CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail

Back in December of last year, the CBS News site did a feature printing some of the frustrated and confused emails sent by Star Wars Galaxies players. These individuals were all upset by the 'NGE', or New Game Enhancements, patched into the game by publisher Sony Online Entertainment. Evidently the feature was so popular they've gone back into the well, printing up a whole new batch of SWG-related frustrations. When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now. Second, Sony made a mistake. Warcry has some information that may reveal how big a mistake. They claim that a packet sniffer built into the SWG client made population numbers for the servers available to players. On a Friday night, at peak time, post-NGE Galaxies is apparently only drawing 10,400 players across all galaxy servers. This is basically 'some guy on a website' talk, so take this with a big grain of salt. It's sobering news, though, if true.

CBS gets SWG hatemail?

FYI, IANAG but FWIW I think that CBS, in addition to NBC, WB, ABC, CNN, and TBS and the CBC ought to provide TMI rather than too little regarding MMOG, especially SWG and (OMG) NGE! I take issue, though, with TFA in that I don't think that it's such a BD when CBS and the WP are covering this. MMOGs are still for DSHs living ITPBs.

10,400 is a lot of players. And I certainly wouldn't want my packets sniffed. But, WTF? It's not like it's BB watching you, just a bunch of other DSHs ITPBs.

OMGWTFBBQLOL!

Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

I just don't understand why Sony didn't create a seperate world for people who wanted this "simplified SWG" or whatever you want to call it. Just have a frontend that connects you to a different server that has the patched version if that's the world you want to play in. Is it simply that Sony didn't want to maintain two branches?

Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds?

Because they don't actually give a flying fuck about the customer. They decided that the customer was going to play simplified SWG period.

Notice that they managed to:

• Release a paid-for extension a week before releasing the NGE that basically made the whole extension worthless, pissing off 90% of their user base
• Release the NGE without any talk with the community and without so much as announcing it beforehand, pissing off 99% of their user base
• Make Jedis available as a base class (instead of the player having to work to become a jedi), pissing off every SW fan, and every player who'd spent the best of his 2 previous years trying to get his jedi lightsaber
• Ignore bug reports, pre and post NGE
• Ignore any and all requests to fix the shortcommings of the game and the instability (and basically impossibility to use) the last two extensions of the game.

Why would they maintain 2 code branches when they don't even maintain one in the first place?

10,000 players is still quite a few

10K is peanuts next to World of Warcraft or the original Everquest, but it's still quite a few. 10,000x$15=$150,000 a month in income, not counting income from boxed copies. Assuming Lucasarts is willing to let SOE continue running the game, they could continue running the game indefinitely by cutting the development team down to a skeleton crew and consolidating most of the servers. Of course, it's far more likely Lucasarts will see the game severely sagging and pull the plug entirely rather than let the brand get diluted by a bad player experience. Star Wars games usually aren't very good, but they're generally better than the SWG experience and don't charge monthly fees.

Let me ask you something

"... Lucasarts will ...pull the plug entirely rather than let the brand get diluted by a bad player experience."

Have you seen Episode I? Yeah, he made TWO more! There is no concept of "pull the plug" to avoid a bad user experience.

No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS

To put things into perspective, EA considered TSO a _flop_ when it stabilized at 100,000 subscribers. So 10,000 active subscribers is just dead. There were a couple of MUDs in the 90s which could boast more players than that.

Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development. We're talking a major commercial game, not someone's web-based exercise where making any money in a month is still great.

But I'm guessing they don't even make 150,000 USD a month. Two words: "station pass". If you're already paying for a Sony game, you can get access to all others for half the price of a game. If you already play two EQ games (e.g., Planetside and EQ/EQ2), you get SWG for free. Heck, Sony even offers in-game advantages for for getting a station pass even for a single game, such as getting extra moves (directly or via bundled mini-expansions), or extra character slots or whatever. So you could really play just one Sony game and incidentally get the others for free.

I know that first hand. The periods when I went back to SWG, only to find it a bigger mess and buggier to boot, were just that: I already had a station pass, SWG didn't cost anything extra (other than the download times for the patches) to try, so wth... sure, I'll give it another try.

So the question is how many of those 10,000 are just dropping by between rounds of their main SOE game (e.g., when their guildies aren't online in EQ), but don't actually pay a single buck to Sony for the privilege. It could be none, or it could be that SWG isn't actually making Sony _any_ income, or more probably somewhere in between.

Either way you want to slice it and look at it, it's a major fuck-up. Only 10k subscribers is MMO death anyway, but for a game based on the biggest franchise in history... there are no words to properly describe how big a fuck-up that is.

