f13.net

In other news, SWG is dead (http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/06/24/exclusive-smedley-on-the-sunsetting-of-star-wars-galaxies/) as of Dec 2011.

Guess Lucasarts like to keep their eggs in as few MMO-baskets as possible...

SWG was still alive?  :why_so_serious:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?topic_id=1220357


Honestly? It's been a long time in coming but I'm still somewhat surprised by it.

I'm not at all surprised and reading the other article that is linked from there I saw that Smedley had the perfect quote about why SWG failed even though the author hated it along with the others who stuck around. He basically said that SWG delivered the Uncle Own experience and not the Luke and Han experience. He's right and that's why it failed.

Doop. I have no idea how I missed this thread.

TOR release date: December 16, 2011.

You didn't.  People started discussing in the SWTOR thread before you got around to making your thread.

About damn time.

Oh, wow, I bought a copy of this game I still haven't used.  No time like the present, I suppose.  Are they still an MMOFPS or whatever, or did they revert that?

Out with the old in with the new!

Heh, maybe that's what they meant by "super huge way of announcing the release date that no one would suspect"  :awesome_for_real:

we will always have SWGEMU.  Or it's endless test.  Ok, we have nothing.

Be nice if Bioware could pick up the tech for JtL from SOE.

Maybe TOR can get the JtL assets and add a real space game?  (I know it's hopeless musing.)

Should wait a little longer. If you have a subscription on September 15th then you get to play until it closes down for free and see the end game events they add. So about August 17th is good time to start a 1 month subscription.

My thoughts exactly, although BW have said they space may eventually become free-roaming though it could be on Mr Schubert's "Wall of Crazy".

The news of SWG's execution date makes me sad. SWG pre-9, Pre-NGE was my own personal gaming Nirvana. I even liked the CU.

I just might re-sub to take my character for one last tour of the worlds and park her in ME, where she was born on day 1 server up.

On a cheerfully vindictive note: Smed, we did tell you so you ass.

Burn in Hell, SimBeru!  :drill:

Sad. It  does not deserve to die ,even though it has many flaws it not that bad of a game and still great sandbox. I also had impression they have decent sub base still. Its a decision to kill  a niche game for the benefit of a mass market  blockbuster (swtor). I dont think it will benefit the latter all that much but will make overall landscape worse

I popped back in to SWG last month, since SOE was kind enough to give me 45 days for giving all my account info away.  :oh_i_see:

It was down to a fairly small amount of servers, and while there looked to be a fair number of people in Mos Eisley, Theed, et all, most of them were just standing there, doing nothing the entire time.  I think it was just SOE logging in inactive accounts to make it look like people were still playing.  Outside of the main cities, I didn't really see but 1 or 2 people.

I'm kind of surprised that it took them this long to pull the plug on it.

From what Smedley said in that Massively article it was mostly an issue of contracts that even kept it going. I doubt Lucasarts had any intention of renewing their SWG contract with SOE come 2012, and they figured now would be a good time to pull the plug.

My blog post on it:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2011/06/24/swg-is-shutting-down/

And not trying to be defensive or do rose-colored glasses here, but SWG was only a failure if you compare it to a hypothetical game that doesn't exist, or to a game that came out after it (say, WoW). Not discounting all the MANY things that went wrong here, from launch onwards (Believe me, there are few people on the planet who are more cognizant of the many screw-ups on it than I am) but it was profitable early on, made millions, & at peak was the second most popular non-Asian MMO behind EQ.

I really loved SWG til the NGE.  It was my first MMO addiction and I was sad that I moved on. 

I remember me and a bunch of my, at the time, fps clan mates being in beta and we would sit around in IRC chat for hours waiting for servers to come up. 

And back then we were still arguing about whether to easier Asian MMOs yet :)

SWG was one of my high points in MMOs, representing the alternative to prettier/easier EQ. Had such a fantastic time playing SimBeru with my energy business and home decorating gig, really never cared that the combat had issues. So many people on this forum were part of that experience, particularly Sky, Rasix, Slack, schild. Except for Shadowbane, i haven't been in an MMO for any appreciable amount of time with this crew.

It wasn't the Star Wars people wanted, but it was the sequel to UO that I craved :D

Everything i've ever wanted to say about it has been said. It was just that kind of game that always riled up the conversationalists, more so than most others. I am glad I was there because it represents an important part of the evolution of MMOs.

Rasix the Trandoshan Droid Engineer.  :heartbreak:  My stuff never worked.

Indeed, Raph. Thanks for what you did on SWG. I had a lot of fun playing it.

Yea but you were my first energy customer!

Shit i feel like old homes day here. Remember that one month period when that Empire Strikes Back flying Droid thing was crazy over powered? Good times.

For all its flaws, I loved this game. The open virtual world games are almost all gone now. Thanks Raph, it was very enjoyable.

I just wish someone would do a modern day VW game. But I guess that is too niche now given development costs. Ah well.   :heartbreak:

I LIKED being a moisture farmer, i LIKED living in the Star wars world.    :heartbreak:

You are a silly, broken, person though.

If you say so, but I'll be waving goodbye to it from Britain bank.

Heh. Every so often I'm tempted.


Eve  :grin:

Yeah, EVE pretty much has this market cornered.

SWG (or rather SWG angst) is what first made me aware of Waterthread, way back when.

Ah WT.o. Wasn't the second or third iteration of the place where our guild started? Or were we here by then? Christ I'm getting old.

I hear it was really hard to become a Jedi in this game.  :grin:

I left long before the first Jedi ever appeared.  For a Star Wars game to have neither Jedi nor space ships was a pretty clear indicator that things weren't quite kosher.

I didn't even buy the box because of the Jedi thing.

And yet Jedi appearing is what started the downward spiral. I wish we'd kept them out altogether!  :uhrr:

Out with the new, in with the old.

God I am so clever, etc etc

Imagine SWG never existed.  Now imagine that this announcement is made tomorrow:

DEVELOPMENT NEWS:  A Star Wars MMO currently in development, targeted for release in 2013.  

--Set in the context of episodes 4-6.  
--Fully customizable player housing on multiple planets with dozens of building styles to choose from.  
--Fully customizable character appearance.  
--Wookiees playable as a race.  
--Bounty Hunter profession with actual PVP bounty missions
--Complex crafting system, unlike any other game to date.
--Build your own spaceships, with dozens of models and countless customizable components to choose from
--Fly said ships in space and engage in pve and pvp (in space)(did I mention you could take your ship into outer space)
--Entertainer professions to provide player healing and enhancements
--Unprecedented freedom to choose your path and change it at any time
--Player cities, designed and built by players, complete with your own shuttle port, cantina and guild halls.
--Attackable faction bases that can be placed in your cities
--Faction pets, including AT-ST for Imperials, to be used in combat
--Fully customizable player vendors (machine, droid or humanoid)
--Diverse combat system that can be set up and changed at will
--Explore and visit several points of interest from episodes 4-6, such as Jabba's Palace
--Create your own endgame.  The tools are there, you just have to use them.  Help your city's crafters gain the best resources from challenging planets so that you can have the best gear and food.  Engage in open world Imperial vs Rebel PVP.  Relax and in your city's Cantina and plan your next group event, and more.
--Three character slots:  One for Jedi (that you can play from day one), and two for all other professions (for example, one for crafting and one for combat).
--NO RAIDING


The character slot thing was my own idea but the rest was in SWG vanila and combat revamp.  Don't get me wrong, the game needs to die.  As it stands it's like the final fusion of brundlefly and teleporter.  But it was a legendary endeavor on all accounts, good and bad.

I would call it horse shit still.  :awesome_for_real:


Like, whenever I read something like this:

--Complex crafting system, unlike any other game to date.



My first reaction is to run away and never look back. Crafting fuckers are just as bad as the AssRape fuckers.

The holocrons and grinding is what started it.  But that's a dead horse.  (Also I'm still bitter about the system...)

But really the pre-NGE SWG was the most enthralling game I've played.  I can only hope that one day something tops it for those of us who enjoy the things it offered.

I hope you like games like Wurm, et. al., because that is about the size of that niche at this point I think.

It would hit beta and we'd hear that pistol damage didn't stack with rifle damage, that there were no Jedi, that there were fencers and animal tamers and other "I ported these over from UO because I'm Raph Koster and I don't know what Star Wars is durr durr" bullshit character types, and we'd laugh at it.


Yeah man you managed to keep out everyone who wanted Jedi everywhere. Then they put Jedi everywhere and pissed off everyone you hadn't kept out in the first place. It was the worst of both worlds. Plus, I mean, an overpowered-by-design class that can be used in PVP? But which is balanced by PERMADEATH? In a mass-market commercial MMO? Yeah you can pretty much just take the lumps you deserve when it comes to the whole Jedi thing.

This is pretty melancholy for me. I guess it's as good a time as any to come out of the closet a bit, but I actually worked on SWG. It was the first, and remains the only game I've made that I also routinely played. I still to this day remember the name of the very first beta tester who logged into the servers on our first stress test (his/her name was Kebernet). We swarmed around him like groupies, we were all so excited to see someone from the outside in there with us. I remember all the fun I had wandering around the game and watching random interactions with strangers blossom into memorable events and stories. Looking back, I really feel it was a special and unique game. It's always made me smile when people write fondly about their memories in it, and it's really sad on a personal level to see it disappear even though it realistically disappeared awhile ago. I'll probably try to get back in and find my way back to the old hill we started from (I think it was outside of Bestine?)  and wait for the crowds of other diaspora to trickle back in and take one last look around.

Wonder if LucasArts tried to renegotiate the contract and it would just not work (profitably) for SOE under the new deal.

I don't think LucasArts cares either way if they have 1, 2 or 100 SW MMOs out there provided they get their cut.

Alternatively SOE sees that SWG was going to take a big hit whenever SWOR launched and didn't want to sign another contractual period to pay royalties when they also expect the player base to plummet.

WTF! :ye_gods:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWb3cxA4g_U&feature=player_embedded

Edit:  I see the problem now.  She's a Twilight fan.

I enjoyed the chat system, community and ship customization.

SWG's been a love/hate thing for me... some moments of brilliance mixed with kludgy / frustrating gameplay. I was also a dirty RPer, and the game was pretty awesome for that! Some things I remember:

- Treating people in the coronet med center as a doc, and chatting them up about where they got those scars, etc. Unsolicited mad scientist escapades (TF2 medic had nothin' on me). Also a whole lot of random RP happening all over the place, even with people who didn't think of themselves as RPers!
- A huge player city with lots of activity around the clock; plenty of events like theater productions or live bands (Greenmurk on Naboo, Kettemoor in case any of you played there)
- Operating a very specialized store (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?topic_id=697182) (explosives only, basically :awesome_for_real:) and taking care of bizznezz: ad campaigns, marketing, researching the competition, etc etc.* It was probably a bit more involved than '450 jewelcrafter lfw, have all metagems', and a lot more fun.
- JTL was good, and reminded me of the X-Wing days. I didn't have a joystick, so some of the missions were a bit tricky (hi, mr. corellian corvette!)
- A whole lot of frustration about how bad some of the game systems were (there's a reason I never had a combat character) leading to quitting in 2004, checking out the post-NGE ruins in 2008 briefly, then leaving for good.

* of course, ~1 month after I made that posting, the devs decided to remove explosives from the game. I followed this up with removing my subscription from the game. :P

Jobu, who are you? :)


Ironically, many of those features are what drives the massive massive social games audiences today. Don't get me wrong, SWG was nowhere near "mass market" in terms of accessibility. But in terms of many of its features, we were far more correct about what the true mass market wanted than any other MMO -- too on target for powergamers, in fact. Farmville was a *feature* in SWG, after all. If anything, the SW license held it back in that sense.


Some of those lumps aren't mine to take, actually. A lot of what Jedi were when they first appeared was developed when I wasn't on the team anymore. That said, if there's a single design decision I regret more than any in my entire career, it's when the AP on the project came to me and said "we can't manage the Jedi selection system as designed... how about this compromise?" and it was a long, frazzled day of crunch and I listened and said "sure, whatever."

I've said it before elsewhere, but the intent even with the permadeath was quite different. Jedi was supposed to end up as a minigame, not something you invested months of work in. One day, you unlocked it, and you got this extra slot. So your main didn't become a Jedi, but a new character. It had some powers from the get-go, but was also hunted by everyone. And when you played, you died fast, within the first couple of minutes, because you had an awareness meter that went up when others saw you use your powers. Then you tried again with a new character, and a fresh timer ticking. Stay alive long enough and you got a blue glowy of that jedi you could summon with your main as an emote -- bragging rights.

Bits and pieces of this were in what launched, but a lot of it was not. Or was altered in crucial ways: making your main the Jedi, for one. Working for months to unlock the slot created a very different atmosphere. And slow grinding as a Jedi likewise didn't work with permadeath.

Anything but "Let's make Jedi a character class and balance them with everything else!" was sheer madness from whoever had final say on making the call, whether it be you, your boss, or some guy from LucasArts whining that it wouldn't be canon. Anyway.

Five minutes in Paint. Because I am a dick, and have not expressed my undying UO fanboyism properly in ages.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/hehheh.png)


She's a roleplayer who refers to her character as if they were another real person. "She and I have been through a lot together." I have seen those people up close and they are crayyy-zay.

Well, my first proposal was not to have Jedi as PCs at all, but that lasted for mere seconds after I proposed it. :)

See, Raph, this is what I mean. Like don't get me wrong. You were the main dude behind the genesis of UO, so you know WUA loves you deep down. But it's obvious that you Just Do Not Get Star Wars At All. Like if you think you can make a Star Wars RPG and not let people run around with lightsabers kicking ass, then you just do not grok the IP on a fundamental level.

Like if you watch this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AELImg_jnBA&t=2m6s) and somewhere inside the depths of your brain a six-year-old doesn't scream "OH YEAH YOU ASSHOLES ARE IN FOR IT NOW!" as the lightsaber swishes on then you were just plain working on the wrong game. They were right to make you add Jedi, and your mistake was trying to implement them in the most beardy text-muddy way possible.

Back during whenever the "let's make a SW MMO" decision was made, the most popular period in the lore was ESB. Two Jedi, one ghost, all unknown. To do Jedi right, you need to pick a different period. Ep 1-2 would work if anyone liked those movies, or more recently Clone Wars (Ep 2-3) if a serious MMO was made in that setting. Or, of course, you integrate a lot of "hey that almost looks like..." stuff into KOTOR.

Regardless, set aside the holocron mess for a sec. I don't think Jedi would have felt right in SWF. And personally I don't think people needed to play Jedi as much as the lens of history (and SWTOR) makes some believe. A better combat system that made sense to the combat fan would have done a lot more for SWG than having everyone running around with a light saber.

Man, it's 2003 all over again. Queue 100 pages! :)

DON'T CARE. STAR WARS. NEED LIGHTSABER.


You are wrong. Also, remember this when Star Wars: Half Our Classes Have Lightsabers comes out in a box with a guy triple-wielding lightsabers on the front of it and outsells the entire history of SWG in like a month.

I love Jedi as much as the next guy, but give me a little shop in Mos Eisley selling speeder and ship parts and I'm a happy man.

This, right here. I got into the SWTOR beta (which I am allowed to say). I'm not going to talk about NDA breaking stuff but I'll say this: I have been extremely not giving a fuck about this game and the second I turned my lightsaber on I was 8 years old again.

You think adding easier to get Jedi before NGE started a downward spiral?  I can't agree with that.   Maybe that nonsense about Jedi's being more powerful caused some problems but that's another topic.

I guess I'll jump in, as another Raph fanboy who enjoyed UO immensely and thought SWG had a lot of potential.

I agree with Raph about Jedi, given the time period of the game and the game world itself. However, as everyone has pointed out, the big draw for the masses is lightsaber combat and Lucasarts wants the masses. The IP was just not right for a Raph world.

However, I know I'll miss a lot of what made SWG immersive when TOR comes out. The crafting will be some cheesy WoW-alike, the social portions will be forced (but lets not forget forcing dancers (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3667682/mamma.jpg) on people), and the planets will be more theme park than world.

I'd almost add a third leg to the old horse Darniaq and I used to pine for - a cross between SWG's world and crafting, Planetside's modified shooter combat, and I'll add in TOR as the quest/story layer (and of course JtL, lest Lantyssa lambaste me).

And at the end of the day, HAM did not work and could not be made workable. That I'm /still/ bitter about my rifleman speaks volumes about that.

Completely ridiculous.  Lore matters to about 0% of the population, star wars = jedis.

I think there's a generational aspect here. Star Wars to me is blasters, speeders, x-wings, the Millenium Falcon and Han shooting first because he's just so cool.

Well, with Raph in this thread I can hardly speak for what the goals of SWG were with any kind of authority, but it was always my impression that SWG was trying to faithfully recreate the Star Wars universe in that time period and let people in to do what they would.    At the time, I think that was a reasonable approach for an MMORPG - clearly at this point it would not fly, but at the time MMOs weren't what they are now.

Had they gone with the old republic setting that TOR is and had more or less the same game with lots of Jedi running around do you think that would've made the game successful?  I don't personally, because the real issue is that it turns out that that kind of game is just incredibly niche, most people want to kill shit and collect loot and absolutely nothing serious beyond that.

For Raph:
I know the facebook games give credence to the idea that there is a huge population who wants to play games where they are farming and stuff, but I think thats misleading.  Those games are competiting with people's jobs/work etc, where launching any kind of client might get you fired, but having a browser window open isn't a big deal.  A full on MMO has to compete with every other possible game for entertainment, so I suspect that there isn't as big an audience for this kind of crafting/social based MMO as facebook makes it look like.  I know Garriot said something similar in a recent interview and the he thinks the kinds of games he likes to make would work well with that mindset, but I'm not convinced.


In summary:  I really appreciate what SWG was trying to do, but I don't think we can seriously suggest that there is a very big market for that kind of virtual world/virtual life sim game.

Yeah, as someone who simply knew the setting from the first three films, the idea of having lots and lots of Jedi running around actually seemed a bit silly. Back when SWG was announced, it was the real fanatics who started talking about an "extended universe" with lots of Jedi in. All I knew was that the Jedi were pretty much extinct, because that's what Peter Cushing said in the first film.

A lot of it was how you obtained Jedi.  There were other social and balance implications, though I really think the grinding mentality it caused forever stuck with the game from that point on.  It wasn't supposed to ever be about grinding, and then future revamps made the grinding worse.

Yeah this was always what made me interested in Star Wars.  Sure, the wizards with laser swords were neat, but they were neat because they were part of this kind of Bladerunner grungy universe.  Mos Eisley basically sums up everything I like about Star Wars - for all the galatic politics and plans, the idea of a kind of Tortuga in a space faring universe was fascinating.

The end result for SWG was to basically ignore the timeline it was situated in, add in Jedi so that they were everywhere, then add in whatever could be scrounged together all the way up to zombie Stormtroopers.

It was an odd decsion. Why not just set it after the original timeline, somewhere in the EU where it didn't matter so much what was canon and what wasn't?

I was five when Star Wars was released, lightsabers aren't actually a massive part of that story but they were still awesome enough for me to register them at five as 'better than blasters and speeders'.

If SWG had released with the name 'Future Laser Gun Battle World" it may have done better long term because there would have been no expectation of things like Space Ships or Jedi.  Instead it got named Star Wars and shipped with the HAM system, which I hated more than not being a Jedi (My sniper rifle shoots your MIND but his pistol shoots your HEALTH so we are less effective cooperating on the same target than on separate ones?  What?).

I know the HAM thing has been discussed to death so we don't need to rehash it.  There are things that SWG did really well, although when I stopped playing crafting wasn't one of them.  That aspect actually didn't get really working until several months after launch if you recall.  I firmly believe that there is room, a LOT of room, for a solid sandbox MMO.  But, we have also learned a lot about multiplayer systems in the last 8 years and that would need to be incorporated to any new effort as well.

I absolutely love Raph's vision and would sign on to one of his projects in a heart beat but I think Star Wars was the wrong project for his strengths.

I can't really agree.   At that time a lot of us felt the market was ready for a 1mil+ MMO.   EQ was making a lot of money even while it foot stomped on casual nuts.   Star Wars had a million subs in the bag if they just went for something more accessible than EQ.   They didn't need to go diku but getting the combat right should of been priority one.   Anything else was totally unreasonable.    

I'm guessing the decision on that was far above Raph's head though.  Probably a lot of nonsense about any kind of casual accessible combat focused game stealing EQ customers.  

Well, if they had stuck in a good combat system would that have really made the difference though?  I mean, maybe, but I'm betting people still wouldn't have liked the sandbox direction even with snappy combat, at least in the long run.

No, SWG failed because Smed and a couple of douchebags at Lucasarts thought they could make it like WoW when it was never meant to be.

No, I didn't say that SWG.  I said a Star Wars game with those features.  Tell me that thread wouldn't get as many pages as the on rails single player that is SWTOR.  

You didn't notice that I put "jedi day one" in there too.  Did your rage even allow you to read my post?

Depends on the defnition of failed.  Certainly failed to be the market dominating force it wanted to be. NGE was an attempt to try and salvage that goal.  Had they stayed with the original, they'd probably be something closer to what EVE is today.  Niche, but solid enough a popiulation to continue development.

Speculation, of course.

I spent more time playing with my han solo pistol than the lightsaber, but that might be because original toy lightsabers were total garbage.

You couldn't hit shit with them, true, but goddamn did they make an awesome noise.   I wish they'd remake them with modern plastics & molding techs.

This thread is drifting from the original intent pretty badly. We've had the SWG discussion so often it's auto-denned these days. How about letting it go, admitting the flop and moving on.  Seriously, you're as bad as the Trammel-haters and denned for the same reasons.

On that note: Companion death.  Yes, I expect it'll cause some people angst, but I also expect it to be a low, low number, particularly with the pop-ups.  The question at hand is really how loudly will they bitch and how will Bioware handle that noise.  So far they're taking a "Well, tough for those guys," position on a lot of issues.  You can't maintain that front when a game is live because of the ill will it generates.

Um, this thread IS the SWG thread, not the SWTOR thread.

This thread is about SWG discussion, your companion death stuff is whats out of topic :P

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/facepalm01.gif)

Fooook. I fail.

You know, I'm playing though Oblivion right now with a Jedi custom class - Blade, Block, Armorer, Acrobatics, Alteration, Mysticism, Illusion. It pretty much rocks. It does lack a range capability but that's why I have a bow and arrows.  :awesome_for_real: Besides who needs range when they are all fighting one another?  :grin:

I'll stop being off topic...

I think that's absolutely true.  SWGemu is proof.  

Oh, but they did. (http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/collectibles/e26d/) Not as nice as the ones I make, but not bad either.

I guess I didn't really word it correctly.   I was saying that a good combat experience with accessible PvE should of been the core of the game content INSTEAD of the sandbox stuff.    They could of put sandbox in everywhere else as long as people could kill stuff 90% of the time and reap rewards for it.   EQ proved that's where the money was.   SWG just needed to swoop up all the casuals who didn't like the way EQ nutstomped them.

