.... not good, flawed, lacking...... I'm sure which ever term I would have picked would have lit someone off.  As has been pointed out by others, SWG had a ton of bugs and shouldn't have launched with them.  NGE was/is the same way.  By saying 'not good' I meant not ready for public consumption.  The term I hear now a days is 'a paid Beta account'.  Games being released too soon and the players are paying for the privlege of Beta testing it.  Go look at the official PoTBS boards and you'll see thoughts and words like that all over.

250K accounts.  Doesn't really matter if that's a good number or not.   They left (and I too was one of them, but for different reasons) but the game is still going.  I can't believe if the game wasn't making money it would still be here; costs to produce, power, run etc... have to be less than the take in or I would think it would be dumped, unless it's just a tax write off.

Yes the dev's should have kept at fixing SWG and letting it evolve.  I think it would have been a much better and stronger game today if they had.

Sookster54:  I don't play COH so I can't comment on how max buffing new toons to do high end stuff would effect that game.  I do think it had a negative impact on SWG.

Dalevi1: The systems worked in tandum?  Which systems were you talking about, because if it was professions what I remember was bumping up one prof. skill area, but that over maxed them and nerf'd a different one, so they had to bump up that one but it over maxed them and nerf'd a different one, so they had to bump up that one but it ..... and so on.  Carbineer was nerf'd fairly early and never recovered.
 

Which system was better?  Hands down I say pre-CU.  I've had no problem with letting NGE lapse from time to time to try out other games, something that probably wouldn't have happened if orig-SWG was still going.

How will SW:TOR effect SWG?  I say 2 ways.  Either SOE will rise to the challenge of having a competitor and fix / make NGE a better game or it will go to the station pass bin and never get a dev fix again.  Either way I think the competition will be the best thing for all.  And no I have no interest in playing TOR, doesn't sound very appealing for my play style.

PreCU wasn't that good, but it had potential.  Unfortunately, the most incompetent MMO management team in the known universe was in charge of it.  It was released untested for game play at the high end, with too many bugs, a tiny fraction of the obviously originally planned content, all about six months to a year prematurely.

The NGE has reached its potential, and there was never much potential to be reached.

Originally posted by goiterboy

Originally posted by ummax

Originally posted by sookster54

In YOUR opinion, pre-CU wasn't good, but your opinion won't be agreed upon by 250K players that vanished overnight. :)

And if you think "level 1" (which there was no such thing of) buffing up and doing hard stuff is bad, you have no clue on what goes on in City of Heroes/Villains, which to say is worse.

 

tired of seeing the magic 250k number

250 might possibly stand for the number of paid accounts, but no way it accounts for the number of actual players.   I knew very few people who only held one account, in fact I think I was the only one in my guild at the time that held one account.   Most held 2 and some held obscene numbers of accounts.   So if you cut off about 100k your probably closer to the actual number of actual real people who are individuals playing this game.  (this has been pointed out by others before of course and of course ignored).

Probably because it's irrelevant.

Yup, absolutely true.  From SOE/LEC perspective, and the ONLY thing they care about is money, a paid account is a paid account, even if one individual is paying for 10 of them.

---

Originally posted by Nebless
.... not good, flawed, lacking...... I'm sure which ever term I would have picked would have lit someone off.  As has been pointed out by others, SWG had a ton of bugs and shouldn't have launched with them.  NGE was/is the same way.  By saying 'not good' I meant not ready for public consumption.  The term I hear now a days is 'a paid Beta account'.  Games being released too soon and the players are paying for the privlege of Beta testing it.  Go look at the official PoTBS boards and you'll see thoughts and words like that all over.
250K accounts.  Doesn't really matter if that's a good number or not.   They left (and I too was one of them, but for different reasons) but the game is still going.  I can't believe if the game wasn't making money it would still be here; costs to produce, power, run etc... have to be less than the take in or I would think it would be dumped, unless it's just a tax write off.
Yes the dev's should have kept at fixing SWG and letting it evolve.  I think it would have been a much better and stronger game today if they had.
Sookster54:  I don't play COH so I can't comment on how max buffing new toons to do high end stuff would effect that game.  I do think it had a negative impact on SWG.
Dalevi1: The systems worked in tandum?  Which systems were you talking about, because if it was professions what I remember was bumping up one prof. skill area, but that over maxed them and nerf'd a different one, so they had to bump up that one but it over maxed them and nerf'd a different one, so they had to bump up that one but it ..... and so on.  Carbineer was nerf'd fairly early and never recovered.
 
