This was taken from the SoE SWG forums, and has now beed deleted by SoE off thier forums.
Tiggs finnal post before being sacked.
For any of you that were around since this game's launch, thing back to November 2003. Two years ago this month SOE introduced vehicles and player cities to SWG. This was a very exciting time, and arguably the pinnacle of this game's existence.
The day the player city and vehicle publish was to go live was very intense. There was a lot of excitement. Many of us were on the old Gorath Imperial IRC server talking about grand plans, wishing each other luck on getting our spots. Many had architects lined up to make city halls. A lot of us had our would-be mayors logged out right by where the politician trainer would be located when the server came up. A LOT of people did not go to work or school that day hehe.
Player cities actually came to define this game early on. It gave guild's a sense of pride and ownership. It gave folks places to gather. Gave us territories to defend/assault. This gave us rise to the GCW and the massive PvP that ensued.
But while all this was going on, there were many underlying problems that were creeping up on us slowly. See the game had only been out for a few months. People had not fully realized to what extent things could be crafted. We had not had many good resource spawns, and not substantial quantities either. Almost no crafters had any experimentation tapes, nor did they fully understand how the intricacies of the crafting system worked.
But over the next couple of months, people realized they could make armor that would resist 90%+ all damage. Or that they could make MIND poison that would kill everyone within a 30 yard radius in three ticks. Or they could make buffs that would more than DOUBLE our stats.
These were all items that for some reason or another were never capped before the game went live as they should have. This was a direct result of SOE's short-sightedness. They underestimated the resourcefulness of their player base.
Combine those factors with bugs and exploits (faction bases had MANY that took MONTHS to patch), unbalanced classes (TKA, CM, Rifleman) and eventually the revelation of HOW to unlock Jedi (effectively taking a huge part of the player base OUT of the game as they pursued the grind) - and you had the begining of the decline.
Before all this, the GCW was super addictive and I would say in November 2003 the majority of players were actively involved somehow. Not sure how many remember the battles at Maelstrom that went on for over 8 hours. Only reason it ended was because people had to leave to go to work or school lol. The game was FUN and MUCH more addictive then. Faction meant something. We had a LOT less faction hopping back then because the war was in full swing.
Well, the game kept deteriorating so SOE came up with the plan to fix it - originally called the Combat Revamp, later to be known as the Combat Upgrade. I was one who was privy to a LOT of the early documentation on the first CU. Let me first point out that the CU that did go live that you all call CU 1 is actually CU 2. There was another version of the CU prior to what you saw that IMHO was MUCH better, but for some reason or another they took it upon themselves to redo the CU before it even went live.
But the CU 1 that I was shown was the game I wanted. It was basically the same game we all loved, but solved the long-standing problems that revealed themselves since launch. Being able to target the mind pool was no longer going to be an advantage for only a handful of professions - each profession was going to get a move to be able to target each of the three pools. Weapons, armor, buffs, foods & drinks were all going to be capped. DOT's were going to be nerfed so hard they were going to be a nuissance, but not make or break in combat. Mind pool was going to finally be healable. We still had the same graphics and toolbars - none of the cartoony stuff that I think really was a distraction. We also still had Jedi which arguably was the biggest flaw of the game.
Not sure why - perhaps too much playing WoW and not focusing on their own unique game - but they scrapped all of CU 1 and ended up pushing out what you have now.
But now - now we have the NGW. There are SO many things I find wrong with this I do not even know where to begin.
First off, SWG never has been known as having a substantial amount of content. To be honest, I think that half the content in this game WAS the professions - being able to build a unique character template for YOU. Bored of tailor? Try droid engineer. Bored of pistoleer? Try carbineer.
Now I see these nine classes folks will be pigeon-holed into and I think that SOE just took it's BIGGEST strength for this game and turned it into a weakness. Character classes in SWG will now have even less diversity than WoW because in WoW at least they have the talent system to offer some diversity within a class.
