Pre-NGE starwars Jedi concept

Cryomatrix · November 2018

I never played SWG pre-NGE but I read about how certain people could unlock being a Jedi by maxing out certain random skills and it was different for each player. I actually think it is a fantastic concept, it allows people who put in the time + a bit of luck (which I'm okay with) to become something special. That is what it is important to me in gaming.

So those that played during that time, what did you guys think of the concept?

If i were to make an MMO game, I would include a concept like that. I just think it makes it so fun and special. I am not a believer in every one has equal chance to be every thing. Life isn't like that and neither should a game.

Cryomatrix

Hashbrick · November 2018

The concept was cool, the players that were Jedi were treated like Celebrity, hated and loved at the same time. It wasn't just random skills there was more to it then that but if you somehow unlocked it then you got to go on a holocron hunt to improve your jedi training. It was really unique I don't think I recall anything like that again showing up in an MMORPG.

mmolou · November 2018

Originally, there was no Jedi at all, then they added it, and for some people it was instantly unlocked without any idea how they had done it.

For some players, it was frustrating, knowing it could be done, but having no clue how to achieve it.

Personally, I was not really interested in unlocking Jedi, still not interested even now, playing swgemu Basilisk.

One thing the random Jedi unlock did, was help ruin the game, as they added the holo grind so all you have to do was grind out the professions holocron's told you to.

A lot of players decided to just ignore the holo grind and grind out every single profession, unlocking Jedi that way.

I just found that part of the game a bit shit in all honesty.

Amathe · November 2018

There were many things I loved about original SWG. This wasn't one of them. The "path" to Jedi was a mindless, tedious, hateful grind, often governed by sheer luck, made worse by the infamous "hologrind."

Aethaeryn · November 2018

I liked the idea of perma-death for them. I think the path to it could have been better but I am not sure how I would do it differently myself. I was gone by the time that all came about.

Cryomatrix · November 2018

Describe the hologrind?

FlyByKnight · November 2018

The way folks talk about Star Wars pre-NGE you got me (a person who never played either) feeling like its basically Second Life based on the Star Wars universe. Was it that free form or just rose colored nostalgia? You telling me pre-NGE, I could be a Jedi master and then just one day decide no more fights for me and open a bar sell people buffs?

MonsieurX · November 2018

Cryomatrix said:

Describe the hologrind?

The holocron told you which profession to grind to master level one after another.
In short, it was just a plain and simple professions grind which in itself was lame.

moshra · November 2018

Xavier_78 said:

Cryomatrix said:

Describe the hologrind?

The holocron told you which profession to grind to master level one after another.
In short, it was just a plain and simple professions grind which in itself was lame.

the last holo didn't actually tell you what to master either. You basically had to master random professions until you got the right one.

Amathe · November 2018

Cryomatrix said:

Describe the hologrind?

Ok, from memory of a galaxy now far, far away, in order to unlock Jedi for yourself, you had to master a certain number of professions. Five maybe? Let's say 5. But there were many professions and you didn't know which five. It had to be five chosen for you, so it varied from person to person.

So you started in a position where you basically had to master profession after profession after profession ad nauseum until by blind shithouse luck you unlocked. You had to unlearn many of the professions you mastered in order to do this.

Now along comes the holocron. It's a little gadget that tells you one of the professions you need to master. Not all five, One. So of course people valued holocrons above all things and farmed hell out of any content where they dropped. Or bought them. Or sold them. The whole game basically became about getting holocrons either to unlock Jedi or for personal enrichment.

laxie · November 2018

I pretty much spent my teenage years in SWG. I played it since early launch for about 5 years on a daily basis (6+ hours a day, often more). I then played it regularly until the closure, although not as excessively.

It was a sandbox game in the true sense of the word. The majority of the content was generated by social play or role play. It would not be possible to literally spend 25%+ of my life there otherwise. This was partly due to game design (heavy social focus), but also due to other reasons: the franchise (passionate fans + lore), the MMO environment of that time (expectations of open gameplay), and the online environment of that time(user ownership, low regulation).

For context, the pre-release designs were even more socially focused, but the game got pushed out by the publisher. This influenced the Jedi progression in particular. The very original system (design pre-release) was similar to the jedi village progression released later on. For the first few years of SWG though, you had a 'temporary' system in place called the holo-grind. I am calling it 'temporary' because it was not the original system planned.

Both systems did a reasonable job of making the Jedi hard to obtain. The first publicly available system, the holo-grind, consisted of finding a rare drop called the holocron. Activating it would consume the item and randomly pick a profession (or a 'class' in WoW terms) and tell you to master it. Upon fully levelling up that class, you would have to repeat the whole process several times. This puts a relatively direct value on the Jedi profession, as it is equal to levelling up a few other classes, at which point you unlock Jedi which you still have to level up. The major issue with this was two-fold. First, the holocrons were tradeable, making them a bit of a non-factor. Second, and more importantly, the RNG nature of the profession roll meant some players had to complete very straight forward professions (some crafting profs were a breeze, entertainer could be maxed using a macro in a couple of days), while others rolled very difficult combat professions.

The pre-release (unreleased) design was very different. According to that trail of thought, a Jedi should be only reserved for someone who is fully engaged with all aspects of the game. This should not be a completionist who simply sits down and follows all the boxes to tick. Instead, it should be a true SWG fan who experienced all the game has to offer. To achieve this, you make a very long list of achievements (hundreds). You categorise achievements into buckets according to playstyle (e.g. social, combat, PvP, crafting, exploration, NPC dialogue ...). Many of these will be very specific achievements that are tricky to obtain. Here comes the trick though. The achievements are never made public. In addition, for each player, a random set is pulled from each bucket. Your personal achievement list is invisible to you, randomised, and including achievements from every single bucket. You get no notification when you complete an achievement, you only get notifications at key percentage milestones (e.g. "You are getting stronger in the force" - meaning you completed over 50% of your achievements).

The Jedi village system that got released in the later stages was a robust questline. It involved several "chapters". One of these was completing an exploration based semi-random achievement list, which was a diluted version of the above.

In my memory (though this is blurry now), the overpowered nature of the class wasn't that much of an issue. Most important skirmishes were faction based, involving 10-20+ people on each side. If you had 1-2 Jedi on each side, they battlefield revolved around them, but the other players still had a meaningful role in the fight.

Another interesting aspect was a severe XP loss penalty on Jedi death, much more so than other classes. This could represent hours of lost work, so you would usually not risk your Jedi in a casual fight.

Tiller · November 2018

I do remember thinking it was something special and mystical before anyone really knew how to unlock it, then they added Holocrons and it ruined it. By the time I unlocked Jedi everyone knew how to do it; granted there were some players who avoided it. TBH I enjoyed playing my second bounty hunter more.

Amathe · November 2018

Oh. Oh! And after you did all this, would you believe they changed the whole system so that EVERYONE could be a Jedi, making all that long, tedious grinding completely pointless!

Amathe · November 2018

Something else. Back before people knew how to become a Jedi, the entire community was engaged in trying to solve the "mystery." We went to temples. We read runes. We studied statues. Anything at all mysterious, we studied it and tried to divine what it might mean to the overarching Jedi "mystery."

For nothing! We did all that for nothing! Because no one would ever have guessed that becoming a Jedi was the result of something as preternaturally stupid as grinding professions over and over and over, to absolutely no purpose, and which had not squat to do with Star Wars lore.

They tried to rationalize this by quoting Yoda for "you must unlearn what you have learned." But that's not what Yoda meant! He didn't say "Luke go craft thousands of widgets and then somehow stupidly forget how to make one." It meant Luke had to part with certain misperceptions about life. Whoever tried to pass off that tripe should never be allowed anywhere near Star Wars.

Tiller · November 2018

Amathe said:

Oh. Oh! And after you did all this, would you believe they changed the whole system so that EVERYONE could be a Jedi, making all that long, tedious grinding completely pointless!

Little story some of you folks may or may not know.

Back during the CU I remember this one troll who used to post here and on the SOE forums and pretty much spent every waking hour arguing and crying about how hard Jedi was to difficult unlock and how everybody should have a Jedi.

Well once he got his wish with the NGE he spent the next 8 months railing on everyone how all Jedi should get Elder Jedi robes and Force Ghost skill and a title because he didn't like looking different. Yeah us Elder Jedi got exclusive robes, big deal right?

There were actually two guys who were like super protected SOE shills. I don't know how many people got banned here and on the SOE forums for arguing with those two but yeah they were the source of a shit ton of animosity between veteran players, SOE, this site and the newer players who started during the CU. Their mission seemed to be to run anyone off who had a disagreement over the direction of the game.

You literally couldn't have a discussion about anything SWG here or in the SOE forums without those two coming in and grandstanding and starting shit, telling us to leave the game if we hate it so much ect. Eventually a bunch of us left the game and this site and made our own forums to discuss SWG, share other games. Believe it or not they went there too and started the same shit. I won't name names even though they are both long gone, bu after SWG died; which I feel they contributed to, they kinda both vanished like farts in the wind never to be heard from a again. Even to this day I think they were paid to do it.

immoralthang · November 2018

SWG was so awesome in the beginning. The freedom to be a hero or a simple person was completely up to you. Most MMO's nowadays make everyone the savior.

MonsieurX · November 2018

moshra said:

Xavier_78 said:

Cryomatrix said:

Describe the hologrind?

The holocron told you which profession to grind to master level one after another.
In short, it was just a plain and simple professions grind which in itself was lame.

the last holo didn't actually tell you what to master either. You basically had to master random professions until you got the right one.

