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Imagine you're in charge at SOE...
ArcAngel3
Member Posts: 2,931
and LA tells you, the game isn't attracting enough players. We want you to make it more of a success, like WoW. How could you respond to this?
Here are some of my initial ideas:
-Make sure that the professions actually work. Don't have skills that don't function correctly.
-Add in some story driven content, that has you do more than just ride out into the middle of nowhere to gun down 15 dudes.
-Add in some interesting content for character development instead of gun down 1500000 wookies and convert it to force xp.
-Make sure that quests are completable. There is a history in SWG of broken quests, which have always been very frustrating.
-Don't make it necessary for people to stand in a buff line for 15 minutes and pay someone 10000 credits just to be able to survive on certain planets or equip their gear.
-Fix regular NPC spawns in objects.
-Fix collision detection problems.
-Get rid of the need for people to camp spawns of keys and bosses. In SWG you had to wait an hour sometimes just to get a chance at a certain piece of content. Sometimes after waiting, people would jump the line, and there was nothing you could do about it. You'd also have to wait for keys to spawn to go further in a certain dungeon. Then people would fight over the spawns. That kind of content should be instanced, like it is in WoW.
-Don't introduce a host of new bugs with patches.
-Don't break something every time you try to fix something else.
These are the kind of things that in my mind SOE could have done to respond to encouragement to learn from WoW's success.
They also could have kept aspects of SWG that were always superior to WoW. These include:
-The skill system,
-The rich character creation tools, and template diversity,
-the superior pet taming system,
-the crafting system and player driven economy.
-the UI that was much more user friendly, and customizable, I especially liked the ability to have 3 rows of skills visible to choose from. The NGE copied WoW, moved them to the bottom, and allowed you to only have one row.
-I also liked the pre-cu skill icons better because they were a neutral colour that made them blend into the background. I found this more immersive. The CU introduced flashy, colourful new icons (like WoW) that stood out, and made it feel less like a virtual experience. The NGE then made the icons even more ridiculous by having the exact same flashy icon for a bunch of different skills. You couldn't even tell the skills apart anymore. Insane.
What did not ever need to be copied from WoW in my mind would be:
-a level system,
-a completely loot based system, especially if you already have a crafting system in place,
-deleting so many professions, losing diversity, eliminating progress by bringing the number of professions down to WoW's allegedly magic number of 9.
-trying to rip off their UI, and making a complete mess of it.
So if you were given the task of learning from WoW's success, and bringing in a broader target audience what would you have done?
SOE folks seem to think that being asked to improve the game and learn from WoW means that they were forced to implement the NGE. I disagree. I'm highlighting a number of options that they had to respond to this direction. Feel free to add your own.
Comments
>>"Imagine you're in charge at SOE..."
"Hmm, numbers are down again. So, what's new. Dumb geeks don't know what fun is when we hand it to them on a platter! Oh well, better swap another programmer from SWG to Planetside and swap an EQ2 programmer to SWG, then swap the lead dev from Planetside over to EQ2. Then I can say we've got new talent on each product and we're looking at changes. That'll hold everyone over for a few weeks and give us some news to throw to the fanbois on the forums."
"Ok, on to business. Stock not so good, down to 25 million- hmm. Oh who cares, it was free as part of my package anyways. Whatever, not like I'm not already so loaded I'd have to buy an island to feel a pinch."
"Meeting with the lead designer on my new awesome super-special chocolate-covered personal brainchild, Agency! COOL! Those geeks who are still playing Planetside are gonna LOVE me for shutting down their game and shuffling them over to what *I* think they should play! I bet everyone who used to play comes running back too! We should look at charging them extra for leaving our game though, those ingrates. Gotta make up some of that lost money. "
"Whoops, meeting coming up tomorrow with my new Japanese bosses- better get some hottie to take them to sushi first, warm them up a bit. They love blonds over there, let's see.... "
(intercom) Janice, can you send one of the new girls from Marketing in here? A blond one? What's she look like? A young Angelina Jolie? Really? Awesome, send her in. Thanks!"
"Hi, how are you doing! (holy crap, she IS hot!) Settling in ok? Of course you are, I've already heard good things about you."
"Listen, there's some VIP's coming, and I have a really bad schedule conflict. I was supposed to go to lunch with them, but I can't make it. Do you like sushi? Of course you do!"
"Can I ask you to take them to lunch then, just this once? Great! (ZOT- blinding flash of inspiration from the little head) And..umm you know what? I'm really interested in your impressions of them. Yes, really! No, we always take all the input we can get, especially from the people on the front lines like you. You're the ones who really make this company work, after all- we just sit up here and pretend we're driving, ha ha ha!"
"Listen, I'm busy for the rest of the afternoon, so I won't be able to meet with you to hear what you think . How about I take you to dinner after and you can tell me all about them so I'm prepared for my meeting tomorrow. We'll go someplace nice, it's about business so it's on my card."