That and the Jedi.   Really the license was just a complete handicap without the Jedi.


Shit I'm a sad person.   When I looked at those I just thought how awesome it would be to buy one and take it to midnight release for SWTOR.

You could do a sandbox game and have it make money, easy. You just couldn't blow $80 million on production in vain hopes of getting Warcraft numbers. You could even do it in a Star Wars setting, but the game would have to be... not a "Well I can't be a Jedi but my pikeman sure is good at milking banthas, and isn't that was Star Wars is really all about?" goddamn abomination.

I mean I play UO. Still. I enjoy the sandboxiness of it, but I don't craft or grow plants or any of that shit. I kill things and socialize, mostly. Why don't I just go do that in any old game? Because when I do it in UO I can make up any sort of character I want, not one of ten classes, I can dress him however I want and still be combat effective, and the game isn't trying to feed my life story to me. "You are a noble warrior of the Alliance and you are concerned about the Murlocs in Redshire or whatever the fuck. No? Fine, fuck you, don't level then!" It's also not screaming "GROUP WITH 24 OTHER ASSHOLES OR YOU'RE A SECOND-CLASS FAGGOT!"

I mean, forget about building virtual farms for a minute. Can't I just have an actual MMO where you don't just play one of ten varieties of useless assholes that have to either team up to accomplish anything or else live as Untermenschen?

Fallen Earth maybe? Its going free to play, so you could check it out.   I agree with what you've said though, I think choosing to play a combat oriented character in a game like UO is a fine choice, and I think its a more interesting choice because you don't have to do that.  I'm not saying everyone needs to be a Bantha milker, but I think having people who don't fight or fight minimally is a good thing for a game.

Incidentally, the thing that came to mind when I read your post was something like a multiplayer/persistent world Morrowind.  I'd buy that.

I liked my Ranger. He harvested animal resources for all sorts of crafters on the server. That shit was fun. :/

LOL

Incidentally, the best player I knew in SWG was a pikeman and he won a duel with 3 jedis at the same time.  I know this statement invites all sorts of bashing but it was one of the most memorable things I've seen in all my years of online games.

Also, SWGemu forums are hot, and many of the twitter "SWG" comments mention SWGemu.  #justsayin

Yeah, but you still can't hit shit with them, don't make the awesome wind-powered noise and require batteries.   I was thinking just fix the "can't hit things" problem and keep the rest of the old toy.

That's a foregone conclusion. My point wasn't about the lore for the sake of lore though. It was about the license. I have no idea what the licensing agreement was. But, licensing isn't just signing on the dotted line either. It's that plus someone looking over your shoulder forever while you make decisions outside of their area of expertise and compromise to close the gap. Therefore, I'd bet large that given the period during which this was greenlit, and the setting of the game, the edict was "rare/no Jedi". The rest was just details on how to make them "rare". For SWG, there wasn't going to be a good answer.

That was nowhere near the biggest problem with the game either.  But the actual problems have been discussed more often than why WoW was successful.

And as I said on page one: this was my UO 2. It just happened to be called "Star Wars". So I personally didn't care about the lore.

My nephew has the latest in actual toy lightsabers, they telescope into the handle and you can extend them out with a button press and a swing of the saber. You can also smack things with them without much issue, as my bruises from his last visit will attest to. They aren't that expensive either, got them on sale for like 5 bucks each.

They don't make any noises though.  :sad:

Why in the world would you sign an agreement to make a Star Wars MMO if the agreement doesn't allow for Jedis?

That's like signing an agreement to make a Warhammer 40K MMO but you aren't allowed to include Orks and Space Marines. If what you say is true then all that does is transform "it's stupid to make a Star Wars game without lightsabers" into "it's stupid to agree to make a Star Wars game without lightsabers then go ahead and make it despite the fact that that's a terrible fucking idea."

This smacks of over thinking to me. Too many Jedi doesn't jive with the fiction that only 30 extended universe super nerds in the world care about - yay. Balancing a Jedi against other classes is hard because Jedi are supposed to be awesome - whatever. People like laser swords. That's like THE ONLY GOOD THING about Star Wars. FFS find a way to make it work!

If you take laser swords out of Star Wars you have complete shit. What is Star Wars at that point? CGI dinosaurs?

Apparently milking banthas and a universe where it's possible to cross the galaxy in a few days but impossible to haul water for less money than sucking it out of the arid air of a desert.

Thats kind of non-trivial, Jedi in the original series BECAUSE they are awesome, rare, and way more powerful than non-Jedi.  Make them prentiful and balanced and they aren't really all that special, hell, Bounty Hunters and Smugglers (if we had to call them classes), are "cooler" than Jedi if everything is balanced.

SWTOR is doing it full on, and thats fine we will see what happens, but I still think SWG made a fine approach.  But hey, with an argument like "wollolololololol only nerds care about lore" nothing is going to make you care, so whatever.

 

Raph first off thank you for SWG, I loved the game (pre-CU) from start to finish and really would love to play another one.  I would though like to ask you two questions about SWG if I could.  There was a random encounter on Tatooine where a slave girl gets killed before you and gives you a disk before dying.  

Just Two Questions:

1.  Why didn't the devs make more meaningful random content like that, that would have rewarded exploration?  I ask because I thought it was so obvious with your spawning algorithms seemingly set to do this anyway (ie: actual NPC bases, not the little boxes spawning in the middle of nowhere).

2.  Was this encounter ever solveable?  I thought and my memory on this is not so fresh as it once was but I thought we were supposed to give this disk to someone.  I was never able to give it to anyone.

I sorta agree. However, that's through a lens of hindsight. Not having been in the early negotiations, I'm totally guessing about the topics and the timing. I think SWG took 3-4 years to develop, so am adding in another year from the moment someone said "that EQ1 thing looks like moneyhats, let's make one of them there new fangled "MMORPG" things".

That puts us right around when Episode 1 came out, maybe even before it. Were we thinkiing Star Wars was all about lightsabers in the late 90s? I don't know. I was really into the EU stuff at that point, and to me the IP was about a bunch of crap that either got retconned or nixed altogether. Already had a thick skin at that point, even midichlorians didn't bother me (ok, not as much as others maybe).

In any case, if all I knew about SW was the first three movies, there was exactly one Jedi that mattered. If all I knew about SW was the movies and some Lucasarts SW games, that doesn't increase the amount of Jedi. All the Jedi I knew about were whoever Luke was picking up years after RotJ as he was rebuilding the academy on Yavin IV under the watchful gaze of Exar Kun. But from a game play standpoint, I wasn't expecting Jedi as much as I was really aggravated by the lack of space combat. If we could resurrect Slow News Day or old LtM before it, I'm sure there's a bunch of posts in there with me saying "how the eff do you launch a SW game without space combat.".

We'll never know for sure probably, since all the people involved are too professional to talk about this kind of stuff, or to take chances confirming or denying. And besides, it doesn't truly matter because TOR has been skinned enough like Clone Wars to give us what we think we really wanted in 2003 anyway. :)

And before anyone states the obvious, yes, I'm totally overthinking this. SWG topics is my own personal "mechs vs tanks".  :oh_i_see:

SWG wasn't a failure, it generated revenue for eight years.  But, yeah, it wasn't very good.  I did enjoy the crafting and living near Anchorhead.  But the combat was bad (OMG HAM), no Jedi and no spaceflight (at first) made it seem like the game was designed by someone who had heard of Star Wars but had never seen it.  

It was half-baked and poorly designed, but the sandbox did feel good.  

For the record, I loved UO and have many great memories of it. My iconic MMO.  I can't think of a single great memory of SWG.

How many people play SWGemu? And what does it cost to play?

I have nothing against EU nerds but you guys have to remember you are a small niche. Yes, only SW nerds care about SW lore.

MMOs already have the problem where everyone is the chosen hero, Jedi don't change that. Sure, it's kind of silly if Jedi are supposed to be rare and there are 100,000 running around. Then against it's kind of silly when you are given a quest to rescue the princess from the dungeon because you are the only guy strong enough and 2 seconds later someone else is given the same quest to rescue the same princess from the same dungeon because they are also the only guy strong enough.

 :oh_i_see:

"solid enough a population to continue development"

The answer to this is in a post on my blog:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/04/30/dynamic-pois/

Yeah, I can't really speak to most of the stuff in the thread; there are many more moving parts that are not public knowledge.

Some things I think it is safe to say: the requirement to have Jedi, make them be like in the movies, make them rare, plus the time period being mandated... Yes, it was basically all required, and yeah, kind of impossible. I did suggest using the post-movie period -- there's a lot of stuff in the EU that is really great and would have been fresh and new to more casual fans. And many more Jedi start popping up.

There was also a desire to not cannibalize EQ, and make the game different. Despite that, SWG WAS intended to have tons of content. There are a lot of reasons why it didn't.

Actually, if you don't count the EU (which you shouldn't because it's horrible), in the time period of the game (the first 3 movies) there were three living Jedi. Five if you count the Sith. This was kind of the entire plot of the movies. It's a bit more to overlook than "30 EU nerds" and is an excellent argument why setting an MMO in the time frame of the movies is a bad idea.

I kind of figured on this.   Did you guys feel at the time that SWG should of tried to be the first mass market MMO?    What I mean is, was there a conscious decision (due to risk/whatever) to give up on the idea of making SWG much bigger than EQ?   Or did it just not really occur to anyone inside SOE at that point?

I feel that WoW caught everyone by surprise of course but I still felt it was clear that the market was ready for a big game anyways.   It's feels like the worst problem was that Lucas didn't have many options besides SoE to work with.

Well make it require a voluntary commitment by the player.  Like a golden cock appears and starts spinning in your UI.  CLICK for your POI wankery!  And you can say "hellz yeah, it's time to slay the bantha!" or "bros before hos, chucklefuck!" and decline.  And later, if you feel like it, you can go back and start your golden wang adventure.

Not think, know. Holocron drops that first Xmas, specifically.

That crap was crazy.  I got lucky on both my jedi and had to grind 6 classes on one and 7 on the other :D

The intent was absolutely to make the big mass market MMO. Making a combat only game seemed at the time the wrong way to go about that. The casual features that were in SWG were the ones aimed more mass market. And sure enough, time has shown that farming, dancing, business management, house decorating, crafting, the whole asynch play stuff, and the like ARE way, WAY more mass market than combat. Just not in MMOs... In social games.

There's a great case to be made that all the ideas were put into the wrong game on several different levels... Not just in the SW universe, but into a core MMO at all, and into a retail disk product, and into too big a product.

The combat and the content needed to be there, no doubt at all, to satisfy the core. Big miss there.

Side note: all the biggest hits in games are and have always been homegrown brands. Look up the historical performance of licensed titles... Saying "it's SW, therefore it must be huge" does not accord with reality in any other genre of game. This has not prevented half my career having been work on adapting IP from other media into games... Virtually none of which ever came to fruition. I think I have written treatments or done meetings for a dozen or so.

But then that defeats the purpose of dynamic content no? Spinning golden cock or golden exclamation point - same diff.

People are saying that about Kinect Star Wars. "Hey it has Star Wars on the box, it will sell a bajillion copies!" There have been probably 50 Star Wars video games made, the vast majority are moderate sellers.

That's fair enough I guess.   I never considered that the intent might of been to pull in non gamers.   That seems like a pretty big miss for the license but hindsight.  I'll admit I never considered anyone would try to go quite that mass market without some sort of interm step away from EQ's extreme niche.

Well, it could have worked.  Initial sales were excellent.

Unfortunately the market they were targeting isn't willing to put up with bugs.  They don't complain, they just wander off to other things.  They aren't interested in monthly fees or commitment.  They, at least initially, needed a simple system to ease them into the more complex aspects of the game.

A lot of the game was close.  Unfortunately they suffered from being too early in MMO's lifespan and having way too many buggy, partially, or non-developed systems.  And of course tied to an IP at the most constrained point in its timeline.

How good it turned out for a segment of players is really pretty incredible given the constraints and when it was developed.  I'm glad it was the first non-MUD game that really got its hooks into me, and I still hold out hope that some will, one day, make something with just as many great ideas but add a few more coats of polish and give it sufficient time to get completed.

It definitely could have worked if they'd marketed it as what it was.  That and finished it.

The problem is that you're basically talking about two effectively separate games in one.  Its not some kind of trivial thing to just tack on a bunch of sandbox elements onto a game and hope they work out in the end game after people didn't participate at all for 50 levels (or however many, I don't know what max level is).   Aside from the development issues, I'm sure you're going to have a bunch of pissed off customers who get to max level and suddenly have a different game to play than they have been, one of the major things WoW has done of the years is trying to make their end game coherent for people who have just leveled up, and raiding isn't even sandboxy.

I'm fine with TOR just going full on for what it is. I'd rather have it just nail its design for what it is than get all muddled up trying to add in a bunch of different play styles.

 :angryfist:

Raph thanks for the link to the blog you wrote.  It did indeed answer the questions i had, and in hindsight is sort of funny.  I spent days weeks getting rebel rep so that I could do the rebel theme park back then.  I was so sure it was connected to that themepark.  Anyway good times, and a great game.

I was going to make a bounty hunter just to kill all the Jolt Cola Jedis, but then they took the permadeath out.  :heartbreak:

I'm honestly not trying to trip you up; I'm asking because I'm curious. A F2P open source title has lower barriers to keep running than a professionally developed game. A solid population could be 8 people plus a coder who wants to do something with their friends.

My apologies for the guarded response. 

I am not on the staff but I can tell you what I know from following the project and playing from time to time:  It's currently F2P because it's still in development.  As for numbers, I just checked the forum roster and there are 36388 registered users.  Of course it's safe to say that there are not 36k regular players.  It usually depends on what is being tested.  If the game was finished and worked well, that forum statistic could be a good indicator of a ballpark figure...many of them would probably be long gone but many new people would catch wind of it and join.

There have been times when I logged on and there are players everywhere in Theed and Coronet.  Cantinas full of entertainers, people in the spaceport plazas, group pvp skirmishes going on.  There are regular guilds that seem to form back up after every server wipe.  But the population goes up and down...usually corresponding with the times that the "blue frogs" are up.  Blue frogs are little nodes at spaceport entrances that give out free skills and items for testing. 

I think it was going to remain F2P even if it went live, because of legality issues.  However, with SWG out of the way, perhaps things are different now?  Which leads me to my honest question, for the forum:

With all due respect to everyone's opinions about the game, do you think it's possible for a project like SWGemu to get some sort of boost now that SWG is ending?  If so, what would it take?  Again, I'm not on the emu staff so I don't speak for them.  I'm just an old fan of the game and would like to see a solid revival of it.

I hate to be negative about what sounds like a cool emu which I will probably check out, but nothing associated with SWG is open source and if anyone involved in this thinks they are going to be able to start charging for entry then they might want to take legal advice now rather than later. Personally I'd be delighted if they manage to turn their emu into a going concern (in the sense of creating an income from it) but also very surprised.

Umm, I hate to be a downer here, but swgemu's situation is not improved now that SWG is going to be dead.  In fact, I'd consider it much worse now that the contract between LA and SOE will be terminated.

That's unless swgemu has consent directly from LucasArts.  Do they?

Rasix:  Not sure about consent, but I don't think they have any plans to implement sub fees.  They give the option to donate.
Palmer:  Here is some info from the FAQ:

That is nice and all, but regardless of if they are truly legal or not, it will not prevent them from being sued. And given the likely depth of their pockets, I doubt they would survive even a mild assault from Lucas.

The fact that they're canceling the main game brings up an interesting legal question though.   I am obviously not a lawyer but I'd imagine it gives them a bit more wiggle room in some areas.

No. it really doesn't.

I didn't say they could get away with it.   I simply said wiggle room.   Meaning specifically certain damage claims can't be made anymore.

I never played SWG. I had purchased my first game-capable PC around the time it was released, but that was for the specific purpose of playing PlanetSide. After that, FFXI was my first "real" mmo (Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast surely doesn't count).

These days I would appreciate the sandbox it apparently offered, but only well after the fact.

If you are SOE, you are correct. If you are EA and about to launch the now only official Star Wars MMO on the market...  :grin:

Just because an artist's album gets deleted or goes out of print doesn't mean you can pirate it with more wiggle room, someone somewhere still owns the rights to the original material even if they are sitting on it.  Same goes with video games.  Abandonware sites have run into issues with this from games that have been out of print for 10+ years.  I know emulators aren't technically pirating in the same vein, but they still use IP developed by someone who legally owns it even if that owner chooses to keep it off the market.

What in the goddamn hell are you people smoking?

Vapors from the moisture farm?

Whoa whoa who said anything about pirating it?   Didn't they say explicitly you have to own a legal copy of the game?

Wrong. See: bnetd.

A legal copy of a game that can no longer be played past Dec 15 because the vendor no longer has access to the IP for that game.  Like I said (ok, implied), I think their position got much, much worse.

bnetd is only illegal in the US via two specific parts of the DMCA.   That's exactly what I'm talking about in fact.   Now that SoE has essentially disabled SWG they can't pull out the DMCA to claim a DRM mechanism is being circumvented.   The DRM mechanism is gone and doesn't even function anymore.

The most interesting point though from the bnetd case is probably this: "Appellants failed to establish a genuine issue of material fact as to the applicability of the interoperability exception [of the DMCA]. The district court properly granted summary judgement in favor of Blizzard and Vivendi on the operability exception."

In essence it was ruled bnetd failed to prove that it was needed for interoperability.   Proving swgemu is needed for interoperability when the game doesn't even work is easy.


The issue is entirely about DRM and only DRM.   Some IP issues might come up if they actually tried to extend the original client with new content of course.

It's more likely that LucasArts (or EA) sends a message one day to all SWG emulators that says, "See all those Star Wars characters and names you are using? Stop it." That they haven't so far may have been because SOE didn't think it was worth chasing that particular issue. However, the comments of people who are leaving SWG and heading to an emulator might raise it above the 'we don't care' threshold.

They can't really do that since they released to the buyer a license to view that content.

No, it's really not. Lucasarts licensed SOE the rights to use the Lucasfilm-owned content in SWG. That license is expiring (which Smedley said was one of the main reasons SWG is being shut down). It doesn't mean "oh, we only enforce licenses for big companies" as any number of fan-driven mods hit with cease-and-desist orders can attest.

There's also the not minor fact that the SWG client, client-server protocol, and game content is all SOE's intellectual property, which is why every MMO emulation project is technically illegal and which is why every MMO emulation project over a given size which tries to make $ is shut down quickly (by lawyers in some cases, by the FBI in a few).

But they didn't license the guys running the server to show it.

I've two things to say:

1) I entered SWG beta with the greatest scepticism and little knowledge of the IP. But I became drawn in by the team's deep, complex intentions for the game. It was tough to get your head around the plans and I think few people, even here on F13, understand what it could have been (if there had been time and money). There was genius at work, so the fate of SWG is sad. I had some great times in it anyway.

2) I hope SWGEmu can survive. I never thought I'd experience pre-CU SWG again and it actually delivers. The world has moved on, so it's only ever going to be a niche community. If you want them in your fold, the real answer is to release something good enough that they will play instead.

All that stuff is in the client so the server just says "show character #42" which happens to be Darth Vader.  Of course that assumes they do it all properly.   If they just half ass it and create their own Darth Vader and send that character to the client then they're fucked.

The license expiring does not matter at all.  IP infringement is IP infringement no matter WHO is the current holder of the IP.   Lucas might be more likely to sue but that isn't really the discussion.


They are not distributing the client.   Also client-server protocols are not covered under copyright law.   Those can only be protected with patents and the EULA.   EULA's can not exclude reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability as well.   That right at least is still protected by law.

For not being a lawyer, you sure try to argue like one.

Fact is, if EA or LA decide they want SWGemu dead, it will be dead.  Either via bleeding them out of time and money or judgement in their favor.  The rest is internet herf-blerf.

Forgive me my profession is software development and a lot of it is reverse engineering so a bit of annoying fanatical interest in the topic tends to pop out.

I agree they'll 99% likely just fold without even arguing their case.

So this server doesn't include any material that is the intellectual property of someone else? It never, for example, sends data to clients which include a text string with the word "Jedi" in it? Or "Tatooine"?

It doesn't replicate systems which are the intellectual property of SOE, such as the class and skills system seen in SWG?

It doesn't depend for its operation on users obtaining a copy of the SWG client and then using that client and the assets it contains in a manner specifically prohibited by the EULA? I gather the argument would be that the person who wrote the server software (the emu) and the person using the client are different people, but the emu is literally good for nothing without the client, unless you really like command lines.

Edit: I realise I'm being a bit of a cock but the idea that copyright and intellectual property rights don't really exist any more is one of my pet peeves. Sorry.

I think what they were claiming is that the stuff that DOES isn't distributed by them, i.e. you have to have purchased a legal copy of SWG to play.  Maybe its worth making the distinction maybe it isn't, I'm no lawyer.

It really doesn't matter. They may be perfectly within their rights. But if legal action is brought against them, they will have to defend themselves. That will cost coin. Game over.

I am asking questions about how their "open source" server code works, ie the emulator itself. Does it not send text files to the client? Does it not control game systems such as skill use and gain? It can't all be client-side.

Well, SOE has already given them their blessing, so it's only Lucas Arts that is the potential problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekzslGuSQC8

Granted, this is around 1990, but:  Lucas didn't go after Luther Campbell for "Luke Skyywalker Records" until the 2 Live Crew got huge.  If the emu stays f2p and doesn't advertise, maybe things would be copacetic....

And who knows, maybe if they let Lucas redo the graphics and change the Ewok music he'll get on board  :why_so_serious:

BTW this is another perfect example why you should never go after  shiny mainstream IP. I would bet that SWG would be a heck a lot better if it didnt have any SW in it. On top of that it wouldnt be shut down just because more mainstream  product appeared and the way needed to be "cleared". SWG was a damn solid sandbox  and it had pretty solid sub base (unlike vanguard). They could have boosted their numbers even more if they went f2p.  But alas...

Can someone please remind me what happened with this game from its genesis, particularly the crafting system?  I'm having trouble remembering (and I only played this game for about 2 months after launch).  It seems to be considered almost the Holy Grail of crafting but I can't recall why the devs fucked it all up.

I know they've gotten a blessing from Smedley to develop the Emu. I personally confirmed it a number of years back (and still have the email).

With that said, I don't think those guys intended to ever release an emulator.

Any time they get close, they dump the whole thing and start all over again, creating all sorts of good reasons for why they're basically starting from almost scratch.

Truth is they could have released a playable emulator for servers years ago. It might not have been 100 percent (Emus never are) but it would have been close enough IMO. And the current version they have is not significantly better than past versions.

But they haven't IMO for two reasons ...

1 - They get a ton of donations. If they release the code at least some of that money goes to the folks hosting servers and communities. Remember these are the folks who already had one of their devs clear out the paypal account for thousands a few years back. So there is money there.

