That's the unforgivable flaw that SWG had. You only needed to hit one or two buttons and then spam 1 over and over to win. This was a tragedy considering the large skill list you could have and how cool some of the moves that you never got to use were.
I still remember when one guy killed me just by spamming pistol whip.
The game really wasn't that great technicly or design wise no matter what state it was in.
This, take of your rose glasses and see the truth for once, the game wasnt the end all be all of videogames, the only reason it was even popular was because it was Star Wars, if it had released as "generic sci fi world galaxies" it would have crashed and burned on release.
Ofcourse the game had bugs and balance issues, I don't think anyone are claiming otherwise, but are there any mmo's without bugs and balance issues?
SWG Pre-CU had ALOT of bugs, but the game was more than playable, yes they should not have released it as early as they did.
But SWG had great potential, the community was the best I've ever seen, I saw someone saying that the crafting system sucked... wha? I guess the crafting system sucked if you're more into WoW's click once and you're done type of thing, but there were so much to do in SWG that gave me more content than I had time to do, it werent a "log on and do your dailies and raid on sunday" deal
Pretty much all of this. All the Pre-CU haters always claim that we think the game was "perfect". I have not once in the 6 years that the game changed to the NGE seen somebody say that Pre-NGE was flawless. Everybody knows the game had bugs. Some game-breaking for some people. Everybody knows it had balance issues with the 250 point skill system. But it was all FIXABLE. The main issue with Pre-NGE was that the developers and producers wouldn't take the time to FIX THE DAMN BUGS! The other thing was content. The absolute lack of it. I tell people time and time again. The only thing good that came out of the NGE was that they added content. That was it. If the developers would have added the content that is in game now to the Pre-NGE engine, they wouldn't have been bleeding subs as they so claim. And on that topic of bleeding subs, the developers never published any numbers to back up their claims of losing 10k subscribers a month. So how are we to know that was the case? Show me the numbers.
There are profession imbalances with the NGE. There are bugs in the NGE. The majority of them dating back to Pre-CU when the game launched. The buffing is waaaaaay more out of control and rediculous than in Pre-NGE. Which was exactly one of the things that the developers said was the reason why they went to the NGE, along with "easier" profession balancing/fixes. Funny how that turned out in the end. They are no where close to balancing and fixing the game now than they were Pre-NGE. And they had six, SIX years to do it. Sounds like time wasted to me.
The whole "rose-colored" glasses thing really needs to stop because nobody who is a Pre-NGE vet ever said that it was perfect. It was just a lot more fun to play than what is there now. Not to mention the fact that people loved it just for the simple fact that you didn't play "cookie cutter" professions. One Bounty Hunter was totally different from another Bounty Hunter who showed up. It isn't like that in the NGE. You either play a BM/BH, a Carbines spec or a Rifle spec and use either the Flawless set or the Dire Fate jewelry. And it is the same with every other profession. You have at most 2 to 3 different ways to spec your profession. There is no diversity in the NGE.
EDIT: One last thing. the only thing really great about SWG right now is space. And that is because JTL hasn't been NGE'ed yet. Hopefully it stays that way to because that would effectively kill off a good bit of the SWG population who loves space.
In all seriousness, we've had NGE for longer than we've not had NGE. I hate it the same as you folks. but, to still try "Pre-CU FTW" this far down the road, we as a community, look like a bunch of Rain Man wanna be's, bitching that we're "Gonna miss Wapner"
Seriously, the last stage of grief is acceptance, and it looks like most of us are still in the Anger or Bargaining stages.
Yeah, it blows. Yeah, they shot themselves in the foot. Yeah, it was one of the worst mistakes in video game history, right up with Atari refusing to license the Famicom and EA's Copy Protection debacle with Spore and Bioshock.
As of now, we have 3 options. That -other- project, Sucking it up and playing SWG as it exists now, or simply moving on and playing something else
The combat might have sucked, but the social aspects of gameplay and the crafting has been unmatched and entirely forgotten since. That's the real loss here, the loss of a beautiful and engaging sandbox *world* to be replaced by mindless themepark game clones.
So yeah, 6 years later we can still wish a good game would come out instead of all this crap that's out now. Nothing wrong with that.
Yeah, except no.
You didn't even ignore what I ahd to say about the SWG community, you completely excised it from my quote. I hate to break it to you, the SWG community was one of the most toxic I ever played in. the "Vets" killed off any hope of new players coming in (something -any- MMO really needs to pay mind to) with tactics like training Jedi players or griefing them via shout and tell.
That's not what I call "unmatched" unless you mean "unmatched by asshattery" at which point I would say goonswarm on EVE or the Chuck Norrie spam in Barrens Chat comes close.
I hate it too, but SWG pre-CU is not going to ever be seen on a legitimate server. It's just not going to happen. All the wailing and gnashing of teeth won't change that.. best thing anybody who misses it can do is find something else they enjoy.
I am sorry you have had issues with the SWG population back in pre-cu.
I cannot say the same, however. And I have read a lot of praise from former players and even journalists and developers about the SWG community throughout the years.
