For the most part I agree with this review, but I play on quite a few SWG servers, and only 2 of my toons are cl 80, so I've done the tutorial quests 4 times and they're always exactly the same. Now I'll agree that it was fun the first time through, but I must say, it gets extremely dull once you've gone through it more than once. The real problem is that those quests are the only way to lvl and once you're done with them Mustafar is really the only way to grind, and I personlly haven't gotten the TOW expansion so this means I can't lvl anyomre with any of my toons...I've cancelled my account, and as of Jan 11th I will no longer be able to play, but as bored as I've been I don't think I'll miss it. Part of the joy of the game in the first place was the complexity, and that's all gone. If Galaxies survives I will be thorougly suprised, and personally I'll probably never play a SOE game again.
Originally posted by Damean1 For the most part I agree with this review, but I play on quite a few SWG servers, and only 2 of my toons are cl 80, so I've done the tutorial quests 4 times and they're always exactly the same. Now I'll agree that it was fun the first time through, but I must say, it gets extremely dull once you've gone through it more than once. The real problem is that those quests are the only way to lvl and once you're done with them Mustafar is really the only way to grind, and I personlly haven't gotten the TOW expansion so this means I can't lvl anyomre with any of my toons...I've cancelled my account, and as of Jan 11th I will no longer be able to play, but as bored as I've been I don't think I'll miss it. Part of the joy of the game in the first place was the complexity, and that's all gone. If Galaxies survives I will be thorougly suprised, and personally I'll probably never play a SOE game again.
The way you described having to do the same quests with every character you create is how I feel about WOW. I think WOW is a good game, but without class specific quests, it's not really worth my time to create more than one character and play it through. Sounds kind of similar to a solo single player game. Now with SWG doing the same thing as WOW in that regard plus with all the bugs I think this game needs a lot of work still. We need class specific quests and we need diversity amongst classes that at the same time won't encourage FOTM specs.
I as well as many of the devoted fans of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) have been in constant agony since Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) unexpectedly released the New Game Enhancements (NGE) the middle of November 2005. The Combat Upgrade that was implemented in the spring of 2005 was extremely painful enough but the misery caused by the NGEs is beyond words. The suffering that many of the veterans, including myself, have endured from the changes to this game can almost never be reconciled. The new changes have destroyed everything we have worked so hard to create over the thousands of hours we have invested online.
Therefore I have decided to discontinue my month-to-month subscription for this game that I have loved and enjoyed over the past 13 months. The only way that I can possibly see myself come to enjoy this online game again is if SOE rolls the SWG gaming servers back to a pre-Combat Upgrade status. By doing this I believe that Star Wars Galaxies can regain the richness and diversity that was enjoyed by so many for so long.
I plan to post this on as many internet gaming web sites as possible, including LucasArts, until somebody of importance hears me and understands my frustrations.
I will never buy another SOE game again. I was not a big fan of thier EQ model and SWG simply put the torpedo in the water. They screwed the players plain and simple. It almost doesn't matter if you consider the buggy and contentless game in the beginning or the shaft up the yazoo in the end, either way we came up on the short end. I truly truly hope (and I shudder at this) that everyone buys XBox360 and or Microsofts offerings, just to drive the spike into SOE's wallet. Ultimately, we can't bankrupt Smedley, he will have made a fortune in his position, but we simply can stick it to Sony's share of gaming, and the online market.
I started playing SWG when it first hit Europe and played it every day for about a 10months. I did enjoy it but towards the end of my time the game got silly, with the dupping that went on for awhile and a few other nasty hacks that went on to upset the community, when you started seeing dot pikes doing nasty damage in pvp and killing other players and jedi stupidly real fast it was time to leave. I went back when they did the combat upgrade and i did like alot the new changes as it forced people to group again like when game first came out but the drop from a 20player group to a 6 player group made it frustrating to get a group going or to join a group so left again.
AFter all we pay our money every month for a months Entertainment, if we dont enjoy it we just spend our money elsewhere for our next months entertainment. Yeah im soft like that played UO for 5 years (started before trammel) and saw all the changes in that, realy its not much different to what SWG has had done to it, they lose one customer only to get a new one.
I have to thank mmorpg.com for having the spine to post this editorial, even if I think it is a bit soft in its stance towards the recent actions of SOE and LA in regards to the SWG game.
The changes, whether you like them or hate them, were unwanted by the existing player base -- the CUSTOMERS who had been paying a regular recurring monthly fee to play a game that they bought with every reasonable expectation of being able to play continuously for so long as they paid their monthly fee. It is pointless to debate whether the new game is better or worse than the original. That's fuel for an entirely different conflagaration.
The question, and indeed the single most stated problem with the entire SWG subject, is "how could SOE and LA take away a game people were paying to play and replace it with another, vastly different game?" To take a soft stance on the ethics of the action is foolish to say the least. It is NOT acceptible or ethical business practice, regardless of how supposedly well intentioned the switch was or was not. It is a simple case of "I paid for this specific product and I do not want it replaced with a very different mystery product".
Many compare this fiasco to the old New Coke disaster, but in many ways, it is a very different thing. New Coke was packaged and marketed as a new and different product. There was no deception involved in any stage of its introduction onto the market. Its failure was noted by Coca-Cola Company very quickly and they recovered quickly. Star Wars Galaxies is different in that the product was completely changed and marketed with the exact same product branding. NGE is NOT Star Wars Galaxies as we bought it in any way shape or form. It is packaged (skinned) the same, but it is a completely different game than the one that the majority of consumers bought and paid for. THIS is where the comparisons fail.
Coca-Cola were very forthright about their new product and did not try to sneak anything past its customers. Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts were very sneaky about the new product and refuse to acknowledge that it is an entirely new and different product than that which it formerly sold under the name Star Wars Galaxies. Better or worse notwithstanding, it is not the same product and should not be sold under the same name.
The abuse of customer branding loyalty is aggrivated by their later acknowledgements that they were well aware that the new product would NOT be well recieved by their existing paying customer base and their repeated insistance that they the company know better than what we the consumer base want and require from the products we buy. This is blatantly insulting, adding to the shadiness of the entire switch. In what other market will a company that openly shows contempt for its customers continue to bring in revenue? If you also add the very blatant message from many of SOE and LA's public spokesmen that "we do not value your business, you are expendable in favor of a LONGSHOT GAMBLE on larger market numbers" it becomes very clear that neither company has any interest in providing customer satisfaction of any sort as long as they can find a way to increase their profit numbers through customer churn. Or to put it in easy terms -- they want people to buy and subscribe, but are not willing to put out any effort to make it worth the customer's while to be loyal to their product.
This, more than anything else has turned me from a dedicated customer to both companies' products to an anti-SOE/LA advocate. If they had released the NGE as a seperate product, even if it had replaced the game I was playing eventually, I would have simply continued to play the game I bought and paid for until it closed, then moved on with no lasting ill feelings. I don't hold it against companies that they produce games and products that I don't enjoy. I simply cease to buy them and move along quietly to something I will enjoy more. If a company's product becomes old and loses its appeal for me, but that product was still what I bought and enjoyed over time, I will move on and communicate my satisfaction with both product and company to others. After all, it may just bring hours to years of pleasure to someone who hasn't already worn it out for themselves.
Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts have BOTH earned a very special and very rare status with me in their approach to business with MMOs -- open and agressive activism AGAINST both companies. I do not believe that either company should be allowed to do business in the manner which they have handled Star Wars Galaxies. I view the entire debacle as a deliberate scam on the part of the companies against their customers. I see their actions of the past year as a fully intentional fleecing (and perhaps even defrauding) of the SWG customer base to finance a seperate product that they were fully aware would not be welcome or wanted by those paying for it under the deliberately placed expectation that they would continue to recieve the game they chose to buy in the first place.
This is something that I do not see adressed by any of the writers on the SWG subject, and from my point of view, it is the single most important and signifigant part of the entire thing. I honestly think that both companies are BANKING on this being buried in the furor of veterans complaining that they don't like the new game versus fanbois calling it the best thing since the invention of the PC. I further feel that many gaming sites and other media coverage are playing directly into SOE and LA's hands by overlooking the legality and ethics of the product bait and switch perpetrated in the NGE's rollout in favor of covering what many forums have chewed past death -- which is a matter of preferance rather than a matter of business practice, market and legal precedence and how this "event" will change how the gaming industry treats its customers in the future.
Now that the game has been reviewed again due to the NGE...the new rating should be what is shown as the rating in the game list. I noticed it still shows the rating from the original review which will be misleading to people looking through the list for a new MMORPG to play.
I don't have the time to read all 239 previous posts, so I apologize if my post is redundant.
My biggest gripe about the NGE is the way it was developed and announced. Yes, John Smedley has apologized. But apology or no, it was a cheap-shit ploy to wring as much revenue out of Trials of Obi-Wan pre-orders before the mass cancellations they knew the NGE would precipitate.
SOE shouldn't be taken to task for trying to make a more accessible (if not a more fun) game. This is a business, after all, and they have to maximize the return on their investment. And yes, they have the right to change the game, as so many are keen to point out.
But it really rankles me when they attribute the timing of the NGE as a "mistake". Are we to believe that no one at SOE was aware of the likely backlash of such a move? They were completely oblivious to the deceptive nature of the tactic? It was just a random anomaly that the NGE was shrouded in complete secrecy while all other expansions and major patches were anounced well in advance? And it's just coincidence that the concealment of the NGE announcement until after TOOW preorders were finished worked to SOE's financial advantage?
No, this wasn't a mistake. This was quite deliberate. They did a classic bait-and-switch, and hoped that only a small number of people would be angry enough to demand a refund on TOOW. Yes, they can change the game whenever they want, within the strictures of the law. And I think there was a very good case against SOE under any state's deceptive business practices laws. Notice how they didn't offer refunds on TOOW preorders until after the community outrage started to snowball?
If SOE really thought that the NGE was so terrific and the best way to jump-start this game's player base, then they had no need to hide it or wait until after TOOW orders were billed before announcing the changes. Again, a cheap-shit move all around.
And that, above all else, is why I cancelled my subscription. Funny thing is that I like the NGE. It ain;t perfect by a long shot, but I fully support what they were (are) trying to do with it. Even if I wasn't a fan of the NGE, we all knew this could happen at any time. That still doesn't make it OK for SOE to trick us into giving them money for an expansion of game X when they secretly knew they'd be swapping game X out for game Y a few days later.
There was an extreme breach of trust with the NGE. Not just a breach of trust in SOE's stewardship of the game, but more importantly, a breach of trust due to SOE's attempt to swindle us out of our money.
I'll come back to the game, I'm sure. The devs are trying to get things right, and they likely had no hand in this horrible business decision. But I won't be back until SOE has lost more money than they hoped to gain off me through their cheap-shit ploy.
Originally posted by Teala You know the more I review your review, I think you are actually doing a huge disservice to gamers with your scores. Are you afraid to score it honestly so that SOE doesn't pull their ads? I think maybe you are. As long as gaming websites like this kiss up to game companies like SOE they'll continue to release buggy and broken games. NGE is chuck full of bugs, it is not even 1/4 of the way finished. Combat is atrocious. The loot tables are no better than what they had before though they swear they are. The GUI is abysmal. How can you possibly think that you can score this game the way you did and think people are going to take you seriously?
I reviewed the game and I gave it a fair rating. lol, we have no secret agenda with SOE. On the same note, if I were to give it all 3s I guarantee you that I would get a whole bunch of How can you possibly think that you can score this game the way you did and think people are going to take you seriously? but from the opposite playerbase than you.
If I gave it a all 3s or all 2s would you seriously have agreed to the review? Maybe you. But what about others? I think the rating was fair. The final rating was 6.3. Look at the average ratings of mmorpgs. 6.3 isnt the greatest in the world. If I gave the final rating of SWG a 3 I would transcend from a Mmorpg.com reviewer to an upset SWG fan who feels SOE is ripping me off.
And to reinterate....no we do not have some super secret AD deal with SOE. That's hilarious.
honestly i think it deserved 1's after the shiat SOE pulled, like you said in your reviews, the Vet jedi's who spent months-years and 100's of dollars and thousands of hours getting to where they were, and have that all go away, all their work, SOE should roll over in its grave
Playing: EVE Online Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2 KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
ok i am gonna try for my own review or whatever the hell it is for this game.
My review is a 3 for vets and a 5 for new comers, 3 for vets because of everything they lost and everything they new SWG was before NGE. 5 for Beginners because they practicly dont know how great this game was and they didnt have a jedi they worked on for 13 months.
I didnt start the game the first day like most people, i started in august 2003, i loved the game and the overpacked PVP Anchorhead and Bestine, we led raids on eachother and shit it was sooooooooooo sooooooooooooo great.
CU i didnt mind too much, i did when it came out, but now that i look back on it, they balanced the melee and ranged skills (except jedi). The CU would have been fine i think with all the new armors and new weapons and everything, if they didn't have so MANY BLOODY JEDI, then to see the
jedi crying how the Bounty hunters are too strong and that THEY NEED TO BE NERFED when its really the jedi who needed to be nerfed. If i were to pick between the 25 badges or the hologrinding to get force sensative, i would have chosen the hologrinding because thats when more people played
and there were probaly only 100-200 jedi on the server (not at one time of course), and also actually see some people in the citys was great. Alot of people left during the CU and most people didnt like it, but i remember getting owned by TKMs because i didnt have a stun, a snare, a root, or even a KD.
Also with their Doctor buffs they were invincible, if they had kept the pre CU version in but added all the CU armor and balancing they did and kept the auto shoot i gaurantee most of the people who left might have stayed. In Pre CU SWG was at its peak of popularity, i was a newb for almost most of the
Pre CU but lol i had tons of fun, exploring correllia with a group of friends (on foot) meaning we would have to kill everything we ran into. Or try and avoid everything. Also exploring and meeting scouts with there camps up, with maybe 1-3 people in them and go sit with them and have a good convo
The graphics were great in PRE CU the lag was a little bad considering we didnt have our 256mb video cars out yet and what not. The NGE brought nothing but the end of SWG unless they change it fast. I hear people talking about how great it is, then i ask em "how long have you played SWG?"
