Good thing is too, in NGE if you dont want to feel apart of the universe, you can go back to mind numbing, click a mission run out to a random place deal with the slow combat, run back, do it again and again and again and again and again. Guess you guys like that grind I forget some people like to do the same thing over and over and over and over, must be a symptom of the average work people do in the day time.
Not sure what you are still going on about, you didn't need to grind you didn't need to anything you didn't want to. Again it was the COMMUNITY that was awesome about pre-cu, no one is saying the engine or anything about the game was awesome. It was what we dealt with it. The ideals of SWG, the tools available to the community is what died with NGE. I'm glad you find it fun but most of us "veterans" do not.
haha your the one who came into my post, which was about saying NGE was better. I don't believe you when you say the community was better, those are just memories from 15 years ago, that mean nothing. I remember a bunch of retarded people in that game running around asking for credits, they would let you do anything to their character. I also remember a bunch of spam, like all the time about the most stupidest things.
As far as community goes, they were good people pre cu, and there were retarded people, it is the same as any game. Basically what you just said was, it doesnt matter what game, garbage game or not if you got good people you can have fun haha, but than you counter dict your self, because you said the same people who were only interested in playing in a good community regardless of game features, all quit, because they added more game features.... You make 0 sense.
No. Actually he said in spite of some problems, such as the engine, that it was because of the "Ideals and tools available" that the game allowed a strong community to exist. The CU weakened the community by removing some of the features and caused some to leave. Then the NGE stripped out many more and caused a mass exodus.
Good thing is too, in NGE if you dont want to feel apart of the universe, you can go back to mind numbing, click a mission run out to a random place deal with the slow combat, run back, do it again and again and again and again and again. Guess you guys like that grind I forget some people like to do the same thing over and over and over and over, must be a symptom of the average work people do in the day time.
Not sure what you are still going on about, you didn't need to grind you didn't need to anything you didn't want to. Again it was the COMMUNITY that was awesome about pre-cu, no one is saying the engine or anything about the game was awesome. It was what we dealt with it. The ideals of SWG, the tools available to the community is what died with NGE. I'm glad you find it fun but most of us "veterans" do not.
haha your the one who came into my post, which was about saying NGE was better. I don't believe you when you say the community was better, those are just memories from 15 years ago, that mean nothing. I remember a bunch of retarded people in that game running around asking for credits, they would let you do anything to their character. I also remember a bunch of spam, like all the time about the most stupidest things.
As far as community goes, they were good people pre cu, and there were retarded people, it is the same as any game. Basically what you just said was, it doesnt matter what game, garbage game or not if you got good people you can have fun haha, but than you counter dict your self, because you said the same people who were only interested in playing in a good community regardless of game features, all quit, because they added more game features.... You make 0 sense.
No. Actually he said in spite of some problems, such as the engine, that it was because of the "Ideals and tools available" that the game allowed a strong community to exist. The CU weakened the community by removing some of the features and caused some to leave. Then the NGE stripped out many more and caused a mass exodus.
Thank you for drilling the point home, I'm glad someone understands
He didnt drill anything home. You 2 still make no sense. This is what they removed, a very grindy over complicated skill system, Jedi being something that took a year to get and perm death for the Jedi, Forced grouping with entertainers and doctors for no other reason than to get get a buff removing combat fatigue ;which were all bots any ways, and they left the entertainers in if people still wanted to do that;, a slow combat system that was bad, and that is about it. None of those things allowed for a strong community, nor did taking them out make it so a strong community didn't exist. So were are at the same road, neither of you actually even play the game, your using stuff from 15 years ago, get me some things from the current game than we will talk. Let me know which you like better, they both have strong communities New age and pre cu.
All youve said, is you liked things they way they were and they changed them on you and you got butt hurt. It is literally like a child sitting playing with blocks, and you give them a ball and they dont like it, so they get butt hurt and throw the ball at you.
You mean the new SWG is the one after the combat update ? I thought that was what killed the original SWG.
I played SWG from 2003 - 2006. My first professions mastered were Carbineer, and Creature Handler. I also mastered all the Novice Professions, then gave them up. I kept Scout for Exploration / Hunting, Artisan for Surveying, and Medic for Support. I eventually opened Elder Jedi in the village, and got the cool dark Robe the proc'ed lighten bolt
If you are a Fan of FPS/TF2 and twitch game play then CU/NGE if for you. If you are a Fan of MMORPGs and crafting then the Pre-CU if your favorite. If you are Fan of Story and Online Novels then TOR is your favorite.
Vanilla (Pre-CU) SWG had over 30 professions with a choice of 2.25 of them. At any time you could give up all learned profession and start learning new ones. Class and Professions where entirely dynamic and not tied to a player at creation. Even the look of a player could be dynamically changed by an Image Designer profession. Only Sex and Species were locked at creation.
There were no NPC vendors for gear or too sell loot drops (I don't even remember what besides credits NPCs dropped.) Gear was player crafted and stats varied based on quality of resources and skill level of the crafter. So just about every weapon and armour had different stats, and they decayed (had a viable life span). Credits and XP were made from missions. Missions were given out by static or player constructed terminals. Grinding was viable, and Static Spawns where often camped, and Humanoids did drop credits.
It took years for abandoned player housing and cities to vanish. So there was a constant reminder of what a ghost town SWG had become. The ruckus over the CU/NGE didn't come from Elder Jedi, most of them left to play WoW. It came from RPGers who were upset that the MMORPG that they had bought over night had become an MMOFPS. I had a subscription to PlanetSide 1, so I was happy playing a FPS. I could tolerate what had become of SWG, though I was not pleased with the change. Hell I was also playing KoTOR 1 & 2 so I had my Jedi fix taken care of elsewhere.
