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True Tears on the SWG Forum
zipit
Member Posts: 487
The following is a complete extract from a thread created by RobbHood who laments the terrible times the NGE has cast upon the SWG community.
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my groups Planet Side testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to here the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains ands the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went hot hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in a camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few new I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more Star Warsy scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didnt have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPCs could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time o be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc
The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friends lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours
and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storms End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friends list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
Comments
Thalos Vipav
Star Wars Galaxies: R.I.P.
ya that's kind of a necro post that's made its way back to the surface. A really good thread nonetheless.
I like that even some NGE fanbois have responded with things like, "That sounds like the game I wanna play".
Lol. Kudos to the OP!
and here is the response of the devs / managment...
<Insert cricket sound here>
Having access to a billion $ IP - Billions of dollars..
Having access to a massive fan base of said IP - Even more Billons...
Singly handedly alienating them due to stupidity - Priceless.
to the op ----->
I sleep with a pillow under my gun.
/kowtow
You want loot? Go kill some npcs, you wanna visit hades? come find ME, and dont forget to bring coins for the ferryman,
Probably the best post I've ever read on SWG preCU. All the vets loved it because of the open-ness, the individuality, the community, and the overall unique game play SWG had to offer. Sure there were problems with the old system: profession imbalances, hologrinders, bugs, content, and whatever else the current players point out. Simply put, the pro's outweighed the con's, and by a much larger margin than the NGE does.
Imbalances vs Restriction: I for one, along with the strong majority of disgruntled vets, would pick imbalance in a second. I was just fine not being the strongest on the battlefield, and in fact since I started during pub6, I never earned a mastery badge until the fourth month of the CU. I loved the freedom to make and remake my character exactly the way I wanted, and dabbling in over half a dozen professions suited the way I wanted to play. Many characters didn't want to be "teh ub3r l33t pwnzl0rd" and the ones who did could grab the FOTM profession whenever they wanted.
Hologrinders vs Jeedai: All right, hologrinders where probably the worst thing about preCU, but it at least ensured profession diversity, even if it was temporary and misguided. Some people started their hologrind, but then found something they particularly liked and put it off for a while. I still prefer the sense of community, no matter how forced/artificial hologrinders provided over all the little kids and their goldfish whining about how they have to play for a whole hour or three to earn their glowbat.
Bugs: Yes preCU had them, yes the NGE fixed some, but the NGE brought many, many more bugs with it than the number of bugs it fixed. It's the same problem, just in a different form now.
Buffs/Armor: This could've been an easy fix. Readjust the formula for buffs, and allow armor to be created where the protection stats are independent of the skin, similar to the fix implemented with armor in the CU.
Content: Players created their own content. The SWG world allowed for so much player immersion that people used the foundation of what was provided, and put forth a little bit of effort to make the greatest MMO game play (even currently) worthwhile. Now, players are held by the hand and fenced into a path that's been walked by thousands of other people, and doing the same thing over and over again to get to a communal ending spot that's not nearly as fulfilling as choosing your own destiny.
The community and player interdependence along with the Theme Parks, battlefield PvP, and cantina RPing all contributed to the Star Warsy atmosphere, giving players a kind of, "Hey, this is what's going on behind the scenes." feeling. You knew it was Star Warsy, and if you wanted to be 'Star Warsy-er' you had to go out and work at it just as hard as the characters in the movies.
RobbHood, this was a great post that definitely brought up some old memories. I'd easily pay double, even to SOE, to get that old feeling I had when playing preCU. Back then there was so much to do that I never got bored. The first time I ever felt like I was logging on for the sake of logging on was after I had adjusted to the CU, and had just heard about the NGE. Needless to say I cancelled shortly after that and check back every once in a while on a free trial on the hopes that this game may undergo some sort of devolution. It's no wonder why the old SWG catchphrase, "Now, live the greatest Star Wars saga ever told... yours." is no longer hammered as hard as it used to be. I didn't want to be Han, Chewie, Luke, or Lando. I was content being the standoffish guy in the back of the cantina, or the lance corporal who's stuck in the trenches, or that one guy you see in the background of Cloud City for almost half a second, or the pilot who had to bug out just before the space battles got to 'iconic' proportions. The people who wanted to be heroes had to earn that status, but when they did, they made a name for themselves and were known across the server (sometimes even into other servers.) I do miss the old days, and would greedily take them back just as greedily as they were taken from me, but I don't wish our situation upon the current player base in spite of how much I don't think they deserve it.
Thank god this thread has so much reading, it keeps out the whiny, fanatical NGE lemmi-... target audience.
-Edit- If someone can post this up in that thread, it would be appreciated, for some reason my computer won't let me.
Je mettrai l'amour sur dos de moi.
That was the game That we loved so much. Nothing else comes even close.
wow... i gotta say that deserves a /salute for that one
well thought out and well written.
$OE i hope you're proud of what you've done to your game.