Which system was better?  Hands down I say pre-CU.  I've had no problem with letting NGE lapse from time to time to try out other games, something that probably wouldn't have happened if orig-SWG was still going.
How will SW:TOR effect SWG?  I say 2 ways.  Either SOE will rise to the challenge of having a competitor and fix / make NGE a better game or it will go to the station pass bin and never get a dev fix again.  Either way I think the competition will be the best thing for all.  And no I have no interest in playing TOR, doesn't sound very appealing for my play style.

---

With SWG's skeleton staff (15 people and shrinking?), I don't think they're enough to rise to the challenge to compete with SWTOR, my and many other's prediction is that LEC will pull the plug on SWG when SWTOR goes live, didn't LA say somewhere that they didn't want 2 Star Wars MMO games competing against each other?

What bothers me is that SOE and Sony are gaining control of a majority of the entertainment industry with online gaming and the Playstation 3 and the Blu-Ray DVD format. It's a pretty bad company and eventually in a decade or so they'll have more control over most of this and there won't be much we can do about it.

telling us they weren't that good is just as bad as someone posting that one or the other or both were bad.

don't tell us what our opinions should be.

thanks.

SOE is a company, pure and simple. People act like they shot their mom and got their dog pregnant. They didn’t lie to anyone, unless you have direct contact with any of them. They made business decisions based on marketing which changes like the wind. And I am not trying to stick up for SOE. Most of their games are ok, but nothing great.

What I don’t get is all the people still harping on the same subject for years, freaking NGE. If you don’t like a change, don’t pay for it and don’t play it. Leave the company; stop giving your money to them. But whining about something that happened that long ago is psychotic.

I have seen people get over death of a loved one quicker.

 

---

Originally posted by Gkarn
They didn’t lie to anyone, unless you have direct contact with any of them.
 

---

wait, you're talking about SOE?

Originally posted by sookster54

In YOUR opinion, pre-CU wasn't good, but your opinion won't be agreed upon by 250K players that vanished overnight. :)

 

Probably a fair chunk of them though, me included and the best counter argument against this myth that pre-cu players are all hyper intelligent mmo players that appreciate the finer things in their games is destroyed by the fact that at some time or another most have played WoW, lots still do in fact.

Originally posted by PreCU

 

---

Originally posted by Gkarn
They didn’t lie to anyone, unless you have direct contact with any of them.
 

---

 

wait, you're talking about SOE?

Wondered about that statement myself, perhaps a small refresher is in order here.

  Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 12:58 am
 

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Folks tend to have short memories and some werent around for all the lies. So here's a list of lies SOE has told us. Also please consider sticking this

1. SWG wont launch until its ready - SOE repeatedly told us this game wont launch until its ready to go. This early on was to include space, JTL wasnt ever supposed to be an expansion. Lets also not forget key components not included at launch like player cities, vehicles, and jedi. As a beta player, I still remember the notice in beta forum that the game was going gold in 2 weeks. Everyone agreed it was a huge mistake but SOE ignored us.

2. Jedi - We all know that jedi was NEVER possible at launch. Yet SOE made post after post dangling that carrot and offering encouragement. They told us to get married, explore every world, build a home, etc. It made some think that jedi was some random amazing quest to be discovered. Soon though we learned the truth when SOE patched in several .tre files with obvious jedi implications 5 months after launch. Then the day after a patch several unlocked all at once.

3. Rebel Theme Park - Sorta ties into # 1 as it wasnt ready either. However SOE repeatedly lied about the theme park. If you recall, it was broken after Han's quests. Han tells us to seek out Lt. Lance on Dantooine, but there isnt any Lt. Lance anywhere. SOE tells us its working as intended despite nobody having found Lt. Lance after months and month of looking (my guild personally had several major expedition searches done over many weekends looking for him). Suddenly we learn the truth after a patch...Han now tells us to seek out Ackbar on Dantooine and the once empty abandoned rebel base now has several rebel nps in there. My guild who had followed the game for years in development was soooo pissed off they immediately disbanded and quit.
 

4. two part lie -

A. The Combat upgrade (curb) was top priority - Remember how SOE told us over and over again that the CURB was its number 1 focus. It would be first to get completed over the JTL expansion.

B. There were two separate teams working on JTL and the CURB.

We later learn both are lies. JTL gets pushed over the combat fixes AND we find out the CURB team has been merged with the JTL team. Whats really insulting is SOE goes on a PR campaign and tells the public that we players demanded JTL first. Another fat lie as every poll posted strongly stated we wanted the CURB first.

