Sony Shutting Down Star Wars Galaxies MMO and TCG 142
flibbidyfloo writes "Sony has sent an email to current and former subscribers to its long-running MMO Star Wars Galaxies explaining that the service will be shut down in December. Here's an excerpt from the email: 'We write to you today to inform you that on December 15, 2011, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and LucasArts will end all services (MMO and Trading Card Game) for Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). The shutdown of SWG is a very difficult decision, but SOE and LucasArts have mutually agreed that the end of 2011 is the appropriate time to end the game ... In addition, we will be discontinuing the sale of all Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game (TCG) digital card packs as of today, June 24, 2011. Loot cards will not be redeemable in the SWG MMO after September 15, 2011. The TCG will continue to operate until the final service closure on December 15, 2011.'"
And this is why virtual objects have no real value (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games, then finding out a few weeks, months, or years later that it's going into the bit-bucket at the end of the month?
Re:And this is why virtual objects have no real va (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And this is why virtual objects have no real va (Score:4, Insightful)
At least with a meatspace game, like the trading cards, players will have a piece of memorabilia that may be of value to someone, if not as much as it means to them.
But when your collectibles are stored in an array that will never be loaded to RAM ever again, it's not even possible to be surprised on finding them in the attic while looking for your high school transcripts...
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Granted, it was designed by Wizards of the Coast, so maybe it might end up making the transition to the real world. However, the way it stands now users will lose access to their cards in December.
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That might work for simple online games where it's mostly about the gameplay (say, EA sports games), but for anything with persistent objects that have value because of their scarcity, it won't make a difference. You need a secure central database/service to prevent hacking, duplicating objects, or whatever other form of cheating people can come up with.
If you let anyone run a mint, money will rapidly lose its value :)
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Right. People can and do run pirate WoW servers -- admittedly mostly to avoid paying, but it is entirely possible to play on one of those and earn digital items the same way. They aren't transferable to other servers, so it's more like, if you choose to play in that world, only the admins can run a mint -- their money has no value on other servers.
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So, you spend a bunch of time on a private server that may be taken down at the whim of the admin? That seems to be an ever bigger waste of time than playing a MMORPG that gets cancelled (or playing one at all, depending on point of view ;)
Not to mention it doesn't sound like much *fun*, anyway... I'd trust Blizzard developers/designers to do a bit better job than some people trying to copy their stuff, not to mention what is most likely a sad sack group of other players on the server. Not really an "MMOR
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Already been done, for the MMO. They're also making is better, by not adding the game-killing idiot-friendly "upgrades" that SOE added. See SWGEmu [swgemu.com].
Not sure about the TCG. A "digital TCG" is utterly stupid, IMNSHO.
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Re:should just open source it (Score:1)
"No! Never! All that iProperty must be kept locked up and unused forever because there might be a single still shot they can reuse somewhere!! What do those players mean, they want to set up their own rogue servers to keep it going? Get the terrorists NOW!! P.s. We agree it's the appropriate time to end a game *before Christmas* so that here will be two sales weeks forcing familes of gamers to buy them something else!"
/ SarcasmQuotes
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Does require you to own the game for a client, though.
Not the same thing as sony making swg open source, but based on postings by swg devs etc, that's probably for the best. The code was rumored to be a complete disaster. Also, the current revision of the game really sucks (compared to older revs) because of changes made in the "NGE" update from a few years ago.
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This is why when companies decommission their software, they should just open source it and let everyone go nuts. Someone somewhere is bound to maintain a gaming server for this game. However, companies like Sony have the mentality where if they can't make money off it then no one shall have it.
An open source SWG with non-Sony servers would compete with Sony's other MMORPGs (EQ, EQ II, and Vanguard) and also with their non-MMORPG games. Why would they want that? If they were exiting the game market completely, then maybe open sourcing would make sense.
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So? Did these people get enjoyment out of that hundreds of dollars spent? Is it better to buy a boxed game and never get around to playing it?
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You realize you just compared valuing an MMO to valuing a person's life, right? I suggest you don't write eulogies either.
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Lenin's mummy thinks you're a fool.
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Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games
Nope.
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You mistake price for value.
A lot of people do that.