CU/NGE had 7 combat professions, 4 crafting professions, and 1 Entertainer. These were locked at character creation and you only got one (This is the extent of what was taken from WoW). The game played like a FPS. The CU/NGE didn't kill SWG, the launch of WoW did. The week of WoWs launch over 75% (99% that first week, server populations were 5-10 a day over 7 servers) of SWGs population left and never came back, this is what killed SWG. I had 5 accounts by the end of Pre-CU, unlocking Elder Jedi gave that account 3 character slots for a total of 11. So when the character re-spec came along I was able to master the four Trader professions (Domestic Goods, Engineering, Munitions, and Structures), a Medic, a Commando (favorite holdover from the village grind), four Entertainers, and an Elder Jedi. But I gave up on crafting. I harvested for my guild and that was all.
I'm working on my own self published MMO, that has over 30+ dynamic professions, 15+ spherical mapped planets (night / day and weather / atmosphere), dynamic NPCs and factions (Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic), player crafted gear has the potential to be the BIS (with crafting bonuses), Planet based Zone Auction House search (Planets will be divided into 4 or more zones based on size and search is limited to in zone only), Space Combat with 6 degrees of freedom (think The Expanse), Player Cities / Housing, PvE (Grind, Quest, and Mission Terminals all XP viable), PvP (Tagged Enemy Flagged, Battlegrounds, and Theme Parks), and RPG combat (Tab Targeting).
Those who are fans of FPS don't worry I'm also working on a 3 faction FPS (Humans, Bugs, and Robots). With an RTS component, Resource Harvesting (Both NPC and Player), Base Building and Spaceship Building (Both NPC and Player). Right now each faction has a home system with a single habitable world and two neighboring systems each with a single habitable world. Future plans are to add Orbiting Space Stations / Platforms, Domed Moon Bases, and Terra Forming. The goal is to have Player Crafted as best items in game, but have NPCs fill the gap so players don't have to focus entirely on harvesting and crafting. Players will earn XP and Credits based on Faction Rank. They will spend these credits on Training, Gear, and Consumables (Ammo, Armour, Food, Drink, Med Kits, Repair Kits, Re-spawn, Housing and Vehicles). Why the cost in credits? I want the player to feel the worth of everything in game from gear to their lives. The more a faction loses or spends to replace what is lost the closer they come to losing a territory or control of a world. Don't asking about trying the games, they are still in alpha
SW:TOR is not KoTOR Online or SWG 2.0. Like KoTOR, TOR is story based. But it did away with the Scout, Soldier, Scoundrel, Consular, Guardian, and Sentinel class system. This was a vital component of KoTOR and BioWare didn't realize or respect that. They felt that by dropping two words from the title they were free to do as they pleased. It may be in the top 10 earning Western MMOs, but it is not they game I or others wanted.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
He didnt drill anything home. You 2 still make no sense. This is what they removed, a very grindy over complicated skill system, Jedi being something that took a year to get and perm death for the Jedi, Forced grouping with entertainers and doctors for no other reason than to get get a buff removing combat fatigue ;which were all bots any ways, and they left the entertainers in if people still wanted to do that;, a slow combat system that was bad, and that is about it. None of those things allowed for a strong community, nor did taking them out make it so a strong community didn't exist. So were are at the same road, neither of you actually even play the game, your using stuff from 15 years ago, get me some things from the current game than we will talk. Let me know which you like better, they both have strong communities New age and pre cu.
All youve said, is you liked things they way they were and they changed them on you and you got butt hurt. It is literally like a child sitting playing with blocks, and you give them a ball and they dont like it, so they get butt hurt and throw the ball at you.
OP's name checks out - hateful and mocking of any opinion that disagrees with his. Hateful on features that others clearly enjoyed. So hateful that it closes out any possibility of meaningful discourse. Frankly, not sure why there is even 'peace' there - clearly there is none.
You don't stop playing because you get old, you get old when you stop playing ..
Well the New age one is way more popular than the old one, so that ends that. The combat system is way better in the new one, the old one was terrible. If your saying the new combat system is bad, than your saying SWTOR is bad, everquest, everquest 2, WOW, Star trek online, Never winter, Baulders gate, baulders gate 2, and like 90 mores games with the same combat. As for your fake news about the vast majority of swg leaving, its just not true. The new SWG brought in more players than it lost. I dont recall anything saying, we are closing SWG because nge ruined it....... There were more people on SWG consistantly than SWTOR has now. When i logged onto swtor, there were like 10 people on republic, and 20 on imperial, starter planets had like 15 players, assuming they were even there. No one was talking so it is hard to tell. I rarely ran into any one.
So that ends that for me, the people who say the old swg was great, have rose colored glasses on, or never played either. It is right up there with the conspiracy that the moon is hallow and aliens live in it, thats why we dont go back to the moon.
I played SWG from '03-06. I was on the SWG servers the week WoW came out and vacuumed up all the MMO players. I had 5 SWG subs and 10 other MMO subs at the time. Of those 11 MMOs in 2004, I was subed to the top 10 in the USA. They were all EMPTY servers the week that WoW came out. I'm talking less than 10 people on the entire server, not just a starting map.
