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SWG dev on NGE
arcdevil
Member Posts: 864
probably old for many people around here, but this was new to me, and a good read nonetheless
I think most of this can be applied to the recent events (failtrains) in the MMO industry.
Comments
" Not just small changes, but rebuild it.
And it was needed. When we were asked, we were bleeding subscribers.
If I remember correctly, somewhere around 10k a month. LOSING 10,000
subs a month.
Note – I think our subs were closer to 160-180 than 200k. It was a bad financial situation no matter how you look at it."
Woah.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
He doesn't mention the C/U/R/B before that, a game with 200k subs is a roaring success. People got greedy and thought they could get more people and didn't care about shitting on the current playerbase because the potential playerbase was huge.
Before anyone mentions LA please post a link to someone who worked there that mentions them as being responsible. You can't because they weren't as everyone confirms it was an idea dreamed up by a group of people. Smed believed he could squeeze more cash out of the SW IP and some Developers believed they could provide the means to achieve it.
It all ended in the charge of the light brigade!
R.I.P SWG pre-cu.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
If you keep picking a scab it never heals.
Though this one probably never will anyway.
If it's true that SWG was losing 10,000 subs a month, that would make anyone panic.
$150,000 less each month? A million less in 6-7 months?
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
I've never played SWG, but always wondered if Sony were to open servers with the game in its state before the changes, would people return? Same question goes for DAoC players.
Would you return to these games if they were how you remember or is it too little too late?
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Gotta agree with that.
They would have had a decent-sized loyal fan-base still playing if they hadn't gone down the CU/NGE path.
My guess would be somewhere in the 100-150k ballpark.
Too bad that we'll never know what it's true potential was.
It's hard to imagine a time when another MMO will eclipse the debacle that was made with the NGE implementation.
They wouldn't have lost 10k subs a month if they actually improved the original game more instead of working on the NGE behind close doors.
Fix the bugs, balance issues, add more shit to do and more tools and people would have stayed.
The CU and NGE were moronic decisions. These guys know it thats why they constantly speak of it and try to defend themselves.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
Although...
You'll have to admit you're making a couple very big assumptions:
Big assumption #1: They were indeed losing 10k subs per month. ( If there is proof of that... I haven't seen it yet.)
Big assumption #2: They would have continued to lose 10k per month until every single player was gone.
(I can't think of a single MMO where that has ever been the case. If someone knows of one... again, I'd be interested in reading about it. Even MMOs that were shutdown had subscribers up to the very last day).
With that in mind... it's a bit of a stretch to think that what they have now is better than what they would have had if they had done nothing.
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
Although...
You'll have to admit you're making a couple very big assumptions:
Big assumption #1: They were indeed losing 10k subs per month. ( If there is proof of that... I haven't seen it yet.)
Big assumption #2: They would have continued to lose 10k per month until every single player was gone.
(I can't think of a single MMO where that has ever been the case. If someone knows of one... again, I'd be interested in reading about it. Even MMOs that were shutdown had subscribers up to the very last day).
With that in mind... it's a bit of a stretch to think that what they have now is better than what they would have had if they had done nothing.
Of course I'm making assumptions -- all anyone can do is make assumptions. It's not about hindsight, it's about foresight. Looking at it from the lens of executives in 2005, they would have had to make the same assumptions and say so "oh <bleep>, this game could be dead in 20 months if we don't do something." And as I alluded to in my last sentence, unfortunately it seems they didn't really make a good choice on what action to take...
These devs are still trying to justify their actions. All they had to do was fix the game they had! Once they shipped JTL, the core gameplay was pretty well complete, but there were a lot of bugs and performance issues that simply needed to be addressed. The idiotic implementation of Jedi to the game was only a distraction from where the real problems were, but there were glimmers of hope. In the weeks leading up to the impact of the NGE warhead, the Community Lead for the Creature Handlers was leading a spirited discussion of what we thought needed to be added to our class. I always assumed that the discussion was at the behest of Sony management. Things looked promising. Trials of Obi-Wan had been announced with elements that seemed to show that Sony was finally listening to its playerbase. At the same time, their stealth development team was wasting time and resources trying to make the game more "Star Warsy". How could anyone imagine that this would end well?
The simple truth is that they were trying to make the game easier to maintain. They simply didn't want to devote the time and effort necessary to support as rich and complex a game experience as pre-NGE SWG was.
A little over a week ago, I finally bit the bullet and took advantage of the $10 Steam promotion. The game is a damned mess now. This fellow and his cohorts need to face facts. There is nothing here to be proud of and the best thing Sony could do for SWG is take it out back and put it out of its misery.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO MATH!