"Great! Janice will set you up with her card for the lunch. Thanks so much and have a good time!"
"Man. I have the BEST. JOB. EVER. And I TOTALLY DESERVE IT!"
All the stuff you listed needed to be there before launch..if not at launch then immediately after. If not immediately after then..you fail. There is no magic update you can give a game to turn it into a super success. Not after 2.5 years of existence. Hell, not even after a bad launch. If your in that situation..all you can do is make the best implementaion of what the players want and hope they sell the game to their friends, and have a slow normal regular growth that any MMO should have...or shut it down and let the community say their goodbyes and have their funerals in their own fashion. Or you can just use it as a test bed and data mine. They already knew all of this anyway...theres nothing we can say that they didnt already say or know..question is why the hell did they do it? Why kill the last virtual world..one you created..one that had one of the most passionate fans..why kill the Virtual World when they could have done anything to fix the problems and left the Virtual World.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
more jedi and alpha classes people wanted them.
start banning whiners
ditch jtl we didn't need it and allowing people to use ships to move around was stupid
remove speeder bikes and swoops.
make the game much harder we need more group stuff.
more pvp.
LOL! I didn't say, "imagine you're Smed," but man you made me laugh.
The low cost method, which oddly enough was the only one with a chance of success, would have been to focus on fixing bugs and adding content to the game that existed. Instead they broke what worked and removed what made the game tolerable.
Players: "Fix the bugs and add content!"
SOE Producers: "They don't know what they want. Make Jedi easier to achieve and nerf everything else. Ignore content."
SWG Players: "These changes suck! Put things back the way they were and add some content!"
LEC Beancounter: "The subscription numbers are dropping. I thought those changes were going to attract new players."
SOE Producers: "We obviously didn't change things enough. The players obviously want a total revamp."
Someone who isn't retarded: "A total revamp will make more people quit. Our subscribers won't accept it."
SOE Producers: "Those idiots don't know what they want. Even if they all quit, they will be replaced by all those people who play WoW."
SWG Players: "This sucks, we quit!"
LEC Marketing: "The changes are what our customers wanted. Everything is going great!"
Players: "This still sucks, we quit too!"
SOE President: "Things won't get better until the game is fun, which it currently isn't. Stop asking for a rollback, because I will plug my ears and ignore you if you don't!"
SWG Players: "This still sucks, we quit too!"
SWG Developers: "We're going to add new grouping tools, because there are tons of players on all servers, they just can't find each other because we don't have WoW's grouping tools!"
SWG Player: "I love SOE and want to have Blixtev's baby!"
The other SWG Player: "No I can group with that other SWG player!"
To be honost this isn't one of your better topics Arc, we all have idea's, i even bet most of your idea's are similair to what SOE must have thought. But keep in mind idea's are sort of meaningless if you not able to code them. So if you truly want to make a topic saying you in charge of SOE i expect something like seeing how big the dev.team would be....what type of code will be used. You know the type of things that about 90% of idea's on this site hardly talk about about or simply have no clue in how to implement things.
Sure idea's are fun but seriously they are meaningless without the proper experiance into gamemaking. Now if you could show me a couple of games you have made í will be glad to take your "idea's" abit more serious, but like most idea's on website/forums like this by gamers often show most lack the expertise to actualy make or develop a game, let alone being able to run a business like SOE.
Trust me it's not that simple as some of you try to make it. If it was then asnwer me why there till today has not been ONE developer that actualy could make the things we keep reading people want out of this genre?
Hi Reklaw. I'm not sure you're understanding me yet on this one. Near the bottom of the post I try to provide some context. Some folks think that "learn form WoW's success" meant that SOE was "forced" to implement the NGE. So, I'm going back to the brainstorming stage. Does, "learn from Wow's success" force you to delete most of your professions, switch to a loot based economy, and change your UI? My short answer is no, it doesn't. So, if I was going to learn from WoW and not break my game or piss off my entire playerbase, what would I do? I've listed a number of ideas that could have fulfilled the "learn from Wow" mandate without all the pain caused by the NGE.
Regarding coding, can a game be produced with virtually no bugs? Well it's being done right now by WoW and CoH and CoV. So yes. Can a game add in some story driven content? Well other games are doing it, so yes. Can a game add instancing so people don't wait in line for spawns and keys. Again, other games are doing it, and it's working, so yes. Do other games add content without breaking pre-existing content? Again, yes. So, tbh, even if we talk about coding, which is beyond the brainstorming I was doing, my list is quite feasible. My list also happens to learn from WoW without cloning it entirely, and without taking anything away from pre-existing players. Features unique to SWG and superior to WoW in my view are left intact.
If you're saying that the NGE was necessary because other things are too hard to code, well other games demonstrate that this is not accurate. If things on a list like mine are too hard for SOE, well what can I say? They're not too hard for the competition.