2 - It diminishes their role in the emu community, and people will take their project and it'll branch off in different directions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies#Reception_and_criticism

Dunno about that. WoW would like nothing better than to squash all private servers - and you can find dozens with a google search.

First thanks for your role in SWG. It was my first ever MMO and despite the pain that came with the NGE, I made a lot of friends (and enemies) that I'm still in contact with today.

As mentioned, one of the great things about SWG was the community. Some five plus years since I stopped playing, we have a guild of dozens of people who have kept in touch ready to play together again in TOR.

Personally, I would have loved to have seen what the CU could have done if allowed to breathe for more than six months. The Pre-CU period had a lot going for it, but I also think folks look at it through rose colored glasses.

The community has just gotten past the shock of the CU's launch, most of the bugs were ironed out, and people started coming back to the game. IMO the game was defiantly back on the upswing after months of treading water (or losing ground), only to have all that momentum crash up against the NGE.

Can do.

First off, the best items in the game were player made.  This made crafters not only useful but essential.

Resources weren't nodes, and they had stats that fluctuated.  For example, in April maybe you had to go to Tatooine for the best of a certain kind of metal.  In May, that same metal would have different stats, and the good stuff would be on another planet.  It was up to you to find the locations off the good stuff when the shift occurred.  Same went for hide, meat, and flora.  Instead of nodes, you "surveyed" the ground, sort of like archeology in wow, to pinpoint the best concentration of resources like metal and water that were found underground, or flora above ground.  Hide & meat, obviously, came from creatures.  Since players only got one character slot per server, crafters needed combat buddies or money to get resources.  This made everyone work together for a shared goal:  crafters got their mats and fighters got their gear.  This also made everyone get second accounts but that's another story...

Once you found the water, flora or metal, you didn't just stand there and grab it.  You needed machinery to harvest it.  Bigger harvesters were more expensive but could extract at better rates.  Harvesters needed money and resources to run, but they ran 24/7 regardless of whether or not you're online.

Once you had the mats, you didn't just stand there and rub your hands together.  You had to buy the machinery (factories) to manufacture the items.  Basically, and I'm wracking my brain to remember the details, but when you knew you had high quality mats, you made a "blueprint" instead of the item itself.  This blueprint would be inserted into your factory and you'd add x amount of each material to create x amount of items.  For example, if you wanted to make 100 copies of the same gun, and each took 10 ore, you would drop 1000 ore into your factory and whatever multiple needed of the other mats.  Again, this would take time and would run even when you were offline.  If you didn't want to make a large run of items or were leveling up the skills, you could make items one at a time, but it involved a lot of dragging and dropping.  Here's a video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW72-dIiXgs&feature=related

At 0:31 in that vid, you'll see four slots that get filled with the same item.  It was a simple item that just needed 4 helpings of any ore.  More complex recipes had a higher number of slots, each a different resource with different quality requirements.  

When your stuff was done, give some to your guildies that helped you get the mats, sell some at a reduced price to your guildies who didn't help, and sell some at higher prices to the public.  

Selling to the public was a game in itself.  You could place vendors in your house, guild hall, or merchant tent.  Any player could walk up to them and access them like an auction house, except only your inventory was shown.  Pricing wasn't as simple as competing other sellers for the same items.  Even if 20 crafters were selling the same gun, people would seek out the best quality model of that gun.  As time went on, players knew where to go for the best stuff because word travelled fast.

Best of all, there was no such thing as bound items (until later).  So as one player received upgrades, they could give their old stuff to someone else.  

Baby's crying, no time to edit, hope this made sense

That makes me angry just reading it. God damn crafting fuckers.  :angryfist:

You used crafting tools for one offs, Factories were for copies and schematic runs. He didn't even go into experimentation points. (http://swg.wikia.com/wiki/Experimentation)


Talking about all this makes me pine for SWG Pre-CU. Dam it.

If that crafting system had fed a robust combat system (like, say, its contemporary Planetside) it would've been amazing. I've never mentioned this before.

The crafting and merchant system was really, really cool...and I wasn't involved in it. I made the mistake of trying to be a combat character.

I didn't really have an issue with the combat system other than: Doctor buffs, Eye shots, Melee VS. Ranged issues. But I suppose I agree with you mostly.

My few years in SWG were spent either being a resource & energy vendor or flying in space. Or dancing. The combat thing passed me by entirely until shortly before the end.

Space though - too much time spent playing that.

I disagree, if the combat system wasn't horse shit, the crafting system would've been hated by the people just wanting to shoot wookies or whatever.

Really, one of the best "worlds" to play in.

Raph, strip out the IP and do it again. I work for peanuts!

<eyetwitch>

I am glad that existed for the people who liked it. I am. But that sounds really annoying to me. I assume the prices were outrageous? How did people make money to afford shit without crafting themselves?

I loved the crafting but didn't like the combat system too much, as I recall.

Thanks for the pointer, Malakili, that helped.

Thanks, Crumbs, for the summary, it sounds familiar, now I remember.

What I still do not understand, though, is _why_ they fucked up the crafting system.  I don't recall complaints that it was too complex or not fun - the opposite, in fact.  I wonder what sort of data they used to determine that they needed to revamp the whole thing - the seats of their pants?  "Hey, subs are dropping, let's take the best part of our game and completely futz with it until it's a mere shell of what it used to be!"

Because poopsocking crafters are still poopsockers.

This.  "Relevant" crafting is always seen as some utopia when it's really just funneling money to a few players who aren't doing anything but pissing off your combat players.  If your game isn't combat-centric, great.  If it's anything like a DIKU you're just going to drive away the players actually using the content you're producing.

Crafting-centric games also suck for the time-limited and so I do my best to stay far away from them.


Exactly, but now they're running the entire economy instead of just subsidizing it.

I loved the crafting, despite its poopsockiness. The problem was, it really punished you if you wanted to play solo at all. With one maxed out crafting tree, along with the basic skills to support it, there was only enough left to make a character that was about an even fight with a wamprat. So I had my cool crafter, who couldn't explore, couldn't visit other worlds, could go on hunts with friends, etc.  Would have been ok if I could have made a second character to adventure with.

I eventually quit the game when I realized that crafting had become as much of a cut throat race to the top in the game as everything else - a mediocre crafter could not sell anything, there was simply no demand for anything but the highest tier stuff. So when it started to feel like a job, that I was obligated to log in every single day, I just quit.

No, they'd have just used a terminal to locate the nearest place to buy a gun, locate the cheapest one, and buy it. They wouldn't care about the 20,000,000 credit uber-crafted Gun of Doom that the server only had FOUR of because the guy that made it only had enough uber-components to make the four.

Seriously. That's what they would have fucking done. Combat characters don't GIVE a shit. They look at what they need ("A better gun" or "Better Armor"), the cash they have (X credits) and go looking for the best they can find. (Hence vendors). They then use this damn thing to get more money to get a BETTER gun.

In fact, other than a few hard core raiders, most combat characters would PREFER the system of "I give you X cash, you give me fucking awesome weapon" to "I kill 8000 Rancors for a 0.0002% drop chance of that weapon". Because then they could kill whatever the fuck they wanted, and still be earning the money.

I made a good living as a scout by keeping an eye on the forums for people wanting new spawns of meat. A friend of mine was a Master Ranger and we'd basically go shoot and harvest everything whenever a really top-notch spawn hit, then either fill orders or auction it.

I had enough Merchant to have vendors, and I kept a set of harvestors going 24/7 -- didn't bother moving them, I'd just switch them to whatever spawn was decent. (If there wasn't one, I'd sell it for cheap grindables). Same with energy. I had a factory -- specialized mostly in furniture and paintings, since I always had tons of hide and whatnot. I made a very steady income stream that way.

I was just getting into bio-engineering when the CU hit. That was fun.

Bunk: I think I heard that, orginally the design (God I hate that word in relation to SWG. It reeks of "Shit we dropped to make the schedule, and didn't bother thinking of the consequences") was that you could drop lower-level boxes. You just worked your way up a tree. Master Weaponsmiths, for instance, would require people with the lower boxes still to make the sub-components. It's just experimentation points and keeping all those boxes fucked this -- I think because they had issues balancing the skill system for combat with the ability to drop boxes.

The hell they wouldn't.


EDIT: That is to say, if the combat in SWG wasn't shitty, the people there for the combat would absolutely hate that a) there are only four Super Awesome Guns and b) that they could not afford one. They probably didn't care in SWG because ... well, the combat was shitty anyway.

Yeah, you're just wrong here, Morad.  Even with the shitty combat I had players tracking down my friend - the 2nd best gunsmith on scyllia - for said rare items.  She was where the bulk of my best ore went because she couldn't afford to buy it up like the conglomerate of catasses that wanted to corner the market.

SWG taught me that crafters in MMOs are all the worst abuses of RL business practices you can think of just waiting to happen.

This assumes that one hasn't spent time on the server, made friends, joined a guild, and became part of the manufacturing system.  I never paid a dime for my gear and I had some of the best on the server, because I helped secure the resources for my guild (and later, for my city).

It's a weird paradox in mmos.  People have this thing about gear quality but they want to treat the game like street fighter 2.  

So it's like raiding, only instead of fighting a big bad lore figure, you beat on rats for their meat to bait traps for wolves for their pretty, pretty pelts, in the hopes you can bribe some people into giving you not-shitty gear because they needed those pelts to line the insides of some boots. Yes, combat-centric people would totally adore that.

-fake edit-

Dammit Sjofn!  :why_so_serious:

Thats why you need full PvP - crafters abusing ecomonic power? Nothing a little force can't solve  :grin: :why_so_serious:

Except if they are the only supplier of said force and you are impotent without their stuff.  :oh_i_see:

Let's talk about the rest of the game.  If all we ever did was gather mats and craft stuff, then yes, that would be boring.  There was a point though:  open world PVP.  Imps v Rebs.  The real fun was invading cities and taking out bases, or defending your own city.  Or just chasing people from planet to planet, or getting chased.  To do this, gear helped.  It was worth it to help get the gear made.  In that respect, it's not like raiding at all.

Open world pvp was a huge part of SWG, if not only because there was nothing else to do.  But take a look at all the subsequent games in which there was a player base who really yearned for open world pvp.  Wow failed hard, WAR tried but made the mistake of adding battlegrounds.  FE, well the first time I took out half of my team with a friendly fire AOE I unsubbed.  If a player needs a hamster pellet for every move they make, then SWG was definitely not for them...the fun was in the experience itself.

Ok, so, crafters loved it and everybody else didn't?

So what happened?  The crafting was redone and everybody flocked to play with the new better crafting system? No, no they didn't.

So for those who claim the crafting wasn't the Holy Grail of mmo crafting - what is?  Y'all sound like a bunch of crafting h8rs.

NGE happened.   Most of the people who would've liked the NGE went to WoW, most of the people who liked SWG for what it was felt betrayed by the changes.  The end.

Um, that is exactly like raiding, only you're either paying out the nose for it or organizing quilting bees instead of a raid. People raid because it "helps" them do whatever it is they like to do, be it more raiding or to get some best-in-slot doohicky they can't get some other way. Generally speaking, people who like to fight are going to prefer fighting for it, not literally farming for it by growing Space Rice for the Space Chef who is friends with the Best Space Gunsmith on the planet.

I think there's a NO U thread for SWG already so I'll capitulate. 

People who liked SWG liked it, not sure what else there is to say.

Prices could very a lot.  Combat guys would make money from missions or selling materials to crafters.  They very tip-top items would often selling for huge prices, but as quality dropped so did prices.  There were people that specialized in all levels of quality, from newbie gear (because you were restricted by skills) and  selection, to quality.  As a Bio-Engineer I made custom pets, chef tissues (for food, which combat peeps would eat), and tailor tissues.  Pets I did for fun, the tissues I did to get rich, though I'd make batches of lesser tissues for crafters to make mid-range gear.  The materials were cheaper, so those batches were, and people could still see an improvement over the goods which didn't use tissues, which were optional.

But just being a crafter wasn't enough to cause high prices.  You had to know your stuff.  You had to search out a supply of the best materials -- random stats for a given spawn, limited life-spans for harvesting periods, and blueprints required identical components.  You could make a run of near-perfect items, but it might be months before you could come close again.  When I got high stat materials, I'd hoard them for special projects.  You also had to understand material qualities, which could vary between types.  Copper almost always had a high conductivity but a lower durability.  Some recipes might use any metal, but if the end result depending on durability and not conductivity, you'd want to use an iron or steel.  One might use both and you'd have to pick what to sacrifice.  Some might use highly specific materials and the only stats available might suck.  Knowing where you could use low quality and where to use high quality made a huge difference in final product.  Plus experimentation where skilled crafters could increase certain categories, yet high-end items could never be maxed in all of them.  Choosing high damage, over low point cost, over faster attack was important.  (As a Teras Kasi I had to get my local Weaponsmith to custom-build low-HAM vibro-knucklers.)

So you had producers and you had craftsmen.  Some people did it for fun, some did it for profit.  And crafters never had to touch the combat game if they didn't want to because hunters did it as a part of their normal combat routine.  Leveling could get a little grindy, but otherwise no other crafting system has come close to touching it.

Combat people were by no means poor.  They weren't second-class.

There was room for everyone to play how they wanted.  The only downside was it was difficult to both craft and do combat to the highest levels.  Thankfully as a Creature Handler my skills overlapped with other professions I enjoyed, so I could be very effective even when I didn't have many combat skills.

This, too, sounds like raiding.

This is my only point, that the crafters of SWG were pretty clearly also catasses of the highest order. And I can see how people would think fondly upon a game where they could catass in a way different from every other game out there. I'm just making the point that while it was cool for the crafting people, the notion that had the combat in SWG not been shit, the combat people would've been happy as clams in that situation is probably not the case.

I mean dang, in DAoC you'd have masterpiece armor going for a bajillion gold (plat, whatever) over 99% shit because you could squeeze a little bit more customization out of it. I cannot imagine SWG would've been any different in that regard, especially because of the PvP aspect.

The only thing that saved DaoC in that regard, was the fact you would get your 100% and would be DONE. Stat caps are a wonderful thing. You got your suit and went on to the actual fucking game, instead of endlessly preparing the infrastructure to maybe play the game one day.



Well, untill they made ToA and fucked it all up. (DaoC's own NGE extinction level event.)  :why_so_serious:

Ooh ooh is it time for my DAOC crafting/stat cap/hybrid class balance rant?

I can EVADE it!  :awesome_for_real:

 :angryfist:

You obviously haven't met the folks with the ultra-rare BoE drops on auction houses.

Seriously, combat-types didn't bitch when they were selling the rare drops and rare materials for insane prices TO the crafters, but sure as hell bitched when the stuff came back just as pricey. There was a real level of supply and demand there.

I think the most money I made off of materials -- which I got farming birds that wouldn't have been a threat to a first day, stark naked toon -- set me for the life of the game. I didn't worry about money ever again, and all it took was two boxes of scout and a few free evenings. Crafters were paying insane amounts per unit because each bird only dropped one or two units, and the spawns were rare and only had two or three birds.

Those greedy little craftards paid me enough for it that I changed to top-end armor and weapons and had enough money in the bank to get two houses (one for me, one for my merchants) and decorate them -- and buy a few rare paintings and schematics too.

Taking that an adding a few other things led to a 25k doc buff that left your combat toon a walking god for three hours, who could earn back that 25k in about four minutes with no risk.

As to "you'd never be able to have that gun" -- frankly, you could always buy it off the guy that has it (no soul-bound items) or just wait. Sooner or later another crafter would make something just as good, although if you didn't want to wait you could find out what they needed and go find the materials yourself. I knew a few that did exactly that.

The loot and resource model in SWG was the one undeniably great system.

The only game that comes close is EVE and not very close at that.

And it was unfortunate that the design of gear that came out of resources+crafting was pretty lacklustre.

I experienced the game differently.

I gathered my own resources and mass-produced some of the best Doctor buffs, but never sold them. Imperials knew I buffed overts for free, coverts for donation. I never buffed Rebels. I funded this by selling well-crafted Stim B (low-level heals) on the open market.

I was a Master Doctor with some Carbineer skills, plus basic Artisan and Scout skills (from memory I switched points between those two as needed). This enabled me to find resources, place harvesters, kill/harvest meat, run a crafting lab and factory, and fight in team PvP raids, all with one character. Within our player city we had armorers and weaponsmiths doing the same, equipping our alliance with the best items. Our cantina always had entertainers buffing, so we could defend the city.

It wasn't perfect, but the popular culture of queueing for buffs in NPC cities to play the PvE game or one-on-one PvP paled in comparison.

The most amazing time, though, was just after retail launch. I had crafted Doctor buffs in beta (one of only 2-3 people to do so, as far as I'm aware). I levelled up my Doctor/Carbineer in retail, buffed myself and ran around as an overt Imperial in Coronet with my more HAM than any Rebel had ever seen, mowing them down. They thought I was a hacker  :grin:

I really wanted to like this game.

To reiterate: The "you just weren't playing right" comments from raider-haters have been the best part of this thread.

To reiterate: The "you just weren't playing right" comments from swg-haters have been the best part of this thread.

To reiterate:  You are all a bunch of bitter asstwats.

I can speak specifically to the metallic gathering part of the resource system. I spent most of my time running a very high end resource empire. I would scour every planet and find the exact spot with the highest density of highest quality metal, and sell it on my exclusive vendor. I became insanely rich doing so, and helped drive traffic to and from the player city I setup shop in.

I think the best way to "get it" is that it was very much like min-maxing in a stat heavy RPG. The same warm sensation one gets from collecting all your pokemon, or power-leveling your dudes in Final Fantasy is very similar. As a bonus you got to explore and see the entire game. I had so many random, entertaining encounters with other players while I was deep in a swamp trying to place harvesters.

The problem I have with 'crafting', is the same problem I have with raid-centric games or FFA-PvP games.


In order for crafting to be 'relevant' to a game, it must have it's hooks into every other aspect of said game. If the non-crafting player base can just ignore the crafting part of a game, then the crafters no longer have THEIR desired game... but when the crafter's do have their game, everyone else gets to either 'deal with it' or play something else.


It's the same way the "Wolf" wants to gank those noob "Sheep" in a FFA-style game. The Wolf doesn't have his game if all the Sheep are safely in the pen out of harms way. Give the Wolf his Sheep; the Wolf will be happy, but the Sheep certainly won't.

Wolves need their Sheep, Crafter's need their Consumers.


The Raiders have mostly adapted at this point, they actually can exist in their own little raid bubble and don't need to lord over the entirety of the rest of a game anymore in order for them to have THEIR game. Mostly...  :why_so_serious:. There's still a large chunk that "NEED" their specific raid game to be the most important thing ever and everything else must be subservient to it.

I don't understand your view. I liked my time in SWG after 3 years of raiding in EQ1, which I also liked. My next game was WoW raiding. Then Tabula Rasa non-raiding. They're not mutually exclusive play styles.

I played a master tailor in SWG, mainly making dresses for entertainers. More recently, I've been raiding in EQ2 with a proper serious guild. I enjoyed both experiences, but they had nothing in common.

It's funny though, some of the arguments on this board are the same arguments you saw on the SWG forums when the game was new.

Some players really hated having to pay another player for a gun.

I never said they were.  The fun part is watching people use similar arguments in a role-reversal situation.  Foibles like that amuse me. I don't see you praising SWG to high-heaven as some holy grail while also bitching you can't get the best stuff in WoW.

Barter was quite common with all the crafters I knew.  Hunter brings in materials and gets a few of the finished products in return.  Since most people supplied their friends and cities for free or at cost, and made their money from sales to outsiders, there was a lot of cooperation.

Being able to have player run cities made a huge change in social dynamics.  It's not like a city in WoW where the entire population sits, it broke it into more tribal units which got to know one another.  When a stranger was visiting your city, you knew they were.  Yet since they were rare, and you were on home turf, people often started up conversations with complete strangers!  It was completely natural.

That's important to understand, Sjofn.  Social dynamics were very different, so behaviors were, too.  You can't apply a lot of the behaviors you've seen in other MMOs to SWG because the environments were not interchangable.  It's why the game spawn multiple 200 page threads.

This. A million times, this. If you didn't play it. And I mean, really play it; if you didn't go out there and grind a few professions and hang with a some people and just really become part of the whole ecosystem, you won't understand. There is no comparison to raids and raiders that will ever accurately fit what happened in SWG.

Man, people really do have wildly different tastes.

The harvesters were the worst ever. If you thought the player housing sprawl in UO was bad, SWG was infinitely worse. You'd crest a hill and it would be harvesters as far as the eye could see. I think they finally limited the number of harvesters you could have per player, but for the entire time I played you could have as many as you wanted.

Good riddance, terrible game.

Really?

All the other stuff the game had going on and that's what you're stuck on? Shit, I was barely on the settled planets enough to care.

I'm a UO guy and a non-raider and every single time people talk about this game it sounds fucking terrible

Yeah, but that's because you're a professional troll.  :why_so_serious:

Man when I was young and dumb ( now not young anymore , still dumb though) I used to troll SWG beta boards in order to convince them the game was "sh!t" and they need scrap their combat system and implement a better one. ALAS they  never listened (ahaahah  ) . So I never payed. Apparently I wasn't only one who thought everything but sandbox elements in SWG pretty much sucked. Sandbox elements were pretty damn  good I'd give them that.

They should have hired somebody who actually enjoys pew-pew games and made  a decent  combat system. That and of course whole SW license was a horrible idea.

:why_so_serious:

But to provide an answer: the catass achievers in SWG actually helped the community because it was based on people buying up their stuff. Without the folks who tirelessly surveyed the planets to find the very best raw ingredients, who developed the schematics and created the amazing rifle of pwnage, my casual self wouldn't have been able to dislike the combat half as well.

edit: Oh, man. Now I'm agreeing with Dark_MadMax. Time to lock this thread!  :ye_gods:

They got a box sale and a free month out of me. I didn't see anything beyond the land-rush and one shot rifle kills.

I made this back when laughing at twitch was still new. May as well use it one last time.

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/GLpeeSWG.jpg)

Isn't it time for some Vader pics now?

Or, how about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFKnMCRwNOI (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFKnMCRwNOI)

Why do you hate Star Wars WUA?

You sound exactly like the raiders in vanilla WoW trying to 'explain' to casuals that they could never understand what was involved in raiding without actually doing it. I mean literally you're using the exact same words they did, with what at least comes across as the same attitude.

EDIT: And also exactly like the 8v8 purist PVPers from DAOC, now that I think about it.

Yeah, it's the exact same "You just aren't doing it right, duh" vibe. And that's fine, it just means the game wasn't for me, because the way of doing it right (much like vanillla raiding in WoW) makes my eye twitch just thinking about it. I wouldn't have wished NGE on it, that's for sure. But it doesn't mean the game was some sort of nirvana that if only people would try harder, they too could love the catassery.