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
Although...
You'll have to admit you're making a couple very big assumptions:
Big assumption #1: They were indeed losing 10k subs per month. ( If there is proof of that... I haven't seen it yet.)
Big assumption #2: They would have continued to lose 10k per month until every single player was gone.
(I can't think of a single MMO where that has ever been the case. If someone knows of one... again, I'd be interested in reading about it. Even MMOs that were shutdown had subscribers up to the very last day).
With that in mind... it's a bit of a stretch to think that what they have now is better than what they would have had if they had done nothing.
Of course I'm making assumptions -- all anyone can do is make assumptions. It's not about hindsight, it's about foresight. Looking at it from the lens of executives in 2005, they would have had to make the same assumptions and say so "oh <bleep>, this game could be dead in 20 months if we don't do something." And as I alluded to in my last sentence, unfortunately it seems they didn't really make a good choice on what action to take...
Yeah, I agree that part.
Although it still baffles me that they were willing to throw away 200k +/- subs on a gamble. It's not like SWG was the first MMO in existence. They knew at that time that 200k was very respectable. Sure, WOW was tearing it up and going into the millions of subs... but all MMOs before WOW had not done that. It seems a bit presumptuous on their part to think that a rushed re-vamp would be a mega-hit.
For me anyway the NGE lesson is about greed. Those in charge of SWG thought they could throw away the subs they had for a chance to gain many more subs. They were wrong.
Instead, they lost what they had, and now are know as THE prime example of what NOT to do in a MMO. So, in the end, perhaps SWG served an important role in the evolution of MMOs.
I don't know why everyone talks about the NGE but seem to forget the CURB earlier in the year? That was what caused me and 90% of my 100 plus guild membership to leave originally. I actually came back for the NGE and joined up with about 15 other people remaining from the 160 that had originally been in our in our guild and another we were friendly with.
We did have fun with the Mustafar expansion for a couple of months. However, the problem with the NGE was that it had destroyed the last remnants of what made SWG a game that had a myriad of things to do even when you weren't fighting. Once we had finished the Mustafar missions, there wasn't much else to do. Crafting had ceased to serve much purpose, and therefore our cities and shops too. So, just about all of us had left by the end of winter 2006.
I've re-subbed a couple of times since to check up on our old city. I think lots of people have done the same. All I found was sadness though, looking at the ghost towns in what had been a thriving server. I can't see myself ever going back again now.
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
Although...
You'll have to admit you're making a couple very big assumptions:
Big assumption #1: They were indeed losing 10k subs per month. ( If there is proof of that... I haven't seen it yet.)
Big assumption #2: They would have continued to lose 10k per month until every single player was gone.
(I can't think of a single MMO where that has ever been the case. If someone knows of one... again, I'd be interested in reading about it. Even MMOs that were shutdown had subscribers up to the very last day).
With that in mind... it's a bit of a stretch to think that what they have now is better than what they would have had if they had done nothing.
Of course I'm making assumptions -- all anyone can do is make assumptions. It's not about hindsight, it's about foresight. Looking at it from the lens of executives in 2005, they would have had to make the same assumptions and say so "oh <bleep>, this game could be dead in 20 months if we don't do something." And as I alluded to in my last sentence, unfortunately it seems they didn't really make a good choice on what action to take...
Yeah, I agree that part.
Although it still baffles me that they were willing to throw away 200k +/- subs on a gamble. It's not like SWG was the first MMO in existence. They knew at that time that 200k was very respectable. Sure, WOW was tearing it up and going into the millions of subs... but all MMOs before WOW had not done that. It seems a bit presumptuous on their part to think that a rushed re-vamp would be a mega-hit.
For me anyway the NGE lesson is about greed. Those in charge of SWG thought they could throw away the subs they had for a chance to gain many more subs. They were wrong.
Instead, they lost what they had, and now are know as THE prime example of what NOT to do in a MMO. So, in the end, perhaps SWG served an important role in the evolution of MMOs.
You will find no disagreement from me, other than that perhaps there was more than one lesson from the debacle but alot of that has been hashed over. ( ' :
I am sure they were looking at a dead game in a year. Yeah I am not a fan of the NGE and the numbers after NGE may look like a failure, but if his numbers are correct they were screwed either way and it seems that SOE claiming 90-100k subs on SWG is a far better direction then they could have ended up with in a CU environment. Did I play after NGE nope, but I know people who did.
well at the end of the day it makes sense why they thought they should have doen it.
1. there losing subs
2. its star wars, how could people not like it?
3. What are we doing to make this feel more like star wars.
Now i will be teh first to say this any day of the week. SWG was awesome, but it never trully felt liek a star wars game! what made that game awesome was teh fact that it was by far the best socially built mmo to ever come out! Even today, its socialization features to get people together outshine any other game to date. SWG would never have been some epic game. It just didnt have enough star wars features ( emotion, War, depth, meaningful leveling, endgame)
It was a great game, but it wasnt a great star wars game!
But.... SOE should know better then to change so many mechanics of a game after it has been live! thats was stupid beyond belief. .
Ah, I see that you are linking to the 'sanitized' blog article where Rubenfield toned down his abusive disdain for SWG vets. Take what he says regarding player numbers and player loses with a block of salt. He was trying to justify the creation of and push for the NGE and spread around the blame as much as possible since it failed on an epic scale.
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
Yeah, and if my aunt had nuts she'd be my uncle. Nothing is constant, certainly not any rate of decline, at least not with any sort of organic measurement like subscription numbers. Everything points to the situation being officially analyzed by morons. If SOE were in a balloon, at the time, this would have been the equivalent conversation:
Smed: "Guys, this balloon we're in is slowly sinking. It's never gotten us as high as we thought it would, though. In 2 years we'll be on the ground. Suggestions?"
Dan: "Well, the balloon is obviously flawed. We should start over. Pop the balloon right now and blow a new one before we hit the ground."
Smed: "This makes sense."
In the 4.5 years since they've implemented the NGE, they've taken the game in every direction possible, often at the same time, in a mad grasp at anything. The NGE simplified the game to the point of stupidity, so they added in (initially) massively complex mini-games such as beast master. Also added were Ewok fairy wings, the Chronicles and Story-teller systems, tokens, TCG... The Official Star Wars Kitchen Sink is going to be the next vet reward. Choose from Imperial Blue or Rebel Red!
I suppose this all points back to your last sentence, though - something had to be done, but what? It all starts with ego, and that's something many, many people at the top have a problem with, and SOE was obviously no exception. They claim to have listened, and that's probably partially true, but what they listened to was a random noise that fit their worldview, instead of what would have made the most sense. If they really wanted to compete with WoW, they would have had to release a world-class game like WoW, and the bug-ridden mess that they DID release was barely playable. It wasn't fleshed out past the intro, and even if they were willing to evaporate their existing player base - which, as we all know, they were more than willing to do - they had to provide the 11 million brand spanking new players with something to do past the intro, and they failed to do that. It was a rerelease of a game, supposed to be on-par with a new launch, and they had put almost no money and only a couple of devs into it. How they could have possibly expected ANY success at all in those conditions is beyond anyone who knows anything about coding any type of application, not just a game.
There's a sucker born every minute. - P.T. Barnum
Anyone with at least bits of brainpower must know that SWG was losing subs when WoW came out and would continue to lose subs.
SW:G NGE or not was doomed to the rapid decrease of subs. SW:G pre-CU would still struggle now with whatever amount of subs SW:G now has. SW:G, VG, EQ2 are basically all the same games, all struggle with the same amount of subscribers (5000-20.000). WoW killed this subgenre within MMORPG.
REALITY CHECK
Well it only has 7k subs now according to the figures I last heard from an insider, how bad could it have got without the NGE? In fact how bad could it have got without the NGE or CURB? Certainly no worse than the 7k and item shops crap it has today? Seems they wasted alot of time and resources to convince the playerbase to quit and play something else!
Well done SOE!
Well.....at 10K a month, if there were 200,000 at November of 2005.....then there would have been no subscribers left by August 2007 at that rate, so yes, it could have been worse than the present. Clearly they felt they had to act. Now, of course, there's a difference between taking action and making the right choice about what action to take....
ah, nevermind.
I know the NGE is a pretty hot topic on the STG forums, but isn't it a bad idea to keep pouring salt in an old wound? I suppose by now *everyone* has heard about the dreaded "NGE" and have avoided this game, but for the few people who might be interested in the game, talking about it like this just seems like a bad idea. I mean.. When you're trying to save a sinking ship, you don't do it by throwing more water on it.
~Miles "Tails" Prower out! Catch me if you can!
Come Join us at www.globalequestria.com - Meet other fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic!
He writes that you cannot change a running MMO but the real problem here was that they never talked it through with the players and asked for their opinions and the fact that the rebuilt the entire game in 3 months, it is not possible to redo a game that fast.
All large changes in a MMO needs the support of the players, you just can't tell them "Oh, yeah... We changed everything in your game and will patch it in the next few days".
A long discussion at the forums would have worked a lot better because even if they after that released something similar the players would at least had the time to state their opinion and to get out the dumbest stuff.
Happen to know where we could find the "original"?