5. Combat Revamp - whatever you want to call it, this was meant as a reward for the vets who stayed around and played a broken game. Talk about a slap in the face when SOE announces the CU...a system as the devs told me at Celebration 3 was meant to "have a more broad appeal". This was SOE's 1st attempt at screwing over its current community for the wow crowd. All the promised fixes never happened. The armorsmith rep quit and was banned after he started a massive protest over changes they never asked for. In fact the CU brings in many more bugs than it fixes and never balanced anything.

6. The CU is here to stay - Smedley comes and makes his first post on swg forums asking for calm and patience. He states that in 6 months the cu will be working as intended so give them time to make things right. FAT LIE...during that time the NGE is either in design stages or already being worked on.

7. FRS - CU disables the end-game for jedi, our force ranking system. SOE tells us its being worked on. Later they state its al most done and just awaits final approval from LA. Of course we learn there wont ever be a FRS system and the nerfs we've been getting oover the past 6 months were done on purpose to weaken jedi into a regular class. For me personally, this is one of the more disgusting lies as it was obviously done to keep us jedi players paying.

8. Jabba Palace disappears - The last patch before the NGE garbage makes Jabba's palace completely disappear. SOE acts surprised and promises a fix is coming..another fat lie as we learn why after the nge hits. Jabba's palace was taken out to implement th new nge quests.

9. village breaks - Same patch breaks the village and the old man stops visiting people. SOE again lies to cover its tracks and tells us its being looked at. Of course it was just a cover for the nge.

10. Expansion - SOE presells an expansion with several promised features. One desired item is a creature handler necklace that will allow for the taming of higher lvl pets. Im not sure if that necklace was ever found but it didnt matter because 1 stinkin day after the nge launched Torres of LA announces the revamp of the game and removal of over 24 professions.

11. starter kit - SOE tells us the starter kit is an eroneous listing and will be removed. They deny the rumors of impending changes.

12. SOE tells us fixes will be faster. SOE says the whole reason behind the nge was to make balancing the game easier and would allow for faster publish fixes. In fact, it has slowed the game down to a crawl as publishes now seem to come every 4 months as opposed to almost monthly before the nge.
 

13. smuggler revamp - this one could have its own page on broken promises and lies.

14. Capitol ships - a dev at a fanfest shows the players capitol ships he has been working on. Later on SOE tells (months and months later) that it was just a dev fooling around with his laptop and this was never being considered. Of course SOE could have tol the players this months earlier rather than ignore the posts asking for more information. To flyboys, the capitol ship dream was their FRS system...ie end-game content they so very much wanted. It didnt hurt SOE to once again lie a little and let people keep paying while they waited for features that would never ever happen.

15. profession revamps - ranger comes to my mind foremost because my alt was a master ranger for years. It was painful to see rangers slowly dwindling in numbers as the profession remained broken forever. I still recall one of the camo kits (i think it was for Lok) required a type of meat to contruct, only problem was that meat didnt even exist ! And the final tease, SOE says ranger is the next revamp coming in the next publish...oops the next publish turned out to be the NGE.

Then there were the professions that got sorely needed revamps weeks before the nge hit. Why did SOE even bother to revamp squad leader if they were going to turn around and remove the profession entirely a few weeks later ? Maybe it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.

16. Broken quests - How many times did SOE tell us a fix was in the works and it either never came or it took a year to do. And even when they finally did fix something like the Hermit quests, they turn right around and re-break them weeks later. My personal pet peeve for broken quests was the ones at the gungan sacred place. It pissed me off that not only were the quests incomplete, one of the npc's chat bubble was blank ! How tough would it have been to code in some simple words ? These quests were broken in beta, remained busted through launch right up to the nge.

The NGE broke several old quests as well. When I tried the 21 day free trial I started the krayt skull quests, some of my favorites with a great storyline. I got to the last part where I needed to talk to Darklighter only to my surprise he has no chat option. The NGE is 1 year old and Im assuming this quest remains broken, pathetic.

17. 6 month promises - Smedley has repeatedly made the 6 month promise for fixes. His very 1st post following the CU debacle asked the players to give SOE 6 months to get things fully working. He then makes the same promise after the NGE launches, needing 6 more months. Ironically, the post after nge is almost identical to the cu one (asking for time to fix things) and yet somehow the gullible desperate players buy into it AGAIN. Later SOE promises major revamps to each profession each coming within a month or two o each other. Later after MONTHS of no publishes and silence (the swg forums were literally rioting), SOE announces yet ANOTHER series of profession revamps. Typically, the pathetic player base thanks SOE devs in posts for answering their concerns. A year into the NGE, it remains broken, unfinished, with no end in site.