I've never experienced any griefing at all via shouts or tells. In fact, it is the only game i remember to date where volunteers proudly wore the "Helper" tag and EVERY time (not once, or twice, but EVERY time) I approached one of those in the early days they dropped what they were doing to answer my questions or help me out.
My first ever guild in an MMO was in SWG (my first MMO). I joined after a higher level saw me struggle against some mobs and came to help in. He gave me a house too (back in 2003, when they were still an expensive commodity not just worthless change)
Ive made friends in that game that i have not made in any other game. One particularly helped me grind all TKM in detriment of what he had to do. We camped often in the wilderness and we would chat for hours.
He left the game and left me all his possessions.
And I have countless of more stories of how the SWG community was helpful to me or to others. The game was designed that way. It was a mature and complex game where people needed each other to survive. They needed other people's services all the time. Sure you get rotten apples everywhere, but more so in some games than others.
I have to agree the best community ever pre-cu.
I landed a little lost sheep with aspirations to join the rebelion so headed to Anchorhead and hit up a HELPER with my myriad of questions and what a friendly guy he was, this player then went onto give me a contract to get him some hide (it was crap stats) I suspect he wanted to help me get started but not just hand me everything on a plate without putting in some work for it.
Whilst on the hunt for this hide I came across a camp and went and sat with the guys there and ended up chatting for hours until server reset at 12pm GMT the next day stopped the fun.
From that moment I knew I was hooked to SWG and slowly but sureley the last few years and the true toxic communites have been driving me away from them a bunch of self entitled children who want everything on a plate with no work and no interdepenance.
That's the unforgivable flaw that SWG had. You only needed to hit one or two buttons and then spam 1 over and over to win. This was a tragedy considering the large skill list you could have and how cool some of the moves that you never got to use were.
I still remember when one guy killed me just by spamming pistol whip.
The game really wasn't that great technicly or design wise no matter what state it was in.
This, take of your rose glasses and see the truth for once, the game wasnt the end all be all of videogames, the only reason it was even popular was because it was Star Wars, if it had released as "generic sci fi world galaxies" it would have crashed and burned on release.
Ofcourse the game had bugs and balance issues, I don't think anyone are claiming otherwise, but are there any mmo's without bugs and balance issues?
SWG Pre-CU had ALOT of bugs, but the game was more than playable, yes they should not have released it as early as they did.
But SWG had great potential, the community was the best I've ever seen, I saw someone saying that the crafting system sucked... wha? I guess the crafting system sucked if you're more into WoW's click once and you're done type of thing, but there were so much to do in SWG that gave me more content than I had time to do, it werent a "log on and do your dailies and raid on sunday" deal
Pretty much all of this. All the Pre-CU haters always claim that we think the game was "perfect". I have not once in the 6 years that the game changed to the NGE seen somebody say that Pre-NGE was flawless. Everybody knows the game had bugs. Some game-breaking for some people. Everybody knows it had balance issues with the 250 point skill system. But it was all FIXABLE. The main issue with Pre-NGE was that the developers and producers wouldn't take the time to FIX THE DAMN BUGS! The other thing was content. The absolute lack of it. I tell people time and time again. The only thing good that came out of the NGE was that they added content. That was it. If the developers would have added the content that is in game now to the Pre-NGE engine, they wouldn't have been bleeding subs as they so claim. And on that topic of bleeding subs, the developers never published any numbers to back up their claims of losing 10k subscribers a month. So how are we to know that was the case? Show me the numbers.
There are profession imbalances with the NGE. There are bugs in the NGE. The majority of them dating back to Pre-CU when the game launched. The buffing is waaaaaay more out of control and rediculous than in Pre-NGE. Which was exactly one of the things that the developers said was the reason why they went to the NGE, along with "easier" profession balancing/fixes. Funny how that turned out in the end. They are no where close to balancing and fixing the game now than they were Pre-NGE. And they had six, SIX years to do it. Sounds like time wasted to me.
The whole "rose-colored" glasses thing really needs to stop because nobody who is a Pre-NGE vet ever said that it was perfect. It was just a lot more fun to play than what is there now. Not to mention the fact that people loved it just for the simple fact that you didn't play "cookie cutter" professions. One Bounty Hunter was totally different from another Bounty Hunter who showed up. It isn't like that in the NGE. You either play a BM/BH, a Carbines spec or a Rifle spec and use either the Flawless set or the Dire Fate jewelry. And it is the same with every other profession. You have at most 2 to 3 different ways to spec your profession. There is no diversity in the NGE.
EDIT: One last thing. the only thing really great about SWG right now is space. And that is because JTL hasn't been NGE'ed yet. Hopefully it stays that way to because that would effectively kill off a good bit of the SWG population who loves space.
I love how one of the big problems with pre-CU was the overpowered buffs which lead to people soloing multiple red cons and certain skills being overpowered because buffs mean that the skills require little to no HAM. So... Instead of fixing the problem- Over powered buffs, they change the entire game so that it works better with the overpowered buffs, but overpowered buffs are still a problem.... WHAT!
I love how one of the big problems with pre-CU was the overpowered buffs which lead to people soloing multiple red cons and certain skills being overpowered because buffs mean that the skills require little to no HAM. So... Instead of fixing the problem- Over powered buffs, they change the entire game so that it works better with the overpowered buffs, but overpowered buffs are still a problem.... WHAT!
Any long time player could have told them how to fix 90%+ of the combat problems, if you were only paying attention:
Cap med buffs at 1k each: give people more surviablilty but no invincible rhino mode
Cap Comp armor protections at 50% or 60%: Always leave a good bit of vulnerabilty to reduce the effectiveness of turtleing and mitigating the effectiveness of being the stacker of the week
Open the mind bar up to be the same as other HAM bars and allow stims to heal it
Cap CM poison and shorten the range.
Dizzy/Stun on a timer until you could be Dizzy/Stun again.
There: combat system adjusted and any "overpowered" build is still plenty vulnerable. It would have cut the need to "balance" everything way, way down.
And putting Jedi in their own Jedi vs Sith faction war to parallel the GCW would have gone a long way too.
Instead of that, Smed got WoW fever and NGE'd the whole thing into oblivion. Yeah, might as well call it SWGNGE:Buff Wars now, great solution.
adding caps would contradict the fundamental nature of how precu worked. Buffs/weapons/armor stats were controlled by a multifactorial system that came to fruition when one of these items were used (not when created).
To slap a cap on them is to disregard a lot of what makes precu a sandbox. What they needed to do was have better control over spawned resource stats and looted components so that overpowered items could not be created more then once in a blue moon.
what bothers me is that they had control over every detail, they just didn't do the proper checks, like making a buff set, to see what happens.
adding caps would contradict the fundamental nature of how precu worked. Buffs/weapons/armor stats were controlled by a multifactorial system that came to fruition when one of these items were used (not when created).
To slap a cap on them is to disregard a lot of what makes precu a sandbox. What they needed to do was have better control over spawned resource stats and looted components so that overpowered items could not be created more then once in a blue moon.
what bothers me is that they had control over every detail, they just didn't do the proper checks, like making a buff set, to see what happens.
Agreed, caps would have been counter-productive and changed the whole beauty of the games customisation, all it needed was a change to multipliers or such, maintaining the individuality of the doctors while reducing potential OP'd buffs.
The devs seemed to give up on the game a long time before NGE or CU, or more accurately they were resting on their laurels, they seemed to be happy where they were, wallowing away in the field all a sudden the wow juggernaught appeared and they over-reacted and had a fit, which ultimately caused a stroke and paralysis, of the brain. Idiots, I swear the whole thing looking back was like a bunch of kids runnig the show who had no idea what they were doing.
----- The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
adding caps would contradict the fundamental nature of how precu worked. Buffs/weapons/armor stats were controlled by a multifactorial system that came to fruition when one of these items were used (not when created).
To slap a cap on them is to disregard a lot of what makes precu a sandbox. What they needed to do was have better control over spawned resource stats and looted components so that overpowered items could not be created more then once in a blue moon.
what bothers me is that they had control over every detail, they just didn't do the proper checks, like making a buff set, to see what happens.
There were always and already caps, and capping the values on the resources is no different in function than capping or dialing down the maximum value of a "capped" item, only doing it further upstream.
Even in the original game, the best possible resources would only make a 43% protection stun layer, for instance. So there were plenty of restrictions already there, they were just set too high and the devs never bothered to see what the effects were when resources could cap items.
They simply needed to dial down the values on stuff like armor protection and buff packs and the like. Crafters could still strive for making the best possible items, only the best should have been 60% comp instead of 90% comp (even 100% comp early in the game, and I made a pair of 100% comp boots with the help of some 42% NS shards). And 1000 pts on a buff instead of 3k and 100 per tick on mind poison, instead of 400.
In so doing, the advantages that the FOTM stackers enjoyed would have been less important, because instead of the maybe 2% edge they'd have on top of 90% protection and mitigation, would have been 2% on top of 60%. Much less noticaable.
And then the PvP people would not have always been crying for nerfs, and more nerfs and lessened the "need" for the CU and later the NGE.
your argument is flawed burntvet. Already caps? There are different kinds of caps. Were there already caps similar to the ones you're proposing? No. 43% stun layer cap? Was that in the original plan, or even in the game at launch? I doubt it. And you just gave this one example and then say, "So there were plenty of restrictions already there". WTF? First of all that was just one example. Secondly of course there were restrictions. It's not like the game were made of pure imagination (can't wait for those games to come out!).
A sandbox is a game that does it's best to hide and obfuscate the restrictions. So of course precu had restrictions. But they were never meant to be so tangible and obvious that you practically trip over them, like the CU-like examples you proposed.