"And after blizzard takes over the world, they are gonna gather a bunch of lemmings, sit on their fat asses near a cliff, and watch the little fuzzy bastards suicide dive into the ground below. . . . . all just for their own entertainment."
To RobbHood ......
/deepbow Thanks for reminding me of the "good times".
Now I wander off and cry in solitude wondering what kind of a freakin' moron would want to change such a great game .....
Can you imagine being a n00b to SWG now? ... Looking at all the EMPTY servers while seeing the TENS of THOUSANDS of vacant and empty houses and player cities? Knowing that they existed during a time when Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people played the game.
I mean really ...... just imagine ... you are a brand new player to SWG. You log in, don't see many people around, then in your travels you see the thousands upon thousands of houses EVERYWHERE.
My first question would be ..... W(What)TH happened to this game? W(Where)TH are all the people that lived in and used these buildings.
Dam I miss that game
Yep......
It was the most open ended do whatever the hell you want without restrictions game I ever played. God I miss those days. We were a band of merry murdering S.O.B s and we loved every second of it.
Critical thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture.
And here you have the real side of the NGE and it's destruction... we all have these stories, I know I do.
And yet some NGEr that got his free Jedi and is now able to rule in the land of the blind because he has some insight or bonuses that he never had before will claim the game is fine....
Utter bullshit.
What is left is the people that did not do well, did not make it big previously, could not handle the hard game and failed at getting Jedi.
All 5% of them now have the chance to get and do all of this with little to no effort.
Outstanding.... you won...the NGErs can rejoice, all 15,000 of them tops... you won... nothing. There was nothing hard... nothing complex, nothing with a challenge, nothing with a thought provoking concept to keep you up at night wondering about it, no issues, no worries, no decay, no loss, nothing to gain that someone else cannot in a matter of hours.... Yes the NGEr has won it all.
In a way, it is good to see people like JemyM, MsNhil get thier PvE care free Jedi -- it is good to see the result of what they wanted and what it did to Jedi and the game.... as proof of the bad idea they had...
It is good to see Helios and Rouge_5 fail at the NGE and make us all aware of what can happen when morons are put in charge.
It is good to see someone like Chris Chao say the things he did and be shunned from the gaming community and Dev community as well.
It is good to see a President of a company, Producers of a company see the bottom line known as the dollar fall to the ground due to some bad choices made and now regreted.
It is good to see what FAILURE is that we all warned them about, begged them not to do and tried so very hard to stop.
It is good to know that you were right in the choices made for leaving the game to prove that you and hundreds of thousands of people agreed with your concept and idea of what should have been a better game.
It is good to have dialog and be able to see that some people will forgive, accept, buy into, allow themselves to be walked on, lied to, sold a bag of goods, trust anything said and accept a sub-par product like this.
Why?
To learn what NOT to be like DO or ever invest into.
If anything people learned alot from this mess.
______________________________
I usually picture the Career builder commercial with the room full of monkeys and upside down sales chart when thinking about the SOE/SWG decision making process.....
SOE's John Blakely and Todd Fiala issued a warning: "Don't make our mistakes." Ref NGE
Winner of the worst MMOS goes to.... the NGE and SWG..!!! http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=1034&bhcp=1
/middlefinger to the NGE.
John Smedley beat up my grandmother.
----------
"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
---------------------------------------------
Don't click here...no2
Truly a great story...
/Kowtow
SWTOR. Face it, in the Scooby Doo Mystery Solving Van of coolness, this game is Velma. In this current MMO climate it has about as much chance for survival as a group of inquisitive teenagers in a 1980s slasher flick. -Tardcore May, 2011
And as for the likes of JemyM and MsNil... well I've always held them in contempt. They just don't get it -- and they are everything I dislike about the NGE community. Reading their posts is like listening to a Trekkie try to convince an engineering and physics PHD Star Wars fan that Imperial tech is primitive and inferior to Federation tech. You might come away laughing if your head doesn't spontaneously reboot.
The most challenging things about SWG are trying to figure out why I still pay for it and finding folks with enough firing braincells to RP with. The only reason this game is still standing is that they have the single most universally appealing addictive franchise to have ever been concieved.
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
I'm going to post my story/rant here. Kept it shortish.
STORY FIRST
I was part of a close knit community. We had cities, we had a group of
100 strong, we had fun. Some of them I would consider to be my best
friends at the time. As nerdy as it sounds, at one point I had more of
a connection with my crew then my school friends. The game just had
such an amazing world for people to meet. If it wasn't for SWG, I
wouldn't be interested in computers, I wouldn't have learned C++ and I
wouldn't have been interested in game development. This game gave me a
career goal, and a helluva fun time. This was the best time in a video
game I ever had.
When NGE came out, it was a
disaster. I lasted exactly 2 months after NGE, many lasted less. Our
guild went from 110ish to 34 when I left, and those were die hard
players. The cantina's were the last refuge for SWGers. About 90% of my
last month was just chilling in a cantina. They killed the game but
it's inhabitants just didn't want to let go. From what I hear now even
those are deserted. With all the deserters I lost all my e-friends. The
jedi whom I worshipped, my battalion who died constantly but had fun
doing it, and the half dozen noobs I brought up to become brother hell
raizers. I had them on AIM for a while but eventually we just lost all
contact. I really miss those guys. I almost get a tear to my eye when I
look at the SWG box I have in my closet, remebering the time when I
stared at the horizon of a new land with my new friends, laughing about
the huge beast mobs that killed most of us off.
I know that all sounds amazingly nerdy, but I'm sure a lot of the vets know what I'm talking about.
RANT ABOUT THE GAME
I honestly beleive that if there were no changes to this game, EVE
wouldn't be as orgasmicly successful, and maybe even WoW wouldn't. The
game had what it took to stand the test of time. To become a wonder of
the video game world along with mario and final fantasy (among others).
I look upon modern MMOs with sort of a saddenned mood. I tasted SWG
perfectly grilled steak in a four star restraunt, and I'm now eating
WoW burgers and the little shits at the table across from me are being
annoying. I look at MMOs in production and none of them look appealing.
None. Zero. There's no hope for me getting pure enjoyment out of a MMO
within the next few years. The closest I get is www.atitd.com . It's
like SWG's little brother with down syndrome.
TOKEN RANT ABOUT SONY
$OE caused a huge trainwreck and I hope their railway suffers.
Sony as a whole is heading to an early grave because they are money
whores. UMDs are screwing up, PSP did not get as many sales as they
would like, their CD players are getting raped by apple, they are
having an advertising nightmare with the PS3 (let's put console quality
aside, PS3 marketing is crap) which is showing them to lose the next
console war. They had huge layoffs and their stock is going to look
like an elderly phallus in a decade because of their disconnect to the
consumer. All this set in motion because they wanted to radically
change a game so that it would supposedly appeal to more people. Change
your ways or rot in hell, sony.
In
closing, $OE destroyed a lot of fun for me. They kicked down my
sandcastle. While I'm not as eloquent as the OPost, I share the same
feelings.
And as for the likes of JemyM and MsNil... well I've always held them in contempt. They just don't get it -- and they are everything I dislike about the NGE community. Reading their posts is like listening to a Trekkie try to convince an engineering and physics PHD Star Wars fan that Imperial tech is primitive and inferior to Federation tech. You might come away laughing if your head doesn't spontaneously reboot.
The most challenging things about SWG are trying to figure out why I still pay for it and finding folks with enough firing braincells to RP with. The only reason this game is still standing is that they have the single most universally appealing addictive franchise to have ever been concieved.
Oh no... I do think they learned from this. With the comments made at the game conference in Austin -- I think they went out on a limb saying the NGE was a mistake, then with Mr. Smedley sending me a email saying the same, then other people here as to back up my statements (Again thanks for that) --- that there is no doubt they did learn from it.
The sad part is they cannot go back now... they just can't. Not only is the code screwed, but now you have players that think they should be able to keep what is there much like us. If they were to try to change the game again, it would fold and just be worse then what it is somehow.
In the end this game is done, it will not be rode out and die. This is not worth the investment, time or money as you can see SOE has done, from the E3 show to all the expansions and large Dev team.
If the game had promise or was a success then I could see some love, but now... naa, it's done. Raph, Freeman, Smedley all have made comments as such that they are now on other projects.. Raph freaking jumped ship! I mean how bad is it that the creator of somthing leaves it to die?? lol.... that is sad.
The games engine is over 6 years old now. It was a great game in it's day and the playerbase tells you this... if it had been polished and they made good on the promises made then maybe we would be discussing the next expansion instead of how fast the game will die or should.
Bottom line this is a businss, this last stunt failed. This was a huge loss and giant failure, they know it trust me.
When a company division loses 450.00 US a year from each person that is equal to 30 million, they see it... don't worry.
There is some finger pointing now, but don't worry -- this ship as it sinks will see alot more of that soon enough.
Freeman started to flame, Raph already did this... Hell the games producers came out in public and stated it was a mistake and like the titanic -- with references. (Not a opinion - fact)... SO with all of this said, it is now only a matter of time.
I do like watching the NGErs though, it is funny to see them hold on and try to validate thier game or ideas as it crumbles around them.
Whatever you do, don't tell anyone you played this game...lol you do get some funny reactions to the rest of the gaming community.
______________________________
I usually picture the Career builder commercial with the room full of monkeys and upside down sales chart when thinking about the SOE/SWG decision making process.....
SOE's John Blakely and Todd Fiala issued a warning: "Don't make our mistakes." Ref NGE
Winner of the worst MMOS goes to.... the NGE and SWG..!!! http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=1034&bhcp=1