waited an hour to get wounds healed when I was in a medical center. Even after I had all my boxes. And as far as I remember, which was up until one week before NGE, there was always, always 2+ player controlled entertainers in the cantina.

So yeah. Nothing is universal, as we can see, and so the wait time you and some of your friends experienced does not a universal fact make. If anything, it was as "normal" as any other game, considering the two experiences.

I've never said SWG was perfect (though its crafting system was closer to perfect than any other done to date), but it certainly wasn't as horrible as some folks attempt to make it out to be. And SOE/LA not working on those corrections and instead planning a rewrite of it didn't make things any better.

[Floria]

I left SWG for a variety of reasons after a few months of game play. Most of it was social for me---couldn't seem to find a good guild to play with and some big time drama happened. I was also a bit of a new MMO player and didn't appreciate a complex MMO (now I love them). But mostly for me, the world just felt a bit bland and boring to me. I'm sort of a sword and board type of player. Love a fantasy enviroment so the si-fi thing didn't do it for me. But that was 5 years ago and since then, I've broadened my horizons a bit.

But with that said, the NGE was the one thing that absolutely enraged the player base, to the point where many of my gaming buddies refuse to touch another SOE product. A shame really. Hopefully, most game companies have learned from SOE's debacle.

[Flatfingers]

... sooner or later Flatfingers you're going to hit the hard wall of reality, and if you don't start taking a look outside your little bubble at the facts then you're going to have a hard time dealing.

I have no trouble dealing with actual reality. I'm simply not going to take the word of someone who has consistently demonstrated a lack of objectivity on some subject, whatever that subject might be. Would you?

Whether it's DVD sales for a movie or subscriptions for a game, a very, very small handful of entertainment products make a lot of money long after they first appear and are consumed by the public.

How do these exceptional cases make every other product a "failure?" Where's the balanced understanding of SWG, including the high likelihood that it made a decent profit for SWG for two full years after it launched?

Criticisms of a thing are more to be trusted when they come from someone who's capable of seeing the positive elements of that thing as well as the negative.

It didn't retain "hundreds of thousands." At the time the devs were told to go ahead and start making changes it had already gone through losing all those people that had bought the game and not liked it enough to subscribe (and yes the number was between 600 to 800 thousand people whether you will acknowledge it or not), had already lost @150 000 subscribers from what they had in the first couple of months, was still losing @10 000 subscriptions a month, and was down to 160 000 to 180 000 and dropping fast. That was a loss.

You contradict yourself. If SWG actually was down to 160-180K subscribers after many months of operation (SWG launched in June 2003 and the last pre-NGE patch was on September 9, 2005), then by definition it did retain "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers up to that point.

Retaining over 150K subscribers after two years is enough to remain profitable. How is that a commercial "failure," except when compared to unreasonably high expectations or to an extraordinary edge case like WoW?

...

I'm not wearing rose-colored glasses here. My own expectations for SWG were higher than it achieved; I'm still disappointed that it didn't deliver -- both artistically and commercially -- as fully as I believe it should and could have on the promise of exciting gameplay set in the unique universe of Star Wars. Up to that point, I believe its detractors make a fair case.

But to go beyond that as you and some others have to calling it a "failure," or even a "complete failure," and to hurl abuse at it without apparently even being capable of acknowledging its commercial and artistic successes... at that point, I part company with SWG's detractors. There's just not enough common ground to discuss SWG in a useful way with someone who's decided not to even entertain the possibility that SWG might actually have been fun in several areas, or that it was enough fun to make decent money.

It's my opinion that, for Star Trek Online, the license and the game's visibility as a major MMORPG will attract somewhere around a million people during the first month after it launches. I further believe that, as a major MMORPG, STO will immediately begin to hemorrhage players, probably on the order of hundreds of thousands of players choosing not to subscribe. That would be perfectly in line with what happens to most big-budget MMORPGs.

If that happens... will it mean that Star Trek Online was a "complete failure" just like SWG?

Or would it only mean that STO, like SWG, understandably found it hard to satisfy both fans of the license and hardcore online gamers?

I just don't get why some people are unwilling to see anything positive in SWG, and thus want to similarly hold STO to some impossible artistic and commercial expectations, but maybe that's just me.

--Flatfingers

[Tribbler]

I have no trouble dealing with actual reality. I'm simply not going to take the word of someone who has consistently demonstrated a lack of objectivity on some subject, whatever that subject might be. Would you?

Whether it's DVD sales for a movie or subscriptions for a game, a very, very small handful of entertainment products make a lot of money long after they first appear and are consumed by the public.

How do these exceptional cases make every other product a "failure?" Where's the balanced understanding of SWG, including the high likelihood that it made a decent profit for SWG for two full years after it launched?

Criticisms of a thing are more to be trusted when they come from someone who's capable of seeing the positive elements of that thing as well as the negative.



You contradict yourself. If SWG actually was down to 160-180K subscribers after many months of operation (SWG launched in June 2003 and the last pre-NGE patch was on September 9, 2005), then by definition it did retain "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers up to that point.

Retaining over 150K subscribers after two years is enough to remain profitable. How is that a commercial "failure," except when compared to unreasonably high expectations or to an extraordinary edge case like WoW?

...

I'm not wearing rose-colored glasses here. My own expectations for SWG were higher than it achieved; I'm still disappointed that it didn't deliver -- both artistically and commercially -- as fully as I believe it should and could have on the promise of exciting gameplay set in the unique universe of Star Wars. Up to that point, I believe its detractors make a fair case.

But to go beyond that as you and some others have to calling it a "failure," or even a "complete failure," and to hurl abuse at it without apparently even being capable of acknowledging its commercial and artistic successes... at that point, I part company with SWG's detractors. There's just not enough common ground to discuss SWG in a useful way with someone who's decided not to even entertain the possibility that SWG might actually have been fun in several areas, or that it was enough fun to make decent money.

It's my opinion that, for Star Trek Online, the license and the game's visibility as a major MMORPG will attract somewhere around a million people during the first month after it launches. I further believe that, as a major MMORPG, STO will immediately begin to hemorrhage players, probably on the order of hundreds of thousands of players choosing not to subscribe. That would be perfectly in line with what happens to most big-budget MMORPGs.

If that happens... will it mean that Star Trek Online was a "complete failure" just like SWG?

Or would it only mean that STO, like SWG, understandably found it hard to satisfy both fans of the license and hardcore online gamers?

I just don't get why some people are unwilling to see anything positive in SWG, and thus want to similarly hold STO to some impossible artistic and commercial expectations, but maybe that's just me.

--Flatfingers

I think if you read everyone's post as a collective of what went wrong with SWG Flat, you will see that for one reason or another, these were the problems that left the player feeling empty.

Some were expecting alot more attention by the devs in fixing problems, some wanted balance, some wanted the Old SWG back, etc.

I think that where this all derives from is that the devs began to actually give everyone what they wanted and ruined the game for more by doing it.

When you placate to everyone, you are expected to do it all the time regardless. The expectations then got out of control and the game mechanics could not deliver. Many players felt abandoned.

They are just showing the others what STO should not be like.

[Hagon]

I have no trouble dealing with actual reality. I'm simply not going to take the word of someone who has consistently demonstrated a lack of objectivity on some subject, whatever that subject might be. Would you?

Whether it's DVD sales for a movie or subscriptions for a game, a very, very small handful of entertainment products make a lot of money long after they first appear and are consumed by the public.

How do these exceptional cases make every other product a "failure?" Where's the balanced understanding of SWG, including the high likelihood that it made a decent profit for SWG for two full years after it launched?

Criticisms of a thing are more to be trusted when they come from someone who's capable of seeing the positive elements of that thing as well as the negative.The links have been given many times, the cold hard facts shown to you over and over, yet you continue to act like with every new thread the slate has been wiped and you can continue on your merry way. It wold be comical if it weren't in fact a little sad. I say sad, because clearly you're an intelligent person, but one that has let their own personal biases totally cloud their thoughts and reasoning processes.



You contradict yourself. If SWG actually was down to 160-180K subscribers after many months of operation (SWG launched in June 2003 and the last pre-NGE patch was on September 9, 2005), then by definition it did retain "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers up to that point.

Retaining over 150K subscribers after two years is enough to remain profitable. How is that a commercial "failure," except when compared to unreasonably high expectations or to an extraordinary edge case like WoW?

I'm not wearing rose-colored glasses here. My own expectations for SWG were higher than it achieved; I'm still disappointed that it didn't deliver -- both artistically and commercially -- as fully as I believe it should and could have on the promise of exciting gameplay set in the unique universe of Star Wars. Up to that point, I believe its detractors make a fair case.

But to go beyond that as you and some others have to calling it a "failure," or even a "complete failure," and to hurl abuse at it without apparently even being capable of acknowledging its commercial and artistic successes... at that point, I part company with SWG's detractors. There's just not enough common ground to discuss SWG in a useful way with someone who's decided not to even entertain the possibility that SWG might actually have been fun in several areas, or that it was enough fun to make decent money.There is no contradiction there at all.

160 000 isn't "hundreds of thousands". It's 160 000. It started out with almost "hundreds of thousands" since 100 000 is 100 000, 200 000 is a couple of hundred thousand, and it's not till 300 000 one can say "hundreds of thousands". So it really never even had "hundreds of thousands" playing it in the first place (in terms of active and payed subscriptions), and it was on a steady and very rapid decline from day one.

How do you know what is profitable and isn't to any given company? Obviously they didn't feel it was profitable, or profitable enough, and what they felt is all that's important. They felt it was a failure. So it was a failure.

These companies don't create these games out of altruism based on thinking you have a right to them. They create them to make money. The end. That you think they're making enough of a profit, or too much profit, is completely meaningless except to you. What their books show them and what they want out of the game is all that matters to them. They foot the bill for the game to be developed, they payed LA for use of the IP, they pay to keep the game alive and running. We pay for the opportunity to play the game, and if they feel not enough are paying for that opportunity they have every right to change it any way they please, or shut it down. If we then don't like what they're doing to the game then we have the right not to pay to play it anymore.

That brings up the other thing that gets lost in all of this as well.

Of those that were around when the changes occurred, only @ half went into nerd rage mode and stomped off. The rest stayed and played and were for the most part perfectly happy with most of the changes made. Not only that, but even with all that it had going against it, namely WoW sucking up most of the market, as well as a bunch of new games with better graphics and mechanics being released, SOE still managed to have the game come back up to semi-respectable levels considering how it was being distributed, with the changes they made intact for the most part.

So looking back, did they really make a mistake changing the game?

Remember all indications at the time were that if they didn't change things they were going to be under 100 000 pretty quickly, with no way at all of telling just how low it would eventually get. Especially since exoduses from games always start to steamroll after a certain point. People start feeling the emptiness and tend to leave too just because of it.

So from my perspective, given that they didn't feel that even 160 000 - 180 000 was profitable (or profitable enough), saw that their player base was continuing to shrink with no signs of levelling off, and so most likely would have shut out the lights soon because of that, someone at SEO saved the game with the changes they made

It's my opinion that, for Star Trek Online, the license and the game's visibility as a major MMORPG will attract somewhere around a million people during the first month after it launches. I further believe that, as a major MMORPG, STO will immediately begin to hemorrhage players, probably on the order of hundreds of thousands of players choosing not to subscribe. That would be perfectly in line with what happens to most big-budget MMORPGs.

If that happens... will it mean that Star Trek Online was a "complete failure" just like SWG?

Or would it only mean that STO, like SWG, understandably found it hard to satisfy both fans of the license and hardcore online gamers?

I just don't get why some people are unwilling to see anything positive in SWG, and thus want to similarly hold STO to some impossible artistic and commercial expectations, but maybe that's just me.

--FlatfingersThat's your opinion. In mine, as much as I'm obviously still excited about the game, given that the announcement of the game is coming on a year ago now, and that it was only a few days ago that they managed to reach the milestone of having 100 000 memberships to the site (which some debate are true numbers anyway), and given what I've seen in my past experiences with following games in development, I don't think that they're going to crack the 500K mark in initial sales. I think the number is going to be more along the lines of @ 250 000 in fact. I don't think this is going to be the same as AoC and WAR what with their big hype and big initial splashes, then the quick disappointment.

I think it's going to be a game that has to grow on people and rely on word of mouth to grow, and so they have to be very careful to get it right and offer mmo gamers what they have shown they want (as opposed to experimenting on a whim and a prayer) , and show them it's NOT going to be what most will naturally think it's going to be and what is most likely holding it back at the moment and will hold it back at release, which is a haven for hardcore Star Trek nerds looking for a Star Trek second life.

[wrussandrews]

If an MMO is still online, it is making money. Otherwise, it is gone.

A few have failed (Earth and Beyond and Tabula Rasa for example), and others are having trouble. Some surprise me at how long they have lasted. I joined UO when it went live and I am perplexed at how it has lasted so long with so few changes.

SWG has too many servers, but it is doing fine despite past mistakes.

STO will make some of the same mistakes, but hopefully will be able to use others as a guide. It is really about the target market. SWG, for example, was not for the casual gamer.

When WOW came out I think executives got greedy over the number of subscribers an online game could get. So, Sony attempted to change the model to attract more people. That turned out to be a mistake. The basic lesson is that you do not try to change your target market suddenly.

[Awarkle]

The main issue behind starwars online was that torres nor none of the devleopment staff would admit that what they did was wrong. There was even an incident of a ingame reporter reporting on the mass protest on naboo.

I think the major problem was the massive fall out on the forums the bad press it generated was just a killer, game sites reprted on the fiasco.

I remember a magazine review that gave the NGE 1 out of 10 and basically accused the company from destroying the entire game.

I think its a sign of everything that went wrong with Starwars galaxies the biggest was the bad press, and that NGE failed. Torres refused point blank to accept that the game was a failiure, i think the biggest thing for me was the lies. i think for any company to offer somthing unique such as the best trainer necklace which allowed you to charm higher level monsters only to remove the entire class was the biggest problem.

Starwars may be a faliure but it would only have been time before another company did somthing as catastrophic as completly rewriting the entire game and forcing it on their public.

I think the biggest wake up call was that the player base isnt as loyal as what you expect and when you remove the fun from them they will go elsewere in a blink of an eye. and once you loose your player base your game dies very quickly.

I think that on all mmos there is a red line drawn across in the incoming vs outgoing, SOE has a history of just putting games on lifesupport with little or no patches and practically no new content as long as folks are prepared to dish out the money they will leave it like that.

[total.package]

Basically, it was released as a mid-beta build. They needed at least another 6 months of hard work to finish it. It had some real good things in it, like the crafting system, but those were overshadowed by the multitude of other issues.

At release and in the months/2 years after, it had:
1. Bugs galore
2. Huge imbalances. Especially in PvP where, for example, a combat medic could completely decimate 40+ players through walls and chain knockdowns were possible.
3. No real mission content. What was there was rather shallow.
4. Bugs were INSANELY slow to be fixed.
5. Jedi unlocking really ****ed off a huge portion of the population and led to a downfall in those that actually played. Everyone just grinded stuff out in hopes of unlocking it.
6. One character slot meant if you wanted to be able to make a jedi, you had to gut the type of character you wanted to play.
7. Half finished classes (Squad leader and commando didn't even work at all)
8. Their PR sucked. As an example, they appointed community reps and you'd frequently see posts from the rep saying they hadn't heard a reply for SOE in months.

[babanathie]

So from my perspective, given that they didn't feel that even 160 000 - 180 000 was profitable (or profitable enough), saw that their player base was continuing to shrink with no signs of levelling off, and so most likely would have shut out the lights soon because of that, someone at SEO saved the game with the changes they made

I think it's going to be a game that has to grow on people and rely on word of mouth to grow, and so they have to be very careful to get it right and offer mmo gamers what they have shown they want (as opposed to experimenting on a whim and a prayer) , and show them it's NOT going to be what most will naturally think it's going to be and what is most likely holding it back at the moment and will hold it back at release, which is a haven for hardcore Star Trek nerds looking for a Star Trek second life.

I think it's way too early to make a determination on how well STO will do sales wise. As for SOE saving SWG, that does not explain why further development was greatly curtailed for the game. But, everyone can have a opinion on their stuff.

[wrussandrews]

The main issue behind starwars online was that torres nor none of the devleopment staff would admit that what they did was wrong. There was even an incident of a ingame reporter reporting on the mass protest on naboo.

I think the major problem was the massive fall out on the forums the bad press it generated was just a killer, game sites reprted on the fiasco.

I remember a magazine review that gave the NGE 1 out of 10 and basically accused the company from destroying the entire game.

I think its a sign of everything that went wrong with Starwars galaxies the biggest was the bad press, and that NGE failed. Torres refused point blank to accept that the game was a failiure, i think the biggest thing for me was the lies. i think for any company to offer somthing unique such as the best trainer necklace which allowed you to charm higher level monsters only to remove the entire class was the biggest problem.

Starwars may be a faliure but it would only have been time before another company did somthing as catastrophic as completly rewriting the entire game and forcing it on their public.

I think the biggest wake up call was that the player base isnt as loyal as what you expect and when you remove the fun from them they will go elsewere in a blink of an eye. and once you loose your player base your game dies very quickly.

I think that on all mmos there is a red line drawn across in the incoming vs outgoing, SOE has a history of just putting games on lifesupport with little or no patches and practically no new content as long as folks are prepared to dish out the money they will leave it like that.

Eventually someone did admit the mistake. It took a change in producer and such. Sorry, do not remember who or when but you can probably find the post if you look.

I left SWG for a while after NGE. It took nearly two years for SWG to return to something that I found enjoyable. There are things I like about it now and things that I miss, but that is the way it is. I can find something in most online games to like, even if I do not like the game itself.

[Flatfingers]

Eventually someone did admit the mistake. It took a change in producer and such. Sorry, do not remember who or when but you can probably find the post if you look.

Here's what Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley said to WarCry's Dana Massey concerning Star Wars Galaxies and the NGE (http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/interviews/2301-John-Smedley-Exclusive-Interview-with-the-SOE-CEO.2):

"With the NGE, I'm sorry about the mistake we made," [Smedley told Warcry]. "We screwed up and didn't listen to the fans when we should have, and it's not a mistake we're going to make again."

The NGE completely altered Star Wars Galaxies, a game that had launched in cooperation with LucasArts over two years before. Classes disappeared and the game fundamentally changed in almost every way. It came as no surprise to observers that this change was massively unpopular among the playerbase.

And what was the mistake SOE made that Smedley is sorry for?

"[The mistake was] to not just think we know the right direction without bringing the fans into the mix," he explained. "We made the cardinal sin of not listening, but assuming and we were wrong."

Good to hear, I thought... but of course it raises some interesting questions.

Which fans were SOE listening to when they changed the original design of SWG from playstyle-balanced content to combat-focused content, starting from Day One all the way through the Combat Upgrade and into the New Game Experience?

If Smedley was right that SOE shouldn't have listened to the fans who wanted those things, which fans should SOE have listened to?

And are any of those fans here on the STO forum today? If so, what lesson should Cryptic draw from them concerning SOE's mistake?

--Flatfingers

[wootage]

I really don't know how its "Star Wars" nothing about that game will have anything to do with the Star Wars Universe that most fans know anything about. The only thing it really has is lots of Jedi and Sith runnng around. All of the familiar storylines are missing. I am not saying it won't be successful but it won't be the ultimate Star Wars game set so far before any of the films.

Don't get me wrong..I actually like the KOTOR games and I'm looking forward to the MMO but I'm not sure its any more Star Warsy than SOE's product.

It's the feel of how it plays that I'm referring to. From what I've seen so far, they want you to feel like you're playing a Star Wars canonical character in an epic storyline in the Star Wars canon universe, and doing so with Star Wars canon approach.

SOE's approach was to recycle the party with tank, dps, healer, buffer and crowd control model taken from fantasy novels, where that is canon and works well with that kind of story.

I actually can't recall any scenes in any Star Wars movie where all of the principals got together to fight the bad guys at the same time, and used their abilities to help and heal one another a la the FRPG approach. Generally, they had one or two together at any one time (not counting droids), all pursuing some thread of the main story.

[OrabIbo]

I think SWG failed mostly because:

1. It was to complex, but because of this complexity. It made it different than any other MMO out there! It still is unique, in crafting, player housing/cities. GCW, I wish they would have left squad NPC's at 3, but they changed it to only 1. Droids!... etc...

2. Because of this complexity and uniqueness nobody could learn it very easily. This isn't a bad thing, but SWG needed a good tutorial from the begining. and quite frankly it launced without one! Then it got a slight overhaul with very vauge instructions. then they made a HUGE leap in tutorial goodness. But it was so fantastical and felt just like the movies, that when you got in to the game, they dropped the ball big time!

You were introduced to Han Solo and Chewie and once in game you never saw them again! Rebel vs. Imperials vs. Neutral should have been a choice at the very beginning. And probably should of had unique races for each side. And each side should of had their own starting area and unique tutorial. But they did a half ass job all around.

Anymore, though I draw alot of my MMO experience from SWG. Because there was alot of game mechanics in that game that one should appreciate. It just didn't work together very well as a hole. It definately needed more follow through.

[wootage]

My opinion: SWG failed for one major reason alone: It was an MMO decorated to look like Star Wars, but felt nothing like it.

That's what I'm talking about. I started as a rifleman, with a gun. I was told to go clean up some nonaggressive pests. Fine, I went and found one and shot it.

It ran up to me and started biting me in the kneecap instead of running away or dying. So I shot it again. And again and again and again and again - I put a full clip into it's friggin head and it didn't die.

Riiiiggghhht. That sure really feels like I'm living a character in a Star Wars movie.

So I ran around town and saw two people dueling. They were stationary, hitting each other. Hokay, I watched for a minute. Then another. Then another and another and another. Then I left, ran around town a bit, came back and they were STILL AT IT. Same people, lower on health and whatever that other bar was (mana bar stolen from FRPG again).

Riiiiggghhht. That sure really feels like I'm living a character in a Star Wars movie. Sub cancelled on the spot.

Edit - just to put a little Star Trek into it, from what I've seen of the gameplay trailer, it won't be perfect, but it will be a heck of a lot closer to the Star Trek experience. Oh and if I have my way on ship loss and replacement, it'll be a LOT closer :D

[Hagon]

Here's what Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley said to WarCry's Dana Massey concerning Star Wars Galaxies and the NGE (http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/interviews/2301-John-Smedley-Exclusive-Interview-with-the-SOE-CEO.2):



Good to hear, I thought... but of course it raises some interesting questions.

Which fans were SOE listening to when they changed the original design of SWG from playstyle-balanced content to combat-focused content, starting from Day One all the way through the Combat Upgrade and into the New Game Experience?

If Smedley was right that SOE shouldn't have listened to the fans who wanted those things, which fans should SOE have listened to?

And are any of those fans here on the STO forum today? If so, what lesson should Cryptic draw from them concerning SOE's mistake?

--FlatfingersYou know, sometimes when I've had a long day, and my kids are whining incessantly and it's giving me a headache, I tell them pretty much what they want to hear to try and get them to finally shut the heck up...........

[DocSavag]

It's the feel of how it plays that I'm referring to. From what I've seen so far, they want you to feel like you're playing a Star Wars canonical character in an epic storyline in the Star Wars canon universe, and doing so with Star Wars canon approach.

SOE's approach was to recycle the party with tank, dps, healer, buffer and crowd control model taken from fantasy novels, where that is canon and works well with that kind of story.

I actually can't recall any scenes in any Star Wars movie where all of the principals got together to fight the bad guys at the same time, and used their abilities to help and heal one another a la the FRPG approach. Generally, they had one or two together at any one time (not counting droids), all pursuing some thread of the main story.

I can't recall a scene where Princess Leia got bored standing in the control room on Yavin IV while everyone else was out shooting at stuff so she logged off to go watch television either but thats what would happen if you tried to make an MMO too close to a dramatic motion picture.

I look forward to Old Republic. I hope its a huge success and I hope it is fun and challenging to play. It won't be just like the movies though because games have a different standard of entertainment than movies. People have to be enganged and have stuff to do and they all have to be important in the game play.

[BanTarleton]

I never really liked the fact that Rebels and Imperials could team up together to fight and beat missions...

[Ayradyss]

Wow. Like some others who've already responded, I feel I could write a book on this. In all fairness, yes, SWG did indeed have some revolutionary ideas. It did have some aspects that I thought were really cool. But as a whole, it failed on many, many levels, IMO. (FWIW, I was a beta tester, then played up until shortly before the Combat Upgrade and all that came out. I left BEFORE the big changes, as my fun had never really come together even in the 'old' game that so many seem to revere.)