Are you kidding? I love Star Wars! All those long drawn-out scenes of Luke and Han accompanying crafters into the forest while they mine ore to make blasters, oh and all the heroic animal tamers and pikemen fighting against the evil Empire! Who can forget the exciting sequence of Luke getting a doctor to buff him so his Stormtrooper armor didn't fall off?

Fuck this game, it should have been murdered in the cradle.

Well hey, we get a NGE do-over around September, so all is not lost.   :why_so_serious:

So should you but these boards would have been that much less without your ubiquitous charm.

You're just pissed that they removed outcasting.

Wakes are rarely ever any fun, and this thread stands testament to that fact.

I don't think this is a fair comparison at all.

The early days of MMO were different, the early days when something is barely defined are always a little crazy compared to what it becomes once its a known commodity. Early EQ1 and other games of that era were virtual worlds first and games second. It was much more wild west either in terms of pvp, death penalties, progression, zone size, no instancing whatever. I think it was less about those aspects of the MMO's back then though and more about the gamers themselves. We didn't go into those early attempts with anything but wide eye'd wonder and a willingness to immerse ourselves in the game world. Its just not that way anymore.

I don't think that is really the same as raiders telling casuals that they will never get it.

Except, that I've raided. And the comparison is bullshit. Raiding is nothing like what went on in SWG. So yeah, compare me to those asshats all you want. Still not nearly the same.

It's not about telling you how to play.  Those days are long gone.  I'm simply explaining my perceptions of how it was.  It may never be reproduceable, and I won't claim that it's gaming paradise for everyone.  For some of us though, it's not something which has been replicated.

I'm just saying there wasn't the disparity that you seemed to think existed between crafters and combat players.  My PA was 150+ at its peak, but from when it was just twenty people with an outpost in the middle of nowhere to a teeming city, there was a place for everyone.  I saw it in other guilds, and I saw it running into complete strangers in the middle of nowhere.  Being able to set up temporary camps ten miles from nothing which turns into a camping party is just not something possible in other games.

The social dynamics were different.  There can be debate about if it was the systems, or the people attracted by the systems, or timing in the MMO genre, but the feel of the game was different.  That's all I'm saying.

So along with closing SWG, Sony has also decided to change their pricing plans.

A copy of the email I just received:

Full pricing plan details are here: http://www.soe.com/gamepass/

Heh, it's reduced the cost to play DCUO from AU$20 to AU$16. Too late, too late.  :awesome_for_real:

Ok I appreciate this reply is some 4 pages late but I managed to miss the beginning of the thread due to working at places with web filters in place :-(

The biggest thing I never understood was why SWG couldn't accomodate all the play type and why the the virtual world players had to be burned at the stake to satisfy the action players?

I disagree they needed to force everyone into a character class to make things 'less confusing'. Resulting in the 'Lando' class being unable to participate in any combat content.

If action types dont want to be dependant on crafters then they should be able to obtain npc/loot items but accept a lower quality than player crafted. Forcing crafters into the 'Lando' role and then maginalizing the crafters role is just a bait and switch (just like trials of obiwan followed by removal of the CH class was).

I dont really have an opinion on the Jedi thing actually. I was never going to be in a position to devote enough skill points to force stuff to be a Jedi so it was never going to be an issue for me. I did the village because it was content to do and opened up some crafting related force stuff and a friend who did make Jedi got killed by BH gank squads at star ports alot (probably tracked down by BH droids sold by me ironically). But seeing all the Jedi's post-NGE was just looked stupid.

The over-the-shoulder camera and increased graphics speed was just shit though!

I did always hope they would one day do a 'classic' server (a bit like EQ) but thats obviously not going to happen now.

Incidentally...


If they really gave a crap they'd work on the project quietly and distribute it to the far corners of the earth. Even if EA remembered that they own UO and went full Nazi about it tomorrow, they couldn't shut down all the freeshards operating around the world. No more than Blizzard can shut down the scads of emulated servers despite their efforts.

I have a similar question.  Were those unhappy with the pre-NGE state of the game happy with the post-NGE state of the game?

My understanding was all the players who would have been happy with post-NGE SWG had already left, so they were changing it out from under the people that actually liked the current design. Kind of a "if it had been like this from the beginning it would have been better" kind of thing, but they made the change so late in the game's life that it only pissed off the remaining base.

I would also add: "Probably not" since that sort of fundamental engine design in a mature product generally doesn't work well. They might have been happier with the NGE (those that had left previously because they didn't like SimBeru) but wouldn't have stayed, because it just didn't work as well as other games that were designed with it from the ground up.

How can you take this game away from us? You do know you are making a mistake ! TOR isnt the game people are thinking its gona be and after the play it and realize it they wil be begging to play SWG again. People ! IN TOR you cant go all over the planets like you can here in SWG. YOu cant fly ( Basically ) anywhere you want to in TOR. like yiou can here in SWG.  My heart has been broken.  I may as well stop playing swg no. I will never play another lucas arts game or hjave anything to do with SOE in any way shape form or fashion. This should be a crime! (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?&topic_id=1222222)

I can see Peaches writing something like that when they finally shut down UO.  :awesome_for_real:

Probably. I think when it happens I'll most enjoy the people trying to claim that it's all because they nerfed PK 15 years ago or however long the game lasts. But really I think the knowledge that there are a million freeshards and any dipshit with a PC can make their own will mitigate the insanity a bit.

That thread is awesome.  :awesome_for_real:

People with shitty lives and so become heavily invested in a virtual life that then goes to shit freak out. Not new.

There's movie potential there, though.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462246/

This was my favourite (http://mmogamerzz.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-im-boycotting-swtor.html):

Thats historic.

I wanna say that's got a 50/50 chance of being a troll.  That might be too generous though.

well, I liked SWG.  I got sucked into trying to figure out the FS Slot.  It was a great and unintentional mystery.  PvP was "fun"... in a hair pulling way.  But really the crafting, social stuff (so many emotes and animations) and the opportunity to build (businesses, player cities, player faction forts, player homes with sometimes incredible designs) was unsurpassed.

The SWGEmu is going well but needs more coders.  I hope they finish.  SWG should live on in a pre-CU state.  

Edit: I should add for honesty -- I spent too long and too often dealing with a lot of broken stuff in SWG.  

I'm jealous I didn't think of making that kind of insane rant first. It seems so obvious now.

What I liked was the ambush. I was just reading it, thinking to myself "blah blah, typical po- holy shit, it just got awesome!"

The NGE could not be played. They broke the game. It consisted of a cool Star Warsy tutorial that spat you out into an unfinished total game redesign, implemented on a whim from a test project, that was still missing core systems.

Also, the sequence of events went: design expansion pack, sell pre-orders, then suddenly decide to replace all gameplay mechanisms with broken new stuff, just before the expansion launched, breaking both the existing game and the expansion, while keeping people's money.

The NGE was a do-over of the Combat Upgrade (CU), a revamp of similar scale that had occurred a few months earlier, which had effectively deleted most crafting output and rendered in-game achievements to that point irrelevant. These were again erased en masse (with no warning) for the NGE.

So it was a non-functional revamp of a revamp, with a clear fuck you to anyone who had played to that point. It's hard to see a "better" for anyone in that, action-oriented player or not!

All it needs is a chalkboard to show the connections.

The blog has a picture.

It didn't set off my trolldar precisely because the crazy was so deeply placed. You've have to read a lot of the usual complaints to get to that particular bit.

Ha! Yes, that would make it just about perfect.

Mostly right, but I believe the NGE was announced the day after the expansion released, and implemented 15 days after.  So it was an extra fuck you and PR nightmare.

Didn't they end up offering refunds for Trials of Obi-Wan?  Not that it matters that much, the damage was already done.

This. I actually enjoyed the NGE. I had fun in the early crafted stages. There were a couple 'dark jedi' decision points where a master spoke to you. You could ally up with the Imperial faction. Then...it abruptly ended.

And in no way should they ever have done anything negative against the community and craftards who were the core of the game. As I've said before in this thread, with them there, the action part of the game was much richer and more immersive. The best pvp I had in UO was as a militia unit for the roleplaying community.

They did, but I suspect it was more to do with legal reasons (fraud?) than out of the goodness of their hearts.

They weren't going to at first, but then people were calling for a class action suit with that kind of bait-and-switch.  It really was a disaster in so many ways it's unimaginable.

Unimaginable except for the fact that it happened. That and the recurring, "we lost all the original code, so we can't go back" excuse. Who the fuck does that? The whole fucking debacle was so clownshoes that if it hadn't actually happened, yeah, anyone bringing it up as a hypothetical would have been laughed at.

This thread has made me more interested in SWG than at any other time after my early beta invite  :awesome_for_real:

I would love to see Raph give us a sandbox unbeholden to some draconian IP master. Set it in the Wild West- other than Call of Juarez and RDR, that genre has been critically underused and underappreciated. Hell, I would pay $20 Six Gun Shootout with updated graphics and UI today!

I was hoping Fallen Earth was going to go in this direction actually.

I played SWG briefly with my girlfriend (who was a launch-until-CU vet) post-NGE, and one of the first things I noticed when I got dropped off on Tattooine after the tutorial - besides the massive amount of credit seller spam - was that, even two years after the NGE hit, weapons and items for professions that no longer existed would still drop because they hadn't had the staff or the time to clean up the database and flush out all the old items.

I always felt that was a perfect introduction to the NGE.

Oh, and there was also the weird balance kick SOE was on for it at the time. A few weeks before I played, Sony felt that players were xping too fast solo, so they completely fucking broke slightly tweaked the aggro system so that more of a mob spawn would attack you at once, practically necessitating group play (or a respec into Jedi or Bounty Hunter) past a pretty low level. But then shortly after, they felt that the people grouping up to xp were leveling too fast, so they completely fucking broke slightly tweaked the group xp system so that you got less xp by being grouped. The only problem was, just one other person in your group slashed your xp/hour by 40% through xp reductions alone, and it got worse from then on. Pretty much the only way to level was via powerleveling, and it sucked.

He should hook up with Shane Hensley and do a Deadlands game.  :-P

The Deadlands MMO was started at FireSky / Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. It didn't end well and now Hensley is back at Cryptic (who would probably be open to developing a Deadlands MMO...).

Videos (linked through my blog) found here (http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/deadlands-mmo-the-video/) and here (http://unsubject.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/deadlands-mmo-the-video-the-sequels/).

Lots of people SAY they want a sandbox, but turn their noses up at the sandboxes available because they aren't the right kind of sandbox.

It is my belief that sandboxes tend to fail because they are difficult to do correctly:

UO, it was a griefer paradise when it first launched and never really recovered. If it had launched as Trammel it might have held on for awhile though its graphics would have doomed it eventually.

SWG, launched early with some poorly thought out designs. HAM, no vehicles or space, etc

EVE, a niche hit for people that don't mind spreadsheets in their MMO.

Its really the time.  I love the idea of the sandbox still, but when you have that much freedom to do things, if you aren't actively in game DOING them, you're going to be falling way behind / becoming irrelevant really quick, and since these things also usually have a strong player driven/PvP component that matters.  You can't have as much fun in the sandbox if you are still using a plastic toy shovel and everyone else is using a backhoe.  Something like Minecraft is probably a great example of how to do a casual sandbox, and look how enormously popular that is.

Example:  EVE - I would change very little about EVE if I was given the opportunity, still, at the end of the year, there a much better chance I'll have a sub to SWTOR - which took me literally 2 years to come to peace with for not being sandboxy enough - than EVE, simply because I don't have the kind of time required to play EVE that way I'd want to play it, and if I'm going to have 10 hours to play an MMO a week, I'm going to pick one that is friendly to that schedule.

What always cracked me up about EVE, you could turn the game into a Turn Based browser game and as long as you kept a little flash graphic of your ship in station that the player could spin, no one would notice for months.  :why_so_serious:

The problem is that every time someone goes to make a sandbox MMO, it's some broke-dick indie that probably couldn't publish a successful flash game trying to sell some sort of over-the-top Wurmesque hellworld of a virtual universe which, even if it worked as advertised, would only appeal to the absolute beardiest of necks and griefers who like to work for weeks to earn their jollies. I just want to own a little stone tower out in the woods and tame a wolf to be my pet, not spend two hours on a forty-step crafting process making turnip soup so I don't starve into permadeath.

Think of everything bad you can say about latter-era UO and then remember that despite EVERYTHING the game still has enough life left in it to have active development and a dozens-strong Live Events team, even as it's years-newer successors go into their graves. I keep saying this but it's worth repeating: Remake this with modern tech while avoiding the mistakes of the past and designing with expandability in mind, and you can probably grab a few hundred thousand people and gross $50 million a year basically forever.

Let people have their own houses and shops that they can customize from the ground up. (Instanced, in the world, or a combination.) Let them dress up however the hell they want, and design their own character types from a list of skills. Have things wear out but be replaceable so crafting is 'meaningful' but keep the power curve relatively shallow so it isn't TOO meaningful. Have PVP but make it consentual depending on server type.

Put in sandbox elements but don't go so fucking hardcore with them that they shit up the game. It's not THAT hard. It's sure as hell a more viable business plan than a lot of this indie shit seems to have.

Except for the "too meaningful" crafting, that part of your post does describe SWG.

This could lead to a discussion of PvP consent and TEFs (temporary enemy flag, a contagious PvP+ timer acquired through faction-linked actions). So I'll say it now. Anyone who claims a TEF they didn't understand is essentially Jason with the password Jason1, baffled he got hacked. He shot at a rival faction's NPC and forgot. He healed a PvP+ ally. He healed someone who had healed a PvP+ ally. He was ganked before he knew it. Jason is still mad at Raph.

I am not and I resent the implication that I never understood TEF.  :grin:

And the whole "too meaningful" crafting bit is a HUGE "except for."  It's like saying "Release-build UO was the best game ever, except for the ganking, stealing and bugs."

How did a man who is so wrong about SWG write such a good post?

So besides Eve, is there a choice MMO that the SWG crowd is jumping ship to?

Apparently there's a player petition about not closing SWG down and making it F2P.

I'd wish them luck but I wouldn't go back even if it was F2P (logged in exactly once during my free 45 days) and if we couldn't get NGE rolled back I doubt they'll get F2P.

Because he's a professional troll, but actually has a good eye for the important bits of making a great game.

SOE isn't shutting SWG down because they are tired of it; they are shutting it down because they can't agree with LucasArts on the licensing contract. If SOE could make SWG F2P, they probably would.

Perptuuumm. Mechs instead of ships, and like Eve was 5 years ago. So not really a replacement.

Otherwise, join BAT COUNTRY in EVE ONLINE: GOONSWARM FEDERATION 2011 the next generation.

Or Fallen Earth. Especially after it goes F2P.

Your definition of failure is weird. UO "not held on for a while"? It's still running and has made crazy bank over its lifetime. All those games have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

I (gasp) think WUA is right.

There's an X-factor at work here, in the more sandbox games. What encourages "stickiness"? Not to the game, but to other people? Forming communities.

SWG worked for crafters so much not just because of a complex crafting system -- heck, they could have been doing it puzzle-pirates for all I think it really matters (although there is something to be said for a mini-game that feels 'real', rather than obvious minigame) -- but because crafters networked with each other and then combat types coalesced around them.

There was an interdependence there, where the very top tiers couldn't really be satisifed with stuff bought off of vendors. They had to find other top-tier crafters, from other professions, and trade components and make custom orders. Which drew in top-tier rangers and scouts to bring in materials.

But why did it work in SWG, despite the game's numerous and glaring flaws (sorry, Raph, but it was a mess in a lot of places)? I think that's sort of a 'why Facebook and not MySpace' sort of question.

Or heck, why EVE? Something about people forming real, if virtual, communities. Groups that aren't just there to bring down mass DPS on a raid-target (which requires, among other things, leadership, a sizeable bulk logged on a the same time, etc) but even if logged on at 2:00 AM are still feeling like they're a valued contributer to their Guild, City, PA or whatever.

I can't do EVE battles because I can't do 3:00 AM shit. It was hard as hell to make a regular 10 or 25 man raid, just once a week, in WoW. But in SWG I could log-on, play the way I wanted (build shit, explore, set factories to running, futz over my vendors) and feel like I was contributing. I could see it in the msgs I got (people asking if I could make certain things for them, make certain components), in the stuff moving on and off my vendors, or just knowing that farming birds on Dantooine wasn't "kill for XP and maybe loot" but filling a doctor's needs.

*shrug*. You want sandbox? I think you *must* give people reasons to band together, encourage them to interconnect -- but you can't mandate they all have to be on at the same damn time, or have an actual leader willing to herd cats. You need organic connections and the flexibility to fufill them in the player's own time.

It's a game, not a job.

At the same time being dependent on other players too much can be detrimental, because when people who you rely on to do whatever it is you do quit, it is often a lot easier to walk away yourself than to rebuild all those relationships with new people all over again (and again, and again, given the way MMO populations turn over.)

People claim they want a sandbox, but people (whether they admit it or not) also need direction and focus or else they will sit there and go "wtf should I do now" and their interest will start to wane.  A lot of people need someone (something) to tell them what to do, and providing a sandbox but also giving direction/focus to those who need it is hard from a design perspective and is getting harder with more choices in games that focus more on giving players direction (WoW and most MMOs that come out). 

Actually, now that I think about it, current-day UO crafting is probably "too meaningful" by my standards. So I guess I don't mind as much as I thought I did. I have a dedicated crafter I keep in touch with who made my armor for a good price, as well as the armor of four or five different people I referred to him, and to whom I give right of first refusal when I have crafting materials to sell.

I guess I may as well describe the system. It's been around for a couple years now.


I don't mind it. I can have a custom suit made that looks like whatever I want with whatever stats I want, crafters get to enjoy making the best stuff, and since a lot of the resources come from PVE the crafters need fighters like me in more than just a "Someone has to buy this shit!" sense.

One of these sandbox indies that crops up from time to time needs to try building/refining a system like this. Not just coming up with one where creating a sword hilt takes 37 steps because they think sandbox = tedium.

EDIT: Really the problem with SWG was the SW part. Make it a fantasy game without all the expectations the Star Wars license places upon it, and I'd have probably played it. The developers wouldn't have felt like it needed to be NGE'd to be more "iconic", and it probably wouldn't be getting shut down right now.

Very true. One of the things SWG did right on that was player-owned vendors and their Auction House stuff. (Admittedly, it would have been better if people could FIND them more easily at the beginning, and the AH wasn't so limited. I understand they wanted people to use vendors, but people couldn't get to vendors).

A casual player could go get decent gear easily enough, and then move on. The communities formed more around the 'experienced' players -- casuals would transition there when they started to want a steady supply of good gear, trusted people to play with, customers for their own goods or loot, and access to better housing/shuttles/etc.

SWG did lack some obvious direction for players, though. I was lucky to join with a few friends giving us a pre-built group and a variety of useful skills -- and some information sharing.

I think the enforced 'downtime' worked here (medical centres, cantinas, shuttles/starports). As much as some of the players bitched so hard it eventually got these thigs removed they forced the players to not only depend on each other but the be around each other (as opposed to grinding xp on Darthomir until your doctor buffs ran out the rest of the time). This was a good thing even though most players didnt seem to realise/appreciate this (which is why the customer isnt always right).

Now you just use global vendor search (or whatever they called it) and jump in your spaceship (or insta starport travel if you are a newbie) to buy stuff and never see a doctor or entertainer again (to the best of my knowledge, I couldnt do combat after they turned me into Lando!)

Uh, no. If the bitching is as universal as that the customer is almost certainly right. They're paying to have fun (in theory), a system like that is a huge anti-fun wall for most people.

Not...exactly. You have to look a bit deeper. People are often, to be blunt, really confused about what they want. In games, especially complex ones, they often don't realize what would happen if they GOT what they wanted.

And then, more importantly, there's the fact that the loudest whiner isn't "your customers". I don't envy the poor folks whose job is to wade through cancellations, forum whinings, feedback surveys, and polls to find the sticky spots and then pass them onto the designers who have to figure out what should be fixed, what can be fixed, and what effects it's likely to have.

IIRC, the "happiest" the SWG forums and playerbase ever was was during a six-month or so period when the Dev team did NOTHING but basically tackle, one after another, a serious of really annoying issues -- most of them simple bugs, bad GUI choices, and broken mechanics. There weren't a lot of fixes that altered gameplay, other than making it work 'as intended' more than anything.

There's no use removing, for instance, gameplay mechanics in place to drive increased socialization if the result will be players screaming just as loudly that they never see anyone again.

The real sticky spots are a lot harder to find than listening to forum bitchings, because the plain and simple matter is that the biggest forum bitchers (and thus generally the loudest voices) are people who don't want 'a better game' so much as they want 'my guy to be better'.

it may be one of those things with no real 'solution' -- make Devs play the game? They focus on how they want to play it. Listen to cancelled subs? Those guys probably aren't coming back, no matter what you do. Listen to current players? Which ones? The whiny min-maxers? The "I care only about my specific class and this specific weapon" guys? The ones who want more raids? The ones who want more sandbox?

My personal thought is if you find a developer, community correspondent, PR guy, tester -- anyone -- with a feel for teasing out the REAL sticky shit from the whining -- pay that guy a ton and listen to him. :)

Battle fatigue and related systems was great. 

I respectfully disagree here.  I think the development of preCU SWG would have greatly benefitted after the first maximization patches by listening to the player base.  Many fixes that people were asking for and that the game greatly needed were summarily ignored and the player base correctly identified huge problems in the combat system. 

The biggest case in point was how mind was affected by combat.  Early on people saw how grossly overpowered states were and mind shots.  When BH's first started terrorizing people with eye shot was the first time that the dev team was alerted to a problem and they promptly ignored the base.  When eyeshot was "addressed" the problem had not only bloomed but graduated into a full fledge catastrophy when people started using the CM Mind disease and Mind poison abilities without any check.  Mind fire came later but that also went to show you instead of addressing the root problem that team made it a lot worse.

Had they listened early on, I think the CU would not have been deemed "necessary."  In turn many people like myself would not have left as early and disgruntled as we were.  The mind flaw was just one thing to, its important to note I could also say the same about Squad leaders, riflemen, carabineers, Bounty Hunters, stacking and crafting issues like DE, Armorsmith and Chef.  The team would have done well to listen to the many lists they were provided from feedback with their customers.

Totally agree with you (but don't tell anyone).  SWG was about as Star Wars as my sweaty arse.

I think I was unclear -- you may be right in specific cases but saying something that's close to "The customer is always right" in videogames is a generally bad idea.

Game's aren't like customer service, especially not when your loudest and most virulent feedback comes from a tiny, self-selecting sample (forums, mostly). However, if a single feature or gameplay element is causing 90% of your customers to complain -- by all means, look at it.

Just be aware your customers generally have no fucking idea what they really like and don't like about a given game. (Or, in some cases, know way the fuck too much). They know if they like it, but they couldn't coherently explain why they liked X better than Y in a way that'll help you design.

And to be honest, a lot of times they'll bitch about one thing but really mean something else. Whatever they're bitching about is just an icon for the real problem.

Yes.  I believe that was the couple of months Gordon Walton was in charge.

Unfortunately this also probably describes the design team as well.

I remember that time to, it was after the DE "revamp" that caused DE's to quit the game.  SOETyrant  I believe he was called.  His changes made the game better and there was a perception that finally someone was listening.  Sadly I think he joined Vogel in SW:TOR almost immediately after taking over and things immediately went downhill.

Unfortunately it's really hard to attribute a lot of changes to any one lead.  Besides some things being in the pipe for so long, we knew there were like five factions trying to impose their own vision on the game.  Other than bug fixes, which he posted about being one of his focuses, I don't know what good or bad he did.

So other than not changing the game from under your customers... having steady leadership helps, too.

The guy I truly blame is Julio Torres from Lucasarts. Fucker seemed genuinely proud of the fucking NGE and actively trolled the complaint threads in the forums with what amounted to "we're not changing back, so you can suck it" posts.

I'm not sure how much actual blame I would direct towards him personally, but the guy was definitely a colossal douchebag.

The people you're all mentioning merely inherited SWG from its developers.

The original team disintegrated when beta was cut short. The new guys only had an initial roadmap: finish mounts, vehicles, and player cities.

After that, it was a cheap tattoo place adding to a Monet. What's with all the water lilies? Needs more tramp stamp.

You literally contradicted everything you said point by point in the same post. :oh_i_see:

Players almost always know what they don't want after the fact.  This is due to the fact that when a developer has a bad idea it's inevitably "I'm going to violate you with a sharp object and you're going to enjoy it" bad.

No, seriously players don't know for the most part. They can be specific -- like "I really hate X" and scream for hours about it. That's what they say. What they really dislike might be anything from "I hate the fact that X doesn't make me an uber PvP king" to "X isn't as good as my alt's Y, which seems like it should be the same" to "This class doesn't play the way I want".

Or it could be X is just a pointless suck mechanic. If you just change whatever they're bitching about, you'll fuck game balance and screw up a dozen things that are related to it. (Something the SWG developers seemed to do often). If you understand WHY they're bitching, you can change/alter or just plain ignore the bitching depending.

But you can't give players carte blanche to alter design, because they'll "alter it" into them winning 100% of the time. Which is, frankly, a boring game they'd quit.

I ran a NWN server where many players said they wanted it to be hard to get XP and items because they wanted to play in a roleplaying server and not a monty-haul server where everyone was max level and carrying a dozen magic swords. They wanted a realistic world, where players couldn't just walk in to an orc stronghold and expect to wipe the orcs out.

The harder we made the world, the more they min-maxed, grinded, exploited and did anything other than stop and talk to each other (ie, roleplay).

One of the things I admire Raph for is his willingness to actually sit down and try to figure out what the hell gamers want, and how to give it to them.

Which is hard because "fun" is nebulous. And while games and gameplay have long been studied, the things videogames and MMORPGs -- and social games like Puzzle Pirates or Farmville -- can let you do really expands that beyond the well-known studies. In a way, video games are cutting-edge sociology.

I'm surprised they're not studied more than they are, but you'd need to find good socialogists who are ALSO gamers, because outsiders seem to make the weirdest-ass assumptions.

Raph fucked up SWG. Let's be honest. He delivered a ridiculous fucking mess. And yet...it generated a sizeable number of die-hard fans who are still looking for that game. They want a better, more functioning game, but he managed to put something together that people liked despite the glaring flaws. Sure, they'd want more now -- video games have evolved, tastes have evolved, technology has evolved....

But something in the way he put it together spoke to a lot of people. UO you could, possibly, handwave away. it was the first. It was novel. It tapped into the MUD/MUSH folks and gave them "more". Things can get popular just because there's not a lot of choices, you know? Best of a bad lot can be better than nothing.

But SWG had it, or at least some of it. People are still arguing and bitching about SWG, and there doesn't seem to be anything like a "I loved the CU" or "I loved the NGE" crowd as there is a pre-CU crowd. There were people who liked CU better or NGE better, but I haven't found any, really, who didn't ditch the game for another that "did it better".

Maybe SWG was simply lack of choice for a sim-World/social-space type game. I think it was a bit more, that Raph was a bit ahead of the curve in realizing that social bonds could be encouraged, and that doing so made games stickier -- and generated devoted fans.

Trying to figure out what that X factor is, and how many people respond to it, and how to get their attention is the rub. I think a lot of this is just wild-ass guessing, luck, and good timing.

Which one, if you are willing to say?  I played on City of Arabel for a long time and it was pretty low magic, and while there was a lot of min maxing, there was also a LOT of RP. 

It was called Battledale. The server worked pretty well, but partly because we didn't always give people what they said they wanted. We stayed low magic, and we did it simply by not having many magic items in the game - not by making the items that existed hard to get. Making something difficult to obtain doesn't actually make it rare. If it's possible to get it then people will get it (assuming they keep playing). It just means they have to jump through hoops, and probably resent you for making them do it.

But it's a good example of the way that how people behave isn't the same as the how they say they behave.

I'll disagree with you here because no one knows where to draw the line and you can't define 'universal' as a forum community. Players would ask for faster levelling and/or easier to kill stuff and then they'd soon be bitching the game was too easy and that there were maxed level and bored because there was nothing to do/no challenge.

I forgot about enforced downtime. That would have kept me from ever playing regardless of literally anything else. Fuck that shit.

That seemed more about confusion. Here's how it worked:

* Health and Action wounds (part of hitpoint/energy pools turns black, reducing pool until healed): Instantly curable by a Doctor (in the field, using a medical droid or campsite). Many people mistakenly thought they had to visit a Medical Center. Others only used /tendwound, a newbie medic skill intended for those who hadn't yet crafted wound packs. Many also thought they had to sit around in the Medical Center or campsite, which slowly healed you, point by point, over time.

* Mind wounds (affecting third hitpoint/energy pool) and Battle Fatigue (reduces effectiveness of heals on you): Curable fast by watching/listening to someone with dancer/musician skills (higher skill = faster heal), in the field by setting up a campsite, or in a Cantina (type of building in player city or NPC city). But many people relied on the newbie entertainers who healed you more slowly in an NPC city cantina, or sat alone in camps trying to heal themselves.

Seriously, I used to walk my Doctor into Medical Centers and one-shot cure the noobs who were sitting around having "enforced downtime". I'd get reactions like "what did you just DO to me?".

Another thing people didn't understand was that you needed to clone (create a bind point). If you died and respawned at your clone point, there was no penalty other than short-term rez effect. But if you just respawned somewhere else or without cloning, you took major health/action/mind wounds. This led to people accumulating all-black HAM (I levelled up by curing them). Many people were also unaware Doctors could resurrect in the field, as the Doctors they knew sat on their asses in cities spamming "20k for buffs".

On PvP raids, we'd have a couple of doctors behind walls doing cures, rezzes and rebuffs (drag the fallen person's corpse to them) and an entertainer in a campsite over a nearby hill, so we could keep fighting. You could destroy us by figuring this out, but most people didn't.

The SWG downtime system worked, but it may have been too complex.

Let's go with "Poorly Documented". And also "Shit NPC alternative". Sitting slowly in the medical center was too slow. Pay-to-heal droids and entertainers in the cities would have worked. People in the field would have preferred a campsite and handy doctor/entertainer, since it'd be quick and then back into the action.

People who hit ghost hours would just need to pop back to a city every hour or so and spend a bit. As long as PC's, in the city or out, were better and quicker....

But yeah, lots of people didn't know how it worked and the game was very bad on educating players to what was a complex mechanic, at least for MMORPGs.

Is it just me or did you just say 'there wasn't actually forced downtime' and then go on to describe the mind healing as being forced downtime?

EDIT: It sounds like at a minimum people were dependent on other players for healing, unless they themselves were Doctors?

correct, which is why one popular FOTM was Master Doctor / Master Rifleman.

It's not correct.

1. I didn't say "there wasn't actually forced downtime". I said confusion/complexity seemed to convince people it was a bigger problem than it was.

2. You didn't need to be a Doctor to heal. I'm sorry I gave that impression - I was speaking as someone who played as a Master Doctor. It was a game where you chose skills from different trees, so if you didn't include any medical skills at all, you were deciding to be reliant on other players for healing.

3. The base medical profession was Medic (generic heal/cure/crafter). Mastering this led to Doctor (close-range heal/buff/cure/crafter) and Combat Medic (long-range heal/poison/disease/crafter). The higher you went up one of the Medic trees, the better crafted heal packs you could use. You needed Doctor skills to craft the better ones, but Medics could obtain and use more powerful medicines from Doctors. e.g. I sold Stimpack B, usable by novice medics, crafted from the best possible resources and experimented on as a Master Doctor, meaning they could deliver big heals.

4. Master Doctor/Master Rifleman sounds like overkill if it's just so you can buff and heal, as you could do this without spending points on medical crafting skills. Probably another result of confusion over complexity.

I don't want to paint SWG as teh bestest gaem evar. I found my fun there and I think it had a lot more to offer than people realise, but it had big problems.

TKMs could also meditate all their wounds away. There were multiple ways to get rid of those black bars.

TKM's were a great class but my favorite was combat medic.  Before they nerfed the ability to throw poisons threw a wall you could literally take out a raid party and not even get into LOS lol.  Good times good times

TKM was quite awesome for that. Very solo-friendly class. I think you needed the Master box for that particular skill, which balanced it out somewhat.

Just master meditation. Which was always the first line I went up after getting the TK line opened.

uh I think we're both correct.  There was a forced handicap by wounds -- that was the temporary death penalty, which didn't expire on a timer but needed player action to refill pool(s).  And it's correct that you didn't need to be just a Doctor to heal Agil/Health wounds like you say.  I think the complexity probably was lack of documentation and/or lack of incentive for others to help you (when they weren't levelling heal xp)?  I dunno. 

I've often wondered how many of the problems could be tied to a crafting game whose output wasn't calibrated enough.  Certainly the over-reliance on powerful med buffs affected combat, as did uber poisons with CM's, Krayt Pistols, etc. 

Supposedly -- and I'm using the word loosely here -- the original HAM design was fast-regenerating HAM, which meant what would end a fight was wound accumulation.

HAM was supposed to be closer to something like Focus in WoW -- skills would drain some of one or more of the pools, and when you ran a pool out you couldn't do anything (basically a self-stun, although I can't remember if you merely weren't able to use skills or if you dropped like a knockdown) until a few moments had passed and it had regenerated.

Running a pool out would give you a wound, whether it was because the guy attacking you had emptied your mind pool with his specials, or you ran it out youself spamming a special -- and when you had enough wounds, you dropped, end of fight.

You'd rez, heal the wounds, and head back.

Since regen never worked at anything like the correct speed they just made running a pool out be the fight-ender, instead of forcing a breather, and it ended up with massive buffs to take make it work. (Buffs to size, buffs to regen, etc).

Lastly, I don't think *anyone* ever ran the numbers on most crafting. There should have been a spreadsheet of minimum, maximum, and average crafting results for every product (not like paintings and furniture, but guns, armor, foods, buffs, etc), and the same for their combines (yes, it would have taken a lot of work. It was necessary) so that developers could see how good weapons, armor, etc could end up.

And with the understanding that the trend line would be towards the maximum, not hovering around the minimum, as crafters hoarded and stockpiled higher-end components.

Somehow, i don't think anyone had the time to vet the final crafting numbers properly.

TKM was my favourite profession to combine with BH to go after Jedi, pre-cu.  Since no armor had lightsaber resists, the unarmed toughness mitigated some of the damage.  The dizzy/knock down ability was also nice.  I was a master at keeping people on the ground for a good part of the fight (one guy was down the whole time) and TKM enabled you put multiple states onto an opponent.  And yeah, the meditation ability was very nice and had a fairly cool looking animation as well.

Any downtime more than stopping to eat a cheeseburger to restore health/mana and I'm out regardless of what else a game has or does.

The downtime there was functionally equivilant, or at least if it had worked as designed, to the "downtime" of armor repair in WoW. Except having a medic, entertainer, and scout (One person could be all three of those, at least enough for jazz) could fix it in the field -- like a repair bot.

This all seems strangely familiar...

(http://www.bitrebels.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Docomo-1.jpg)

The whole entertainer thing just sounds like a total pants-on-head Raphism.

Armor is 100% functional til it breaks, it sounds like the wounds actually made you less effective progressively?

Wounds usually weren't all that incapacitating in PvE, unless you ran into something like the Mantigrue Screecher or Toxic Merek Battlelord.  I loved watching people get hit by them.  "5... 4... 3... 2... 1... incap!"

Nowadays I don't think it'd work as a forced mechanic, but recovery rates really weren't as bad as other games of the time, and with a bit of preparation were easily mitigated.  The system couldn't work at all in a world where you pick one class and that's it.

Yes, though under most circumstances you were talking about a slow reduction to a 1-2% hit on your HAM.  Rezzing could ding you if you went to an unbound station.  Disease could blacken the bar a bit more, and a few very rare creatures were "g'bye now" levels of death.  (Incidentally I loved taming them.)

yeah, because the combat whole system was fucked up. Wounds were SUPPOSED to be the fight ender, which means you lost, which means you rez/heal/whatever and go back to 100%.

Instead, people buffed the shit out of HAM bars that regenerated glacially without buffs, and "losing" a fight meant just getting a HAM bar depleted. Which was like wounds lowering your total health, instead of wounds BEING your health.

Like...say mind was 100 points. Supposed to be you'd spend like, I dunno, 20 to eyeshot a guy (doing 30 points of damage to his mind pool). You'd get those 20 back in like ten seconds. If you eyeshot a guy 5 times in 10 seconds (or the other guy hit your mind pool) you'd take anything over the 100 as wounds, leaving you like 90 to use in the fight. Eventually a pool would hit 100% wounds, and you'd die.

Instead, once you hit 0, you died AND got the wounds. Which means you rezzed with a total of 90 or so mind to use, until you healed.

And HAM regenerated super-slowly, unless you were buffed, in which case you had like 5000 mind and it regened at like 500 every 10 seconds, so you could never run out. Which meant people had to spam specials and weapon damage had to go up so you could actually incapaciate someone.

Original armor design was to work like wounds...like light armor might reduce your mind pool by 10, and heavy armor by 30. So less room to futz around. Done properly, it might have led to some rather interesting tradeoffs and styles. Instead it became a spamfest of specials that hit mind, because it was the hardest to heal.

Some classes were so screwed -- carbineers, for one -- that they actually killed themselves faster than they killed you.

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

Yeah, I loved me SWG. I would not, even remotely, claim the combat wasn't all sorts of fucked up. Or the crafting results. Overly complex system, insufficient testing cycle, and then moving to Live without legacy knowledge to actually FIX the broken shit -- and handle emergent behavior.

I don't think the Devs understood the game they were 'fixing', because design got thrown out the window as they rushed to launch. What went Live probably didn't look a whole lot like the original design, and there were so many moving parts and interlocking systems that no one stuck around long enough to get the expertise to even think about fixing it.

Shh, it's time for the non-SWG playing UO troll to add a random negative one-liner.

No, no, sounds great. Totally not a disappointing shitpile of a game that nobody including the devs could make heads or tails of and should have been put out of it's misery years ago.

 :oh_i_see:

Hey, I understood it.

There was knife on the Intrepid server that did something like 700-800 fire damage a tick to the action (yellow) bar.  It was nasty and became known as "Da Knife".

This is what I haven't been able to forgive Raph for. Risky design decisions in the pursuit of theory/dogma over reality/logic is one thing, but he and his team screwed the pooch with SWG's incomplete design, botched implementation and total failure to produce a software system that could even be completed much less maintained, then bailed rather than fix the mess they had made. "But I’d rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity." (quoted from his blog)  my ass.  That only flies when the work itself isn't mediocre (to be generous). He over promised and under delivered then took his bonus and promotion and ran and made no effort to make it right nor even acknowledge nor apologize for it. 

I submitted the complaint that got this weapon removed. It was on Valcyn server, from whichever event gave those random temporary uber weapons. It was looted by someone in Soga Mijizi, a Rebel PvP guild that regularly raided our Imperial city.

At first, it belonged to some guy who used it until the shots ran out. It was then supposed to become unusable. Instead, it went to -1 shots which, as you say, was infinite. It was given to another player who was a regular PvP raider.

It spammed an area-effect mind poison DoT in a cone shape. It was far stronger than any craftable Combat Medic poison. At maximum buffed mind, it meant incapacitation on the second tick (incap = unconscious, ready to be killed with a deathblow or healed back to consciousness). It took two charges of a Doctor cure pack to remove the poison from one person. A poisoned Doctor had to attend to himself first, while everyone else fell incapacitated. Cures were only worth doing if the victim reached cover inside a private building, otherwise the gun would immediately inflict the poison again.

When we found out it had infinite charges, I submitted a detailed petition and the devs ultimately apologised and removed it. Soga Mijizi wasn't happy. My best PvP win :)

When I first heard of a SW MMO I thought of big space battles, being a BH, killing rebels etc. The last thing I thought of was decorating my house or a new dance routine.

I guess I should have read up on the game first before I subbed and recieved a free box.

I will never understand the reasoning that people wanted some SW sim world instead of an actual experience where you felt ike a rebel or a imp. Within 2-3 days I grew a hatred for the alliance in WOW that I never felt in SWG towards the rebels.

My opinion is that SW was the definate wrong choice to test out some world sim game instead of what WOW became, yet everyone claims Raph is some genious.

Oh well. I think myself and my guild would have stayed with SWG if it DIDN'T concentrate so much on the social aspects, and worry more about the actual war.

I don't know, I suspect SW could work as a worldy sandbox game.  If someone handed me a trillion dollars to design my ideal Star Wars game, it would probably be some open world GTA-esque thing with Jedi.  I'd say that the problem is more that SWG is lousy at simulating the Star Wars world rather than that "Star Wars world" games are a lousy idea in the first place.  Cities in SWG don't look or work like they do in the movies, combat doesn't work like it does in the movies, politics is nothing like it is in the movies, even crafting is nothing like it is in the movies.  I can't speak to the quality of the systems (since I spent less time in the game than I have reading this thread) but to me felt more like someone trying to fit the Star Wars license around a set of pre-concieved systems than someone looked at Star Wars and said "how can we design a game which feels like THIS".

Which is where a lot of this Raphites are coming from, I think.  This game and the SW license do not belong together.  You can say "the game would have been better without Raph" or you can say "the game would have been better without Star Wars," and either would be (maybe) true.  And while you can say "DIKU SW would have been more popular," that's kind of missing the point: that some people want to play these social games more than they want to play a Star Wars game. 

I find myself asking [again]

Why can it not be both? Does the presence of one prevent the presence of the other?

Unless you have unlimited Time and Money, yes, yes it does.

In SWG, yes it did. Sure you could be some sort of mutant hybrid (some of the combinations I had while clinging to droid engineer were hilarious); but socialization, crafting, and combat skill points came out of the same pool.  Bone-headed design decision #3,445.

Combined with single characters per server..  /BIG_SIGH.

I'm going to disagree with you both on two counts.

Firstly the 'happy' element of the community didn't need to be touched [by the NGE] to try and appease the 'unhappy' part. I think the issue here is that LA/SOE decided to throw the baby out with the bath water and massively over-extended the scope of what needed to be fixed (i.e. fixed character classes) with the NGE.

Those unhappy/not-starwarsy-enough types wouldn't have spent points in the 'non-combat' skill trees anyway so why is that a problem? - if they don't want to have to deal with other elements of the community (crafters/healers etc) why the hell are they playing an MMOG?

 I did enjoy my dancer phase in SWG when I was trying to unlock my Jedi, watching people run through the cantina fighting it out.  Rift and WOW have the achievements that offer nothing other then doing it to do it.  Never underestimate the attractiveness of a useless activity in an MMO cause there will be a group of people who enjoy it.  Im usually in the group who enjoys killing those people

Well, because it was.  All the defenders want that Sandbox game and like to ignore that it wasn't appropriate for the license.  There's all kinds of mindtwisting that's happened over the years that boils down to "no, really I wanted to be Aunt Beru when I first watched ANH."  To that I said and still say, "bullshit."

The entire push to not see SWG as the colossal failure it was comes from people desperate to see a sandbox MMO.  That's not going to happen and I feel bad for it.  That still doesn't excuse the failure to deliver on the license rather than pushing a new UO in a SWG wrapper.

SWG always felt like Raph trying to fix mistakes made in UO and show that it was better than EQ.  My sentiments mirror Nerfdalot up above on this topic.

The genre could benefit greatly from a well-executed and well thought-out sandbox, but that time is passed.  Social media F2P games take their place and aren't nearly as complex and don't build as many new social connections.  The days of the Premium-fee MMO seem limited, which is also sad as the Cash-Shop games lack even the depth of WoW in favor of nickel and diming you out of more than that $180 a year.

I agree and disagree.  I love playing *not* the hero.  One of the reasons I love EVE so much is because I can play the game and be effectively an industrial worker in a remote part of the galaxy, and still have a place in the game.  To be fair to you, Star Wars always HAS been about the Heroes.   But I also watch those movies and think about all the not-heroic stuff that is going on in the galaxy and think it would be neat to see what that is like too.  Same with lord of the rings  - the FIRST thing I did in that game was just wander around Hobbiton for a few hours in LOTRO.

Now, being the hero is fun, and being powerful is fun, but one of the things that I like about sandbox MMOs is that you get to see the non-heroic side of these worlds too (less so in LOTRO of course, where they shoe horn you into the plot).   When it came to Star Wars Galaxies, it let me LIVE Star Wars more than PLAY Star Wars, and as a Star Wars junkie I loved it for that.  Was it fun 100% of the time, no.  But that was never the point for me. 

You can call bullshit if you want, but I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to be the center of attention, I like to be quietly good and what I do and stay out of the limelight (in real life).   I like games that let me do something similar.

That's great, now the question is are there enough of you to sustain a large-budget MMO project.  History would appear to tell us the answer is "no."

Ugh I hate this line of thinking.  The lead designer for Fury had the same ideals ("Do players know what they want?" was actually an interview question he gave me).  You can't dismiss complainers because "they aren't your customers" or "they just don't understand".  That's up there with Brad Mquad (sp?) complaining that players don't understand the Vision (TM). 

The reality is that when players complain they usually go for the extreme point of view in their complaints, and as a game designer you have to look at the complaints and find out what their core issue is of their complaints and find ways to design around that.  Instead game developers tend to take the complaints at face value and outright dismiss it, and then act all surprised when their games fail.  Most of the time there is legitimacy to what players are complaining about, but it's hidden in between the lines of their complaints.

Game design is harder than it looks, and since the players are the customers then ignoring them will make your game go die much faster

Yes, this is 100% true also.  I have no problem admitting that.

