Star Wars Galaxies

I have never played SWG.

I have had a few friends who tried it , left for other games, i have never asked why.  Reading these boards, i have tried to find a summary for what happened to SWG.... could someone either explaing (briefly) or post a link for me regarding the events that have lead to the demise of SWG? I am asking  from the most neutral postion. I am under the impression a game was realeased, then re-vamped (with a expansion?)with out community approval 3 years ago?

I am just curious.

SWG was released with great potential and a great game design. The game was attracting 300k excited players as customers.

Then the company decided to replace the playerbase  squinting at WoW numbers. They did this in 2 steps (CU 2005 April then NGE  2005 Nov) by replace the core game mechanics by most rubish crap i have ever experienced in the game world.

The customer numbers went down to 30k-  since then.

Thats in short what happened to the former great game.

 They released an unfinished game, that we still loved, it had the greatest amount of subs of any MMO at the time in NA , but then WoW came along SOELA got envious and started a process of massive changes,CU@NGE, Which wiped out thousand of hours of gameplay.for thousands of players.
  The changes were handled in a most unproffesional manner,typical SOE, unfinished bugged, and when the playerbase protested the axe fell,SOE literally attacked it's own customer base and drove most away.
 The entire history of this game has been one of gross incompentence and mismanagement,driven on by lies and greed. 
 Did i miss anything Vets? Perhaps someone would be so kind as to post a link concerning the history of SOE lies it is quite long and extensive.

 IT is all unfortunate, i found it to be the most engrossing, diverse,challenging MMO i have ever had the pleasure to play.

Well i did not want to come across as totally incompetent towards the game, so i did the most basic search .. Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies

The "Controversies" section pretty well seems to sum up the chonological series of events for me...

So sad for such great potential in the SCi-Fi MMO's..

Originally posted by Loky

 

Well i did not want to come across as totally incompetent towards the game, so i did the most basic search .. Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies

 

The "Controversies" section pretty well seems to sum up the chonological series of events for me...

So sad for such great potential in the SCi-Fi MMO's..

Wikipedia "controversies section" is biased.

They don't mention that most developers fired/gone cause of the NGE for example.

One core developer behind it Jeff Freeman even admit  how the NGE is an insult to the SWG community, we past the point NGE being  discussed just controversial. In relation to the expansion NGE can be considered as crime.

Originally posted by BushMonkey
 Did i miss anything Vets?

No, you pretty much got it all.

I'd only like to add that the original launch game had a few things that were unfinished, but it was more or less stable.  That's because they had years to work on it pre-launch.  Even though some things were broken, these were usually confined to pretty small details.

The NGE though was another matter.  They completely redesigned the game in secret with only seven coders, leaving only the graphics remaining from the original game.  They announced it after the latest expansion released and rushed it onto live servers in less than two weeks.  When the NGE hit, the haphazardness of the design showed.  The animations became sprite-like, people had performance issues, and the entire concept was literally unplayable.

Overnight, you had over 200,000 subscribers who literally did not know how to play the game that they've previously enjoyed for over two years.  People would shoot and walk through walls.  Using equipment would cause you to crash.  These would be professions like entertainer and artisan who literally could not do anything productive in the game world.

And why did they take a perfectly good game system that a quarter of a million people loved and turn it into a distasteful, buggy mess?  Because a handful of business whiz kids thought it would be "neat to try."  Actually, they wanted to port it to console, but the product was simply so bad, there'd be no way any console would pick it up.