Originally posted by noncley

Originally posted by Settingsun

Ftp would have worked for SWG. Would it have had huge numbers? No, but I bet it would have been more than enough to make money (even if it wasn't much).

Not that it matters, since LA doesn't want more than one SW mmo running.

I think a FTP version of pre-CU SWG would have done very well. 

Pre-CU for sure, but even NGE version would have done well as FTP

I think closing SWG instead of making it FTP (They already had the TCG and were making good $$ on it) and putting all their bets on SWTOR was a BIG mistake on LAs/SOEs parts

Originally posted by grimal

Originally posted by bigsmiff

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by Obraik
 

/facepalm.  

Let it go, man.  SWG was dying long before TOR was a twinkle in Bioware's eye.  

I think the dying ended in SWG a couple of years ago and it ended up with a healthy population when it shut down. I preferred SWG over ToR and would love it if it were ever resurrected. I feel that LA made a huge mistake in shutting SWG down since it could have done well as a F2P title. SOE is showing that they know how to do F2P well.

Healthy Population? Lol! You mean the one server that all the free transfers went to?

Do you even know what you are taking about? I had toons on several servers and I had no problem finding groups. And, I am talking about before the shutdown announcement. Please know what you are spouting off about before you comment. Starsider, Chilastra, Europe-Chimera were all doing good before the shutdown announcement. The servers weren't brimming over with people, but they weren't dead either.

Keep in mind, had the kept it open, it could/would have drawn players away from Tor, so I guess I can see why they did it.

Originally posted by Settingsun

Keep in mind, had the kept it open, it could/would have drawn players away from Tor, so I guess I can see why they did it.

If they would of kept it open I'm sure there would have been questions on the TOR forums from TOR players asking why the hell does SWG have this feature and we dont?

Originally posted by firefly2003

Originally posted by Settingsun

Keep in mind, had the kept it open, it could/would have drawn players away from Tor, so I guess I can see why they did it.

If they would of kept it open I'm sure there would have been questions on the TOR forums from TOR players asking why the hell does SWG have this feature and we dont?

It looks like that anyway and SWG is dead.

George and LA had to play a part in everything that has happen todate.  But in the long run that is nether here not there.

It would be very hard to bring back the old preCU SWG because of the state of the game engine they used and you would have to recode everything from line 0 because of the state of coding back at the time when it was first started.

Yes, I would like to see a preCU type SWGMMO see the light of day.  But I would think a new open game base on George's plans for post SWG episodes VII through XII.  That would have the feel of the old game but give us new ground to cover in rebuilding what has been done in the first six sagas and the problems they had created plus how will the power vaccum be reshaped.  I think something like this would give players the best chance to shape what happens in game.

There were many players on my server (By that I mean the Imperial PVP guilds and vent on Chilastra) that had decided before SWGs end was even announced that they would probably stay subbed to SWG on their accounts and play TOR for a bit to see whether they want to make the full jump. That all changed when they announced SWG would end right before SWTOR would be released, where people decieded to drop subs due to there being no point anymore. I ended up subbing 1 month in September in order to play the last few months and only logged in twice during those months. 

Announcing its death dropped the subs to all time lows, but the devs seemed to take this as a sign to introduce the things we had been waiting for as if they could do whatever they wanted at that point

Well, good "what if" post as SWG was thee best resource gathering, crafting and player city building game ever created. It is a shame it was shut down, but nothing we can do about it. Except for maybe the underground operation that was trying to bring back the pre CU / NGE version. Personally, I'd rather play SWG then a lot of the new games that came out recently. I'm beginning to think The Repopulation is probably the closest game to what SWG did right, so it's definately on my radar.

Originally posted by PyrateLV

Pre-CU for sure, but even NGE version would have done well as FTP

I think closing SWG instead of making it FTP (They already had the TCG and were making good $$ on it) and putting all their bets on SWTOR was a BIG mistake on LAs/SOEs parts

FTP = File transfer protocol, it is usually used to share stuff on your computer with friends...