Keep in mind, I also plan on playing SWTOR at this point.  I can have fun with a variety of types of games, I just think that what I described above is really fun for its own sake independent of setting.  The point I was really trying to make was "Its Star Wars, therefore mass Jedi with laser swords needed" isn't really a good argument against SWG in my opinion. "The Combat Sucked" "I hated the crafting mechanics" "I think downtime sucked"  those are all fine arguments against the game that I'm perfectly happy to accept.  But there is more than one way to do a setting.  While extensive moisture farming wasn't something the main characters spent time doing in the movies, it is clear that SOMEONE in the Star Wars universe is doing it, so it isn't like the stuff in SWG was totally against the setting.  It just wasn't Star Wars the movies, the game.  It was Star Wars the universe, the game.

History tells us buggy games tend to lose customers.  The game was perfectly sustainable pre-NGE, and though down from its peak, still had more customers than 90% of other MMOs at that stage of their life.  All that despite idiotic balance changes, competing political interests, and the continuing annoyance of bugs.

Being "the hero" is fine for a single-player game, but much tougher in an MMO.  The entire design philosophy is making you weaker as you level up in comparison to your enemies, so you have to find groups to tackle the big-bad.  It's also completely subjective.  Plenty of people came away from the movies wanting to be Luke, Han, or Leia, but some of us just wanted to live in that universe.  Their stories were already written.  Watch the movies or read the novels if you want to be them.  How many works actually put as much effort as Star Wars into making the background interesting though?

Actually...history tells us the answer is "yes."

I didn't say ignore them. I meant pretty much what you said -- that what they're bitching about is not necessarily the actual problem, and giving them exactly what they want won't necessarily make them happy.

And designing with a 'The customer is always right' mindset is a good way to make your game fail, because what your customer says and what he means isn't always the same thing, and some of what they say they want...they don't.

For a potential derail: Take full PvP -- lots of people say they want it. What they often really MEAN is "I want lots of sheep to fleece. And I don't want the sheep to be able to turn it off". You've got to look at that, look at the number of real wolves, real sheep, and pseudo wolves, and decide if that's really something for your game....

or if you're just going to please, for a brief time, a bunch of griefers who will then ragequit because the sheep avoid them.

How did you pull that out of what I said? 

I was only touching upon how the combat portions of the game and the ability to participate in them directly conflicted with the ability to participate in the crafting/social aspects because they were in the same pool of resources for your character. 

This was a major problem for me and for a lot of people I played with.  You could either be "Star Warsy" or "Sim Beru", but those of us that wanted to do both were fighting a losing battle with an extremely restrictive system.

Let's rephrase this for you, then.  As soon as making money becomes the metric for success you validate everything about pop music, Michael Bay and EA Games.

I didn't try SWG, partly because of the one character, THAT IS ALL aspect. I would've been one of those miserable "I want to do all of it but I can't" people for sure. What was the reasoning behind that, does anyone know?

Twofold:

1) Because it encouraged community, rather than tons of alts.
2) Because of the nature of the skill system, you could be *anything* and change it at any time. Bored of pistoleer? Drop the boxes and start working up doctor. You could even do it piecemeal.

The only things you couldn't change were your race or gender. (You could change your looks by visiting...someone. Image Designers?. They finally added an NPC for it, I think, because Image Designers were a bit hard to find).

So the reasoning was you didn't need alts, because you could change your classes and skills at will. (You had to level up through the new skills, and you had a max number of points you could have, but literally it was just a choice to change).

I kinda liked that aspect, at least the flexibility and ability to change. I'd have preferred a way to change race/gender, because I had the urge to change later, but even without that....

Over the time I played I was a Tera Kasi Master, a Master Merchant, a Master Armorsmith, a Master Scout, a Master Pistoleer, and a Creature Handler -- and a few others that I took some or all of at times. Not because I was holocron grinding, but because I'd want a change. The only ones I felt "locked into" was part of the Merchant tree because I wanted to keep my vendors.

Sir that's hilarious -- small place the Interweb!  Nice one.

The reasoning is pretty simple: there are two reasons to have multiple characters. One is to try everything, and the other is to cheat.

In the case of a game design with player interdependence and team-based PvP, the impetus to cheat is really really strong. Instead of working with others for supply chains, you'd do the whole chain yourself. Instead of knowing that an area was infested with Rebels but being unsure of how to scout it, you'd bring in your Reb mule and waltz through.

The "try everything" aspect is still a great reason to do it, don't get me wrong. That's why we let you drop skills and change. What you're really saying is "you want to do it all at once." Which immediately plays against interdependence and team dynamics.

I'm not seeing the downside here.

What, you hate all team sports, all game mechanics arising from character classes, all economic gameplay involving multiple resources, and all other people?  :grin:

YES

Edit: Being more serious I just hate having to pick my in game friends based on their reliability.

It's basically asking, in WoW, for a single character to be the best tank, best healer, best crowd control, and best DPS in the game. And also to be able to craft jewels, mine, harvest hide, do leatherwork, do tailoring, and do enchanting. I'm not aware of any game with crafting that lets you be the whole supply chain.

The skill system in SWG meant you could be the best at any given niche, create your own hybrid, or whatever. If you got bored, you could change it.

If you just wanted to be a crafter and never leave a player town? Don't bother with combat skills at all. Don't like crafting? Use all those points for combat. There were tradeoffs, of course, 'cause you didn't have unlimited skill points. Just like in WoW there are trade-offs -- you can be DPS or Tank or Healer or some mix, but if you're the mix you're not as good as the pure characters.

The variety was really good -- you had flavor of the month templates, of course, and variants -- DPS stackers, defense stackers, etc -- but most people seemed to pick up a collection of skills that worked for them.

I ended up with a solo type character, at the end -- TKM meant I didn't really have a problem with combat. I had enough scout to harvest meat, bone and hide. I had enough artisan and merchant to survey, place factories and excavaters, and have loot vendors. I had enough Creature Handler to tame creatures, though I was working my way up to being able to make them into mounts when I quit.

It fit exactly my play style. My friend, also tended to solo, was Master Ranger, Master Rifleman and...something else? My wife was working on bioengineer with her Wookie. She'd done medic, some doctor, and some dancer -- she was all over the place and barely combat capable, but then she only played when me and my friend were teamed up. (Made her darn useful in camp, though).

Edited to add: If you hate all team sports, game mechanics with character classes, and economic gameplay -- I think the type of game you want is called "Single Player". :)

Well, that's fair. In SWG, it was much more about asynchronous contact and about weak ties, meaning it didn't have to be your friends, and didn't have to be trusted people. It wasn't like a raid group or the challenges of PUGs in class-based MMOs.

And if you wanted to craft but also at some point wanted to pewpew in a Star Wars game? NO FUCK YOU I'M RAPH KOSTER AND YOU'RE AN ANT IN MY ANT FARM NOW BITCH, WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

The fact that you wrote all that in response actually makes me feel terribly guilty for not using a  :why_so_serious: face.

*raises hand*

I did both of those. At the same time even. I didn't pew-pew though, since Pistoleer was fucked up. :)

Amaron: I liked the skill system. I liked the flexibilty and the ability to change. I wish more games used something like that, instead of locking you into a class and forcing you to have a zillion alts. I also realize it's a bitch to balance and complex as shit, and DIKU frankly works. :)

You had plenty of skill points to pewpew and craft and some left over to do even more. Seriously, it wasn't that big an issue in practice.

I think I did a short rant about not having crafting and adventure trees separate at some point in SWG.

But I like to 'cheat' at crafting. I want to have enough characters to cover all the crafting components and a shared inventory system to move items back and forth.

That said, SWG was one of the better games at actually being able to find components from others reliably (though quality was not guaranteed, obviously).

90% of people want to try everything. 90% of those people don't want to have to dump stuff they have a ton of time investment in to try something new. Numbers obviously pulled out of my ass, but I think they probably roughly approximate reality. Respeccing is great, resetting a skill grind to zero is not, if that's what is being described.

In practice it didn't really work out quite that badly, because you never 'started over'. You always had your cash, your gear, and because you could remove individual boxes, you were basically training a new talent without suddenly being a newb again. Say youyou were a Rifleman/Carbineer and wanted to drop Carbineer to take up TK. You'd only drop enough carbineer skills (if you  needed to at all) to take novice brawler and work up the brawl tree, dropping Carbineer boxes only when you had the unarmed XP to buy a new brawler box.

Which meant you'd generally keep all your defense stacking, to-hit bonuses, etc until you were replacing them with the new ones. The various "types" of XP were a bit of a pain, but it also meant you could bank them.

Personally I would have added an XP bonus to anyone who'd previously had, oh, a Master's box in a related skill (Like if you were a Master Rifleman, ranged Weapon XP would come faster) and MUCH faster XP to relearn a skill you'd once had. There was sort of the latter, in that you could keep some amount of XP even after you'd dropped the boxes. I don't remember what it was, but it was enough to pick up a box or two straight off if you went back.

Sort of ontopic regarding one character per server:

I have to laugh a little that Raph basically had to go from getting fucked over by clownshoe retarded flatfiles (UO) to getting fucked over by Oracle (SWG).

Sweet merciful Cthulhu.  :facepalm:

On a casual level this is true.

Problem was to get ~serious buisiness~ on any activity, especially crafting, required that you absolutely fill every box in a profession so you could reach Master, which typically added 30% to everything and made something of a mockery of the 'you can mix and match' ideal. After pre-reqs you could basically pick two professions.

I remember seeing the overweighted master boxes just before launch was the first moment I realised this was turning into a bit of a confused mess - felt like too many people trying to pull it different directions.


EVE did this better
 - Add 'stuff' quicker than you can train it all.
 - In industry just have so much esoteric shit going on and keep lathering it on so nobody can realistically do it all.
 - In combat rely on the fact that you can only use one set of gear at a time to define roles.

I can't imagine ever permanently dropping anything that took a genuine grind to get in the first place (fuck weaponsmith).

One can make a shitload of characters in WoW and do pretty much every crafting profession if they want to, but there's still plenty of stuff on the auction house because nobody but a poopsock 5% actually wants to do all that shit.

Yep, most people play a couple of characters, pick the profs that complement them, and move on with their lives.

There's UO, EVE, Atitd, and almost everything else bar the EQ clones.

EDIT : In fact, I don't remember even EQ forcing you to pick a crafter class?

The more I think about it the more I'm convinced that one character to a server *hurts* community, not builds it. If I feel like doing something else on a given night, I have to go do it on another server where my character built for that activity is, which takes me *away* from everyone I know. That's as anti-community as it gets.

Which is, you know, what most people in SWG did. :)

You didn't think my TKM/some Merchant/Some Scout/Some CH was a flavor of the month, did you? :)

Ingmar: I can see your point, but my experience in WoW and SWG doesn't really support it. There seemed to be a lot more community in SWG than in WoW. That could just be player cities and houses. Frankly the lack of alts never seemed to be that big a deal. The handful of people so dang anal that they HAD to have multiple toons to cover all their crafting 'in house' or have a dedicated crafting and a dedicated combat toon bought two boxes.

95% of people just found a template they liked had fun doing whatever.

There were a lot of things wrong with the game (and your point about the huge Mastery bonuses is quite true -- it certainly had the feel of something slapped on at the end when they realized they'd never get the skill system working to their original ideas, or that their original ideas had some gamebreaking issues), but of all of them -- the lack of alts didn't really seem to be one of them.

As designed, the only people that really needed them were the ones who got them -- jedi, and that's because Jedi were supposed to be hunted. Not that that worked too well.

So your issue is with the single character slot.  I agree, that was restrictive.

I'll agree with eldaec here. I for example made what I intended to be a primarily social character, focused on tailoring (I have no idea why). Quickly figured out that in order to "matter" in the whole dynamic of the world, you had no choice but to master whatever profession you chose. I dabbled in the various entertainer trees for a bit, but ultimately dropped 90% of it because I just didn't have any room for it if I wanted to focus on crafting and still be able to leave town.

Maybe it was too much to ask to have a viable Tailor/Entertainer that could still shoot a blaster well enough to survive an encounter with a lone Tuskan Raider (I couldn't). So I dropped the entertaining almost completely and learned a few trees of combat skills. I still sucked at it, but at least I could explore a planet a bit.

It's too bad really, I get the idea for the single slot. The problem was, I loathed the idea of completely rewriting a character. If I spend the time to build a character up as one profession, I sure as hell didn't want to trash all those boxes to start a new one. I'm one of those guys who had four level 35 WoW characters at the same time. It wasn't about twinking, or muling - it was about wanting to experience different aspects of the game.

Oh, and the whole idea of leveling a character through every profession to unlock Jedi. I just still shake my head at that. Being able to make a change, move in a different direction as a character grows is one thing - but to just power through every single class? Why would I even bother naming such a character?

It didn't work out that way.  You either didn't do that other activity or you changed professions over the course of a few weeks.  I've never seen a stronger community in a game than SWG.

But the way the profession trees worked, you needed to have ALL the skill boxes in a profession (meaning you could craft any component that you might use) to get the Master box needed to be able to do ANYTHING in that profession at the highest level.  I.e. in terms of your skills there was no way to specialize in, say, assembling rifles, and work with someone else who specialized in making power cores or whatever.  If you want to make good rifles, you need Master Weaponsmith, which means you need to be equally good at making every weapon and every weapon component there is.

I mean, you could go through the charade of having a friend make your components so you could pretend that you were part of an efficient assembly line, but you were really just making more work for yourself and if your friend wasn't a master whatever you'd end up with a slightly lower quality product for your trouble.

God, you've gotten me started on SWG crafting again.  So many things about it were ALMOST really awesome and interesting.  ALMOST.

I'd think there's at least one more reason: to just build a character for its own sake, much in the way someone in ATITD builds a sculpture or someone in Minecraft builds a fortress. There are some aspects of "try everything" in there; like in WoW, if I made a gnome wizard and a human wizard, one is to experience the game with a short character and the other is to experience it with a slightly taller character. That can be solved with letting the player change races and appearances. But then if I wanted to make two orc warrior brothers, named Grott and Bruto, we can introduce name changes. But at that point, I wouldn't be playing Grott or Bruto; I would be playing one or the other with their name changed.

(Note this has nothing to do with roleplaying, though one could theoretically roleplay with any character, distinct or not.)

Well player interdependence isn't enough reason to make people have only 1 character. As for PVP cheating, that's easy. Make it so that once you choose a "side" on a server, that's your side and you can't make characters that join the other side. See, oh, every RvR type game ever.

Not having multiple characters cut out the many, many players who get lots of pleasure from trying alts. I have a friend who has played LOTRO since launch and not one of her characters is max level because she likes to try different characters and crafting professions etc.

Finally, referring to cheating exposes another issue I suspect. It sounds like some SWG decisions were made with an us vs them mentality. Players were the enemy who had to be convinced to play the game the way the devs intended it.

And every single one of those almosts is situated squarely at the intersection of a neck-beardy theory and reality.

Once again, the problem wasn't so much with any individual system or design decision.  The problem was with the whole complicated mess of them combined, and how they interacted with each other and had apparently unforeseen negative affects on each other.  Lots of cool systems/interesting design choices were designed/conceived in isolation, but the overall meta-design was either non-existant, incompetent, or completely obscured by the atrocious implementations of each of those individual systems which were themselves apparently crunched out in isolation then haphazardly thrown together with a total lack of (or incompetent) architectural design.

Providing lots of varied and interesting options for both crafting/socializing and combat was fantastic.
Shipping a world with so little actual content that participating in the various combat, crafting and socializing options (ie growing your character) was almost all there was to do was shortsighted.
Making hybrid crafter/combat players be weak sauce at both was stupid (issues with balancing hybrid combat characters is NOT equivalent).
Single character per server has some potential minor benefits, but only when considered in isolation. 
Allowing "respecs" but at the price of discarding weeks or months of effort that you had to redo if you changed your mind was just plain mean.
Starting with broken and incomplete systems, then changing the rules, changing the systems, completely revamping the balance, changing how gear works, etc, EVERY SINGLE MONTH while still never actually fixing the damn bugs, was clownshoes. 
Combining all of the above into a single monstrous clusterfuck, then throwing it all out for a completely different game, priceless. 

People who love alts are legion.  :grin:

The single character slot was one thing that never bothered me in SWG.  I think because I felt like I was spending too much time grinding out one character as it was.   :awesome_for_real:  

For a combat-oriented character it might have been different, but for a crafter the game didn't really start until you finished grinding out the Master box of your chosen profession, since before that nobody was interested in buying anything you were selling.  That's another rant, though.  (Why was experience gained from actually doing what your profession was designed for about 1/100th of what you could get from grinding useless components by hand?  WHY???)

I'm known for my alt-itis.  It wasn't an issue in SWG because I could be whatever I wanted.

It's like making multiple of any class in Rift.  Unless you're trying to see the Guardian/Defiant side, why would you?  There's no point nor need.

Sure being able to do more than one thing (or maybe two things badly) without grinding up skills over and over might be "fun" but that would allow players to cheat the Interdependant Raph Koster Social Monkeydome!

But was that because of the single-character per server or in spite of it?  And even if we assume that SCPS was a major factor in building community, would its effect have been greater, lesser, or unchanged if your single character could actually Master multiple skill areas simultaneously?  

I confess that I was one of those that wanted to excel in both crafting and combat at the same time.  Or not even at the same time really, I would have been perfectly happy to do it with two different characters played one-at-a-time, but on the same server during the same time period.  So once my single character got to the point where I could no longer progress in one without sacrificing the other, yet there was plenty of room to grow still in both, I became very frustrated.  I did stoop to starting a second account, but I hated myself for it, resented SWG for it, and came to despise anyone and everyone at SOE who made the design decisions that left me with that ugly choice.  I know, I was weak.  I was also nearly broke which made it hurt all the more.  

All the high-minded sounding pontification from the developers about the benefits of a single-character-per-server design is total bullshit as long as they allow anyone to have two characters on the same server just by spending more money.  It invalidates everything they say and opens the door to all sorts of ugly suspicions about ulterior motives.  Like greed.  Might as well admit it, SWG was the first AAA western title to officially adopt pay-to-win.  And it sucked just as much if not more then as it does now.

And the irony is, all that resentment I had over that devil's choice?  I suspect that it magnified my dissatisfaction with the many other flaws in the game and its management such that I left much earlier than I would have otherwise.  I didn't even make it to the release of the CU, as I saw where it was headed after the first (what were they called? Senators?) preliminary reports came out.  So probably they at best broke even with total income from me and my two limited-duration accounts versus what they might have gotten from me with a single account played all the way through till the NGE.

I think it was because of a combination of systems.  A flexible profession system for one, but it was a combination of things.

To use Sjofn as an example, when I see one of her characters in WoW I think "hey, it's Sjofn" not it's Character X.  In SWG I thought of people as Character X.

That's not to say the system was perfect.  I was fortunate in that the professions I liked overlapped, and always could do some combat.  They probably could have done something where you have the skill points for combat, the skill points for crafting, and maybe a mixed pool where you could have augmented one or the other.  There were probably other ways to improve on it.

It's still one of the most flexible systems we've seen though, and it allowed me to play a character instead of playing a class, because I was never locked into the class.  For me that is a really important distinction.  I play alts to see content and try out classes I couldn't otherwise.  Any game where I can keep my character but I can try new stuff with her makes me love it.

From the way SWG's system is described, it's not really the same. In Rift it's a matter of paying a little in-game money and boom, now you're good at X instead of Y and you can go on your merry way, so I can understand people not needing more than one of each base class (especially since not only can you respec, but you can have quintuple spec if you're rich enough). That doesn't appear to be the case in SWG, it was "How bad do I want to try this other aspect of the game? Enough to abandon all the work I put into the other thing?"

Chances are, the answer is "no." That shortens the life of the game considerably for me. But like I said, I knew this about myself and didn't give SWG a second look once I heard "one character per server." All the other shit that came after (it's really buggy, the combat is crappy, etc) would've kept me away anyway, but I do specifically remember the one character thing being the main reason I wasn't even curious about it. It's interesting to hear why, but I can't say I agree with the reasoning. But that is probably surprising to no one who has played these sorts of games with me!


As an aside, I enjoy that I am "Sjofn" to people who never even met Actual Sjofn. MY SKALD WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.

As I said, it wasn't perfect.  Mind, we had EQ1 as a comparison at the time.  Being able to switch your profession around at all was pretty revolutionary.  (Was UO allowing reskilling at that point?  I never followed it too closely.)

Original design was that the bulk of crafter xp would come from people using your shit. Which was an awesome idea. Only master boxes fucked that up, because your shit was worthless until you finished master (and no longer needed xp). Then xp came from all production, only factory production was deemed too 'easy', so that got nerfed because apparently sitting there mindlessly clicking things or macroing was 'fun and engaging'.

This all another great example of not having the team commit to one vision. Also a great example of the era when devs confused grind with achievement even more regularly than they do today.
 

DAOC had respecs, dunno about other same-era games.

What I don't understand is why they felt the need to nerf usage xp (which they did, IIRC) rather than letting it work to the extent that it was possible.  I actually was able to make some money as a rising weaponsmith by selling crates of grenades, since they were the best way to grind that stupid combat XP and people didn't care as much about quality when it came to one-shot items, but I got just about ZERO experience from that (i.e. actually being a weaponsmith and selling some weapons) because I had to make them in a factory and because I didn't get any usage XP.  I mean, I can understand maybe not wanting people to be able to grind out the master box in a weekend by buying a bunch of resources and loading up a factory with them, but if you're actually making weapons that people are BUYING and USING?  You deserve some fucking XP.

Profession was more or less equivalent to class. The only games that didn't lock you in were those that weren't class based.

Yeah, it was.  In UO, once you hit the skill cap, but increased a skill, it would take the increased skill points out of skills that you had marked with a "down" arrow rather than the pool of unspent points.  You could also lock skills in place at pretty much any value so that they wouldn't max ou, and thus take up room in your skill % total.

Honestly, dropping a profession to pick up another was, in most cases, relatively painless and quite a few people did it all the time. Crafting was a pain to level if you were poor or just starting out (unless you found a sponsor) but if you'd been playing a while you could probably get hold of a load of cheap resources and power level quite quickly. Combat was even easier - because (pre CU) there were no character levels, you could still join a group of people and go fight stuff even if you weren't as effective in terms of damage. It wasn't like a level 1 joining a group of lvl 85s or whatever. I don't think there was any restriction on what armour you could wear or how much your health could be buffed so survivability wasn't an issue.

Plus, no running back to trainers each time you got a box (level) as anybody who had the skill you wanted could train you. I recall levelling up to Master Rifleman or something over the space of an evening. The idea of "all the work I put in" didn't come into it for the most part.

The thing where other players could take the place of npc trainers was cool - and easily transferable even to eq clones as well. No reason any random higher level guy from your class can't trigger access to the training dialog (if your design uses trainers at all).

So you basically want to be able to do everything solo in a multiplayer game?

I can accept that if I want to Hybrid I cant be as good as someone who is dedicated. In your ideal world wouldn't everyone just end up with exactly the same character at the end of the day (i.e. do everything at max level - granted not everyone would bother with it all but thats not the point)?


