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Why SWG pre-cu failed.
Xhyron
Member UncommonPosts: 40
Now, before the title fools you, believe me... I hated the CU and ABSOLUTELY ABHOR the NGE with a complete and total passion, as the SWG which I left has only its equal in UO, which was also destroyed for me. But, let me give you my point of view on what led to subscription bleeding and the downfall of the pre-cu system we all loved.
First, let me say that the most fun I had in SWG was in the first 3 months of release. Back when you actually had to work hard to earn the exp required for your profession and when it took a long time to actually master a profession.
1.> Doctor Buffs
First and foremost doc buffs destroyed the PRE-CU. When you can buff your stats to the point of near invincibility VS NPCs/Mobs, this is going to no doubt lead to a problem. It allowed people to master combat professions in 1 day if they were dedicated enough and macro programs destroyed the sanctity of crafting professions. When I started playing on June 26th 2003, I WORKED MY ASS OFF mastering marksman/scout and getting the first box in bounty carbine and first two boxes into bounty pistol. This was no small feat. It took two weeks of crazed durni lairs and tabage missions and even going to Tyrena to avoid the mission stealers out and around Coronet. When Corellia was not sufficient enough to gain experience anymore, myself and a close group of friends would head to Dantooine, back when NO ONE would go there for fear of death. We would party up and kill huurtons/pikets/bols to gain our experience. Our dedication gave us a HUGE advantage in GCW PvP and there are threads that were on the Intrepid board(that are still searchable believe it or not) about us and how we exploited/cheated/use at-st too much, etc. This was back when Tatooine sunburns and muon gold were king for the quick 10 minute fix to dominate pvp, BUT did not make you near invincible like doctor buffs. Smuggler spices(sad it was only 1) actually had a use and Tat sunburns were in high demand. You actually had to watch your ham pools whether or not you were pvping or simplying fighting NPCs. Armor did not mean much, no matter how good it was as you could not equip a full set of the best composite armor without being buffed to high heaven. A composite helm and chest did the trick and was all you needed. The game at this time was fun as well as challenging and the power of the doctor buffs completely ruined this early phase of the game.
2.> Holocrons
Holocrons were a direct result of the devs thinking there were not enough Jedi unlocked after they were patched in and their IGNORANT way to get the SWG community to unlock more Jedi. Guess what?....... Holocrons + Doctor Buffs + Macroed Crafting = LOTS of Jedi going to get unlocked. Little did they realize this and only after patches were put in to regulate unlocking to the 30th, 31st or 32nd profession did they come up with the even worse force sensitive village quest line. This entire fiasco should have never occured and is a big part of what destroyed the game.
3.> Jedi patch
The Jedi patch which took away the 3 death and you start over was the BIGGEST DAMN MISTAKE IN SWG HISTORY. If you wanted to play a Jedi and feel safe, YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN PLAYING KoToR, NOT SWG. This patch, even with its lenient exp loss system caused the Jedi population to flourish. No longer were Jedi relegated to grinding on the furthest perimeters of odd planets, they were given the EZ button. I was one of the first Jedi to unlock on my server and WHENEVER I played it, I was scared. TRULY and GENUINELY scared. I worried about the bounty hunter that may have seen a mission for me if I was careless. I was scared of people seeing me fighting and taking advantage of my saber TEF. I was really worried about dying, because if I died three times, it was the end of me(even at the rolling 1 death a month period). This gave the Jedi profession meaning and kept most(not all) acting like actual Jedi would have during that time period... Plus, there was no "starport jedi" problem.