Then i would get a responce somewhere towards the beginning of NGE. The NGE is not a good Development in SWG, and the developers were not very bright to bring this upon their customers, atleast in CU people who worked hard for their jedi got to keep them and the perks that came with
before the NGE. Now when people hear STAR WARS they instantly think JEDI!!!! but star wars isnt all jedi, this game showed people what star wars really was, it showed them the creature handlers, the business skills (crafting) entertainers, bounty hunters, and you could decide what kind of weapon you want to specialize in(pistoleer,rifleman,swordsman,pikeman). This game was unique
It had 24-26 professions (i frget) and you had the freedom of makeing your own awsome template and advertising your shop on a different planet and ect. In NGE it took away that freedom and replaced it with skills based on star war's characters....... SWG IS NOT STAR WARS if SWG
was STAR WARS then there would be nothing but jedi, there would only different types of jedi. Now SOE and LA wanted to make SWG more "star warsy" but what they didnt know, underneath all their bugs and not yet developed armors and ect, THER IT WAS !!!!! (music in the background) STAR WARS
if they had just fixed thee problems and kept doing what they were doing with bringing more and more armor and different weapons into the game, it would have been STAR WARS!!! Everyone had there own style of playing their templates in PRE CU, like i thought pistoleer/BH was the best ever for killing
but anyways im rambling. I had 15 good friends in the CU, and i came back to see what the NGE was like, and theed was empty, and so was mos eisley, my (medium populated server) was empty (before mustafar) and i saw someone i used to know and asked him if anyone still played and he told me that
Everyone quit when the NGE came out. Now your trying to say that the NGE was good for SWG!?!? there used to be 400k players playing, now there is only 50k-100k players, after NGE. As for the "loyal SWG people" there are none who are still playing and have started in beta/the start of the game
If there are YOU ARE STUPID. There is no more SWG, there is only Runescape Sci-fi edition. As rob said with the gameplay and shooting mobs, the combat system is shit, there are no such thing as macros. You now have to click the macro and double click the baby nuna (that was real fun). It took
me 5 minutes to kill a nuna with the laggy atmospher and haveing to double clik it to attack it. as for the fun of the game...... well it wasnt fun spending 5 minutes killing a nuna.... community sucks, medium in that game means 100 people. Roleplaying, i did a little and it was fun, but its dead
now that NGE is here. OVERALL they need to shut the game down and let a real company redesign the game or make the sequal, and not let SOE ANYWHERE NEAR IT. yeah they tried to make it "better" it was a risk. a risk that didnt work and now they are probaly losing money due to the lack of
players and keeping it running. If they did make a classic server (pre CU) i would be bak in a heartbeat, but if i smell any NGE on it i will never trust SOE and not go near any of there products. Right now im waiting for huxley, it looks promising.
OVERALL RATING------3.8
playerbase----4
roleplaying----3
fun----2
graphics---7
Value----1
sound----5
Playing: EVE Online Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2 KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
great review BTW rob i think you overrated the rating tho
Playing: EVE Online Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2 KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
Playing: EVE Online Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2 KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
While I think the reviewer was eloquent in his review I think he was overly generous with his scores for community, performance, and customer service.
Giving a 6 to customer service for fast canned responses is in my opinion like tipping a waitress for getting you the wrong order quickly. Yeah she got it to you fast and piping hot but it's still not what you ordered and therefore very poor service.
Performance is also sub par. Lag, even on a high end gamer machine, in PVP areas is occuring at an unacceptable level.
Finally if you can still find a veteran in game you will see, I am sure, what the community used to be. However these days you are much more likely to run into smack talking juveniles that SOE has targetted with the NGE either being disrespectful or begging for items.
I will give them the graphics and the sound, but that is all it has. It's pretty but wrapping paper is what gets thrown out at Christmas and Birthdays. It's what's inside that should be what you want to keep and I threw mine out when the CU occured. I came back for a free trial and I gave it an honest try. I was quite frankly disgusted, even with creating a new character. The game is rubbish now. I count the days to the SWGEmu being completed so I can play the game I bought.
The worst thing I think, is that SOE say SWG is better now???
"We have beter chracter creation" How the hell can they say so? Its fucking levels and classes, that is the worst thing you can have if you are used to total freedom.
The worst part is yet to come.
I reinstalled SWG today, i had to see again how bad it was
Been Master : Doc, Tera Kasi, Bio Engineer, Ranger, Driod engineer, we had a very cool guild on the Chimaera server, very large city, We were hardcore mmorpg players so didn't fully relied on the gamestory's and made our own fun we even made a few live events that where amazingly followed by many people outside our guild aswell, we encountered many bugs but we still had fun because we where playing/living in a SWG universe. Many of the people i met in pre-cu SWG became (online)friends and still have contact with them but many of them stopped the whole mmorpg game play just because of what SOE had done to SWG.....
Then suddenly a company named Blizzard showed up in the mmorpg world and brought to the public World of Warcraft Online, that game was a nightmare for SOE as they saw Blizzard taking a hugh leap forward to getting people to play their game. And thats the moment SOE thought he' we need to clone WOW into SWG settings cause it seems to be working for Blizzard. SOE started with a what i like to call true mmorpg feeling as a game but had many isseus that had to be fixed and many quest had to be fixed aswell, but instead of fixing things they decided to just ignore it and fully change the game into a sort of Counterstrike for Jedi's online game. I really wanted to become a Jedi, heck thats the reason i started playing the game in the beginning, but it was something to look forward to and it was a rare something to see a Jedi, i remember the day's someone spotted one of the first Jedi's on the server (i think the 1st 2 Jedi's remained about a month or 2 the only Jedi's found on the server) and people hurried to the spot they were seen. Tried the trial to see if it had changed for hte better last juni 2006 had fun at the new starters area but when on the ground first of it was soooooo incridible empty, met someone that told me to follow him to a more crowded place, took of too i think was Tatooine and then i saw like a few people and all of them where jedi's. That make me stop and cancel the trail cause it wasn't anything near that STAR WARS FEEL.
SOE should have fixed pre-cu and i bet it would be on of the top listed mmorpg's out here today
It once was a universe of possibility's, now its just a online game
People that have not been with SWG aslong many of us vets have might really enjoy this game at its current state so everybody thats new to SWG can try it out and judge for themselfs afcourse. You might be the new breed of gamers (sub-wow-culture) and really can have fun with it. But its like you have tasted something very delisious and suddenly you are forced to eat S**T
SOE wont keep me from playing Vangaurd but it will keep me far away from SWG because what they did to THAT game.
Comments
For the most part I agree with this review, but I play on quite a few SWG servers, and only 2 of my toons are cl 80, so I've done the tutorial quests 4 times and they're always exactly the same. Now I'll agree that it was fun the first time through, but I must say, it gets extremely dull once you've gone through it more than once. The real problem is that those quests are the only way to lvl and once you're done with them Mustafar is really the only way to grind, and I personlly haven't gotten the TOW expansion so this means I can't lvl anyomre with any of my toons...I've cancelled my account, and as of Jan 11th I will no longer be able to play, but as bored as I've been I don't think I'll miss it. Part of the joy of the game in the first place was the complexity, and that's all gone. If Galaxies survives I will be thorougly suprised, and personally I'll probably never play a SOE game again.
I'm sure they wont release a pre-CU server
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
Just to remind you Star War Geeks & Nerds who have never had sex! before....
well you have now you got well and truly shafted PERIOD.
Wonder if Any of the DEV's write on there CV's that thay where involved in producing SWG rofl.
I as well as many of the devoted fans of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) have been in constant agony since Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) unexpectedly released the New Game Enhancements (NGE) the middle of November 2005. The Combat Upgrade that was implemented in the spring of 2005 was extremely painful enough but the misery caused by the NGEs is beyond words. The suffering that many of the veterans, including myself, have endured from the changes to this game can almost never be reconciled. The new changes have destroyed everything we have worked so hard to create over the thousands of hours we have invested online.
Therefore I have decided to discontinue my month-to-month subscription for this game that I have loved and enjoyed over the past 13 months. The only way that I can possibly see myself come to enjoy this online game again is if SOE rolls the SWG gaming servers back to a pre-Combat Upgrade status. By doing this I believe that Star Wars Galaxies can regain the richness and diversity that was enjoyed by so many for so long.
I plan to post this on as many internet gaming web sites as possible, including LucasArts, until somebody of importance hears me and understands my frustrations.
The NGE blows!
I will never buy another SOE game again. I was not a big fan of thier EQ model and SWG simply put the torpedo in the water. They screwed the players plain and simple. It almost doesn't matter if you consider the buggy and contentless game in the beginning or the shaft up the yazoo in the end, either way we came up on the short end. I truly truly hope (and I shudder at this) that everyone buys XBox360 and or Microsofts offerings, just to drive the spike into SOE's wallet. Ultimately, we can't bankrupt Smedley, he will have made a fortune in his position, but we simply can stick it to Sony's share of gaming, and the online market.
/flipoff SOE
<--Vet of SWG since launch
pre-CU was great needed work but very nice foundation IMO
CU made the game to generic and ruined many game items(started losing interest but still played after all the time I invested)
NGE ruined the game and the peoples trust, SW needs to be taken from SOE and redone from the ground up from another company IMO.
I live with my wife and her best friend and we cancelled 20+ accounts we had at the start of the NGE in disgust of the mis-management of this game
PIRATE LORDS
I started playing SWG when it first hit Europe and played it every day for about a 10months. I did enjoy it but towards the end of my time the game got silly, with the dupping that went on for awhile and a few other nasty hacks that went on to upset the community, when you started seeing dot pikes doing nasty damage in pvp and killing other players and jedi stupidly real fast it was time to leave.
I went back when they did the combat upgrade and i did like alot the new changes as it forced people to group again like when game first came out but the drop from a 20player group to a 6 player group made it frustrating to get a group going or to join a group so left again.
AFter all we pay our money every month for a months Entertainment, if we dont enjoy it we just spend our money elsewhere for our next months entertainment.
played UO for 5 years (started before trammel) and saw all the changes in that, realy its not much different to what SWG has had done to it, they lose one customer only to get a new one.
Yeah im soft like that
I have to thank mmorpg.com for having the spine to post this editorial, even if I think it is a bit soft in its stance towards the recent actions of SOE and LA in regards to the SWG game.
The changes, whether you like them or hate them, were unwanted by the existing player base -- the CUSTOMERS who had been paying a regular recurring monthly fee to play a game that they bought with every reasonable expectation of being able to play continuously for so long as they paid their monthly fee. It is pointless to debate whether the new game is better or worse than the original. That's fuel for an entirely different conflagaration.
The question, and indeed the single most stated problem with the entire SWG subject, is "how could SOE and LA take away a game people were paying to play and replace it with another, vastly different game?" To take a soft stance on the ethics of the action is foolish to say the least. It is NOT acceptible or ethical business practice, regardless of how supposedly well intentioned the switch was or was not. It is a simple case of "I paid for this specific product and I do not want it replaced with a very different mystery product".
Many compare this fiasco to the old New Coke disaster, but in many ways, it is a very different thing. New Coke was packaged and marketed as a new and different product. There was no deception involved in any stage of its introduction onto the market. Its failure was noted by Coca-Cola Company very quickly and they recovered quickly. Star Wars Galaxies is different in that the product was completely changed and marketed with the exact same product branding. NGE is NOT Star Wars Galaxies as we bought it in any way shape or form. It is packaged (skinned) the same, but it is a completely different game than the one that the majority of consumers bought and paid for. THIS is where the comparisons fail.
Coca-Cola were very forthright about their new product and did not try to sneak anything past its customers. Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts were very sneaky about the new product and refuse to acknowledge that it is an entirely new and different product than that which it formerly sold under the name Star Wars Galaxies. Better or worse notwithstanding, it is not the same product and should not be sold under the same name.
The abuse of customer branding loyalty is aggrivated by their later acknowledgements that they were well aware that the new product would NOT be well recieved by their existing paying customer base and their repeated insistance that they the company know better than what we the consumer base want and require from the products we buy. This is blatantly insulting, adding to the shadiness of the entire switch. In what other market will a company that openly shows contempt for its customers continue to bring in revenue? If you also add the very blatant message from many of SOE and LA's public spokesmen that "we do not value your business, you are expendable in favor of a LONGSHOT GAMBLE on larger market numbers" it becomes very clear that neither company has any interest in providing customer satisfaction of any sort as long as they can find a way to increase their profit numbers through customer churn. Or to put it in easy terms -- they want people to buy and subscribe, but are not willing to put out any effort to make it worth the customer's while to be loyal to their product.
This, more than anything else has turned me from a dedicated customer to both companies' products to an anti-SOE/LA advocate. If they had released the NGE as a seperate product, even if it had replaced the game I was playing eventually, I would have simply continued to play the game I bought and paid for until it closed, then moved on with no lasting ill feelings. I don't hold it against companies that they produce games and products that I don't enjoy. I simply cease to buy them and move along quietly to something I will enjoy more. If a company's product becomes old and loses its appeal for me, but that product was still what I bought and enjoyed over time, I will move on and communicate my satisfaction with both product and company to others. After all, it may just bring hours to years of pleasure to someone who hasn't already worn it out for themselves.
Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts have BOTH earned a very special and very rare status with me in their approach to business with MMOs -- open and agressive activism AGAINST both companies. I do not believe that either company should be allowed to do business in the manner which they have handled Star Wars Galaxies. I view the entire debacle as a deliberate scam on the part of the companies against their customers. I see their actions of the past year as a fully intentional fleecing (and perhaps even defrauding) of the SWG customer base to finance a seperate product that they were fully aware would not be welcome or wanted by those paying for it under the deliberately placed expectation that they would continue to recieve the game they chose to buy in the first place.
This is something that I do not see adressed by any of the writers on the SWG subject, and from my point of view, it is the single most important and signifigant part of the entire thing. I honestly think that both companies are BANKING on this being buried in the furor of veterans complaining that they don't like the new game versus fanbois calling it the best thing since the invention of the PC. I further feel that many gaming sites and other media coverage are playing directly into SOE and LA's hands by overlooking the legality and ethics of the product bait and switch perpetrated in the NGE's rollout in favor of covering what many forums have chewed past death -- which is a matter of preferance rather than a matter of business practice, market and legal precedence and how this "event" will change how the gaming industry treats its customers in the future.
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Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
This game was destroyed. It is cursed in bugs. The promises of changes are lies. A waste of money it is.
Stick to BF2 and KOTOR. Least you won't feel cheated.
I don't have the time to read all 239 previous posts, so I apologize if my post is redundant.
My biggest gripe about the NGE is the way it was developed and announced. Yes, John Smedley has apologized. But apology or no, it was a cheap-shit ploy to wring as much revenue out of Trials of Obi-Wan pre-orders before the mass cancellations they knew the NGE would precipitate.
SOE shouldn't be taken to task for trying to make a more accessible (if not a more fun) game. This is a business, after all, and they have to maximize the return on their investment. And yes, they have the right to change the game, as so many are keen to point out.
But it really rankles me when they attribute the timing of the NGE as a "mistake". Are we to believe that no one at SOE was aware of the likely backlash of such a move? They were completely oblivious to the deceptive nature of the tactic? It was just a random anomaly that the NGE was shrouded in complete secrecy while all other expansions and major patches were anounced well in advance? And it's just coincidence that the concealment of the NGE announcement until after TOOW preorders were finished worked to SOE's financial advantage?
No, this wasn't a mistake. This was quite deliberate. They did a classic bait-and-switch, and hoped that only a small number of people would be angry enough to demand a refund on TOOW. Yes, they can change the game whenever they want, within the strictures of the law. And I think there was a very good case against SOE under any state's deceptive business practices laws. Notice how they didn't offer refunds on TOOW preorders until after the community outrage started to snowball?
If SOE really thought that the NGE was so terrific and the best way to jump-start this game's player base, then they had no need to hide it or wait until after TOOW orders were billed before announcing the changes. Again, a cheap-shit move all around.
And that, above all else, is why I cancelled my subscription. Funny thing is that I like the NGE. It ain;t perfect by a long shot, but I fully support what they were (are) trying to do with it. Even if I wasn't a fan of the NGE, we all knew this could happen at any time. That still doesn't make it OK for SOE to trick us into giving them money for an expansion of game X when they secretly knew they'd be swapping game X out for game Y a few days later.
There was an extreme breach of trust with the NGE. Not just a breach of trust in SOE's stewardship of the game, but more importantly, a breach of trust due to SOE's attempt to swindle us out of our money.
I'll come back to the game, I'm sure. The devs are trying to get things right, and they likely had no hand in this horrible business decision. But I won't be back until SOE has lost more money than they hoped to gain off me through their cheap-shit ploy.
I reviewed the game and I gave it a fair rating. lol, we have no secret agenda with SOE. On the same note, if I were to give it all 3s I guarantee you that I would get a whole bunch of How can you possibly think that you can score this game the way you did and think people are going to take you seriously? but from the opposite playerbase than you.
If I gave it a all 3s or all 2s would you seriously have agreed to the review? Maybe you. But what about others? I think the rating was fair. The final rating was 6.3. Look at the average ratings of mmorpgs. 6.3 isnt the greatest in the world. If I gave the final rating of SWG a 3 I would transcend from a Mmorpg.com reviewer to an upset SWG fan who feels SOE is ripping me off.
And to reinterate....no we do not have some super secret AD deal with SOE. That's hilarious.
honestly i think it deserved 1's after the shiat SOE pulled, like you said in your reviews, the Vet jedi's who spent months-years and 100's of dollars and thousands of hours getting to where they were, and have that all go away, all their work, SOE should roll over in its grave
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
ok i am gonna try for my own review or whatever the hell it is for this game.
My review is a 3 for vets and a 5 for new comers, 3 for vets because of everything they lost and everything they new SWG was before NGE. 5 for Beginners because they practicly dont know how great this game was and they didnt have a jedi they worked on for 13 months.
I didnt start the game the first day like most people, i started in august 2003, i loved the game and the overpacked PVP Anchorhead and Bestine, we led raids on eachother and shit it was sooooooooooo sooooooooooooo great.
CU i didnt mind too much, i did when it came out, but now that i look back on it, they balanced the melee and ranged skills (except jedi). The CU would have been fine i think with all the new armors and new weapons and everything, if they didn't have so MANY BLOODY JEDI, then to see the
jedi crying how the Bounty hunters are too strong and that THEY NEED TO BE NERFED when its really the jedi who needed to be nerfed. If i were to pick between the 25 badges or the hologrinding to get force sensative, i would have chosen the hologrinding because thats when more people played
and there were probaly only 100-200 jedi on the server (not at one time of course), and also actually see some people in the citys was great. Alot of people left during the CU and most people didnt like it, but i remember getting owned by TKMs because i didnt have a stun, a snare, a root, or even a KD.
Also with their Doctor buffs they were invincible, if they had kept the pre CU version in but added all the CU armor and balancing they did and kept the auto shoot i gaurantee most of the people who left might have stayed. In Pre CU SWG was at its peak of popularity, i was a newb for almost most of the
Pre CU but lol i had tons of fun, exploring correllia with a group of friends (on foot) meaning we would have to kill everything we ran into. Or try and avoid everything. Also exploring and meeting scouts with there camps up, with maybe 1-3 people in them and go sit with them and have a good convo
The graphics were great in PRE CU the lag was a little bad considering we didnt have our 256mb video cars out yet and what not. The NGE brought nothing but the end of SWG unless they change it fast. I hear people talking about how great it is, then i ask em "how long have you played SWG?"
Then i would get a responce somewhere towards the beginning of NGE. The NGE is not a good Development in SWG, and the developers were not very bright to bring this upon their customers, atleast in CU people who worked hard for their jedi got to keep them and the perks that came with
before the NGE. Now when people hear STAR WARS they instantly think JEDI!!!! but star wars isnt all jedi, this game showed people what star wars really was, it showed them the creature handlers, the business skills (crafting) entertainers, bounty hunters, and you could decide what kind of weapon you want to specialize in(pistoleer,rifleman,swordsman,pikeman). This game was unique
It had 24-26 professions (i frget) and you had the freedom of makeing your own awsome template and advertising your shop on a different planet and ect. In NGE it took away that freedom and replaced it with skills based on star war's characters....... SWG IS NOT STAR WARS if SWG
was STAR WARS then there would be nothing but jedi, there would only different types of jedi. Now SOE and LA wanted to make SWG more "star warsy" but what they didnt know, underneath all their bugs and not yet developed armors and ect, THER IT WAS !!!!! (music in the background) STAR WARS
if they had just fixed thee problems and kept doing what they were doing with bringing more and more armor and different weapons into the game, it would have been STAR WARS!!! Everyone had there own style of playing their templates in PRE CU, like i thought pistoleer/BH was the best ever for killing
but anyways im rambling. I had 15 good friends in the CU, and i came back to see what the NGE was like, and theed was empty, and so was mos eisley, my (medium populated server) was empty (before mustafar) and i saw someone i used to know and asked him if anyone still played and he told me that
Everyone quit when the NGE came out. Now your trying to say that the NGE was good for SWG!?!? there used to be 400k players playing, now there is only 50k-100k players, after NGE. As for the "loyal SWG people" there are none who are still playing and have started in beta/the start of the game
If there are YOU ARE STUPID. There is no more SWG, there is only Runescape Sci-fi edition. As rob said with the gameplay and shooting mobs, the combat system is shit, there are no such thing as macros. You now have to click the macro and double click the baby nuna (that was real fun). It took
me 5 minutes to kill a nuna with the laggy atmospher and haveing to double clik it to attack it. as for the fun of the game...... well it wasnt fun spending 5 minutes killing a nuna.... community sucks, medium in that game means 100 people. Roleplaying, i did a little and it was fun, but its dead
now that NGE is here. OVERALL they need to shut the game down and let a real company redesign the game or make the sequal, and not let SOE ANYWHERE NEAR IT. yeah they tried to make it "better" it was a risk. a risk that didnt work and now they are probaly losing money due to the lack of
players and keeping it running. If they did make a classic server (pre CU) i would be bak in a heartbeat, but if i smell any NGE on it i will never trust SOE and not go near any of there products. Right now im waiting for huxley, it looks promising.
OVERALL RATING------3.8
playerbase----4
roleplaying----3
fun----2
graphics---7
Value----1
sound----5
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
While I think the reviewer was eloquent in his review I think he was overly generous with his scores for community, performance, and customer service.
Giving a 6 to customer service for fast canned responses is in my opinion like tipping a waitress for getting you the wrong order quickly. Yeah she got it to you fast and piping hot but it's still not what you ordered and therefore very poor service.
Performance is also sub par. Lag, even on a high end gamer machine, in PVP areas is occuring at an unacceptable level.
Finally if you can still find a veteran in game you will see, I am sure, what the community used to be. However these days you are much more likely to run into smack talking juveniles that SOE has targetted with the NGE either being disrespectful or begging for items.
I will give them the graphics and the sound, but that is all it has. It's pretty but wrapping paper is what gets thrown out at Christmas and Birthdays. It's what's inside that should be what you want to keep and I threw mine out when the CU occured. I came back for a free trial and I gave it an honest try. I was quite frankly disgusted, even with creating a new character. The game is rubbish now. I count the days to the SWGEmu being completed so I can play the game I bought.
*edited for poor spelling*
The worst thing I think, is that SOE say SWG is better now???
"We have beter chracter creation" How the hell can they say so? Its fucking levels and classes, that is the worst thing you can have if you are used to total freedom.
The worst part is yet to come.
I reinstalled SWG today, i had to see again how bad it was
Been Master : Doc, Tera Kasi, Bio Engineer, Ranger, Driod engineer, we had a very cool guild on the Chimaera server, very large city, We were hardcore mmorpg players so didn't fully relied on the gamestory's and made our own fun we even made a few live events that where amazingly followed by many people outside our guild aswell, we encountered many bugs but we still had fun because we where playing/living in a SWG universe. Many of the people i met in pre-cu SWG became (online)friends and still have contact with them but many of them stopped the whole mmorpg game play just because of what SOE had done to SWG.....
Then suddenly a company named Blizzard showed up in the mmorpg world and brought to the public World of Warcraft Online, that game was a nightmare for SOE as they saw Blizzard taking a hugh leap forward to getting people to play their game. And thats the moment SOE thought he' we need to clone WOW into SWG settings cause it seems to be working for Blizzard. SOE started with a what i like to call true mmorpg feeling as a game but had many isseus that had to be fixed and many quest had to be fixed aswell, but instead of fixing things they decided to just ignore it and fully change the game into a sort of Counterstrike for Jedi's online game. I really wanted to become a Jedi, heck thats the reason i started playing the game in the beginning, but it was something to look forward to and it was a rare something to see a Jedi, i remember the day's someone spotted one of the first Jedi's on the server (i think the 1st 2 Jedi's remained about a month or 2 the only Jedi's found on the server) and people hurried to the spot they were seen. Tried the trial to see if it had changed for hte better last juni 2006 had fun at the new starters area but when on the ground first of it was soooooo incridible empty, met someone that told me to follow him to a more crowded place, took of too i think was Tatooine and then i saw like a few people and all of them where jedi's. That make me stop and cancel the trail cause it wasn't anything near that STAR WARS FEEL.
SOE should have fixed pre-cu and i bet it would be on of the top listed mmorpg's out here today
It once was a universe of possibility's, now its just a online game
People that have not been with SWG aslong many of us vets have might really enjoy this game at its current state so everybody thats new to SWG can try it out and judge for themselfs afcourse. You might be the new breed of gamers (sub-wow-culture) and really can have fun with it. But its like you have tasted something very delisious and suddenly you are forced to eat S**T
SOE wont keep me from playing Vangaurd but it will keep me far away from SWG because what they did to THAT game.