How did it suck?  if you were one of the lucky players you were chosen at random (no matter how long you have been playing or level) to join the padawan camp.  Where you had to do many many misions to ever become a jedi.  It kept the number of jedis low and to the lore of the time period of SWG.  Who cares if you want to be a jedi it stuck to story.

"yes and thats why AOC worked so well lol...... I dont want to be "the one" or "special" i want to be just another person in the crowd who sets himself apart through my actions. That is how all MMORPGs should be, and what you described is a design flaw. Its only usefulness is in singleplayer games where ..... there is really only 1 player who can be special"

I agree. Not everyone in life is equal, so trying to make a game with everyone equal is setting yourself up to fail. Some players are better than others, period. By trying to make a game that everyone is great at the devs are trying to cater to the least able player, and as a result the games are getting simpler and simpler. No matter how simple the games get, one person will be better than another, its how this worls works.

I also don't want to be an auto hero. Not every player is a 14 year old kid dying to be a Super Hero. Many of us want to be able, and have the potential for heroics through our abilities. And some of us don't even want that, they just want to be a farmer, crafter, buffer. The games now are forcing me to be Mr. Star Wars hero of the day. Maybe I just want to own a small shop on Tat and sell loot and cloths, but I can't because a system like that might not be aplicable to the all are equal all are heros gameplay mechanism.

I think it might be a generational issue. Too many kids have grown up never getting told the weren't good enough, instead they get told they are all equal. The result is they can't handle the reality of losing, just look at how many people cheat at meaningless games to win, they can't accept a loss, they were never showsn it's ok to lose sometmes, its nature. Equality is a lie, it sucks, but its part of the world and how it functions. Some are better at things than others.

Originally posted by jjjk29

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

Originally posted by nariusseldon

 

That is bad design. The means most of your customers will never see the content. The trick of successful MMOs is to make everyone FEELS special, but not really special in reality. It is the illusion that sells.

 

 

NO NO NO NO NO!!!

This is the kind of SHIT we're trying to get away from. This "no one can be special" crap just means that everyone must be mediocre.

Bullshit. If I put the effort in to be awesome, goddamnit I earned it, and I expect to have it. If Joe Blow can't do it, then he doesn't get to.

Life's not fair, why the hell should a virtual world be any different??

You're talking like one of LEC / SOE's  "Focus Groups", and we see what THEY can do with a game, right??

I'll take a game where I have goals, and aspirations of greatness over a game where I'm just another fucking clone of "Class X".

 

  Im with you... I hate playing games where im a warrior (for example) and and caster class can take me down.. That is trash.  I hate the balancing of classes.  They are different for their own reasons.  I guy with a gun will kill a guy with a sword, but a guy with a sword can kill an unarmed guy.  Thats how these games should be set up.  Makes people who go these weaker classes different.  Which in my op is what MMO's need..

  SWG in the olden days no one was a jedi.  Except for the vary few who got lucky.  and thats how it should have stayed.  None of this " lets let everyone have a shot" crap.

Unforunately it is short term thinking like this that caused the Jedi debacle to begin with.  Whenever you are dealing with a computer/mathematical system which has many iterations and long durations you MUST consider what will happen as you approach the limits.

SWG did not do this and you got a debacle.  Jedi may have started the way you wished, a few special people running around who got "lucky".  But it was always doomed to become something else.

I believe Aion is doing something that my old MUD used to do.  They called it "Offices" in the MUD  I forget the name Aion is using, but basically it is a temporary boost in power.  You do stuff to get it or it may be random.  You get extra power and may use it in PvP.

The Aion version is not as developed as my Old MUD which gave out Offices in multiple ways.  There were about 5 some of which made you permanently and irrevocably PvP flagged until you lost the office.  They were tied to various extra-class organizations.  Some were earned and others were completely random (like the discordian one).  They were all temporary usually lasting a day or less then transferring to someone else.