18. Item Conversion - Recall that the players were very concerned over losing their gear with the coming CU. We were repeatedly told that everything would convert properly. If you had an exceptional weapon with amazing stats, it would convert to an equal type of weapon for the CU. They were full of crap though and not only did our exceptional weapons and armor NOT convert properly, in many cases we now couldnt even equip them anymore !!!

CA's and AA's didnt convert because SOE took out several stats like dizzy, knockdown, the poison and disease resists, etc. Players that spent years and millions of credits to collect were overnight ruined. The final insult in classic SOE fashion, SOE adds in melee def and ranged def clothing that tailors can craft. They didnt even bother to take into account the thousands of players who spent their credits by the millions to get these things as ca/aa drops. A +12 melee def tape would possibly sell for 15-20 million, 1 day after the cu and a player now can buy a shirt with +17 melee AND ranged defense !!! So much for really being concerned with ca/aa conversions.

RIS Armor - Not only did the conversion for this armor become crap, it also got very common. I and some friends of mine were the few around who had even had any ris armor. Before the revamps, RIS armor was something one could try and get as a trophy to their hard work and dedication. Plus it took real skill to get. You had to know where the components dropped. You had to know spawn rates. You had to know where to find the giant dune kimos. You had to find addon components like shards to boost the completed armor's stats. In essence, it was a lot of hard work for players that yet again was totally tossed out the door. My ris helmet once had offers of 15 million credits, suddenly its for sale on vendors for 15k bleh.

BE Tissues - nge takes out bio-engineers and their tissues that make chef foods better. Now something that was once extremely common is the rarest most sought after item by crafters. And since food is a consumable, eventually there will be no more bio tissues around.

The theme here of course is SOE didnt give a damn about how their revamps would hurt or help their CURRENT community. I seriously doubt based on the evidence that they even looked at the changes, much less tried to ensure the conversion wouldnt screw us.

19. pearl drops - sometime into the cu pearl drops got really messed up. At first, over a weekend flawless and premium pearls are dropping like crazy and not just off krayts. Soon SOE hotpatches a "fix" in to correct whatever they were trying to fix before and the pearls stop dropping. Now premiums and flawless dont drop anymore. SOE responds to player concerns by telling them its working as intended. Later they admit there "might" be a problem but there were other things more important to fix. SOE lies and promises its being looked into.

According to my source, the pearl drops were broken or gated on purpose. This was done to remove the elite power items so jedi could be better balanced for the nge. I hear sometime

20. Gating content - According to a source who wrote a letter to CBS newsbag, SOE purposely gates its content to finish it. In other words, SOE breaks something to hide the fact that it remains unfinished. Why would SOE do this ? Well according to this person, it was done to basically use player subscription fees to pay for the finished development of that content. This source reported that this was done repeatedly for EQ1 expansions. Devs would then lie on the forums claiming that a fix was being worked on when in fact it was busted on purpose.

This of course is outrageous but not unexpected by SOE. To take subscriber money and finish something that the money from the expansion was already supposed to have paid for is unforgivable. Smedley responded on some other site he posts on that this was a fabrication and SOE had (allow me to quote) never once released an unfinished product to the public LOL. This same person later admits the nge is unfinished...oh and the CU is unfinished...my oh my how the lies grow.
 

http://soe.lithium.com/swg/board/message?board.id=game_guides&message.id=140564#M140564

Thunderheart
Dev
Posts: 14078
Registered: 07-02-2003

Reply 19 of 146

Viewed 8790 times

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Gravez wrote:
So which parts of this combat balance will be in Publish 8?

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Should be all of it.

Kurt "Thunderheart" Stangl
Community Relations Manager

From the original message "Once Combat Upgrade is done, we will immediately work on upgrading all the non-combat professions in another series of publishes.".
That paragraph lays out our high level Live development strategy. I'm sure every time in the past a mention was made of something we intended to do it was true -at that moment-. But the team does not set all the priorities for the game and things have changed quickly and often since launch. LucasArts and we are aligned on this development strategy and we are going to make it happen by hook or crook. If anything holds us up or slows us down, we will let the community know.
Combat Upgrade is the basis we need in place before revamping the other professions. And we need all the professions to be solid to build a complete and compelling GCW, because it will affect everyone. We will do all this as quickly as we know how, but it will be high quality first and foremost.
 

Nah i don't see any lies either  /rollseyes

LOL I remember that response by TH and they even said they wanted to release the CU BEFORE JTL, you also forgot another one: Smedley said on the forums that "the combat upgrade is here to stay" in early Octobor- about 3 weeks before the NGE went live.

Cookie cutter templates only existed for ppl who PVP'd and that goes for any game but atleast you still had freedom to be what you wanted. For me who just did the PVE side of things I could be whatever I wanted and just dabbbled in things I found fun that were really gimped but that didn't matter in PVE.