No, Eve just encourages you to sub a shit ton of alts (Power of 2 offer for example) so CCP make more money.

FWIW In SWG I was Master DE (yes, the lower boxes were a grind but thats another discussion) with enough Merchant to sell my stuff and (even after CU) enough Carbine (RP choice) to be useful (at least if it wasn't inbalanced as hell and more often than not you incapped yourself with the specials).

I had a friend who always goes for the best combat class (he did eventually get Jedi via the village just in time to quit with the NGE). In other MMO's he's had to create new characters when the nerf/balance bat swings, which is a pain in the ass as he than has to power level just so he can team with us again.

In SWG he could just shift his skill points over to the new FOTM profession without it causing a huge problem for everyone.

I think my only complaint about the skill system was when they let you reallocate the points (after the CU hit I believe) since everyone worked out that if you just stuck a merchant vendor down the xp flowed in even when you weren't online and enabled you to level up other professions without actually doing anything.

(I'm not going to complain too loudly though as thats how I got to Master DE in the end since the devs seemed determined to make droids completely bloody useless!)

I took my mouse droid everywhere if it makes you feel any better.

I loved me my harvesting droid. :)

I'd move onto the next kill while my droid was off deboning my last one. :)

What part of wanting to be a top-notch crafter in a single craft out of what, 10? AND a top-notch combatant in a single combat role out of another 10? simultaneously equates to wanting to do everything solo in a multiplayer game?  That is a stupid strawman argument that invalidates everything else anyone using it has to say.  It is NOTHING like wanting to be some uber tank-mage-healer-master-of-all-crafts-plus-resource-gathering monster.  Nothing.  So stop using that stupid argument.

If that was directed at me, I don't believe, prior to this point, anyone had discussed how many professions a character should have been able to master at the same time (bearing in mind there were two tiers) although Raph did touch on it briefly and therefore 'everything' was used.

It would appear your issue wasn't therefore with the single character slot but actually with the costs of the skill boxes and/or the max. skill points a character could have?

But that was the thing. Even with the limitation of skill boxes, you could still make yourself one badass perpetrator that still had a soft side. My girlfriend at the time was a bounty hunter and a dancer. One of the only people I knew on our server that had a firespray, fer chrissakes, yet you could still find her shaking that ass in cantinas every now and then, waiting for someone she had a bounty on to walk in.

Me, I was happy with my smuggler/TKM/jedi and my TKM/BE combo was pretty damned funny too.

1. You can't be a Trandoshan AND a wily old black lady who is just down on her luck and needs to shake her moneymaker.

2. Agree with that one. I have four characters and no desire to make another one. It was a bit tough to get my visuals narrowed to only four avatards, though. A lack of diverse and interesting races "helps"  :oh_i_see:

Skill points were, IIRC, set to two and a half 'mastered' professions. You could be a Master Weaponsmith, a Master Rifleman and I think still have enough points to have top-line vendors.

If ALL your skill points were in crafter you generally got eaten by womp rats. Which was an issue.

I think the crafting interdepency was a seperate issue, as well as the problem with Master Boxes. The former I think was a solid game mechanic (note: WoW also uses this. It's pretty common), but the latter --

*shrug*. I can see what the original goal probably was -- and that I think was worthwhile. The idea of being able to take enough weaponsmith to make, say, top-quality scopes or power paks whereas the guys making top-end guns had to purchase those schematics or components because they were too specialized was an interesting one. And in the places where it worked, it worked well -- the interlocking economy between resouce vendors, scouts, and crafters worked really well.

The related interlocks between various weaponsmiths of various skills, for instance, did not. Because of the huge Master bonuses.

That was about my exact build, except that it wasn't possible to get all the vendors that way (you needed Master Merchant and Master Artisan for that).

I seem to remember that you could however get master merchant, stick down then vendors and the drop the unneeded skills that were only required to place vendors, not maintain them

Yep. I think Master Merchant was needed for like global visilibity or something, which is why I hit the box. I was dropping Merchant and picking up Creature Handler when the CU hit and I left the game.

Interestingly enough -- one of the reasons I've had a hard time picking WoW back up with the new expansion is they redid the mechanics so much (Hunters especially with the new focus stuff) that I've just not felt it was worth it to relearn. It's a surprisingly small thing that didn't so much sour the expansion on me -- it just was enough of a hump that I've yet to really deal with it and explore the new content.

Instead it's just waiting for me to get the WoW bug again. I suspect that's universal to MMORPGs. You need change and growth, but too much and it discourages players from continuing. If they're going to learn something new, why not the newest shiny MMORPG that came out, rather than relearning to play?

Ah yes, I remember that now.  I also remember the forum community frothing at the mouth about this rampant "cheating" and requesting that the dev team make closing that loophole their top priority.  Which they eventually did, since it was a hell of a lot easier than doing something that might make the game BETTER.  :facepalm:  And then shortly thereafter, the CU came along and the merchant profession was gutted/removed anyway, or something.  I'd unsubbed by that point.  God, I'd blocked all of that out.

In real game design, Merchant would have either been heavily revamped or eliminated. The lack of soul-bounds and the looting and crafting stuff meant that lots of people needed vendors, the AH was deliberately price-limited, which meant there wasn't a potential for a true 'Merchant class'.

It was a solid idea, another social tie, but it just wasn't working in practice. Which meant it needed to be removed or eliminated. Everyone that wanted loot, resource, or goods vendors just took some merchant and nobody got squat out of keeping more Merchant than enough for the vendors. Should have been roled into an artisan line, at most.

IIRC Merchant survived the CU because thats when they added the ability to directly respec skill boxes for other skill boxes (without having to re-grind the xp) and everyone just used merchant xp (which flowed in freely once you placed a vendor) to respec to other professions


I think you got the base level 'coke machine' vendor during artisan (and maybe a splattering or other merchant bits), but yes in hindsight it would probably have been better to integrate the merchant tree with the artisan tree (although merchant was tier 2 and artisan tier 1).....

For some reason all of this is making me feel more motivated to work on my zombie MMO.    Maybe it's the idea of getting to implement a cool branching skill tree like SWG's that isn't stupid.   :awesome_for_real:

I don't follow your logic. Without a price-limited AH, there would no vendors at all (perfect info economy eliminates shopkeeper gameplay). And there were quite a lot of Master Merchants.

I *think* you're saying "people needed to buy and sell lots of stuff so everyone should have been able to run a shop." The point of the merchant tree was to enable those who wished to do the shopkeeper gameplay to do so. There's a specific audience target for that. The fact that if you were outside that target you could pick up just a little skill and get by would be "as designed."

Were merchants really a positive gameplay mechanic? The *real* mechant profession traded in the market for profit (and provides liquidity in the process).

Merchants in SWG were in fact vending machine attendants.

I was a merchant, it was indeed useful.

I was a miner! It was glorious.

As a practical matter, my recollection is that a 'little' bit of merchant skill was useless. Perhaps prior to the auction house showing vendors globally sure. But after that, you needed enough to get the global exposure. Folks doing high end like Krayt (sp) pearls or taking harvesting requests generally did so by direct contact and had no vendors.

I believe thats where "interdependence" kicked in.

On rereading that, I realized I skipped a few important bits. :) I blame fatigue.

The idea was solid (and the limited AH played into it) which was:
1) Crafters, gatheres, and combat types find a merchant, sell goods (loot, crafted items, resources, etc)  to merchant.
2) Merchant puts them on vendor. Full merchant tree gives global vsibility and enough vendors to run a 'shop' so that goods can be easily found by going to the correct vendor.
3) Sellers get rid of inventory items immediately, merchant marks up goods a bit and makes profit.

In practice, however, it just didn't happen. You didn't have a lot of full merchants doing -- those that existed were basically doing the equivilant of trying to buy up as much of a commodity and resale it at a higher price, basically like scouring auction houses to find under-priced goods. Except with vendors scattered over a dozen worlds, they really couldn't do so effectively.

What you HAD was generally either you or  a friend who bit the bullet and took enough Merchant to have three or four vendors and global visibility. (And then exploited to drop as much as possible of the tree). Even in PA's there was rarely a dedicated merchant, unless it was someone's alt who was basically there AS a merchant and generally side-crafter (furniture, paintings -- the sort of thing that didn't need experimentation points but could provide solid vendor items).

It was a skill tree and a class that someone had to suck it up and take, for the most part., which is a sign that it really needed to be removed or revamped.

I know I really begrudged the skill points -- and I loved having vendors -- because I was my friend's loot vendor. I'd put their stuff up on my vendor, and when it solld I'd give them the money.

I understand the theory. The reality? People two-boxed to get an alt who had a vendor, or lost a ton of needed skill points in order to sell their crafted goods. The *best* you could hope for was a PA with a full-time merchant alt or two, and even then you had to trust them to give you the money.

The ability to allow others to place goods on your vendor directly (IE: I give my friend permission to put stuff on a specific vendor, when it sells the money goes to him -- less a specific % I set and he agrees to when he places it) would have helped. It was a nightmare going through my mail trying to figure out what sold and who I owed money to, and I only did this for like three people (myself and two others).

Also, I think if Merchant boxes had given you more and more ability to remotely view, sort, analyze, and acquire goods you might have seen dedicated merchants. It was freakin' Star Wars, for Pete's sake. Why can't I buy goods from a vendor on another planet without leaving my home? There are guys in Eve, WoW and any other MMORPG who LIVE for basically playing an economics game. If going up the Merchant tree basically gave you the same tools someone playing the AH on WoW gave you, it would have formed a much better niche.

Especially if a basic artisan, or hell just a basic house, gave you the ability to put up a vendor -- even if one that could only sell to Merchants remotely.

That would allow anyone with a house to sell to Merchants, anyone with artisan to put up a merchant or two that could sell to anyone who saw them (so really good for player cities), and merchants themselves to look at an entire galaxy of goods and buy and sell, getting goods for their own shops/malls.

This all sounds incredibly inconvenient for the person who will buy and use the items in the end.

As with a number of SWG professions, the idea was interesting, but the actual utility/gameplay you got wasn't a good return on your SP investment because there just wasn't enough stuff for a dedicated merchant to do on a day-to-day basis.  IIRC half of the skill boxes in the Merchant tree were basically placeholders; that maybe should have been a clue that there wasn't enough gameplay there to justify all those skill points.   :awesome_for_real:

Later in the game, I had an architect that was kind of a hybrid. She had full master Arch and Merchant. She specialized in interior decorator items like rugs, paintings, rare interior items. She would fly around and buy up rug parts, blueprints of rarer items, and anything that fit that was below the potential sales price. She really did little of actual building construction, there was little demand after the game was settled. She made a ton of cash though.

Yeah, I think that was the last thing my character was doing before I unsubbed.  I realized that the most fun thing about being a weaponsmith had been decorating my shop, but it was a pain in the ass to actually find someone who sold all the different kinds of furniture, so I opened an IKEA.   :awesome_for_real:  Levelling architect was a hell of a lot easier than levelling weaponsmith, partly because you could grind items that used large amounts of cheap resources and gave lots of XP, and partly because furniture quality didn't matter so you could assemble things by hand (and get the grind XP) that you could then actually sell.

Not really. The way it ended up, every player city had a massive mall of vendors. The problem wasn't finding something to buy (unless it was quite rare, which is  always a problem) -- anyone taking a shuttle into a player city could see all the vendors. The problem was selling stuff.

Yours, or loot, or resources. You either needed a vendor of your own, or to catch a merchant actually in. I think there was some crappy-ass way to sell directly to a vendor, but it was more like a "I give you this, you okay whether to spend X" system. (And the inventory system SUCKED).

It wouldn't have changed a thing for the end-user, which was pretty easy. Not as easy as an auction house, but it was REALLY hard not to notice player cities full of crafting vendors and loot vendors.

Merchants in SWG either needed to be removed, or turned into something that could work like in Eve -- basically a class with full access to the entire playerbase public transactions, and the ability to winnow through it so you could actually 'play the market' or create the equivilant of an economic consortium.

The problem was that merchants were just like everyone else when it came to buying -- they had to fly from planet to planet, drive out to each vendor and look at the inventory. If you were going to make a merchant class, why on earth didn't that include getting the ability to, you know, NOT do that? Any businessmen has peons to fetch and collate that sort of thing for him.

Nyght: Since I had the vendors, I bought painting schematics. I always had TONS of excess hide and cheap components, so making giant painting lots for factories was easy. I think I did rug parts and a few others. I had the skill points tied up in vendor anyways.

So you're saying you had to browse each vendor separately, in-person, to see what was for sale there, but that wasn't inconvenient for the buyer? Even DAOC had a global search for player vendor contents.

I remember some sort of vendor search at one point at least.   You still had to actually go and buy it manually in the middle of nowhere though.

How might it work in a grimy fictional galaxy, plagued by civil war and a domineering empire, where much is illicit and spoken in hushed tones? There was a busy official market with global search, but it was price-capped. Your own NPC vendors were not price-capped. So the really good stuff was on private vendors.

Stockpile worthwhile stuff, build a shop, put a sign outside saying what you're selling. If you were any good, people shared waypoints to Ingmar's Weapons on Tatooine. Most things had decay or charges, so you got return customers unless they found better product.

You were listed on the planetary map under vendors. You could add a note to items on the public market, giving people your shop location, and set up a droid that advertised for you in cities.

But the co-operative malls in player cities worked best. Well-known traders would often have a mall outlet in addition to their own shop. People knew it was your outlet because you named the NPC "Ingmar's Guns".

UO still works like this. It's mitigated a little bit in comparison to SWG by the fact that at least you can instantly teleport between shops, but nevertheless it's a giant cockstab. All I've been hearing from ex-SWG people in this thread is "No no the kicks in the nuts felt kinda good once you got used to them!"

Look, guys, I know what it is to be irrationally in love with a clusterfucked old sandbox MMO, but come on. Some of you haven't come anywhere near completely to terms with just how much stupid bullshit you were overlooking even when the game was "good".


Weapons would be manufactured by a handful of massive corporations, not individual artisans like it's the goddamn middle ages. If I want to buy a handgun I go buy a Glock or something, I don't google up a gunsmith and then go out into the mountains with him to mine for ore like a 19th century prospector. Jesus Christ. Don't even try to appeal to "realism" with this shit.

Again, that's all about the seller. I didn't know you could create automated trade channel spam though, that sounds wonderful.  :oh_i_see:

I didn't say you could create automated trade channel spam. I said you could have a droid walk around advertising your shop. In speech bubbles above its head.

That's enough "here is my SWG opinion" from people who skipped it. Just accept it was a game of missed potential. It contained successes and disasters. "But is it fun?" is the F13 question and the answer continues to be "nobody can agree".

If you knew where the stuff was and had the creeds to buy it, it wasn't inconvenient.

And in answer to the "But is it fun?" question, it was for me.

I'd sum it up for them this way:  As a game, it wasn't that great.  Ingmar wouldn't have liked it, though it wasn't as bad as he is trying to image, either.  I've just played with him enough to make that assessment.  As a world though it was awesome.

If the gamey bits could have been improved to the point that people who only like games could have had fun, the worldly bits kept for those of us that enjoyed those, and a plethora of bugs squashed, it would have been truly amazing.

*shrug*. I can't remember a whole lot of problems with it, mostly because player cities tended to have shuttles which meant getting there was ridiculously easy and I passed through them constantly. So if I was feeling like I should probably pick up some new weapons, I'd probably pass a half-dozen weapon vendors just by moving around. I admit, early on it was probably FAR more of a pain.

But by the time i played, there were established cities, with malls full of of vendors for every good possible with shuttleports and vehicles had just been introduced.  Finding them wasn't a big deal -- the whole "global visibility" thing on the Merchant tree was effectively "Show my vendors on the map". Pick one and it'd give you a waypoint to it.

No, it wasn't as convienent as the Auction House on WoW. On the other hand, it was part of what made player cities really work so...your mileage varies if the slight hassle was worth it. It was certainly easier than buying and selling in, say, EVE. :)

No Jita lag.

I'm looking for a world.  Are there any good worldy games out there besides Rift right now?

Yeah, but this is a wake. This is all the "hey, remember the time SWG did the thing with that guy and that guy got so mad hahahaha" while ignoring the fact that SWG was a drunk who never paid back loans. The SWG released a title that showed how successful a AAA sandbox MMO can be, which was then eclipsed by a better themepark in WoW in its first month.


Yes.

AAA, highly polished, strong player-base? No.

A theme park with a fucking built-in player base, so several dozen grains of salt.

Um.

Star Wars.

I came very close to spraying beer out of my nose.

And yes, it's Star Wars.  Warcraft has fucking nothing on that fanbase.

It's EVE or nothing. Rift isn't a worldy game.

Warcraft is a fanbase of gamers. Star Wars is a fanbase of, well, Star Wars fans.

SWG did pretty good by the standards of the time. WoW basically worked on an entirely different plane.

WindupAtheist.  Checkmate, I win.

Seriously though.  You're goddamn insane if you don't think there is a massive overlap between "nerds who play computer games" and "nerds who like space samurai and space cowboys versus space Nazi's in space Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress."

Warcraft is a base of RTS gamers. WoW's success past the initial period had little to do with them. Especially with WoW going mainstream, which meant it pulled in a lot of first-time gamers who didn't play the RTS at all.

The Star Wars player base contains a lot of gamers who will buy fairly average titles in the millions of units (http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/13801/star-wars-the-force-unleashed/). SWG's launch hype was heavily based around playing in the Star Wars universe and that's what attracted a lot of early purchases.

To re-cover the same ground, SWG was a poor game for the Star Wars universe, but it wouldn't have been as successful as if it had been Generic Sci-Fi Sandbox: Koster's Revenge.

It's the argument that gets trotted out every time SWG's failure to capture anyone but the  "I wanted to live Beru's Life" crowd is pointed out.

You're arguing with world-sim fanatics.  They'll excuse anything because of their zeal for the system itself, never mind how inappropriate for the franchise.  It could have been an actual release of Whamdoodles online and they'd be justifying each and every decision made.

Reskin preCU SWG into the Firefly MMO.

There's an emu project right there.

Especially since the actual Firefly MMO seems to have disappeared.

That's not shiny.

Wiki sez Warcraft III has something like three million boxes sold (though the citation is out of date, so it may be wrong).  Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has moved something like seven million. (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6251593.html)

And look at the release dates between the two and the formats in which both were released.

WCIII was released PC/Mac back in the late 90s/early 00s when gaming was much less socially acceptable.

Force Unleashed was released on pretty much Every. Fucking. Console. plus the iPhone and probably Speak N Spells in 2007. Big difference.

Ask Bungie why they chose to go for an XBox release of Halo rather than one for the Mac/PC and they'll tell you, "it was a call between selling a couple hundred thousand boxes and a few million." The two don't fucking compare.

Actually, Bungie was traditionally a Mac based company and fully intended to have a Mac Release of Halo, but they were bought out by Microsoft so Halo could be the flagship game for the Xbox and blah blah etc.

Sure it is.  All the archetypes are there...Mal is obviously the smugger/pistoleer, Jayne is the Rifleman/Commando, Wash the pilot, Zoe the Carbineeer/Commando.  River's a TKM.  Simon is a doc.  Change the YT1300 to the Serenity, make the Empire the Blue Hand/Alliance and you're set.  Remove all alien skins and change them to humans, make player cities totally razzable.  Take out Jedi.  SOMEHOW get in atmospheric flight.

Tell me you wouldn't play the shit out of that.

True, it's not exactly a fair comparison.  But I'm not trying to say that there are twice as many SW fans as Warcraft fans or anything.

The point I'm trying to make is that A) it seems weird to say that WoW's success is all because of the Warcraft brand, when WoW easily outsold Warcraft 3 by way more than 2:1, and B) that Star Wars fans aren't these weird luddites who live in theatres and never buy games, even way back in the dimly remembered stone age of 2003.  I can't find sales figures for more relevant SW games or I'd post them (just newer stuff like TFU, Lego SW, and Battlefront), but it's not like Lucasarts have been putting out Star Wars games for decades just on a whim.  Even the dimmest executive would pull the plug after the hundredth game or so if nobody was buying them.

edit:

Yeah, and don't forget Inara, who - what's that you say?  DIKU will be fine after all?

I'll accept that the timing of release may be a bit different.

A quick look at the Wikipedia indicates that SWG, SW:KOTOR and SW: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy all launched in 2003. I can see that KOTOR has (to date) .

Anyway, Kail's made the point: there are lots of SW fans out there who look to buy a title just because it is Star Wars. As with many IPs, it is what draws in the initial interest. Hell, it is a major reason why people are excited about SWOR. (http://gamrreview.vgchartz.com/sales/6445/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic/over 2m sales[/url)

Forget World of Warcraft. That comparison is just SimBeru tards trying to make themselves feel better. It's the way an entire generation of failures in the MMO industry have tried to make themselves feel better. You just go "Sure it wasn't as big as Warcraft, but what is?" and shrug, while implying that Warcraft is only successful because Blizzard has an infinite budget. Sure champ, it's their budget. It's their brand. It's not the fact that they would rather kill themselves than design the sort of technically shoddy shitpile their competition all have reputations for. No, no, it couldn't be that.

SWG never managed to pull ahead of Everquest, despite coming out 4 years later and having the Star Wars license. I don't even mean peak Everquest, I mean it never managed to pull ahead of whatever EQ was doing subscriber-wise at the same time. The peak of SWG was only about 50k subs higher than peak UO, a game that came out in 1997 with Super Nintendo graphics, and you can't even pin that on the stupid diku-loving masses since they're both sandboxes.

"Sure it was no Warcraft..."

Haha, no shit?

According to VGChartz Dark Forces (1995) has sold 1 950 000 copies.  Warcraft: Orcs and Humans has sold 2 079 792.

Blizzard also has a little online action RPG you may have heard of.

The Blizzard fanbase is what got that ball rolling. Not just the Warcraft fans.

I rather liked the simberu game, and I still think it could have worked if the rest of the game was as good. I like a lot of Raph's ideas and design ethos, but seems to lack that certain oomph in the action/combat area that a Star Wars game needs to shine.

What's amazing is how many people stuck with it despite the glaring issues. It wasn't the Star Wars license that did that. There was a point where the game became more playable, despite being badly flawed, but that was a LONG time after launch.

I mean, how long was it before they had cities and vehicles working?

Broken spawn system, no real questing hubs, some half-done themeparks, a weird and complex set of undocumented mechanics to really do anything more than kill womp rats (buffing, the HAM system, armor -- shit, even how to find things).

The license got people to buy the box, but something kept a surprising number of people playing it. And it wasn't lightsabers.

Although I second the Firefly MMORPG idea. :) Especially if the space part can have a bit of the Wing Commander Privateer feel...

Entertainer.

What better way to heal one's mind wounds? ;D

Entertainer/Image Designer.

Seriously, if you wanted a makeover, who else would you go to?

People stuck with Shadowbane and Auto Assault until the end, too, despite both having huge tech problems and being shitty games.  Usually around here we deride those people and say they have shitty taste or are simply fanatics for the game system and have a laugh.  With SWG somehow that argument is deemed invalid and it's because the game, 'just had so much potential.'