4.> Player Cities
Yes, player cities were a problem with SWG. Housing was a great idea, but player cities took the veteran population of the game away from the cities such as Anchorhead, Moenia, and Bestine and put them in a guild/faction created city where new players could not/would not go(hence leading to newer players not picking up on the game and getting into it as we did). No longer were there players faction missioning out of Anchorhead, Moenia or any of the smaller cities that used to flourish. They went to a player created city and grinded faction in relative peace which led to the downfall of the GCW in a way. Anchorhead(atleast on Intrepid) was a ghost town going into 2004 when it was a mecca for PvP for the first few months after release. Houses sprouted up around major cities like Coronet and even smaller ones like Anchorhead. This would have been sufficient to keep the population happy and merchants in business. Player cities ruined my favorite part of the game. Factional PvP.
5.> Template Stackers
This would not have been a problem had the true bonuses for a profession been given in the master box instead of in less skillpoint costing trees in the actual profession itself. Template stackers were nothing more than UO flavor of the month players using this to have an extreme advantage at 1 on 1 pvp. Once again, giving out the best bonuses in the master box of an elite professions would have solved this problem yet not destroyed hybrid character mixes.
Well, this is what really screwed the game over for me. I loved SWG the way it was, but it spiralled out of control into the mess that it is today. Had common sense and simple fixes been implemented, it could have been the absolute best sandbox MMO ever. Period.
RIP SWG - Spike Spiegel - Template stacking exploiting BH of Intrepid(you forced me to do it $oE)
Comments
EXACTLY. I have said this EXACT SAME thing to my IRL friend who also played with me. Coronet, Theed, etc were FILLED with buildings that could have been hollowed out and made into rentable apartments with different sizes/costs. That would have made the whole problem moot.
EXACTLY. I have said this EXACT SAME thing to my IRL friend who also played with me. Coronet, Theed, etc were FILLED with buildings that could have been hollowed out and made into rentable apartments with different sizes/costs. That would have made the whole problem moot.
I think using the apartment approach you may not even have had to get rid of player cities, as a lot of players would have preferred them to PCs. I see where you are coming from with PCs reducing PvP, but to be honest, a lot of us carebears that liked PCs never PvP'd either. Maybe it is possible that PvPer's would have remained in the Big Cities..except Jedi of course who would run and hide in the Guild Halls and Cantinas
In SWGs most populated time on Ahazi, I could see a thriving number of player cities coexisting with the Apartment plan. Perhaps we should have required houses to be placed in Player Cities and not the wilderness? Like the Ring Cities around Theed and Coronet?
I guess I see the PvP point, but don't. Yes, some PvP players were drawn out of big cities, but why does the non-PvP player have to sacrifice their content as a result? I think there just needed to be more incentive to go to a city like Coronet or Theed..tax breaks, etc..
I realize I said I quit. I never said it was forever
Hauken Stormchaser
I want pre-CU back
Station.com : We got your game
Yeah?, Well i want it back!!!
Believe me buddy, everything was NOT fine with this game. I knew how to play the game better than most and it had serious issues that were allowed to fester into the incarnation that is the NGE.
Btw, www.dictionary.com type in abhor, definition comes up. Take care.
-Spike
Doc Buffs were only OP when the nooblet used them to power grind. An unarmored double master with a mediocre weapon was going to get slaughtered by the bulk of the high end content. Buffs at the level they were, were required because of the way the content ganked you. You needed good buffs, what killed it was the role it became. A farmer tool for credit sellers. It was a vital part of SWG otherwise. I got my ass handed to me many times in the cave on Endor because I got cocky.
Holocrons was an attempt to keep up to template runners. A tute was out a week after new content was introduced, telling people how to own the content. If it wasn't holocrons, it would have been something else. They wanted to stop secret to success and make it a grind to scare of the light hearted. It worked, they spent all their time in the forums bitching and moaning and we got NGE.
I agree. 3 death should have killed the Jedi in your toon. Not your toon, just his Jedi. Start oer, don't but the 3 death should have stayed.
Player cities and harvester farms were massive lag whores. That was a problem they could have worked around though. They ignored it and cherry picked to accomodate what they wanted. Another example of not fixing what thewy knew was wrong in favour of creating bugs they didn't even know would be there.
Template stackers were all about PvP and they crippled it but Over pop of Jedi would have done that anyway. No matter what the template was, you had good and bad. It was paper rock scissors there, like all games.
In the end, what killed PreCU was the fact that SOE and LAE didn't want to be bothered. They did some calculations and concluded that even if they got massive account activity the servers were going to fill up with former players legacies and the game would become a big glob of farms and cities nobody owned or were being inherited from former accounts. I had rights to 20 houses. Most on the assumption they may come back, I wanted them to have something to come back to. Most of the problems could have been fixed easily. Apartments and the surrender of the inentory cap fetish. That's the only game I have ever played that kept item count so stingy. Most house issues were inventory issues, people would have been happy with one warehouse rental they had 5000 items in.
Lack of imagination, failure to see problems untill it was too late and no respect for players. SOE and LAE failed. Plain and simple.
Sorry but I can't agree...
I think it failed (in case it did, because I think it still had hope before the CU was forced) because, basicly,
the game had stopped it's development. Look at wow, they publish several new instances each year (quite a few!), some world events, new schematics, new loot, they don't stop improving the game. Sure it has it's problems, but they do as much as they can to solve it.
SWG again seemed to lack a development team. Now they for sure don't have it. There are tons of ideas that could have made the game really attractive, but they prefered to try making another wow, and failed miserably (and even if I love WOW, I played more time in SWG until the CU)
I also think vehicles destroyed it for me. I loved mounts, but vehicles just brought you everywhere TOO quick!
I guess the jedi community should have spent more time listening to everyone else rather then showering anyone that proposed change with all manners of vile mentation.
_____________________
I am the flipside of the coin on which the troll and the fanboy are but one side.
To balance the combat all you needed to do was reduce the effectiveness of doc buffs. Every one seems to forget regardless if you had a complete set of compsite 90-% resists that could be worn unbuffed and you were a template stacker, if you fought unbuffed you would go down quite easily. What they should have done was not allow you to buff your secondary stats and also not allow you to hit the mind pool with attacks such as mindfire, disease poisens. If you reduced the doc buffs to a max of say 1000 for the main stats i.e Health, action and mind thats all you needed. We tested this out loads of times when we worked on the best templates for pve and pvp in my guild even with some of the best armor I made and from other top armorsmiths on my server; regardless of how good your template was if you had buffs with a max of 500 ish up to 1000 on the main stats you wouldn't last long as a stacker.
However when you started adding buffs to secondary stats and main stats which were in the 3000+ region and combining that with compsite armor with 90% resists to all stats include 40% stun you were invincible because the effects of encumberance on the secondary stats was negated by doc buffs. This meant that the player could spam specials all day long and get hit x amount of times and regen so fast it had no affect on him. Combine this with the various, dodge bonuses he would be God in pvp and pve. So you see you could have armor that hit 90% with a good slice and still get beaten with ease provided the doc buffs were tonesd down by 60 to 70% as someone suggested. This would mean that instead of having 1 vs 10 with a super stacker, buff and armor template you would have to work as balanced groups in pvp and pve. The only thing that would have to be done to compensate this would be to tone down Jedi to bring them into line with the rest of the player base which I think would be a fair price to pay.
The main reason Jedi was pushed out as a normal profession was because that was the only way they could attract players to the NGE. Remember their target audience for this incarnation are 10+ age group and what do these players want? They want to play as jedi so they got rid of the hard part which was unlocking and grinding through the village to make their target audience happy.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
That system would only work if the Jedi were rewarded with significant power increase. Remember risk vs reward could be argued. If the jedi were only marginally better then a normal profession whats the point being a jedi if you died 3 times and you loose a skill box which took say 30 hours of continuous play to attain?. The system would have worked for the old 4-4-4-4 guardians from the pre-pub 9 days as they were extremely powerfull. However it would only seem worth while that skill loss occurred at a certain level of progression so you by passed the lower levels.