That paradigm is ok to spice things up, has its problems but is sustainable.  The jedi version is just plain bad design.  Not even a matter of opinion, it was just bad math.  They never even bothered to do the math.  But as anyone with much SWG knowledges know math caught up to them anyway.  It is simply not sustainable.

I didn't like SWG before CU or NGE and it was because thousands of people like me were leaving the game that they even came up with the changes in the first place.  Your holy grail didn't and doesn't appeal to most of the player base.  Not sure why you people keep toting it around and shoving it in our faces every chance you get.

Just returning the favor since you fanatics can't seem to leave SWTOR forums alone with your constant vileness.  Going back to the forums of a game that actually appeals to me.

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

Originally posted by nariusseldon

 

That is bad design. The means most of your customers will never see the content. The trick of successful MMOs is to make everyone FEELS special, but not really special in reality. It is the illusion that sells.

 

 

NO NO NO NO NO!!!

This is the kind of SHIT we're trying to get away from. This "no one can be special" crap just means that everyone must be mediocre.

Bullshit. If I put the effort in to be awesome, goddamnit I earned it, and I expect to have it. If Joe Blow can't do it, then he doesn't get to.

Life's not fair, why the hell should a virtual world be any different??

You're talking like one of LEC / SOE's  "Focus Groups", and we see what THEY can do with a game, right??

I'll take a game where I have goals, and aspirations of greatness over a game where I'm just another fucking clone of "Class X".

Exactly.   I will be the king because I am awesome at the things I do and everyone else who is not awesome the way I am or is awesome in things I am not awesome in can be a peon and work to make me even more awesome.  And if your idea of what people should be awesome in is differnt then mine then you can just stay a carebear and go back to WoW.

Awesome.

  No offense but its thinking like that that causes games to fail.  If it was bad math then it was terrible when I played pre-SoE and combat update, there where hardly 100 jedis on my server.  And this was a time when SWG was filled with people.

Originally posted by jjjk29

  How did it suck?  if you were one of the lucky players you were chosen at random (no matter how long you have been playing or level) to join the padawan camp.  Where you had to do many many misions to ever become a jedi.  It kept the number of jedis low and to the lore of the time period of SWG.  Who cares if you want to be a jedi it stuck to story.

The reason you don't see why it sucked is the same reason that you erroneously think it had anything to do with "luck" or uncertainty.

In my Offices/Aion example above you can't sell a character with an office.  Because by the time you sold it some else would the the Hand of Eris or the Fist of Tyr.  With Jedi they could be and were sold for thousands of dollars.  And people developed ways of making sure they got one.

The whole mechanic of ditribution was assinine on many levels.  Even with a server cap its still extrmely problematic and in the end boring.  It is mostly static.  At least with "Offices" you never knew when you would get one or when they would transfer.  And when they did transfer it was announced across the world.  In the case of the Hand of Tyr a large number of  chaotically aligned characters started gunning for that guy and the I know of a few who got rocked by the extra powers it granted.  In the case of the Hand of Eris it was usally something like "[Discordian]:  What the heck does this glowy aura do?  It said I was the Hand of Eris and a potted plant fell on some thign i was fightings head" with a response like "[Discordian]:  I am not real sure I only had Hand once and I am not sure what it did if it did anything at all".

Either way it was an event and was interesting and special.  The jedi implementation sucked.  Static, easily manituplated.  Crap.

  You can bash all you want because many people agree with me.  im sorry that in you world you dont like there to be something different that you cant get.  Well in most that gives players a reason to keep playing.  No matter if the system was shady.  Like in WoW the hero class shouldnt have been 'log on and start a dk'  I think if the player wanted to be a dk sacrafice one of the players capped lvl toons to be able to lvl a dk.  Then you wouldnt has the 1/5 of all loged in players being dk's. 

  Its things like that which make MMO horrible games.  The pre cu jedi was good because seeing a jedi player running around was a sight.  Anytime after SoE seeing a character that wasnt a jedi was a sight.

I left SWG after closed beta. I felt it was a crap game and that SOE just kept lying to their customers about the content and features that it was supposed to have.