Neither of those games had anything like the following that SWG had. There is a dedicated group out there who wants that kind of a world. For some Eve does it, for others they want something more personal.

I half wonder if UO will see an uptick in December.

If Fallen Earth was less FPS and more tab target autoattack, they could probably put together a mediocre ad campaign of 'come get your virtual world' here! and probably see an uptick in subs.

I actually felt like it wasn't FPS enough.  Or, maybe to be more accurate, it was an FPS with pretty mediocre gun play.  It was probably the single biggest turn off for me. 

It wasn't as bad as that. Within a couple of months my friends and I had our little town set up with people running shops. a base for the PvPers who'd go off and fight rebels, and a tavern where people hung out. Not too far away you'd find the local harvesters mining ore and minerals to keep the industrialists going. My bounty hunter friend would dissapear off to other planets for days and come back with a collection of high quality hides to sell to the crafters.

Even in that basic state it was a lot of fun for some people. The world also changed - NPC bases nearby would come and go, and new people would turn up and place their houses or businesses close to ours.

The key thing I think is that it was a totally different experience to Everquest or WoW, both games which I also like. Although WoW and SWG are both considered MMOs and are superficially similar, I'm not sure it even makes sense to look at them as members of the same genre.

I'd say the combat controls were just plain terrible.  Had it been standard DIKU combat, or something more like Borderlands in action, the game would have held me longer.  I enjoyed many aspects of it, and I'll definitely be trying again once it's f2p.

But it'll be the combat that makes me put it down again.

And the Xbox and PS2 versions of Star Wars: Battlefront alone (PC sales aren't listed) nearly match the numbers for Diablo II.  In case you haven't done this before, your next tack is to trot out the "But D2 was PC only, and some people don't meet the minimum specs for PC games," argument.  But if you want we can skip that step.

Have you not been paying attention to the sales discrepancy between PC games and console games that's been brought up at least twice?

Obviously more people didn't buy D2 because it wouldn't run on their computer, right?

I told people not to go there.

wut I don't even follow. I just wanted to point out that the Blizzard fanbase is/was more than just Warcraft fans.

Ah, misread that, my mistake.

And Lucasarts and Star Wars in particular has been driving a significant portion of video game development and sales since the Atari 2600.  Because Star Wars nerds just fucking love video games.

You like shooters with three dimensions, where you can pan the camera along the z-axis, and where you can strafe to avoid incoming fire, right?  You should give this one a try:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4f/Dark_Forces_box_cover.jpg)

SWG was A Bad Game. End of story.

Yes, just like EVE is a bad game.  People still have fun with it, though, just like they did with swg.

IIRC Dark Forces (great game BTW) didn't have panning on the z-axis. I think it had autoaim on the Z like Doom though. Hrm. Maybe it did. I shall have to reasarch this.  :grin:

It also had no Jedi  (For a while.  :uhrr:), like the X-Wing series. Just for those people saying all SW games have to have Jedi vroom lightsaber tardness.

It had Z-axis panning, or else you'd never have been able to kill Dark Troopers, who enjoyed landing on your head.

Yep. I blanked out the memory since the original used the awkward pgup pgdwn keys.  :ye_gods:

Sizeable difference in numbers, at least until the CU and NGE hit. Not that the numbers were anything remotely WoWish, but it was doing well enough.

IIRC the timeline correctly, the CU and NGE were pretty blatant "Holy Fuck, look at WoW" responses. Prior to WoW, a 100k subs was dandy.

I wouldn't worry Windup & Merusk TOR will no doubt be your holy grail of SW MMO where you get to be the hero and the focus of the story/galaxy and there won't be a Beru in sight.

add /sarcasm tag to taste

SWG was beyond being a game. It was an alternate life.

Some people played it as a game, min-maxing and being the best duelist, or soloing Ackleys and Night Sisters.
But the special thing about SWG was that you could pretty much play it just as you like it. You didn't have to compete to have fun, you could live it.

I think everyone would have got bored and quit, or dragged on for the sake of it (like many do in MMOs), if combat was all it offered.
I actually enjoyed the combat, but I was spending a lot of my time doing stuff I'd never even dreamed of doing in other games.

One of my first loves was being a Bounty Hunter. I spent many happy hours tracking NPCs and Players down and working out the best way to kill them.
Other times, I'd be sitting in a Cantina with my friends watching a group performing a song and dance routine that they had choreographed just for that evenings event.
My friends, from the Player City we had, would go on group hunts, taking out new players to kill some of the nastier mobs.
Sometimes, wed go raiding bases, or defending our own.
I'd be sourcing Ores and planting harvesters, then I'd craft and run shop sometimes (on a second account).
I actually found myself role-playing, something I thought was really alien at first, but this game made it seem normal, somehow.
Fuck! I even got married in SWG.

The choices were endless, and it felt natural to actually spend time with others, for no other reason than it was fun.
What other games would ever consider riding a slow-ass Dewback, when you have a super fast speeder?
I made a fish tank and decorated my house, like it was a palace. I don't even like fishing, or D.I.Y. but I did it in SWG.

To tell the truth, the one thing that almost made me not join SWG, was the Star Wars connection.
I actually never thought much of the Star Wars films when they came out, I watched them like everyone did, but I wasn't really into it at that time.
Playing SWG taught me more about Star Wars than I'd ever cared to know before.

I'd still have to rate my enjoyment of pre-CU SWG above all over games, despite it's bugs and all the flaws that it had.
But it's hard to put into words exactly why. Anyway, it was very special.

Thank you Raph for creating that magical place.

You play (and like) WoW.

That's like a Ke$ha fan casting aspersions on Joy Division.

Maybe so but I got a 1.5 years of solid enjoyment out of it. 

And therin lies the problem.  I have a life. It's not perfect but I don't need to escape it so badly I fawn over terrible mechanics and space-cadet decisions for some guy wanting to test his social theories. I also don't need to get home from my job in one life to get to my job in another.

And thus is why I despise 'virtual worlds' of all stripes.  I'm looking for entertainment, not another even less convenient and time-consuming life.

Some people find that entertaining.

Your argument thus boils down to "Stop having fun your way, start having it my way!".

If they found your way fun, they'd be doing that. I don't get the hate. It's not like US law requires you to sit down and play a virtual world game, or that it's somehow crowding out other games. Shit, you'd think your type of fun was niche, not the other way around!

Stop playing MMO's

I suddenly have an urge to tell some of our volunteers to go collect 10 rat gullets for me.

Not enough people.  Some people enjoy having their balls kicked, that doesn't make their particular taste worth basing a game around either.

200-300k people sticking around to play a buggy-as-hell game is plenty enough.

Maybe not if you want to reach WoW numbers, but no one has actually succeeded at that.  More than 250k two years into the game though?  Only a handful.  Just because you didn't like the game, doesn't mean it wasn't successful or that there weren't enough people who enjoyed it.

I disagree.

As a game, just like with EVE, it wasn't all that great.  It was buggy as hell and there was very little dev made content for players to go through.  What it did, however, was give you the tools to make your own fun, again, just like EVE.  Some people like that while others (the majority it seems) like to have a more directed experience. 

And therein lies your problem, actually. Shit, at its height I had a life too. 100-hour work weeks and weekends of staggeringly huge bar bills. I wanted something that would take all that shit away and SWG did just that. And I was goddamn entertained. Like Morat said, just because you didn't find it fun doesn't mean a good number of other people didn't love it.

I love virtual worlds, especially sandbox-y ones.  I have a life.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

If you don't like virtual worlds, why play an mmo?

They are if you want to do more than putter around.  Virtual World always translates into "time to achieve" which is on par with games, but they have a "time to maintain" requirement as well, which makes them timel-sucking wastes.

Your second question is as pointless as asking Sky why he bothers when he wants to solo lots of stuff.   It's funny how the same arguments that are invalid when used against DIKUs are spewed in defense of bad VWs.


If that were the case they wouldn't have entertained the idea of the CU in the first place.   You don't do that kind of thing unless you're pretty sure it'll be embraced OR you're not meeting your financials.


K10R was a step.  It was certainly better than "here, go kill shit for xp. No, we're not going to tell you were, figure it out." that was EQ.  It was embraced and hailed as a great innovation at the time.  Now it's worn and tired and we'll see if Bioware can successfully pull off the next step or at least show us where some flaws in it are.

No. She's totally right. The ONLY reason they weren't making their financials was because they were paying LA a mint for the license. Any game then that wasn't WoW would've killed for sub numbers like that.

CU was a reaction to Wow. For the time, SWG was doing well pre-Wow launch. However with blizzards market opening title, it showed that game populations could be much larger, and some thought the SW IP should have been. But thats only a revelation that came AFTER blizzard opened the market so wide.

It was also extremely knee jerk reaction. Also for the sake of the discussion, the "Combat update" is not the same as the "New game enhancements", two different knee jerks.

SWG was built for a different era, one that is easy to pick at with hindsight and what era we are in now.

I have a life and I find virtual worlds very entertaining.

It seems that different posters on this board have different opinions on the topic of "the type of game I enjoy most". Don't get so angry - they're not doing it to upset you.

Hard to see the rest of the world I guess, when you are the center of the universe.   :oh_i_see:

Note that it is totally possible to love and enjoy a game that is bad in an objective sense. DAOC was riddled with horrible design elements but I still loved it (at the time).

I was remarking on your parallel of virtual and real life, that it would be funny if it worked in reverse. Now go make me two pair of shoes.

Well SWG especially post Light Speed had hell lot of more stability and tools for sandbox than SB. Lets put it this way - SB never ever worked properly. SWG did at some point. Combat always sucked there though. - It was proven again and again- you cant have mass market game without good combat, its not sufficient to have good combat, but without it it will surely be a very niche game. No matter the rest.

Anger assumes a level of emotional involvement not in play here.   Trippy said "if you didn't play, hushup" so those who were questioning the systems did so, leaving me alone sitting here saying "Uh, no, it really wasn't all that fun or successful. Here's some of why."

Assuming anger in any of it just seems like projection to me. To wit:



Yeah, but if the game can't meet its license fees it's not really doing well or successful, is it?  Are we aruging that there's an audience for the genre? I'm not, because there is.  Was this the game type right for the license? No.   Was this the license for that game type's audience? Some very small segment of it, maybe.  I still say if it had been baby killer online the virtual world types would be praising it.  You're all defending the genre while ignoring the specific game in question.

Tha's lead me on to ranting about the game type itself.. which is widly off track.  I hate the genre but I don't begrudge you all from enjoying it if you want to spend that much time in a game.  More power.  My experience in these types say it's self-destructive rather than entertaining, and in a way DIKUs Post-EQ can be only if you're ultra-alt-catass.  That's all a discussion for a different thread, though.

Quite clear they met the license fees. The issue was, Blizzard came out with a game with a younger IP and crushed all before it. Many, thought that any game with the starwars IP must do the same. So they knee jerked.

Baby with the bathwater and all that.

Also, do you REALLY think that bioware would be able to put out Star Wars: The Old Republic in the Old republic time frame if the last three movies and the TV show had not been made yet? The choise of SWG's time frame was the one most known.

Considering its set thousands of years before any of those things, maybe?


I don't think KOTOR lined up with any previous Starwars release, could be misremembering though. I've forgotten how old the prequels actually are.

One of the things I like most about sandbox games is the way they let you play for as long or as short a time as you like. No pressure to keep up with your guildies levelling or anything like that.

Hell, in Eve one of the measures of success is the size of your bank balance and my best hope there is to play as little as possible. Because I am bad at playing Eve and get blown up a lot.

Oh, I'm not saying it didn't have some interesting systems, or that people didn't enjoy it, or it wasn't immersive or whatever. I'm saying as a game it was bad. As a toy? Quite good, if you like that sort of thing.

WoW is still (even after the Cataclysm fuck-ups) a batter game than SWG ever was.

And you still missed the point of what I posted there.

All games should be Farmville!   :why_so_serious:

I definitely do. The Sims is like ... the only sandboxy game I have been able to stand for more than 10 minutes. I don't even like Minecraft. :(

All depends on how the world is structured and what you want to do.  UO I hear was totally like this.  I'd have like to have tried it but the magazine reviews I read all detailed how the reviewer was ganked & full-looted within minutes of logging in, so I decided it wasn't for me.  (And I imagine thousands of others did the same.)

EVE you can do empire at your own pace, sure.  If you like EVE's mission system or empire mining (if that's even possible w/ all the macro miners) there's no pressure to do anything.  In 0.0 that's a quick ticket out of your corp for inactivity (as with raiding guilds, I'll grant.)  However, the distinction is very few raids in WoW involve long stretches sitting around doing nothing (Gate camps) or staring at a screen that's frozen (fleet battles) or minimizing your window while you circle a place with cannons on Autofire for 2h trying to destroy something. (POS) 

Yeah, there's the odd small and exciting op or infiltration mission but those are few and far between.  Your chances of getting one with an off-and-on playtime (in anything but goons) is pretty limited.

SWG, however, you couldn't do the entire sales & merchant game in spurts.  Doing it for resources meant you'd miss a shift and quite possibly the only resource crafters would want in bulk for the next few weeks/ months. Doing it for crafting meant you'd slowly lose your clients.  If you're not around or only around every few days and they want that new weapon now, you're just unreliable.  Which meant less income so you couldn't buy the best resources, which meant fewer clients..

The only thing you could do that way was combat, which sucked ass.

If you wanted to be a competitive crafter/merchant, you had to put in some effort. And if you want to be a competitive SC2 player, you had to put in some effort. And if you wanted to progression raid in WoW, you had to put in some effort. If you just wanted to putz around and make your own droid, you could do that too.


I don't think anyone will argue with that one.

There's "Some effort" then there's SWG Resource shifts, where you had to be able to be on within 10-15 mins of an occurrence or else you'd miss out entirely because of the legion of harvesters that would be dropped within that window.   It was just plain broken.

There was a lot of hype that SWG would the be the first million+ sub title in the West. Lineage was out there with a multi-million membership and the combination of some big name MMO talent (Raph and all the others forgotten to history) plus SOE (big success with EQ) plus Star Wars IP (favoured nerd IP) meant it was an incredible shot.

Game launched, didn't get there, so there was probably a "hmm, maybe there aren't that many MMO players out there in NA / EU".

Then WoW launched and took (I think) less than 1 month to exceed SWG's population and less than 3 to hit the 1 million subscribed mark.

I'm fine that people loved SWG, and the NGE serves as a fantastic example of what not to do to a player base (and how every MMO you love is exactly one patch away from driving you off). However, from a business point of view, it didn't meet expectations and WoW showed it up badly.

And also despite the talent involved, despite the time / money invested in it, it was still horribly buggy at launch which helped drive a lot of people off. Themeparks are comparatively easier to build than sandboxes and appeal to a wider audience, which is why the themepark model dominates (if you want to draw a binary line, of course).

Actually, you could do just fine. If you wanted to be the top -- or one of the top -- crafters, yeah. You either had to do that or buy from someone who did. (It wasn't hard to do the latter). But plenty of people -- myself included -- did just fine by tossing down harvestors somewhere convienent and merely picking what to harvest when we passed buy.

Plenty of things --furniture, paintings, architectural stuff -- didn't need quality, it needed quantity. I think I had down a factory, three harvestors aimed at minerals, two at energy, and one or two at biologicals. (I think. It's been a long time). I just left them near my house, and since I habitually logged out there it took all of five minutes when I logged on to zip by them and make any changes.

Stuff sold pretty well, and I used a lot of it for paintings and such.

Anyways, back to profitability: SWG was profitable. It had, by pre-WoW standards, a respectable player base. Then WoW came out and had approximately 43 million players, making EVERYONE look second rate. The CU was a knee-jerk attempt to grab some of the new WoW market. You could practically see the seams where they'd taken an in-house combat revamp and basically thrown 90% of it and radically shifted gears.

The NGE was simply a hail Mary pass, because they lost a lot of subs to the CU.

*shrug*. Someone, either at LucasArts or SOE, got dollar signs in their eyes when WoW started pulling in millions of players, not hundreds of thousands. The CU was a cynical, untested, quickly thrown-together attempt to cash in. It succeeded exactly as much as you'd expect it to. :)

Despite being years newer with a much bigger budget and a major IP, it only bested peak UO by 50k subscribers and never came close to unseating EQ. If WoW never existed it would still be remembered as underwhelming.

"Gee this UO thing made some money, but what if we did it over again with newer tech?"
"Hmm, go on."
"Then say we spend a lot more money on this version so it doesn't look like Super Nintendo?"
"Yeah yeah, I'm liking this."
"I know right? Then to top it off this game's setting is based on Star Wars, not some single-player RPGs that quit being good in the eighties!"
"Holy fuck dude, this is awesome, how many more paying customers than that old UO thing do you think we'll get?"
"Oh I dunno, like 20% tops, but our game will only last like half as long or less."
"..."

Too garish; didn't read.

SWG was doing fine, sub numbers were north of 100k and while not quite EQ it was doing better than EQ2 and making good money.

Then WoW hit, SWG underwent two wrenching and poorly thought out conversions, and subs dropped off the face of the earth -- leading to the game being canceled. Claiming that it didn't last as long as UO is kinda pointless, insofar as SOE killed it to try to compete with WoW.

I have no idea how it'd be doing right now if they'd just continued on with as they had been, but I can't imagine them doing any worse. :)

WindupAtheist is basically looking back on it with rosy post-WoW tinted glasses. "Better than UO and EQ2 but not as good as EQ" was what, back then, they called a "solid success".

I think you might have your timeline slightly confused, EQ2 and WoW came out within weeks of each other.

We get it.  UO was the bestest MMO of its type ever and to suggest anything else sandboxy was even remotely as good or fun is blasphemy. :oh_i_see:    Thanks for confirming what I've been hearing about for years regarding the hard core UO players.

The subs swg had may have been only 50k more than UO peak population but UO was competing with....hmm...no one else for subs while swg was competing with UO, EQ, DAOC and whatever else was available at the time.  I don't see how you fail to understand that swg was fun and enjoyable for many people.  Those same people will never tell you it was perfect and won't sugarcoat its problems.  They will, however, tell you that no MMO before or since has come to close to the great experience they had with swg.

Shit, it was a long time ago. :)

Okay, so SWG did better than UO, worse than EQ, but better than EQ2. In fact, if you neglect WoW entirely and compare it to every MMORPG every made that WASN'T WoW, it was solidly in the triple-A category and had levelled off at about six figures.

Then WoW came and every fucking shop and their dog had to stop accepting a mere 100,000 or so subs (and three or four times that in box sales) and shoot for millions or bust. I think SWG was the only one where the developers basically savaged an existing game trying to remake it to capture WoW's audience. Given the results, I'm not surprised no one else tried. (Somehow I suspect LucasArts was behind that particular stupidity)

So, in short, in a non-WoW world SWG was doing just fine. I'm sure LucasArts would have preferred it to crush EQ and take the top as the biggest Western MMORPG, but until WoW came along they were showing no signs of doing anything other than, well, continuing to support and expand the game.

Bluntly put -- SWG was only a failure when compared to World of Warcaft (well, up until the CU and NGE fiascos. If the first didn't drop enough subs to shitcan it, the second did). But by that standard, every Western MMORPG is an utter failure because no one is even remotely in WoW's league. And it's several years old now.

Timeline of releases:

1994 - Tales of the Jedi: Knights of the Old Republic (comics)
1999 - Phantom Menace
2002 - Attack of the Clones
2003 - Knights of the Old Republic (game)

The KOTOR game is set 40 years after the events in the comics.

The only reason we're having the 'was it a failure?' discussion is the license, really. Obviously it wasn't a financial disaster or anything, the question is more, did it achieve its potential?

Compared to what, though? Obviously SOE and LucasArts wanted a "more subs than EQ or UO" since it was pitched as UO + Star Wars. It didn't get the former, got the latter.

And on what terms? Ignore WoW -- it's an abberation, an outlier. Nobody's EVER come close in Western MMORPGs.

So what are we looking at? Box sales? Sub length? Peak subs? Return versus investment? Compared to other MMORPGs?

*shrug* If you toss out the giant in the room, you're left with a more-successful-than-average MMORPG. Hell, EQ did better and I think one or two of the post-WoW MMORPGs did better (and WoW grew the potential market a ton), but basically you had a standard, profitable triple-A MMORPG. I vaguely recall SOE and LucasArts hyping it as expecting a lot more, but fuck -- every MMORPG does that. WoW's the only one that actually, you know, did.

I think that people expecting a license to somehow make magic happen are going to get disappointed every time. For the most part, licensed games suck and licensed MMORPGs tend to fail more than succeed. (LoTRO was a nice exception, and WoW was a license from a gaming company, so if anyone was going to turn IP into 'good game' it was them).

Did it achieve it's potential? Not as a game. It launched buggy as shit, and IIRC SOE yanked most of the development team and restasked them, and the Live team never stood a fucking chance with all the half-finished and broken shit. (The game was, as usual, rushed to launch. There have been worse launches, but SWG was definetly in the top lists for 'shit on delivery').

In terms of box sales, sub numbers, and longetivty? Yeah, I'd say it did. Right up until WoW changed everything.

AFAIK D&D did better than The Star Wars Roleplaying Game. Or whatever it was called.

Generic fantasy always wins.

Does anything, besides EQ and WoW, which surprised their creators?

Maybe RIFT.  GW if you want to include it in that category.  I can't think of another MMO that's unequivocally reached or surpassed its potential.

UO didn't peak until DAOC had already been out for a year.  :oh_i_see:

But no guys, it's cool. I'm sure that when they bought the Star Wars license and shelled out for development "Do little more than half of what our game from 4 years ago with no licensed IP did!" was totally their goal. It's the same song and dance you get from fans of every flop-ass MMO to have ever taken more than like a year to shut down.

"EQ2 doesn't seem to have done very well."

"Sure EQ2 didn't do WoW numbers, but who can compete with WoW? Those Blizzard guys have advantages that no one else in the industry has, such as competence!"

"But it peaked hundreds of thousands of subscribers lower than EQ1. That had to be disappointing."

"FUCK YOU SHUT UP IT TURNED A PROFIT EVENTUALLY FUCK YOUUUUUUU!"

Show us on the doll where Raph touched you, WUA.

He's mad Raph left UO to go work on SWG.

And like everyone else, is now on fucking facebook games.

When Raph Koster and Brian Reynolds are doing facebook shit, it's time for some new blood in the industry.

I would really like to see SWG done with out the IP, and with some of this stuff addressed. Fallen earth was close, but lost some of the charm and features.

Fuck WoW. Has any NA made MMOG since WoW got much more than 1 million subs? And that million is usually at launch.
Over the years has the combined playerbase of MMORPGs increased much since WoW? Or is it still about a million subs for a new big IP title (max) that then trickle off into the sunset?

WoW didn't expand the MMOG playerbase. It just made Blizzard a lot of money.

Yes it did.