Sure, this will be easier for them to balance, and easier for players without a clue, but it seems to me that this is a cop out and a slap in the face to anyone who has been loyal to SOE through it all.
I am sure the NGE will be fun for a little while, but unless SOE plans on adding a LOT of content, the NGE will become boring FAST.
Where did SOE go wrong over the past few years? Well here is a quick list of major issues that they either never addressed or took too long to address or just flat out screwed up:
- Mind Pool
Making the ONE unhealable pool explicitly targetable by only a few classes automatically made some classes better than others.
-No Caps
Having no upper-limit caps on DOT's, buffs, food&drinks, armor effectiveness, weapons, etc allowed for game-breaking items to be crafted. Had there been better testing in beta with MAX resources they would have discovered this before the game even went live.
-Jedi
Making an alpha class in an MMORPG is always going to be a failure. Who would NOT want to play the dominant class? Nerfing Jedi was wrong too. We want Jedi to be like canon and strong. SOE should have NEVER allowed player Jedi. To my understanding this was a HUGE internal debate before the game went live, with LucasArts weighing in to push Jedi. BIG mistake. Fact is the game had MORE paying subscribers before there were Jedi. Fact - after DOT's (often pointed out by Jedi as the true death of the game) the game had even LESS subscribers. I hardly think all those people quit because DOT's were nerfed Point? People got sick of Jedi, and sick of seeing more and more of them. Less diversity among players = less fun. When SOE devoted two huge publishes all to Jedi instead of fixing other long-standing issues this was a sign of things to come. And the original holo-grind killed off a LOT of the PvP we had since so many became reclusive and devoted all their time to grinding.
-GCW bugs/exploits
Once people discovered that you can shoot through walls of player bases from the inside out but not outside in things went downhill. Once people discovered you could abort a base countdown even while DEAD of feigning death it was game over. How long did it take for SOE to fix this bug? FOUR months. What about people being able to attack turrets from out of range? SIX months. It was not like these were secret tricks either. They were well documented on the forums. For some reason though, they were extremly slow to respond. Instead of spending eight hours fighting back and forth between cities, people just got rid of their bases and the GCW died. With it PvP died off in a big way.
-Content
At one point they promised us new PvE content every other patch. Well, we got the corvette (which was a BLAST for about 3 weeks) and the Geonosian cave (which was so bugged it became a favorite place for grinders) and eventually the DWB which was the most challenging and fun, but then it was not until the expansion that the game actually got additional PvE content.
-Wasted Space
Land area in SWG is immense. If you did the math and figured it out and compared it to any other MMORPG out there SWG has MORE explorable space than any other game by far. But you know what? It is USELESS. Take Talus for example. Big beautiful planet with NOTHING on it. We have these little mini-dungeons, or doodads on each planet that serve minimal to no purpose at all. What is their answer? In the expansions they actually have invisible fencing to keep you in the few areas they actually have content. Instead of having the whole huge area filled with stuff of use, they close off areas to the player. This is an area where SOE could learn a LOT from WoW where all the land is not only explorable, but most of it serves a purpose and/or has unique mobs.
-Character customization
SOE made characters so customizable that this actually becomes one of it's biggest weaknesses. The more unique features the game has to track, the more queries clients have to make to the server in order to properly render a toon on your screen. 20 players no problem. 50 players? Slowdown time. 200 players? Server go kaboom. Too much load for the system to handle. Basically epic battles become near impossible.
Thinking about all of this it seems to me that in SOE's rush to get product to market in the first place they dropped the ball bad, and instead of making things better, they constantly seem to make the wrong decisions.
Stop f'ing around with focus groups, and fire the marketing suits and hire some good, competent developers and people with vision. Unfortunately at this point I think it is too late. No one trusts you anymore SOE and their experiences here WILL likely make them think twice about trying other SOE games. I know for myself I will NEVER play another SOE title.
Sincerely,
Someone who loved what once was,
Just reading half, you can see that this is exactly spot on!