Pre-CU SWG had a population of ~250k. After merging half of the servers CU/NGE had a population 90k, so that ends that. If you are a fan of FPS, then the CU/NGE may have been a better one, but it didn't draw back the 100k who left Planetside 1 to play WoW and never came back. The CU/NGE only came close to the numbers of Pre-CU SWG on the free EMU servers. But I don't know their population numbers, I only have their website unique visitor numbers and those number are less than 250k (peeked at ~190k). FYI SW:TOR has a population around ~1M in 2012. I just emailed an operator of an EMU and asked his numbers, he said his servers gets less than 6k unique players a month. That's far less than the +100k his website gets every month.
Are you saying in your third sentence that begins "If your saying the new combat system is bad...", that all those games had FPS twitch combat then I believe you are mistaken. I still have my copy of Neverwinter in the original box with the $59.99 Best Buy price tag, but I don't remember it having the same combat as the CU/NGE. Nor did EQ, EQ2 or WoW, I owned and played the rest of the games you listed but I just don't remember them like I do Pool of Radiance in the gold box.
My primary server was Tarquinas, a smaller server population, but my first character was on Bria (The largest pop server at the time AFAIR).
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
My primary server was Tarquinas, a smaller server population, but my first character was on Bria (The largest pop server at the time AFAIR).
You remember correctly @Konfess Of the 3 beta servers(Ahazi, Bria and Corbantis) most beta players went to Bria. Then it got the influx one would expect from being low in the alphabet, thus high on the server list, to propel it to #1 pop early on. By the end I believe it was Starsider, though Bria was always in the top 3.
I think what is going on here is either a population drive for a CU/NGE EMU server or some one trying to drum up sales of installation media on eBay. Either way this is not a valid discussion of SWG, except by those of us that were there.
Thanks for the heads up @Thourne on the population information.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
I think what is going on here is either a population drive for a CU/NGE EMU server or some one trying to drum up sales of installation media on eBay. Either way this is not a valid discussion of SWG, except by those of us that were there.
I hear ya @Konfess Like you I was there early, from beta in my case. I eventually had 13 accounts, although only 5-6 active at a time.(the dead accounts held my factories and houses). I made my 1st live character at launch on Corbantis. Don't let anyone tell you that you couldn't log in on launch day. You could but it took luck. 4 hours later Corbantis crashed and I remade on Chilastra and never looked back. I had a Master of every single profession except one -> Master Squad Leader, even my sanity had it's limits. I was the 1st Master Merchant on my server and the 3rd Master Weaponsmith.
Anyway I could go on for hours but there isn't much point in it lol.
The thing is that the early SWG (vanilla?) was original but buggy. After NGE it lost most of what made it an original game but they did fix a lot of broken things.
So if you just see bugs and problems as how good the game was then the late version was better. Gameplay wise and fun wise the early version was far better.
Nothing changes that the NGE was probably the largest MMO blunder ever, you don't change a launched game completely without a discussion with your players first, and you certainly don't release a new expansion only to rend it useless 9 days after launch.
SWG was rather far from a perfect game but it did offer a unique experience for it's players. When it started to loose players to Wow Smed panicked and decided to make it closer to the competition but what he really should have done was fixing up the game instead. What really lost SWG players was how buggy it was, not it's unique mechanics. If the game would have run as well as Wow and had as few bugs it would certainly have kept it's players better.
And the sub numbers dropped even faster after the NGE, the drop started really a while before Wow launched but we can clearly see that the game faded into obscurity rather fast once the NGE had hit.
I don't see what TOR have to do with anything? It was kinda Star wars Wow with more cutscenes but you can't really blame it for SWGs final death, the game was already dying by then and Daybreak would have killed it anyways when they took over, it just wasn't earning enough money. SOE screwed up and most players left, that was the problem.
Hopefully can someone salvage some of it's ideas like the excellent crafting for a future game but I don't think we see anything similar in the future unless some fans make a kickstarter and use a slightly different world (no way Disney would license a kickstarter MMO) and even then I don't think it ever would be close to SWG peak.
I personally didn't like swg. Played it for a few weeks just after launch. I was just... bored. My brother loved it and played for a long time running a little town.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Late to the party, but let me give you an example of why Pre-CU was better. First, I attribute the addition of Jedi in the first place as what was ultimately responsible for SWG's eventual downfall. It took career Dancers, Doctors, and crafters and turned them into FOTM holocron grinders. It destroyed the community. The part you're missing is that ALL of the professions had a place. Every single one of them. Dancers were important for mind wound healing. Rangers were important if you wanted the best hides for 80% kinetic armor crafting. Remember, the best resources would rotate in and out, and a ranger could gather boatloads of the stuff when it was available. Doctors were necessary for amazing buffs and wound healing. Bioengineers made it so we didn't have to master Beast Master to solo Rancor missions. The list goes on and on.
I submit that you never really "got" SWG if you believe NGE was better. I'm glad you're still able to enjoy it in some fashion, but I have to disagree that NGE was better. No there were no AH listings. Remember, SWG was about community not killing. If I wanted a new wepon (or a crate for Pikeman because they broke like crazy) then I went to Vast's Weapon Emporium on Corellia. Yes, 15 years later, I still remember my weapon guy, because SWG allowed us to build communities. I might spend an hour killing sand people because I wanted a broken datapad that looked good on the desk of my doctor's office I had made. I didn't need a fast speeder. I was an X-34 Landspeeder guy. I even had a looping macro that turned the beat up as I cruised around town ridin' slow. Those are the things that NGE destroyed. Community didn't mean as much anymore, and it became about hitting max level, not living in the world you were a part of.
NGE existed for a lot longer then PreCU. It had loads of content added and was improved upon for long. I hated NGE at first, but came back a few years later when a lot had changed. I always loved being a trader in SWG and that was basically destroyed at first. But they expanded the crafting a lot afterwards and when they also brought back empire vs rebels city invasions etc, I was sold. Oh and spacecombat with those multiplayer ships was awesome.