But I assume you meant F2P. And I am not so sure it would have worked, the game would probably have been made pay2win.

For a game to survive as F2P it still needs to get in cash, and most PvP focused games fails as F2P. It works fine for PvE based games like DDO and LOTRO but if you think about it, few PvP games ever succeded with that business model.

As soon as you sell really useful stuff in the store people will quit.

SWG was a flawed, badly designed mess of a game from day one thanks to a designer that thought star wars was about crafting and player housing littering planets rather than adventure and space battles etc.  Had the game been some generic sci fi game it probably wouldn't have been so bad, but the fact that it carried the name star wars made it a mess and nothing like star wars.  Not one bit of that game felt star wars.  The engine was clunky and bad, the graphics weren't even good when it came out let alone by todays standards.  Everything about the game was bugged, boring or just badly designed.  It should have been put out of it's misery long long ago.

Yeap I would still be playing SWG if it was still around. TOR is ok. But only reason i'm still playing it is because of all my friends and enemies from swg are there.... Also The Repopulation does look really fun.

Originally posted by vanderghast

SWG was a flawed, badly designed mess of a game from day one thanks to a designer that thought star wars was about crafting and player housing littering planets rather than adventure and space battles etc.  Had the game been some generic sci fi game it probably wouldn't have been so bad, but the fact that it carried the name star wars made it a mess and nothing like star wars.  Not one bit of that game felt star wars.  The engine was clunky and bad, the graphics weren't even good when it came out let alone by todays standards.  Everything about the game was bugged, boring or just badly designed.  It should have been put out of it's misery long long ago.

I suppose you're going to say TOR is more Star Warsy? The movies were only a small part of the Star Wars universe, so to say SWG was nothing about Star Wars is an obvious troll remark. JTL had plenty of space combat, more so then TOR and as for the crafting and player built cities. Sure, they don't define Star Wars, but the fact they were so well designed is reason enough to mention them.

The fact you think it was a huge waste of a game, has me wondering if any game has satisfied you. Cause in my 25+ years of computer gaming, I can honestly say there weren't many MMO's that actually had an entertainment value outside of combat. Just out of curiousity, what MMO have you played that you can honestly say was a better game then SWG overall? I can think of maybe 2 and my quote is a good idea of which 2 those might be.

Originally posted by vanderghast

SWG was a flawed, badly designed mess of a game from day one thanks to a designer that thought star wars was about crafting and player housing littering planets rather than adventure and space battles etc.  Had the game been some generic sci fi game it probably wouldn't have been so bad, but the fact that it carried the name star wars made it a mess and nothing like star wars.  Not one bit of that game felt star wars.  The engine was clunky and bad, the graphics weren't even good when it came out let alone by todays standards.  Everything about the game was bugged, boring or just badly designed.  It should have been put out of it's misery long long ago.

While it didn't necessarily follow the canon of Star Wars, it was still a Star Warsy game.  The difference between it and TOR was that SWG let you choose how you wanted to exist in the Star Wars universe - if you didn't want to be the hero and wanted to be the Watto or Uncle Owen of the Star Wars universe then those options were available to you however if you wanted to be the hero that you see in the movie, those options were available to you too.  In SWTOR your characters story is pretty much predetermined when you choose your characters profession.

It was the fact that you could virtually live in the Star Wars universe that made it so appealing to many.

The game was due for a reboot, but the problem historically is that each new incarnation becomes more stripped down than the previous version. It's like we get better graphics (for the most part) but have to shed depth of play.

To be honest, if they would have remade the game as SWG2, they would have more than likely fucked it up. Things that sound good in meetings often turn out shitty in implementation, and I know they would have killed the damn thing anyway if they would have made a 2.

Look at the successor, it's about as bare-bones as you can get. Sony would have gotten rid of player housing and anything else that was particularly bothersome to them over the years. Because we buy shit like that, simplified.

Maybe another company will come in and take the best of what has been done. Maybe they will even figure out how to make the game deep without scaring off the mass audience that drives the money wheels.

It was the fact that you could virtually live in the Star Wars universe that made it so appealing to many.