Just chronologically speaking, having been a forum member following the development of SWG before release, I thought the FIRST major mistake the dev team made was the time period. I can't really think of many worse choices they could have made. Why? Jedi. Well, mostly Jedi. That and the fact that setting it after 'A New Hope' wedged them into a very tight spot in canon. That left them very little leeway at all to create any kind of new content of their own without worrying about bumping into canon. And of course, did I mention, the Jedi?

It seemed then, and seems now, to me, the most glaringly obvious thing that fans of Star Wars would want to play Jedi. Yes, there were other types of characters in the movies contributing to the story. But the single defining character that jumps out at you as definitively (and uniquely) Star Wars? That reads "Jedi" in my book. So we'll set our game in the one time period when the canon dictates there ARE NO JEDI. (Well, okay, there are like, 2 and a half, but they're all NPCs, so that hardly counts. And 2 Sith, but same there.) Yeah. That's brilliant. :rolleyes: Such was the foundation the game was built upon.

Then we come to the cornerstone of SWG -- the golden rule of Koster and friends: Forced player interdependence. Everything (particularly the economy) was based on this forced interdependence. Bottom line -- your gaming experience, your fun and enjoyment -- whatever you get out of the game -- is dependent upon other players, their whims and wishes. Yes, that's REALLY how it works. Or doesn't, as the case may be. If you get the idea that I'm not a fan of forced interdependence, that I think it's very much the wrong way to go, you're spot on. I want a game where I can log in and enjoy myself -regardless- of what anyone else is doing. That's not to say I want to play alone, that I don't want to group, that I don't want social interaction. Not at all. It merely states that I don't want my enjoyment of the game to be -wholly dependent- upon any of these things. Certainly I want to have them all available to me so that I may participate in them to whatever degree I desire at the time. But tell me that if I want to get a better <whatever> the ONLY way to do so is to go find some other player who makes it and pay whatever price they want to charge, and if I don't have the thing I am essentially gated from progressing in the way I desire . . . that's not fun at all. Give me a challenge to overcome to obtain it, sure. As long as there's a way that doesn't absolutely require my fun has to be dependent upon someone else.

As for the vaunted crafting system . . . I don't see it. Not entirely anyway. It did have some good aspects. Experimentation to produce superior items and such was very good. The resource system, however, was atrocious! They didn't stop at having several hundred different types of materials, they also made infinite unique sub-types of each material, which really made no sense at all, IMO, and caused whole cascades of issues throughout the game system. Perhaps the largest issue was simply the massive data storage required by all this, which constantly resulted in player storage and inventory limitations being cut back or limited very uncomfortably. Everyone suffered for needless complexity that, IMO, didn't actually make the system any better (read: more enjoyable). Another example of a potentially brilliant system painfully hobbled by bad choices in the implementation.

And then there was the content. Was there? Not really. There were worlds. With . . . big open fields, hills, mountains. And trees. And of course lots of monsters. Great scads of open wilderness to run around and be attacked in. Because in the movies, they all ran around in the wilderness so much and . . . well, hey, there was Endor, right? And the desert of Tatooine. That's wilderness, of a sort. Yeah. SWG was a sandbox because sand was about all there really WAS to it. Plain and simple. If you wanted story content, there were a few 'theme park' areas that had some basic mission chains, but you weren't going to find anything terribly deep, nor anything that was going to last through that much playing time, for an MMO.

The 'NPC cities' were okay, but on the small side and IMO, lacked a feel of being a huge metropolis in a futuristic galaxy. They felt more like old-West frontier towns. Maybe that's okay for Tatooine, but the Corellian cities, Naboo cities and so forth? Not for me, anyway. There was still very little indoor activity. (Okay, there were cantinas, but I get to those later.) Mostly, the cities were outdoor mazes with walls painted like buildings. It didn't feel like a city to me, more an overgrown hedge maze. Just my own take, but that's how it seemed from here. And then the 'player cities' -- another vaunted feature. How I hated them. I loved being able to have my own house and decorate it -- that much is true. I think the whole system for object placement and manipulation was great and I've not seen anything to equal it in any game since. But letting people put up actual buildings across the countryside willy-nilly? Bad, bad idea. If they'd used instanced housing in the existing cities, perhaps added some new dev-built cities for such things -- it would've been great. But again. Great ideas, bad final implementation.

The social aspect. SWG had the greatest potential of any MMOG I've seen so far, and again, mucked it up through their own designs. Sound like a familiar refrain? It should. I played a Dancer. That may sound odd, as generally Dancers are not a class in RPGs. But SWG had it. It was fun at times. It had great potential for enjoyment. Of all the things I miss, I think I miss the dancing the most. Strange? Perhaps so. But true nonetheless. They had a viable, reasonably enjoyable system for dancing as well as (instrumental) music. It wasn't something you'd want to sit there just doing over and over (then again, there are those crafters . . . hmm . . . but I digress) but with some other players around to socialize, it could be great fun. So what went wrong this time? First, macros. Second, the phenomenon that came to be dubbed 'the hologrind.'

Macros made any sequenced, repetitive keypress type actions something you could program and essentially, 'bot.' Unfortunately, dancing and music, being non-combat things done in relative safety turned out to be prime candidates for this sort of thing. Suddenly you've taken the portion of the game specifically designed to be the social aspect and made it a 'botting fest. From social to AFK play in one fell swoop. Again, in my opinion, this was a bad design call, and something that seemed kind of obviously so. But if a person didn't really want to engage in the social part of the game, they wouldn't really play a dancer or musician in the first place, would they? So why would it be a problem?

Well . . . don't forget the forced player interdependence -- remember, I said that was a cornerstone woven throughout the design. Combat types were forced to seek out the dancers and musicians because they accrued 'battle fatigue' (BF) and required such entertainment to relieve it so they could get back to fighting again. While this made a certain logical sense, to bring folks together, people being what they are, it ultimately failed. Those combat types who didn't want to deal with the whole social side, or felt they didn't want to spend time running around searching for a dancer or musician when they needed to get rid of BF found ways around this. Namely, they could create a 'bot dancer/musician, macro them up through the needed experience points to gain the desired healing and buffing skills, and then use said 'bot to take care of their BF healing. The tools were all there, they -could- do it, so they did. This served only to make things worse for those who actually wanted to play the dancers/musicians. Most of these activities were limited to specific locations (cantinas) -- at least originally -- so the 'bots were all competing for space with and sometimes displacing these types of people.

And then came the Hologrind. The ingenious method to unlock the Jedi class. One had to master three or four (I'm murky on it now -- it's been a while) of the profession trees. But they were randomized for each character at creation and you didn't know which they were. So . . . you've got neat, but decidedly niche professions that can be mastered via macros . . . how hard is it to see where that's leading? Whatever semblance of the devs carefully planned system of interaction there was was totally decimated by the hologrind. Some brilliant ideas, combined with dreadful implementations and mechanics that utterly destroyed them in practice.

To me, it was as if the devs picked out a wonderful selection of 'gems' -- great ideas that had huge potential -- and then threw them all together in a system that they never really looked at from the outside, as a whole. For every shining gem, there was a system that thwarted it perfectly. An ingenious system of self-sabotage. And this is all long before the CU or NGE or any of that. I, and many other Beta testers, all said vocally that the game was not ready. Another 6 months or so. But given the tendencies of the dev team toward a willful blindness when it came to the way their own systems interacted as a whole . . . I'm not sure time alone would have made the difference. There were indeed other issues such as unfinished classes, unbalanced, unfinished classes, and so on that others have already mentioned.

All in all, I feel SWG was a somewhat tragic failure -- so much promise all doomed by the overarching systems built up around all the little neat ideas. I wanted to love it. I really did love little bits of it. But that just made me hate the rest all the more.

If I had any advice to give based on SWG, I think it would be to take a HUGE step back and look at your game as a whole, as objectively as possible. See where the various mechanics are leading and how they interact. Don't try to force player interdependence. Do make a game where people can -choose- to which degree they'd like to interact at any given time and where they can pursue things via more than one route -- alone, duo, grouped, etc.

[carnagefiend]

^
Excellent post.

In that regard, has anyone played Tabula Rasa? Well, I suppose "had" anyone played it since it's a decidedly failed MMO. What did Tabula Rasa fail to do that STO dev team could learn from?

[OddjobXL]

Wow....

I was in from Beta, on and off, until now. That's right. I'm still there. My community and the cool toys (speeders, pets, droids, multiplayer ship, fully decorated bunker and assorted other toys) keep me around. I'm not always the most active guy this late in the game but when I log in I always see someone I know and find something to do. A very good PA has adopted me more as a consultant than a terribly gung-ho participant but as I get older I find thinking and writing about MMOs and roleplaying is what I spend more and more of my time doing anyhow.

My Ship (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?topic_id=756618)

My Base (and some old pics of very early times in SWG or what I think of as the Vagabond's Rest era). (http://s186.photobucket.com/albums/x162/OddjobXL/?start=60)

Holowood Galactic Studios - My Pals (http://guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=70851&TabID=613051)

Just chronologically speaking, having been a forum member following the development of SWG before release, I thought the FIRST major mistake the dev team made was the time period.

It seemed then, and seems now, to me, the most glaringly obvious thing that fans of Star Wars would want to play Jedi.

I think this makes sense. I'd have done what STO is doing and pushed the timeline far ahead, past anything that's been published, but lifted the key elements of the original Star Wars to create the right vibe. Let the future belong to the players and the fans. It's very smart. The Jedi are a defining element but let's not forget neither space nor The Empire was properly represented in SWG. If there's no Empire to fight it doesn't really matter if you're a Jedi or a swashbuckling, smart mouthed, gunslinger: There's no Star Wars. And if you're dealing with the very property that gave birth to a thousand Han Solo wannabe games like Privateer the least you need to do is pay tributes to those tributes by incorporating the key elements to make space come alive. They wish they were Star Wars. You are.

Then we come to the cornerstone of SWG -- the golden rule of Koster and friends: Forced player interdependence.

There's both truth and distortion in this analysis. Yes, you needed at least the marketplace to get ahead but my character never really joined a PA the entire time he was in the game until quite recently. It was very possible to get by as a soloist if you knew what you were doing and built informal ties (much easier in SWG than in other games because of the massively mutually dependent nature of resource gathering and crafting) with other characters. The player city mechanic was invaluable to me in this way. Player cities weren't based on guilds but on whomever wanted to be part of the city. In Vagabond's Rest I'd say half of our population were primarily solo players who came to the city for roleplaying, healing, or the occasional merchant transactions. But they did have that social center to make contacts and friends so when the going got tough or they wanted a more group oriented experience there was that option too.

Later on this became weaker as player cities atrophied due to player city shuttles to NPC hub cities and the rapid growth of the shanty towns for vendors outside of them.

Many soloists in the early days adapted to the game rather than trying to buck it. You'd see people who absolutely loved being scouts or rangers and the whole, lively at the time, wilderness mechanic. This was an instance in which SWG truly shined but it's also Exhibit A in the misplaced priorities binder. There were no Jedi, was no Space, and no believable Galactic Civil War. But you could play a damn fine game of Grizzly Adams.

As for the vaunted crafting system . . . I don't see it.

I think you'll find thousands of crafters who to this day will cite that very flexibility and depth as the best example of crafting in any MMO to date. Yes, it was complex and took effort but that's what made it interesting and perhaps even more importantly could help a crafter really stand out as being qualitatively better than another crafter. Listen to those guys talk and they took amazing pride in what they created, in helping customers (and acting as unofficial Helpers as they explained how a product would work), in aggressively finding the best resources and stockpiling them or trading them, and the fame doing it all well would bring. How many famous crafters or traders are there in any other game? SWG was full of merchants (who could also become famous or infamous for great selections of stock and how their stores were decorated as players physically had to go visit them) and artisans who were household names on a given server.

This is another example of something SWG actually got right. And it's Exhibit B in the misplaced priorities binder. How important is this to people coming to raid the Death Star? Does this have anything to do with Star Wars?

If you wanted story content, there were a few 'theme park' areas that had some basic mission chains, but you weren't going to find anything terribly deep...

I'm not a huge fan of the theme park approach. I'd much prefer a sandbox game. However, that experience does need to be shaped to feel like the subject matter. Here it wasn't. While those great vasty wildernesses were great for the rangers and scouts, for surveyors and city planners, nobody else had much use for them. The guy who wants to take on the Evil Empire wants to get in the X-Wing and maybe brag about bulls-eyeing womp rats but not actually have to do it.

The 'NPC cities' ... didn't feel like a city to me, more an overgrown hedge maze.

