Open Letter To Star Wars Players 113
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.
Look at the date (Score:5, Interesting)
Alienating and attracting players at once? (Score:5, Interesting)
At one point, I would have recommended to anyone looking to start playing a MMO to take a look at SWG. It had player cities. It had huge planet maps nearly free of barriers (unlike games like EQ2 that have many cliff walls and other barriers). It had an innovative profession system where you could multiclass as much as you liked. It had problems and shortcomings, but the overall experience was positive, and I was lucky to be in some PAs (a.k.a. guilds) and cities that were mostly free of griefers and immature dolts.
Gradually, everything changed. They killed off my server of choice (Test Center). They killed off my professions of choice (Entertainer, Creature Handler, Melee Combat Professions). They turned combat from a community-supporting system where you could talk while fighting to yet another first-person shooter.
I didn't join because of the Star Wars universe. I didn't join because of the game's features. I joined because some friends played it and liked it. Only after I joined did I learn to appreciate its unique features that were then gradually taken away. At this point, I would not recommend that anyone join the game. It's not only the changes that they made but also the way they made them that changed my mind. (Example: announcing NGE changes right after an expansion ships, so that players would rush to buy the expansion. They offered refunds only after the massive outcry against that devious tactic.)
SOE, if you really think you can alienate your original fanbase and attract a new one, best of luck. But even if you are successful, what then? You will have a community of twitch gamers, focused entirely on combat, that don't understand what a unique idea SWG was.
Misrepresentations (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with SWG was the balance, bugs, and lack of fresh content. Certain classes had overpowering abilities that needed to be reduced. Bugs needed to be fixed. New content needed to be added.
Everybody wondered why these issues weren't being addressed. They were needed for the health of the game but they were being totally ignored.
Now we know why. Instead of fixing bugs, balancing, and creating new content, they were too busy writing a new overhaul. WTH? If they would have invested the time they spent in the Combat Upgrade (CU) overhaul and the NGE into addressing those issues, they would have never been in this situation.
Just think of how much time they spent in secret working on those two upgrades. All that time that could have been spent enhancing the game instead of rewriting it. Just stupid.
I quit after the first CU because of this. I tolerated the problems thinking they were working on fixes as they said they were, but then they come out with a revamp and a realized they squandered all that time. No thanks, I canceled.
In other words, "We made a failure worse" (Score:5, Interesting)
Whoops! SWG failed. It was horrible at startup, being quite possibly the buggiest "gold release" I have ever seen. It was corrupt, as players were exploiting the crap out of it for a while. It was boring for a lot of people, with a common theme of people leaving the game being "I never thought it would be like THAT! It sucked!"
Everyone that I know that bothered to purchase it (after hearing the consistently bad reviews from beta testers, as well as the not-so-hot reviews from some game magazines) quit the game within the first 3 months, it was obvious that the game just wasn't that good. Sure, some people will like it. Some people will like a game, no matter how bad it is, or what it's theme is.
So, SoE realized it blew it, and then spent all this time trying to come up with a way to save what should have been the golden MMO game for the decade. They saw the PvP in WoW and other games being more "in your face, action packed" than what they offered, so they tried to throw the same type of thing at SWG.
The bottom line is, when a game is completely borked, a revamp isn't going to draw old customers back, or get you new ones. It is going to just piss off the few remaining players you had. And SoE did just that.
Former players log in and voice your opinion (Score:1, Interesting)
--Zonjai Nezba
Re:A viable buisness plan.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Players would have a problem with a profession, and then SoE would go and nerf it. Then they neglected professions (smuggler, commando), and not fix specials. And feature creep. Every month they would announce something new going into the game. I quit when I found out about cybernetics because many other bugs had gone on fixed and many other ingame systems and mechanics could use better polishing.