Also do I really need to be a game coder to be able to make valuable suggestions? You're going to lose a lot of input, and silence most of your players if that's your mindset. I don't have to know how to code something to see that it can be done and is being done in numerous other games that compete with SWG. Of course, you can ignore my input because I'm not a coder if you like. SOE has been ignoring me for years lol.
Also, a good friend of mine wrote some of the programming that runs the stock exchange, so when I'm in over my head, I can bounce ideas off of him if I like -_^. I also have an I.T. department that works for me, so I could access their expertise, but frankly it would be a waste of time that I want them using more constructively. Do I really need to do that to share my thoughts though? (Shrugs)
Wow, does that ever capture the history of SWG and development decisions. Amazing summary. It also shows options that SOE had for development, and ignored. In so doing, they also ignored their players and many of their own staff, who have now moved on to more successful projects.
Okay i see and understand your point now....exuse me for before, might have been to early for me to read and reply
Okay i see and understand your point now....exuse me for before, might have been to early for me to read and reply
No worries
I have off posts, and off days (weeks?), and humans are prone to misunderstandings. Also, I think my post to you reads a bit argumentatively. Apologies for that, I got my back up a bit.
SWG can't be saved, no point in trying
There have been a couple games that have had what we wanted..they were killed on purpose against the players wishes and for the worse for the actual game. No one makes one now because they arent allowed to in this market. You cant even make an openended game multiplayer..has nothing to do with not being able to code it.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
Even if someone competent, or even brilliant replaced Smed, the infrastructure of talented employees simply does not exist to accomplish anything constructive.
SOE has bled all it's talent (such as Raph) basically because management has fostered an atmosphere of "screw our own ideas, clone the competition". Which cost them any employee smart enough to come up with any ideas of their own.
The damage Smed's mismanagement has done to SOE is so complete, and is so irreversible at this point the only way to save SOE is to literally blow it apart, fire nearly EVERYONE and start over.
if i was in charge at soe i would get paid to do what they do now! easy money.
-eat donuts
-take a poop
-play solitaire instead of reading bug reports
-smash the fax machine
damn it feels good to be a gangster
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USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST
I gotta say there does seem to be a really awful corporate culture over there. I mean if you can't tell your boss that a toilet in the living room is psychotic, you're in for big trouble.
People should have been able to say the NGE isn't technically feasible, and cannot possibly launch. Nothing should have ever gone live that broke all three systems: chat, movement and combat all in one swoop.
People should have been able to say the NGE isn't ethical. You can't sell people an expansion with exciting new creatures to tame, and new loot, and then delete the professions that can use the loot and tame the creatures right after you take people's money.
People should have been able to say that the NGE is going to be a marketting disaster. You can't delete the progress of a few hundred thousand people, and then expect new people to come flocking to your game. Word of mouth is going to simply kill it, and your existing player base is going to be so pissed off that you'll lose what you had to begin with.
AND management should have been able to listen to all of these things that should have been said. AND management should have acted on all of this information and chucked plans for the NGE in the trash where they belonged.
Now, as a result of all these things not happening SOE is short a lot of players, short a lot of good developers, and short a good StarWars MMO.
I gotta say there does seem to be a really awful corporate culture over there. I mean if you can't tell your boss that a toilet in the living room is psychotic, you're in for big trouble.
People should have been able to say the NGE isn't technically feasible, and cannot possibly launch. Nothing should have ever gone live that broke all three systems: chat, movement and combat all in one swoop.
People should have been able to say the NGE isn't ethical. You can't sell people an expansion with exciting new creatures to tame, and new loot, and then delete the professions that can use the loot and tame the creatures right after you take people's money.
People should have been able to say that the NGE is going to be a marketting disaster. You can't delete the progress of a few hundred thousand people, and then expect new people to come flocking to your game. Word of mouth is going to simply kill it, and your existing player base is going to be so pissed off that you'll lose what you had to begin with.
AND management should have been able to listen to all of these things that should have been said. AND management should have acted on all of this information and chucked plans for the NGE in the trash where they belonged.
Now, as a result of all these things not happening SOE is short a lot of players, short a lot of good developers, and short a good StarWars MMO.
Competent management never would have PROPOSED a thing like the NGE in the first place, much less actually spent money developing it, because they shouldn't have needed to be TOLD those things, they should have known them.
Yes, all that should have been said, and probably was, behind closed doors. Note that SOE had it's biggest talent exodus at the time of the NGE. A company that once employed people like Koster is left with nincompoops like Heliass and Toilet Boy, commanding a bunch of entry level graduate/intern type Devs.
As I've said, the NGE is the bastard child of two horribly mismanaged companies, LEC and SOE. Only the management cultures of Smed and Ward could have possibly conceived a monster like that, and actually THOUGHT it was a great idea that would succeed. Had management been competent at either company, the NGE never would have happened.
I know that Smed, et all, like to claim that they didn't think at the time that the NGE would turn out like this, but I call BS on that. Soon as the NGE was announced, the customer base was SCREAMING at them, predicting back in October `05 that what has come to pass, WOULD come to pass.