There were _millions_ of SW nerds who waited for SWG like it was the second coming of Obi Wa... err... the messiah. There were people who grew up with SW. People who put "Jedi" as their religion on census forms and _meant_ it. As Scott Kurtz aptly put it in a comic strip, there were people who said goodbye to their friends and family and never expected to leave the SW universe again. It was a franchise that made Warcraft or The Sims look like peanuts. (When was the last time you've heard someone debate Warcraft as passionately as "Han shot first"?)

And yet they fucked up. They were handed over the franchise and the fans on a silver platter, and they fucked up. There's no other way to put it.

Of course, I suspect that won't stop Raph Koster from giving even more interviews about how great a game designer he is, and spout various stuff like "a MMO doesn't have to be a good game, it's just a social framework" (then how come SWG never was much of either?) or "the biggest MMO success ever isn't WoW, it's Habbo Hotel." (Never mind that Habbo Hotel is a free game _and_ it still doesn't have the number of active subscribers that WoW has. We'll just redefine that as the new metric of success.) But I digress.

SWG Is Doomed

Sony had the right idea, they had to revamp the game. But they took the wrong approach and instead has hastened SWG's death. No one is going to go play a game when all the current players are leaving and ranting how much it sucks. That is repelling all the potential players that Sony is expecting to replace all the players leaving. SWG has been such a disaster and it's fate is now sealed. The developers seem to actually be going in the right direction now but it is much to late and the plug will be pulled soon.

Of course...

SOE is working on getting things right again. I've got a feeling that it was LucasArts that pushed for the NGE to be released well ahead of schedual.

Take for instance the huge list of fixes/changes that are currently on SWG's test center. Most of those are getting positive feedback.

The only real issue I personally have with SWG currently is that the NGE was pushed out too soon, and that they really should have given a greater deal of warning.

deary me sony

i would bet a quid to a penny that those packets sniffers are able to send info to sony somehow.
rootkits, packet sniffers...dear me.
in related news sony announces the decision to change their name to
73|-| 50|\|Y 0|2P3|24710|\|

Biggest problem...

is that Sony forgot to treat its game revamping as an optional expansion, but instead forced players to switch to new rules. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Sony making a mistake?

OUR Sony? Making a MISTAKE? Say it ain't so!

"Sony made a mistake."

The mistakes happened long before the NGE. They were numerous. In fact, every design decision I can recall was tardy and poorly executed. That's why I left with most of the other players long ago.

Sounds like the NGE was a desparate gasp from a company that realized it was trying to support an unsustainable (read: crappy) product. Sounds like the NGE itself is evidence something has been systemically wrong for a long time.

Since the game has been so bad for so long, I'm not sure I can trust any reactions from those still playing. For all I know, maybe the NGE was a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, we'll never know, because it's too little too late for all of us who care about either a rewarding game experience or a minimally competent dev team.

Re:"Sony made a mistake."

I agree, I saw the many problems back Fall 2004 when development was essentially centered around 2-3 things.

Number 1 was that they wanted to fix the Jedi profession, which was a profession you unlocked by mastering 5 random and unknown professions of the 30+ professions. Jedi at this time were extremely powerful. The plans were to change the way to become a Jedi, they turned it into a quest that would take many weeks to complete. The other thing is they restructured the way the Jedi learn their skills. Now the problem here is they concentrated on fixing the Jedi for a very long time, and neglected the other professions in the game who still had many problems and issues that were not getting addressed. Smugglers not being able to smuggle anything was probably the funniest.

Number 2 was rushing Jump to Lightspeed, about half of the team working on Star Wars Galaxies was put on to rushing this game out, this was supposed to appeal to those that liked the old Star Wars flight sims and the new Star Wars games like Rogue Squadron. From what I can tell this seems to have lacked the dynamic content that was wanted, space was and still is pretty static.

Number 3 was the feature creep, new features would be added, and major bugs and issues would go unfixed for many months, if not a year or more.

When a profession got something that was two powerful or whatever, all that would happen is it would face a major nerf that made pretty much unusable. As one player described it in a longer post, they launched as an 747 and tried to change it into a F-16 midflight. It was a hobbled together mishmash of ideas and fixes. Things would break off, things would be patched on haphazardly with what could be little to no thought.

Even when they had plans for the Combat Upgrade, they decided to change that from what the players wanted to this new system that they were developing which was going to be completely different.

Times. . .

When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now. Second, Sony made a mistake.

This story, and the dozens like it, tell me two things as well. First, that people are running like crazy from reality into the warm, waiting arms of entertainment. And Second, that times must be getting pretty rough if this is the case.

-FL

Re:Times. . .

This isn't 1400 when everyone has to slave away in the fields all day to survive, you know.

Sony better hope the SWG team ...

... doesn't find it's way over the PS3 online platform group, if they Sony does intend on beating Xbox Live [slashdot.org] this console generation.

I know Sony's a large company, so I'm guessing SOE and the group responsible for console development is pretty far apart. Anyone know for sure?

Compost Mainstream?

When CBS and the Washington Post are covering something like this, it tells me two things. First, MMOGs are definitely mainstream now.

Parent post is partly meaningless since neither of these media outlets are mainstream anymore. Free broadcast news ratings are a fraction of what they used to be and continue to drop, the Washington Compost's numbers have been dropping for years and will continue to drop (as are all hardcopy paper's numbers).

Perhaps this only a good sign in that both outlets might be starting to wake up and realize they've screwed the pooch, alienated a majority of possible readers/viewers and are starting to seek new audiences.

Impossible to fix

Oh sure there are the obvious bugs that everyone agrees on. The old vehicle repair bug where your costly repair disappeared between vehicle calls affected all players.

But the so called unbalanced proffesions problem is impossible to fix. Why?

Because nobody can agree on what it should be like instead.

Believe it or not but some players actually like the NGE. They hate the fact it is bugged but they like the basic idea. How can Sony possibly hope to satisfy these players while also keeping the fans of the old system happy. Let alone satisfying those players that want a different system all together?

SWG biggest failure is that it never really dared to say, we are X take it or leave it. Imagine if you tried to make a FPS sim and tried to satisfy all at once both the hardcore Operation Flashpoint players and say the Unreal Tournament players. Could it be done? No.

SWG was a 'complex' game. Well to some, personally I think that any person that considered SWG complex is the kind of person who needs a tutorial on lightswitches but that is just me. SWG was a game that might require you to read. Yeah, shocking isn't it?

Now apparently it is 'simpler'. The reason seems simple, they hope to appeal to that mythical gaming group called the casual player. The problem is that this group does not actually exist outside focus groups. Oh, NGE was tested ONLY on focus groups, with no existing players involved.

I could start a long rant about the idiocy of focus groups (first off, what kind of losers possibly have time to be in one?) but lets not. Lets just say that focus groups never ever work.

They didn't work for NGE. By trying to appeal to a gaming group that does exist SOE only managed to split the existing user group in to two camps. The first want the old system back and are upset to be forced onto a bugged system they don't want. The second group kinda likes the new system but is upset about the huge number of bugs.

Halfing your audience (making the totally wild speculation that it is a 50/50 distribution) is not a good move.

SWG NGE is currently a desperate move to copy WoW's success without actually doing any real development. The current system is just ewh. It reminds me of those over ambitious mods that try to take an existing engine were it was never meant to go.

The combat now tries to be a FPS but lacks collision detection and you can only shoot when you have the mouse over the target. Yeah, unlike EVERY FPS out there where you can shoot when you want. This makes melee totally unfun. If you think it is like Jedi Academy think again.

The proffesions now take a bit after Everquests rigid role model but with crafting being a seperate job. So is entertainer. Before you could mix match those jobs with other roles. Now your an entertainer/crafter and that is it. Nothing to do but dance dance dance baby. Oh yeah. In fact both proffesions are now next to useless.

SOE seems determined to take its games into the direction of the simple slash and hack korean games but getting it completly wrong. EQ2 too has had simplifications that ruin it. No more spirit shard and your character running insanely fast ruined it for me.

Personally I am on the look out for a MMORPG like game that dares to be complex. That dares the most daring of all moves and not try to be another FPS shooter because those sell so well.

I am 35, I got money to burn but I no longer like being in twitch games that require me to constantly be twirling around trying to keep a polygon under my mouse cursor.

DDO was a nasty shock. It feels more like playing some console fighter then playing D&D. Just having a die on the screen does not make it D&D.

Oh well, that is what you get for being a minority gamer.

The old faithful should just move on...

The original incarnation of SWG was universally panned. All the game journals give it a thumbs down, and it had a poor subscriber rate. What we're seeing now is the work of the vocal minority who actually liked the original product. Unfortunately, their devotion doesn't make the game any more profitable. I really don't see the problem with a massive revamp of SWG. The game would have been cancelled if not for the retooling. The only other route would have been to scrap SWG entirely and try with a new incarnation.

I am sooo glad I didn't choose SWG

About this time last year, I was considering trying, for the 1st time ever, an online game. I was 5 in '77 and am a Star Wars diehard. I seriously considered trying out SWG. But, WoW had so much good press that I went with it instead. I really feel like I dodged a bullet on that one.