It's why our economy is currently fucked blue by plutocrats.
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The value of something is up to the individual person to decide. If they like it and wish to buy it, then what you think of it is rather irrelevant.
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Then there's no such thing as fraud. I'll alert the DoJ.
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If such a law tries to state that the value of something isn't subjective, but objective, then yes, no such thing exists (as far as I know).
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Price is what the seller convinces the buyer to pay.
Value is what the buyer should have paid.
Like I said. Fucked blue.
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Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games, then finding out a few weeks, months, or years later that it's going into the bit-bucket at the end of the month?
I sold one of my characters for several hundred dollars, but it was at the height of that particular game's lifespan. SWG characters may have been valued in the hundreds and thousands - I don't know, but if SOE is discontinuing service my guess is that the game is well past it's prime - and characters aren't valued for very much anymore.
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I was amazed that the TCG was popular. It was an obvious moneyspinner by Sony to get people to pay for trinkets in-game that should have been available through the in-game crafting system. I find it hard to sympathize with anyone who paid real money for that crap, especially since it's been obvious for years now that Sony never had any intention of putting real development effort into the game and therefore they were just riding the downhill slide to make profit with no investment.
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If nothing else I have to give SOE kudos for giving almost 6 months notice. Most MMOs shut down with maybe 2 months warning, if you're lucky.
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If you have a mother, and she's proud of you, that's a shame.
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Tourette's is not something to joke about. Hopefully you never have a child affected by it.
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Seriously?
I hope my kid doesn't end up with Downs Syndrome, missing a limb and still born as well, but that doesn't mean I can't have a sense of humor as well.
Stop being such an over sensitive pansy. Words don't actually hurt you.
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sorry mate (Score:1)
never heard of it and it probably sucks, well bye
Maybe someone can.. (Score:3)
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The really sensible thing to do would be to hack the security and/or game and/or consoles (depending on Sony's setup) so that servers can be hosted by players rather than a central system. I honestly don't know why companies don't make this a "support" option more often, most seem more than happy to do a similar thing with unofficial fora and the like.
Hell, even if So
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I'm telling all hackers everywhere, this is impossible. There is no way anyone could ever do what the OP is saying. No one on Earth is that good.
-There, that should do it.
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Bootcamp FTW!
It's the wrong universe, but who cares (Score:2)
Re:It's the wrong universe, but who cares (Score:5, Funny)
It's dead, Jim - Chewbacca
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I think you mean, "He's gone, Leia."
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Then, you should be happy. By striking you down now, you'll become more powerful than they could possibly imagine!
New Product (Score:1)
I'd bet that a new Star Wars product gets announced just after the new year.
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I'd bet that a new Star Wars product gets announced just after the new year.
Isn't there another Star Wars MMO in development? One that might not suck?
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Star Wars Old Republic from Bioware
http://www.swtor.com/
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I'll (Score:2)
Give you a dollar for it.
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I've tried that before with websites. Even just for business models. A dollar is never enough.
There is still SWGemu. (Score:5, Informative)
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I wonder if this timing has any relation to the fact that the new star wars MMO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic) Is going to be released very soon.
Probalby not (Score:2)
That one isn't Sony (it's EA). They are probably shutting it down because the number of subscribers is insufficient to justify maintaining the infrastructure of servers and people that it requires to run.
Most companies will run their MMOs forever, if there's the customers. Why wouldn't you? However, there is a a minimum level of subscribers you have to have. While not every MMO needs the massive staff World of Warcraft has, you still have to have a few people working on various things, you have to have some
I felt a great disturbance in the Force (Score:5, Funny)
As if tens of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced
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Good Riddance!
It was not the waste of money that was sad, it was the time and effort to get on to the servers to sit and watch people dance! It was the insanity of the original quest system. It was the hour or three to login.
Time may heal all wounds, but this game bit a hole deep and wide in the psyche of this gamer. Pray for SW:TOR.
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Finding a ranger camp and learning things from other players.
I miss it very much.