Anyway, at that point, the only thing I still missed was the skill system. (Well and hoping for a better engine, because that was really showing its age in ground combat).
To be fair, ground combat is kind of shit in any implementation of SWG. The engine is utterly crap for a 3d game (there is no real z axis). But who played SWG just for the combat. For me it definately was the sum of all those features the game offered (top crafting, space combat, player housing, player cities, content creation system , bounty hunting)
I dono I dont think the game looks to bad. It is def better looking than, EQ, Anarchy online, about the same as ryzom. Minus that guys head that got stuck in the screen shot lol, it would look better if I could figure out how to force aa with a radeon card but I cant.
I never said that the game looked bad, it looked great for the time. Just that the engine was very bad for combat. Because there was no z-axis, you had all kinds of line of sight issues during combat. Standing with one foot in a ditch could make it impossible to shoot at someone. The other way around was even worse, when laser beams followed you through walls. There were a lot of glitches to exploit, making pvp quite bad sometimes.
And then when mounts and vehicles were introduced you could see that the engine could not handle that speed well. Because lairs and other scenery tended to pop up way too late. This was especially annoying when hunting specific animals, because you had to pause to wait for lairs to spawn
Only reason I could live with these issues is because its Star Wars and it had loads of other things to enjoy.
The community folks nailed it. SWG was about that, you did things with other people. You could solo if you liked, but the fun part was with others. I played long after NGE hit, but it was all in space, NGE did not mess that up. SWTOR is just your typical MMO of today, no community. Attempting to compare the two is absurd. They are as different as night and day.
Jedi really had little effect on the game, the grind was bad enough that most people did not bother.
Actually, if you didn't train other people you didn't get the points for training and therefore could not purchase any Master Boxes for your professions. This would be why people made sure to train others more than any other reason. Again community building Inter-dependence.
No you could def go from nothing to master from a npc.... I mean think about what you just said, you just said that the only way to get master boxes is from training from other people. You start the game with no skills, therefore no one could train master boxes, because no one was there with master boxes to start with.................................................. .... .. .a.fsda .,mf,asd ; l';f,sa [dfjkg[oasifhdgpiuaweshj
and it became about hitting max level, not living in the world you were a part of.
THIS.
That's exactly the reason why I struggle to enjoy mmorpg today. The community does not exist on the same level we had those days. People log in, use some sort of facilitation like auction houses to avoid interaction, get in some sort of dungeon finder and rush the run without paying attention to lore or they brothers or sisters in arms.
Dude, I knew people who sold good stuff by (nick)name!!! Most mmorpg players nowadays don't even know the dungeon boss name! They don't know where it stays, where is the entrance!
They are so disconnected from the online multiplayer game they are playing that it baffles me!
And is not just the trading aspect, as someone mentioned in previous thread the lack of facilitation would force you to build a certain "fame" on the server if you intended to engage in bigger stuff other than soloing lower lvl maps - either by being a badass who everyone wants to be around or being nice and making friends.
I had people on Priston Tale (I know, I know, it was the only mmorpg here at the time) stopping me and asking how I was doing, and helping me out because "this is the guy that helped me and my sister with the job quest". It did not have any sort of facilitator like friend list or anything, and as much those tools sure helps how far do they keep us from actually interacting with one another if we can double click a name and type what we need?
Well, all your talking about is a new game, where no one knows anything about it. Once people figure it out, they post guides, and then no one lives the world, they just do the fastest grind to max. In the emu I think I was the only one that actually went through it and had fun, I saw 99 percent of every one else, just running to the cantina getting a buff, and grinding missions over and over.
Actually, if you didn't train other people you didn't get the points for training and therefore could not purchase any Master Boxes for your professions. This would be why people made sure to train others more than any other reason. Again community building Inter-dependence.
No you could def go from nothing to master from a npc.... I mean think about what you just said, you just said that the only way to get master boxes is from training from other people. You start the game with no skills, therefore no one could train master boxes, because no one was there with master boxes to start with.................................................. .... .. .a.fsda .,mf,asd ; l';f,sa [dfjkg[oasifhdgpiuaweshj
Now you have proven you didn't play the game. The Master Boxes for any profession and only the Master Boxes required points you earned ONLY BY TRAINING OTHERS. If you hadn't trained other player characters you didn't earn those points and could not train a Master Box.
I played all versions of SWG: original pre-cu/nge, CU, and NGE. It was one of my favorite games of all time (in all its forms, though I personally preferred the original version (and the JTL expansion was awesome, too)). I can confirm what @Thourne said:
Master Profession boxes required Apprentice Points, which were only acquired by teaching other players skills you already knew. Every other skill box required specific weapon, general combat, or some sort of crafting experience points.
I played all versions of SWG: original pre-cu/nge, CU, and NGE. It was one of my favorite games of all time (in all its forms, though I personally preferred the original version (and the JTL expansion was awesome, too)). I can confirm what @Thourne said:
Master Profession boxes required Apprentice Points, which were only acquired by teaching other players skills you already knew. Every other skill box required specific weapon, general combat, or some sort of crafting experience points.
Anyways, just wanted to chime in.
Ty @Smoden And it required 620 apprentice points to buy that box, which was a fair amount of training of fellow players.
Since I only tried each of the three for a short time (6 months or less), I'm really giving an outsider's perspective here. None of them were perfect games.