Exactly

No other Star Wars game has had that. SWTOR especially doesnt even come close to achieving it

There is the fact that you could play any role you want in swg. There is also the fact that if you play the "hero" which you play by default in swtor was done better in swg to some extend. What I am talking about here is the gear. In swg, you could equip whatever suited you best in the color you wanted and when the appearance tab came, there were virtually unlimited possibilities.

Now going to swtor... you equip yourself with either crafted gear or customizeable (orange) gear while you lvl up but only to be undergeared by special pvp / pve gear for the end game which btw looked as ugly as possible in most peoples eyes including mine. I expected to get a better jedi experience in swtor only to be disappointed. Bioware could (and should) have addressed this problem in their update 1.2 but mostly failed to do so.

I am beginning to doubt the quality of bioware as an mmo developer just like most of us unfortunately do with soe which yes, includes myself. The dev team soe had during the last year did get a 10 on the scale of 1-10 (10 being the best) no question but it did take a too long time for them to realize that.

The sad irony is, if they had simply modernized SWG they would have had a mega hit.

It is really sad that game developers are just incapable of taking the games we love and giving them a modern KISS( KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID)!

Instead they have to completely reinvision the game and create what they think the game should be rather than what the fans idolize.

The same thing happened with Everquest 2, and later Vanguard, they promised the fans a modernization of  the game we loved, but when we got EQ2 and later Vanguard they were nothing like the original but instead totally new games with new designs new concepts and nothing familiar to the fans of the original.

Same thing happened with Star Wars, SWG had some of the most loyal fans of any mmo ever, 10 years after it's release, thousands of fans still sit around reminesing about the game, the community, and all they offered.

Why would any INTELLIGENT business not capitalize on a pre-exsisting fanbase of thousands when offering a new product, rather than as EA/Bioware chose and instead allienate those thousands of fans by basically slapping them in the face and then calling them names when they asked for things they loved in the original.

I mean on a business level the whole debacle has been the work of madmen from the start.

If you think for a minute that 10 years from now anyone will be sitting around reminesing about how great SWTOR was well don't put any money on it.

From what I can tell is that SWG got shut down because SOE wanted to take SWG F2P, but LA did not.

With SOE taking all their games F2P, and not one left P2P, I am thinking the reason SWG shut down is partly because of SOE. If they were not going F2P crazy, SWG may not have shut down either.  Hence Smedleys statement saying SWG shut down mutually between SOE and LA

EQOA got shut down and I think that it was as could not go F2P, as the game is loaded from disc with a small patch / updates on memory card. A patch to make F2P would be too much for it.

Shutting down SWG is not LAs biggest failure (if SOE did not want to keep it going as P2P), but LA not resurrecting under themselves or letting EA take over (as F2P) from SOE is their biggest failure - I am hoping this is still a possibility, especially if SWTOR has less interest than SWG did, by the end of the year, or that EA/LA can see that at the rate of decline over these past few months that SWTOR is bombing harder than SWG did.

Originally posted by ignore_me

Look at the successor, it's about as bare-bones as you can get. Sony would have gotten rid of player housing and anything else that was particularly bothersome to them over the years. Because we buy shit like that, simplified.

I doubt it. Nearly all of SOE's other MMOs have player housing, and they are enhancing it, not cutting it back.

Originally posted by vanderghast

SWG was a flawed, badly designed mess of a game from day one thanks to a designer that thought star wars was about crafting and player housing littering planets rather than adventure and space battles etc.  

It may not have been very Star Warsy but the resource gathering, crafting and player housing built communities which is something all the fully voiced stories can't hope to create in SWTOR. 

SWG and SWTOR are two very different games however and a topic for another discussions but to me an MMO is about playing with other people and interacting with them not playing alongside them.  

As to whether shutting SWG was LAs biggest fault, I think that lies with the ill-fated and well documented CU/NGE problems. I do think that there was still some life in SWG beit premium or F2P. At the end  half a dozen servers could have carried on for a long time as they had a core of established and committed gamers.