There was a long writeup at the beta forum before the release where someone actually listed the content that was promised and what was actually delivered at release. It was like 30% of the promised content.

6 months later, it was still at 30%. It was time I gave them to deliver and pretty much forgot about the game after that.

I understand many feel nostalgic about SWG and that for some it was their introduction to MMOs. However, in my opinion, it was never a good game, which to me means that it needs to be fun to play. It was average game at best, hiding behind well-known IP.

Originally posted by jjjk29

  You can bash all you want because many people agree with me.  im sorry that in you world you dont like there to be something different that you cant get.  Well in most that gives players a reason to keep playing.  No matter if the system was shady.  Like in WoW the hero class shouldnt have been 'log on and start a dk'  I think if the player wanted to be a dk sacrafice one of the players capped lvl toons to be able to lvl a dk.  Then you wouldnt has the 1/5 of all loged in players being dk's. 

  Its things like that which make MMO horrible games.  The pre cu jedi was good because seeing a jedi player running around was a sight.  Anytime after SoE seeing a character that wasnt a jedi was a sight.

Just because something is different, it does not make it special.  There was really nothing very special about Jedi in pre-CU SWG.   In many ways it seemed pitiful that people would put themselves through something so pointless.  Having a Jedi character did not say anything about a player beyond the fact that he was willing to grind for it.  It did not make him better or worse than another player.

Originally posted by jjjk29

  You can bash all you want because many people agree with me.  im sorry that in you world you dont like there to be something different that you cant get.  Well in most that gives players a reason to keep playing.  No matter if the system was shady.  Like in WoW the hero class shouldnt have been 'log on and start a dk'  I think if the player wanted to be a dk sacrafice one of the players capped lvl toons to be able to lvl a dk.  Then you wouldnt has the 1/5 of all loged in players being dk's. 

  Its things like that which make MMO horrible games.  The pre cu jedi was good because seeing a jedi player running around was a sight.  Anytime after SoE seeing a character that wasnt a jedi was a sight.

Complete farce of a response. 

I already said I lament, ie. am sad about, the fact that MMOs have made class stuff boring and unimaginative.

I already said special power boosts are useful and fun.

Face it Jedi was implemented poorly.  Admit it and come up with something better.  Throwing already contradicted conspriacy like BS political attacks out at anyone disagreeing is just silly.

This is the worst and most transparent of strawmen attacks.  Of course I can't argue that MMOs need special character events, its obvious and something I already said.

Nowhere did I say "[I] dont like there to be something different that you cant get" (a direct quote from you btw).  Nor was this my point.  My point is that the jedi implementation of way a way to do this was awful.  Even worse if was easily provable to be awful given simple computational style math and the rich history of MUDs.  The designers of SWG did in fact play MUDs too.  So ignorance is no excuse.

By attempting to assign a point to me that I a) did not argue b) already ceded as important and c) is easy to argue against.

This is called a strawman argument.  It is fundamentally dishonest.  Many people do this wiuthout realizing it.  You are either being dishonest or not listening/comprehending well.  This is not a flame.  I am saying this because it is such an incredibly obvious and clumsy attempt that I do not believe you understand fully what you just did.  You should consider re-evaluating what you are trying to accomplish here and reconsider how you listen to others.

In a general I have found people who do this unconcsciously to approach all discussions as some kind of political debate (ie. a propaganda war ) rather than true argumentation where you try to convey or prove or disprove a point.  In one you force people to dismiss, hate or like you in the other you may convince or you may disagree with a measure of respect and at the very least convince you someone you have a valid point that can be contended among reasonable people.  Please note that i use strong terms in my criticism this is beause I I like to do that and emotion is not bad.  Invalid or dishonest rhetoric is another matter entirely, people will recpgnize this even if they do not know the names.  This turns it political and creates "sides".  Some people have become so used to and/or brainwashed that they think everything boils down to this.

Sadly many valid points are lost because of this.  Everything even moderately touching anything of a social nature is getting turned into political BS.   Where if you agree with 50% of some well known position people then you are automatically stereotyped into 100% of that position.  This is BS.  If you find yourself doing this (and it is human nature).  Stop and consider.  Are you being manipulated?  Are you confusing yourself to no real end or perhaps even alienating allies to your point of view?

This happens in MMO discussions too much.  It is naturally politically charged due to things like Guilds and the way an MMO automaticallly puts people into "camps".  And to some extent the drama ginned up by this is good for a game.  But be very careful.   Each time you start using tactics that are recognized as something politicans do, you run the risk of being considered a weasel.

This poor attemt at a strawman is dramatic in nature.  You can see it in 5 year olds when they throw a tantrum (5 year olds are smarter than you may think).  It is a trick that is natural when someone is in a dramatic frame of mind.  And while in that frame of mind they may even think its true.  However it is something that only someone who agrees with you will ever react to positively, other people will dismiss or actively dislike and have contempt for saying it.  This is why politicians use it often, but take pains to disguise it.  And will deny that they have ever used it all the way to their grave.  Even though everyone know they do it on some level.

SWG should be applauded for attempting to add mechanics to create special player driven things. 

However their implementation was crap. 

And they should have known better.   As a long time MUD player who has a grad degree in Computer Science believe me, they SHOULD have known better.  At the time there were literally 100s of examples in MUDs and in the end it is very very basic math/economics.  Simply a course in Alogrithms, which forces you to do inductive proofs to evaluate future behavior, and a course in Discrete math and combinatorics would have been sufficient.  

They had every resource at their disposal to realize that it would not turn out well.  They simply chose to be blind, most likely cause they got caught up in a cool idea and didn't check their shit.

No, what it really boils down to is that SOE fails to see past the ends of their own noses, cannot begin to fathom that there may be consequences to their actions, and cannot follow anything to it's logical conclusion.

A legacy of great ideas, and piss-poor implementation.

Actually after reading that it makes me really miss the orginal idea of SWG.  That sounds like a freakin blast!  A jedi just can't run around without a bit of fear.  It truley held the ideals of the Jedi by making them have to remain humble and not as flashy as they became in the SWG we have now.  It would make bounty hunting a freaking blast, and for those who leveled their jedi up high enough, well, they would be a tough character to take down.

What a great idea that ended up going soar!

Originally posted by Stellos

Actually after reading that it makes me really miss the orginal idea of SWG.  That sounds like a freakin blast!  A jedi just can't run around without a bit of fear.  It truley held the ideals of the Jedi by making them have to remain humble and not as flashy as they became in the SWG we have now.  It would make bounty hunting a freaking blast, and for those who leveled their jedi up high enough, well, they would be a tough character to take down.

What a great idea that ended up going soar!

Bounty hunting WAS a blast.
 

Pre-cu SWG was the best gaming experience I have ever had. Many classes were fun to play... I got jedi the old way, but had the best times as Weaponsmith,  CM, Rifleman, fencer, tk, etc.. The game was very unique... all mmo's today are more or less the same.

Originally posted by Torik

Originally posted by rikilii

SWG was so full of fail from day one, I can't even begin to imagine why anyone is pining away over it, and that's coming from someone who played it for 2 years from launch.

 

The basic idea of SWG was good but it was simply too ambitious for what SOE could deliver.  They went with a very broad sandbox approach but it ended up being extremely shallow since they did not have the resources to fix the bugs and expand the content at a pace that was needed to keep things from imploding.  Once people went through the coolness of the intial setup and skilled up the character they wanted, they realized that all they had left was grinding the same stuff over and over. 

The problem with the jedi was that it was the ultimate cool thing SOE could use to keep otherwise bored players interested and they simply threw it out there and put one of the most pointless grinds possible in front of it. 

Life lesson for players:  just because the description of something sounds cool does not mean that the implementation will not blow chunks. 

Lol, they didn't have the resources to fix the bugs but they had the resources to change the whole game twice and both times equating to less subs (less money/customers)??? It was more like they got caught up listening to people who didn't have the creative bones to play a sandbox style player ran MMORPG. And then add that to SOE watching Blizzard put out a game with less depth but more polish and so they tried to dumb SWG down so they could try and match or surpass Blizzards sub count. That is why it ended up being such a big failure.
But even still they are making money with the dumbed NGE version and to date pre-CU SWG is one of the most widely missed MMO's of all time. Must be something to it to be so popularly missed.

Once people went through the initial coolness as you put it, those who didn't have a clue how to play a sandbox pvp MMORPG ran to the forums crying their asses off claiming the game sucked while hundreds of thousands kept playing and making their own content. Player made content far surpasses what any company has been able to produce...well for those who know how to create player content. But for the IRL unsociable's, I suspect they reflect that same attitude in MMO's and therefore “don't get it” and maybe they never will <shrug>.

The Jedi-BH system was awesome fun from both ends but you would have never known it if you went into the game at every turn looking for an NPC to tell you what to do and not interacting with the community and experiencing an MMO as it really should be experienced. This is why they make single player games....for the homelies with no social graces who don't understand why MMO's were created in the first place. (no offense)

Your “life lesson” doesn't really apply in this case, cept to those who are just like you and that's not me.

Jedi were the beginning of the end for the original SWG.  Once that first idiot unlocked, all the powergaming grinder tards had to have one too, and the hologrind resulted.  From that, you had basically the entire player base mindlessly grinding 30-odd professions to get the one they really wanted, and in effect completely ignoring everything else there was to do in the sandbox.

In addition to being completely overpowered in combat, Jedi also existed outside of the player-driven economy because they were entirely self-sufficient and didn't need to depend on crafters like everyone else.  Sure, given Star Wars lore, they should have been massively powerful, but they also shouldn't have been in the hands of players, or in the game at all unless they were hiding from Darth Vader at the ass end of space, rarely, if ever, seen by another living soul.

I miss pre-CU SWG a lot, but I don't miss the player Jedi at all.  They're part of the reason the game no longer exists.

Originally posted by Torik

Originally posted by MystaIV

Originally posted by Torik 

"The basic idea of SWG was good but it was simply too ambitious for what SOE could deliver.  They went with a very broad sandbox approach but it ended up being extremely shallow since they did not have the resources to fix the bugs and expand the content at a pace that was needed to keep things from imploding. "

 

For the most part this is right, except they could've easily kept up, and could have provided the necessary fixes and content to make it a great game. Instead, whoever was pulling the strings decided to redo the game, as i'm sure you know, TWICE. The resources required to accomplish a complete restructure of a game could have EASILY went towards content and fixes. Why they didn't? Never know..

I do not want to make excuses for SOE but from my own experience working with and designing computer software systems, there sometimes comes a time where instead of patching and 'hacking' a flawed complex system it is more prudent to just go back to the drawing board and replace it with a simpler, more robust system. 

From what I saw duing my time playing pre-CU SWG, their entire game system was breaking apart on them.  Game balance was all shot to heck, plenty of professions had broken mechanics and gear.  Whenever they patched something, it would break something else.  The problem was not that a few things were broken but that everything seemed to be held up by string and duct tape. 

IMO SOE were not have the resource and/or were not competent enough to fix what was broken with SWG.  As such restructuring to a more manageable, robust model was the 'smart' way to go.  However, they bungled that too so their 'smart' play went bad on them.

SWG was a great idea.  However, ideas are easy.  SOE should not have taken on the project in the first place since they simply were not capable of implementing it properly.

For all it's depth and complexities the game had tons of things that worked fine. Fact is with what? 36 proff's (about 6 times the class depth of other MMO's) SOE might have done allot better and made the game more profitable by simply spending a fraction of what they probably spent to refashion a code by hiring another top end coder who could have handled the job. This of course would have took some time but it would have been more profitable for them I'm sure.

If SOE had put some more consideration into not wasting the players progress and kept some of the things pre-CU had to offer they might have actually had a huge success with transferring the game to a simpler coded system. In the end it seems what has already been said, in that it most likely simply came down to greed.....people make mistakes.

Originally posted by veritas_X

Jedi were the beginning of the end for the original SWG.  Once that first idiot unlocked, all the powergaming grinder tards had to have one too, and the hologrind resulted.  From that, you had basically the entire player base mindlessly grinding 30-odd professions to get the one they really wanted, and in effect completely ignoring everything else there was to do in the sandbox.

In addition to being completely overpowered in combat, Jedi also existed outside of the player-driven economy because they were entirely self-sufficient and didn't need to depend on crafters like everyone else.  Sure, given Star Wars lore, they should have been massively powerful, but they also shouldn't have been in the hands of players, or in the game at all unless they were hiding from Darth Vader at the ass end of space, rarely, if ever, seen by another living soul.

I miss pre-CU SWG a lot, but I don't miss the player Jedi at all.  They're part of the reason the game no longer exists.

Couldn't agree more. I have always had the opinion that it is exactly the jedi that ruined the game and they should have never put those in.

Fist bad step were jedi, second CU and then the NGE was the complete death blow to an immensely unique game. Yep, plenty of flaws and bugs, but the game itself was unique of its own. Shame they didn't want to seriously continue the selected course they had when they launched.

swg was horrible from release on the only difference between then and now is they actually found a way to make it worse

SOE never did a single thing right with that game. I think what people are remembering fondly is, not the gameplay/game mechanics itself, but the community. It was the players that made the game enjoyable. That's one of the great things about sandbox games; developers will always make mistakes when releasing content but players always know what they want - so let the players make the content.

Originally posted by rikilii

SWG was so full of fail from day one, I can't even begin to imagine why anyone is pining away over it, and that's coming from someone who played it for 2 years from launch.

that means you liked it but got bored..............

here's how Jedi should have been handled in SWG:

As GM / CSR played characters. A long (and hidden) questline, which would eventually lead to the location of the Jedi's hiding spot. Rebel and Imperial each have their own line, and chance to dicover him. Once the Jedi was discovered, the rebels could try to cover him to the nearest spaceport, while the Imperials were trying to kill him, in a fun-as-fuck PVP event, ALL IN LINE with the canon.

Kinda like the old "Deadeye" questline in Bestine, but taken a few steps further.

But mark me....player jedi should NEVER have been allowed in the game.

Originally posted by Stellos

Actually after reading that it makes me really miss the orginal idea of SWG.  That sounds like a freakin blast!  A jedi just can't run around without a bit of fear.  It truley held the ideals of the Jedi by making them have to remain humble and not as flashy as they became in the SWG we have now.  It would make bounty hunting a freaking blast, and for those who leveled their jedi up high enough, well, they would be a tough character to take down.

What a great idea that ended up going soar!

Pre-CU (original version of SWG) was fun from the second you started the game.  You could do anything.  100% skill-based, almost NO restrictions on what you could do.  No game since the original UO could offer so much freedom.  It was very unique.

I actually think Jedi is what killed SWG.  I had more fun walking around with my dueler (pistoleer/fencer hybrid) and fighting Teras Kasi's and Bounty Hunters than I ever did trying to roll a Jedi toon...

SWG was a much better game before everyone decided to try to unlock their Jedi.  No game has even come close to matching the SWG economy as it was back then. 

Now SWG is a joke, arguably the worst MMO on the market.  The original version was buggy and incomplete, but it was a very cool game.

Originally posted by Vrazule

I didn't like SWG before CU or NGE and it was because thousands of people like me were leaving the game that they even came up with the changes in the first place.  Your holy grail didn't and doesn't appeal to most of the player base.  Not sure why you people keep toting it around and shoving it in our faces every chance you get.

Just returning the favor since you fanatics can't seem to leave SWTOR forums alone with your constant vileness.  Going back to the forums of a game that actually appeals to me.

So the original SWG was too difficult for you...  I guss that is why the eliminated all the "reading" from the game and dumbed it down to the degree they did.  The problem is that for every 1 of you there were 100 who liked the more difficult version.