60% comp sounds great burntvet, but as a soft cap, not a hard cap. It's like hardcoding something that, with a bit of effort, could be dynamically generated. No need to be lazy. All the controls are there, they just needed to put some effort in, so that rare resources and legendary components and amazing successes coupled with mods from food/clothing/innate could only have the possibility to get to maybe ~65%, with the majority of hard core players running around with 57-59%.
your argument is flawed burntvet. Already caps? There are different kinds of caps. Were there already caps similar to the ones you're proposing? No. 43% stun layer cap? Was that in the original plan, or even in the game at launch? I doubt it. And you just gave this one example and then say, "So there were plenty of restrictions already there". WTF? First of all that was just one example. Secondly of course there were restrictions. It's not like the game were made of pure imagination (can't wait for those games to come out!).
A sandbox is a game that does it's best to hide and obfuscate the restrictions. So of course precu had restrictions. But they were never meant to be so tangible and obvious that you practically trip over them, like the CU-like examples you proposed.
60% comp sounds great burntvet, but as a soft cap, not a hard cap. It's like hardcoding something that, with a bit of effort, could be dynamically generated. No need to be lazy. All the controls are there, they just needed to put some effort in, so that rare resources and legendary components and amazing successes coupled with mods from food/clothing/innate could only have the possibility to get to maybe ~65%, with the majority of hard core players running around with 57-59%.
Want more? Ubese topped out at 76% even with near perfect layers, Same with Tantel and energy layers, same with other armor types. Weapon speed was gated, both by resources and final assembly. Slicing was even gated, remember that a weapon could either get better speed or damage? Well, if the damage went over a certain point, you'd always get a speed slice, and vice versa. This was tested many times. Gimme a break, it was 6+ years ago, I can't remember everything off the top of my head.
Much of what you are talking about is semantics anyway, a "cap" like they eventually put on comp or "gating the resouces" which they did also. It all more or less functioned to stop things from being "too good". In the end, it doesn't matter.
Want all those things I suggeted put in as soft caps? Fine. Longtime crafters that were any good figured out all the caps and the gates soon enough. You know what recipes were intentionally gimped by requiring the use of a crappy resource. Would it have been nice to leave room for an attribute enhancer? Sure. Did SOE bother? No.
Soft cap, hard cap, I don't see any real difference. Diminshing returns vs a brick wall. In the end, the result is the same. Philosophically, maybe, in practical terms, exactly the same. SOE needed to pay attention to the inevitable outcome of max crafted stuff and needed to think about what limits should have been there. And SOE didn't do it. Or enough where it counted anyway.
But then, they all but fired Raph Koster long before any of this stuff became a problem and he would have been the one to see a decent solution. He walked, the game tanked, and the rest is history.
There's a huge difference between setting a resource to have a diminishing probability of spawning with more then 650 on a specific stat, and capping a weapon's max dmg at 300.
The former is complex, takes time to maintain, but gives the game depth. The latter nullifies all these sandbox systems and is just plain lazy. It's like buying all fresh ingredients to make dinner and then throwing them all away as you stick a tv dinner in the microwave.
There are plenty of cap crazy games out there burntvet. Precu wasn't meant to be one, no matter how many flawed examples you give.
side note - you're wrong about the slicing. Plenty of legendary or legendary-like weapons were sliced for dmg when dmg was the stat that was out of proportion. And if this were testable then the limits by which speed and dmg are too good would be easily approximated and would be public knowledge. And what happens when both speed and dmg are ridiculously good as often happened? I think you're remembering wrong.
There are plenty of cap crazy games out there burntvet. Precu wasn't meant to be one, no matter how many flawed examples you give.
side note - you're wrong about the slicing. Plenty of legendary or legendary-like weapons were sliced for dmg when dmg was the stat that was out of proportion. And if this were testable then the limits by which speed and dmg are too good would be easily approximated and would be public knowledge. And what happens when both speed and dmg are ridiculously good as often happened? I think you're remembering wrong.
Whatever man, I think you seem to be howling at the moon over this cap stuff. The caps were there, even in the original game, whether you choose to believe it or not, and there were both hard caps and resource gates In the end, it doesn't really matter.
As for the speed and damage stuff, I can't speak about legendary weapons, because there were never enough to do reliable tests on. What I do know, is that we tested 100 identical heavy damage LLCs and 100 "fast" FWG5s. The resutls were that in all 100% LLCs, we were not able to get a damage slice over 14%, even tho on other weapons you frequently got into the high 20s/30s on damage slices. We got on the order of 3/4 speed slices on these and low score damage on the rest. We theorized that if the damage slices went over a certain threshold, it kicked the default over to a speed slice.
We repeated the experiment and got almost the same numbers with the FWG5s, only no high "speed" slices, but damage all the way up to 35%, no better than 12-13% on speed, and many fewer of them.
So, we were fairly sure we were hitting a gate, on both damage and speed, respectively, on standard weapon types, because of the results we were seeing. What specific values some legendary weapons had, I don't know, or care at this point. That was our testing method and those were the results we got.
It was 6 yers ago, no point in arguing over it now.
the argument isn't whether hard caps were in precu. They were there. I could argue that precu wasn't how it was intended even at launch. The argument is whether hard weapon/armor/buff stat caps should be added. The answer is obviously no because they negate subsystems and go against the concept of a sandbox, especially precu.
You're obviously wrong about the slicing. Or maybe the devs changed stuff for a day or a week and you just happened to do your testing then. I've never heard of this, I was a precu smuggler for probably a year, there's nothing about this in the guides. And it's easily testable, as you've exemplified, so it wouldn't be some hidden mechanic that very few knew about. And if your tests are real, as I already mentioned, you would have written down the limits, and every limit for each stat of each weapon would be known and documented by other players. Instead players crafted and looted awesome non-legendary weapons fairly frequently and sliced them for the stat that was out of proportion for a high percentage. This is documented with ss from imagedump and personal collections. Not sure if any are still available, but if you were any kind of precu player then you'd have heard about, known, and done these slices yourself.
if it doesn't really matter then why are you arguing? Are you so unaware of the connection between what you say and what you do?
the argument isn't whether hard caps were in precu. They were there. I could argue that precu wasn't how it was intended even at launch. The argument is whether hard weapon/armor/buff stat caps should be added. The answer is obviously no because they negate subsystems and go against the concept of a sandbox, especially precu.
You're obviously wrong about the slicing. Or maybe the devs changed stuff for a day or a week and you just happened to do your testing then. I've never heard of this, I was a precu smuggler for probably a year, there's nothing about this in the guides. And it's easily testable, as you've exemplified, so it wouldn't be some hidden mechanic that very few knew about. And if your tests are real, as I already mentioned, you would have written down the limits, and every limit for each stat of each weapon would be known and documented by other players. Instead players crafted and looted awesome non-legendary weapons fairly frequently and sliced them for the stat that was out of proportion for a high percentage. This is documented with ss from imagedump and personal collections. Not sure if any are still available, but if you were any kind of precu player then you'd have heard about, known, and done these slices yourself.
if it doesn't really matter then why are you arguing? Are you so unaware of the connection between what you say and what you do?
Whatever man, I am as big a fan of the old game as anyone, and pardon me that I don't have 6 year old game testing data at my finger tips.
The other thing to consider is that looted weapon values not might have been constrained the same way in regards to slicing, where as with manufactured, they were, as there was no real way to "track" the values of loot weapons as opposed to manufactured ones. Whatever.
And my WS partner posted the results in the old WS forum long ago. Fired up a big discussion as I recall.
Done talking with someone who seems to argue just to argue.
"Caps" or limits had their place, had they been done well and organically to begin with, SOE would not have needed to put in hard caps they did later, nerf and re-nerf combat skills, fool around with combat levels leading to the CU and finally decide the whole thing was beyond their ability to fix and just NGE the whole thing (WoW envy notwithstanding).
90% comp, 400 tick mind poison and those other things I mentioned created such narrow margins in the combat areas as defenses were so tight, that whenever someone had a small advantage, it was magnified because of the small "ability" to have any advantage. So people compained, there were more nerfs, and it all went downhill from there.
Originally posted by Burntvet Whatever man, I am as big a fan of the old game as anyone, and pardon me that I don't have 6 year old game testing data at my finger tips.
precu scrapbook. It's online and downloadable. Very surprised you don't know about it.
Originally posted by Burntvet The other thing to consider is that looted weapon values not might have been constrained the same way in regards to slicing, where as with manufactured, they were, as there was no real way to "track" the values of loot weapons as opposed to manufactured ones. Whatever.
And my WS partner posted the results in the old WS forum long ago. Fired up a big discussion as I recall.
no man. Stop trying. This is easily testable. Lootable/craftable only or not. Players would have stumbled upon this without intending to. And slicing was tested all the time because it was so easy to test. And again, you never sliced a awesome weapon for the disproportionate stat with a big percentage? Did you even read the trade forums with all the before and after screenies?
Originally posted by Burntvet Done talking with someone who seems to argue just to argue.
pot.. kettle.. bye
Originally posted by Burntvet "Caps" or limits had their place, had they been done well and organically to begin with, SOE would not have needed to put in hard caps they did later,..
my point exactly. Why would you say this and still argue for hard caps? It's like you have no idea what your argument is.
I'd resub, but honestly I don't think it'd last for me. Its been too long. Once the nostalgia factor faded and I realized I couldn't recapture the magic, I'd just be mad knowing I'd given SoE money again for SWG.
I'd resub, but honestly I don't think it'd last for me. Its been too long. Once the nostalgia factor faded and I realized I couldn't recapture the magic, I'd just be mad knowing I'd given SoE money again for SWG.
BINGO! The magic was in the communities that were developed. $OE had social game play gold and frittered it away.
That's the unforgivable flaw that SWG had. You only needed to hit one or two buttons and then spam 1 over and over to win. This was a tragedy considering the large skill list you could have and how cool some of the moves that you never got to use were.
The CU fixed a lot of this.... I would say. Pre-CU had a bunch of combat related issues that warrented a major fix (the CU, which was a step in the right direction BTW)... but the NGE.... it blows. I know because I played the game from launch until nov 2005 (a week after NGE) then went to WoW and raided my ass off got tired of that and went back in 2008 and played for 2 more years..
For 2 years I logged into the game pretty much to talk to whoever wasleft in my guild, do a little crafting.. maybe an instance with my guild or mainly just explore... re-explore all of the planets.. on foot... that was fun.. I guess.
I would take pre-CU with all of its bugs (100% energy resist armor, combat spam, etc...) over any other game on the market out right now.
I'd resub, but honestly I don't think it'd last for me. Its been too long. Once the nostalgia factor faded and I realized I couldn't recapture the magic, I'd just be mad knowing I'd given SoE money again for SWG.
BINGO! The magic was in the communities that were developed. $OE had social game play gold and frittered it away.
The Communities still exist... try logging into the SW:TOR forums and lookng at the SWG server check in posts... I get all teary eyed to see some of the best guild and people checking in...
Comments
Pretty much all of this. All the Pre-CU haters always claim that we think the game was "perfect". I have not once in the 6 years that the game changed to the NGE seen somebody say that Pre-NGE was flawless. Everybody knows the game had bugs. Some game-breaking for some people. Everybody knows it had balance issues with the 250 point skill system. But it was all FIXABLE. The main issue with Pre-NGE was that the developers and producers wouldn't take the time to FIX THE DAMN BUGS! The other thing was content. The absolute lack of it. I tell people time and time again. The only thing good that came out of the NGE was that they added content. That was it. If the developers would have added the content that is in game now to the Pre-NGE engine, they wouldn't have been bleeding subs as they so claim. And on that topic of bleeding subs, the developers never published any numbers to back up their claims of losing 10k subscribers a month. So how are we to know that was the case? Show me the numbers.
There are profession imbalances with the NGE. There are bugs in the NGE. The majority of them dating back to Pre-CU when the game launched. The buffing is waaaaaay more out of control and rediculous than in Pre-NGE. Which was exactly one of the things that the developers said was the reason why they went to the NGE, along with "easier" profession balancing/fixes. Funny how that turned out in the end. They are no where close to balancing and fixing the game now than they were Pre-NGE. And they had six, SIX years to do it. Sounds like time wasted to me.
The whole "rose-colored" glasses thing really needs to stop because nobody who is a Pre-NGE vet ever said that it was perfect. It was just a lot more fun to play than what is there now. Not to mention the fact that people loved it just for the simple fact that you didn't play "cookie cutter" professions. One Bounty Hunter was totally different from another Bounty Hunter who showed up. It isn't like that in the NGE. You either play a BM/BH, a Carbines spec or a Rifle spec and use either the Flawless set or the Dire Fate jewelry. And it is the same with every other profession. You have at most 2 to 3 different ways to spec your profession. There is no diversity in the NGE.
EDIT: One last thing. the only thing really great about SWG right now is space. And that is because JTL hasn't been NGE'ed yet. Hopefully it stays that way to because that would effectively kill off a good bit of the SWG population who loves space.
I have to agree the best community ever pre-cu.
I landed a little lost sheep with aspirations to join the rebelion so headed to Anchorhead and hit up a HELPER with my myriad of questions and what a friendly guy he was, this player then went onto give me a contract to get him some hide (it was crap stats) I suspect he wanted to help me get started but not just hand me everything on a plate without putting in some work for it.
Whilst on the hunt for this hide I came across a camp and went and sat with the guys there and ended up chatting for hours until server reset at 12pm GMT the next day stopped the fun.
From that moment I knew I was hooked to SWG and slowly but sureley the last few years and the true toxic communites have been driving me away from them a bunch of self entitled children who want everything on a plate with no work and no interdepenance.
I love how one of the big problems with pre-CU was the overpowered buffs which lead to people soloing multiple red cons and certain skills being overpowered because buffs mean that the skills require little to no HAM. So... Instead of fixing the problem- Over powered buffs, they change the entire game so that it works better with the overpowered buffs, but overpowered buffs are still a problem.... WHAT!
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Any long time player could have told them how to fix 90%+ of the combat problems, if you were only paying attention:
Cap med buffs at 1k each: give people more surviablilty but no invincible rhino mode
Cap Comp armor protections at 50% or 60%: Always leave a good bit of vulnerabilty to reduce the effectiveness of turtleing and mitigating the effectiveness of being the stacker of the week
Open the mind bar up to be the same as other HAM bars and allow stims to heal it
Cap CM poison and shorten the range.
Dizzy/Stun on a timer until you could be Dizzy/Stun again.
There: combat system adjusted and any "overpowered" build is still plenty vulnerable. It would have cut the need to "balance" everything way, way down.
And putting Jedi in their own Jedi vs Sith faction war to parallel the GCW would have gone a long way too.
Instead of that, Smed got WoW fever and NGE'd the whole thing into oblivion. Yeah, might as well call it SWGNGE:Buff Wars now, great solution.
adding caps would contradict the fundamental nature of how precu worked. Buffs/weapons/armor stats were controlled by a multifactorial system that came to fruition when one of these items were used (not when created).
To slap a cap on them is to disregard a lot of what makes precu a sandbox. What they needed to do was have better control over spawned resource stats and looted components so that overpowered items could not be created more then once in a blue moon.
what bothers me is that they had control over every detail, they just didn't do the proper checks, like making a buff set, to see what happens.