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Sigh ... I like to play MMOs alone, retarded I know, but thats my thing, and that was one of the coolest things in SWG, as a ranger/bio-engineer in the Pre-CU/NGE days, out of know where I'd see a group wonder up on me. Sometimes people I knew, often not. So I'd throw up a camp, let them recover from their wounds before they moved on to their next mission/target in their group ... or get together with some other higher level players to break in some newbies and help them get going.
It was an MMO where the
Blowing Up Galaxies (Score:5, Interesting)
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Interesting read. The Escapist is really underated; a lot of people just go there for Zero Punctuation and ignore the well-written articles. I especially enjoyed the advice you wrote to game/MMO devs at the end, which I'm going to parrot here because it's awesome:
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Are there any MMOs that were launched when they were ready and didn't need a whole slew of bug fixes after the fact? WoW may have come close (I wasn't paying attention at the time) but all the other ones I've paid any attention to (WAR, LotRO, AoC, Aion) had real problems at the start.
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Even WoW had its problems at Vanilla. An example would be the Tauren's "Plainswalking" - rather than get mounts, Taurens would get a skill where they could basically ramp up to mounted speeds (after reaching the same level you could get a mount). The issue was that, of course, it wasn't exactly the same as using a mount and therefore unfair to the Tauren.
I think this is true with nearly any game, but it's especially true with MMOs: your best bet is to catch 90-98% percent of the bugs. Some stuff you won't c
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The SOE hack killed it (Score:1)
A coworker of mine said that after it came back online, a month after the SOE hack, it was a virtual ghost town. Not that it was vibrant before, but being offline for nearly a month just killed it.
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I'm quite sure SoE will have seen a player decline in many of its older titles were players will often play due to habituation, community or a lack of motivation to try alternatives. With SWTOR on the horizon this was wound to happen eventually...
For me, the only surprise is that the closure of Vanguard wasn't announced at the same time.
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This isn't the SW MMO you've been looking for... (Score:2)
Move along, move along... to SW:TOR?
Huh? No dedicated user ran servers? Not buying it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously folks. I don't buy games that don't have private or dedicated servers. Would it really be such a bad thing if little groups of players could host their own worlds? They can't really compete with the experience of the main servers, but at least some people would be able to play, even after the game's plug has been pulled.
Some determined players have done so with WoW by reverse engineering the client server protocol, so I gave it a spin -- It wasn't my cup of tea, but my brother became a subscriber because of the added exposure -- That's right: Blizzard made money because a private server existed.
Some people don't have the time to grind forever -- the private servers can have different exp rates; WoW and RuneScape servers I've seen do, anyway. One such WoW server almost won me over due to the benefits afforded to the time-challenged player.
It's really a shame that games have to die at all. Welcome to the future folks. There is some hope, some FPS franchises still have dedicated servers that players can run... but, for the most part it looks rather bleak.
Some game titles are deprecated for no good reason eg: Halo2 multi-player is canned. How the hell does this make sense? When playing most of these games one player's console becomes the "server" for the others... All you have to do is ALLOW the game to talk to other games and bingo, multi-player. However, we can't do this -- and that makes me mad.
So, 5 friends and I all join up in party chat. We then all pop Halo2 in the 360. We can each see that the others have inserted the game by looking at the Icon next to our names on the friends list. Our XBoxes KNOW that we are all playing the game, and we have connections to each other ALREADY because of the party chat. However, WE CAN'T play online together because the matchmaking server was killed (because of Halo3 & Reach no doubt -- bet they'll eventually get killed to force migration to other new games too).
Now, there is such a thing as unranked matches, so the score keeping server isn't an issue... Additionally there is LAN play. So, we all join my VPN, and play Halo2 -- No XBox Live needed (we use it for party chat and coordinating matches). THANKS FOR NOTHING MICROSOFT! My XBox Live subscription seems to lose value over time... not.. very.. smart.
That's when we all made a pact when in comes to new games: No private/dedicated server? SCREW IT -- DO NOT WANT.
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This doesn't really apply to shooters. Unlike MMOs, which need a complex environment to be maintained server-side, shooters lend themselves well to simple LAN play. Cutting the ability to play over LAN for completely arbitrary reasons, and when it would require no resources from the company -- that's the kind of stupidity that hurts.
