I don't remember any bugs at launch. I didn't mind the imbalanced stuff, premature launch.
I didn't mind the fact that my big ranger camp was almost useless, entertainers couldn't even do their thing in the camp, but it was still fun.
Did SOE ever get around to making the ranger camp useful?
It is called selective memory, it is rather common. Many guys have it about ex girlfriends (kladies seems on the other hand to have very good memory about problems with ther ex).
No it wasn't selective memory, I was a master-ranger/rifleman who changed to droid engineering and then architecture, and didn't run into any bugs, except maybe mobs spawning inside of my house.
dude... come on now. Ive been playing SWG since beta and love the shit outta that game. But even I know that game had hundreds of bugs at launch.
I didn't do any missions, I hear that's where the bugs were.
Lol. Oh my.... you were playing with your eyes closed? Let's see...
- there was a 'hole' in the player placed vendors, making items disappear without a trace. It was eventually fixed by a patch, that put all lost items into the owner's inventory. The results were hilarious, since virtually everyone got overloaded... and having more stuff in your inventory than allowed meant you could not move. Hundreds of people were stuck wherever they had logged out. Architects made big money of selling storage houses and delivering them to the victims.
- it was possible to earn xp by making items in a factory (which was a bug). Many crafters used this to get to full template long before honest players could ever hope to get there. The cheats made a fortune selling stuff no one else could make yet. This tended to be a guild effort, causing some guilds to be WAY ahead of the curve.
- there were several money duping exploits in game, allowing people to max out their money. Many of these people were later traced and banned, but not before the money had gotten into circulation and ruined entire economies for a while (as any economy, things adjusted eventually).
- people were able to place 'ghost harvesters': a player would create a toon, and this toon would place harvesters, and give another toon admin privileges on the harvesters, The toon would then be deleted, the harvesters would stay in the world. A new toon would be made, would place harvesters, give admin, etc. Some people wound up controlling over 300 harvesters.
Then we have the horrible lag, the crashes, the BH missions that didn't work, the jedi that were promised but which were not in game yet... the bug list goes on and the above is only a small example of some of the worst ones. Once jedi were actually added, we got a whole slew of brand new bugs, like the ones that allowed BH to serial kill jedi into losing all skills they had earned to that point.
But despite all this, we had a lot of fun. And gradually, most bugs did get removed. The months before the CU happened, things were nearly bug free. If they'd just contented themselves with adding a quest system for the quest junkies, and if they'd somehow managed to neutralise the jedi for normal pvp (there were many ideas, including a jedi-only high reward PVP planet), the game would still be going strong today I think.
Linna
Sounds like exploits to me, not bugs, which can only be discovered in a fully released and populated game......of cheating assholes.
These were all bugs in the system, which were for the most part discovered in Beta, and which were exploited by players once the game went live. Heck, I even forgot the most infamous one, the melons that crashed the servers. People got 3 melons in the original tutorial. Each of these had a unique object identifier... and it turned out to be more than the system could handle at launch, literally bringing the servers to their knees.
You see, one of the problems that plagued the game from the get-go was the completely inadequate database design. I could give you a long and technical explanation (my husband is a DBA and I work with databases a lot), but it comes down to sloppy design by people who were not specialised in the field. Much of the lag too was caused by these design flaws. You have to realise, when someone loaded into a planet (zone), all information about their toon, including inventory, was sent to ALL OTHER players on that planet. It choked the connections.
Programming mistakes like this are not something that only comes out in a live environment, they're 100% a consequence of rush jobs and not hiring the specialists that are needed.
These were all bugs in the system, which were for the most part discovered in Beta, and which were exploited by players once the game went live. Heck, I even forgot the most infamous one, the melons that crashed the servers. People got 3 melons in the original tutorial. Each of these had a unique object identifier... and it turned out to be more than the system could handle at launch, literally bringing the servers to their knees.
You see, one of the problems that plagued the game from the get-go was the completely inadequate database design. I could give you a long and technical explanation (my husband is a DBA and I work with databases a lot), but it comes down to sloppy design by people who were not specialised in the field. Much of the lag too was caused by these design flaws. You have to realise, when someone loaded into a planet (zone), all information about their toon, including inventory, was sent to ALL OTHER players on that planet. It choked the connections.
Programming mistakes like this are not something that only comes out in a live environment, they're 100% a consequence of rush jobs and not hiring the specialists that are needed.
Linna
Hi Linna. I’m not used to defend SOE at these forums, but what you say does not make sense for me.
If data was sent to everybody, it was a programming or design error,
maybe a leftover from beta where sending data to all (a limited amount of) players did not affect the performance.
But I don’t see how this is related to the design or even usage of the database.
Databases don’t send data to clients over TCP/IP. Software request data from databases and do that task.
These were all bugs in the system, which were for the most part discovered in Beta, and which were exploited by players once the game went live. Heck, I even forgot the most infamous one, the melons that crashed the servers. People got 3 melons in the original tutorial. Each of these had a unique object identifier... and it turned out to be more than the system could handle at launch, literally bringing the servers to their knees.
You see, one of the problems that plagued the game from the get-go was the completely inadequate database design. I could give you a long and technical explanation (my husband is a DBA and I work with databases a lot), but it comes down to sloppy design by people who were not specialised in the field. Much of the lag too was caused by these design flaws. You have to realise, when someone loaded into a planet (zone), all information about their toon, including inventory, was sent to ALL OTHER players on that planet. It choked the connections.
Programming mistakes like this are not something that only comes out in a live environment, they're 100% a consequence of rush jobs and not hiring the specialists that are needed.
Linna
Hi Linna. I’m not used to defend SOE at these forums, but what you say does not make sense for me.
If data was sent to everybody, it was a programming or design error,
maybe a leftover from beta where sending data to all (a limited amount of) players did not affect the performance.
But I don’t see how this is related to the design or even usage of the database.
Databases don’t send data to clients over TCP/IP. Software request data from databases and do that task.
Care to explain?
By design, every object in Star Wars Galaxies had a unique database identifier, whether it was loot, a quest reward or a crafted item. There were some justifications for this, in that this was what made it possible to have a crafting system where each crafted item was 1) identifiable per crafter, 2) could have completely unique stats and 3) could – despite their uniqueness - be tied to one owner, so they could not be traded (other games handle this by making entire classes of items untradeable. SOE by necessity had to do it on a per item basis). The downside on this was however that there were NO generic items. And if you set up a database that way, you had bloody well better make sure the way all that data is exchanged, is on a basis of what is needed only, because otherwise you're going to flood the system with unnecessary data. The infamous melon crash is only one of the problems that resulted from this: there were simply too many unique melons entering the game at launch, enough to crash it.
Have you ever seen any variant of the story of the sorcerer's apprentice? The one with the multiplying buckets of water and brooms? That's pretty much what the SOE databases were doing. And that's simply horrible design. And keep in mind, this was NOT a remnant of beta, it was how the system was designed to work.
In an MMO, when characters interact there is a constant exchange of data: for trading, for PVP combat, for just seeing the other person. There are different ways of handling this, different levels of data exchange. What SOE decided to do, was to front load everything to all other players in the same zone (planet). (Which, incidentally, is not something I pulled out of my thumb, but something they themselves published at some point.)
Maybe they thought this would make interaction smoother, but that was in fact not the case. It generated a huge amount of data traffic, even if players never even came close to other players. You could experience lag in your (empty) player city because lots of people were hanging near the main spaceport of the planet. A massive PVP battle on a well-populated planet could (and did) literally crash the planet, because the combination of the constantly ongoing front loading and the exchange of combat data would simply become more than the system could handle. According to my resident database admin (aka the husband), it was fairly obvious they had never bothered to normalize their database (made it so that items of the same 'class' were handily grouped so they could be exchanged faster and more efficiently).
As to databases not sending data to clients over TCP/IP... uhm.... I'm not sure what IT background you have, but er... yes, databases in any network environment DO 'send' data, massive amounts of it even. Yes, sure, there's software involved to make the traffic happen, but the bottom line is that the data are constantly being exchanged. The trick is in streamlining the process, avoiding sending unnecessary data and in having a hardware (and software) setup that prevents bottlenecks.
Incidentally: that whole story with the vanishing vendor items too just REEKS of incompetent design. And don't get me started on what happened in cities on server borders. Game data (some, not all) basically just went invisible for both players and server, resulting in items vanishing from backpacks, vendors, houses, light sabers... and the interesting thing about the light sabers: the contents vanished, the stats did not.
Now I'll grant you that there was also plenty going wrong on the software side. Standard operating procedure with competent software developers, is that only ONE person or dedicated group works on a module at a time. While they're working on it, the module will be locked for all other people/teams. On top of that, all changes made to the software are documented, and this documentation is made available to any other teams, in order to make sure all related modules are updated too. The reasons for this are fairly simple: first off, you need to make sure that what is fixed today is not broken again day after tomorrow. And secondly: you need to make sure that when people leave the company, you have all the necessary documentation about how your product works and why, so the next people you hire will be able to actually understand the software and work with it.
For me, it's fairly obvious SOE did not do this. A bug – major or minor – would be solved in February only to make its way back in with the April patch. There would be a massive walkout of developers (two I remember happened around xmas in 2003 and 2004), and for months after, the new developers would noticeably be struggling, and we would get claims on how certain bugs just could not be solved, making a clean sweep a necessity (claims made laughable by the fact that the emulator guys apparently DID solve a lot of these).
I don't remember any bugs at launch. I didn't mind the imbalanced stuff, premature launch.
I didn't mind the fact that my big ranger camp was almost useless, entertainers couldn't even do their thing in the camp, but it was still fun.
Did SOE ever get around to making the ranger camp useful?
It is called selective memory, it is rather common. Many guys have it about ex girlfriends (kladies seems on the other hand to have very good memory about problems with ther ex).
Hi everyone, I share the same setiment that many of you have about SWG failing due to the CU and NGE. I am sorry to see it go, but in a way I am happy to watch that era of my life come to a full close. I still follow Raph Kosters blog and believe he is largely to thank for the amazing direction SWG took us in.
In response to Loke, I think what Nerf was saying is, bugs did not keep the game from being fun. I wasn't ever frustrated by bugs either. I just played the game. People get so angry at bugs, probably because they think they have some sort of entitlement to play a game that is 'complete' or 'polished'. In my opinion, having a fun interesting game with bugs is much better than having a polished game with little gameplay or content. My only memory of bugs were rather fun, laughing at this or that, remembering the time that all the players clothes (including underwear) glitched off. Haha. It was hilarious.
And since I never had the time to play the game as seriously as some of the hardcore players did, I wasn't nearly as aware of the exploitation and imbalance that some of the people are talking about in this thread. It is an issue that most people do not know about or care about, a game is a game, SWG was made to be a progressive social experience. It was never made to be soley about progression like so many newer mmorpgs.
As far as firing smed goes... That far up a coorporate ladder, I don't think making quality games matters much (especially innovative games). It is too focused on statistics, networking, competing, and positioning perspective. It will probably always remain a mystery to us what is going on between smed and his superiors, but they don't keep him around for his honesty or detication to the playerbase that is for sure.
Well... it's refreshing that Smed seems to actually 'get it' now... shame it took so long.
I chatted with John at 2008's Fan Faire....got him to admit that they bent over for LA for the Launch and NGE...and they have been paying for it ever since.
Only took 10 shots to get him drunk enough to admit it.
Ehmm sorry, but it has never ever been a suprise that Lucas Arts was behind the NGE and forced SOE to execute it!
There was a large article about it in the New York Times at that time, interviewing that stupid bimbo at Lucas Arts about how proud she was to come up with the NGE, that it was the right choice and that game would be much better and more succesful! Eventho practically everyone RAGE quited, she continued defending her decisions being the right one.
SOE has also several times stated that they were not allowed to revert the NGE nor putting up classic servers. Lucas Arts wouldn't hear of it.
These were all bugs in the system, which were for the most part discovered in Beta, and which were exploited by players once the game went live. Heck, I even forgot the most infamous one, the melons that crashed the servers. People got 3 melons in the original tutorial. Each of these had a unique object identifier... and it turned out to be more than the system could handle at launch, literally bringing the servers to their knees.
You see, one of the problems that plagued the game from the get-go was the completely inadequate database design. I could give you a long and technical explanation (my husband is a DBA and I work with databases a lot), but it comes down to sloppy design by people who were not specialised in the field. Much of the lag too was caused by these design flaws. You have to realise, when someone loaded into a planet (zone), all information about their toon, including inventory, was sent to ALL OTHER players on that planet. It choked the connections.
Programming mistakes like this are not something that only comes out in a live environment, they're 100% a consequence of rush jobs and not hiring the specialists that are needed.
Linna
Hi Linna. I’m not used to defend SOE at these forums, but what you say does not make sense for me.
If data was sent to everybody, it was a programming or design error,
maybe a leftover from beta where sending data to all (a limited amount of) players did not affect the performance.
But I don’t see how this is related to the design or even usage of the database.
Databases don’t send data to clients over TCP/IP. Software request data from databases and do that task.
Care to explain?
By design, every object in Star Wars Galaxies had a unique database identifier, whether it was loot, a quest reward or a crafted item. There were some justifications for this, in that this was what made it possible to have a crafting system where each crafted item was 1) identifiable per crafter, 2) could have completely unique stats and 3) could – despite their uniqueness - be tied to one owner, so they could not be traded (other games handle this by making entire classes of items untradeable. SOE by necessity had to do it on a per item basis). The downside on this was however that there were NO generic items. And if you set up a database that way, you had bloody well better make sure the way all that data is exchanged, is on a basis of what is needed only, because otherwise you're going to flood the system with unnecessary data. The infamous melon crash is only one of the problems that resulted from this: there were simply too many unique melons entering the game at launch, enough to crash it.
Have you ever seen any variant of the story of the sorcerer's apprentice? The one with the multiplying buckets of water and brooms? That's pretty much what the SOE databases were doing. And that's simply horrible design. And keep in mind, this was NOT a remnant of beta, it was how the system was designed to work.
In an MMO, when characters interact there is a constant exchange of data: for trading, for PVP combat, for just seeing the other person. There are different ways of handling this, different levels of data exchange. What SOE decided to do, was to front load everything to all other players in the same zone (planet). (Which, incidentally, is not something I pulled out of my thumb, but something they themselves published at some point.)
Maybe they thought this would make interaction smoother, but that was in fact not the case. It generated a huge amount of data traffic, even if players never even came close to other players. You could experience lag in your (empty) player city because lots of people were hanging near the main spaceport of the planet. A massive PVP battle on a well-populated planet could (and did) literally crash the planet, because the combination of the constantly ongoing front loading and the exchange of combat data would simply become more than the system could handle. According to my resident database admin (aka the husband), it was fairly obvious they had never bothered to normalize their database (made it so that items of the same 'class' were handily grouped so they could be exchanged faster and more efficiently).
As to databases not sending data to clients over TCP/IP... uhm.... I'm not sure what IT background you have, but er... yes, databases in any network environment DO 'send' data, massive amounts of it even. Yes, sure, there's software involved to make the traffic happen, but the bottom line is that the data are constantly being exchanged. The trick is in streamlining the process, avoiding sending unnecessary data and in having a hardware (and software) setup that prevents bottlenecks.
Incidentally: that whole story with the vanishing vendor items too just REEKS of incompetent design. And don't get me started on what happened in cities on server borders. Game data (some, not all) basically just went invisible for both players and server, resulting in items vanishing from backpacks, vendors, houses, light sabers... and the interesting thing about the light sabers: the contents vanished, the stats did not.
Now I'll grant you that there was also plenty going wrong on the software side. Standard operating procedure with competent software developers, is that only ONE person or dedicated group works on a module at a time. While they're working on it, the module will be locked for all other people/teams. On top of that, all changes made to the software are documented, and this documentation is made available to any other teams, in order to make sure all related modules are updated too. The reasons for this are fairly simple: first off, you need to make sure that what is fixed today is not broken again day after tomorrow. And secondly: you need to make sure that when people leave the company, you have all the necessary documentation about how your product works and why, so the next people you hire will be able to actually understand the software and work with it.
For me, it's fairly obvious SOE did not do this. A bug – major or minor – would be solved in February only to make its way back in with the April patch. There would be a massive walkout of developers (two I remember happened around xmas in 2003 and 2004), and for months after, the new developers would noticeably be struggling, and we would get claims on how certain bugs just could not be solved, making a clean sweep a necessity (claims made laughable by the fact that the emulator guys apparently DID solve a lot of these).
Linna
Thanks for your clarification.
As I said, the database itself does not send data via TCP/IP or other media, software do.
In general, the game/business logic layer is used to decide what data to fetch/store and what data to send to the clients. The database is the storage with some smart methods to store and fetch related data.
Having items with unique stats is a design decision for the game, since almost all items in-game are unique. Maybe SOE could organize their data differently, but somehow you had to store it. Other options would be to make a game where, for example, all crafted items should have the same stats. But then it would not have been the SWG as we learned to love it.
The lag you talk about mostly comes from network lag, not database lag. You ask the database once for an object, and then send that information to all clients. You don’t ask the database again and again for every client. Nobody does, not even SOE.
A fight 25 vs 25 generates a lot of data and network traffic. Let’s say, for simplicity, that the server updates the clients once every second. Every action made by one character has to be sent to 49 other characters (clients). And since we had 50 characters this will generate 50*49 = 2450 messages every second. Add to that, the fact that there are more than one type of data that need to be transmitted (position, direction, animations, combat-stats etc), you will easily end up with 10 000 transmissions every second just for this fight. This introduces lag, and it affect all characters connected to that server, cluster or whatever you call that logical unit.
On the other hand, if you have 50 players spread out, not directly interacting with each other, there would be no network traffic induced lag worth of notice.
The above example indicates that you statement that SOE sent everything to all clients can’t be true. A zone with 500 players (not un-common pre-cu) would generate 500*499 = 249500 messages every second just by the idle-positioning messages.
And IF they did, it’s still not a database design issue, as you also claimed.
Objects like items in inventory, cloths and other equipped items are only transmitted when the character zone in or appears as a new object to other objects within a given area. So even if this information was send to all clients, as you stated, it would be nothing compared to the standard idle position messages generated by the client every second, mentioned above.
The FPS-style of combat introduced with the NGE increased the amount of data and network traffic about 3-4 times for each character. And since this number multiplies with the amount of characters it generates huge amount of network traffic. That’s the main lag-related issue we got with the NGE, and that’s why even small population fights lags enormously now, compared to pre-cu.
Regarding my IT background, I’m a Master of Science since 25+ years, and I have also had the joy to work with the SOE protocol and pre-cu client, as of publish 14, and know pretty well how the interaction between characters add up in term of network traffic.
I understand that the server/client was different during the release, but still your claim that the server did send everything to all characters all the time can’t be correct; else SOE had never got the server running at all. It’s simple as that, just do the math.
I hope you now see why fights in other places induced lag for everyone; it’s not because SOE in their wisdom sent all data to all characters on the server, it’s simple because the server got busy. We can start talk TCP/IP transfers, MTU and packet size all day if you want, but there is a limit of how much data you can handle, and as shown above, a medium size fight is all that takes to impact all players connected to same cluster, even if properly done in regards to networking.
What SOE actually did, was to start using combined messages, putting more than one logical message into one UDP-mulipacket, and thus making the example above manageable, the network traffic of the 25 vs 25 fight mentioned above would go back to 2450 messages every second, given that the messages would contain slightly more data.
And regardless of what your husband thinks, there are methods to update client data without sending the complete object again, in the most cases you just update the changed stats.
Google “SOE protocol delta”.
Lightsabers gone, but the stats still there, well the link between the lightsaber object and the attribute became broken. And why’s that?
That’s because the lightsaber is one object and the stats (attribute) are other objects. So when requesting the lightsaber, server only asks the database for the lightsaber model, instead of the complete stats etc. So contradictory to your believe, SOE did make optimizations.
Infact, the lighsaber hilt is a generic item, you send the same data to every character when they attach the same type of hilt, even though the may have different crystals and attribute.
I’m sure many things could be handled better by SOE, but some of the things you claim as fact are frankly not true.
Well... it's refreshing that Smed seems to actually 'get it' now... shame it took so long.
I chatted with John at 2008's Fan Faire....got him to admit that they bent over for LA for the Launch and NGE...and they have been paying for it ever since.
Only took 10 shots to get him drunk enough to admit it.
Ehmm sorry, but it has never ever been a suprise that Lucas Arts was behind the NGE and forced SOE to execute it!
There was a large article about it in the New York Times at that time, interviewing that stupid bimbo at Lucas Arts about how proud she was to come up with the NGE, that it was the right choice and that game would be much better and more succesful! Eventho practically everyone RAGE quited, she continued defending her decisions being the right one.
SOE has also several times stated that they were not allowed to revert the NGE nor putting up classic servers. Lucas Arts wouldn't hear of it.
If Lucas Arts "forced" SOE to make changes to SWG that they did not want to make then Lucas Arts would be responsible for the damages the NGE caused. We are talking tens of millions of dollars lost each year.
SOE was the developer and had the power to say no to anything Lucas Arts requested be done. Just like SOE couldn't put in anything they want without the permission of Lucas Arts. Just like Lucas Arts cannot force SOE to stand up in front of their playerbase and lie about the combat upgrade not going away or forcing SOE to commit fraud by selling TOOW expansion knowing they are going to remove listed features the day after people bought it or lie that pre-cu servers are impossible, because they don't have the code for it anymore. In short Lucas Arts can't force SOE to lie to their players, ruin their reputation, drive away tens of millions in business for a game that SOE is paying Lucas Arts to create.
It isn't like the NGE is something completely out of the nature of SOE to do. They flat out lie to their players constantly. They love to revamp their games well after they have been released in whatever way they think will gain more players, even if it will drive away their existing customer base. SOE has long been more concerned with trying to attract the potential players instread of working on what their actual customers want.
Everything about the NGE screams SOE all over it. It fits right into how they run their games and their developers have even stated publically they came up with the concepts for the NGE and some even had to fight to get them considered. I'm sure there was a lot of collaberation between the two companies on what the NGE looked like once it was all said and done, but in no way shape or form was SOE forced to make changes they didn't want to make. Honestly the developers working on SWG openly admitted how much they hated the first two versions of SWG and were anxious to change it to something else.
If Lucas Arts "forced" SOE to make changes to SWG that they did not want to make then Lucas Arts would be responsible for the damages the NGE caused. We are talking tens of millions of dollars lost each year.
SOE was the developer and had the power to say no to anything Lucas Arts requested be done. Just like SOE couldn't put in anything they want without the permission of Lucas Arts. Just like Lucas Arts cannot force SOE to stand up in front of their playerbase and lie about the combat upgrade not going away or forcing SOE to commit fraud by selling TOOW expansion knowing they are going to remove listed features the day after people bought it or lie that pre-cu servers are impossible, because they don't have the code for it anymore. In short Lucas Arts can't force SOE to lie to their players, ruin their reputation, drive away tens of millions in business for a game that SOE is paying Lucas Arts to create.
It isn't like the NGE is something completely out of the nature of SOE to do. They flat out lie to their players constantly. They love to revamp their games well after they have been released in whatever way they think will gain more players, even if it will drive away their existing customer base. SOE has long been more concerned with trying to attract the potential players instread of working on what their actual customers want.
Everything about the NGE screams SOE all over it. It fits right into how they run their games and their developers have even stated publically they came up with the concepts for the NGE and some even had to fight to get them considered. I'm sure there was a lot of collaberation between the two companies on what the NGE looked like once it was all said and done, but in no way shape or form was SOE forced to make changes they didn't want to make. Honestly the developers working on SWG openly admitted how much they hated the first two versions of SWG and were anxious to change it to something else.
^THIS^
LOL I seriously question the Lucas Arts conspiracy nuts and their continous drive to blame LA for the NGE.
Smedley = proven repeated liar.
SOE = proven repeated liars.
And yet these are the people that some of the LA conspiracy people want to believe? Seriously???
Believe what you want I guess. Personally I think smed and gang are full of $hit and wouldn't believe them if they said it was dark outside at midnight without stepping outside and checking for myself.
Sandbox sounds pretty correct, from a programmers perspective. Its true that SWG had a lot of bugs and wasn't optimized that well, but Linnas claims about it are pretty outrageous. The most frustrating thing about the bugs in SWG was how few serious ones there were, and how if given just a bit more time the game would have been much more playable. I personally never had the bugs or lag keep me from having fun though
I agree, Smed can go to hell,.. this man acts like he tried to do what was best and didn't understand what was wrong with the game.. come on!!, do you smell what he is standing in??.. He knew how upset people were, he knew what was going on with the customer base when it came to SWG because I know SOE got TONS of emails when it came to them blowing up this game... come on!! This guy is a joke and if it was me,.. he woul be out on his butt and finding a new job! How SOE keeps him employeed is way beyound me...
Been there done that: Asherons Call,SWG,AOC,D&D,COH,Anarchy Online,DAOC,EVE,Guild Wars,LOTRO,POTBS,WAR,WW2, and Rift
LOL I seriously question the Lucas Arts conspiracy nuts and their continous drive to blame LA for the NGE.
<Shrug> The conspiracy nuts go too far. That said, I have no doubt that SWG's Jan'05 radical change in direction was no coincidence when World of Warcraft blew through the stratosphere boosting on an escape trajectory. There are very long-standing rumors that SWG's license renewal is around that time of year. While the notion that LA invented CU/NGE and forced SOE to implement it is ludicrous, I don't doubt that LA was demanding big changes RIGHT NOW. Dragging SWG into the same-old-same-old model of nearly all the other MMOs was about the simplest quick-and-dirty revamp that SOE devs could come up with on such short notice.
Sandbox sounds pretty correct, from a programmers perspective. Its true that SWG had a lot of bugs and wasn't optimized that well, but Linnas claims about it are pretty outrageous. The most frustrating thing about the bugs in SWG was how few serious ones there were, and how if given just a bit more time the game would have been much more playable. I personally never had the bugs or lag keep me from having fun though
The only opinion that mattered on the subject was the people behind the game. If they felt the ROI was insufficient and on a decline, they decided that a change was needed. We know the results of that. But only liars and the blind couldn't see the game was trending down before they made those changes.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
to the few people claiming that quests would have made SWG better....did you even play it precu?
tell me, how in the system they had, would the quest exp be given out?
there were no levels. exp was granted based on what weapon you used. you also could get as much as 3 or 4 or hell 5 or 6 different types of exp from killing one mob.
pull with rifle, switch to pistols when it gets close, then melee it down at the end. that gives you rifle exp. pistol exp, lets say TKA exp and the all encompasing combat exp. then you skin it you get scout/ranger exp. if ya healed yourself you get medic/doc exp.
so, how would a quest grant exp?
sometimes i wonder if people clamoring for one thing or another even played this game
I don't remember any bugs at launch. I didn't mind the imbalanced stuff, premature launch.
I didn't mind the fact that my big ranger camp was almost useless, entertainers couldn't even do their thing in the camp, but it was still fun.
Did SOE ever get around to making the ranger camp useful?
Credit Dupe exploit (resulted in hundreds of ban's and not everyone that was ban'd deserved it thanks to /tip and /banktip )
/extract and /pickip bugs
Droid Storage to Trade Saber Hilts to smugglers for DPS Slices (yeah..it took Jedi being added to be able to do it but it was Live at Launch)
Just to name 3.
Lol I remember the lightsaber slicing... Us PRE 9 Jedi on Bria were careful on that due to we didnt want to get banned. But yeah there was exploits and bans alot... then. Crap I remember a gambling machine breaking and we all won big creds on that thing. THEN I THINK they took out gambling due to like real life issues with it.
To this day the biggest mystery and unreal concept is the idea that PEOPLE, real people...actually pay for the broken car... they actually help pay for these peoples salaries they actually encourage this, (well until now) finally some seeing what we say the DAY the NGE went live and you could click on LUKES FREAKING HEAD to be a instant Jedi... that right there was the demise of it all.
Instead of making people spend time to earn somthing in game, or I dare say apply effort they wanted to cheapen it and give it to the quick fix kids and people out there.
How or why people PAID for this is beyond my logic and it looks like OH SAY 90% of the playerbase they once had OBVIOUSLY based on fact not opinion too.
Again -- Hey, I want to sell you a car... sure its broken, sure its been through alot of owners, mechanics, tons of work done to it-- HEY YOU WANT TO PAY ME FOR IT?? Sure... some do and did.. That is the mindset of acceptance and worse... low standards. In short, you get what you pay for... and worse, if you keep paying for garbage... you get more what? GARBAGE.
So for all those NGE fanboys... I wish and can only hope we never ever ever see that mindset allowed in a game or product ever again. Say all you want but to be that passive and accepting has done what? Helped servers close and game end one way or the other.
Now I can safely say that the mindset right now in SWTOR is anyone with NGE on the brain need not apply... they are soooooo running from that type of player and its good.
What did the NGE playerbase do for the game? Nothing good... is that a fact? or opinion? Well.. judging by the current state of the game... I think I rest my case with that.
Back in the day we begged, we pleaded, I myself sent John multiple emails and when he replied back with one saying he messed up... it was enough for me to realize I wont be a victim to SOEs false money getting machine.
Now I should note: If there is any NGE players out there that feel the need to keep paying for the NGE please make checks out to me and send them my way. I actually might be able to do more for you money then they did.
Imagine a world of people accepting things like that for every product on the market.... for a moment.. Imagine 3 wheeled cars, bikes with like half a handlebar and saying like "ahh its ok, its a BIKE" its fun and stuff!!! lol..
Comments
No it wasn't selective memory, I was a master-ranger/rifleman who changed to droid engineering and then architecture, and didn't run into any bugs, except maybe mobs spawning inside of my house.
These were all bugs in the system, which were for the most part discovered in Beta, and which were exploited by players once the game went live. Heck, I even forgot the most infamous one, the melons that crashed the servers. People got 3 melons in the original tutorial. Each of these had a unique object identifier... and it turned out to be more than the system could handle at launch, literally bringing the servers to their knees.
You see, one of the problems that plagued the game from the get-go was the completely inadequate database design. I could give you a long and technical explanation (my husband is a DBA and I work with databases a lot), but it comes down to sloppy design by people who were not specialised in the field. Much of the lag too was caused by these design flaws. You have to realise, when someone loaded into a planet (zone), all information about their toon, including inventory, was sent to ALL OTHER players on that planet. It choked the connections.
Programming mistakes like this are not something that only comes out in a live environment, they're 100% a consequence of rush jobs and not hiring the specialists that are needed.
Linna
Hi Linna. I’m not used to defend SOE at these forums, but what you say does not make sense for me.
If data was sent to everybody, it was a programming or design error,
maybe a leftover from beta where sending data to all (a limited amount of) players did not affect the performance.
But I don’t see how this is related to the design or even usage of the database.
Databases don’t send data to clients over TCP/IP. Software request data from databases and do that task.
Care to explain?
By design, every object in Star Wars Galaxies had a unique database identifier, whether it was loot, a quest reward or a crafted item. There were some justifications for this, in that this was what made it possible to have a crafting system where each crafted item was 1) identifiable per crafter, 2) could have completely unique stats and 3) could – despite their uniqueness - be tied to one owner, so they could not be traded (other games handle this by making entire classes of items untradeable. SOE by necessity had to do it on a per item basis). The downside on this was however that there were NO generic items. And if you set up a database that way, you had bloody well better make sure the way all that data is exchanged, is on a basis of what is needed only, because otherwise you're going to flood the system with unnecessary data. The infamous melon crash is only one of the problems that resulted from this: there were simply too many unique melons entering the game at launch, enough to crash it.
Have you ever seen any variant of the story of the sorcerer's apprentice? The one with the multiplying buckets of water and brooms? That's pretty much what the SOE databases were doing. And that's simply horrible design. And keep in mind, this was NOT a remnant of beta, it was how the system was designed to work.
In an MMO, when characters interact there is a constant exchange of data: for trading, for PVP combat, for just seeing the other person. There are different ways of handling this, different levels of data exchange. What SOE decided to do, was to front load everything to all other players in the same zone (planet). (Which, incidentally, is not something I pulled out of my thumb, but something they themselves published at some point.)
Maybe they thought this would make interaction smoother, but that was in fact not the case. It generated a huge amount of data traffic, even if players never even came close to other players. You could experience lag in your (empty) player city because lots of people were hanging near the main spaceport of the planet. A massive PVP battle on a well-populated planet could (and did) literally crash the planet, because the combination of the constantly ongoing front loading and the exchange of combat data would simply become more than the system could handle. According to my resident database admin (aka the husband), it was fairly obvious they had never bothered to normalize their database (made it so that items of the same 'class' were handily grouped so they could be exchanged faster and more efficiently).
As to databases not sending data to clients over TCP/IP... uhm.... I'm not sure what IT background you have, but er... yes, databases in any network environment DO 'send' data, massive amounts of it even. Yes, sure, there's software involved to make the traffic happen, but the bottom line is that the data are constantly being exchanged. The trick is in streamlining the process, avoiding sending unnecessary data and in having a hardware (and software) setup that prevents bottlenecks.
Incidentally: that whole story with the vanishing vendor items too just REEKS of incompetent design. And don't get me started on what happened in cities on server borders. Game data (some, not all) basically just went invisible for both players and server, resulting in items vanishing from backpacks, vendors, houses, light sabers... and the interesting thing about the light sabers: the contents vanished, the stats did not.
Now I'll grant you that there was also plenty going wrong on the software side. Standard operating procedure with competent software developers, is that only ONE person or dedicated group works on a module at a time. While they're working on it, the module will be locked for all other people/teams. On top of that, all changes made to the software are documented, and this documentation is made available to any other teams, in order to make sure all related modules are updated too. The reasons for this are fairly simple: first off, you need to make sure that what is fixed today is not broken again day after tomorrow. And secondly: you need to make sure that when people leave the company, you have all the necessary documentation about how your product works and why, so the next people you hire will be able to actually understand the software and work with it.
For me, it's fairly obvious SOE did not do this. A bug – major or minor – would be solved in February only to make its way back in with the April patch. There would be a massive walkout of developers (two I remember happened around xmas in 2003 and 2004), and for months after, the new developers would noticeably be struggling, and we would get claims on how certain bugs just could not be solved, making a clean sweep a necessity (claims made laughable by the fact that the emulator guys apparently DID solve a lot of these).
Linna
Hi everyone, I share the same setiment that many of you have about SWG failing due to the CU and NGE. I am sorry to see it go, but in a way I am happy to watch that era of my life come to a full close. I still follow Raph Kosters blog and believe he is largely to thank for the amazing direction SWG took us in.
In response to Loke, I think what Nerf was saying is, bugs did not keep the game from being fun. I wasn't ever frustrated by bugs either. I just played the game. People get so angry at bugs, probably because they think they have some sort of entitlement to play a game that is 'complete' or 'polished'. In my opinion, having a fun interesting game with bugs is much better than having a polished game with little gameplay or content. My only memory of bugs were rather fun, laughing at this or that, remembering the time that all the players clothes (including underwear) glitched off. Haha. It was hilarious.
And since I never had the time to play the game as seriously as some of the hardcore players did, I wasn't nearly as aware of the exploitation and imbalance that some of the people are talking about in this thread. It is an issue that most people do not know about or care about, a game is a game, SWG was made to be a progressive social experience. It was never made to be soley about progression like so many newer mmorpgs.
As far as firing smed goes... That far up a coorporate ladder, I don't think making quality games matters much (especially innovative games). It is too focused on statistics, networking, competing, and positioning perspective. It will probably always remain a mystery to us what is going on between smed and his superiors, but they don't keep him around for his honesty or detication to the playerbase that is for sure.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Ehmm sorry, but it has never ever been a suprise that Lucas Arts was behind the NGE and forced SOE to execute it!
There was a large article about it in the New York Times at that time, interviewing that stupid bimbo at Lucas Arts about how proud she was to come up with the NGE, that it was the right choice and that game would be much better and more succesful! Eventho practically everyone RAGE quited, she continued defending her decisions being the right one.
SOE has also several times stated that they were not allowed to revert the NGE nor putting up classic servers. Lucas Arts wouldn't hear of it.
Thanks for your clarification.
As I said, the database itself does not send data via TCP/IP or other media, software do.
In general, the game/business logic layer is used to decide what data to fetch/store and what data to send to the clients. The database is the storage with some smart methods to store and fetch related data.
Having items with unique stats is a design decision for the game, since almost all items in-game are unique. Maybe SOE could organize their data differently, but somehow you had to store it. Other options would be to make a game where, for example, all crafted items should have the same stats. But then it would not have been the SWG as we learned to love it.
The lag you talk about mostly comes from network lag, not database lag. You ask the database once for an object, and then send that information to all clients. You don’t ask the database again and again for every client. Nobody does, not even SOE.
A fight 25 vs 25 generates a lot of data and network traffic. Let’s say, for simplicity, that the server updates the clients once every second. Every action made by one character has to be sent to 49 other characters (clients). And since we had 50 characters this will generate 50*49 = 2450 messages every second. Add to that, the fact that there are more than one type of data that need to be transmitted (position, direction, animations, combat-stats etc), you will easily end up with 10 000 transmissions every second just for this fight. This introduces lag, and it affect all characters connected to that server, cluster or whatever you call that logical unit.
On the other hand, if you have 50 players spread out, not directly interacting with each other, there would be no network traffic induced lag worth of notice.
The above example indicates that you statement that SOE sent everything to all clients can’t be true. A zone with 500 players (not un-common pre-cu) would generate 500*499 = 249500 messages every second just by the idle-positioning messages.
And IF they did, it’s still not a database design issue, as you also claimed.
Objects like items in inventory, cloths and other equipped items are only transmitted when the character zone in or appears as a new object to other objects within a given area. So even if this information was send to all clients, as you stated, it would be nothing compared to the standard idle position messages generated by the client every second, mentioned above.
The FPS-style of combat introduced with the NGE increased the amount of data and network traffic about 3-4 times for each character. And since this number multiplies with the amount of characters it generates huge amount of network traffic. That’s the main lag-related issue we got with the NGE, and that’s why even small population fights lags enormously now, compared to pre-cu.
Regarding my IT background, I’m a Master of Science since 25+ years, and I have also had the joy to work with the SOE protocol and pre-cu client, as of publish 14, and know pretty well how the interaction between characters add up in term of network traffic.
I understand that the server/client was different during the release, but still your claim that the server did send everything to all characters all the time can’t be correct; else SOE had never got the server running at all. It’s simple as that, just do the math.
I hope you now see why fights in other places induced lag for everyone; it’s not because SOE in their wisdom sent all data to all characters on the server, it’s simple because the server got busy. We can start talk TCP/IP transfers, MTU and packet size all day if you want, but there is a limit of how much data you can handle, and as shown above, a medium size fight is all that takes to impact all players connected to same cluster, even if properly done in regards to networking.
What SOE actually did, was to start using combined messages, putting more than one logical message into one UDP-mulipacket, and thus making the example above manageable, the network traffic of the 25 vs 25 fight mentioned above would go back to 2450 messages every second, given that the messages would contain slightly more data.
And regardless of what your husband thinks, there are methods to update client data without sending the complete object again, in the most cases you just update the changed stats.
Google “SOE protocol delta”.
Lightsabers gone, but the stats still there, well the link between the lightsaber object and the attribute became broken. And why’s that?
That’s because the lightsaber is one object and the stats (attribute) are other objects. So when requesting the lightsaber, server only asks the database for the lightsaber model, instead of the complete stats etc. So contradictory to your believe, SOE did make optimizations.
Infact, the lighsaber hilt is a generic item, you send the same data to every character when they attach the same type of hilt, even though the may have different crystals and attribute.
I’m sure many things could be handled better by SOE, but some of the things you claim as fact are frankly not true.
If Lucas Arts "forced" SOE to make changes to SWG that they did not want to make then Lucas Arts would be responsible for the damages the NGE caused. We are talking tens of millions of dollars lost each year.
SOE was the developer and had the power to say no to anything Lucas Arts requested be done. Just like SOE couldn't put in anything they want without the permission of Lucas Arts. Just like Lucas Arts cannot force SOE to stand up in front of their playerbase and lie about the combat upgrade not going away or forcing SOE to commit fraud by selling TOOW expansion knowing they are going to remove listed features the day after people bought it or lie that pre-cu servers are impossible, because they don't have the code for it anymore. In short Lucas Arts can't force SOE to lie to their players, ruin their reputation, drive away tens of millions in business for a game that SOE is paying Lucas Arts to create.
It isn't like the NGE is something completely out of the nature of SOE to do. They flat out lie to their players constantly. They love to revamp their games well after they have been released in whatever way they think will gain more players, even if it will drive away their existing customer base. SOE has long been more concerned with trying to attract the potential players instread of working on what their actual customers want.
Everything about the NGE screams SOE all over it. It fits right into how they run their games and their developers have even stated publically they came up with the concepts for the NGE and some even had to fight to get them considered. I'm sure there was a lot of collaberation between the two companies on what the NGE looked like once it was all said and done, but in no way shape or form was SOE forced to make changes they didn't want to make. Honestly the developers working on SWG openly admitted how much they hated the first two versions of SWG and were anxious to change it to something else.
^THIS^
LOL I seriously question the Lucas Arts conspiracy nuts and their continous drive to blame LA for the NGE.
Smedley = proven repeated liar.
SOE = proven repeated liars.
And yet these are the people that some of the LA conspiracy people want to believe? Seriously???
Believe what you want I guess. Personally I think smed and gang are full of $hit and wouldn't believe them if they said it was dark outside at midnight without stepping outside and checking for myself.
Sandbox sounds pretty correct, from a programmers perspective. Its true that SWG had a lot of bugs and wasn't optimized that well, but Linnas claims about it are pretty outrageous. The most frustrating thing about the bugs in SWG was how few serious ones there were, and how if given just a bit more time the game would have been much more playable. I personally never had the bugs or lag keep me from having fun though
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
I agree, Smed can go to hell,.. this man acts like he tried to do what was best and didn't understand what was wrong with the game.. come on!!, do you smell what he is standing in??.. He knew how upset people were, he knew what was going on with the customer base when it came to SWG because I know SOE got TONS of emails when it came to them blowing up this game... come on!! This guy is a joke and if it was me,.. he woul be out on his butt and finding a new job! How SOE keeps him employeed is way beyound me...
Been there done that:
Asherons Call,SWG,AOC,D&D,COH,Anarchy Online,DAOC,EVE,Guild Wars,LOTRO,POTBS,WAR,WW2, and Rift
<Shrug> The conspiracy nuts go too far. That said, I have no doubt that SWG's Jan'05 radical change in direction was no coincidence when World of Warcraft blew through the stratosphere boosting on an escape trajectory. There are very long-standing rumors that SWG's license renewal is around that time of year. While the notion that LA invented CU/NGE and forced SOE to implement it is ludicrous, I don't doubt that LA was demanding big changes RIGHT NOW. Dragging SWG into the same-old-same-old model of nearly all the other MMOs was about the simplest quick-and-dirty revamp that SOE devs could come up with on such short notice.
The only opinion that mattered on the subject was the people behind the game. If they felt the ROI was insufficient and on a decline, they decided that a change was needed. We know the results of that. But only liars and the blind couldn't see the game was trending down before they made those changes.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
to the few people claiming that quests would have made SWG better....did you even play it precu?
tell me, how in the system they had, would the quest exp be given out?
there were no levels. exp was granted based on what weapon you used. you also could get as much as 3 or 4 or hell 5 or 6 different types of exp from killing one mob.
pull with rifle, switch to pistols when it gets close, then melee it down at the end. that gives you rifle exp. pistol exp, lets say TKA exp and the all encompasing combat exp. then you skin it you get scout/ranger exp. if ya healed yourself you get medic/doc exp.
so, how would a quest grant exp?
sometimes i wonder if people clamoring for one thing or another even played this game
Credit Dupe exploit (resulted in hundreds of ban's and not everyone that was ban'd deserved it thanks to /tip and /banktip )
/extract and /pickip bugs
Droid Storage to Trade Saber Hilts to smugglers for DPS Slices (yeah..it took Jedi being added to be able to do it but it was Live at Launch)
Just to name 3.
MMO History: 2528 days in SW:G