Ha yes, I forgot that part which adds to the lameness of the process.

Amathe · November 2018

Tiller said:

they kinda both vanished like farts in the wind never to be heard from a again. Even to this day I think they were paid to do it.

Paraphrasing Kansas, "all they are is farts in the wind." Yes whatever that all was, I was not part of it.

Octagon7711 · November 2018

The game was a lot of fun when there were no player Jedi. Most players were content being simple men and women trying to make their way in the universe. The lead developer wanted it to remain a mystery which might take three to five years for someone to unlock Jedi and even then the formula would be different for everyone.

He stated that on his way out of that position the bosses wanted Jedi to be a simple unlock process, he said he reluctantly agreed. Once a formula was hinted at, players became obsessed with grinding Jedi, all the other professions fell apart as people were obtaining them then dropping them to work on others. Holocrons were meant to cut down on grinding but weren't easy to always get.

To stop the constant grinding they came up with another formula in which you could become force sensitive and go visit an old man in a village who would set you on your path. After that they just reworked nearly everything, and just added Jedi to the regular professions list.

Even though it had it's non-stop complaints about skills balance, abandoned housing, and other things, it did have it's moments that everyone who played can remember them like it happened yesterday.

SWG EMU does a good job of recreating pre-NGE and SWG Legends recreated post-NGE really well.

koboldfodder · November 2018

JEDI were not in the game at release and there was no concept of how to put them into the game. The game was a technical flop fest from the second day of release to the day it closed. You could not play it the first day, the servers did not work or something like that. And it never really got better from a technical view.

There were lots of great systems in SWG from the skill system, to crafting, to housing and finally space loot re-engineering...but the JEDI system was a steaming pile.

There was a post on the official forums at least 50 pages long about how to unlock a JEDI. There were some really creative ideas too, but none of that mattered because JEDI were not even in the game.

Finally, the had to do something because people started to leave the game after those first few months. The nerfs starts. The scout EXP bug was the first to be nerfed, and then everything else after that.

Jedi were always going to be an alpha class, better than everyone else, but they could not figure out a way to put them in. Finally, they decided that every character upon creation would have 3 professions that were checked for them to become a Jedi. It was random. It could be something easy like Dance or Musician or something that took a long time to grind like Scout Leader or whatever that bizarre profession was.

The way you found out the first two on your list was to inspect a ultra rare holocron, which dropped from high level mobs. People farmed the night sisters on Dathomir for these, and I think you could sell them as well as nothing was loot locked.

The first two were spelled out for you, the third was blank. So you could either get lucky and pick the right one, or unlucky and have to keep on mastering professions. If you stuck around for the grind, I think an Old Man visited you and then you could create another character on that server, so the Jedi was a fresh toon. You were only allowed one character per account, and this was before people multi boxed.

You went to a village surrounded by fog and could level your Jedi there but at a certain point you had to go EXP off regular mobs. Bounty Hunters could kill you and if you did that was it for that toon and you had to reroll another Jedi but without the insane grind.

You would always seem a house near the squill caves on Tattooine that only Jedi could enter, sort of a safe house. But sometimes, Bounty Hunters would plop a house down there..heh.

The game went on for a while, slowly losing people. They released the Obi Wan expansion and the day BEFORE that came out, was the dreaded NGE which totally changed everything about the game. They didn't even tell the players. They lost most of the customers and they never really came back.

mmolou · November 2018

FlyByKnight said:

The way folks talk about Star Wars pre-NGE you got me (a person who never played either) feeling like its basically Second Life based on the Star Wars universe. Was it that free form or just rose colored nostalgia? You telling me pre-NGE, I could be a Jedi master and then just one day decide no more fights for me and open a bar sell people buffs?

Pretty much, yes.

you start out with 250 skill points, which you spent on unlocking a base profession, and the tiers within that profession, with the aim of unlocking a secondary profession, and eventually mastering that profession (or a mix of professions, you could master one basic profession, and two elite/hybrid professions, and have some points left over, or you could just dabble, learn bits of different professions to get the skills you want, without mastering any).

For example, you could start as a Novice Artisan, which cost 15 points, craft items to earn XP to enable you to learn each tier in the different skill lines, then spend another 14 points learning the Engineering line in Artisan, which meant you could unlock Architect, Armorsmith, Droid Engineer, Weaponsmith, and Shipwright (which was added later with JTL if I remember correctly).

If you wanted to become an Architect, you would learn Novice Architect, which cost 6 points, then craft Architect items to earn XP to level up and become a Master Architect.

If you decide you want to be something else, you could, by unlearning skills, freeing up the skill points, and spending them in other professions.

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Pre-NGE starwars Jedi concept

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Pre-NGE starwars Jedi concept

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"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey