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Role Playing (Games)

CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail 100

Posted by Zonk from the force-really-needs-a-good-hosedown dept.
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.
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CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail More

CBS News Fields SWG Hatemail

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  • CBS gets SWG hatemail? (Score:5, Funny)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @01:42AM (#14667480)
    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? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @01:44AM (#14667485) Homepage
    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?
    • Because maintaining two separate codebases is a lot more expensive than maintaining one.
      • Following this reasoning, they shouldn't ever release WoW, Matrix Online etc. They are all separate codebases. Furthermore, there should be only one MMORPG ever made, by anyone.

        Would it sprout into 100 different codebases, as long as each of them has userbase making given branch profitable, it's fine and should stay that way. If any branch is getting dry, either try to fix it, or cut it. But don't cut live branches.

        Sony failed to understand that profitablity of games is strongly influenced by variety: I won
        • Sony didn't release WoW or Matrix Online. Those were released by other people (Blizzard and Monolith, respectively).

          As for trying to follow the theory that if it complicates matters there should only ever be a single MMO you are using the false logic of Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc. Just because there are multiple code bases that exist doesn't mean it doesn't take increased effort to maintain those extra code bases. Obviously it does, otherwise the number of people employed in the manufacturing and maintenanc

    • I can't speak of swg as it appears their customers are their very own beta testing group.

      But in any normal project maintaining two code bases may not require two sets of engineering groups, but for any release requires two QA cycles which may require twice as many people. Not to mention twice as much training for technical support/customer service as they need to be aware of the two product types.
      • Actually many players have stated they were willing to play the old version of the game with no more development support. They liked that version of the game that much. But even I know that although it would have kept players on and playing, they would have moaned to fix it. Sony Online just decided to quit trying to fix both versions of the game before this new version they put out which is a complete 180 degrees from the game before.

        And to be completely honest the game has been in a form of beta since rel

    • Re:Why didn't sony create two seperate worlds? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by masklinn ( 823351 ) <<ten.nnilksam> <ta> <gro.todhsals>> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:51AM (#14668120)

      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?

    • Some are saying it wouldn't be practicable, but it's essentially what Dark Age of Camelot did with player frustration over the introduction of the Trials of Atlantis expansion.

      A "classic" server was introduced (quite a while subsequently, mind you), on which the expansion and its changes and additions were not present. It (Gareth) has maintained a sizable userbase throughout its existence so far and the experiment is for all intents and purposes a success. It maintains a separate ruleset and different g

    • Because the coding staff stuck on whatever branch was discovered to be wildly unpopular would either get fired or quit. It would devastate morale.

      "Hey, you crackers. Who wants to toil for the same wages and not even have the satisfaction of having your work noticed by anyone! Come on, who's in?"
  • 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 th

    • Let me ask you something (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aztektum ( 170569 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:03AM (#14667555)
      "... 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.
    • It's 10k players at once. So if true that there is only 10k max at once, that's probably 50-100k players total.
      • It's 10k players at once. So if true that there is only 10k max at once, that's probably 50-100k players total.

        I'd wager around 50k. EQ in it's prime had about 100k players online with about 550k total accounts. Still, for SWG these numbers are pathetic. SOE was given one of the biggest sci-fi franchises and didn't manage to capitalize on it.

        There are many games without a franchise that are fairly popular: City of Heroes/Villains, DAoC, Second Life. I just don't understand how SOE and Lucas Arts could have

    • No, 10,000 players is just PEANUTS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @03:02AM (#14667763) Journal
      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.

      • Just to put it in perspective, I play a MMORPG (sigh) that has about 1300 players. Total. It's quite alive, though there is only one server. I don't think the developers are strapped for cash either. The GMs are volunteers from the among the players I think... in return for GMing, they get snarky name signs. So it is certainly possible to run a MMORPG with 10000 players.