Pre-CU had a terrible interface and a steep learning curve. Thankfully people there were friendly and someone helped me get started in crafting. I wasn't there long enough to build any notoriety but I was having fun without having a combat character. As others said, It was extremely player driven in those days and crafting felt like it mattered. It felt rewarding to see friends using the items I crafted.
The CU caused my crafting mentor and many of my friends stop playing so I did too. I decided it was time to dedicate more time to my other game, Anarchy Online, where I still had friends to play with. So unfortunately my only memory of the CU was my friends quitting the game because of it.
Later on I tried NGE while I was playing The Matrix Online because it was included on SOE's station pass. Again I tried to be a crafter (engineer I believe). The crafting didn't seem to be as fun or useful as it was pre-NGE. Since I was already established in MxO since it first came out, I just stayed there and learned to code (craft) almost every craftable item there instead.
Then came SW:TOR. I was impressed by the story (aside from The Secret World there is really nothing that comes close) but unfortunately that's all it had for me. It felt like a solo story RPG that happened to have other people in it. No sense of community at all.
If these games were good or not differs from person to person. Everyone likes games for different reasons. Some love combat and pvp, others want a great story, some want a great community while others like to solo everything. One person's "best game ever!" is another's "I hate this **** game!"
As I found out after a game I played shut down, even among players who all loved the same game they all enjoyed it for very different reasons. Now, three years later, I'm still in contact with my clan from that game but we still haven't found a new game we can all agree to play together because of our different tastes in games.
It doesn't matter what everyone else likes or thinks is a good game. What matters is what you like. If you find a game you really enjoy stick to it and spend as much time there as you can. You never know when it could end.
SWG was rather far from a perfect game but it did offer a unique experience for it's players. When it started to loose players to Wow Smed panicked and decided to make it closer to the competition but what he really should have done was fixing up the game instead. What really lost SWG players was how buggy it was, not it's unique mechanics. If the game would have run as well as Wow and had as few bugs it would certainly have kept it's players better.
And the sub numbers dropped even faster after the NGE, the drop started really a while before Wow launched but we can clearly see that the game faded into obscurity rather fast once the NGE had hit.
That was my experience as well. My server has some great communities but they all started to die even before JTL. Wow was not live yet so people were leaving for EVE or City of Heroes. The game was buggy and so grindy that I was getting cramps in my mouse hand . The sandbox was nice but rather shallow in everything except the most involved crafting. The game engine was weak which severely limited certain gameplay styles. eg playing as a sniper type was pointless since the range of rifles was essentially the same as pistols.
The game was also way to bot-prone. Many of the actions were so grindy that the only way to get anything done was to write a bot in the internal scripting language. Pretty much 99% of the doctors or dancers you saw were bots.
The CU and NGE were not hte right things for the game but the game needed to change or it would have died anyway.
Look man you are opening up a beehive for a lot of us who loved what made the pre-cu SWG so great. As many said, its not about quests, its not about the combat, its not about any hand holding features that came with the NGE. It is 100% about how the entire game was a sandbox with zero direction. It was ahead of its time and that is why it failed so brilliantly.
The entire game was ran by the community of the server, things happened because of the players not because the devs scripted it to happen. You had masterful traders and crafts that you knew by name cause they were the best in the business. They knew where to buy or collect the best materials to make the most optimized weapons. You had people you knew in the cantina that would do nothing but serve customers and those customers were players to get buffed. You had to actually learn skills from other players. You had player cities that soon became known landmarks on the server, people knew what it was and who resided there. You had raids and peace treaties depending on actual people actions in the community. AGAIN IT WAS A COMMUNITY! When CU came out that community still survived a bit, but when NGE hit that COMMUNITY DIED. Massively huge player cities turned to ghost towns. Traders were no longer known by name just how quickly you could get it. Crafting became irrelevant.
The combat was shit, the interfaces were shit, the entire engine rendered like shit, BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERED! COMMUNITY was and is the only redeeming factor of pre-cu. If you think for a second the only people that whined that their game, their community was driven in the ground by stupid executive decisions, were the Jedi's that spent a lot of time gaining the gift of the Jedi from holocrons you are 100% wrong.
~ Signed - A memory in the past
Even after the new age came out you could play it any way you wanted. There were no things in place that forced you to do quests. What is with you wanting a game with nothing in it? Just because they added quests and a tutorial that could be ignored that made the game bad? It still is a sandbox in the new age version of the server, I dont know how you could claim that it is not. It was not ahead of its time, it was the same as all the other mmos at the time, like uo and eq. Forced grouping, limited content because they were new, a bunch of bugs.... As far as the crafting goes, they didn't change that in the new age, I dont get why you say that. Stuff was all still player made, there were some quested stuff, but the majority of stuff was still made, the resources were still randomly generated, the crafting was still unique.
I am starting to think you didn't play. You 100 percent didn't have to learn skills from other players, you learned skills from npcs. The only reason people got skills from other players is because they were free from them. As for the player cities they never left when the new age came out....... Raids never left when the new age came out..... THe community 100 percent didn't die, there where plenty of people that played it, and did the same things they did before, maybe all the butt hurt Jedi left.
The combat in the new age is 10 times better, the animations dont skip over them selves, the worthless que system was gone, it was 10 time less clunky.
Yeah I am sure more people got butt hurt and baby whined the game changed, but that happens with everything. I hear people whine about how they think wow was better when it first came out, how eq was best when it first came out, how uo was best when it first came out, how ford cars were the best when they first came out, how 60s music is the best and new music is garbage.
Its called make believe nostalgia. Swg hands down was a better game at the end than when it started. More new player friendly, same crafting system for the most part, better classes, easier to use interface, better trading system, city system was still there, space combat was better, random asteroid resources you had to get in space, more fluid animations, better combat system, better story, better tutorial, better everything, minus the Jedi, and on and on. If you take away that fake memory you have of a game being good when it wasn't we wouldnt be having this conversation.
Just like SWTOR, with even more hand holding, 0 freedom from quests, so simple a game, you can slap your face on the keyboard and win, less defined classes, no beast handling, no crafting at all, no player economy, gambling boxes, 0 sandbox features, linear everything from pvp to space ships, is a 100 times more popular game than swg ever was.
So yeah, a tiny minority thinks a game, that has no content, a bunch of bugs, forced grouping, no balance classes, a perm death Jedi thing, pvp that was so unbalanced a Jedi could take on 100 people, was the better game...... It is also why Ryzom, which basically has that crafting system you keep glorifying, a 10 times better combat system, a 10 times better world, make your own skills, random resources, ect ect, has like 100 people that play it.
All i can say is your wrong lol. Because if you were right, ryzom would have wow population, and wow would have like 100 people. SWG when it first came out had no competition to speak of, if they keep the game the same, yeah it would of retained the original 5000 people who thought the bug fest, forced grouping, no content game was good, but they wouldn't of got all the new players they did.
What game are you playing now? Bet it is not Ryzom or SWG emu, classic uo, or project 1999, cause all those put together have like 4000 people.
Your right though your obviously butt hurt about the whole thing, and no matter what i put your gonna feel the same way, so what ever, im gonna go play new age SWG and have some fun. You enjoy your make believe memories, while you dont even really like that kind of game, more than likely playing WOW as you were writing that to me haha.
There are plenty of old mmos to play. Project 1999, Dark age of Camelot, Ryzom, Istria, Classic Uo, Dark fall, SWG emu which is to the t like old SWG use to be, and I am sure there are plenty more.
The OP is just on the tip of the realization that people value and enjoy widely different things.
This person, however, clearly still clings to their delusions very strongly. They are but flesh and faith, and have their mind concluded.
I have to chime in and say that all this talk about SWTOR having no players is exaggerated. There are dead servers unfortunately, but they have also made it very cheap to transfer servers(if you sub the cc you get is enough for it). Make sure you join a populated server like The Harbinger. My queues do not take NEARLY as long as some have said and I am standing in a starter zone right now and there are 66 people here.
Playing or interested in playing SWTOR? Use my referral link here and we will both get rewards! Including a week of game time for you, if you are a preferred status player! Click here for more info!
Comments
He didnt drill anything home. You 2 still make no sense. This is what they removed, a very grindy over complicated skill system, Jedi being something that took a year to get and perm death for the Jedi, Forced grouping with entertainers and doctors for no other reason than to get get a buff removing combat fatigue ;which were all bots any ways, and they left the entertainers in if people still wanted to do that;, a slow combat system that was bad, and that is about it. None of those things allowed for a strong community, nor did taking them out make it so a strong community didn't exist. So were are at the same road, neither of you actually even play the game, your using stuff from 15 years ago, get me some things from the current game than we will talk. Let me know which you like better, they both have strong communities New age and pre cu.
All youve said, is you liked things they way they were and they changed them on you and you got butt hurt. It is literally like a child sitting playing with blocks, and you give them a ball and they dont like it, so they get butt hurt and throw the ball at you.
This is the only guy out of any of us making any sense.
I played SWG from 2003 - 2006. My first professions mastered were Carbineer, and Creature Handler. I also mastered all the Novice Professions, then gave them up. I kept Scout for Exploration / Hunting, Artisan for Surveying, and Medic for Support. I eventually opened Elder Jedi in the village, and got the cool dark Robe the proc'ed lighten bolt
If you are a Fan of FPS/TF2 and twitch game play then CU/NGE if for you. If you are a Fan of MMORPGs and crafting then the Pre-CU if your favorite. If you are Fan of Story and Online Novels then TOR is your favorite.
Vanilla (Pre-CU) SWG had over 30 professions with a choice of 2.25 of them. At any time you could give up all learned profession and start learning new ones. Class and Professions where entirely dynamic and not tied to a player at creation. Even the look of a player could be dynamically changed by an Image Designer profession. Only Sex and Species were locked at creation.
There were no NPC vendors for gear or too sell loot drops (I don't even remember what besides credits NPCs dropped.) Gear was player crafted and stats varied based on quality of resources and skill level of the crafter. So just about every weapon and armour had different stats, and they decayed (had a viable life span). Credits and XP were made from missions. Missions were given out by static or player constructed terminals. Grinding was viable, and Static Spawns where often camped, and Humanoids did drop credits.
It took years for abandoned player housing and cities to vanish. So there was a constant reminder of what a ghost town SWG had become. The ruckus over the CU/NGE didn't come from Elder Jedi, most of them left to play WoW. It came from RPGers who were upset that the MMORPG that they had bought over night had become an MMOFPS. I had a subscription to PlanetSide 1, so I was happy playing a FPS. I could tolerate what had become of SWG, though I was not pleased with the change. Hell I was also playing KoTOR 1 & 2 so I had my Jedi fix taken care of elsewhere.
CU/NGE had 7 combat professions, 4 crafting professions, and 1 Entertainer. These were locked at character creation and you only got one (This is the extent of what was taken from WoW). The game played like a FPS. The CU/NGE didn't kill SWG, the launch of WoW did. The week of WoWs launch over 75% (99% that first week, server populations were 5-10 a day over 7 servers) of SWGs population left and never came back, this is what killed SWG. I had 5 accounts by the end of Pre-CU, unlocking Elder Jedi gave that account 3 character slots for a total of 11. So when the character re-spec came along I was able to master the four Trader professions (Domestic Goods, Engineering, Munitions, and Structures), a Medic, a Commando (favorite holdover from the village grind), four Entertainers, and an Elder Jedi. But I gave up on crafting. I harvested for my guild and that was all.
I'm working on my own self published MMO, that has over 30+ dynamic professions, 15+ spherical mapped planets (night / day and weather / atmosphere), dynamic NPCs and factions (Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic), player crafted gear has the potential to be the BIS (with crafting bonuses), Planet based Zone Auction House search (Planets will be divided into 4 or more zones based on size and search is limited to in zone only), Space Combat with 6 degrees of freedom (think The Expanse), Player Cities / Housing, PvE (Grind, Quest, and Mission Terminals all XP viable), PvP (Tagged Enemy Flagged, Battlegrounds, and Theme Parks), and RPG combat (Tab Targeting).
Those who are fans of FPS don't worry I'm also working on a 3 faction FPS (Humans, Bugs, and Robots). With an RTS component, Resource Harvesting (Both NPC and Player), Base Building and Spaceship Building (Both NPC and Player). Right now each faction has a home system with a single habitable world and two neighboring systems each with a single habitable world. Future plans are to add Orbiting Space Stations / Platforms, Domed Moon Bases, and Terra Forming. The goal is to have Player Crafted as best items in game, but have NPCs fill the gap so players don't have to focus entirely on harvesting and crafting. Players will earn XP and Credits based on Faction Rank. They will spend these credits on Training, Gear, and Consumables (Ammo, Armour, Food, Drink, Med Kits, Repair Kits, Re-spawn, Housing and Vehicles). Why the cost in credits? I want the player to feel the worth of everything in game from gear to their lives. The more a faction loses or spends to replace what is lost the closer they come to losing a territory or control of a world. Don't asking about trying the games, they are still in alpha
SW:TOR is not KoTOR Online or SWG 2.0. Like KoTOR, TOR is story based. But it did away with the Scout, Soldier, Scoundrel, Consular, Guardian, and Sentinel class system. This was a vital component of KoTOR and BioWare didn't realize or respect that. They felt that by dropping two words from the title they were free to do as they pleased. It may be in the top 10 earning Western MMOs, but it is not they game I or others wanted.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
OP's name checks out - hateful and mocking of any opinion that disagrees with his. Hateful on features that others clearly enjoyed. So hateful that it closes out any possibility of meaningful discourse. Frankly, not sure why there is even 'peace' there - clearly there is none.
You don't stop playing because you get old, you get old when you stop playing ..
Now you just need to accept that many people liked what they removed.
I played SWG from '03-06. I was on the SWG servers the week WoW came out and vacuumed up all the MMO players. I had 5 SWG subs and 10 other MMO subs at the time. Of those 11 MMOs in 2004, I was subed to the top 10 in the USA. They were all EMPTY servers the week that WoW came out. I'm talking less than 10 people on the entire server, not just a starting map.
Pre-CU SWG had a population of ~250k. After merging half of the servers CU/NGE had a population 90k, so that ends that. If you are a fan of FPS, then the CU/NGE may have been a better one, but it didn't draw back the 100k who left Planetside 1 to play WoW and never came back. The CU/NGE only came close to the numbers of Pre-CU SWG on the free EMU servers. But I don't know their population numbers, I only have their website unique visitor numbers and those number are less than 250k (peeked at ~190k). FYI SW:TOR has a population around ~1M in 2012. I just emailed an operator of an EMU and asked his numbers, he said his servers gets less than 6k unique players a month. That's far less than the +100k his website gets every month.
Are you saying in your third sentence that begins "If your saying the new combat system is bad...", that all those games had FPS twitch combat then I believe you are mistaken. I still have my copy of Neverwinter in the original box with the $59.99 Best Buy price tag, but I don't remember it having the same combat as the CU/NGE. Nor did EQ, EQ2 or WoW, I owned and played the rest of the games you listed but I just don't remember them like I do Pool of Radiance in the gold box.
My primary server was Tarquinas, a smaller server population, but my first character was on Bria (The largest pop server at the time AFAIR).
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
You remember correctly @Konfess
Of the 3 beta servers(Ahazi, Bria and Corbantis) most beta players went to Bria.
Then it got the influx one would expect from being low in the alphabet, thus high on the server list, to propel it to #1 pop early on.
By the end I believe it was Starsider, though Bria was always in the top 3.
Thanks for the heads up @Thourne on the population information.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
I hear ya @Konfess
Like you I was there early, from beta in my case.
I eventually had 13 accounts, although only 5-6 active at a time.(the dead accounts held my factories and houses).
I made my 1st live character at launch on Corbantis. Don't let anyone tell you that you couldn't log in on launch day. You could but it took luck. 4 hours later Corbantis crashed and I remade on Chilastra and never looked back.
I had a Master of every single profession except one -> Master Squad Leader, even my sanity had it's limits.
I was the 1st Master Merchant on my server and the 3rd Master Weaponsmith.
Anyway I could go on for hours but there isn't much point in it lol.
So if you just see bugs and problems as how good the game was then the late version was better. Gameplay wise and fun wise the early version was far better.
Nothing changes that the NGE was probably the largest MMO blunder ever, you don't change a launched game completely without a discussion with your players first, and you certainly don't release a new expansion only to rend it useless 9 days after launch.