The NPC cities shouldn't have been in the game at all. Period. They should have left it all up to player cities. Bazaars, Spaceports and the rest. This way some at least would have become real metropolises that people had a reason to go to. As it was, post player-city shuttles, there was no real reason to stick around. Everyone put their vendors up in the suburbs of NPC cities. If you're going to go the Koster route you need to go whole hog.

If you're going the Star Wars route then you need the NPC cities, simply because fans will be looking for them (and should damn well find something more interesting than we found in them) and I'd agree with preferring instanced housing in NPC cities over player cities. However I'd keep them 'open' so people from different areas can freely visit each other and even keep the SWG vendor mechanic so folks would have a reason to gather here or there. Look at the concept of gathering places and common markets in urban design for example.

The social aspect. SWG had the greatest potential of any MMOG I've seen so far, and again, mucked it up through their own designs. Sound like a familiar refrain? It should. I played a Dancer.

They've sinced fixed a good deal of this. And instead of healing mind damage people come to entertainers for buffs (the buffing in SWG borders on ridiculous though - "How do we make X relevant?" Make it a buff or let it give buffs! Problem solved *brushes hands together in satisfaction*). I think macros don't work like they used to so you only rarely see AFK buffers these days. My PA, linked above, has loads of entertainers and they do some pretty elaborate shows. These days, with Storyteller tools, they can create amazing outdoor stages and sets for events and people actually sit still to watch 'em. (I even have trouble sitting still that long watching other people have fun in an MMO, roleplaying ain't a spectator sport, but they pull it off).

And then came the Hologrind.

I'll be honest here. I was never interested in playing a Jedi myself though I know many folks were. I just stayed away from the hologrind. It did not look fun. I play MMOs for fun. As I'm not a powergamer or PvPer either there was no real impetus for me to indulge. I stuck with what I liked doing and didn't worry too much about what other folks were doing but it did make some of my friends scarce for a while.

To me, it was as if the devs picked out a wonderful selection of 'gems' -- great ideas that had huge potential -- and then threw them all together in a system that they never really looked at from the outside, as a whole.

All in all, I feel SWG was a somewhat tragic failure -- so much promise all doomed by the overarching systems built up around all the little neat ideas. I wanted to love it. I really did love little bits of it. But that just made me hate the rest all the more.

If I had any advice to give based on SWG, I think it would be to take a HUGE step back and look at your game as a whole, as objectively as possible.

This is wise. In fact, as much as I loved my multiplayer ship in SWG and as much as many of my friends love theirs, I'm holding back and not lobbying for it in STO right now. Players should be able to do their own thing without being too dependent on others. That's a valid playstyle, actually, it's a reality. Even if you're in the best guild or fleet ever there will be plenty of times you want or have to do something on your own. So, yeah, I agree with Cryptic that this needs to wait.

But one day, I'd like to see that become an option.

So far I think I understand what Cryptic's doing and even the experimental stuff that excites me, procedurally generated missions, IPvP (competitive PvE) and persistant NPC crew pets, all fits the premise and themes of Star Trek. They seem to have a grip on the thematic big picture and care about it in a way I don't think Koster quite did.

Sorry about all the snippage but it seems we're both very wordy folks and there's a count limit.

[DanSeale]

Wow. Like some others who've already responded, I feel I could write a book on this. In all fairness, yes, SWG did indeed have some revolutionary ideas. It did have some aspects that I thought were really cool. But as a whole, it failed on many, many levels, IMO. (FWIW, I was a beta tester, then played up until shortly before the Combat Upgrade and all that came out. I left BEFORE the big changes, as my fun had never really come together even in the 'old' game that so many seem to revere.)

Just chronologically speaking, having been a forum member following the development of SWG before release, I thought the FIRST major mistake the dev team made was the time period. I can't really think of many worse choices they could have made. Why? Jedi. Well, mostly Jedi. That and the fact that setting it after 'A New Hope' wedged them into a very tight spot in canon. That left them very little leeway at all to create any kind of new content of their own without worrying about bumping into canon. And of course, did I mention, the Jedi?

It seemed then, and seems now, to me, the most glaringly obvious thing that fans of Star Wars would want to play Jedi. Yes, there were other types of characters in the movies contributing to the story. But the single defining character that jumps out at you as definitively (and uniquely) Star Wars? That reads "Jedi" in my book. So we'll set our game in the one time period when the canon dictates there ARE NO JEDI. (Well, okay, there are like, 2 and a half, but they're all NPCs, so that hardly counts. And 2 Sith, but same there.) Yeah. That's brilliant. :rolleyes: Such was the foundation the game was built upon.

Then we come to the cornerstone of SWG -- the golden rule of Koster and friends: Forced player interdependence. Everything (particularly the economy) was based on this forced interdependence. Bottom line -- your gaming experience, your fun and enjoyment -- whatever you get out of the game -- is dependent upon other players, their whims and wishes. Yes, that's REALLY how it works. Or doesn't, as the case may be. If you get the idea that I'm not a fan of forced interdependence, that I think it's very much the wrong way to go, you're spot on. I want a game where I can log in and enjoy myself -regardless- of what anyone else is doing. That's not to say I want to play alone, that I don't want to group, that I don't want social interaction. Not at all. It merely states that I don't want my enjoyment of the game to be -wholly dependent- upon any of these things. Certainly I want to have them all available to me so that I may participate in them to whatever degree I desire at the time. But tell me that if I want to get a better <whatever> the ONLY way to do so is to go find some other player who makes it and pay whatever price they want to charge, and if I don't have the thing I am essentially gated from progressing in the way I desire . . . that's not fun at all. Give me a challenge to overcome to obtain it, sure. As long as there's a way that doesn't absolutely require my fun has to be dependent upon someone else.

As for the vaunted crafting system . . . I don't see it. Not entirely anyway. It did have some good aspects. Experimentation to produce superior items and such was very good. The resource system, however, was atrocious! They didn't stop at having several hundred different types of materials, they also made infinite unique sub-types of each material, which really made no sense at all, IMO, and caused whole cascades of issues throughout the game system. Perhaps the largest issue was simply the massive data storage required by all this, which constantly resulted in player storage and inventory limitations being cut back or limited very uncomfortably. Everyone suffered for needless complexity that, IMO, didn't actually make the system any better (read: more enjoyable). Another example of a potentially brilliant system painfully hobbled by bad choices in the implementation.

And then there was the content. Was there? Not really. There were worlds. With . . . big open fields, hills, mountains. And trees. And of course lots of monsters. Great scads of open wilderness to run around and be attacked in. Because in the movies, they all ran around in the wilderness so much and . . . well, hey, there was Endor, right? And the desert of Tatooine. That's wilderness, of a sort. Yeah. SWG was a sandbox because sand was about all there really WAS to it. Plain and simple. If you wanted story content, there were a few 'theme park' areas that had some basic mission chains, but you weren't going to find anything terribly deep, nor anything that was going to last through that much playing time, for an MMO.

The 'NPC cities' were okay, but on the small side and IMO, lacked a feel of being a huge metropolis in a futuristic galaxy. They felt more like old-West frontier towns. Maybe that's okay for Tatooine, but the Corellian cities, Naboo cities and so forth? Not for me, anyway. There was still very little indoor activity. (Okay, there were cantinas, but I get to those later.) Mostly, the cities were outdoor mazes with walls painted like buildings. It didn't feel like a city to me, more an overgrown hedge maze. Just my own take, but that's how it seemed from here. And then the 'player cities' -- another vaunted feature. How I hated them. I loved being able to have my own house and decorate it -- that much is true. I think the whole system for object placement and manipulation was great and I've not seen anything to equal it in any game since. But letting people put up actual buildings across the countryside willy-nilly? Bad, bad idea. If they'd used instanced housing in the existing cities, perhaps added some new dev-built cities for such things -- it would've been great. But again. Great ideas, bad final implementation.

The social aspect. SWG had the greatest potential of any MMOG I've seen so far, and again, mucked it up through their own designs. Sound like a familiar refrain? It should. I played a Dancer. That may sound odd, as generally Dancers are not a class in RPGs. But SWG had it. It was fun at times. It had great potential for enjoyment. Of all the things I miss, I think I miss the dancing the most. Strange? Perhaps so. But true nonetheless. They had a viable, reasonably enjoyable system for dancing as well as (instrumental) music. It wasn't something you'd want to sit there just doing over and over (then again, there are those crafters . . . hmm . . . but I digress) but with some other players around to socialize, it could be great fun. So what went wrong this time? First, macros. Second, the phenomenon that came to be dubbed 'the hologrind.'

(note .. edit to fit on to forum)

Well . . . don't forget the forced player interdependence -- remember, I said that was a cornerstone woven throughout the design. Combat types were forced to seek out the dancers and musicians because they accrued 'battle fatigue' (BF) and required such entertainment to relieve it so they could get back to fighting again. While this made a certain logical sense, to bring folks together, people being what they are, it ultimately failed. Those combat types who didn't want to deal with the whole social side, or felt they didn't want to spend time running around searching for a dancer or musician when they needed to get rid of BF found ways around this. Namely, they could create a 'bot dancer/musician, macro them up through the needed experience points to gain the desired healing and buffing skills, and then use said 'bot to take care of their BF healing. The tools were all there, they -could- do it, so they did. This served only to make things worse for those who actually wanted to play the dancers/musicians. Most of these activities were limited to specific locations (cantinas) -- at least originally -- so the 'bots were all competing for space with and sometimes displacing these types of people.

And then came the Hologrind. The ingenious method to unlock the Jedi class. One had to master three or four (I'm murky on it now -- it's been a while) of the profession trees. But they were randomized for each character at creation and you didn't know which they were. So . . . you've got neat, but decidedly niche professions that can be mastered via macros . . . how hard is it to see where that's leading? Whatever semblance of the devs carefully planned system of interaction there was was totally decimated by the hologrind. Some brilliant ideas, combined with dreadful implementations and mechanics that utterly destroyed them in practice.

To me, it was as if the devs picked out a wonderful selection of 'gems' -- great ideas that had huge potential -- and then threw them all together in a system that they never really looked at from the outside, as a whole. For every shining gem, there was a system that thwarted it perfectly. An ingenious system of self-sabotage. And this is all long before the CU or NGE or any of that. I, and many other Beta testers, all said vocally that the game was not ready. Another 6 months or so. But given the tendencies of the dev team toward a willful blindness when it came to the way their own systems interacted as a whole . . . I'm not sure time alone would have made the difference. There were indeed other issues such as unfinished classes, unbalanced, unfinished classes, and so on that others have already mentioned.

All in all, I feel SWG was a somewhat tragic failure -- so much promise all doomed by the overarching systems built up around all the little neat ideas. I wanted to love it. I really did love little bits of it. But that just made me hate the rest all the more.

If I had any advice to give based on SWG, I think it would be to take a HUGE step back and look at your game as a whole, as objectively as possible. See where the various mechanics are leading and how they interact. Don't try to force player interdependence. Do make a game where people can -choose- to which degree they'd like to interact at any given time and where they can pursue things via more than one route -- alone, duo, grouped, etc.

This is unquestionably one of the best posts on this topic todate. IMHO there were some other issues that have also been well presented .. such as issues that were so late being fixed, the exteme swings in addressing (or nerfing) other issues, charactors or contient ...

That's not to say that there was not some good stuff in it : there is ! However, the simple fact is that these itmes so over shadowed the good .. it has seriously impared the future of the game.

[Captain.Hunter]

Wow. Like some others who've already responded, I feel I could write a book on this. In all fairness, yes, SWG did indeed have some revolutionary ideas. It did have some aspects that I thought were really cool. But as a whole, it failed on many, many levels, IMO. (FWIW, I was a beta tester, then played up until shortly before the Combat Upgrade and all that came out. I left BEFORE the big changes, as my fun had never really come together even in the 'old' game that so many seem to revere.)

[snip - just to fit the post in, lol]

All in all, I feel SWG was a somewhat tragic failure -- so much promise all doomed by the overarching systems built up around all the little neat ideas. I wanted to love it. I really did love little bits of it. But that just made me hate the rest all the more.

If I had any advice to give based on SWG, I think it would be to take a HUGE step back and look at your game as a whole, as objectively as possible. See where the various mechanics are leading and how they interact. Don't try to force player interdependence. Do make a game where people can -choose- to which degree they'd like to interact at any given time and where they can pursue things via more than one route -- alone, duo, grouped, etc.

Amazing post!