        A tale in the desert [atitd.com] in case anyone wants to check it out. Free clients, free trial period, $14 (I think) a month thereafter, linux, mac

      • Between Ralph 'The customer makes the content' Koster & John Smeedley... SOE is rapidly getting a bad rep (getting ???), not only for SW:G, but with The Matrix Online, which they are keeping running to get the DC Comics MMO...
        • SOE started getting bad reputation when they took over EQ1 and started their trend of ignoring their customers (as far as SOE is concerned, the "customer" is nothing but a cash cow, stuff like customer service or game enjoyment don't exist in the SOE world but in marketroid speak), releasing half baked products or products not done at all, dumbing down the game in ways that had never been done before, basically telling the players to shut the fuck up, stop suggesting improvements and stop asking for bugfixe
          • SOE started getting bad reputation when they took over EQ1 and started their trend of ignoring their customers (as far as SOE is concerned, the "customer" is nothing but a cash cow, stuff like customer service or game enjoyment don't exist in the SOE world but in marketroid speak), releasing half baked products or products not done at all, dumbing down the game in ways that had never been done before, basically telling the players to shut the fuck up, stop suggesting improvements and stop asking for bugfixe
            • Look at Blizzard games, WoW included. It has been pointed out before that Blizzard hasn't really innovated much. Diablo was just a scrolling arcade game (a la Contra or Gauntlet), Warcraft was a Dune 2 rip-off, and WoW has borrowed most of its elements from other games before it (e.g., the PvP theme had already been made mainstream by the likes of Dark Age Of Camelot and Anarchy Online). So what was Blizzard's secret mojo? Quality (including not just the lack of bugs, but also a good interface, smooth learn
              • Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre.

                Except Legends of Kesmai was around before UO, so it's hard to back up a claim that UO invented anything. MUDs have been around for almost 30 years.. [thinkquest.org] slapping a graphical interface on one was just an eventuality. UO didn't invent the graphical interface, nor were they the first to use it for a MUD. At best, they popularized the genre. EQ was the first of its kind to go 3D, and while
      • Just to clarify, the article said 10,400 players active on the servers. In other words, 10,400 logged on at that moment.

        The general rule of thumb is that at any point you can expect about 10% of the playerbase to be playing. So the 10,400 active number means SWG has ~104,000 players, give or take. While not outstanding, 104K is a decent number. Without knowing the cost of development, the size of the current team, and the costs for the hardware to run SWG there's no way to determine if 104K paying subscri

      • 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.

        That's about 1.8 million per year... (This is really higher, as this is only the peak usage at one given time. )

        A full-time GM costing $3000 per month would only cost $36000 per year - 15 of thim

        • A full-time developer costs around $150000 yearly

          Are you hiring?

          Seriously though, I'm betting they aren't paying that much for all of their developers.

          • Seriously though, I'm betting they aren't paying that much for all of their developers.

            As you can tell, I'm overestimating - mainly because of previous cases where employers "forced" overtime without paying for it. (Standard mis-management stuff.)

            Of course, you still can't hire some random programmer - a server on the scale of SWG cannot fail (or if it does, it must come back online as soon as possible.) This puts a limit on development as any inefficient coding is magnified by the sheer number of playe

          • You have to also realize that what you're paid and what you cost the company are very different things. Having a team of programmers involves not just their salaries, but also rent/taxes/whatever for the building, electricity costs, admin costs, maintenance costs, taxes (at least here a lot of stuff is paid 50/50 by the employee and the employer), management costs (you'll notice that even Linux involves some people at the top deciding what goes in and what stays out), etc, etc, etc.

            For a lot of large compan
      • AFAIK, SWG was never covered by the station pass. It definitively was not covered when SWG first came out.
        • You're right, he meant Station Access [sony.com], which covers The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest II, EverQuest, EverQuest Mac Edition, Planetside, Everquest Online Adventures, and the three Station Pass games.

          Whether or not Station Access originally covered SWG is irrelevant, as the conversation is about how SWG is doing now.