Originally posted by Gkarn

SOE is a company, pure and simple. People act like they shot their mom and got their dog pregnant. They didn’t lie to anyone, unless you have direct contact with any of them. They made business decisions based on marketing which changes like the wind. And I am not trying to stick up for SOE. Most of their games are ok, but nothing great.

What I don’t get is all the people still harping on the same subject for years, freaking NGE. If you don’t like a change, don’t pay for it and don’t play it. Leave the company; stop giving your money to them. But whining about something that happened that long ago is psychotic.

I have seen people get over death of a loved one quicker.

 

It's probably a mistake to think most people got bent out of shape about one unwanted revamp.   You'd need a few pages probably to list all the ways people felt (and still feel) shafted by this unethical (my opinion) company.  It's one broken promise after another, and people make a good case for outright lies as well.  The latest frenzy generated by SOE's way of doing business was probably the TCG loot items, and the new TCG expansion.  If it wasn't that, you could look at the way people feel used and ignored on the SWG senate.  If it wasn't that, you could look at Smed's comments against RMT in EQ, followed by the introduction of RMT in EQ.  It's hard to find a time over the past 5 years where SOE wasn't the center of some kind of controversy regarding how they treat their customers and manage their games.

NGE was probably the pinnacle of their failures, so I think it gets mentioned as an example more than the others.  It's really just one sample, though, of an ongoing pattern of misdirection and mismanagement.

P.S. You realize that by even suggesting that Smed got someone's dog pregnant you're going to start rumours...

Some interesting opinions throughout the thread. I personally really enjoyed Pre-CU, but admitedly canceled my subscription shortly before the NGE was implemented, this was due to the same old same old. There were only so many times you could camp theed for overts, grind Janta missions for credits, and adventure out on a shopping spree in various player cities coming across some interesting items!

I scanned trough all the posts, and i either missed it, or it really wasn't mentioned.

Another thing that SOE messed up was that, Pre-CU, the economy was player driven. Crafters were a big part of the game. Pre-CU, armour and weapons didn't drop as loot, and if you wanted better equipment you HAD to buy it from a crafter (that also applies to any other item in game).

I came back to NGE a few months ago just to try it out, and i got from lvl 1 to 50 in like 3 weeks. Worst of all, i didn't really need to buy anything from the trader. All weapons and armour i needed were just either dropped by NPCs or given as quest rewards. It wasn't from lack of money either. First time i logged into Tatooine, i was running to the Bazaar when this veteran crafter player walks up to me and tells me he wants to give me everything he owns. Why? Because he was a Pre-CU crafter and just couldn't do anything anymore. He handed me 16 million credits, all his items, his large house deed, some furniture, and just logged out. Never saw him since.

Also doesn't help that there is a bug with the crafter profession (which happaned to all the crafter characters i made tot est it out on). I go back to NGE every 4 to 6 months to check things out, and first time i noticed that thought when i stopped my subscription my crafter was a level 10 at best, when i re-activated it, it turned into a lvl 90 master craftsman, and i hadn't done ANYTHING to it. Made a few more characters in other servers, repeated, and the same result. So now i have 4 lvl 90 crafters, one of each kind, in 4 diferent servers, without moving a finger.

Anyway, I agree with the original post, but having played both versions, i think that in some aspect Pre-CU was way better than it is now.

Originally posted by Gkarn

SOE is a company, pure and simple. People act like they shot their mom and got their dog pregnant. They didn’t lie to anyone, unless you have direct contact with any of them. They made business decisions based on marketing which changes like the wind. And I am not trying to stick up for SOE. Most of their games are ok, but nothing great.

What I don’t get is all the people still harping on the same subject for years, freaking NGE. If you don’t like a change, don’t pay for it and don’t play it. Leave the company; stop giving your money to them. But whining about something that happened that long ago is psychotic.

I have seen people get over death of a loved one quicker.

 

comparing the end of a game to the death of a person? tacky.

Originally posted by Robsolf

 ...

But when the time came to say, "great!  what do I do?  Can I kill Stormtroopers?" 

The answer was:  "Wait til' you get doc buffed and some composite armor.  Otherwise, you won't have a chance til' level 40." 

.... 

I think ya and I played different preCU.. I remember eatin' STs for breakfast as I was "grindin'" my TK and rebel rank up.. I didn't have any medic skillz(so no heals), no armor, no buffs... they weren't that tough. could kill 'em one on one even though they tried to kite me lol
 

It's over 'hyped' how good it was. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed it and everything but it wasn't that special.