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You know the WoW server emulators don't handle most scripted events (such as raid encounters). It isn't really the same thing. There's also the fact that gear can be modified and made deliberately over powered by people running the private server. Not much fun to PVP if mr. admin has a one-shot-and-you're-dead bat.
Private servers make sense for simpler games like FPS (although cheating can still be an issue) but not as much for MMOs. They're okay if you want to dick around but they don't replicate the exper
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I ain't buying it. For example, the Xbox could just give them 100 friends of the player's, starting with the most recently seen online... Any such arguments are irrelevent. MS has plenty of capital, they don't want to support something, they'll "extinguish" it -- I ran a 16 bit executable on XP... Xbox x86 games are running on the PowerMac in the 360... Tell me backwards compatibility isn't something they are pros at. Don't delude yourself.
As for the servers being gone -- the bungie.net servers may
Tremolous (Score:2)
Try Tremolous. It's an opensource RTS/FPS blend, and installing a dedicated server doesn't seem hard. (Although there are plenty hosted by others.) It's got a pretty good community. It's the only FPS I played in the last 2 years, and I don't miss the canned railshooter experience. (I usually play the 1.2 gpp beta on the official servers, that's where most of the folks are.)
Also, there's a quite a bit of emphasis on teamplay. Lone wolfs don't win the match.
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Actually most of the SWG emulation scene stuff got killed by the egos of the SWGEmu guys. There was a ton of bickering and fighting right after the first open source release (which I can't remember being publicly ridiculed, but if you saw how little code they actually had after 6+ months of 'writing the server' and having 'almost complete documentation of the protocol', you would've been thinking it) Then the community's headbanging trying to get their own code added into the 'official' codebase while vario
Not a surprise at all... (Score:1)
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And this is why I never got into the game! (Score:2)
I won't invest money in a game/experience and spend weeks or months of time playing only to find out one day it's denied to me and I can't revisit it. They should have gone more the way of City of Heroes. But the best thing would have been if online game companies escrowed their code for an open source release (of some form) when the game died, that would be a major feature to me that would make me consider investing hundred of dollars in an online game.
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Do you realize how stupid you sound? With that attitude you could never do anything in life, because everything is temporary. Why play Super Mario Bros when you won't be able to play it in the year 2175? Why breathe, when I can only breathe for 80ish years anyway and then you aren't allowed to breathe anymore?
Enjoy life! Enjoy a MMO game with thousands of others during it's prime. It can be entertaining. If you get bored, move on to something else. If you get the urge to do it again, come back to it.
Inevitable (Score:1)
I used to play it (Score:2)
I felt an insigificant disturbance in the Force, (Score:2)
They lost the source code .. (Score:2)
From the SWGEmu site ..
Q. Has SWGEmu ever seen Sony Online Entertainment's code?
A. Absolutely not. In fact, Sony Online Entertainment persists that they have lost the code entirely. ...
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LucasArts is just freeing up the IP (Score:1)
Move on to TOR (Score:1)
They killed the game years ago, this is just it's final death-throes. No big loss here, really.
I wonder how long it will be before Final Fantasy XI goes offline? It's almost as old (although, the abysmal failure that is Final Fantasy XIV may keep it around for much longer than anticiapted).
Its been closed for years, Sony just didn't know. (Score:2)
As far as anyone who actually played the game is concerned, it closed when they did the combat upgrades and new game enhancement bullshit that basically turned it from fun to boring.
When they decided to cater to the lowest common denominator and let anyone be a Jedi, it was already over for SWG.
Why a flawed game was great (Score:2)
SWG was never a good game, it was buggy as hell and at launch had barely any of the elements that later players took for granted. Simplest example: you walked.
Compared to far more complete games like EQ2 and especially WoW, it was rough but underneat its thick crust of bugs and half completed features was a depth that few games have matched. It wasn't the insane difficulty of a FF or UO either, it was depth but friendly depth. Take for instance the way you build your character, you didn't just have a simple
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Yea, I'm sure Sony closed its game down so EA could make a lot more money on theirs.
You do realize they are different companies right? They aren't reassigning resources to the new StarWars MMO unless by reassigning you meaning firing. They probably don't want the new one to look good since it'll make them look bad, since they didn't make the new one.
Having a clue is hard isn't it?