          • You're correct. I was at work at the time, and had to operate on memory. I would have bought SWG when it came out since I was using Station Access at the time, except that it was explicitly not included. Not sure when it got added.
    • The thing is they said they had a development staff of 70, and that SWG has always had the largest development staff of any Sony Online game(my guess is the problem lies there, they run a dev staff based on the way smaller dev teams run). Even a development staff of 5 would probably not be able to pay for servers, bandwidth, food, and places to live with 150k a month.

      There are a few ratios that are standard in the industry, the 1/4 and 1/5 models are basically during primetime in game, 1/4 to 1/5 of the pla
    • I agree the most recent Star Wars games haven't been very good, but I know many people remember X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter, and TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance. You mention those games and their mouths drop, thinking about playing those again.

      Lucasarts in recent times have seem to go from making good games to churning out money makers in my opinion. And by money makers I mean slapping Star Wars to every game they put out. I swear they are making so many Star Wars games based on the theory the more they produce
    • It may sound like a lot until you recognize the sheer cost of launching the game. Look back in the Slashdot archives a couple months - Blizzard took a loss of $30 million in 2004 and a profit of only $7 million or so in 2005 getting WoW going. That's still $23 million in the hole. Even the most popular MMORPGs take a few years to make back their initial investment. SWG has never been as big as EQ or WoW, and possibly still hasn't broken even, and if it did, it's not been a cash cow. Cost trimming, they migh

  • SWG Is Doomed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BondGamer ( 724662 )
    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
    • /agree with this. As an ex Eve & WoW player looking for a new game a few months back, I downloaded the free trial of SWG, and it was ok. Not great, but ok enough for me to think about giving them a month of subs to try the game for real. That was until I noticed the crapflood of abuse that was being directed at the NGE by existing players. Sure, they might just be a vocal minority, but it doesn't bode well for the community, and community is what makes these games, so rightly or wrongly I left SWG a

  • Of course... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Drakin ( 415182 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:22AM (#14667608)
    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.

    • Re:Of course... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SB5 ( 165464 )
      The funny thing about the huge list of fixes/changes, many of them are just broke features that were broke when they pushed the NGE out the door.

      I hate to say Sony and Lucasarts are to blame together on this one. Either Sony because they didn't want to lose their license to the game or Lucasarts for not taking the massive uproar that this has caused into account.

      I do agree, there was no warning, and there should have been. And pushing something out things to soon has haunted the development process of Star
      • I actually thought the combat system needed a revamp back before the first CU.

        Some of the first CU's changes were good, although, again it was shoved out the door without near amount the testing that it should have gotten.

        The current publish may be a nice change in how much testing it's getting, although we'll see if it continues. If it does, the game may be enjoyable again, although in differnt ways.

        • Yeah I don't think you will find anyone that will disagree that Pre-CU combat was the best. I did like the system though, locking on to a target allowing you to single out and play it sort of like a mud.

          I agree it needed to a revamp, but what the players got in the CU wasn't exactly what they wanted either I don't think.

  • deary me sony (Score:3, Funny)

    by know1 ( 854868 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:45AM (#14667692)
    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... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheNoxx ( 412624 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:48AM (#14667707) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:1, Funny)

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

  • "Sony made a mistake." (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Errandboy of Doom ( 917941 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @03:00AM (#14667760) Homepage
    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." (Score:4, Informative)

      by SB5 ( 165464 ) <freebirdpat@nOspAm.hotmail.com> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:22AM (#14668040)
      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.

      • By way of introduction, I started SWG in beta 2, and quit in December of 2004 to play WoW. I have no comment on the NGE, because I've never played it.

        In my opinion, Jedi were the downfall of SWG. The problem is that if you have a class which should be more powerful than all others, you have to make it very very difficult to get, and you have to have a limit on how many can do it. The path to Jedi was atrocious from the beginning. Mastering classes? That's no path to Jedi. Questing? That's no path to Jedi ei

  • Times. . . (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 )
    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

  • ... 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?
  • 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 sta

  • Impossible to fix (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @08:16AM (#14668714) Journal
    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.