SWG was rather far from a perfect game but it did offer a unique experience for it's players. When it started to loose players to Wow Smed panicked and decided to make it closer to the competition but what he really should have done was fixing up the game instead. What really lost SWG players was how buggy it was, not it's unique mechanics. If the game would have run as well as Wow and had as few bugs it would certainly have kept it's players better.
And the sub numbers dropped even faster after the NGE, the drop started really a while before Wow launched but we can clearly see that the game faded into obscurity rather fast once the NGE had hit.
I don't see what TOR have to do with anything? It was kinda Star wars Wow with more cutscenes but you can't really blame it for SWGs final death, the game was already dying by then and Daybreak would have killed it anyways when they took over, it just wasn't earning enough money. SOE screwed up and most players left, that was the problem.
Hopefully can someone salvage some of it's ideas like the excellent crafting for a future game but I don't think we see anything similar in the future unless some fans make a kickstarter and use a slightly different world (no way Disney would license a kickstarter MMO) and even then I don't think it ever would be close to SWG peak.
I submit that you never really "got" SWG if you believe NGE was better. I'm glad you're still able to enjoy it in some fashion, but I have to disagree that NGE was better. No there were no AH listings. Remember, SWG was about community not killing. If I wanted a new wepon (or a crate for Pikeman because they broke like crazy) then I went to Vast's Weapon Emporium on Corellia. Yes, 15 years later, I still remember my weapon guy, because SWG allowed us to build communities. I might spend an hour killing sand people because I wanted a broken datapad that looked good on the desk of my doctor's office I had made. I didn't need a fast speeder. I was an X-34 Landspeeder guy. I even had a looping macro that turned the beat up as I cruised around town ridin' slow. Those are the things that NGE destroyed. Community didn't mean as much anymore, and it became about hitting max level, not living in the world you were a part of.
I never said that the game looked bad, it looked great for the time. Just that the engine was very bad for combat. Because there was no z-axis, you had all kinds of line of sight issues during combat. Standing with one foot in a ditch could make it impossible to shoot at someone. The other way around was even worse, when laser beams followed you through walls. There were a lot of glitches to exploit, making pvp quite bad sometimes.
And then when mounts and vehicles were introduced you could see that the engine could not handle that speed well. Because lairs and other scenery tended to pop up way too late. This was especially annoying when hunting specific animals, because you had to pause to wait for lairs to spawn
Only reason I could live with these issues is because its Star Wars and it had loads of other things to enjoy.
Jedi really had little effect on the game, the grind was bad enough that most people did not bother.
No you could def go from nothing to master from a npc.... I mean think about what you just said, you just said that the only way to get master boxes is from training from other people. You start the game with no skills, therefore no one could train master boxes, because no one was there with master boxes to start with..................................................
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I do accept it, I just think the things they removed were garbage anyways, so i think they need to accept that. Nyctelios said:
Well, all your talking about is a new game, where no one knows anything about it. Once people figure it out, they post guides, and then no one lives the world, they just do the fastest grind to max. In the emu I think I was the only one that actually went through it and had fun, I saw 99 percent of every one else, just running to the cantina getting a buff, and grinding missions over and over.
Now you have proven you didn't play the game.
The Master Boxes for any profession and only the Master Boxes required points you earned ONLY BY TRAINING OTHERS.
If you hadn't trained other player characters you didn't earn those points and could not train a Master Box.
Master Profession boxes required Apprentice Points, which were only acquired by teaching other players skills you already knew. Every other skill box required specific weapon, general combat, or some sort of crafting experience points.
Anyways, just wanted to chime in.
And it required 620 apprentice points to buy that box, which was a fair amount of training of fellow players.
Pre-CU had a terrible interface and a steep learning curve. Thankfully people there were friendly and someone helped me get started in crafting. I wasn't there long enough to build any notoriety but I was having fun without having a combat character. As others said, It was extremely player driven in those days and crafting felt like it mattered. It felt rewarding to see friends using the items I crafted.
The CU caused my crafting mentor and many of my friends stop playing so I did too. I decided it was time to dedicate more time to my other game, Anarchy Online, where I still had friends to play with. So unfortunately my only memory of the CU was my friends quitting the game because of it.
Later on I tried NGE while I was playing The Matrix Online because it was included on SOE's station pass. Again I tried to be a crafter (engineer I believe). The crafting didn't seem to be as fun or useful as it was pre-NGE. Since I was already established in MxO since it first came out, I just stayed there and learned to code (craft) almost every craftable item there instead.
Then came SW:TOR. I was impressed by the story (aside from The Secret World there is really nothing that comes close) but unfortunately that's all it had for me. It felt like a solo story RPG that happened to have other people in it. No sense of community at all.
If these games were good or not differs from person to person. Everyone likes games for different reasons. Some love combat and pvp, others want a great story, some want a great community while others like to solo everything. One person's "best game ever!" is another's "I hate this **** game!"
As I found out after a game I played shut down, even among players who all loved the same game they all enjoyed it for very different reasons. Now, three years later, I'm still in contact with my clan from that game but we still haven't found a new game we can all agree to play together because of our different tastes in games.
It doesn't matter what everyone else likes or thinks is a good game. What matters is what you like. If you find a game you really enjoy stick to it and spend as much time there as you can. You never know when it could end.
The game was also way to bot-prone. Many of the actions were so grindy that the only way to get anything done was to write a bot in the internal scripting language. Pretty much 99% of the doctors or dancers you saw were bots.
The CU and NGE were not hte right things for the game but the game needed to change or it would have died anyway.
The OP is just on the tip of the realization that people value and enjoy widely different things.
This person, however, clearly still clings to their delusions very strongly. They are but flesh and faith, and have their mind concluded.