Dead on to what the OP was asking for and hopefully something Cryptic will see - leading to a better STO for everyone (very profitable for Atari/Cryptic and great fun for us players)

[Flatfingers]

Ayradyss, anytime you feel like putting together a post like the one already being praised here, I'll read it. I do not agree with all of your points, but you make them well and without unnecessary personal commentary.

Good stuff!

Naturally, as someone else who's convinced that there will some day be a book written on the rise and fall of SWG, I can't resist a few responses. :)

Time setting: agreed. The apparent failure of both LucasArts and SOE producers to appreciate the criticality of Jedi to the franchise, and to wrap SWG around that seemingly obvious feature, is the single most baffling thing about that game. Setting SWG in a period when there are no active Jedi -- and then letting everyone unlock a Jedi character slot -- was absolutely baffling as a design decision, because even in foresight it was guaranteed to antagonize every medium-scale fan of the franchise.

Points to Cryptic for perceiving this and not setting Star Trek Online between TNG and DS9 (or between TOS and TNG, although a TV series might do that some day).

The Hologrind: I think we have to be a little careful with this one. My understanding is that the guy who was asked to design this was given two weeks before the game launched to figure out how to wedge it there. So I cut him some slack on this. My ire is reserved for the LucasArts and SOE producers who did not understand the importance of Jedi, and who allowed so much time to go by before considering how to allow players to have Jedi characters.

Even if allowing players to have Jedi characters was forced on the design team by Marketing, the producers should never have permitted that to happen -- they should not have needed Marketing or some Executive Vice President for Something or Another to tell them that Jedi needed to be the starting point of SWG, rather than an afterthought.

I've said in the past that the design for how to unlock the Jedi character slot (mastering four professions randomly generated when a "holocube" object was activated) was an extemely poor one because it was bound to cause Achievers to simply grind their way through professions. When that became widespread in the game -- which is exactly what happened, leading to the invention of the term "hologrind" to describe it -- it devalued the gameplay of everyone who was a Dancer or Chef or Image Designer or Ranger or Droid Engineer because they actually enjoyed that gameplay.

For these reasons, I still think "master four random professions" was a bad design for deciding who'd get to play a Jedi. (As a game based on a licensed IP, I favored unlocking Jedi based on a player's in-game behaviors.) And the existence of a strong macro facility (discussed below) made this effect much, much worse.

But based on learning about the abdication of the producers to bake Jedi into the core framework of all of SWG's gameplay from the very start, I'm willing to go a little gentler on the developers involved.

Forced player interdependence: I've written a lot on this subject, but here's the short version: Promoting voluntary interaction = good, forcing interdependence = bad.

As an experiment in massively multiplayer game design, it was interesting to see how different kinds of gamers behaved toward each other in SWG when forced to do so by the gameplay. (Battle Fatigue, requiring combatants to visit Entertainers, was indeed the most blunt-force example of this design philosophy.)

But while an interesting experiment, I'm not sure it was wise to implement it as gameplay. I'm not sure how it could have done anything but embitter some players toward others. (In particular, as I've observed elsewhere, it was mostly combatants who were made dependent on others. As time went on, the combat content in SWG was enhanced to the general exclusion of non-combat content, both with the addition of dungeons and of loot drops that were increasingly better than anything master crafters could make. The direct result of this was that combatants needed non-combatants less and less. Since non-combatants had never really been designed to need each other, once they were no longer needed by combatants, those non-combat professions could be done away with... and so they were.)

The alternative to forced interdependence would be a design in which players are rewarded for interacting with others, but are fully able to enjoy the gameplay they prefer without having to stop what they're doing just to allow some other kind of character to progress.

So here's another lesson for Cryptic. To what extent will characters who've specialized in Engineering and Tactical and Science divisions (or their non-Starfleet equivalents) be forced to depend on each other, or rewarded for interacting with each other?

Crafting: This is one point where I disagree strongly. Experimentation was about mechanically adding points to the one most important characteristic of an item to increase its stats -- there were no "interesting choices" to be made.

The great pleasure of crafting in SWG was in the resource hunting game. Accumulating resources was fun even for me, and I'm infamous around here as a non-Achiever. :D In fact, the minigame of identifying the most desirable craftable items, figuring out the resource characteristics that mattered most to making the best such items, and then finding those resources... that was not only an entertaining intellectual challenge, it offered opportunities to explore the planets of the galaxy and to earn a comfortable living doing so.

Actually making stuff wasn't so much fun. Click, click, click, etc., unless you were guild-backed and out to try to crush all others economically, in which case you didn't even bother with "crafting"; you just turned on your manufacturing plants to crank out zillions of copies of the same product.

The big problem non-crafters seemed to have was the price of rare items in a fully player-run economy. But many of the most expensive items weren't crafted; they were very rare loot drops, such as the peko-peko albatross feature needed for RIS armor. By far most items for sale were well within the budget of even casual players, especially since crafters had no choice (in SWG's "perfect competition" economy) but to compete with each other on price, rather than on features.

So on balance, while I'd agree that crafting could have been better (in fact, I'd expressed previously my opinion that crafting generally got ignored by SWG's Live Team developers who focused obsessively on providing major new content only for combat), I would suggest that the resource-hunting part was actually a major success, while the mechanical "supply fighters with weapons and armor" part was rather less fun.

There's definitely room for reasonable people to disagree there, though.

Macros: I've frothed about this before, too. So I'll just say here that I agree with great intensity that a strong macro facility -- and by "strong" I mean that it offers conditionals, loop constructs and/or large line counts -- is an extraordinarily bad idea for a MMORPG.

The potential of a strong macro facility to degrade the social aspect of a MMORPG is very high. Seeing such a "feature" in Star Trek Online wouldn't quite be a deal-breaker for me. But it comes close.

...

There's much more that can -- and no doubt will :) -- be said about SWG as a source of lessons for MMORPG design, production, and support.

But I'll close by quoting the very good advice offered earlier:

If I had any advice to give based on SWG, I think it would be to take a HUGE step back and look at your game as a whole, as objectively as possible. See where the various mechanics are leading and how they interact.

The details matter, but there is no substitute for a holistic understanding of how a massively multiplayer game's design will work both as rules-based gameplay and as "law" creating a social world... and of how those two things affect each other.

My impression is that the design vision for Star Trek Online is nowhere near as expansive as that for SWG. I guess we'll have to wait and see whether that helped Cryptic create a successful and satisfying gameworld that properly leverages the IP.

Maybe that will make an interesting contrast with SWG when the book on it finally gets written.

--Flatfingers

[Erozo]

Think what is killing SWG is the lack of content and glitches. I still play, and that is what is killing it for me. Plus there are player that just kill the game with their foul mouths. OMG it is bad at time.

[kien360]

Also the lack of certain content they had started to integreat in post nge like proffession based missions you couldn't complete although they had started to set up for it. I just hope that STO finds the right balance in the game making interesting and not having the need to dramaticly change it like SWG I've been on and off swg but not fully satesfied as when it first started.

[phantomstar]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

Star Wars was pretty much a fail because they didn't have a real plan, its how Sony does everything. Then after they stumble through beta and wait just long enough for people to lose their excitement, then they try to change the game and make it better.

What Sony calls release should still be beta. If they don't release to early then Star Trek will do just fine. If they decide to release a game that has a ton of bugs (falling out of the world, dying constantly, completely unfinished content) then the game will do exactly what Sony's games do.. Fail then try to rebound.

I'm a bit bitter about Sony because its almost like they are half hearted when dealing with the games. The fans are more excited about their games than they are, and if this is the case for any game.. its doomed.

(oh and if you want to use Everquest as an example, it was developed by Verant not Sony.. although Sony funded Verant (aka Brad) they were not fully vested in the game.)

[The-Raver]

I have to agree with a lot of the comments here,i have played swg for 4years now and i still do but the only reason i do is because of the many good friends that i have made there. Now i am ready for a change and this is the game that i have been waiting for and i am glad to say that many of those mates will be coming here too. Soe has had a lot of years to try to get to grips with making swg a class game and have just turned it into an expensive form of msn so cryptic please please take me out of there and bring me happy gaming experiance again :D


I totally agree Curak..

This is most illogical but I keep getting visions of a previous life as a Wookie and a you as a Zabrack.

What's all that about, its all a bit Crazypack Dood, lol.

:eek:

[cipher_nemo]

Why was this bumped from the dead? :p You're replying to a three month old post.

[The-Raver]

Why was this bumped from the dead? :p You're replying to a three month old post.

Just recognised an old friend, and unable to PM him. Not particularly interested in the thread at all, lol.

[Rota]

Why was this bumped from the dead? :p You're replying to a three month old post.

Maybe someone actually searched for a topic they wanted to discuss and bumped an old thread rather than create a new one. OMG!!! who follows the rules like that?!?!?!

Or maybe someone just necro'd it for kicks


edit: just read the post above me. I guess it was necro'd for kicks

[cipher_nemo]

Bad forum etiquette knows no bounds apparently. Oh well. Hopefully we can let an old discussion RIP now. :)

[Dext]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

first off it was 6 years ago an SWG if not doing well because of SOE changing the game play over an over. it has nothing to do with it being star wars an SWG is not STO.

[cipher_nemo]

first off it was 6 years ago an SWG if not doing well because of SOE changing the game play over an over. it has nothing to do with it being star wars an SWG is not STO.

Gah! Doesn't anyone look at post dates. This topic was discussed over months ago. :p

And I will continue to publicly taunt anyone else posting a reply to an old post on a dead thread, lol.

[Flatfingers]

Bad forum etiquette knows no bounds apparently. Oh well. Hopefully we can let an old discussion RIP now. :)

As I said here (http://forums.startrekonline.com/showpost.php?p=337327), I do not agree that replying to an existing thread is "bad forum etiquette." As Rota correctly pointed out, at least that poster has taken the time to search the forum to see if there's already a thread on the subject.

Unless the existing thread is huge (which usually is not the case, and which should simply be closed by the mods when it happens), preferring that users add a comment to an existing thread makes more sense than encouraging the creation of multiple threads.

(Posting to a thread because someone has turned off private messages is definitely an edge case, though.)

Let the art of thread necromancy flourish, I say! :p

--Flatfingers

[WinterPark1701]

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

I played SWG and truthfully found it over all to be a pretty good game where it failed with in content, mostly you seemed to end up running the same dozen missions over and over again. That and when they did the reboot it became pure crap and I never played again. The other thing is I recall that their PVP system allowed some high level characters to basically rape some lower level ones (some jerk-off stalked my character when I started playing for over a month. I literally couldn't play for more than 20 min before he'd show up and just kill me time after time) But really I did like it if only they'd been a little more creative with the missions and hadn't turned it into a huge pile of steaming poo with the reboot.

[Esgar]

From what I heard, mostly because it had considerable poor design and numerous game breaking bugs (though I don't know if this happened pre or post huge change).

-One drink was bugged and was described as giving you 9 str. It instead gave you 999999999999......... in every stat. My friend was talking about a time he used that and a flamethrower to wipe out every PvP flagged player on Coruscant

-Becoming a jedi was very difficult. If your jedi died, he was dead. Period. When you became a Jedi, all enemy bounty Hunters got a mission to hunt you down. Fun times.

-Beast masters could change the frequency of their pet's attacks. What this meant is that they could set it to once every 365 days, and via a bug, their pet would do insane amounts of damage, even if it only did 3DPS ordinarily.

-Abilities that didn't kill you, only forced you to stop playing (Sniper -> Headshot. For whatever reason, it drained your 'emotional' health. Meaning that after a couple of hits, you had to go to a bar and watch dancers for 45 minutes if you wanted to do anything)


Stuff like that (thoguh for fairness' sake, this is all second hand talk I got from a friend who played for awhile). I don't see this happening to STO, which looks very solid (though looks can be deceiving).

[Sorbek]

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game

The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom


In a nutshell this is your answer.

The game was the best game ever period..will be again once these smart people put it back together and SOE has nothing to do with it.

[metl]

Gah! Doesn't anyone look at post dates. This topic was discussed over months ago. :p

And I will continue to publicly taunt anyone else posting a reply to an old post on a dead thread, lol.

And you would be *****ing to them for starting a new thread also without first searching for an existing thread.

[HittingSmoke]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

I only read the first page of posts so most of this is probably repeat.

When the game was first released there were MAJOR bugs that had not been resolved. Things that should have been taken care of in early beta, if not earlier. Entire professions didn't work right (creature handler), and some were just plain incomplete (droid engineer) or both (smuggler). The crowd that joined because they were MMO junkies found this unacceptable and quit. Many of these issues went unresolved for years right up until NGE.

The CU, which revamped the path to Jedi ****ed a lot of people off because people who had worked for months or longer to attain Jedi felt cheated that it was now a matter of questing and grinding, and people who hated grinding were ****ed that it took weeks of boring solid exp grinding to get there.

NGE was the biggest failure of all. I played before NGE for a while and after on Intrepid and I can tell you that was the biggest player fall off of all. There were a steady amount of players right after NGE for a while but it thinned out quickly to the point that you were lucky to see five people in the most popular gathering spots. Everyone logged in was off doing their own thing or tending to their houses in player cities, which were all for the most part abandoned buildings from before NGE.

I came back during a free play period a while back to give it another shot and it was like an apocalypse had taken place. The massive cities abandoned save for NPC's. Player cities were left to rot by entire guilds who had quit. I would see one or two people now and then and strike up a convo, but I felt very much alone and awkward there for it being an MMOG. Like being among the few loner survivors of a very depressing post-apocalypse movie.

The mistake on SOE's part was not listening to the players when they had the chance. You mention the people who quit before the CU because of bugs and the like... Well I played right up until CU as a Master Doctor and I would still have 10 minute lines for buffs waiting even with other Docs buffing in the area. The cities were still inhabited and you could still find people to fly with.

Cryptic just has to be aware of the decisions they make that people here are critical of and make sure they don't do anything that will make the game enjoyably for any sizable group of players.

[wrussandrews]

Well SWG is still online so it must be making money. Unless Bill Gates likes playing it and is funding it that is (there was a rumor that Flight Simulator survived for so long because he liked playing it).

I enjoyed SWG for years, but I am on break from it. Maybe I will go back, maybe not. Space is my focus which is why I am here!

[Rifo]

SOE and lucas arts had a wonderful game at launch and up until CU. Granted there were lots of little bugs to be worked out on the ground, and yea there was A LOT in the way of being OPed with several of the profs (TKA, BH, and commando come to mind right off the rip) but they NEVER should have made jedi an easy task to unlock, the hologrind was a great way to settle it, after you figured out which profs you needed to master from the holos you then had to grind them out (this took much work to solve)

There were also LOTS of people that got down in space and rarely if ever came back to the ground, myself included... The biggest problem was they started trying to match the ease of play offered by so many other MMOs that were coming out shortly there after WoW was the big one... I think the reason they have yet to merge servers is because that is the right out in the open sign that a game is dead...

By no means am I a fan of the present state of SWG, and the NGE... Yea I have been back several times, but if only to launch into space and keep my piloting skills honed :p I do think it'll be at the very least until the launch of either STO first and foremost, or SWTOR which is certainly set in an era of star wars that allows for jedi off the rip, and as much as I hate to admit it that is what everyone wants to be in a star wars based MMO (or game for that matter)

From what I know of cryptic however, is they haven't jumped the gun on a release to date, and with such a project with a name as big as Star Trek... I highly doubt they will release STO as an unpolished, and unfinished game as some of the others that have been released in the last year have been. There have been far too many games that have been hyped up far to much, only to be launched incomplete...

[JadenStriker]

(looks at first 2 pages of post, and the dates on them)
(looks at last 2 pages of post, and those dates)
(realises that the valide points have already been long made)
(pulls out a grill, loads charcoal into it, sprays lighter fluid, lights the fire)

Ok, what does everyone what?
Steak?
Ribs?
Hamburgers?
HotDogs?
CornDogs?

[shadowsafer]

(looks at first 2 pages of post, and the dates on them)
(looks at last 2 pages of post, and those dates)
(realises that the valide points have already been long made)
(pulls out a grill, loads charcoal into it, sprays lighter fluid, lights the fire)

Ok, what does everyone what?
Steak?
Ribs?
Hamburgers?
HotDogs?
CornDogs?

Steak for me please, got some ketchup to go with it? ;)
I'll bring the salad.

On topic:
I never played SWG, but I was bored so I read this thread.

Summarized;
SWG has 2 kind of players, the hard core and the casual.
Hard core hated to see those Jedi's become easily obtainable.
Casual hated not being able to get Jedi straight away.
Both camps hated the many unresolved bugs.
Both camps hated the NGE.
Both camps like to tell long stories about their sides of the story, which kept me entertained for some time. :)

[saint100]

Have just spent all day reading through 22 pages of posts so I'm flippin' well going to write something (I hadn't realised how old the initial thread was!).

Erm...

Well it strikes me that you can't please all of the punters all of the time! I dont think there is much I can ad that hasn't been said somewhere before - but to my mind there are no HUGE holes to start with. Oh there are plenty of 'niggles' for people - rolling, only 2x races, no ship interiors, but nothing that will stop people palying and hopefully enjoying the game from the start!

[andrewprofit]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

I played SWG for a couple years from the games initial release. The big problem with the game for me was the lack of community. There were not as many things that drove players to do things with other players. Killing npc spawns in groups was one of them but killing the same npc spawns 1000 times gets kind boaring even with different players in the the group. Communication was via bubble and very localized.
Poor communications with poor grouping mechinizems and a multi server environment=poor community some planets I could spend 10 hours on and not see or hear from anyone or anything. Since the population was split between servers with different universes there were tipping points where there wasn't enough people on to make the game server viable as being a mmorpg.

SWG was a desert in more senses than one.

Wow on the other had encourages players to group with strangers and friends they force you to see and interact with the npc and player characters. The leveling system walks you through the content. The chat system is much more robust.

STO's success will largely depend on its chat system implementation. They have set the stage for success imo by have a single universe so friends can connect very easily by sharing the same game universe and share the same content. They just need to make sure that players can communicate at verious levels, locally, shipwide, planet wide, sector, universally, player created channels, market channels, etc. Also the ability of players to see other players of the same faction on the map will potentially improve community. I believe they can add more missions to the system over time as well.


The other things that have a negative impact on MMORPGS IMO are player structures and player crafting. Not that all player structures or player crafting is bad. What I mean is that an orientation primarily to those things leads to huge complexities and desubmersion from the game. Running accross a planet and finding thousands of huge mining rigs as in SWG was retarded. It amounts to a microgame not everyone participates in that becomes more complex than the original game and sucks up development resources. Consider crafting an items say a blaster. The blaster has attributes +1 dmg another +2, another +3, etc After a time nobody wants the +1dmg blaster they only want the best.

The funny part is with the space version of SWG they went to the opposite extreme. For the space part of SWG when it was released instead of player crafted they had purely dynamicly procedurally created ship parts that droped from destroyed ships.

Finally, there was a great deal of Nerfing that took place early on the game was released to early. There were broken professions. I remember it was like 1.2 million clicks of the mouse to get to master droid engineer and well I couldn't make a useful droid because they were nerfed or scalled back and the poor excuse for droids I could make I could by higher quality ones from other players.

Wow had the forsight to make crafting mearly a small extension of the players skill sets. A way to make the character more unique. Ideally I think crafting should be more limited to the point where players are really just improving items efficiencies. IE so I find a pistol on a planet with +2dmg. I have some skills with pistols so I improve the item slightly to +2.2dmg.

STO needs to have hubs of activity like the main cities in wow, where people come together. It also needs to allow captains to go explore places no one else has been before.

[Zepath]

The game failed becuse all the Fanboys couldnt get there I win button Jedi easily...

I so agree with this.

The community, along with the over-reactive devs, are the death of most games.

You can't have 100,000 people screaming about their own personal vision of what a game should be .... the Dev's turning the game upside down every 3 months trying to react to those demands ... and expect a game to survive.

The games that have survived out there forever, are the games that knew their vision, stuck by their vision, and let the customer base the game was designed for migrate to them.

Certainly there are those games that have done the above and died ... so be it, that's capitolism.

But far more games have committed suicide listening to the hit and run players that aren't going to stick around anyway ... than have died because their never found their customer base.

[VainEldritch]

... then once you got out into the desert it was really bland.



Well, what do you expect in a DESERT...? A Las Vegas floorshow?

You want lush and gree, do to Dathomir, or Endor.

If STO had the depth of SWG I'd be very happy. Problem, the number of player with the patience for a complex game that rewards in the long term is low and falling as aproportion of the player base (imo).

[Eurian_Daramond]

SOE...wow, what a horrible gaming company.

[CaptainQuirk]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?

The bottom line answer to your question is far more simple:

Because from launch to present day, SOE has insisted on wrapping Star Wars around their game design, rather than wrapping their game design around Star Wars.

The people who left early on did so not because of the game's complexity. They did so because they were not looking for a Starwarsy MMO... They were looking for a Star Wars MMO. Their farewell posts on the forums explained this. They wanted the game to have Star Wars content and the bugs to get fixed. Most of them even promised to come back when the game started to be more like Star Wars. What happened was that SOE introduced the CU, which introduced what nobody in the community asked for: changes to the fundamental gameplay, requiring many to relearn how to play all over again. And thus came the first mass exodus of the player base. The game did not become any more like Star Wars. And there were more bugs than before.

Six months later, in an attempt to attract players from WoW, they redesigned the game yet again resulting in even more fundament changes to gameplay, just as those who had remained after the CU were really getting used to the new system. These changes including the total removal of professions that many had been enjoying and pidgeonholing everyone into linear, cookie-cutter copies of each other, thus eliminating the game's major selling point: Freedom of character development acording to one's personal preferences. There was also the matter of a bait-and-switch scam on SOE's part surrounding the Trials of Obi Wan expansion which introduced new content for professions that, two weeks later, were discontinued. At first SOE refused to issue a refund for ToOW, but when threatened with a class action lawsuit, they complied. Over night, SWG went from a game that was recovering from a serious injury took a near fatal gunshot wound.

The NGE, as this change was called, was touted as being the solution to balancing issues, would make it easier to add content. and to make the game more like Star Wars. And yet it took SOE over a year to add the first bit of real content, the game is still extremely unbalanced, and it's more Starwarsy (nut no more like Star Wars) than ever.

THAT is why SWG's failure is as epic as Star Wars' success.

Because like Cryptic is doing, SOE refused to wrap their game design around Star Wars and insisted on wrapping Star Wars around their game design.

[ussdefianc]

Out of every huge post I read down to the small ones all I see is you hope STO has the in dept crafting and variety of the "old" SWG, player history making, ship and player upgrades, Epic pvp and the chat box of EVE, be true the star trek series, movies and novels, and kill wow

[ExpendableCrewman]

.....screw Wow.......

[quind]

Pre-CU SWG player here -- and SWG is a topic that I hope will finally be laid to rest once and for all. I don't even want to compare STO to SWG just because they're too dissimilar on so many levels. Not to mention that I have high expectations for STO, and even mention of the acronym "SWG" seems as if we're starting off from the wrong angle. (I'm not superstitious or anything, but SWG is an anathema in the MMO universe, after all.)

Essentially, for those of you who are afflicted with the "tl;dr" syndrome, I'm saying leave the past (i.e. SWG) where it belongs: in the dung-heap collectively known as the SOE/Station.com MMO selection.

[Phunix]

Plus that with alot of things the devil is in the details.
Some features can make or break a game, or even just nuances of how things are done. We've yet to see alot more pieces of the puzzle or even a good close up look.

[pixdix]

I play SWG, and subscribed it 2 months ago. I don't really like it...

Sometimes I think:


"Why does Sony or/and Microsoft make those STUPID and DUMB stuff and even create it into a failure for the system and even hurting their reputation!"

That's why I stick to Nintendo, they never did a failure to their reputation and they never invented something stupid, either (some games are dumb, though >_<)

[Releximas]

I'm a former SWG player (pre-CU, stayed through the CU, left shortly after the implementation of the NGE) who realizes that SWG wasn't "Star Wars" from the start (what crafter did YOU see in any of the movies have a major role in the outcome of the story?), but it was 'Star Wars'-like ("StarWarsey"?) enough to keep me interested and playing as a Medic/Shipwright, then later as a Shipwright/Bounty Hunter/Merchant shortly before the CU..... then (a bit unsettling for me) as a level 60 Shipwright/Marksman/Merchant (all on 'Starsider' under "Dilaryn Starhunter" if anyone remembers me! :D) after the CU.

It was an experience, it was actually fun for a while..... before SOE tried to "improve" the game (twice!) and failed (twice!!), the second a worser rendering than the first!

I was hurt (after the CU) to see my character as a FULL Shipwright to be LESS powerful in his re-incarnation as a Shipwright/Marksman/Merchant (lvl 60) than his pre-CU form as Shipwright/Bounty Hunter/Merchant (no level.... just fully competent in 'Light Lightning Cannon' and heavy armor [I've forgotten the type :o]). I did, however, do most of my exploration and badge-hunting with this (gimped) lvl 60 character, and as a result died more often (solo or grouped....' them's the breaks' I thought).

I then took 2 weeks away from the game right before SOE trotted out the NGU and was STUPEFIED upon my return.... : to find my character gone (and on-screen instructions on how to make a new char.) ; to find my professions gone ; to find myself in my in-game home WITHOUT my inventory {including my kiosks, my trophies (collected from badge hunts and in-game events), my harvesters and resources collected, my 2 star yachts (given to me as previous in-game perks) with each ships individual inventory, my 3 personal starfighters, my Corellian Corvette (my own 'Millennium Falcon') with its own inventory, AND over 40,000,000 (that's Forty Million, my entire in-game balance) in-game earned and spent credits representing over a year-and-a-half of subscription and game-play..... ALL GONE!}.... and I only believe that my house was still standing because I had dumped more than 10 million credits into upkeep the previous month!!

Needless to say, when I was able to take stock of my situation (about a half-hour after landing back in the game), I logged out and haven't returned (it has been over 3 years..... my house may still be in-game! If any present players of SWG are reading this rant, check 1300m or so WNW of Tyrena [exit the city on its west side] on Corellia [on the Starsider server] for a mid-size house with 'Di-laryn Starhunter' or 'Asylum' on its sign..... that was me!) since. I hope never to get invovled with another MMO run in such a shoddy way, with such a disregard for the input of its fans (class-action lawsuit for breech of contract, anyone?)...... Cryptic seems to be heeding this lesson, so I am properly excited and hopeful about the upcoming debut of STO.

Oh, if anyone is interested, since SOE has completely gutted the original game/code for SWG, that code (pre-CU) has been taken up by fan-based programmers in an attempt to get the original game back online in private servers..... you can follow (or help) their efforts on SWGEmu.com.

[The.Grand.Nagus]

Wow, what a huge thread. Not going to bother trying to read through 23 pages, just going to say my peice and be done with it. While the NGE definitely didnt help, SWG was only moderately sucessful even before that, and subs were already on the decline before the NGE happened. IMHO, the reason SWG did not perform as well as it could have is the fact that it was more complex than your typical MMO and alot of people didnt feel like spending the amount of time that was required to be competitive. Also, SOE didnt really advertise SWG that much.

[grimmace]

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game


Don't you mean downgraded ;)


The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom

Ya it was unfortunate, I remember when becoming a jedi was a GIGANTIC chore. And jedi's were subject to permadeath which to offset this they were granted the capability of gaining enormous power. I don't remember where the video is now but I do remember watching a recoded gameplay of someone cutting a bloody swath through waves of people like an unstoppable juggernaut, they were not however unstoppable and even had teams of players dedicated to hunting them down and sending them to their perma deaths to start the process over from scratch if they so choose.

It was one of the best games I'd ever player before they did the fun NGE thing and borked everything up, now all you have to do to become a jedi is select it as a class during character creation.... so instead of them being a rare powerful breed of friend of foe, they are a dime a dozen which made the game into an especially sad state :/

I never understood SOE's rational behind completely redesigning their game from the ground up after it had already been released... it honestly made no sense and im surprised that its still running and has not been shut down yet.

[BreachAndClear]

I've only read through the first 3-4 pages, but I agree with what someone said about the timeframe sucking. Star Wars (particularly the original trilogy) is all about the hero's journey and is sci-fi/fantasy. None of that really came through with SWG to begin with. The fantasy element centers around the force and Jedi, which didn't figure into the game due to the time frame, and then rather than omitting Jedi all together they taunted players by incorporating this system that was beyond ridiculous so that a handful of people might stumble upon their hidden Jedi character.

Ignoring the absence of Jedi, the game also lacked the hero's journey. What's going on between episodes 4 and 5? Not a whole lot. There was no story present in the game, nothing the character should be striving to achieve aside from going into endless grinds to raise skills in career paths that are hardly recognizable in the SW IP (A master fencer/biochemist?). So for the first God knows how many hours of the game - with John Williams' score playing - you might be sitting on the outskirts of Mos Eisley punching womp rats to death to raise your brawler skill (I've never felt so immersed in the Star Wars universe before!)

I didn't stick around for but a year - the game IMO was a horrible, unappealing game right from the start. A few years later I tried the demo (after the NGE) and actually found the game to be an improvement but still quite bad. It used to be that you could mix artisan and entertainer skills with combat skills, but now entertainers play the game as though it's a glorified chatroom, and if crafting gets tedious you really can't break the boredom by doing something else with an artisan. The 'story' now gives you the sense that you are doing something important, but it is so disjointed that I never really understood what that important thing is. And that story is the same no matter what profession you pick. So, if you get sick of your Bounty Hunter and want to be a Jedi, you can expect to ride the rails of the exact same content for another 40 levels.

The game was a mess from the start, and now it's just a different kind of mess. The game did have some good points, but generally for every step in the right direction two steps were taken in the wrong direction. I'm not worried about STO making those kinds of mistakes.

[Flatfingers]

The fact that there are still people showing up four full years after the NGE hit who speak positively about SWG-that-was should be a signal to some intrepid game developer that there remains a real market for that kind of world-y game.

Someday, someone is going to make a large, richly detailed, and high-quality online gameworld not based on some pre-existing IP, whose content and gameplay will unapologetically be designed to say, "we understand that there are different types of gamers; we respect your playstyle; and our game will always include content that you can enjoy."

Then -- and only then -- will we be able to say with any certainty whether that kind of game appears to be capable of attracting enough players to make a decent profit over several years.

In the meantime, other developers ought to be capable of hearing the repeatedly cited praise for specific features that people liked in pre-NGE SWG (such as resource-based crafting) and concluding that it might be smart to offer locally appropriate versions of those features in their own games.

Even if some people really do believe that SWG was a "failure," it did have some good parts that could be reused. SWG had some features that its players really, really liked...

...or they wouldn't still be talking about them four years later.

--Flatfingers

[ffmcobalt]

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game

The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom

I have played (and still play) Starwars Galaxies from day one. The VAST MAJORITY of the player base LOVED how intricate the game was. It wasn't a complicated game. The "complication" was choice of professions. There were more than 400 possible profession combinations pre-NGE, which is what people LOVED.

More than 60% of the player base quit when the NGE hit, and they quit because profession possibilities dropped to nine. NINE.

The "casual" players you're referring to aren't correctly defined by the word "casual" and they represent an insignificant percentage of the player base.

There has been a free character transfer service from dead servers to active servers (usually $50) for nearly a YEAR now. I just got an email today saying that they're closing more than a dozen dead servers, leaving the 13 most active servers available.

I play on Starsider (I am the feared Gwaro the Hutt, LOL), the server with the biggest player base thanks to the FCT, and even still the number of people in major cities is ALMOST as populated as it was pre-NGE. Key word: almost. SWG was a HUGE game back in the day because it was EXACTLY what people WANTED. Some wanted to be pirates, leading a life through the venomous underbelly of the starwars world. Some wanted to be imperial generals leading troops in glorious combat for the Empire. Some wanted to faithfully serve the rebellion against the tyrany of the empire, blah blah blah. They could choose from a seemingly infinite number of profession combinations, essentially tailoring their character to EXACTLY what they've always dreamed of doing from the first time they saw the movies. They COULD live their fantasies in-game and everyone LOVED it.

Then the NGE hit.

A giant slap in the face.

THAT is why SWG died, nothing else.

Attack of the Show even hosted a SOE executive in an interview and absolutely skewered him for SOE's epic mistake.

All of this could have been avoided (and can be avoided in STO, which you really can't compare to SWG anyway) by one simple thing:

LISTEN TO YOUR PLAYER BASE.

[Pipsqueek78]

I have played (and still play) Starwars Galaxies from day one. The VAST MAJORITY of the player base LOVED how intricate the game was. It wasn't a complicated game. The "complication" was choice of professions. There were more than 400 possible profession combinations pre-NGE, which is what people LOVED.

More than 60% of the player base quit when the NGE hit, and they quit because profession possibilities dropped to nine. NINE.

The "casual" players you're referring to aren't correctly defined by the word "casual" and they represent an insignificant percentage of the player base.

There has been a free character transfer service from dead servers to active servers (usually $50) for nearly a YEAR now. I just got an email today saying that they're closing more than a dozen dead servers, leaving the 13 most active servers available.

I play on Starsider (I am the feared Gwaro the Hutt, LOL), the server with the biggest player base thanks to the FCT, and even still the number of people in major cities is ALMOST as populated as it was pre-NGE. Key word: almost. SWG was a HUGE game back in the day because it was EXACTLY what people WANTED. Some wanted to be pirates, leading a life through the venomous underbelly of the starwars world. Some wanted to be imperial generals leading troops in glorious combat for the Empire. Some wanted to faithfully serve the rebellion against the tyrany of the empire, blah blah blah. They could choose from a seemingly infinite number of profession combinations, essentially tailoring their character to EXACTLY what they've always dreamed of doing from the first time they saw the movies. They COULD live their fantasies in-game and everyone LOVED it.

Then the NGE hit.

A giant slap in the face.

THAT is why SWG died, nothing else.

Attack of the Show even hosted a SOE executive in an interview and absolutely skewered him for SOE's epic mistake.

All of this could have been avoided (and can be avoided in STO, which you really can't compare to SWG anyway) by one simple thing:

LISTEN TO YOUR PLAYER BASE.

Quoted For Frakkin Truth. And if you plan on making major changes to your game, give your playerbase ample warning.

I got in SWG a month before the NGE, I found out about it 2-3 weeks after I started. I almost quit the day it hit, but decided to stick it out for one reason: I loved my guild and the people in it. Sadly, though, that fell apart after the NGE. I bounced around a few guilds, but after I got ace pilot and hit 90 with my main, I'd had it and finally cut the cord about four months ago.

Now I'm enjoying CoH while I await STO (and SWTOR :D).

[stinkylover]

soe tryed to turn the game into something a casual gamer would want to play. after seeing wows success with a more stream lined game system ( basically easy enough a 4 year old could play it ) swg sold out.
so imo as long as STO sticks to its guns and doesnt flip flop back and forth , especially after the game is established they would already be ahead of swg

the thing is with a mmo release its sink or swim , making sweeping changes after the game is released because its not making as much as u wanted it to is just plain stupid , the fact is that if you do that u will loose the fans u have , and u wont gain ne because, what reasons do new players have to come to your game when the biggest advertising asset u have ( your existing fan base) is telling all there friends how much the game sucks

also if im not mistaken swg released originally with out vehicles basically they had star wars with out actually being in space, so i dunno i guess it be like star trek with out the ships ... sorta doesn't make much sense does it

[Borticus]

To be blunt, calling SWG a "failed MMO" is a gross inaccuracy. The game is still alive and subscribed to by thousands (maybe tens-of-thousands?) or loyal players.

Just because they aren't selling several million subscriptions a la WoW and others, doesn't make them a failure in this genre.

[ffmcobalt]

Quoted For Frakkin Truth. And if you plan on making major changes to your game, give your playerbase ample warning.

I got in SWG a month before the NGE, I found out about it 2-3 weeks after I started. I almost quit the day it hit, but decided to stick it out for one reason: I loved my guild and the people in it. Sadly, though, that fell apart after the NGE. I bounced around a few guilds, but after I got ace pilot and hit 90 with my main, I'd had it and finally cut the cord about four months ago.

Now I'm enjoying CoH while I await STO (and SWTOR :D).

I played CoH for years. I love my squid!

Fire/fire tanks rocked before the Issue 5 nerf.

[Kellir]

I HATED the idea that I was using a SWORD. I never saw Luke or Han use a sword. Never mind the fact there was NO Space Missions. Here I am playing a Star game on the ground. I had just left AC and here I was doing the same damn things in SWG. What dumbass DEV thought of a Star Wars game without the STARS? It was just another EQ.

The bad part was they had some great space games before SWG. X-Wing, TIE Fighter and X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter. I still do not understand how the dumbass DEVS could not have part of those game in SWG.

[ffmcobalt]

To be blunt, calling SWG a "failed MMO" is a gross inaccuracy. The game is still alive and subscribed to by thousands (maybe tens-of-thousands?) or loyal players.

Just because they aren't selling several million subscriptions a la WoW and others, doesn't make them a failure in this genre.

This. They've made a GREAT number of changes over the years (patches, profession updates, heroic instances & rewards, added PVP options, loot possibilities) that make the game a bit more seductive to new players and potentially-returning players to start bringing in more profit than it used to be. They're making an effort again, which is nice.

Recently, they made a change to Jump To Lightspeed with MAJOR performance changes to "Lesser Used Chassis" based completely on the community's suggestions.

[ffmcobalt]

I HATED the idea that I was using a SWORD. I never saw Luke or Han use a sword. Never mind the fact there was NO Space Missions. Here I am playing a Star game on the ground. I had just left AC and here I was doing the same damn things in SWG. What dumbass DEV thought of a Star Wars game without the STARS? It was just another EQ.

The bad part was they had some great space games before SWG. X-Wing, TIE Fighter and X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter. I still do not understand how the dumbass DEVS could not have part of those game in SWG.

If you bother to take the time to get past the first few levels, you won't be using a sword. Even in the movies, Gammoreans used vibro-axes an vibro-swords so don't ignorantly whine about using swords when you didn't bother playing long enough to even get into the game.

Second, Jump To Lightspeed isn't on the ground. It's an entire expansion completely for space.

You shouldn't be talking about SWG. You're like Stevie Wonder telling people who awful having sight is.

[oD_Guardian]

I tried it and I thought it was horrible even when I heard a lot of bad things about it. I gave it an honest chance and it failed completely. Back then just like I am now...I am desperate to play some space based MMO with something I can easily relate to and Galaxies was a total disappointment.

I am hoping that with BioWare working on The Old Republic, it will pretty much make Galaxies nothing more than a memory.

[ffmcobalt]

I tried it and I thought it was horrible even when I heard a lot of bad things about it. I gave it an honest chance and it failed completely. Back then just like I am now...I am desperate to play some space based MMO with something I can easily relate to and Galaxies was a total disappointment.

I am hoping that with BioWare working on The Old Republic, it will pretty much make Galaxies nothing more than a memory.

I bet you didn't even make it to 90.

[KickBone]

I never wanted to be a Jedi and I thought it was great that not everyone could be a jedi with a simple mouse click. I was rifleman/creature handler and I was loving it and didn't mind getting owned by some Jedi from time to time because lets face it he busted his ass so he can own other people but I quit right after NGE hit because lets face it they killed the creature handlers and I loved being one, came back for a short few days after CU just to see if it's any better and then came back 2 months ago again because I got tired of WOW. I still have no Jedi character to this day.

[Redshirt_40067]

The casual players didn't like how complicated the game was which is why they upgraded the game

The hardcore players were annoyed because they dumbed down the game with the NGE

The game then got bad publicity over NGE changes which eventually led to its doom

1. The casual players were what kept the game thriving liong before Lucas' son started playing. He found it too hard, thus the CU/NGE.

2. That wasn't just hardcore players. Casual players left in droves as well because there was no more individuality left in the game.

3. Rightfully so. You can't remake a successful game into a piece of crap and expect people to cheer. Not only that, but waiting to announce the change two weeks after launch of an expansion (with the changes really making the expansion not worth playing) not only lost them that many more subscribers, but they had to refund the money for many thousands of accounts that had bought it.

In the years since the NGE, the game has actually gotten better - a very playable game for the most part, but it's circling the drain. SW:TOR will be the nail in the coffin. I don't say that lightly, I usually laugh at people who claim a game's death is nigh. But all the signs are there. Mostly the huge number of people on the forums and ingame who say they are only sticking around until the launch of TOR. I myself played from Aug 2003 until a couple months ago. My SOE Access sub officially ends forever tomorrow. I'll miss the old memories of places visited, cities cleansed of rebel scum, and the memories from all the other SOE games I played over the years.

[BreachAndClear]

I bet you didn't even make it to 90.

That's hardly a criticism.

It's like when I told a friend of mine that I tried WoW (I played to about level 20) and I hated hit. He responded that he agreed that the beginning wasn't good, but that after level 50 the game was great.

That's like giving me a 400 page novel that is absolutely boring and tedious to read for the first 300 pages and calling it good because the last 100 pages are interesting. Why would I want to pay $15 a month to play a game that doesn't get good until its pretty much over? People can hardly be blamed for giving up on SWG, no matter how 'good' it gets later on.

[DarkyG]

I have played (and still play) Starwars Galaxies from day one. The VAST MAJORITY of the player base LOVED how intricate the game was. It wasn't a complicated game. The "complication" was choice of professions. There were more than 400 possible profession combinations pre-NGE, which is what people LOVED.

Not everyone, they wouldn't have changed it if everyone LOVED it so.

More than 60% of the player base quit when the NGE hit, and they quit because profession possibilities dropped to nine. NINE.

No they quit because the game sucked/sucks, many games including wow only have 9 professions.

The "casual" players you're referring to aren't correctly defined by the word "casual" and they represent an insignificant percentage of the player base.

Making up your own statistics lol

There has been a free character transfer service from dead servers to active servers (usually $50) for nearly a YEAR now. I just got an email today saying that they're closing more than a dozen dead servers, leaving the 13 most active servers available.

I play on Starsider (I am the feared Gwaro the Hutt, LOL), the server with the biggest player base thanks to the FCT, and even still the number of people in major cities is ALMOST as populated as it was pre-NGE. Key word: almost. SWG was a HUGE game back in the day because it was EXACTLY what people WANTED. Some wanted to be pirates, leading a life through the venomous underbelly of the starwars world. Some wanted to be imperial generals leading troops in glorious combat for the Empire. Some wanted to faithfully serve the rebellion against the tyrany of the empire, blah blah blah. They could choose from a seemingly infinite number of profession combinations, essentially tailoring their character to EXACTLY what they've always dreamed of doing from the first time they saw the movies. They COULD live their fantasies in-game and everyone LOVED it.

Again if people LOVED it so, it wouldn't have been changed, NGE/CU Whiners were and always will be the minority.

Then the NGE hit.

A giant slap in the face.

THAT is why SWG died, nothing else.

SWG albeit awful, boring and filled with idiots is still alive, TOR will finish it, and lol slap in the face.

All of this could have been avoided (and can be avoided in STO, which you really can't compare to SWG anyway) by one simple thing:


No reason to think these guys would, but it does get old listening to disgruntled SWG People filthing up every new MMO's forums, games change and evolve and new ones come along comparing this game to swg is not valid in the least.

[Xenoshaft]

A little over 5 years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched what should have a sure thing - an MMO based on the massively succesful Star Wars franchise.

It is a failure - on an almost equally massive scale. Why?

With literally tens of millions of fans worldwide and a huge corporation behind it, it should be dwarfing World of Warcraft in numbers of subscribers. Why isn't it?

I ask these question so that Star Trek Online can avoid the same pitfalls.

People started leaving Star Wars Galaxies by the tens of thousands right after the first month of release (well before the CU and NGE fiascos). So what was it that kept millions of players away from a sci fi game that should have been a no brain winner?


The folks at home all like the same things from the movies; Jedi, smugglers, bounty hunters, and sith. You know, the classic character types from the films we all know and love....

As I said on the SWG forums before the release of the game the biggest issue was the era they chose. Where 50% of people would at least one to try (all be it an alt or main) a "force user" they chose a time where the cannon of the IP would not allow all kind of people to be Jedi or sith. Also No making a difference! You know what happens in the story and you CANT change it NOW! So no plot effects.

The reason it failed is because they chose at time in the story where most people could not play their favorite character types from the movies. And they could not change the outcome of a story they already knew the ending to. Even if you can take part in battles you watched on tv how is that different then watching the movie, we know how it ends.

The end result is while playing SWG no player "FEELS" like they are in star wars. Not to mention some of the other things said here regarding complexity. I think for this and many other reasons we will see SW:TOR capture the SW experience at an amazing level with some fantastic fan interaction.

STO has already learned from that prime mistake made my Sony. For no reason will they NOT let people not play the type of guys they loved from the movies or shows and you can end up making an impact on the galaxy.

1 lets go in to the future so we can do ANYTHING we want with the story and not mess anything up.
(Thanks star trek 11! Oh well we can fix that. "Thank god that was an alt time line!") However keep in mind SW:TOR did almost the same thing but it was so far BACK in time that they won’t mess anything up.

2 Everyone is going to want to command a ship and lead away teams. “Let’s do that!”
(crazy give the players what they want!)

3 Cryptic went way out of their way to make this FEEL like star trek. And form all of the feedback they did a fantastic job.

Thanks guys

[leagion]

Ok to say that SWG was a bad game depends on your point of view.

You will learn that many things change depending on ones point of view.

SWG was and could have been the best MMO ever in all regards to date it is but that is from ones point of view. Why was it a good game because at release it was awesome. There were no jedi. Static spawns.
Sandbox gameplay. No levels. Awesome professions and skill trees. Awesome effects for your character.
Social hubs etc etc.

What made it so good is that you could pick what u wanted to be. If you wanted to fight and shoot and heal. You could.

If you wanted to walk around with 3 grauls and just own everything on the map. You could. If you wanted to own a manufacturing company that employs several droid salesmen YOU COULD.

If you wanted to
Own a harvesting company that moves from planet to planet harvesting elements then selling them to said manufacturing company YOU COULD.

If you wanted to join the empire and walk around with 3 AT-ST wallkers YOU COULD.

If you wanted to create a player city. That was factional. With Turrets and AT-ST walkers, troop emplacements, a shuttleport, a spacestation, a guild hall, a cantina, a doctors office, several shops and booths, a mayor, trainers well you get the picture.

SWG WAS THE BEST GAME EVER. For a few months.

Then IDK WTF happened.

My take was that there were bugs in the game that we never addressed and professions that needed upgrades. But rather than fix the core of the game. The appealed to the audience that wanted playable jedi.

The real issue was that becoming a jedi was a secret and not alot of peeps had figured it out. And the fan boys wanted them. So they changed the game to fit a more jedi audience. THe problem with this was that true game players didnt need or care about jedi. The factional gameplay was awesome in the beginging. Having that occasionaly jedi maybe pop into your battle made it look so much better. If you happen to see a jedi it was like sweet. cuz u only saw one every now and then.

They needed to fix the true problem which was. IF YOU MAKE A SANDBOX GAME YOU HAVE TO GIVE SANDBOX OPTIONS. Such as letting people steal whatever tey want from faction bases and sell on open marktet. Allow players to ejoy static spawns while also creating dynamic content.

man i said alot.

to wrap it up. STO needs to learn that making a game comes first making people happ comes second. Star trek is a very Sandbox universe how they will put it in a multi shard type will be interesting but we shall see.
they can learn not change their good game into a fanboy game. I like my MMOs dirty and ruthless.

The players will want a real world give them that. Not a remake of the show. A dynamic universe that can be explored and then explored again. and camped. and recamped. then also find entirely new worlds to camp and bring your friends too. I dont think they should even launch without ship interiors I mean come on I will wait. I dont think they should launch without player factional bases. and starbases. but thats me.

2 cents

[blarneystone]

A lot of truth in most, if not all of the posts. I think it boils down to something a little more simple:

They completely changed the core game from what it was at launch.

If at launch it had been the game it was after NGE/CU then the game would have been fine. Or if the core game had stayed pre-NGE/CU it would have been fine. You can't start a game one way and completely change it into something else and expect a bunch of people not to get ticked off and leave.

From what I understand, they made the changes based on exit polls of people who didnt' like the game and were leaving anyway. I guess they thought by changing the game they could get those who left to come back, but instead they lost the customers they had.

[Sorbek]

I still play SWG PRE-CU. SWG for life.

Nothing else will compare, ever. Not even STO. Definitely not TOR, WoW, or CO. Thats not an opinion. Just a fact, so deal with it.

[andeolus]

I mentioned this in another post, but for me I think the biggest issue I had with SWG was the setting. That time frame was the absolute WORST idea for an MMO. They could have set it in any period they wanted, but they chose a setting that is well established. Why would I ever want to join the Empire when I know exactly waht's going to happen to them? Not only that, you can't ever advance the stories. Years in, and it's still just after the Battle of Yavin but before the Battle of Hoth. Terrible.

STO on the other hand made the brilliant move to set the game in a time that isn't bogged down with a lot of established story. This game can go for the next five years and who knows what will happen. Maybe in two years the Romulans and Klingons will join to become a faction. Or, the Klingons and Federation will make peace and the Dominion will become the new second faction. All I know is I absolutely love the developers for their setting. Wonderful!