    • I've heard it's just what you're looking for. I couldn't get through the tutorial, myself; I require a little bit less of a learning curve for my online stuff.

      • Re:ever try Eve? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AlexMax2742 ( 602517 )
        EVE essentially boils down to being a Trade Wars type game. If that floats your boat, great. If not, there are numerous problems with the game.

        EVE had an 'automatic skill gainer'. Similar to how macroing in UO worked, except you didn't actually have to DO anything to gain the skill, it kind of gained by itself. The only problem is that unlike old UO, you can't have a max level charactor within a week...you know...in order to have fun. In EVE, if you know EXACTLY what you're doing, you can be flying a

        • You sound like someone who didn't get hooked up with a good corp. That's a shame, because all of the complaints you listed become non-issues once you're doing things with a solid group of people on a regular basis. Even so, EVE isn't for everyone, so maybe it just wasnt your cup of tea.
        • I was half tempted to try eve online....until now. For all that people yammer on about eve online, it sounds like the same old MMORPG grind, except its grind for money instead of xps/loot/quests. "WOOT lvl!!" or my fav "Ding!"

          You have to join a coorporation (or whatever) in Eve online to be successfull??? Sounds like a guild to me from EQ/WOW or something. Thats ultimately the problem with MMORPGS anyway. Sure its fun with your friends, its just all the other idiots in the guild. Its the fact that yo
          • Psst, buddy. Over here. City of Heroes/Villains. Have cake and eat it too.
          • It really sounds like MMORPG's aren't really for you, then. The thing is, group content, when DONE RIGHT, can be the best MMO experience you can have. Unfortuniatly, Everquest was the one that got closest to it, and all subsquent games in the genre have moved away from the harsh death penalities (which doesn't beat good habits into players) instead of making the group content in and of itself more managable.

            However, if you really miss SOME things about MMORPG's, then here are some alternatives that you mi

            • Cool, thanks for the input. Really got soured on the EQ/WOW grind. (I really HATED the guild I was in in EQ) I'm gravitating towards either Guild Wars or CoV..... Know any good servers on Guild Wars?
              • I admit, I do really like CoH/CoV - BUT keep in mind it's very much a combat oriented game. There isn't a whole lot else to do in the game. Now they have outdoor PVE combat, instanced mission PVE combat, PVP arena combat, PVP and PVP zones (hero vs villain and free for all).
                I spent about 10 months playing City of Heroes and picked up City of Villains last Christmas. I have to say CoV seems to be a smaller game with less zones and less variety in the zones. The missions have a bit more variety and they are
    • "Personally I am on the look out for a MMORPG like game that dares to be complex."

      The game you are asking for is EVE Online. I've played many MMORPGs and nothing compares to the complexity and depth that EVE offers. It's not a game for everyone, though, and it tends to be a "love it or hate it" affair. If you do give it a shot, (and it does have a free 14 day trial), make sure you seek out a good corporation (guild) to be involved with. While you can play solo for quite a lot, you'll miss out on 90% of
  • 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
    • Ironically perhaps, by introducing this NGE to avoid scrap it and start again SOE may well have made at least the 'scrap it' part inevitable. A new SWG might be hard to justify based on their current success. Regardless of the value of the NGE they fouled up the introduction at the managerial, marketing and PR level in almost every concievable way. Then there are the three main changes that the NGE introduces: 1 - Manual aim combat: Actually is reasonably fun, interacts clumsily in with a large number o
    • "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 incar

  • I am sooo glad I didn't choose SWG (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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. ;)
  • 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
  • 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?
    • Where do I send my resume?
      • There is a difference between cost and salary. Cost includes the persons workstation, including software licenses, health insurance, a few weeks of vacation, 11 to 15 holidays, Social Security tax ... That of course doesn't include the IT department, janatorial staff, buildling maitnance, accounting, shipping department, and random secretarial staff.
  • Doom ... doom ... doom. Go home now!
  • 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 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 o
  • 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. :-(
  • www.nrepguild.com/light.jpg

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

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