Open Letter To Star Wars Players

Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley has posted an open letter to the Star Wars Galaxies Community, trying to start a constructive dialogue with the players. He discusses, honestly I think, many of the reasons behind the still much-maligned New Game Enhancements. From the post: "One last thing I'd like to discuss in this explanation is the business end of things. Many of you question the logic of the decision to do this NGE.. stating that many of the existing players will quit because we're changing the game so much. From our standpoint we have to look at the game for the long haul. EverQuest is will be 7 years old on March 16th. We HAVE to think that long-term. With the game the way it was we knew we would never be able to attract enough people to really keep SWG viable as a business." The players, they do not seem to be in the spirit of cooperation. Here's hoping something good comes out of it.

Thank the force

[TheMotedOne]

A few years ago SWG was a really fun game with lots of diversity, now that Jedi are running around everywhere and the game has lost every scense of what would actually be Star Wars, I am glad they are making a few changes.

A viable buisness plan..

[SpaceballsTheUserNam]

Listen to your customers. Or maybe I'm just being naive.

I tried playing this game when it first came out.

[SetupWeasel]

It was buggy as all hell. There were impossibly hard, aggressive enemies waiting at the edge of the most peaceful cities. Peanalties for dying had to be suspended indefinitely, because everyone was dying all the time.

It's too late to redesign. You lost me and manyyears ago. Don't pretend this is an Everquest. Stick a fork in it... it's done.

Here are some tips for next time:

1) Beta testing, it's not just for consoles anymore.
2) Continuously pissing off people who pay monthly dues is a bad strategy. Listen to complaints, give thoughtful arguments for your position, and offer compromises.
3) Two Words: Gungan Hunts.

This was my first ever MMORPG, and oddly enough, it was the only one that had enough non combat things to do to keep me interested and allowed freedom of movement at an early stage. If it were polished, I might have stayed.

It was required that he say this

[MilenCent]

It's exactly what a guy would say attempting to get people to overlook the incredibly crappy decisions his company has made.

They HAVE made crappy decisions, that cannot be argued against. Either they made them with NGE, or they made them originally and the NGE was required to fix them. However you look at it, it is their fault.

The guy's entire statement reeks of insincere appeasement. They're upset to have removed creatures from the game and will be put back in soon? Then hold off on the NGE until they're ready! They have to plan for the long term? Sure, that explains why they pissed people off by giving them absolutely no warning and released a full, pay expansion a couple of days before NGE hit! They can't put up an unsupported server running the old game because someone might find an exploit? Surely they could just release security fixes for it and not introduce new content! The game wasn't working as a business before? It is not the job of players to be understanding of the corporate behemoths to which they've paid hundreds of dollars just to have much of their work pulled out from under them!

The problem is that, to its core, Star Wars Galaxies under NGE is a different game than Star Wars Galaxies. Even the words behind the acronym, "New Game Enhancements," seem calculated to get people to swallow a pill. They didn't "enhance" the game, they made a "new game" that just happens to use the resources and maps of the old one, and completely replaced the old game with it.

It seems to me that this is just about the most unforgivable thing a MMORPG company could do that isn't actually fraud. Maybe I misunderstand the situation, or my argument is faulty? I kind of hope it is, for Sony's sake. Someone, respond to me on this. Tell me how I'm wrong. I want to be wrong, dammit!

Re:Uh, the "Letter to the Community" is from 11/05

[AudioEfex]

As a long-time (since beta) SWG player, I welcome the rumored change in the timeline. It's not going to erase anything to advance the story by adding content. While the NGE was unaccaptable in many ways, mostly due to it's slimy surprise to the community one day after they charged credit cards for expansion pre-orders, in other ways it was necessary. Did they trunicate too much? Yes, but some of the changes were for the better. Many were not.

As Smed and others have said since in so many words (which is, again, why this outdated letter is pretty useless to discuss in and of itself at this point), they simply aren't concerned about current players because we simply weren't enough to keep it going. It was get a bigger audience that dwarfs the current one, or it was going to end period. Was it right? No, but I don't think they had a great deal of choice in the matter.

That's why I support a time period change whole-heartedly; it's now or never, and it's either gonna be great or the game is gonna fold. Either they will capture the period of ESB (which is where we would be going, as SWG currently takes place between ANH and ESB), the Star Wars era that many consider the best of the classic trilogy, or they will fail. If they fail, at least it's better than stagnant and stale.

The absolute #1 error SWG has made from the begining is ignoring what people really want from a Star Wars game - to experience the enviornments and scenarios that were in the films. Take Jabba's Palace, for example. It's one of the most iconic Star Wars locations, and it does it exist in SWG (one of the only true locations that appears in one of the films). However, it's a place where newbies run through doing bugged missions until you get to speak to Jabba (actually, his Protocol droid), get full access to the Palace...and are done. No reason to return. It's a ghost-world.

That's why I'm hoping this new combat system will truly fufill the promise of being able to beef up this kind of content instead of constantly reworking three dozen professions. I'm hoping they put the content in that makes it worth it. I'm not holding my breath, but for now they still get my $14.99 a month. A major content addition like changing the timeline may just be what the game needs to give it a boost. Lord knows it can't get much worse...

AudioEfex

Oh really?

[voice_of_all_reason]

We HAVE to think that long-term.

I can assure you, good sir, that as a non-customer, nothing could have possibly cemented my resolve to never try for your services than such widespread and notable dissent among the current playerbase.

Re:Thank the force

[Jace of Fuse!]

This is perhaps the funniest, on topic, no BS, overall best Yoda-speak post I have ever seen.

Kudos.

Re:Alienating and attracting players at once?

[SB5]

If you took away the Star Wars from Pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies, and had another sci-fi/fantasy universe and other stuff, it still would have been a successful MMORPG. The main problems were the feature creep, and the bugs existing months, and years after being in game. Some were fixed to come up in later patches.

The HAM system was also poorly designed.

Although I am a Star Wars fan, I have to admit, the game's underlying mechanics were amazing, crafting system has yet to be bested. Player cities were pretty fun and the ability to interior decorate your home was pretty dynamic. The problems for this game have been well documented elsewhere, the problem with CU and NGE were also documented.

EVE Online is now where I play, and Star Wars Galaxies could have some of the game mechanics that EVE has, well they would have been successful 10x over by now probably.

Re:It was required that he say this

[SB5]

Nope, sorry cannot tell you that you are wrong. Because you are correct.

They took an old game, changed it completely but left the same maps and resources, and NPCs, and few other things. But they changed how the players interact with the enviroment completely.

Again?

[SmallFurryCreature]

For everyone wondering why the letter is from november and only on slashdot now, it isn't. It is a dupe.

But what the hell, something has changed between now and then. All of us had the chance to play the free trial. Ex-players even got two weeks of free play on our old characters.

The old SWG is claimed by Smedley as being to complex, with to many proffesions for people to figure out and a combat system that was to complex and not action packed enough.

Overall it was felt that SWG was too complex a game.

So was this true? Depends I suppose. Who are you talking too? A person who is confused by patience or an ex F16 Fighting falcon player? There are people out there who find the manual for Diablo a real thick brick. Other people ain't happy until they know every detail of whatever virtual thing they control. Actually fuel mix ratios in a cessna at altitude X and temp Y nuts.

SWG has 34 proffesions but most of them were easy to grasp for someone with an IQ. How hard is it to figure out Medic, Sword master, Pistoleer. If you can't grasp that Medics heal, Sword masters fight with swords while pistoleers use pistols your IQ must be in the single digit range. In binary.

Perhaps it was the fact that you had Medics AND Combat Medics AND Doctors. Medic was the base proffersion from wich you could advance to Combat Medic and Doctor. Well yeah this is complex I guess. For a six year old. Most people playing the game seemed able to figure it out. Most, not everyone however. RTFM Syndrome reared its ugly head in SWG like everywhere else.

RTFM. You know what I mean with that don't you. If you are online you will come across countless people who ask inane questions they could easily answer themselves by reading the GODDAMN FUCKING MANUAL but wich they can't be arsed to do. On slashdot this is called "Read The Fuckin Article" where a poster ask a question that is answered in the article posted.

Simply put there will always be a group who is very focal screaming that it is to complex, I seen this in every game. You probably can't get much simpler then Quake and I seen people begging for help in there.

There is a group of people out there that will never be able to deal with anything wich requires them to read more then one word. Not because they lack the IQ but because they just can't be bothered.

Is this really a group you want to market a game too? You can do it offcourse, it certainly is a big group but you will alienate the group of players who can read a manual without throwing a hissy fit.

And that is SWG's NGE biggest failure. It took a game from the crowd that could read a manual and turned it into a simpleton game. How simple? Well so simple that instead of mixing your own character from various proffesions you now do not have any choice to make in your chars development. You just level up in the proffesion you chose at the start. Every level 60 jedi will have exactly the same skills. Yuck.

There are plenty of "dumb" MMORPG's out there. All the korean ones for a start. Perhaps the truth is that only the "dumb" MMORPG's can survive.

SWG was played by an audience that by and large liked to play a complex deep game where you had a large amount of freedom to play the way you wanted too.

The problem was that SOE never really managed it right. It shouldn't have launched until they had removed a lot of the bugs. This killed the game far more then it being considered to complex, but offcourse they cannot say this. Smedley blames all of SWG failure on complexity not on SOE releasing a bugged product on an audience fed up with buggie MMO games.

SWG was complex and deep enough to allow you to be your own character. Well up to midlevel anyway. Then all of a sudden everything started to crash. Why? The "highend" content. Mini expansions like the Death Watch Bunker and The Corvette (dungeons) were unplayable for a lot of proffesion mixes. Creature Tamers were out because pets cannot be summoned inside. Scout/Rangers trap skill did not work on

People still play SWG?

[RoboRay]

I quit a couple of months after it launched, when I found that Holocron and the rest of the Devs had been lying to us. All through beta testing, they were promising this fantastic, dynamic, and unique for each character system where you could become force sensitive. I specifically asked Holo on the beta forum "It's not going to be something lame like having to master randomly chosen professions, is it?" and he told me no, that's not what it would be. Well, a few months into the live game when they finally started revealing info on the jedi, guess how you became one? Yep, you had to master a couple of professions randomly selected for you by the server. I cancelled my subscription that day and have never looked back. I don't appreciate being lied to and applaud the approaching death of SWG.

Re:A viable buisness plan..

[Syberghost]

The problem with "listen to your customers" is that there weren't enough of them to sustain the business. They were attempting (I leave the judgement as to whether they succeeded to others) to listen to their POTENTIAL customers about why they weren't buying.

Re:Uh, the "Letter to the Community" is from 11/05

[Golias]

I never understood people who think of their character levels as "accomplishments" that they had to work for, as if having a high two-digit number next to the word "Level:" on your character profile indicates anything other than an abundance of recent free time to click on cartoon pictures of monsters.

Did you enjoy playing the game up to that point? If so, you're not really losing anything important when your character is re-writen/nerfed/deleted/whatever. If you didnt' enjoy playing, then you were a fool to spend all that time on it, because your "accomplishment" is utterly meaningless outside of the animated chat-room your character resides in.