Water cooled Intel Corei7 920 D0 Stepping OC'd 4.3GHz - 6GB Corsair Dominator GT RAM 2000Mhz - ASUS RAGE II EXTREME X58 Mobo - 2x HD 5870 in Crossfire X, OC'd 0.9Ghz core 1.3Ghz RAM - Dell 2407WFP Flat Panel LCD 24" 1920x1200
All that high end content was never meant to be soloed. You were supposed to have a large group to attempt it.
Fighting through the very dangerous tusken cave with a group of 10 = fun.
Waltzing through it solo with no problem = not fun.
I'll start my own SWG... with Black Jack... and Hookers!!!
In fact, forget the SWG!!!!
Well all I have to say is BRAVO, I agree 100 percent, however they were not the only things. I still see people blaming the Developers for these actions, and that is true they do deserve the blame, but it is also true that the vast majority of the player base whined about most of these things and demanded that they be changed. I want Jedi easier shouldn’t be so hard, I hate the perma death, I love Buffs and I using them on others to own them, until they would get owned by someone else using them this is so unfair I hate everyone and Buffs, and etc… and etc… the good old days. Thank you for your time.
Damn byotch dat aint no friggn moon fool, dat be a friggn space station byotch.
Well frankly it was due to the devs rushing it out before it was ready, thereby annoying the hell out of a lot of players because all the issues raised by the OP were never finalised.
Added to that, SOE were expecting god-knows how many subscribers due to the fact it was starwars and panicked when they realised there weren't twenty bajillion people buying their product.
Lots of us enjoyed this game like no other, but it was removed due to poor management who regarded the game, not themselves, as a failure
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failed (in case it did, because I think it still had hope before the CU was forced) because, basicly,
the game had stopped it's development. Look at wow, they publish several new instances each year (quite a few!), some world events, new schematics, new loot, they don't stop improving the game. Sure it has it's problems, but they do as much as they can to solve it.
SWG again seemed to lack a development team. Now they for sure don't have it. There are tons of ideas that could have made the game really attractive, but they prefered to try making another wow, and failed miserably (and even if I love WOW, I played more time in SWG until the CU)
I have to qfe this post. All of the problems brought up by the op would have been taken care of if SOE was responsible enough to develop their own game instead of bailing out.
For the Horde!
I agree about Player Cities. I do remember when the game first came out how the different cities were filled with people and you had either Imps or Rebels coming in trying to fight. The player city did take basiclly kill that since vets didn't have to travel to the NPC cities other then to take off the planet and that was a travel through.
Thinking about it this. Anarchy Online had city apartments and peopels till gathered in the city. Dark Age of Camelot had player housing zones yet peopel still gathered in cities, Fort Outpost, etc. Ultima Online has player housing and players still gathered in the cities, will the bigger ones. Allowing it so players didn't have to venture back to the main cities was a big mistake in Star Wars Galaxies. Housing is fine, player cities not so much, especially when you already have so many in the game.
This is a huge flaw with Everquest 1. They've made Plane of Knowledge THE gathering place that racial cities are just empty save on the Progressive server. Hell even the tutorial places you in the Plane of Knowledge and now your starting city, which I think it should. T
* I'll throw in Composite Armor
All of the above made the pre-CU environment completely unbalanced; resulting in either frustrating or boring game play. What fun is it to be a 'one man mass extinction event', or spend time organizing PvP only to be killed in a few seconds by a MCM?
As I've argued in the past, the pre-CU was great in concept, but poor in execution.
Jedi were/are the bane of SWG. The profession caused a myriad of issues ranging from imbalances in the game to creating divisions within the player base. Imo, Jedi should've been implemented as NPCs only.
I absolutely hated the implementation of this feature. The result were vast ghost towns and a large empty map. I felt more of a sense of community in the impromtu towns formed outside cities, like Moenia and Theed.
Were you on Kettemoor as well? I remember a Spike Spiegel running around with EE and SWAT.
Ico
Oh, cruel fate, to be thusly boned. Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee.