Massively^™

"Ironically, the real problem was almost certainly not the changes themselves. As a player of the game today can tell you, the title is almost certainly better off for the firestorm of change that the NGE introduced. Players began to leave not because of the changes themselves but because of the enormous pile of bugs and inconsistencies they introduced"

Sorry to detract from an otherwise great feature but this kind of stopped me in my tracks.

You're trying to say that the problem with the NGE was not the changes? Im sorry but i've never heard a more ridiculous comment regarding SWG before.

Almost all the population logged in one day with their professions deleted, ill repeat that again DELETED. These professions that players had spent upwards of 2 years getting to know and used to. Armour and weapons that cost millions of credits and countless hours to attain suddenly became average. PvP and hunting parties were presented with a totally new games to try and get used to and expected to just forget all the time and effort they had invested in getting where they were. Players logged in to find that this great character they had shaped and developed to play the end game content was suddenly beaten to death with the biggest nerf bat ever wielded. And no it wasnt extra content that required them to get better at playing or 'level up' more. It was that they had been knocked back not even able to take the stuff they had become so used to fighting.

The fact is people had much more reason to quit because of the changes than they did about the bugs. Its why as soon as the NGE hit the population just plummeted visually in game. Blame the bugs? Sure. But state that it wasnt the changes that made people quit is completely ignorant to what really happened.

You perfectly destroyed this feature when you said: "as a player of the game today....". This is just it. You are a minority, like it or not. I dont mind anyone playing any game as long as they like it, but SOE lost out because they changed the game for the worse. Bugs or no bugs people left because they didnt like the way the game went and prefered it the old way. SWG will never get away from that regardless of how much they want to change now.

A classic server would go a long way to getting numbers back up but it kind of proves my point.

Anyway, i read this blog everyday and this feature has just disappointed me. As a past correspondent and long time player i can tell you that people did quit because of the changes, long before people noticed the bugs. The bugs were just the final nail in the coffin.

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"Ironically, the real problem was almost certainly not the changes themselves. As a player of the game today can tell you, the title is almost certainly better off for the firestorm of change that the NGE introduced. Players began to leave not because of the changes themselves but because of the enormous pile of bugs and inconsistencies they introduced"

Sorry to detract from an otherwise great feature but this kind of stopped me in my tracks.

You're trying to say that the problem with the NGE was not the changes? Im sorry but i've never heard a more ridiculous comment regarding SWG before.

Almost all the population logged in one day with their professions deleted, ill repeat that again DELETED. These professions that players had spent upwards of 2 years getting to know and used to. Armour and weapons that cost millions of credits and countless hours to attain suddenly became average. PvP and hunting parties were presented with a totally new games to try and get used to and expected to just forget all the time and effort they had invested in getting where they were. Players logged in to find that this great character they had shaped and developed to play the end game content was suddenly beaten to death with the biggest nerf bat ever wielded. And no it wasnt extra content that required them to get better at playing or 'level up' more. It was that they had been knocked back not even able to take the stuff they had become so used to fighting.

The fact is people had much more reason to quit because of the changes than they did about the bugs. Its why as soon as the NGE hit the population just plummeted visually in game. Blame the bugs? Sure. But state that it wasnt the changes that made people quit is completely ignorant to what really happened.

You perfectly destroyed this feature when you said: "as a player of the game today....". This is just it. You are a minority, like it or not. I dont mind anyone playing any game as long as they like it, but SOE lost out because they changed the game for the worse. Bugs or no bugs people left because they didnt like the way the game went and prefered it the old way. SWG will never get away from that regardless of how much they want to change now.

A classic server would go a long way to getting numbers back up but it kind of proves my point.

Anyway, i read this blog everyday and this feature has just disappointed me. As a past correspondent and long time player i can tell you that people did quit because of the changes, long before people noticed the bugs. The bugs were just the final nail in the coffin.

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In all honesty... how do you mess up the Star Wars Universe? You have a ready made fan base of millions. Executives must look at WoW and want to commit suicide. SWG should have had 10 million subscribers at least.

They should do the right thing and put the nail in the coffin of SWG and just start over. It's over.

There's still a change to make a great Star Wars MMO, but SWG is never gonna be it. SCRAP IT.

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I was a long long time player of SWG. I have to agree with Owen-Lars. If the bugs were the reason why people quit SWG then they would have quit a year earlier. I played from launch until just a few months ago and bugs were rife through the game the entire time I played.

What made SWG special was the ability to create your perfect character with the profs just the way you wanted them.

The NGE came along and dumbed the game down to the point were pretty much all the classes are pretty much the same. Not only they they just deleted creature handler which was just about the most beloved class in the game.

I will agree with a comment that says that the game 'today' is much better then the day after release BUT saying the game today is better then pre-NGE is just not true. The proof is in the numbers. The game is dying - there are only two servers that have any kind of decent population with all the others being ghost towns.

I had done everything there was to do in that game - I was a VERY successful crafter, I made Jedi, I did all of the content. I played from release, through the CU through the NGE.

I probably would have still played until they destroyed the small servers with Chapter 6.

The greatness that was a UNIQUE MMO is gone, SWG is has NONE of its former glory and the proof is in the fact that they lost 90% of their players.

I agree with Owen-Lars that if they put in a "Classic" server they would draw ALOT of people back, but SoE is notorious for not admitting their mistakes so I doubt that would ever happen.

To sum up though I would have to respectfully disagree with you about the game now being better then pre-NGE.... there is nothing special or unique about it now. It is a Sci-Fi dumbed down WoW clone unfortunately.

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It wasn't the bugs that made everyone leave. 90% of the population doesn't walk away after over a year simply because of additional bugs (though the game is still MUCH buggier than it was at launch).

We left because it became really, really bad. And to say that the community is as strong as before is a little misleading. There's not hundreds of thousands of players, as there was in the past. Most cities on most servers have less than ten players in them. And there's no interdependency left in the world.

And... why am I even debating this? It's old, it's an SOE game, it's so buggy its essentially broken, nearly all of the developers left, and the Matrix Online has higher server populations. I can't imagine anyone being able to paint the game's situation in a positive light.

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Obviously you didn't ask anyone that actually played the game through all of these changes and left. The NGE gutted the game. It removed all of the character interdependence and most of the professions. Those were not bugs, those were design changes that made the game un-fun.

That is why everyone left. Do your homework next time.

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Are you frikkin kidding me?? Bugs????

I left because MY game was Taken from me you moron!!

Bug?? I couldnt give a dam about bugs! My game was Replaced with a bastardized versoin of another game.

Bugs??? Are you really being paid enough to weather this storm?

Massively, just shut down now and forgo the inevitable.

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Star Wars Galaxies, pre-CU, was not a game. It was a simulation, and one with the potential to be everything that every Star Wars fan who grew up on the original trilogy could have possibly wanted. Everything done within the simulation was a mini-game, but brilliantly architected. It all fit together; everything and everyone complemented each other. Now? It's just a game, and a poor one at that. It may be better than what came out on November 15th, 2005, but that isn't hard to do.

Saying that the bugs made everyone quit SWG is like saying seasickness made everyone want to get off the Titanic. SOE and LA destroyed every character's accomplishment since the day they started playing. The only ones who left due to bugs and/or inconsistencies were some of the players who started playing during the CU.

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"Ironically, the real problem was almost certainly not the changes themselves. As a player of the game today can tell you, the title is almost certainly better off for the firestorm of change that the NGE introduced. Players began to leave not because of the changes themselves but because of the enormous pile of bugs and inconsistencies they introduced."

This sounds like something I'd expect to hear from a Sony PR guy... 'It wasn't the NGE, it was the timing!', 'It wasn't the NGE, it was our communication!', 'It wasn't the NGE, it was the bugs!'.

Clearly, bugs were present in SWG the entire time. The issue with the NGE and to a lesser extent, the CU, was the dumbing down of the game and the destruction of a virtual world to make room for a commonplace shallow game environment. I mean really, what wouldn't pale in comparison to removing depth and player accomplishments from an MMORPG?

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So how much did they pay you? Or maybe you got the 1 player per hour "badge" for free eh?
Cuz I did not leave my post because of bugs, no sir, I left because they stole everything I had been worked for and enjoyed in the galaxy.

And guess what, so did over 100 of my fellow troopers. Our whole Detachment left the galaxy, because they stole everything, not because we couldnt fire our guns cuz of a code error.

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The point is not 'what' changes were made...but that such wholescales changes were made to a system which people had spent two years playing. It would be like WoW removing the horde and alliance and just having one faction......

SWG was visionary and ahead of it's time in some ways...in fact there still isn't a game with the social and community side of it, which is an absolutely crying shame.

I still remember to this day creating a nooby medic and sitting in Mos Eisley healing people and getting tips. Just letting the players do whatever....I also then created a fencer/smuggler combo which let me tailor my character to a completly unique way.....

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You have got to be joking about people quitting due to bugs caused by the NGE right?

I think you will find that 200k subscribers actually quit due to the NGE itself, the loss of all the proffessions and the horrible fps type combat alone was the main reason for most people quitting.

The dishonest way $OE went about it also did not help their cause as you can see over 2 years later and people have not forgotten and from what I hear the game is a dead buggy mess still.

$OE you reap what you sow!

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Is that you Smedley???

What a piece of revisionist history.

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Just thought I'd point out that according to Dan Rubenfield subscriptions during the CU were falling-at the rate of 10k a month-not rising, as per your article.

http://rubenfield.com/?p=86

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I left because SOE deleted most of the classes and changed the combat into some pathetic FPS-wannabe-crap! Not the damn bugs.

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I left because of the changes and everyone I know who played the game before the NGE left because of the changes. Just FYI.

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I'm sure a lot of ex-SWG players will come in and say how it was the NGE was the total fault of everything and drove the population away. However, if you look at what one of the people who put the NGE in place says (http://rubenfield.com/?p=86), the reason it was done was because SWG was already losing 10k subs a month. NGE didn't come in because SWG was successful - if SWG had been as good as those most involved in it remember, it would have attracted enough players in that such a change wouldn't have been contemplated.

NGE did make SWG a better MMO as a (proposed) game experience. But the implementation was awful - 2 weeks notice on untested content - and it drove away those players who liked the old game. All the bugs the NGE introduced then stopped any players actually enjoying the experience, so few new players came on board.

SWG should have been hugely successful. The fact that it flopped to 200k players or less prior to NGE tells me the original game was horribly flawed. But it took something like the NGE to show that you can't radically change what content / systems you launch a MMO with. You are what you are at launch.

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