Agreed, caps would have been counter-productive and changed the whole beauty of the games customisation, all it needed was a change to multipliers or such, maintaining the individuality of the doctors while reducing potential OP'd buffs.
The devs seemed to give up on the game a long time before NGE or CU, or more accurately they were resting on their laurels, they seemed to be happy where they were, wallowing away in the field all a sudden the wow juggernaught appeared and they over-reacted and had a fit, which ultimately caused a stroke and paralysis, of the brain. Idiots, I swear the whole thing looking back was like a bunch of kids runnig the show who had no idea what they were doing.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
There were always and already caps, and capping the values on the resources is no different in function than capping or dialing down the maximum value of a "capped" item, only doing it further upstream.
Even in the original game, the best possible resources would only make a 43% protection stun layer, for instance. So there were plenty of restrictions already there, they were just set too high and the devs never bothered to see what the effects were when resources could cap items.
They simply needed to dial down the values on stuff like armor protection and buff packs and the like. Crafters could still strive for making the best possible items, only the best should have been 60% comp instead of 90% comp (even 100% comp early in the game, and I made a pair of 100% comp boots with the help of some 42% NS shards). And 1000 pts on a buff instead of 3k and 100 per tick on mind poison, instead of 400.
In so doing, the advantages that the FOTM stackers enjoyed would have been less important, because instead of the maybe 2% edge they'd have on top of 90% protection and mitigation, would have been 2% on top of 60%. Much less noticaable.
And then the PvP people would not have always been crying for nerfs, and more nerfs and lessened the "need" for the CU and later the NGE.
your argument is flawed burntvet. Already caps? There are different kinds of caps. Were there already caps similar to the ones you're proposing? No. 43% stun layer cap? Was that in the original plan, or even in the game at launch? I doubt it. And you just gave this one example and then say, "So there were plenty of restrictions already there". WTF? First of all that was just one example. Secondly of course there were restrictions. It's not like the game were made of pure imagination (can't wait for those games to come out!).
A sandbox is a game that does it's best to hide and obfuscate the restrictions. So of course precu had restrictions. But they were never meant to be so tangible and obvious that you practically trip over them, like the CU-like examples you proposed.
60% comp sounds great burntvet, but as a soft cap, not a hard cap. It's like hardcoding something that, with a bit of effort, could be dynamically generated. No need to be lazy. All the controls are there, they just needed to put some effort in, so that rare resources and legendary components and amazing successes coupled with mods from food/clothing/innate could only have the possibility to get to maybe ~65%, with the majority of hard core players running around with 57-59%.
Want more? Ubese topped out at 76% even with near perfect layers, Same with Tantel and energy layers, same with other armor types. Weapon speed was gated, both by resources and final assembly. Slicing was even gated, remember that a weapon could either get better speed or damage? Well, if the damage went over a certain point, you'd always get a speed slice, and vice versa. This was tested many times. Gimme a break, it was 6+ years ago, I can't remember everything off the top of my head.
Much of what you are talking about is semantics anyway, a "cap" like they eventually put on comp or "gating the resouces" which they did also. It all more or less functioned to stop things from being "too good". In the end, it doesn't matter.
Want all those things I suggeted put in as soft caps? Fine. Longtime crafters that were any good figured out all the caps and the gates soon enough. You know what recipes were intentionally gimped by requiring the use of a crappy resource. Would it have been nice to leave room for an attribute enhancer? Sure. Did SOE bother? No.
Soft cap, hard cap, I don't see any real difference. Diminshing returns vs a brick wall. In the end, the result is the same. Philosophically, maybe, in practical terms, exactly the same. SOE needed to pay attention to the inevitable outcome of max crafted stuff and needed to think about what limits should have been there. And SOE didn't do it. Or enough where it counted anyway.
But then, they all but fired Raph Koster long before any of this stuff became a problem and he would have been the one to see a decent solution. He walked, the game tanked, and the rest is history.
In the end, SOE's mismanagment is all there is.
Pretty much all that needs to be said right there.
There's a huge difference between setting a resource to have a diminishing probability of spawning with more then 650 on a specific stat, and capping a weapon's max dmg at 300.
The former is complex, takes time to maintain, but gives the game depth. The latter nullifies all these sandbox systems and is just plain lazy. It's like buying all fresh ingredients to make dinner and then throwing them all away as you stick a tv dinner in the microwave.
There are plenty of cap crazy games out there burntvet. Precu wasn't meant to be one, no matter how many flawed examples you give.
side note - you're wrong about the slicing. Plenty of legendary or legendary-like weapons were sliced for dmg when dmg was the stat that was out of proportion. And if this were testable then the limits by which speed and dmg are too good would be easily approximated and would be public knowledge. And what happens when both speed and dmg are ridiculously good as often happened? I think you're remembering wrong.
Whatever man, I think you seem to be howling at the moon over this cap stuff. The caps were there, even in the original game, whether you choose to believe it or not, and there were both hard caps and resource gates In the end, it doesn't really matter.
As for the speed and damage stuff, I can't speak about legendary weapons, because there were never enough to do reliable tests on. What I do know, is that we tested 100 identical heavy damage LLCs and 100 "fast" FWG5s. The resutls were that in all 100% LLCs, we were not able to get a damage slice over 14%, even tho on other weapons you frequently got into the high 20s/30s on damage slices. We got on the order of 3/4 speed slices on these and low score damage on the rest. We theorized that if the damage slices went over a certain threshold, it kicked the default over to a speed slice.
We repeated the experiment and got almost the same numbers with the FWG5s, only no high "speed" slices, but damage all the way up to 35%, no better than 12-13% on speed, and many fewer of them.
So, we were fairly sure we were hitting a gate, on both damage and speed, respectively, on standard weapon types, because of the results we were seeing. What specific values some legendary weapons had, I don't know, or care at this point. That was our testing method and those were the results we got.
It was 6 yers ago, no point in arguing over it now.
the argument isn't whether hard caps were in precu. They were there. I could argue that precu wasn't how it was intended even at launch. The argument is whether hard weapon/armor/buff stat caps should be added. The answer is obviously no because they negate subsystems and go against the concept of a sandbox, especially precu.
You're obviously wrong about the slicing. Or maybe the devs changed stuff for a day or a week and you just happened to do your testing then. I've never heard of this, I was a precu smuggler for probably a year, there's nothing about this in the guides. And it's easily testable, as you've exemplified, so it wouldn't be some hidden mechanic that very few knew about. And if your tests are real, as I already mentioned, you would have written down the limits, and every limit for each stat of each weapon would be known and documented by other players. Instead players crafted and looted awesome non-legendary weapons fairly frequently and sliced them for the stat that was out of proportion for a high percentage. This is documented with ss from imagedump and personal collections. Not sure if any are still available, but if you were any kind of precu player then you'd have heard about, known, and done these slices yourself.
if it doesn't really matter then why are you arguing? Are you so unaware of the connection between what you say and what you do?
I just want to say, PreCU, you have the perfect user name.
Whatever man, I am as big a fan of the old game as anyone, and pardon me that I don't have 6 year old game testing data at my finger tips.
The other thing to consider is that looted weapon values not might have been constrained the same way in regards to slicing, where as with manufactured, they were, as there was no real way to "track" the values of loot weapons as opposed to manufactured ones. Whatever.
And my WS partner posted the results in the old WS forum long ago. Fired up a big discussion as I recall.
Done talking with someone who seems to argue just to argue.
"Caps" or limits had their place, had they been done well and organically to begin with, SOE would not have needed to put in hard caps they did later, nerf and re-nerf combat skills, fool around with combat levels leading to the CU and finally decide the whole thing was beyond their ability to fix and just NGE the whole thing (WoW envy notwithstanding).
90% comp, 400 tick mind poison and those other things I mentioned created such narrow margins in the combat areas as defenses were so tight, that whenever someone had a small advantage, it was magnified because of the small "ability" to have any advantage. So people compained, there were more nerfs, and it all went downhill from there.
All the way down.
precu scrapbook. It's online and downloadable. Very surprised you don't know about it.
no man. Stop trying. This is easily testable. Lootable/craftable only or not. Players would have stumbled upon this without intending to. And slicing was tested all the time because it was so easy to test. And again, you never sliced a awesome weapon for the disproportionate stat with a big percentage? Did you even read the trade forums with all the before and after screenies?
pot.. kettle.. bye
my point exactly. Why would you say this and still argue for hard caps? It's like you have no idea what your argument is.
Because at the end of the day how the needed limits came into being MAKES NO DIFFERENCE.
At least not compared to what the value of their effects would have been.
All that matters is that they were not there, to the extent they needed to be, so combat became a nerf and suck fest, which SOE could not fix.
End.
I would sub to a classic server in a new york minute.
burntvet, you think they need to add hard caps. I think they need to stop being lazy and do things right. That's what it comes down to.
I think they need those "caps" or limits, and don't care as much how they go in.
seems to me that a regression server is what people actually want here...
I'd resub, but honestly I don't think it'd last for me. Its been too long. Once the nostalgia factor faded and I realized I couldn't recapture the magic, I'd just be mad knowing I'd given SoE money again for SWG.
BINGO! The magic was in the communities that were developed. $OE had social game play gold and frittered it away.
The CU fixed a lot of this.... I would say. Pre-CU had a bunch of combat related issues that warrented a major fix (the CU, which was a step in the right direction BTW)... but the NGE.... it blows. I know because I played the game from launch until nov 2005 (a week after NGE) then went to WoW and raided my ass off got tired of that and went back in 2008 and played for 2 more years..
For 2 years I logged into the game pretty much to talk to whoever wasleft in my guild, do a little crafting.. maybe an instance with my guild or mainly just explore... re-explore all of the planets.. on foot... that was fun.. I guess.
I would take pre-CU with all of its bugs (100% energy resist armor, combat spam, etc...) over any other game on the market out right now.
The Communities still exist... try logging into the SW:TOR forums and lookng at the SWG server check in posts... I get all teary eyed to see some of the best guild and people checking in...