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THe CU and NGE in Star Wars Galaxies question??
Gintoh
Member UncommonPosts: 329
So, I have never played SWG, before the changes or since. However it sounds great. I was just wondering, everyone hates the changes and I think SOE even admitted it was a huge mistake. Now they have like a 7k player base I heard compared to there original 200k or something.
So why can't they just change everything back?
Comments
You'll find your answers in the SWG section, found here: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/category/103
Why would they do that?
The question you will never know the answer is if the game changes were the cause or consequence of population decline.
No No No No, this is to everyone on THIS board who always talks about it.
I think the loss of pop. was b/c of NGE, I heard everyone hated it and left en masse and stuff.
They said when they switched to NGE they erased precu. /shrug
Pesonally I think it was just another lie.
the game was already in serious decline prior to the nge/cu. it just nudged it along a little quicker.
Once the NGE failed. They tried to turn SWG into a small cash cow to feed off the franchises popularity.
LucasArts still believed in the NGE though, so they hired Bioware to take the idea and build the NGE from the ground up.
So you have SWTOR.
The old SWG was a game model that failed because of pressure from the success of World of Warcraft. Sandbox games failed.
SWG failed because of a lack of leadership and identity.. There were too many chefs in the kitchen as the saying goes..
Macro'ing everything killed it..
TEF's killed it..
Broken missions killed it..
Broken nest killed it..
Holocron grinding killed it..
There was just a number of problems addressed by the community to the profession forum guides that just simply went "IGNORED" I honestly to this date don't understand how or why SWG failed.. Everything that needed to be done to fix it was right in front of them in the profession forums..
It was a beautiful sandbox PvE game with some themeparking that went unpoliced.. It was as if the devs had blinders on and refused to listen to what the community was saying.. Tis a shame..
Speaking for myself, I was a Creature Handler.
I used to love exploring, find new species to tame, and also as a ranger to set up camps in the wilderness where adventurers would come in by after seeing the campfire, to relax and speak. And the occasional trip to sell tamed pets to other players, etc.
I've seen games where classes would receive huge bat nerfs. But how come a company can decide to completely remove what was the core essence of my toon, and... fun.
So, I quit.
Too bad, SWG was one of the few games where social interactions were based on cooperating for mutual interests. We had a whole town, shops, personal vehicles and guards, etc.
The simple answer is SWTOR. That is the game that Lucas Arts wanted... and SOE tried to make SWG into it...
After you make a mistake that monumental, there is no going back.
Yes, but ones they realized that this idea failed ones it released and everyone was leaving, wouldn't it be a smart buisness move by changing it back? If the goal was to make money, which is why they did the NGE, wouldn't it be a good idea according to those interests to undo it. I'm not sure I get it.
I understand the changes they made. My question that I couldn't find the answer to is why didn't they just change it back when everyone hated it?
This is a "poetic" way of saying it, the NGE ain't all that much like TOR from what I've seen. Even though you are pretty much spot on with everything you say.
SWG probably had a nice core of 100k gamers who would have never left that game but for years it was bleeding subs because of the things they couldn't fix and the newer mmorpgs that atleast worked for the most part. Sandbox regardless of what people say was never going to get them the subscriber base they (Lucas) wanted after seeing the money that could be made with an mmo, I suspect it's the only reason the original sandbox was made anyway SOE presented projections based on subs numbers the industry was seeing and the whole bubble burst when wow came on the scene.
Leading up to WOW I was still playing SWG and remember many,many of my friends leaving SWG for WOW or FF mmo and most of us had no knowledge of the NGE (the CU had gone through already though) even though the hardcore people and testers and such were already making some noise about what they were about to do, most of us really didn't have a clue or care since they were leaving anyway.
Supposedly the old game was erased, I could see that for sure the suits were probably so mad after getting chewed a new one by lucas they just let it roll down hill until it landed in the right lap.
The one thing I can say though is I'm glad I had broken my attachment to the game before they erased my class (creature handler) I would probably be walking around calling myself a disgruntled vet too if that had happened.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I've always felt that it was Lucas Arts behind NGE - it really makes no sense for SWG to have done it since they had just finished the CU and put out an expansion. I honestly think that Lucas Arts didn't like creature handler or bioengineer and for that matter didn't particularly like the emphasis on crafting.
Why the CU and NGE?
I think the answers simply lay in this article...
http://www.ianbrooks.com/useful-ideas/articles_whitepapers/200904Sony%20ROI_on%20Customer%20Service.pdf
SOE outsourced their customer service and needed to streamline SWG into a simplified product that falls under an umbrella of generic games.
*My appologies. I believe this is a CS platform and not outsourcing.
One of my mains was a creature handler/gunfighter. So yeah, losing your entire profession kinda sucks. For those of us who loved our pets, it was very sad. My favorites weren't even the ones I used for combat.
Traditionally in MMORPGs, there are complaints if the devs don't update / patch much.
SOE was doing that with SWG but they were the absolutely wrong kind, the worst you can do. Before the NGE, I do remember some of the guys leaving because SOE wasn't fixing some long nagging issues. You bug reported it. You post it in the forums just to make sure it just wasn't you. People agree and they also did the same bug reports. But issues weren't getting fixed.
And then you see them roll out the CU and NGE and wonder, "WTF are they thinking?" All that work in completely redoing core gameplay to unrecognizeable forms. Especially the NGE. The CU at least maintained resemblance to the previous gameplay. We still had Skillpoint / Template System. People still got into frequent, long lasting groups. Crafters, Merchants, Entertainers were still essential to the community. But the NGE completely gutted everything.
The term "Disembowelment" for an MMORPG comes to mind.
Like I said earlier, instead of fixing the original game system and adding more onto it, they gutted it in a vain attempt on replacing it with a bad, cheap knockoff trying to be WoW.
Like a radio commercial I heard about cheap knockoffs: "Umm... Rolex has one X, not two."
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
THIS is the present danger for Players. Just like SOE didn't care about it's customers of SWG, neither will Bioware be allowed to care about SW:TOR's customers... because SOE answers to someone else and so too does Bioware... because the same evil genius is behind the scenes in both cases....
Lucas Arts. It's LA that I watch out for and avoid. SOE was played like a tool back then. Bioware will be the tool this time.
That's why as a Star Wars Fan I didn't jump head first on the SW:TOR bandwagon. If it's customers vs. Lucas Arts, LA will win. SW:TOR will end up being an even bigger mess than SWG was ... you wait and see. Not right away of course, it will take time for LA to mess this one up (Bioware will fight them), but LA will eventually screw up SW:TOR too.
Even though I am at times an incoherent babbling idiot, I thought it best to warn all of you hyped over SW:TOR. It's not going to end up pretty.
I am the Player that wonders... "What the %#*& just happened?!"
...............
"I Believe... There should be NO financial connection or portals between the Real World and the Virtual in MMOs. "
__Ever Present Cockroach of the MMO Verses__
...scurrying to and fro... .munching on bits of garbage... always under foot...
where have you been on these forums I love your posts haha but are you looking forward to SWTOR or no and what are you playing now.
If your going to ban the trolls please for our sake ban the Fan Boys too.
I tend to try and play the game for what it is, not for what it could be. I don't like dealing in the future and basing my interest on something that could or could not happen. You don't know any more then anyone else what "could" happen. That speculation on one possible future. Kinda like canceling going to the park cause theres a chance it could rain.
LA and BW made Kotor and that came out pretty good as well. I think your placing too much importance on LA. All they do is make sure the lore fits. Granted they have some control on what goes in it. It's not LA we should be worried about but EA. Also if EA or even LA see the game making enough profit as it is. Then they will leave it alone. If however they see the game failing as was the case with SWG with leaking subs left and right then they will make certain changes to try and stop or reverse that flow
EA may want money (what company doesn't) but they are also a smart company that knows messing with something thats doing well is not the smart move. If anything is changed in a game it's in an attempt to fix what is wrong. They figured the CU and NGE would fix it. They obviously judged wrong.
If ToR does well, i don't see the need to change things as drastically as they did in SWG, if it does poorly then it will. But then again it was doing poorly anyway so it needs a change.
SWG was failing as it was losing people, thus a change occured, if they had been doing well there would be no reason to change anything. The change was a symptom of the problem not the root cause. Granted it went from dying slowly to being nearly killed out right but sometimes you take that chance.
Everyone has this idea that EA wants to kill all their projects to make money. However they'd prefer a project do well so that money keeps coming in. Smart companies know a constant stream of money is a lot better then a pulse then nothing.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Heh, the thread got moved.
I've been posting mostly in the pub and general discussion. A few times I dive into a few game specific forums. I lurk around some of the game specific stuff to gather info on potential games to try. The last 2 I played were STO (ugh) and LOTRO. Left it after having been with LOTRO since '07.
Not playing any MMORPGs right now, haven't for months now. Which is the first time in 6 years.
Not looking forward to SWTOR either. The more I hear about the game, the more I dislike it. The last single hope I had for that game, and a hope that BioWare fervently crushed a while back was how they were going to do Space Combat. There's been several threads about that in the SWTOR forum on this site, and I was involved in the... "discussions" about BioWare's decision.
I'm sure SWTOR will do fine at least. But I won't be playing it because of how BioWare's doing that game's features.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Arrogance and greed. THEY (SoE) knew better what you wanted than YOU did. They told us we just needed to give it time.
The numerous outcries for a "rollback" would soon be silenced as word spread about the 'fast paced action' SWG now had and the WoW mob rolled in...but it never did. The outcries on the forums were thought to be "the vocal minority". Time would prove them grossly mistaken.
After almost a full year, they realized they may need to do more than the NGE did, which is when Helios (dev at the time) was removed and a focus shifted to 'profession diversity' (the current skill trees). A year later, 'content 'was the focus...but it was too little, too late by this time.
A simple answer...they didn't believe their customers opinions of the NGE until it was too late.
Do some research.
NGE was ALL SoE's idea.
LA's had NOTHING to do with it, except "approve" it.
It was when they did it, now 3 years after the fact theres no way to go back.
Do you also remember when some of us found the prima guid to SWG NGE on Amazon and how soe lied about it and deleted and locked all the threads asking what was up. Then 2 months after mustifar telling us what they were going to hit us with.
The entire situation stank and still does.
Its good to see people still dont jnow what tehre talking about when it comes to SWG, unless in your world 2-5 days is 2 months.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.