Sadly, I quit WoW 2 weeks ago because of real life time constraints, but I enjoyed playing it immensely.

And, no, you can't have my stuff. I vendored the BoPs and gave the gold to a buddy. ;)

Right idea, wrong way to do it.

SWG was a failure, and with it's licence it should have had the success world of warcraft had. I can't tell you how many WoW players I run into that never played a warcraft game before, but picked up WoW and loved it. SWG was the other side of the coin, everyone loved the star wars movies (or at least the first 3) and had played other star wars games before....It was just that star wars galaxies SUCKED at launch. Leveling was long and boring. At least in WoW from levels 1-30 you feel like you accomplish everything when you log in, and you are moving tward a goal, and you can make visible progress (a new weapon/higher level) with about an hour of playtime a night. SWG at launch was this random crapshoot at trying to figure out how to become a Jedi. In SWG you had to grind reputation points just to pvp, and it never really seemed like there was a 'war' going on. It was often said that it lacked both the 'stars' and the 'wars'. While everyone wanted to be a Jedi or bounty hunter, many were stuck being cantina dancers, or random soldiers with pistols. This was quite a letdown.

It was obvious from about 6 months in that SWG wasn't living up to the hype, and that most players just didn't think it was a good game. Sony did what they could, adding the 'stars' in the expansion pack. Finally they realized that people wanted to live out the roles on screen in game. It was way too late by then, and the NGE just ended up pissing off the small playerbase they had.

They should have kept SWG as it was, and started developing a new MMO, with a new name and the star wars licence. They should have shot for the twitch based gameplay, to the point of possibly recreating "Jedi-Knight 2" fps like mechanics while on the ground and Tie-Fighter/Xwing fighter mechanics while in space along with MMO type rewards for repeat gameplay.

Trying to fix SWG as it stands now is a waste, nobody is going to run back to it, most people are busy playing WoW. These people aren't any hidden demographic either, a lot of them are ex FPS players that were just waiting for a popular MMO with a decent pvp system.

Any starwars MMO should be based on war, and player vs player conflict. Not cantina dancing, or sightseeing in a virtual star wars disney land.

some numbers

10,400 divided by 25 servers mean 416 people per server.

I was 423 in the queue on Wow last sunday.

Eve hit "23,178 simultaneous users on a single server" according to a clipping from another slashdot article.

$150,000 is the cost of a mid-entry level software engineer.

Anything else I missed?

summary of comments

Doom ... doom ... doom. Go home now!

More proof SWG is going down

I run a sort of SWG fan site. Not that I play anymore, but people find the site useful so I keep it running.

Before the NGE, I saw around 1200 unique hits a week. It never went more than 200 away from that, for the nearly two years I had been running it up to that point.

As soon as NGE was announced that started dropping. Now it's somewhere between 300-500 unique hits a week.

SWG failed long before the NGE

SWG has been a comedy of errors for the begining. Remeber the first month, how heavy weapons weren't even avaible? And then when they were they did less damage than common blasters? Or then after that they horribly overbowered the weapons? Or how for a long while a support class (combat medic) was king of all pvp? Or how low lever armor was completely useless and was more detrimental than helpful? Or how they strangely then decided that all melee weapon classes should be comically overpowered despite the original "don't bring a knife to a gun fight" statements? Or how they never actaully did any reasearch into how high quality materials could affect the crafting of armor and doctor buffs and make players virtually invincible? Or how their attempts at "high level content" was to make places filled with ultra-mega-super driods that took 20 people 10 minutes to kill one? Or how they completely caved in and removed jedi perma-death despite saying they wouldn't? Or how they had to COMPLETELY rethink the combat system, admitting it was broken and non-sensicle? The only thing SWG has ever had going for it can be summed up in two words "Star Wars." Thats it, everything since then has been a joke, LA has completely failed on this project, constantly making a bad game worse and worse and worse.

People just don't get it.

Sony is meeting it's goals admirably: piss off and piss on everyone and everything they can. Sell rootkit audio CDs, kill off the cool robots, destroy SWG, fight for ultra-invasive DRM in the next DVD standard.

If you see Sony do something cool or valuable for its customers or humans at large, then something's off and it's time to be afraid. I remember when Sony meant "great quality product." I feel like such a geezer. I'm expecting them to ruin Sony-Ericsson phones any time now. :-(

Today's update hides server pop numbers

www.nrepguild.com/light.jpg

SS taken of the galaxy population screen just a few minutes ago.